Cast: Salman Khan, Ranbir Kapoor, Sonam Kapoor, Rani Mukherjee, Zohra Sehgal, Begum Para, Achla Sachdev; Director: Sanjay Leela Bhansali; Rating: **First off, using the ever-fantastic words of Pete Townshend entirely out of context, The Kids Are Alright.

No, Ranbir and Sonam Kapoor — megahyped bachchas sharing a surname but entirely different Bollywood legacies — aren’t, as the hype might have had you believe, the instant quick-mix superstars ready to take Bollywood into the next generation. He’s occasionally likeable, she’s undeniably attractive. And that’s that. As said, they’re alright.

The problem lies with their puppeteer, the all-conquering badshah of bluster. Sanjay Leela Bhansali takes Fyodor Dostoevsky’s White Nights — a stark, lovely story about romance born and rekindled over four nights — and, picking out its barest heart, proceeds to smother it in mixed-up layers of trite melodrama. And money. And so this soft core, this tender tale, is hidden — under several reams of indiscriminately wrapped silk and velvet, of loud noise and harsh light, of bewildering backdrops and the colour blue — so deep beneath smug self-indulgence and a bizarre budget that you can’t even hear the heartbeat anymore.

The story is simple: a minstrel, full to the brim with can-do enthusiasm, falls in love with a fair maiden. All would be well, except she is awaiting her faraway lover. Doggedly the singer tries to awaken her love, while she loyally stalks the bridge assigned to the some-night rendezvous. Over four nights, love, loyalty and longing are all born and questioned.

We’re told, most redundantly, that this is a tale set in a different world. It is a fairytale realm reminiscent of the classic Prince Of Persia video game, with gondolas and prostitutes scattered around a wet Venetian nightmare. The architecture is whimsical, as is the generous use of flickery neon. Clock towers with hyperactive needles coexist merrily with sprawling mosque courtyards and numerous tiny cobalt by-lanes lead arterially out of the central tiny bridge area, most such roads seeming to lead to the exorbitantly built brothel or the one-resident-only guesthouse. It sounds fantastical and brilliant, and could certainly have been, except it doesn’t really have a concept. Or a point.

Thus Omung Kumar gets to play madman art-director, Bhansali letting him go wild and asking only that he be theatrical and sporadic. ‘Just paint everything blue and leave lots of room for Raj Kapoor film references,’ the brief could well have read. And so runs the gamut, from azure to cerulean, with walls and pillars and peculiar choices of artwork.

And while dollars are positively dripping from the scenery, nothing is spectacular. Remember MF Hussain’s Gajagamini? Now replace the high concept in that film with a big budget. The result is Saawariya, an underwhelming waste. Thousands of Bollywood songs are shot with madcap little unreal backdrops; Bhansali has just used one of those for his entire film. One imagines it’ll be a while before Sony Pictures grandly bankrolls another Indian project.

Black, flaws and all, was very well shot. Here one can imagine cinematographer Ravi K Chandran stifling a yawn. And if, for God’s sake, you’re building an absurdist city-of-many-cities, at least leave physical room for some mindblowing camerawork. There are a few — four, count them — well-executed shots in Saawariya, most of them simple cutaway shots. What in the world has been thought-through in this movie?

Not the characters, certainly. Ranbir’s Ranbir Raj tells Sonam’s Sakina that she knows everything about him: his name, where he lives, what he does. One assumes that is all there exists in their character sketches as well. Oh, and the boy is told to be restless, the girl, patient. Outside of that, there is no depth, despite the actress’ limpid eyes and the actor’s sometimes cheeky grin. These are cardboard characters, lazily written and ineffective. In a stylised world impossible to relate to, at least the protagonists should have been flesh and blood.

Instead, the director hams.

Sanjay Leela Bhansali needs to be thwacked with a subtlety stick, much like Sakina messily beats carpets hanging around her. Everything is overblown and hyper-real in the director’s head, and there is no room for soft reality. The characters populating his movie, therefore, cannot sob without hysteria or laugh without sliding off a chair. A glare is held for ten minutes, a coy glance for five. And the dialogue is immeasurably grating, making the film’s sub-130 minute length seem twice as long.

It is a testament to the star-kids, then, that they’ve gamely gone through these dizzying motions without afflicting career hara-kiri. Ranbir, playing a character labeled over-lovable from start to scratch, is often painfully exaggerated and moronic, but he does salvage a few moments of charm where you feel for him — even if only sympathy at his debuting in this production. There might be hope, sure. But then there’s that towel song, the most homoerotic picturisation in Hindi cinema, which could likely take a few years to live down.

The gorgeous Sonam Kapoor is armed with a great laugh — almost as infectious as her father’s — and one wishes she was allowed to simper softly, instead of having a clearly overdubbed plastic giggle plastered onto her. She has the worst lines and moments in the script — save for Rani Mukerji’s  where Bhansali clearly cashed in all his Black chips — but there is a merciful agility to her movement, a fluidity to her style. It is a character impossible to like, and yet she warms you up to her.

The only times in the film the kids really, really work are when the tension abruptly breaks and they burst into laughter. It is almost as if — or, possibly, because — the director yelled cut and two old friends dropped the painful masks and chilled. God, how much better a Jab We Met style debut would have been for these two.

It’s hard to fathom what Bhansali expects anybody to like in this film. With close to a dozen songs assaulting us once every seven minutes, on average, there is no room for the narrative to flow. The background score is deafening, and the writing is so emotionally manipulative — wait for the way Ranbir convinces Zohra Sehgal to let him bunk with her — it makes you want to pen down an alternate script in immediate protest. And, despite conjuring up moments with legends like Sehgal and Begum Para — irresistible when devoutly mouthing Mughal-E-Azam dialogues — these are too few and far between. Are we actually supposed to enjoy Ranbir doing dad Rishi’s rabblerousing lines from Karz, or laugh at Rani’s pathetic half-malapropisms? Please.

What’s the deal, Mr Bhansali? This isn’t a Luchino Visconti remake, as many had feared, but a bizarre reworking, an overbaked version of a very simple romance. Dozens of dancing prostitutes do not a Federico Fellini make, sir.

This film opens with Ranbir, off-screen, persuading a whore to listen to two lines of song. She deigns to listen and he picks up his blue six-string. And instead of an eager-to-please youth fumbling with a scratchy guitar, we get — after a sudden title screen with the star-kids’ name, a la Rajnikanth — a mega song-and-dance production, a full-blown intro. No wonder the heartbeat is muted.

As Gulabjee, lady of the night, would say, I don’t likes.

Cast: John Abraham, Ayesha Takia, Paresh Rawal, Ranvir Shorey Director: Anurag Kashyap ; Rating: **1/2With a rather unusual name, the story is more unusual and is a thriller about a chain smoker (John Abraham).

After two highly controversial films, albeit good films, ‘Black Friday’ and ‘Paanch’, Director Anurag Kashyap is back with his next film.

‘No Smoking’ seems to be Anurag’s commercialized attempt at Bollywood.

‘No Smoking’ is being made under the banners of ‘Big Screen Entertainer’ and ‘Vishal Bhardwaj Pictures Pvt Ltd’. The project is produced by Kumar Mangat and directed by Anurag Kashyap. His other films had character artistes like Kay Kay, etc. But with ‘No Smoking’, Anurag has gone mainstream.

The movie stars top Bollywood actors, Ayesha Takia and John Abraham in the lead.

The film was previously named ‘Cigarette smoking can be injurious to health’.

The makers finally decided to go in for a shorter name, “No Smoking” for its catchyness and its ability to convey the message of the film.

Talented, versatile actors like Paresh Rawal and Ranvir Shourie also play an important part in ‘No Smoking’.

Though, ‘No Smoking’ has big stars in it. ‘No Smoking’ is not the run of the mill story.

The film brings in an interesting line of actors in one frame.

‘K’ (John) is addicted to smoking and refuses to quit. When his wife, Anjali (Ayesha), walks out on him because of his ways, he decides to meet Baba Bengali (Paresh), a mysterious character who runs a rehab centre.

Baba has strict rules: If you sign the agreement but break his rules, there are consequences, as ‘K’ realizes ………….

Info:‘No Smoking’ storyline “has similarities with Stephen Kings short story ‘Quitters’, Inc.

The story released in the ‘Night Shift’ anthology was adopted as one of the three films called ‘Cat’s Eye’ starring James Wood and Alan King.

Baba Bengali, is a mysterious character who runs a rehabilitation hub, which help people come out of their addictions.

‘K’ meets him and agrees to a freeze contract. ‘Freezed’ because once agreed upon, K cannot come out of it.

Soon, ‘K’ realises the power of the contract when pushes the buttons, throws caution to the wind and challenges the Baba’s agreement.

‘K’ is entangled in a smoky game between the self-assumed all-knowing gatekeeper of the netherworld and an innocent.

Now, ‘K’ is on his way to escape from the hands of Baba. The only way is the completion of the contract.

What’s in store for K? Is his wife involved in these mis-happenings? Does ‘K’ manage to come out clear or gets blown up in the smoky clouds? Watch the movie asap, you have all your questions answered.

Cast: Shahid Kapur, Kareena Kapoor; Director: Imtiaz Ali; Rating: ***Who can resist a good love story, and this week’s new release Jab We Met is exactly that – a warm, fuzzy, and for the most part, original love story. Both passengers on a Delhi-bound train, Shahid Kapur stars as Aditya, a dejected young fellow who’s nursing a broken heart when he bumps into Geet, the annoyingly cheerful chatterbox played by Kareena Kapoor.

At first exasperated by her over-enthusiastic disposition, Aditya soon warms up to Geet’s spontaneity and even embraces her inherent joie de vivre when he’s forced to make a long journey with her.

Traveling all the way to her home in Bhatinda turns out to be an eventful trip for Aditya and Geet who go their own separate ways after a few days spent with her extended family. It’s many months later and under entirely different circumstances that they meet again, and must make another long journey together, but this time with the excess baggage of their confused feelings.

Despite the film’s severely flawed second half which is too long, too contrived and predictable to the extent of being seriously boring, Jab We Met is still an engaging watch because it sets off on such a fresh note. It’s the film’s first hour or so that wins you over with its simple charm, its immensely likeable characters, and the intrinsic humour in the writing.

Making a conscious effort to avoid cliché, the screenplay rustles up a bunch of pleasant surprises in the form of some unforgettable scenes that stay in your head long after you’ve left the cinema. Like that one in which Aditya and Geet hire a room for the night in a shady hotel in a small-town, or the one in which a talkative station-master is put in his place by the sharp-tongued Geet, or even that one in which Geet tries to persuade Aditya to elope with her cousin. It’s the film’s excellent dialogue that ensures there’s never a dull moment – at least until intermission.

The real magic of this film lies in the performances of its two main leads who seize your attention from the moment they first appear on screen. Uninhibited and spontaneous, Kareena Kapoor is the soul of this picture, its biggest strength, as she brings alive her character with not just those smart lines, but with the kind of candor actors seldom invest in their work. I can’t think of a greater compliment to pay her than to say with full confidence that no actress could play Geet better than Kareena has.

Despite the risk of being overshadowed by Kareena, her co-star in the film, Shahid Kapur, leaves an indelible impression with a performance that is understated and mature, and indeed the perfect foil to Kareena’s boisterousness. Together, they set off such sparks, that the strength of their chemistry alone is enough to make up for several inconsistencies in the screenplay.

Fresher than any romantic comedy you’ve seen this year Jab We Met works because it delivers what it promises – a snug, heart-warming, relatable love story, indeed a respectable follow-up to director Imtiaz Ali’s last film Socha Na Tha.

But because much of that freshness is replaced by mundane predictability in the film’s second half, Jab We Met cannot claim to be a perfect film. Too many songs, hummable though they may be, slacken the pace of the screenplay, and the DDLJ influence is a little too in-your-face to ignore. In the final analysis, however, these are a few wrong turns in an otherwise entertaining film.

So I’m going with three out of five for director Imtiaz Ali’s Jab We Met, it’s a film bursting with the kind of lovely little moments that’ll bring a smile to your face.

Cast: Rani Mukherjee, Konkana Sen Sharma, Jaya Bachchan, Abhishek Bachchan, Kunal Kapoor, Anupam Kher; Director: Pradeep Sarkar; Rating: **So, it is a Yash Raj movie. You have learnt to forgive them for the extra tinge of orange and the sharp sounds, the mandatory songs and the unnecessary melodrama. But, if throughout the movie, the one question that nags you is, “Could a real person, seriously react this way to this situation?” then what exactly are you expected to enjoy?

We are talking of a movie that claims to be about the ‘journey of a woman’. I refuse to believe that it was supposed to be in the leave-your-brain-home-and-don’t-ask-too-many-questions genre. What could have been a celebration of the spirit of a woman, turns into another story of a woman finding ultimate happiness only in meeting an ideal man. It is uncanny how a salute to womanhood ends in men being the goal of their lives. Not to mention that men are shown as a breed who crave sex. So desperate are they that they pay huge sums to have sex with the most remorseful, uninterested women.

Let alone the societal issues, the treatment given to the story was also half-hearted. The details were missing. Elements that needed build-up happened suddenly. The outcome of things that were built-up over the movie was resolved within 30 seconds of screen time.

The only redeeming factors were the performances by the two leading ladies - Rani Mukherjee and Konkona Sen Sharma. We have seen both these women do a wide variety of roles, and these particular ones don’t stand out from within the standards they have set for themselves. But, that they managed to jerk tears without adequate support from the script or the dialogues is praiseworthy.

The dialogues, especially towards the end were so clichéd that it was outright ridiculous. There was this one pause that Abhishek Bachchan takes mid-sentence. You could sense a huge portion of the audience admire their dialogue-predicting capabilities, when he finishes his line. The dialogues were excessive in a couple scenes given to Konkana. I think, left to her own devices, Konkana could have expressed much more with her silences.

On the other hand, I was bowled over by the lyrics of the songs. Especially, “nistabdh khadi hu mein” and “Kachi kaliyaa”. The music was refreshing because it was different. Now, whether or not the songs deserved time of their own on the screen is a different question altogether.

The camerawork was average. No in-the-face camera or annoying movements except for a few scenes here and there. In fact, there were a couple of very well-done scenes depicting the emotional state of the character. Unfortunately, they did not go with the rest of the film because the technique did not continue in the rest of the movie.

What amused me was the huge compliment the cameraperson paid to Abhishek Bachchan and Rani Mukherjee in the song that was supposedly shot in Switzerland. Just imagine, they had all the scenic beauty in the world to capture and they focused mainly on close to mid-shots of the two-some. Or did they do that to avoid being criticized of favoring the Alps too much? Or could it be because it was not Switzerland at all? The rainbow shot towards the end of the song looked like use of blue screen. If it wasn’t, then that’s a bigger shame, isn’t it? Imagine all that money spent and the effect is that of a blue screen.

Better defined characters and even better defined motivations would have taken this overall interesting plot a long way. But, alas, that is a lot to ask for.

Cast: Akshay Kumar, Vidya Balan, Shiney Ahuja, Amisha Patel; Director: Priyadarshan; Rating: **Gawk, it must be the world’s largest lock. Quickly, a locksmith bakes a nice, thin, long key. And presto, the door opens up to reveal a chamber of ghungroos, paan daans, and very awful paintings of a king fatter than Adnan Sami (before weight loss) and a courtesan whose hips are in a twist. With destiny she has to keep a tryst.

Ultra-tragically that poor ironsmith dies. So does your interest in Priyadarshan’s umpteenth creation, Bhool Bhulaiyaa, which may or may not have been adapted from a Malayalam, Telugu or a Tamil hit.

That hardly matters because it keeps breaking into a yaargh-yikes-cripes fit, till you wonder if it’s a comedy, horrorfest or tragedy. An Exorcist? Entity? Hungama? Bungama? Now should you be tittering, shuddering, or sobbing? With this mixed-genre malarkey, you just can’t tell. Oh well.

Honestly, you do try your darndest to connect with Priyadarshan’s potty-pourri. After all, his shot takings are admirable supplemented with loads of moody colour and lighting and the set designs are out of a heritage preservation catalogue. Plus his regular supporting players – Paresh Rawal and Rajpal Yadav – do guarantee a guffaw or two. Unarguably, the director is a marvellous craftsman. But man oh man, the storytelling is as mumbo as a jiving jumbo.

Pray, what’s going yawn? At the outset, for a lengthy reel you’re locked into a village panchayat speechlet on Hindi and English lingusitics (cricket is translated as something-something-dhan-dhana-dhan!). Asrani faints in a spooky medium-budget haveli, and thousands of elderly men and women whisper on about ghosts-‘n’- ghouls till you fall asleep with your eyes open like an owl’s. Scowl.

Then arrive NRI freshly-wedded couple (Shiney Ahuja-Vidya Balan). He’s a maharaja of sorts. So, a dormouse plays a piano in his haveli, a cat does a nach baliye under a basket, a kitchenmaid bites her lips till yours bleed. And hello, a jilted girl (Ameesha Patel, wasted ) with Rapunzel hair is described as walnuts-`n’-pistachios. Insane.