JANNAT

Cast: Emran Hashmi, Sonal Chauhan, Samir Kochar, Javed Shaikh, Vishal Malhotra
Director: Kunal Deshmukh
Ratings: ***

More, more, more...The motto of motorised materialism seems to have overtaken contemporary life. Everyone wants the good things in life in the shortest time possible. The acquisitive spirit has seldom been defined with such economy of storytelling as in "Jannat".Not surprisingly, a lot of Mahesh Bhatt's latest exposition on the excesses of materialism is shot in shopping malls, expensive restaurants and posh stadiums where money flows like unadulterated honey.
And when our hero sees the love of his life staring at a diamond ring he walks into the showroom and breaks the display window.Get what you want by force and forget those homilies that papa preached at the dinner table about the virtues of honesty. "Honest money means hard work and little reward," says a wry character in "Jannat". He's obviously not read Ayn Rand.Sanjay Masoom's scathing dialogues scamper across the film's lush skyline to create a language of wannabes who would stop at nothing to get that new villa on the Gold Coast.Let's then applaud one more moral fable from Bhatt's sensible stable."Jannat" tells us to waste not, want 'nought'...By all means covet the zeroes on that pay cheque. But don't forget that if you run after the zeroes your life ends up in the zero zone.Forty years ago in Hrishikesh Mukherjee's "Satyakam" Dharmendra had refused to succumb to all the temptations of materialism that were strewn in his path to salvation. Lying dying of cancer, he's asked by his wife: "Finally what do you have to say about your life of integrity?"

"I've lived," Dharmendra says at the end of "Satyakam".Can Emran Hashmi (playing the small-time wheeler dealer who turns into a cricket match-fixer, criminal and moral transgressor) turn around before his gruesome death to say he has lived?Yes, Arjun (Emran) has loved. At heart "Jannat" is a dark tragic love story. While the girl's innocence and the man's corruptible countenance resembles "Kalyug", the whole dilemma of the beloved being instrumental in destroying the criminal hero echoes "Gangster".Both "Kalyug" and "Gangster" were superior in content and treatment.Debutant director Kunal Deshmukh cannot escape the clichés on existentialism that have come to surround Bhatt's cinema...the morally conflicted Shakespeare-meets-James Hadley Chase hero, the independent-minded strong and value-based heroine, the hero's trusted and loyal friend (Purab Kohli in "Woh Lamhe", Shaad Randhawa in "Awaarapan", and now Vishal Malhotra), the ideologue father whose principles are held up to ridicule until the hero discovers the hard way that dad's remedies are the best to deal with ethical ambivalence.
These lingering leitmotifs get a renewed, if not luminous, life in every Bhatt production. But "Jannat" lacks the resonance and staying power of some of Bhatt's earlier films about crime and punishment from "Naam" to "Gangster".Cleverly and cautiously Deshmukh's film brings in the cricket element, which has audiences ignoring the pitfalls of rejuvenating Bhatt's age-old iconoclasm. The stock footage of real-life cricket matches are used well and sparingly in the plot. The stress, as ever in Bhatt's saga of our stressful times, is on the clashing colliding crisscross of human relationships. Emran's father's sequence in his son's luxurious bathroom where he comments on the basket of soaps is a whammer. But the wheeling dealing in the greenroom and clubs with cricketers of indeterminate nationality behaving like debauched goblins smacks of amteurishness. The murder of the Australian coach turns the Bob Woolmer scandal into a climactic add-on. May his soul rest in peace.But what stays is the protagonist's passion for money as opposed to his love for Zoya (Sonal Chauhan). The end-game where the engagement ring is juxtaposed against the gun is arresting in more ways than one. While Emran interprets the over-reaching get-rich-quick schemer's part with a native cunning, one misses that suave and smooth transitions in the character that perhaps a Naseeruddin Shah or even a Shahid Kapoor would bring on the table.But Emran is charming enough to let the protagonist's journey from a chawl to Cape Town look interesting. He's constantly getting author-backed roles of the angst-ridden social outcast (a garage-sale version of Amitabh Bachchan) which he plays with a fair amount of sensitivity.Debutant Sonal has much more to do than be the decorative doll she seems equipped to be.
She's the weakest link in the powerplay where the politics of the playing field is extended to an engrossing exposition of greed atonement.Some of the supporting cast, especially Jawed Shaikh as the cricketing don and Abhimanyu as his silent henchman, come to grips with their characters better than you would expect in a film that has scant space for anyone except the man who would be king. .

Dhoom Dhadakka

Starring Sammir Dattani, Shama Sikandar, Shaad Randhawa, Arati Chabria, Anupam Khe, Satish Kaushik, Gulshan Grover Rating: super-atrocious
By the time Sammir Dattani and Shaad Randhawa get into drag, this criminally unfunny comedy has dragged on way past 'bad'-time.Maybe it's in the air. Everyone uniformly hams through this acutely painful piece of cinematic travesty.There's so much screaming and ranting across the length and breadth of this outrageous ode to idiocy that you wonder if the producer-director intended to provide earplugs for all those bravehearts who would sit to the end of this slapdash hectic and haphazard comedy of terrors.No earplugs, what we get are shrill banshee ring-tones of risqué ragas sung at a ear-splitting pitch, and phallic jokes about not a single danda in the cellphone.Chee chee.If lately you've been wondering where the Bollywood comedy has been heading here's the answer.Comedies can't get any baser or brainless than Dhoom Dadakka. The gags make you gag. The items and innuendoes are embarrassing not because they TRY so hard to be vulgar but because they fail miserably to be sexy.Vulgarity in this comedy of disembodied context depends completely on how many of the characters are crammed in one line of vision in every scene. They all stand making faces and gesticulating as though trying to attract the lifeguard's attention from a sinking boat.

The double meanings flow in unstoppered abundance mostly from the moist painted trembling lips of Deepshikha who keeps referring to the size of 'bada' things every time she spots a male member of the cast in her vicinity.Yup, as one character winks, size does matter.Dhoom Dadakka is a jumbo-sized non-event.Ha ha ho ho. Before you fall of your creaky bed in comic splendour, let's move on to the main 'coarse' in this pickled over-spiced thaali in a hotel that's probably named Romp Teri Giggle Maili.. The two guys, Sammir Dattani and Shaad Randhawa grimace and giggle, roll their eyes and suck in their cheeks to indicate lies buried too deep for jeers. Add two girls (Chabria and Sikandar) trying so hard to be glamorous it's pathetic, and you get a brew that's more eek than greek.The characterizations take the cult of one-upmanship down to the level of a nukkad nautanki, what with every actor getting lost in the confusion of their mistaken identities.In no time at all, the plot suffers from an identity crisis.Director Shashi Ranjan who earlier made us laugh with his supposedly serious study of marital stress in Dobara, doesn't know whether to indulge tongue-in-cheek comedy of the Hrishikesh Mukherjee variety (Ab ke sajan sawan mein aal lagey aisi filmon mein) or just do the out-and-out no -fools-stops comedy of the David Dhawan-Anees Bazmi variety.Eventually the confusions that dominate the plot overpower every sense of aesthetic decency. In the end-game where the entire cast runs around an amusement part looking for amusement, the two heroes get into drag to tease laughter out of an audience that's long since ceased to be entertained or amused and is down to feeling utterly embrassed on behalf of the cast and crew of this weird brew.In one chase sequence Shaad Randhawa pees copiously on a street of Bangkok.You get jailed for dirtying the streets of Bangkok. Alas, there are no laws for desecrating the rules of aesthetics in cinema..

Kareena-Saif: Thoda Jhagda Thoda Pyar

We are talking about Kareena Kapoor, who performed as the Goddess of Bollywood, at the IIFA awards in Bangkok. And of course also bagged the best actress award for her power house performance in Jab We Met.The actress has bagged the maximum number of awards this year for Jab We Met and of course, she is obviously excited about the superb reactions to her live performance that showed her making a grand entrance on a huge lotus and her Best Actress Award.. Kareena performed on three main songs apart from Dil hara and Chaliya from Tashan. "My act ended with Mauja hi mauja from Jab We Met, " says Kareena smiling. Kareena adds, "Manish designed some very colourful outfits. The entire act, I was told, came across as very sexy and glamorous." Praising Manish, Kareena says, "He has worked very hard on my costumes. He sat with the organizers, Wizcraft, and meticulously worked a theme and costume for every song." Kareena also credits Shiamak Davar for her creative act. "Shiamak, who has created the act has come up with a different colour and for every theme", exclaims Bebo. Kareena has no regrets about Tashan bombing at the box-office. She says, "My performance has been appreciated. In fact my look and style has started a trend of sorts and I am happy about that." And how does she feel about being the best actress of this year? "On top of the world, " beams Bebo. Meanwhile doomsayers have been busy writing and rewriting the obituary her romance with Chhote nawab who has been breathing down her neck for quite some time.

Something similar happened at IIFA too, when Saif flew down from London to spend a few hours with Kareena and to see her perform on stage at the IIFA weekend. But alongside love there was jhagda as well. Tabloids are splashed with stories of how Saif had a fight with Kareena over her revealing dress at the event and how he cut short his visit and left back for London in a huff. But another version of the story says the tiff was not over Kareena’s dress but over Kareena’s insistence on Saif to stay back longer. Kareena was apparently enjoying her stint at IIFA and wanted to share more time with Saif, who unfortunately had to return to London. Whatever the reason for tiff, the jhagda was soon over and Bebo was spotted walking with Saif to the car and giving him a loving hug before he left for airport..