Wanted (2009)

(Wikipedia) – Radhe (Salman Khan) is a hard-core gangster . A sharp-shooter with a sharp brain, he works for Gani Bhai, the dreaded Mafioso, on his own terms. Totally fearless, Radhe singlehandedly eliminates Gani Bhai’s enemies, one by one – making more enemies in the process. The man is devoid of any principles; he is arrogant, ruthless and does not care about the emotions of other people.

Radhe’s astounded when young and pretty Jhanvi (Ayesha Takia) professes her affection for him. Jahnavi is a very simple innocent and a naive girl and she believes that everything is good in the world and nothing is bad. After she meets Radhe she realizes that all her previous notions were wrong and life after that becomes a roller coaster ride.

The introductory scene of Salman Khan’s character – aka the first fight scene – was nearly a straight lift of the fight scene from Deewar (1975) where Amitabh locks them in with him and gives them the key.

I’m not locked in here with you, you’re locked in here with me.

This film just kept on getting better and better. I may dislike Salman Khan and generally avoid anything he stars in, but DUDE, this was so fun! And OTT Vinod Khanna was AWESOME. I’ll admit to making fun of Ayesha Takia’s watermelon boob job, and Salman Khan’s weave. I couldn’t not make fun!

It’s a predictable run-of-the-mill trashy action flick with over-the-top dishoom-dishoom fight scenes, dramatic zoom-ins, cheesy dialogue, and characters with their own theme-songs that play generally whenever they enter a scene. But man, they’re always fun!

I mean, I love films like Hero (China), Zemlya (Soviet Union), and Gaav (Iran) – but I have so much fun with trash films like Billa (Tollywood), Dünyayı Kurtaran Adam (Turkey), and The Machine Girl (Japan).

The first song was surprisingly catchy. I had seen a couple teasers for it on the Eros channel on YouTube and it looked really lame. However, it was anything but. The song was fun and catchy, plus we had random appearances by Anil Kapoor, Govinda, and Prabhu Deva himself! I couldn’t actually find a complete version that featured Prabhu Deva dancing with Salman and Govinda, but THIS preview has all the best bits included.

Then we had a big Mughal-E-Azam reference for a while which had me in stitches.

A couple other songs were fun:

There were some more serious elements to it, what with the evil police officer who threatens to rape our damsel, and lots of gruesome killing (which was totally awesome, for the record).

Overall? It was entertaining. Would I watch it again? Perhaps if the mood was right.

Rating: 4/5

I ‘LOL’ed so hard near the end because of the lengths they went to get Salman to take off his shirt and show off his six pack.

It kind of reminded me of that fight scene from Bujjigadu…

[Via http://martoufmarty.wordpress.com]

Bollywood Spectacular

Come and take part…

As part of the exciting finale of the Caldmore Village festival on May 31st 2010 leading local dancer Jaimal Mistry will be presenting a Bollywood Extravaganza and he wants you to get involved. So if you dance or play an instrument we would like to hear from you. There will be opportunities for everyone to get involved, whatever your level of experience or ability.    

Work towards the event starts soon, so come to one of the first workshops in January to find out more.

Workshops take place on  15th and the 22nd of January 2010, 6pm – 9pm.  At Blue Coat CofE Comprehensive School, Birmingham street, Walsall, WS1 3DH.

If you would like come to the workshops to know more about the festival  contact the Festival Co-ordinator Alan Cheeseman on  01922 646724 or by email alancheesemanltd@aol.com

[Via http://caldmorevillagefestival.wordpress.com]

Riya Sen

               

Blogged with the Flock Browser

[Via http://galz4boyz.wordpress.com]

Mumbai terror suspect David Headley was ‘rogue US secret agent’

A key terror suspect who allegedly helped to plan last year’s attacks in Mumbai and plotted to strike Europe was an American secret agent who went rogue, Indian officials believe.

David Coleman Headley (aka Daood Sayed Gilani), 49, who was born in Washington to a Pakistan diplomat father and an American mother, was arrested in Chicago in October. He is accused of reconnoitering targets in India and Europe for Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), the Pakistan-based terror group behind the Mumbai attacks and of having links to al-Qaeda. He has denied the charges.

He came to the attention of the US security services in 1997 when he was arrested in New York for heroin smuggling. He earned a reduced sentence by working for the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) infiltrating Pakistan-linked narcotics gangs.

Indian investigators, who have been denied access to Mr. Headley, suspect that he remained on the payroll of the US security services — possibly working for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) — but switched his allegiance to LeT.

“India is looking into whether Headley worked as a double agent,” an Indian Ministry of Home Affairs official said yesterday.

Mr. Headley, who changed his name from Daood Gilani, was in Mumbai until two weeks before the attacks on the city, which claimed 166 lives last November. It is alleged that he spent months checking targets in India’s commercial capital, using his Western looks and anglicized name to move in elite social circles, hobnob with Bollywood actors and even to pass himself off as Jewish.

Despite being firmly on the radar of the US intelligence agencies, he was allowed to return to India as recently as March. Indian officials are furious that their American counterparts did not share details of that visit at the time. The Indian media has raised the possibility that Mr. Headley was being protected by his American handlers — a theory that experts say is credible.

“The feeling in India is that the US has not been transparent,” said B. Raman, a former counter-terrorism chief in the Indian foreign intelligence service, the Research and Analysis Wing.

“That Headley was an agent for the DEA is known. Whether he was being used by the CIA as well is a matter of speculation, but it is almost certain that the CIA was aware of him and his movements across the subcontinent.”

According to Mr. Raman, it is probable that Mr. Headley, who was arrested when the US authorities learned that he was about to fly to Pakistan, was listed on the main database of the US National Counterterrorism Center, a facility used by the CIA and several other American agencies to track terror suspects.

Indian officials suspect that US agencies declined to share intelligence to avoid compromising other secret operations and to to be able to deny any link with Mr. Headley.

Analysts believe that the US may also have been anxious to avoid sharing information that could further raise tensions between India and Pakistan, nuclear-armed neighbors who have fought three wars.

According to documents put before a court in Chicago, Mr. Headley had links with the Pakistan Army and, through it, with al-Qaeda.

As well as helping to co-ordinate the Mumbai atrocity, Mr. Headley is accused of planning attacks on Mumbai’s Bollywood film industry, the Shiv Sena, a Hindu extremist group also based in Mumbai, a major Hindu temple, and a Danish newspaper that had published cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad.

The US authorities allege that he was close to Tahawwur Hussain Rana, a former Pakistani schoolmate and businessman who is also being charged with planning to attack the Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten. Mr. Rana is accused of having known about the attack on Mumbai in advance.

The CIA denied that Headley had worked for the organization.

“Any suggestion that Headley was working for the CIA is complete and utter nonsense. It’s flat-out false,” Paul Gimigliano, from the CIA’s Office of Public Affairs, said.

The Indian Home Secretary, Gopal Krishna Pillai, has said that his Government would seek the extradition of Mr. Headley — a request that has so far been stonewalled by US officials.

[Via http://bbvm.wordpress.com]

Fool marks

The smartest thing about “3 Idiots” is that director Raju Hirani uses the student crowd of his IIT-inspired engineering college as a laughter track. This means when an idiotic joke is cracked, everyone in the audience thinks the next person laughed and so they laugh too. Which is ironic because one of the things that the story of “3 Idiots” attacks is herd mentality but that’s my explanation for the uproarious laughter that bounced off the walls every now and then during “3 Idiots” because this movie is not really a comedy. It’s actually bordering on tragic. And not just because the men in this movie have a thing for pulling their pants down and exposing rather unphotogenic bottoms in very unflattering underwear, although it really was very sad that there wasn’t one yummy specimen of masculinity in an entire college of men. If any of you find the boys dancing in their towels to “Aal Izz Well” attractive, you have problems that are far more serious than the butchering that the story suffers in “3 Idiots”.

In the first half of “3 Idiots”, two plotlines are set up. One is of a road trip that Farhan (Madhavan) and Raju (Sharman Joshi) take with an old college mate (Chaturlingam, played by Omi) to find their dearest friend in college, Rancho (Aamir Khan). The other is a tale told in flashback by Farhan of their time in college and the heroic antics of Rancho, a prankster who could crack the system and be a topper even while fighting the system’s intention of turning people into zombies. Rancho doesn’t believe in ragging or memorising textbooks. He loves learning, likes to think for himself and he would like people to feel the same thrill that he does when he invents his gadgets. And he’s aware that engineering isn’t the stuff to fire everyone’s pulse rate. At this point, to quote Rancho, aal is well. Ok, so Aamir Khan is an awful caricature of a 20-something and hams so much that Maharashtra could cheerfully stop pig farming for the next couple of years, but that doesn’t kill the experience of watching “3 Idiots”. Sharman Joshi is good, Omi and Madhavan are convincing; the script has its  moments. Most importantly, you can’t not cheer for the guy who takes on the system and champions the idea of being yourself.

Then comes the second half during which, with rigorous and meticulous care, the director and script team demolish everything that was well-set up in the first half and create so much unnecessary, teary melodrama that you have to wonder whether some glycerine manufacturer didn’t give the money to make “3 Idiots”. So the following happens in this chrono-illogical order:

1. In the present we discover Rancho is not Rancho. The fake Rancho (Aamir Khan) is bright but poor lad while the real Rancho (Jaaved Jaffrey) is a rich man’s idiotic son. The real Rancho’s dad decrees that the fake Rancho will get the grades and degrees in the real Rancho’s name. So the real Rancho goes off to London while the fake Rancho comes to study engineering. If you think this idea has holes in it, wait for the rest.

2. In the past, we see Boman Irani, who plays the principal of the engineering college, get into an ego tussle with Rancho (the fake one, naturally, being played by Aamir Khan). He embroils Farhan and Raju into his spat because he knows they are Rancho’s weak spots and remorselessly does a series of cruel, horrible things, including pushing Raju to attempt suicide. Irani’s character, who was initially shown as a slightly eccentric academic, turns out to be a monster who runs the college like a fiefdom. It’s difficult to decide which is more appalling: Irani’s character, his performance or the fact that we’re supposed to like him because he likes his grandkid and admits defeat to Rancho with utter lack of grace.

3. Also in the past, Rancho delivers a baby using a vaccum cleaner. It seems to be stillborn but instead of kicking the bucket, it kicks Rancho in the face when it hears the words “Aal is well” and so joins the living.

4. In the present, Raju and Farhan elope with Pia (Kareena Kapoor), whom Rancho had a crush on in their college days and the only woman in the world who doesn’t want to take off excruciatingly-heavy wedding jewellery while on a road trip. No, Raju and Farhan don’t both want to marry her; they want to reunite her with Rancho (who they’ve just discovered isn’t Rancho). Whom they haven’t met in some 10-odd years and whose real name they still don’t know. No matter. They know he’d want to marry Pia even though he flatly refused to marry her back in college.

5. Rancho turns out to be an inventor with 400 patents pending and a school in Ladakh.

It’s inexplicable to me that the people who began the story the way they did could actually finish it off like this.

I really, really wanted to like “3 Idiots” and, just for what it says in the first part, I hope it does well. I hope parents see it and I hope young people take some confidence from it. Some characters could have been less flatly written (like Omi and Raju) but neither this nor the pantomime versions of humans as played by Aamir Khan and Boman Irani overwhelm a heartwarming beginning. Unfortunately, what happens in the second part is that the system wins. Rancho isn’t able to rub the principal’s nose in the dirt and we are given no indication that he isn’t being a bastard to the next round of students or changing things at the college to allow more free thinking. An unnecessary romance is thrown in, possibly because the Bollywood system demands it. Glycerine and tears flow and it’s amazing that the outflow from the shooting from this film didn’t make up for the paltry monsoons this year. But most heartbreakingly, there’s so much cruelty in the script; particularly towards poor people, characters like Raju whose poverty and whose family’s misfortunes somehow become an uproarious joke. Except sitting in a plush, comfortable chair in a swanky movie theatre and wearing a skirt that cost half of how much Raju’s mother apparently earned in a month, I didn’t find it funny.

[Via http://anonandon.wordpress.com]

Aamir Khan Crashes Wedding

Artists: Aamir Khan

Review: In a recent attempt to promote “3 Idiots“, Aamir Khan disguised himself as a hippie and attended a wedding function in rural Punjab.  Apparently pulling pranks has been his latest idea for increasing awareness about the film.  Once people realized who he was, he performed and danced with the crowd…Only to leave after inviting the bride and groom to his premiere in Mumbai.

Where were these “pranks” on August 15th, when (no not India celebrating it’s independence) I was celebrating my dependence?

[Via http://v2thaj.wordpress.com]

Bollywood’s sultry sirens with size zero figure

Priyanka Chopra,Kangana Ranaut & kreena kapoor

Jiah Khan

Kangana Ranaut

Katrina Kaif

Lara Dutta

Priyanka Chopra

Deepika Padukone

[Via http://bollywoodqueen.wordpress.com]