On "Tamasha"

Tamasha, Imtiaz Ali's latest film, is fortified with all the strengths the director's movies usually possess and weakened by a number of the same flaws. And just like most of his work, it is wonderful and frustrating. 

Here, too, is a man (Ved Vardhan Sahni, played by Ranbir Kapoor) who is broken and can only be fixed by the loving ministrations of a woman (Deepika Padukone's Tara Maheshwari) he puts through the wringer. Here, too, are the existential dilemmas of well-off folks who need to find themselves through tourism and romantic adventure in verdant, picturesque lands, far away from the quotidian distractions of work, family, and real life. Here, once again, are mental health issues, not fully understood or explicated,  and eventually  fixed rather conveniently, as they invariably are in his happy-ending films (Jab We Met and Love Aaj Kal before this one), by requited romantic love and the successes that love inspires in the world of his films.

But Tamasha, like the rest of the films in Ali's oeuvre, mines an almost spiritual sort of wonder from the notion that romantic love warms the great, cold gloom of life into something meaningful and transcendent. Ali has a way with making love's most ineffable experiences visible in his films. He insinuates himself into the companionable silences of kindred spirits, captures the barely contained heat that rises off lovers, simulates with an astonishing keenness of eye the childlike joyousness, the sun-dappled idyll of falling in love and the sad, clanging hideousness of trying to fall out of it. 

I found myself reacting intensely to Tamasha's conception of love as a force of freedom and for good. The film's lovers, in its halcyon Corsica portion, form a jolly, candid friendship right away. They feel emancipated by each other to find in themselves the sweet, unchecked vigor of childhood and also grow toward better, less phony versions of themselves. They both challenge and comfort each other. Well, Ved is challenged and comforted by Tara; the narrative shortchanges her and focuses on him. She is rounded out not by Ali's screenplay but by Padukone's generous performance. As she has been in all of her recent work, she is the cynosure of every scene she's in, bringing to the bracing, unembarrassed Tara a shimmering transparency.

Ali's vision has, in spite of its steadfast faith in the redemptive enchantment of love, darkened with each film, and he lets the shadows swallow his lead players whole before they find their happy ending in Tamasha. They lose hold on their dignity, their sense of self, even their sanity before they are allowed to find their way back to each other. And Kapoor and Padukone together are so vivid, so easy that I was convinced that their characters ought to be together, once he figures his shit out, of course. Some may, with good reason, find her acceptance of him at the end  too facile, even masochistic, but I bought it. Padukone turns into a creature of light and air when she's around the version of Ved that isn't a boring little office drone. (Ranbir, with his French beard, bad posture, and flattened out speech, plays this tedious, unctuous, flavorless man, the one who the girl would dump for the leading man in other love stories, with as much care as he does the flamboyant pixie that is, according to the film and Tara, Ved's true self.) When the two look at each other, you believe they're seeing each other.

But before he makes their match, Ali constructs an idealist's argument for the the value of a fully examined life. Tamasha is a lyric battle-cry against anodyne conformity. Ali calls, like Rajkumar Hirani (in 3 Idiots) and Zoya Akhtar (in Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara and Dil Dhadakne Do) before him, for the liberation of the (generally straight, cismale) self from conformity through joyous art-making, lovemaking, and travel. But he makes his case with wit and audacity, creating a kind of arch collage of image and sound for his film. He directs his actors to play straight, and stages stretches of the film with casual naturalism. But he also calls attention to the artifice of film as a medium of storytelling with playful, showy touches.  He marks "chapters" with French pulp illustration-style title cards that reference pulp Bollywood movies. He slices up the narrative often so the audience is kept just a smidge disoriented by the back and forth of the non-linear narrative. He spins a haze of golden, wine-soaked glamor all over the couple's romp in Corsica, which unspools with a delightfully relaxed unpredictability, and then shoots the Delhi portions like a thriller, mostly at night (the daylight scenes are mostly of Ved going through the motions, again and again, at home and work; if one were to name an Instagram filter inspired by the tone of these parts, it'd be called "Antiseptic"), with silences that are always on the threshold of ominous. He has the characters from the tales little Ved likes to listen to (in a flashback marked "flashback") haunt the streets of Shimla in costumes clearly realized in the imagination of a child. (Laxman is wearing a school-uniform sweater under his bow.) 

Ali also makes cunning, unexpected use of AR Rahman's score; troupes of balladeers in Punjab sing to the audience as Tara struggles to recover from her love affair in Kolkata. An autorickshaw driver is seen, in his memory, singing a lusty folk number, while he reminisces about his past glory in the presence of a lost Ved at a roadside dhaba. The sad, sweet Agar Tum Saath Ho plays as Ved leaves Tara, his walk slowed to the herky-jerky movement of an eight-bit video game. All this showy technique doesn't bug, however, since this is, after all, a film about finding new ways to tell old stories and choosing new stories to tell about oneself. 

Tamasha and its protagonists are idiosyncratic enough, its play of wide-eyed hopefulness and quiet despair compelling enough, that the film develops an appealing strangeness that overcame, for the most part, my instinctual desire to roll my eyes at its earnest insistence on individualism in a story about pretty, privileged, able-bodied people in a society that sets very few challenges in the way of their path to self-actualization. Tamasha's weirdness, and the radiant conviction of its female lead, save it from smugness.

On "Bombay Velvet"

Bombay Velvet is an ambitious film. Anurag Kashyap's assiduously crafted period piece wants to be an alternate history of Mumbai's rise after the fall of the British Raj. To this end, Kashyap shows us archival footage of Bombay and a map of the city as its overlords envisioned it at the time. He has characters deliver, in the form of dialogue, contextual information about land reclamation and political chicanery.  In a postscript, he updates us on the present status of the city and tells us what came of the actual real estate developments that the fictional characters in the film concern themselves with. An enormous set and impressive visual effects are used to gorgeously evoke a vision of Bombay in the fifties and sixties that is so richly and specifically detailed that it reads as authentic. Kashyap is intent on making a magnum opus.

The problem with the film is that its grand aspirations are tacked on to a story that is pure pulp, and not particularly inspired pulp at that. The plot is focused on an immoral goon who is, like the film constructed around him, frighteningly ambitious. It is the usual rags-to-riches-to-revenge stuff that is rife with all sorts of ramshackle coincidences and improbable developments. And it is not sound enough scaffolding for the Serious Filmmaking that Kashyap is going for in his retelling of the initial chapters in Mumbai's post-Independence history. The masala-noir contrivances don't really hold up under the kind of scrutiny that a film that actually wants to say something meaningful about history would generally be subjected to. On the other hand, the filmmaking is often slightly bloodless, and that approach might be in line with the high-minded tangents Kashyap wants to make but is at odds with the movie's larger-than-life, filmi aspects. 

Furthermore, the protagonists aren't particularly compelling. Johnny Balraj (Ranbir Kapoor) wants to be a big-shot because he started out with nothing. But he is not interesting, uniquely intelligent, or even charming. He just wants more money and more power. He is arrogant, evil-tempered, and homicidal. He doesn't have a heart of gold or any scruples to speak of. He's basically the villain from a standard-issue Bollywood movie, except he gets a backstory. Oh, and he likes this girl. Rosie Noronha (Anushka Sharma) has killed her abuser and run away from Portugese-occupied Goa. She takes risqué pictures to jumpstart her career as a singer and finds herself a sugar daddy. On this man's command, she enters Balraj's life to get something out of him (negatives for an incriminating picture of a politician – the business surrounding these negatives is uninteresting and unconvincing throughout) but ends up falling in love with him. All of this ought to make for a fascinating character, but Rosie is mostly passive and sad. When the film showed us Rosie's childhood right after it showed us Balraj's, I figured that it would really be about both of them. But Rosie is just The Girl. I wish we'd seen her write her own music or rise through the ranks at Bombay Velvet, the club Balraj runs. (I suspect, based on the presence of Raveena Tandon, who gives the film a jolt of much-needed sex appeal in her all-too-brief appearances, that a subplot about Rosie supplanting an established singer at the club was left on the editing table. I feel like too much has been taken out of the film in general; as a result, it's slightly incoherent.) 

Balraj and Rosie's love is supposed to motivate much of the film's action. Balraj wants to make it big so he can win Rosie, for one. But Kashyap, once again misjudging what is interesting about his film, does not really show us how the two actually fall in love. Also, the leads are not the sort of performers who can enliven a thin or unsympathetic part by sheer force of charisma. Madhuri Dixit and Amitabh Bachchan, to name the most notable examples, routinely employed megawatt star power to turn wan outlines of an archetype into characters worth rooting for. Kapoor and Sharma are both excellent actors, but they are not the sort of actors who can deliver a memorable performance when the character is basic-ish on paper.They both do the best they can, and Sharma is spectacularly moving in the film's showpiece number, Dhadaam Dhadaam (Amit Trivedi's score, by the way, is genius throughout), but old-fashioned magnetism is not either star's strong suit. I kept fantasy-casting the film as I was watching it, and I wondered what Ranveer Singh, with his manic, slightly sleazy energy, and Huma Qureshi, with her volcanic sexual charisma, would have done with these roles. 

The only intriguing prominent character in the film is Kaizad Khambatta, the silken, scheming power player who backs Balraj's rise and authors his fall. Karan Johar, in his first major film role, gives us a sense of the unconventional character's dimensions and desires in a surprisingly sexy performance; the screen just about thrums with menace when he appears. Khambatta merely alludes to his origin story (he is the scion of a major publishing family that had fallen on hard times and has had to rebuild the newspaper practically from scratch), but Johar finds a way to work the weight of the neurosis resulting from his unpleasant history as well as the heat of his lust for Balraj into his scenes. Khambatta is also the only character in whom Kashyap successfully reconciles the film's interest in the backroom politics that created modern-day Mumbai and its negotiation of more genre-y conventions.

I want to be clear that I did not find Bombay Velvet worthless or tiresome. It looks and sounds stunning. It is intelligent in its craftsmanship and never boring. But I can't stop thinking about what the film could have been. For one, I rather wish Kashyap had set the film more fully at the titular club. I can imagine a Bombay Velvet that might have been about the schemers and climbers at each table, about the backstage rivalries and the shady dealings, and about the love between the ambitious manager of the club and its ingenue singer. It might have been more of an ensemble film, giving us glimpses of a variety of colorful characters instead of a conventional pair of lovers. It would have allowed for more tightly focused, satisfying storytelling and for a more organic-seeming, less awkward exploration of the city's culture and ethos at that time. But that might not be the film Kashyap wanted to make. As it stands, Bombay Velvet is admirable for its chutzpah, but it is not quite the Great Film it clearly aspires to be. (I'm very curious about what an extended cut would look like, though.)

On "Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani"

(Spoilers! Not explicit ones, but still!)

Ayaan Mukerji's sophomore feature possesses a number of annoying traits that are standard-issue in lesser Dharma movies. The first half indulges in way too much of the cornball humor so beloved of The House That KJo Built. Here, these bits are mostly centered around a vapid firang named Lara; they are sporadically funny but never inspired, and feel uneasily written in, a little cheapening even. The background score is wall-to-wall and sometimes intolerable. We get the tinkly fairy sounds and the swell of the orchestra in a romantic scene, we get sound effects straight out of 2003 in a comic scene, we get a creepy-ass chorus of children going  ooh and aah in scenes of wonder and discovery. Also, the film gives us the tomboy-to-girlie-girl makeover that we've seen in both Kuch Kuch Hota Hai and Student of The Year. (The latter turned the spunky, interesting best-friend character into a kurta-clad homemaker whose unnecessary transformation is apparently explained by marriage and childbearing. I don't mind a female character dressing in a more stereotypically feminine manner, and boy, does Kalki Koechlin work the series of outfits that could probably cost as much as one of hubby Anurag's productions. But why, in 2013, are we still making lesbian jokes about a girl who doesn't wear pink? And why does the shift in her look need to be commented upon, as if it were an indispensable, highly desirable change? What else, one might ask resignedly, can one expect of a film where the female characters have their legs out in several costume changes on an uphill trek, while the males stay fully clad. Ugh, am I right?

Now that I've completely convinced you that this film is the no-good, very-bad kind, let me admit that, despite the litany of quibbles I've listen above, I really enjoyed Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani. I know, you guys. I didn't see it coming either. The first half was pleasant , but rarely much more. Bookish Naina (Deepika Padukone) takes an impulsive trip to Manali with kids she knows from school, and falls for rakish Bunny as he expounds at length on his world-traveler ambitions. In the process, she loses the glasses, opens up, and learns how to have fun. It's basically a Disney Channel film with grown-up Bollywood stars, well-acted and travelogue-pretty. You worry that it is going to get worse, and you're going to be subjected to that insufferably played-out "love vs. everything else" conflict once again.
But, post-intermission, the film takes an unexpected turn for the better. It's as if Mukerji decided his writing needed to grow up just when his characters did. Bunny meets Naina again, eight years after the trek, at a friend's lavish destination wedding in Rajasthan. He's a travel journalist, she's a doctor. Amid the revelry - and there is quite a bit of revelry - sparks fly. 

In his tender debut, Wake Up Sid, Ayaan Mukerji kept plot minimal and unfussy, and patiently allowed his protagonists to find their place in the world. Here, too, the narrative is slight. Most of the heavy stuff happens offscreen. One of the characters loses a parent, another fails at making his passion project work, a third gives up on unrequited love and finds the requited kind. We don't see these life-changing moments happen, but we see how they've shaped Bunny and his friends. 

The early parts of the film didn't prepare me for how interesting the writing would get as the narrative unspooled. The initial reels tell us things they've already shown, and don't tell them in particularly original ways. Bunny waxes poetic about his love for traveling, calling it a "nasha" (addiction); his scrapbook, his wall-collage, and his own admissions have already driven home his globetrotting ambitions, though. Naina's love for Bunny is writ large on her face, but she, too, informs us in voiceover that she feels "ishq ka nasha." We get the sense, as one often does in these films about upper-class, westernized Mumbai youngsters, that the lines ought to have been in English. 

Thankfully, Mukerji mostly gives up on the clunky abstractions as the movie goes along. We now know who Bunny and Naina are, as do Bunny and Naina themselves; no more explication is necessary. Now the film lets its characters slowly rediscover each other, altered by eight years of experience. Bunny might be running away from significant baggage  on his voyages, but his choices aren't condemned. His friend Aditi (Kalki Koechlin, wonderfully unvarnished as usual) has made a surprising choice of her own, but, in a lovely revelation, we learn that her choice isn't a compromise. Naina's contentment with her life, her family, her medical practice is sweetly telegraphed; she doesn't need to, or want to, get away from her life, even for love's sake. Mukerji steers the film toward familiarly explosive filmi territory - a potential romantic rival (not Rahul Khanna, surprisingly) is introduced, the big wedding looks like it might fall apart at the mandap - and then calmly turns away. He isn't looking for explosions, and he isn't looking to punish his characters into an epiphany, either. Bunny isn't wrong for wanting to go places, and Naina isn't wrong for wanting to stay at home. They both know this, and they don't need to fight about it. They just need to figure all of it out. 

A plot this uneventful would be an interminable bore if the leads were flavorless. In a Ranbir Kapoor joint, however, you don't need to worry about the leading man's performance. By now we're all aware that Ranbir can do charming in his sleep. (Even the magnificent La Dixit, giving you your money's worth even before the film properly gets going, looks entirely delighted by his shenanigans in the rousing Ghagra number.) He is by turns glib and goofy. He flirts with everyone, he GQs it all over Paris, he sings, and dances his way through a series of songs that may not stand alone memorably, but look and sound terrific in the theater. But he is sharpest when the film asks more of him than easy likability. In the scene where Bunny finds Naina in dishy male company, Ranbir goes from pleased to pissy with an almost scary absence of effort. He also gets fine moments with Farooque Shaikh and Tanvi Azmi (Mukerji has a gift when it comes to writing and casting beautifully believable parents.) My favorite moment in the film is the one in which Farooque Shaikh, one of the all-time greats at onscreen geniality, says goodbye to his U.S.-bound son. This scene is saved for the end in a marvelously effective bit of non-linear storytelling, and it has an aching realness to it. Not gonna lie, I cried a little.

In my piece on why I was ambivalent about the film, I wrote quite a bit about why I was worried about Deepika Padukone's performance. But as Naina, Deepika finally manages to overcome the banality that has plagued her in many of her non-glamazon roles. It helps that this is a good part, not a stock love-interest role. Naina doesn't pine away when the love of her life leaves. She develops friendships, she builds a career, she buys a killer wardrobe of sexy lehengas and flattering salwar-kurtas. Deepika gets just about all of it right. She conveys Naina's initial tentativeness, her quiet sorrow at having lived a cloistered life, and the wonder of first love with such warmth that it isn't at all hard to empathize with her as we once did with Kajol in Kuch Kuch Hota Hai.  She still acts better with that luminous face than with her voice, but her line readings here don't give you the impression that she painstakingly memorized her dialogue and is trying to say them just right. 

Deepika also generates tremendous chemistry with Ranbir. He plays it so that Bunny seems drawn to Naina even before she joyously finds her mojo (and killer white shorts) in the Balam Pichkari song. And who coud blame the dude when Deepika looks so radiantly moonstruck around him? When he pulls her in for a dance, and wants to hold her for five more minutes, it is both swoony and sad.

There is quite a bit that irked me about YJHD, but even more that surprised and impressed me. It is a pleasurable little movie that is determined to give you a good time while managing a surprising amount of depth and maturity. I kinda loved it.

Summer Lovin' (Part One): Random Thoughts Inspired By "Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani"

I can't get enough of great Bollywood love stories. Like, literally. They don't make enough of those.

Straight-up romances have never been the staple genre in mainstream Hindi films. The love stuff has traditionally been one of the many spices in the masala blend. In recent years, there's been an even greater move away from romances. Action-comedies have been the big earners, and the love story at the heart of these films have generally been between the forty-something male superstar and his adoring audience. Karan Johar, that famed filmi miner of the heart, has lamented that there hasn't been an iconic Bollywood love story for this young century.

It hasn't been a completely dry spell, of course. Millennial audiences have annually gotten a successful, memorable romance-centric movie or two. Kareena Kapoor is probably super thankful that Jab We Met turned her career around in 2007, but the rest of us are pretty glad it exists too. Jodhaa Akbar (2008) is still spawning sepia-ed gifs of Ash and Hrithik doing some coy Mughal-flavored flirting on Tumblr. 2010's Band Baaja Baaraat gave us Ranveer Singh (for whom I thank the universe everyday) and one of the best onscreen kisses in Hindi film history.The divisive Rockstar (2011), but for Nargis Fakhri's woeful performance, was an excellent entry into the canon of Bollywood romances.

In 2013, however, we don't just have one potential breakout in the pretty-young-famous-people-falling-in-love-onscreen genre. We have several. Something happened in the past couple years that prompted a bunch of talented young filmmakers to decide that 2013 was going to be Bollywood's annus pyarabilis. (I wish I were more sorry for that phrase than I am.)  Audiences have already lapped up the soggy, weakly reviewed, song-heavy Aashiqui 2, the year's biggest runaway success so far. But things are only getting bigger and better in the coming months for love-lovers, and I'm excited? Is everybody else excited? Good. Now let's play this fun game where I speculate, purely based on their trailers and promos, on the quality of these films. First out of the gate is Dharma's Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani, starring Ranbir Kapoor and Deepika Padukone.

If you were a desi kid back in the early 2000s, you might remember how exciting those big films, with the sangeet song and the party song and the gorgeous costumes and the huge stars (usually SRK), were. They used to come out during Eid or Christmas, and they were Bollywood's version of a tentpole. That sort of film has gone out of style over the years, and going by the first trailer of YJHD, I thought this film was updating that frothy, glamorously feel-good aesthetic, adding to it some youthfulness and self-awareness and subtracting some seriously iffy leading-man costume choices. The visuals looked crisp and glossy, the snatches of the soundtrack used in the trailer sounded awesome, and the cast looked like it was having a grand old time.

But with each subsequent promo has somewhat deflated my excitement for the film. YJHD is directed by Ayaan Mukerji, who made the winsome Wake Up Sid! with Ranbir in 2008. His debut feature managed to be that rare straight-rich-guy-finding-himself narrative that managed the feat of not annoying the crap out of me. The film was helped by a light, everyday-ish touch and Konkona Sen Sharma who, by virtue of being one of India's greatest living actresses instead of a standard-issue starlet, elevated Mukerji's slight narrative and generated some lovely chemistry with Ranbir.

YJHD of course has the far more conventional pair of Deepika and Ranbir. Ranbir seems to be playing straight-rich-dude-finding-himself again, except this time he's surer of what he wants to do. Based on the song promo for "Kabira" (a really, really good number), what he wants to do involves filming stuff* on moving vehicles in foreign countries while going from fulfilled to pensive. Am I the only one reminded of Saif in Love Aaj Kal's "Main Kya Hoon?" where he's all bright and Dharma-y in the beginning but goes all dark and Adajania-y by the end? A lot about this film reminds me of that relatively underrated Imtiaz Ali film, actually, but I digress.

The promos are Ranbir-heavy, and he's clearly bringing all his goofy charm. But I'm not sure how much I like prettified Ranbir anymore.**  He's much more interesting to watch, and certainly much more attractive, when he's a little rough around the edges. By now, I'm pretty certain that Ranbir is a top-notch actor, versatile, witty, and thoughtful, and I will watch him in anything. But this bit, where he tells Deepika's character how cool she is, while she stares at him, all lovelorn? It's clearly supposed to be incredibly romantic, but it doesn't work for me. It might even read a little condescending. Just to be clear, I think Ranbir's going to be great in this, I just wonder if this sort of role is now a bit too easy for him.

The trailer itself made me nervous about Deepika's character, "chashmish-Naina," who takes off her glasses and finds volumizing conditioner at some point in the movie, and becomes "Deepika-Naina" - as in, a super-hot Amazon with legs for miles. All the promos since then have highlighted Ranbir, to the point that, in the "Dilliwaali Girlfriend" number, Deepika's choreography is not much more than stalking around with her hands on her hips and wiggling her chest from time to time, while Ranbir does his charismatic, livewire thing around her. Cocktail proved to me that Deepika's acting could be as compelling as her movie-goddess looks, but I've also realized that she is painfully limp whenever she is cast as the ordinary girl-next-door foil to her leading men. Deepika is best when she is allowed to play magnetic, slightly wicked women who are hyper-aware of their charms and not afraid to exercise them. She's not a particularly rangy actress, but she's got star quality, and she shines when outfitted with the kind of role that lets her work her supermodel looks and preternatural poise. In fact, her best moments in the YJHD footage so far has been in those brief scenelets when she dances up on Kalki in "Balam Pichkari" and "Dilliwaali Girlfriend." The look she gives Our Lady of Kashyap in the latter is pure sex.***

At any rate, her role in YJHD seems to basically involve waiting around while Ranbir finds himself (I promise this is the last time I use this phrase), realizes that travelling around filming stuff on moving vehicles is no good when you don't have true love in your life, and comes back to her. Maybe she gets to marry Rahul Khanna for a bit while she waits. What I'm saying, in this tediously roundabout manner, is that a boring heroine doesn't make for a compelling romance.

You know what else doesn't make for a compelling romance, at least the Bollywood kind? Meh music. YJHD's music is far from meh, but it's got that overproduced Pritam vibe that makes it work very well in a trailer and less so when each song is heard in its entirety. (The aforementioned "Kabira" is kind of an exception.) To wit, "Balam Pichkari" sounds like the perfect song of summer - fizzy and irrepressibly catchy - when you listen to the bit in the promo, but the digitized, cleaned-up vocals get boring after a while if you listen to the whole song. There's almost invariably too much going on in Pritam's music; he can craft an crazy earwormy, dance-ready tune, but his penchant for those generic EDM production values keep at bay a certain sweetness and earnestness that you need for the soundtrack in a film like this.

Even the way these songs have been filmed lacks a certain vim, a certain imagination, a certain "bigness." KJo gets a lot of flak for a lot of things, but people don't realize how boss he is at doing things not a lot of other filmmakers can't do, like filming the shit out of a song-and-dance number. His films pop on screen like few big-budget Bollywood productions. Even the choreography here is a little . . . lacking (except for one notable exception, which I'll get to in a bit.) Ranbir is a great dancer, and I get that the film is about him, and that Ayaan and he are best friends, but if you've cast Deepika Padukone in your film, let her dance, for Helen's sake. Let her dance!

What I feel about the songs is basically what I feel about this film in general. I like how it looks, but I feel like it could have been so much more. I want to watch it, but I know I could be much more excited. I wish it did more with its superficial trappings (Manish Mallhotra, how dare you give Deepika the low-rent version of Bebo's K3G sharara? I mean, she looks amazing, but still. Be less lazy, Manish Malhotra. Oh, and tell your nephew not to eff up Bebo's new movie.) I wish the narrative seemed a little a little bit less familiar, or at least treated in a less familiar, more heartfelt manner.

Wow. I've gone pretty hard on this film without even having watched it. But I'll happily eat crow if it proves me wrong, and subverts the slight genericness of its promos into something clever and moving and original. I want it to succeed! I want it to be good! I really do!

Anyway, YJHD has one feature that is worth the price of a ticket, several times over. Behold.

Seriously, I will watch a film with Mimoh and Ameesha Patel in the lead if it means I get to see Madhuri Dixit in all her queenly glory.

Next up: I get all judgy about Raanjhanaa. Everybody hates Sonam Kapoor. Do I hate Sonam Kapoor? We'll find out.

*What's with Ayaan's protagonists and cameras? Let's have a hero find himself in accounting or plastic surgery next time, 'kay?

**His eyebrows and hairline have been manicured and, er, refreshed a little too aggressively. Not the best look for him.

***So Deepika totally has better chemistry with her female co-stars than her leading men, right? If Cocktail were all DPad and Diana, I'd have liked that film SO much better. Also, the Koffee With Karan interview with Sonam was crackling. Like, they were finishing each other's sentences. I will always mourn the premature demise of that promising frenemyship.