Movie : 'Mussanje Maathu'

Producer: Suresh Kumar Jain

Director: Mahesh

Cast: Sudeep, Ramya, Ramesh Bhat, Sumithra, Mandya Ramesh, Anu Prabhakar

Music: V Sridhar

Good performances by lead actors Sudeep and Ramya, debutant director Mahesh's deft handling of an offbeat subject and melodious music by first-time music director Sridhar take 'Mussanje Maathu' to great heights.

While Sudeep and Ramya outshine each other with strong performances, director Mahesh ensures that the film is a touching drama with a high degree of sensitivity and emotions.

On one of his shows, Pradeep interacts with Tanu, an emotionally-disturbed girl. She changes her attitude in life on Pradeep's advice and the two become good friends and later fall in love. The gripping climax scene is the highlight of the film.

The songs are catchy and the melodious tunes of 'Ninna Nodalentho', 'Enaagalee Mundhe' 'Saagu Nee' and 'Kaddalu Manasanna' will linger in the minds of listeners. Sridhar has not only composed good music, but also written excellent lyrics for the song 'Enaagalee'.

Veteran cinematographer Sundaranath Suvarna and editor Seenu have done good work too.

Sudeep's body language, looks and new hair-do fit the radio jockey's role well. And this can be termed one of Ramya's best performances.

Movie Name : 'Bhram'

Producer: Nari Hira

Director: Pawan Kaul

Cast: Simone Singh, Chetan Hansraj, Dino Morea, Milind Soman, Sheetal Menon

Music: Siddharth-Suhas, Pritam Chakraborty

Singers: KK, Sonu Nigam, Richa Sharma, Shaan, Siddharth Suhas, Earl D'Souza, Suraj Jagan, Sunaina, Khushboo Jain

The fate of Dino Morea-Sheetal Menon starrer 'Bhram' will be decided when it hits the marquee next month. However, the verdict on its music is clear - the six tracks presented by composer duo Siddharth-Suhas and Pritam Chakraborty will have a very short shelf life.

A title like 'I am a bad boy' isn't expected to do well. But it ends up taking you by surprise as, even though it doesn't fall into the category of a chartbuster, it is pretty much a neat deal. Very youthful and fresh, the track has been rendered by a bunch of singers, including Earl D'Souza, Suraj Jagan, Sunaina and Khushboo Jain.

If featured in a different album, 'Jaane kyun tanha ho gaye' might have been considered to be a lukewarm affair. But being a part of 'Bhram' makes it a likeable track.

Pritam sticks to his winning genre of soft rock in this number that has been sung by Sonu Nigam. The track, written by Irshaad and Kumar, is enjoyable but could have had a longer life span if more effort had been put into it.

Unlike the previous track, 'Lagdaa naa lagdaa' boasts of good rendition courtesy KK, but the composition is moderate. Rock forms a base here as well, but the audience wouldn't appreciate it much as something is missing in the song. The only thing that might get it kicking is the fact that it rounds off as a dance piece.

The composers round up the album with 'Teri ankhiyon ki narmi', which has been rendered by Siddharth Suhas himself. With a major western influence, the track is racy with lots of beats thrown in.

The lyricists drop in quite a few English lyrics as well to keep up with the western sound in the track. An enjoyable piece that could get the masses dancing, 'Teri...' is an energetic number.

Movie: 'Jnanajyothi Siddaganga'

Producer: Mahantappa

Director: Omkaar

Cast: Tara, Shivadhwaj, Doddanna, J.K. Srinivasa Murthy, Suchindra Prasad

Music: Yuvaraj

'Jnanajyothi Siddaganga', a film on the life and times of Karnataka's best known living pontiff Sri Sri Shivakumara Swami of Siddaganga Mutt in Tumkur, situated some 70 km west of Bangalore, strikes a slightly different chord than the run-of-the-mill stuff.

In recent times, since most Kannada films have been centred on violence and youthful mushy romances, this film is like a breath of fresh air.

Made with a historical perspective and focussed on the authenticity and details, the film traces the history and traditions of the seven hundred year old monastery of the same name.

Made rather as a eulogy, there are moments in the film that sometimes jar one's sensibilities despite being egged on by Yuvaraj's melodious music.

The hillocks of Tumkur forming the backdrop, the period movie's plus points are the rich, pleasing ambience, eye-catching costumes complete to the last stitch - that merge with the time-span of the saint and realistic props, for which art director Hosamane Murthy deserves a pat on the back.

Cameraman P.K.H. Doss has used the locales like a well-used palette, painting pleasing visuals of the landscape that express considerable technical competence.

Obviously, Omkaar, who has also penned the dialogues, has done sustained research that is evident in the words woven into the captivating moods of the Matt's endeavour to spread the message of love.

Movie: 'Bhootnath'

Producer: Ravi Chopra

Director: Vivek Sharma

Cast: Amitabh Bachchan, Aman Siddiqui, Juhi Chawla, Priyanshu Chatterjee, Rajpal Yadav, Satish Shah

Music: Salim Merchant, Vishal Dadlani, Shekhar Ravjiani

'Bhootnath' is that rare film set in Goa where you don't see a single bikini-clad woman. The songs are colourful, but they are done with the devilish delight of a rock concert rather than the calculated manoeuvres of choreographic manipulation.

Indeed, debutant director Vivek Sharma harks back to an artless innocence to tell the tale of a benign ghost who comes to life.

The film's most delectable aspect is the rapport that grows between the ghost (Amitabh Bachchan) and the fearless little boy (Aman Siddiqui) who comes to live in the dead man's mansion, takes on the ghost and even gets the better of him. Both Bachchan and the boy have a ball. So do we, in portions.

The film's best scenes feature the Big B with the incredibly confident and polished Aman. The pair just takes over the screen and makes you forget the narrative's all-too-apparent flaws.

There are plot-holes large enough to make 'Bhootnath' an uneasy bumpy ride. But Amitabh and Aman make you smile as they frolic, sing, banter and deliver some really heartwarming homilies on the quality of existence.

Of late, the Big B has been repeatedly seen in interactive situations with little kids. After Ayesha Kapoor in 'Black', Rucha Vaidya in 'Ek Ajnabee' and Sweeni Khare in 'Cheeni Kum', he brings a sense of cross-generation harmony with another acutely cute and young co-star.

While the kids in the other three films were traumatized to one degree or another, Aman plays a normal, bratty but sensitive kid, yet another addition to the growing brood of brilliant child actors in Bollywood after Darsheel Safary in 'Taare Zameen Par'.

The director lets the child be. He imposes no adult perceptions on him. The narration consequently carries an air of old-world naivete to the end. There are no breaks for romantic songs, item numbers and other modern day quirks and compromises.

'Bhootnath' glides forward with the unconscious skill of a little boat in a tranquil lake, which knows where it wants to go without creating any stress within the pace of the grace.

And what would Bhootnath be without the Big B, sportingly sharing lines, visuals, songs and drama with a child who gives him tit for tat, and more?

The rapport between the wandering spirit and the spirited kid could have fallen apart were it not for the cool camaraderie between them. While one is unschooled in acting therefore totally spontaneous, the other is so skilled and schooled that he readily redefines what is cool.

The duo apart, the other characters are largely sketchy. Rajpal Yadav with shoe-polish on his face plays one of the stereotypical Goan drunkards.

Juhi Chawla as the flustered mom is sweet and angelic. But she is unable to add anything to the drama beyond a point.

Interestingly, Shah Rukh Khan in a guest appearance clearly tries to improvise on the badly written dialogues mainly in scenes where he pokes fun at his wife's cooking.

Or maybe he doesn't. Sometimes the motivations underlying spontaneity can be the very opposite of fear.

'Bhootnath' tells us ghosts are not scary, they can be fun. At the end of the blithe film we believe the director even if we don't belive in ghosts at all.

Movie: 'Jimmy'

Producer: Salman Malik, Nawman Malik

Director: Raj N. Sippy

Cast: Mimoh Chakraborty, Pooja Singh, Zulfi Syed, Ashish Vidyarthi, Ehsaan Khan, Rati Agnihotri, Rahul Dev, Shakti Kapoor, Vineeta Thakur, Adi Irani, Vikas Anand, Gargi Patel, Vivana, Vikaas Kalantri

Music: Anand Raj Anand, Bappa Lahiri

'Do you think I'm a rejected man?' - the villain asks repeatedly after his true intentions are exposed at the end of this tediously assembled pastiche of bad and ugly.

Don't know about the poor battered psycho who contorts his face like his pants were just bitten off by a colony of ants. But this film sure looks like a collage of rejected footage from a series of canned films that filmmakers made and forgot to go back to.

The characters don't talk in 'Jimmy', they scream dialogues and matching their screechy decibel of dialogue is the sound of cars skidding, screeching and groaning in and out of the frames.

'Jimmy' takes us into the kingdom of the dangerously damned. And none as damned as the audience, which sits to the end to watch Mithun Chakraborty's son Mimoh dance on glass, in a manner of slipping.

Mimoh doesn't dance; he glides! He doesn't moonwalk, he trapezes through a field of corrupted corn planted by a screenwriter whose mind seems to have stopped working two decades ago.

Director Raj N. Sippy made some engaging wannabe Hollywood flicks in the 1970s and 80s, all cleverly adapted from American films, but never slipshod.

Ironically, 'Jimmy' rips off Hindi films from the 1970s including Mithun's gyratory Jimmy-hijinks like 'Disco Dancer' and the Amitabh Bachchan starrer 'Majboor'.

All in vain. The plot is propelled by gallery of grotesque caricatures.

This is cinema at its worst. Gimmicky and overblown with no hope for escape because you want to watch Mithun's boy trying to make his way out of this film with no exits.

Only Rahul Dev seems to be blessed with a twist of sobriety in the film.

'Mr. White Mr. Black'

Producer: Deepak Shivdasani, Bhola Malviya
Director: Deepak Shivdasani
Cast: Suniel Shetty, Arshad Warsi, Sandhya Mridul, Upasna Singh, Vrajesh Hirjee, Tania Zaetta, Mahima Mehta, Bobby Darling
Music: Jatin - Lalit, Tauseef Akhtar

Even a diehard movie buff will find watching 'Mr. White Mr. Black' an ordeal akin to a visit to the dentist.

Suniel Shetty as the boor from Hoshiarpur chasing Arshad Warsi all over Goa to bring him back to the village for a piece of land, and safeguarding a spoilt heiress from debauchery is obviously inspired by Akshay Kumar in 'Sabse Bada Khiladi'. Shetty does the innocent act with a warmth and compassion that this project doesn't deserve.



The first half does have a few funny moments like Shetty's dhoti being pulled off by a dog and a roguish Warsi hoodwinking an innocent Goan girl (newcomer Rashmi Nigam) into believing his double is doing all the mischief.

The second half is based entirely on a series of improvised gags with the Warsi-Shetty duo trying hard to breathe life into a dead script.

Once director Shivdasani takes the characters to Goa, he seems to have gone on a holiday, taking with him the scriptwriter as well. What we are left with is an amateurish clumsy parade of skits masquerading as spurts of satire.

Acute exasperation is all this wannabe-funny film gets out of us. Arguably 'Mr. White Mr. Black' is the worst comedy to have come out of Mumbai's dream factory in recent times.

It's not the quality of performances - Shetty and Warsi are good. It isn't even the fault of the production values - Thomas Xavier's cinematography gets you going on a sight-seeing spree in Goa.


'Mr. White Mr. Black' has hugely gifted comic actor Jameel Khan, who was a laugh riot as a music-contest organiser in Manish Acharya's 'Loins Of Punjab Presents'. But here Jameel is reduced to a non-funny non-entity. While everyone else is trying hard to be comic, the film's biggest comic talent stands apart.

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Producer: Kumar Mangat, Sunil Lulla

Director: Ashwani Dheer

Cast: Sunil Shetty, Tusshar Kapoor, Paresh Rawal, Upen Patel, Esha Deol, Sameera Reddy, Tanisha Mukherjee, Neetu Chandra,

Sharat Saxena, Manoj Pahwa, Vrajesh Hirjee, Murli Sharma, Sanjay Mishra, Atul Mathur

Music: Raghav Sachar

This guy comes into the comedy quite early to serve Sameera Reddy, a car showroom owner, a notice. He smiles and delivers his murderous missive, turns around, frowns and vanishes.

The thing about Ashwini Dheer's flaky but funny farce is that it has accomplished comic actors in the smallest of parts. Watch out for the seasoned Marathi actress who plays Tusshar's mother. All she wishes for her son is that he excels in his work, namely killing people.

She sends him off on his first contract-killing mission in Pondicherry (where most of the knock-kneed, but never hackneyed action unfolds). Tusshar ends up at the doorstep of the wrong person - a loud Tamilian scrambled-brained lingerie designer. Esha Deol is cute and loud as the designer.

Lingerie, or 'kachcha-banyan', as Paresh Rawal insists on calling them plays a big part in covering up the broadly exposed bases in this situational comedies, where the best moments are those that actors take over from the screenwriter and make their own.

Mukesh Tiwari displays an unusual penchant for parody (forget the unfunny 'Buddha Mar Gaya') adding an extra 's' to every English word, is like Rakhi Sawant gone wrong. Tiwari's sidekicks have their own subplots. One of them makes bombs that never go off on time.

Luckily, '123' gets its timing right most of the time. It's a war of nerves between the writer and audience, as the one tries to outpace the other. Eventually, the audience does get tired of watching three guys with the same name, Laxmi Narayan, getting mixed up in situations where spoken words give nothing, and yet everything away.

But our fatigue is slackened by the unslackened physical energy that the characters bring to the minutest of moments. Ashwini Dheer comes from the television sitcom culture.

Nowhere does his framing or shots give away his cramped antecedents. He enjoys the large open spaces that his crowded cast populates with parodic panache, pouncing on the preposterousness in the plot with famished energy.

But Suniel Shetty gets as far away from his macho image as humanly possible as the timid and punctual Laxmi Narayan on the run with a reined-in enthusiasm. 'We've seen Suniel do comedy the before. But he was never so straight-faced and sharp. He is a surprise.'

Has Paresh become complacent? Or have Suniel, Tusshar and company got better at the funny stuff? If only director Dheer had avoided the excessive crudity especially in Suniel's prolonged sequence in the public loo with the cheesy hit man.

'Main nahin pukdunga,' he protests in panic as the other actor (another small-time scene stealer in this festival of interesting actors) reaches inside his pants. Panic-attacks dominate lives of these flustered characters.

These lovable losers try to sell lingerie and cars, while the director repackages the Shakespearean comedy of errors in a new autopilot manoeuvre that doesn't quite have you holding your sides. But chuckles don't stop.

The shortest role in the history of the comic farce goes to Upen Patel and Tanissha. They come in with a song and go out with a bang. In-between, they lose their grip over the giggle trip.