How do you count eight packs? The question plagues you when you first come at Aamir Khan in his new movie. His rippling musculature has been all the focus, through the past month, in print, in TV, in hoardings. That, and the buzz cut, with deep scars running through, showing the scalp. This is an Aamir we haven't seen before—fronting a frame filling physique, flaunting matter over mind.
If you had 15 minutes of memory, what would you cram into that terrifyingly short span? The name of your loved one, your phone number, your home? If you were a regular joe, that's exactly what you'd do, but
if you are Aamir Khan in ‘Ghajini', you would bulk up your body, tattoo the name of the man you need to kill, and smear your walls with violent graffiti.
Short term memory loss means you forget, everything, within a short span of time. And the moment you get back into the zone, re-building the pieces of your life, the clock starts ticking again, for the next meltdown. It's a fascinating premise for a movie, and a few years ago, ‘Memento', made by Christopher Nolan, gave us a unique hero who suffers from short haul amnesia, while he searches for his beloved's killer.
In 2005, the Tamil ‘Ghajini', inspired by ‘Memento', catapulted the till-then-on-the-fringes lead pair of Surya and Asin into the frontlines, and turned out to be a monster hit.
Aamir Khan's first film this year, is a faithful remake of the Tamil film (with a lot of the original crew , including the director) barring a couple of twists in the climax. It has Aamir doing an out-and-out actioner after a long time (‘Sarfarosh' in 1999 was the last time he went around brandishing guns and decimating baddies). It also has him bare-chested for a lot of the running time, because he needs to display his impressively muscled frame. So is it good?
Not really, no. The thing with doing a film like this is that you have to completely get with the flow of the film, and here Aamir is split down the middle. When he's Sanjay Singhania, the billionaire boy friend of wannabe celeb Kalpana (Asin), pretending to be a broke model himself, to insinuate himself into her good books, he's just fine.
Aamir Khan has done a wonderful job. Be it the bold, energetic business magnate or the wild chaser Aamir has stolen the show.He along with Asin are among the very few positives in this movie.And he once again shows why he is known as Mr.Perfectionist.But the thing he is he shouldn’t have done this movie in the first place.This isn’t his type of film.
The sequence in which he first sees her help a bunch of disabled kids and loses his iron-clad heart to her, is a winner. So are a few others: how many impossibly wealthy men carry ‘chutta' to give the ‘pani puri wala'? He flips him his platinum card, and we crack a smile, as we are meant to.
The maximum fun is had by Asin, nicely curved and rounded, very far from unreal size zeroes, making her Hindi cinema debut. She plays pretty much the same role as she did in the original-- loud, warm, emotional, and is the best part of the movie, but even she can't liven up the pallid songs-and-dances. Third lead Jiah Khan, the medical student who studies the amnesiac and ends up first hindering then helping him, is a total loss-- she has to speak Hindi and do an item number, and both are beyond her. The villain (Pradeep Rawat) looks like he's a bit part stretched into something he can't quite handle: is he the only one they could find?
Too long, at three hours and some. Too violent. The bad guy goes around wielding a rusted iron jack and bashing peoples' heads in. And so not Aamir: ‘Ghajini' is engaging, only intermittently. Can we please have our old Aamir, the actor-star who's taught present-day mainstream Bollywood to think, back again?
- RAB NE BANA DI JODI REVIEW
Destiny plays a cruel joke on an extremely enthusiastic young girl Taani (Anushka) as she loses her fiancé and his family in a road accident on the eve of her marriage. Her father, a retired professor, on his death bed requests her to marry his old favorite student, Surinder Shahani (SRK). Taani obeys his last wish and thus begins the start of this extraordinary love story between an otherwise ordinary jodi.
The shy, somewhat geeky Surinder has already fallen for Taani since the first time he has seen her but alls his hopes c
rash when Taani tells him the day they arrive at his house that she won’t be able to give him any love as that’s one feeling she has lost forever with the sudden turn of events in her life. The rest of the film is about how Suri transforms himself into a very hep flirtatious dude Raj to win her love using a dancing school as a platform for his antics. He is well aided with his childhood buddy Bobby (Pathak) who brings on the physical transformation in him. But what happens is Taani who is unaware of Raj being Suri himself ends up falling in love with Raj. Suri is now again in a fix but then he finally decides to take a bold step
Rab Ne has been definitely amongst the most awaited films of 2008 and there have been great expectations riding on it especially because it is Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jaayenge maker Aditya Chopra’s comeback film after a long gap of 8 years. The script has its moments and master craftsman Adi keeps you engaged initially with some really beautifully handled moments between SRK and Anushka. But as SRK’s character’s transformation comes in the grip slowly loosens and you start feeling restless with the pace slumping down considerably. What follows is a criss-cross between some really well penned and executed scenes and some really drab moments with badly placed songs acting as speed breakers. But Adi’s terrific dialogues deserve a special applause for touching the right chords.
Shah Rukh Khan is simply superb as first the shy Suri and then the flamboyant, full of energy, Raj. Newcomer Anushka gets a really well etched character to perform and it despite being her first film, she comes across an absolute natural. Vinay Pathak is fun and provides good comic relief.
Music of the film is good but the problem is apart from a very well tuned and picturised Haule Haule number, the rest songs appear wrongly placed. The picturisation of the number featuring Kajol, Preity Zinta, Bipasha Basu, Lara Dutta and Rani is mind blowing but again it coming at a wrong juncture doesn’t really make it work.
All in all, the film has the capacity to do very well in the North and the overseas but elsewhere the film won’t be anywhere near Adi’s earlier two works in terms of business.
RESULT:So the verdict is clear: Ghajini and Rab ne are both average movies,Rab Ne being the better one..When It comes to acting it’s a tie between Aamir and Shah Rukh. Bollywood is lucky to have them because these two can turn average fares into blockbusters as Rab Ne and Ghajini proved.
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