Meenakshi Rao's Bollywood and Hollywood movie reviews

Starring : R. Madhavan, Kangana Ranaut, Jimmy Shergill, Deepak Dobriyal Rated : 7.8/10 If  Tanu Weds Manu  was a delight, this one is a delightX2. And that’s because there is KanganaX2. Both of the two Kanganas are delightful and edgy in their own ways. Both arrest you with their arresting histrionics, their beauty — one all curly and done up and the other a boy cut Haryanvi athlete with a perfect Haryanvi accent. Both are different as chalk and cheese. Both are well fleshed out as characters in their own right. Both stand tall and both tower of the film. Then there is Madhavan who continues to be a gentle soul, this time however all marriage weary, freshly out from a London  wallah paagal khana  (sent in by his double personality wife of three years) and all smitten by his crazy wife’s look-alike Datto. But the real fun in this film is with Deepak (vintage) Dobriyal as Madhavan’s friend like in the original one. If he was rollicking in the first one, in this...

Starring : George Clooney, Hugh Laurie, Britt Robertson, Raffey Cassidy, Thomas Robinson, Tim McGraw, Kathryn Hahn, Keegan-Michael Key Rated : 5/10 Too futuristic, too fantastic and too hyperactive, this sci-fi wastes the presence of George Clooney who is made to be a scruffy (unnecessarily) inventor not really central to the movie at all. Having Clooney and wasting him is one crime, having a film and losing it is another. Hollywood comes out with sci-fis a dime a dozen and this one — in which the stress is on a happy tomorrow through humanlike robots and a young girl on a drive to see the world beyond her — comes with a lot of ifs and buts. Yes, it is young and happening and for the holiday season may draw in a lot of school-college crowd. Yes, it is stitched together well and the imagination quotient is high. But it somehow does not keep you engaged all through. Source: Sunday Pioneer, 24 May 2015

Starring : Sam Rockwell, Rosemarie DeWitt, Jared Harris, Jane Adams Rated : 5/10 Those who saw the original Poltergeist of 2006, may find this one collapsing here and there and quite frequently so at that. Though the idea of this remake has some amount of applaudable reality — a small girl being “taken” by spirits through her bedroom cabinet and she being trapped in the netherworld from where her parents can hear her through their TV screen — it is the execution and the lack of fear factor that does this one in. Moving to a neighbourhood built on a cemetery without shifting the remains, the Bowen family of five walk directly into an eerie world where a willow tree looks violent at the gate and a cabinet keeps doing weird things to the children — like blowing their hair gently on being touched. And then there is also the inevitable joker with a scary face and a cherry nose. Without creating too much fear, the film erroneously goes into the mechanics of working out the spirits ...

Starring : Ranbir Kapoor, Anushka Sharma, Karan Johar, Kay Kay Menon Rated : 4.5/10 Take a 40s Hollywood gangster movie, preferably helmed by Al Pacino and his henchmen, give it a Martin Scorsese technique, splash it with a whole lot of sepia shades, get a villain who is a known newbie and roll all this into an equally sepia Bombay of the 70s, and you have an Anurag Kashyap film on gangster megapolis of the old world type. Bombay Velvet  exists as much in the curls of a callow-looking Ranbir Kapoor as it does in the aspirations, frustration and exploitation of the what was the predecessor of the quintessential Mumbai bar dancer played impeccably by Anushka Sharma. Those were the days when Mumbai had just started bursting at its seams, crime was bedecking the docks, women were being packed off to red light areas and old time clubs were turning into exclusive preserves of the rich and the famous with shady deals being struck to the clinking of glasses. That time, Bombay was...

Starring : Tom Hardy, Charlize Theron, Nicholas Hoult, Hugh Keays-Byrne Rated : 7/10 Was it 1979 or early 1980 when I was a little girl whose senses were assaulted as never before by the untamed violence of the film. Thirty-six years later, it yet again took my breath away and left me in deep shock. Mad Max, guys, has only got more violent, more compelling and more vicious. I wonder how director George Miller has been able to maintain his stark and singing cinematic fury at such a peak. The latest one, a fire spewing, death charring, violent to the hilt desert safari on monstrous vehicles aboard which are deadly beings led by a ferocious Immortan Joe (he was the villain in the first one too) are in constant pursuit not just of madness but of “wives” with progenies. Ruling over an emaciated humanity by starving them of water, releasing only a few droplets now and then, Immortan Joe is betrayed by his lead worker (Charleze Theron) who organises the escape of the wives to the “Gre...

Starring : Amitabh Bachchan, Irrfan Khan, Deepika Padukone, Moushumi Chatterjee, Raghuvir Yadav Rated : 9/10 If  Vicky Donor  brought the sperm out of the closet in style,  Piku  tells you with equal panache that shit happens because that’s life. And how when shit doesn’t happen, neither does life. The beauty of this unique film by Shoojit Sarkar is that though it is obsessively centralised on the constipation issues of an old man, it is the most free flowing toilet humour that Bollywood has shat, that too through an entire two-hour film. It is Sarkar’s cinematic acumen and more than that scriptwriter Juhi Chaturvedi’s extra-ordinary ordinariness in storytelling that makes this one that  hatke  blockbuster which comes in only once in a while to gently sweep you off your feet. It is ordinary to be constipated at 70 and it is even more ordinary to obsess about it, like Amitabh Bachchan does as a 70-year-old  bhadralok  Bengali in  Piku ...

Starring : Chris Evans, Michelle Monaghan Anthony Mackie, Aubrey Plaza Rated : 5/10 Slow, insipid romances do not sit well on Hollywood so it is very surprising how so many of them find their way to Indian screens? Surely, it is the third world dumping mentality that has crossed over from goods to films and India has long been susceptible to such capers. Now with multiplex tickets going up the price ladder as never before, films like  Playing It Cool  will hardly have an audience which means that the film makes no money or very dismal money for distributors. Playing It Cool  really plays it cool with romance and the relationship that develops between the lead pair is so unconventional that it does not make too much sense. For most part of the film it is unrequited love, or so the heroine would like to portray. There is hardly any reason, not even chemistry, for the hero to be pulled towards a girl (moreso when he is a perennial playboy thanks to his mother deserti...

Kuch kuch locha hai Starring : Sunny Leone, Ram Kapoor, Evelyn Sharma, Navdeep Chabbra Rated : 2/10 Why would Ram Kapoor be doing such films is befuddling, annoying and bewildering. Is it desperation of a TV superstar to be on the big screen that has driven him to such blundering movies in such super-blundering roles? Or is it that he never really had the brains to judge bad from good? Or is it about earning money anyhow? Or is it a combination of all this and much more like the lack of space for characterisations for actors like him? Whatever it is, really,  kuch to locha hai  boss. I mean a sexless sex comedy with former porn star Sunny Leone doing nothing but gyrating and pouting unnecessarily, Kapoor playing a more than portly Gujju  bhai  in  phoren  land, married to an all the more Gujju wife in a  seedha pallu  and having a flat faced bare-chested grown up boy for company was something that he needn’t have gone through even if it ...

While We're Young Starring : Ben Stiller, Naomi Watts, Adam Driver, Amanda Seyfried Rated : 5/10 Ben Stiller needs to be funny — very funny at all times — or, he does not work for me. And that’s the problem with this film — Ben (Josh) is not funny, he is more stupid than funny. To top it, he is a loser too — a righteous documentary maker who gets conned and used by a gen-next counterpart who is not just unscrupulous but working to succeed come what may. In the middle of all this message making, there is also a short but bumpy story about an old-age (50 plus) childless couple teaming up with a much younger couple and then being taken up by their shallow but fast paced (not to mention often weird) existence. The story, as mentioned earlier, is jerky, repetitive and somehow a bit off the rockers too. It is a lazy movie which could have done so much more and so much better only if it had the sense of inserting some more humour into the situation than it actually does. See...

  Gabbar is back  Starring:  Akshay Kumar, Shruti Hassan, Sunil Grover, Suman Talwar Rated:  7/10 This movie has  Gabbar wali baat . But from that  Ramgarh ka Gabbar  and his blood curdling  pachaas pachaas kos dur  threat, this one has moved some paces up, this time on the ladder of goodness. So when this one says his bit about  pachaas kos , you clap, you look up to him and you want to follow his example. The  Gabbar  here is  dabangg  not evil, he is loveable and he is on a mission. The best thing about this mount against corruption is that it gives you no time to think and it stands tall on the becoming swagger of Akshay Kumar. Akshay here is unkempt but has attitude and he doesn’t mind being a grown up professor, happy that all frames of this over two-hour movie focus mostly on him. He does justice to all this concentrated footage he grabs in the film which flows seamlessly from one hanging of a corru...