Film: Kill Dil
Director: Shaad Ali
Cast: Govinda, Ranveer Singh, Ali Zafar, Parineeti Chopra
Kill Dil is one of those misfired gun shots of masala cinema that reads like a fun fest on paper. I am sure everyone must have ROFL (Ranveer’s semi-illiterate character doesn’t know what ROFL means, teehee) while shooting and enacting the scenes and even before that there must have loads of laughter while reading the script.
In principle these unprincipled characters who live and die by the gun must have seemed interes-ting.
On screen “Kill Dil” is as flat as the midriff that Ranveer loves to flaunt whenever the script permits. Not that the script here is too particular about what goes and what doesn’t. This is a free-for-all guns-and-romance spree where Gulzar Saab’s poetry slyly meets Ranveer Singh’s buffoonery. Half-way down the narration you realise director Shaad Ali has run out of designer-cool tricks.
Enough of those chic shots of our two heroes riding down busy highways gunning for unsuspecting victims. Yes, our heroes Dev and Tutu are assassins.
You could’ve fooled me! They look like a couple of petty pick-pockets. But God and the screen writers(three of them, actually….what’s that they say about too many crooks….sorry, cooks?) have loftier plans for our heroes who eat, laugh, cry and kill together.
But never sleep together.
The heroes are assigned boarding school double-decker beds, just so that we don’t get any homosexual ideas. This is Jai and Veeru from “Sholay” without Jai clambering on Veeru’s shoulder on the motorbike. They sing together but the lyrics are about assassi-nation and jubila-tion. Yash Raj films had gone into a similar turbulent territory of dosti versus love in the recent “Gunday”.
I have to admit “Kill Dil” is a smaller disaster than “Gunday”. Ranveer who played one of the two buddies in the earlier film as well, is far more entertaining here.
He’s still way over the top. But here he is hammy in a pleasant way. Trouble starts and the killings for him end when Ranveer’s charac-ter Dev falls in love with the neighbourhood femme fatale, a weirdly freelancing heiress played by the forcibly glammed-up Pari-neeti Chopra, who seems to have her hands in every single pie that she can lay her manicured fingers on.
Just what she sees in the ruffian Dev is something only the film’s writer can answer. The romance which overtakes the Ranveer-Ali Zafar bromance is among the many inexplicable mysteries that squeeze and smother the life out of this trite-and-tested action-comedy masquerading as Tarantino’s distant cousin.
Another mystery: why does Gulzar Saab’s voice-over show up in three places to remind us that violence begets only violence? And why the songs? Good lord,they burst out of the narrative’s seam like a fat man’s paunch in a shirt sizes too small for him.
Undoubtedly some of the purportedly funny situations hit the mark. When Dev falls in love and reforms from a hit-man to an insurance agent his caller tune changes from Pankaj Udhas’s “Chitti ayee hai” to Lataji’s “Rahen na rahen hum”.
The characters including the supposedly sinister villain Bhaiji break into dance without a care about who’s watching. I can understand the script’s eagerness to make the villain dance as he’s played by Govinda. The actor par excellence is not only back in form here, he imbues his uni-dimensional part with unexpected humour and charm. Welcome back, Govinda. Wish we could say the same about the director. His first film in 7 years, and this is what Shaad Ali comes up with?
Is this the same filmmaker who once made the endearing “Bunty Aur Babli”? Shaad brings down with him some of our very best technicians like cinematographer Aveek Mukhopadhyay and editor Ritesh Soni who have done their most patchy work in this film.(IANS)
Film: Beauty and the Beast
Director: Christophe Gans;
CAST: Lea Seydoux, Vincent Cassel, Andre Dussollier, Eduardo Noriega, Myriam Charleins;
With elements of fantasy such as a castle in the forest, a curse, a prince charming and a damsel in distress,fairy
tales have always been fascinating and “Beauty and the Beast”, is no different.
First written as “Belle et la Bete” by French novelist Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont in 1756, there have been many variants of the original in literature, television, stage and films.
Ironically, Director Christophe Gans’ “Beauty and the Beast” is the second major French film adaptation of the classic fairy tale after 68 years. The previous film with the same name was directed by Jean Cocteau in 1946.
Well this latest edition, with a bit of digression in the narration, offers nothing out of the ordinary in terms of plot, acting or presen-tation.
But nevertheless, it is still mesmerising. It is so magically beautiful with its phenomenal music, exquisite visual style and enchanting craftsmanship, that it would enthrall kids of every age group. Narrated as a layered story within a story mode, the film begins with the opening of a book as Seydoux’s voice reads a bedtime story, “Belle et la Bete” to two adorable kids. She tells them the tale of a rich merchant who has three sons – Maxim, Tristan and Luis and three daughters Anne, Clotilde and Belle.
Belle the youngest, is known for her beauty and the film is her journey of how she meets the beast and falls in love with it. Lea Seydoux as Belle is ravishingly endea-ring. Vincent Cassel as the Beast is adorable too. But unfortu-nately the chemistry betwe-en the two is lacking and the fault lies not with the actors but with the sketchy script that wrapped up the expos-ition with seemingly uninte-ntional hurry.
Also, this classic romantic fairy tale feels more contrived than it ought to as the script-writers under-play the true depths of the romance and emotion amidst its majestic plot-graph. But as mentioned earlier, this film, its minor flaws notwithstanding, is sure to captivate kids and leave them engrossed in this fantasy tale.
A treat for kids, the release of the film couldn’t have been more well timed, with this being a “Children’s Day” weekend.(IANS)