MR WHITE MR BLACK - piss-poor Bollywood comedy

Piss-poor Bollywood feature by writer-director Deepak S. Shivdasani. Childhood friends Gopi and Kishan (Suniel Shetty and Arshad Warsi) reunite to nick diamonds from a flash hotel: Gopi, a small-town simpleton having been corrupted by Kishan's big-town thieving ways. The humour is strained and juvenile, the production design cheap, the songs mediocre....in general a pure waste of time. Arshad Warsi may be a good comic actor but any director who puts him on a beach in a wet T-shirt and tries to shoot him a sex-symbol in a music video is clearly lacking in judgment.

MR BLACK MR WHITE was released in May 2008 and is available on DVD.

GOLMAAL RETURNS - Bollywood smash-hit farce

Rohit Shetty's follow-up to his phenominally successful 2006 film GOLMAAL (loosely translated as "crazy stuff") sees Bollywood A-lister Kareena Kapoor join Arshad Warsi and Ajay Devgan and much of the old cast. The film is an old-fashioned screwball comedy in which innocent mix-ups lead to wives suspecting husbands of philandering; people pretend to be other people; and generally rather juvenile but harmless comedy.

Production values are high and I'm sure the target demographic was rolling in the aisles with laughter. I find this sort of artificially high-pitched domestic farce hard to take even when done well. I also don't particularly like the kind of quasi-Happy House sound-track that music director Pritam churns out for the wannabe MTV dance numbers.

GOLMAAL RETURNS was a huge hit on Diwali 2008 and is now available on DVD.

KRAZZY 4 - limp Bollywood caper flick

Jaideep Sen's directorial debut is a lacklustre, snail-paced caper movie called KRAZZY 4. The incomparable Irrfan Khan (THE NAMESAKE) and popular comic actor Arshard Warsi lead a pack of mental patients let loose on the streets of Mumbai when their kind-hearted psychiatrist (Juhi Chawla) is kidnapped. When the movie breaks for the Interval, our Krazzy heroes have unwittingly uncovered a nasty plot involving political corruption.

The movie plays as a poorly written, flabby caper movie, with half-hearted attempts at physical humour and romance in the first half, and a thin thriller plot in the second half. Arshad Warsi, Irrfhan Khan and the rest of the cast are not given a chance to shine. In addition, I fear that the only thing anyone will remember about the score will be the legal kerfuffles surrounding its authorship. Rakhi Sawant is in typically sleazy form in a very lacklustre item number in the first half; the promise of some high wattage cameos will no doubt keep fans in the cinema for the item number in the second half.

The only thing I can really find to praise in KRAZZY 4 is the sporadic attempt at social critique. The film is mostly set on India's Independence Day and the screenwriter has a lot of digs at the corruption and disrespect for public property that is endemic to Indian society.

KRAZZY 4 is on release in India and the UK.

LAGE RAHO MUNNABHAI/CARRY ON MUNNABHAI - Pure popcorn entertainment

LAGE RAHO MUNNABHAI is an outstanding Bollywood feel-good comedy. I haven't had such a good time in the movie theatre in a long time. This isn't really a sequel to the original smash-hit movie, MUNNABHAI MBBS. Rather it is another movie in a franchise that riffs on the original formula. Munnabhai is a Bombay goon who kidnaps people, beats people up and generally lives a disreputable life. He is played by the charismatic and versatile Hindi actor, Sanjay Dutt. Munnabhai has a side-kick called Circuit, who is played by the supreme comic, Arshad Warsi. These guys have real comic chemistry and timing - and the comedy is broad - witty, crude dialogue and physical slapstick. In this new movie, Munnabhai is in love with a radio DJ played by the beautiful Vidya Balan (last seen in PARINEETA). In order to impress her, Munnabhai pretends not to be a doctor this time but a Professor of history. He wins a radio quiz with his knowledge of Mahatma Gandhi and hopes to win her heart. Unfortunately, as the hallucination of Gandhi who follows Munnabhai around tells him, she's in love with the professor, not the goon. So follows a simple, honest, but utterly charming slapstick comedy with the usual mistaken identities and Heart-Warming ending. It may not be rocket science, but I see enough unfunny comedies and Movies with a Meaning that are just manipulative and empty to know a winner when I see one.

LAGE RAHO MUNNABHAI/CARRY ON MUNNABHAI is on release in India, Australia, the US and UK.

JARHEAD - hoo-ra!

JARHEAD - a new movie about the US experience in the first Gulf War - is not the profound indictment of war and US foreign policy that Sam Mendes, the director, no doubt intended. Mendes specialises in over-hyped, well-shot, but emotionally sterile, pretentious wank-fests. American Beauty is one of the most over-hyped movies in recent memory and I still haven't forgiven the Academy for heaping it with Oscars, disregarding far better movies such as Election, The Insider, Topsy-Turvy, Being John Malkovich, The End of the Affair and The Sweet and Lowdown. What's worse, Sam Mendes has no cinematic humility: at several points in JARHEAD he shows the troops enjoying war movie classics such as The Deer Hunter, and Apocalypse Now. The glimpses of better movies only heighten our belief that JARHEAD is rather mediocre fair. The reason why I love movies like Apocalypse Now is that they straddle the fine line between condemning war for its futility and stupidity while at the same time indulging in the pornography of war. Yes, yes, we share Martin Sheen's "horror" at Vietnam, but at the same time, what we love is the US choppers coming in to napalm the Vietnamese village, with The Ride of the Valkyries blaring from the speakers. We love Col. Kilgore's cheesy speeches about napalm and surfing.

Which is all a long-winded way of coming to my point. Sam Mendes has failed completely in straddling the fine line between condemnation and pornography. Every part of the film that tries to make a larger political point suffocates in a sea of piety and banality. The first five minutes and the final fifteen minutes of JARHEAD are some of the most ridiculous in cinema: platitutudes passed off as wisdom. Similarly, in the middle of a film we have a segment that should that shock the viewer, but because of the tone of the preceeding fifty minutes, completely fails to make an impact. Where Mendes succeeds is in the pornography of war - and to that end, he has made a movie that is not so much a liberal critique as a boon for the war buffs. With his combination of superb photography and gallows humour, he has created a glamourous, often-times hysterical, war movie. This is helped by superb cameos by Chris Cooper and Dennis Haysbert (President Palmer in 24). The dialogue is witty, the characters larger-than-life, the vintage rap music well-chosen. To sum it up, if you go see this movie, and there is no reason why you should not, you will remember it not for the scenes of dead Iraqis, but for Jake Gyllenhaal shaking his ass in a Santa* G-string. I bet the Republicans are shaking in their boots after *that* savage indictment.

JARHEAD is on global release. *Which makes me wonder if this movie is a second-order victim of Bina007's first law of movies.