Blog | FunStylers

STOP! Director Ajai Sinha could have called cut 45 minutes before the end! Sinha has mixed two 2007 releases — Vikram Bhatt’s LIFE MEIN KABHI KABHI and Manoj Tyagi’s MUMBAI SALSA. The cocktail is similar, so is the end.

In short, watching STOP is like boarding a flight and knowing where you are headed to.

STOP is about four friends, three girls (Ishitta Arun, Gauri Karnik and Tejaswani Kolhapuri) and a guy (Rocky Bhatia). The movie revolves around their lives as a unit and then steers off for an individual build-up. It’s interesting in the beginning but before you know, it starts dragging. Songs are interspersed without need and plots lengthened, without any cause. The editor could have done with sharper scissors.

For example, the plot between Tejaswini and her father did not have to be prolonged. Evenafter he is dead, life is a party for her. Rocky Bhatia’s and Dia Mirza’s scenes too areunnecessary. So is Ishitaa’s scenes with the guy she is dating.

Ishitaa is Sonia, who runs a boutique in Dubai, Tejaswini is Tina, a theatre actress, Gauri is Pooja a successful Radio Jockey and Rocky is Om, working for a corporate. All friends share an apartment in Dubai and are inseparable, so to speak. Rohit, Om’s colleague in office befriends Sonia, Pooja is propositioned by her lewd boss at the radio station, Tina is troubled by her alcoholic father and Om’s past has come to haunt him in the form of Shama (Dia Mirza). How everyone battles their respective life with the support of their friends is what the story is about. For the record, STOP stands for the initials of the friends.

On the acting front, all three girls do a good job. Tejaswini is quite a revelation. Ditto Ishitaa and Gauri. Bhatia picks up post interval. As for Harsh Chhaya, he continues from where he left in LAAGA CHUNARI MEIN DAAG.

This could have been a quick fun movie if only Sinha knew when to STOP!

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After Khuda Ke Liye and Salakhen, India gets its third Pakistani film release. Unlike Khuda KeLiye, this one is a more mainstream film and gives you an idea of what big budget Pakistanicinema is all about. Yup! A poor clone of Bollywood, where both the choreography and theaction sequences leave much to be desired.

Nevertheless, this Punjabi film, shot extensively in the SWAT valley, makes interesting viewing as it traces the romance between village boy Nomi (Adnan) and village girl Salma (Veena Malik) who has been bethrothed in childhood to bad guy Sameer (Babrik Shah).

Sameer has moved to the city with his parents and has become the archetypal city slicker:lean, mean with a million girl friends.

Things might have turned out right for the simple love birds, since the city boy was hardlyinterested in marrying a rural lass. All it takes for him to change his mind is a slap from therighteous Salma who tries to teach him how to behave. After that, it’s a long drawn battlebetween the innocent lovers and the spoilt brat, with some good music (Sonu Nigam, SunidhiChauhan) thrown in between.

Add to this, a promise of a progressive message, where our hero tells the harried girl she has the right to choose her own husband, and you have a film that works at a certain level.

Watch it out of sheer curiosity.

Cast: Veena Malik, Adnan Khan, Babrik Shah
Direction: Shahzad Rafique

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The wife cooks breakfast. The husband gobbles it and goes to bring in more bread and butter on the breakfast table. Happy family, did you say? But wait, watch out for what wifey dearest does when the husband’s making his millions. She sobs and slips into bed with her husband’s best friend, because he has been black mailing her about a bunch of photographs that might put her husband in jail. The sleazy business could have gone off endlessly, but for the cuckolded husband who decides to avenge his humiliation in his own deadpan manner.

It’s a film where nobody acts. Everybody hams. And everything goes haywire, including themoth-balled dialogues about sati and pati.

Cast:   Kradhika, Rishabh, Sagar, Simran
Direction: Ravi Pun

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Guess if Saif saw this film, he’d take a somersault. Truly, it must be a film pulled out from thecans after almost a decade, since both Saif and Pooja Bhatt look like newbies: young, fresh and completely awkward before the camera. And if that’s not troubling enough, there’s also Sheeba and Atul Agnihotri (remember them?) to remind you of how moth-balled this film actually is. Specially since the two have long retired from active Bollywood.

Of course the film falls short in several other departments too. Like, the plot which is asconvoluted as the going-nowhere romances of the 1990s. Saif, a veritable playboy, gets serious about Pooja Bhatt, only to find out it’s too late to turn over a new leaf. There are too many skeletons (read dumped girl friends, dying for revenge) in his sordid past, to allow him to settle down happily ever after with the girl of his dreams. Also, there’s the mysterious Atul Agnihotri too, who poses as his friend and paints strange pictures of funeral pyres in his house.

Somersault time for us too, unless you’d like to watch Pooja wilting, Saif sobbing and Atulsleepwalking.

Cast:   Saif Ali Khan, Pooja Bhatt, Atul Agnihotri
Direction: Lawrence D’souza

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Team – The Force starts out with three friends, craving to make it big as musicians. Raj (Sohail Khan), Yash (Yash Tonk) and Jassi (Rajesh Hirjee) are buddies and live as paying guests with Babe (Kulbushan Kharbanda).

Knowing that they aspire to be musicians Babe decides to pour his own money into it and asks them to go to Goa to start working on their video album. The story doesn’t happily end there but just begins when the underworld don Raman Shetty (Sayaji Shinde) enters the scene and tries to exhort money from Babe.

It’s not quite as straight forward a demand as Shetty expects it to be and everything goeshilariously haywire.

CAST: Amrita Arora
Sohail Khan - Raj
Aarti Chhabria
Vrajesh Hirjee - Jassi
Yash Tonk - Yash

Director: Ajay Chandhok
Written by: Ajay Chandhok

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Cast: Joaquin Phoenix , Gwyneth Paltrow
In the insular world of Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, Leonard, a charismatic but troubled young man, moves back into his childhood home following a recent heartbreak.

While recovering under the watchful eye of his parents, Leonard meets two women in quick succession: Michelle, a mysterious and beautiful neighbor who is exotic and out-of-place in Leonard’s staid world, and Sandra, the lovely and caring daughter of a businessman who is buying out his family’s dry-cleaning business. Leonard becomes deeply infatuated by Michelle, who seems poised to fall for him, but is having a self-destructive affair with a married man.

At the same time, mounting pressure from his family pushes him towards committing to Sandra. Leonard is forced to make an impossible decision–between the impetuousness of desire and the comfort of love–or risk falling back into the darkness that nearly killed him.

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Straight – Ek Tedhi Medhi Love Story is about the twisted love life of Pinu Patel, played by Vinay Pathak, a man who owns a restaurant in London and drives a Mercedes but can’t seem to land a girl.

Of course it doesn’t help that Pinu is sweet but seriously uncool and that he’s also a virgin. Pinu’s life gets complicated when he starts to think that he may be gay and needs to hop into bed with a woman, only to prove to himself that he isn’t.

Unfortunately this sounds like way more fun than it actually is. Director Parvati Balagopalan had the material and the actors to create a witty comedy of love and sexual identity. But Straight is a staggeringly tedious film.

Pinu’s confusions take the whole first half to surface and his attempts at bedding women are so silly and unfunny that you almost want to suggest that he hire an escort and put us all out of our misery.

The writing is clunky and the dialogue, unintentionally funny. At one point, Gul Panag, playing a cartoonist cum accountant whom Pinu falls in love with, says, “artists are fascinated by imperfection, that’s what make us all real.” To which Pinu replies, “You’re so deep Renu.”

Parvati has a nice eye for visuals. Her plea for love, straight or gay is heart-felt. She creates some nice seamless transitions between scenes and a few poignant moments when you genuinely feel sorry for Pinu and his loveless state. But these are too few and far between.

Vinay Pathak, who is in almost every frame, works hard to flesh out Pinu’s complicated affairs of the heart – his insecurities, his loneliness, his feeble and nerdy attempts at mastering modern mating rituals. But Pathak is saddled with a thankless and predictable script, which goes on and on.

In the climax, Pinu’s cousin and confidante Rajat paraphrases Shylock’s classic speech from Merchant of Venice to declare that gays also have feelings. “When you prick us, he asks, do we not bleed.” Actually viewers have feelings too.

Skip this one and if you want to enjoy a superbly funny sexual comedy, pick up Judd Apatow’s The 40 year old Virgin instead.

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After penning award-winning scripts like Salaam Bombay!, Mississippi Masala and The Namesake, writer-photographer Sooni Taraporewala has donned the director’s hat for her self-written maiden venture Little Zizou - a rib tickling take on the Parsi community.

“Parsis have a culture just like anybody else. I chose to set my debut film within the Parsi world because it is so fascinating and so rarely seen,” Taraporewala told.

“It is a world I am very close to, I am very familiar with and I am confident about depicting accurately,” she added.

Produced by Dinaz Stafford, Vandana Malik and Taraporewala herself, the film stars Boman Irani, Sohrab Ardeshir, Imaad Shah, child actor Jahan Bativala in an ensemble line-up of 34 actors, most of whom are Parsis.

Bollywood actor John Abraham also makes a cameo in the film.Little Zizou,the 101-minute film is a Hindi, Gujarati and English amalgamation and has already done the festival circuit and won acclaim in the Mahindra Indo-American Arts Council (MIAAC) Film Festival, New York, the Asian Festival of First Films, Singapore, to name a few.

Set in Mumbai, “Little Zizou” is a comedy about two Parsi families in conflict - one headed by a religious hypocrite Khodaji (Sohrab) and the other by a reforming journalist Pressvala (Boman).

The story is told by Khodaji’s 11-year-old football-crazy son Xerxes or Little Zizou (Jahan), as he is fondly called, who wants his dead mother to bring the legendary French footballer Zinedine Zidane (Zizou) to Mumbai.

His older brother Artaxerxes or Art (Imaad) is a starry-eyed cartoonist with wild fantasies that come to life in surprising ways.

The brothers love to hang out at Pressvala’s place, the publisher of a liberal community newspaper and their father’s archrival.

Art burns with unrequited love for Pressvala’s oldest daughter, while Xerxes incurs the wrath of the younger daughter, who resents the attention her family showers on the motherless kid.

Fireworks fly when Pressvala writes a biting critique of would-be prophet Khodaji that gathers wide public reaction.

As the two households intermingle, what unfolds next is hilarious.

Considering Taraporewala’s previous record and her forte at offbeat subjects, the film might not appeal to the mass audience but could offer a pep pill for niche viewers.

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Life is always on a fast track!: In life, we all run with different motives for different goals. Some run for love… some for money… some for peace… some for contentment and some for the sheer fun of it. There’s no escape from running.

Life is always on a fast track. It’s an inspirational journey of perseverance and personal triumph. Five ordinary but unique stories with different journeys and different destinations but the same 42 kms.. to run!

‘Marathon’ is now ‘42 Kms.’: ‘Marathon’, which has been ready for more than a year, is getting ready for a release in 2009. The film has been re–titled as ‘42 Kms….’.

The movie revolves around the Delhi & Mumbai marathon. The film is being released by ‘Eastern Union Entertainment’ and stars Mandira Bedi, Samir Dattani, Purab Kohli, Bikram Saluja, Prashant Chainani, Nausheen Ali Sardar & Nauheed Cyrusi.Directed by Nisha Chainani who has been a former assistant to Rakesh Roshan, Harry Baweja & Aziz Mirza, ‘42 Kms..’ comes with a message that in life, people run with different motives for different goals.

Let’s find out how running for the Mumbai International Marathon, changed the life of these people, because all that lay between their broken dreams and a life of contentment was just… 42 kms!

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Xperience films’ first venture IT’S A MISMATCH is ready for release on 17th April 2009. Directed by Ajmal Zaheer Ahmad and produced by Dalip Singh Sethi & Harbinder Brar, this romantic family comedy stars Anupam Kher, Boman Irani, Nandana Sen and introducing Anubhav Anand. The music of the film has been scored by Steven Gutheinz. The songs are penned by Josh.

This Indo-American production is a passionate view of hilariously star-crossed romance while never forgetting the importance of family, culture, and staying true to one’s emotions.

Aman (Anubhav Anand) is a talented young architect. Raised by his Uncle, he has all the love and care a family could offer but Aman takes it for granted. While working towards his dream, his life takes a beautiful turn when he bumps into the perfect girl Neha (Nandana Sen). The two fall in love, and nothing seems able to come between them.

Nothing, that is, until it is the time for their families to meet. Sparks fly. Every known disaster strikes when the hyper-vibrant Mr. Bhalla (Anupam Kher) and the rigidly-conventional Mr. Patel (Boman Irani) meet. Both are hilariously different….Both are woefully mismatched. Naturally both the fathers lock horns and vehemently oppose the MATCH.

The lovebirds must find a way to bring their families together and this leads to a comical series of misadventures of the two disapproving, faultfinding fathers. In the process Aman realizes the true definition of family and what it really means to love someone. Will Aman be able to bring the two families together? And will he succeed in achieving his dream?

IT’S A MISMATCH invites you to Join Mr. Bhalla, Mr. Patel, Aman & Neha, along with their families as they celebrate life, love and everything in between.

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