Ashdoc's old reviews you haven't read

ashdoc

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Badmaash company---


Back in the mid nineties ,when the economic reforms had just been launched ,and the country was still grovelling in the chains of socialism ,one young man dreams of big , indeed spectacular success.

Indians are strangers to high quality imported goods , the common man cannot do air travel , foreign countries are still ' foreign '........arrey....... even a call from mumbai ( oops.....its still called bombay ) to delhi costs a bomb ( by the standards of those times anyway ).......and even if you are willing to pay , you have to wait half an hour for a trunk call.......

How is one supposed to achieve success in this stifling atmosphere ?

But behold the ambition...........Our hero dreams of snazzy cars , superposh houses ,gambling in casinnos ,cool drinks in glitzy bars and a sexy woman......though he is willing to go massively underambitious on the woman part ......in short ,is willing to stick loyally with one woman ( to the extent of refusing to go to massage parlours while in bangkok , a temptation many cant resist in mumbai nowadays ),especially becos she delivers on the sexy part.......wearing bikinis......opening her clothes in the middle of a volleyball match to entice him......kissing him uninhibitedly in a car in blinding rain......living and ----ing with him without the entrapment of marriage.....and saying ---- OFF in style......

The way to achieve this undreamed of success in socialist india........crime , of course......and crime , in the beginning , does pay.......

So out hero teams up with his cool friends and his woman and launches one scam after another........till india becomes too small for him and he has to go big in the land of the free.......

The scams........interesting stuff .........but go and watch the movie.......i am not telling them.......

The film delivers what it promises in the first half, but turns preachy in the second half........robbing you of all the fun

Arrey yaar ( this to the director )........the name-- badmaash company ........and the promos........ promised cool babes , even hot babes ,lovable but shady characters ,living life to the full......and some real partying.....some real entertainment......and to be honest , you delivered up to some extent in the first half........but do you think the college kids who swarmed to the movie hand in hand with girlfriend / boyfriend came in for preachy sentimentality in the second half ......

The film ,in short , promises ......but does not deliver.......
 

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Veer---

i just came back from the show.

the audience was laughing and making jokes on the film throughout,so laughable was the film.

sallu's antics were nothing short of pathetic ,and his acting ,or what goes for it -unwatchable.

newcomer zarine khan ,lookalike of kats baby ,whom sallu has brought in the film to spite katrina ( which means their affair is truely over ) ,is hardly as goodlooking as the original - she's chubby compared to kats.


sallu is a pindhara.

now what is pindhara ?

the pindharis were ancillaries of the maratha armies when they ruled over malwa and lorded it over rajputana ,who used to follow the main army and utterly ruin the countryside in their wake, leaving behind heaps of corpses.

when the marathas were finally defeated by the british ,the pindharis were crushed in a brutal war.

just because they fought against the british , in the film this bunch of locusts have been glorified into a tribe of freedom fighters.

the british of course are magnified in the film as cruel and brutal ........as is the trend nowadays ........the reason being obvious .........the british were one bunch of foreign conquerors who well and truely left the country leaving no minority behind to take care of their ' interests '..........so the film-makers who have no guts to show the barbarity of the muslims ( as they are scared of that HUGE minority ) greatly magnify the british as super-tyrannical rulers and show them as villains hell bent on destroying india.

coming back to the film.......sallus father ( mithun ) has taken a oath to destroy the british and the rajput ruler who supported them in destroying the pindharis ( jackie shroff ).

he sends his son sallu to britain to learn the ways of the 'firangees '.

predictibly sallu falls in love with the daughter of jackie who is also studying there.

after many stupid twists and nonsensical turns ,sallu manages to bring about his real goal --to make the rajputs realise that all indians ,whether rajput or pindhara ,must unite against the white man to drive him out of the country...........
 

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Striker---playing carrom in the tough slums of malwani

Striker is the story of a marathi boy growing in the rough slums of malvani under the shadow of the islamic mafia.

Chandrakant,a good looking young man grows up playing carrom in the clubs of malvani - a slum area of Bombay -as Mumbai was known at that time........much of the film is in flashback mode.

Of course ,the key to playing carrom is the ability to hit the disks accurately with the STRIKER.........AND Chandrakant knows how to do this with deadly effect.

The muslim don who controls malvani ,Jaleel bhai ( played by aditya pancholi )wants him to play for his clubs by betting money on him ,but chandrakant refuses the temptation.

But he is in bad company of his muslim friend Zahid .......who lures him to the don's clubs.

But Zahid's murder prompts chandu to break free from the don's influence......until the two are destined to confront each other in the post babri riots.....

The life ,and the dangers and pitfalls of growing up in a typical slum area of mumbai are certainly shown well in the film.The atmosphere of the slum is authentically picturised.

The end is a bit disappointing though ,as it comes too fast.

But Ankur Vikal truely shines in the role of chandu's friend Zahid , which he has played with rare spontaneity .

All in all ,a watchable film.
 

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Houseful part 1---not too bad in the end

Sajid khan attempts directing a comedy film and succeeds upto a certain extent.

The first half of the film is rank bad ,and the attempts at humour are pathetic.

Akshay Kumar is a ' panvati ' who brings bad luck to everyone .......and walks with a sadela thobda throughout the film.

The film tries to convert this into some funny situations and fails.

Example-- Akshay telling about his birth ,after which his father is diagnosed with cancer ,but it turns out to be diabetes ( ? ! ),so ,in happiness his mother gives him kaju barfi ( or something like that ,i forgot ) ,due to which he dies due to hyperglycemia ( high sugar level ) !!

Are we really supposed to laugh at this ?

To make the situation more ' funny ' ,there is Ritesh Deshmukh ,a haklata-hua ghati , who has married Lara Dutta , a gujju ,whose father Boman Irani refuses to keep relations with her for marrying against his wishes.

For this perfidy , the father's overweight mother beats him with a cane.

We are told that this happens daily

Akshay eventually lands up with Deepika Padukone whose name is Soundarya Bassapa Rao ,also called Sandy ........but Akshay calls her Saaaandy ( as in Saand )

But Akshay is now confronted with her older brother Arjun Rampal ,an ultra-tough ,sophisticated ,polished anti-terrorism officer ..........but he is called anna ( south indian style )!!

So much for some part of the first half.......

The audience actually sarcastically clapped at the interval to show how much they ' liked ' all this .

The film actually picked up in the second half ,when there were some genuinely funny moments.......and some emotional ones too......

Jiah khan tries to give us the hots by exposing ( teeny weeny bikini and all ),but she is overweight ( though some people with peculiar tastes......sutradharji ,for example.......remember shilpa shirodkar ........ may find the bulging ramparts of her body sexciting ), and so is her father ( in the film ) Randheer Kapoor , who also looks sozzled.

Lara Dutta and Deepika expose too , and look good in some scenes.

Boman Irani is funny , as usual .

The situations in which he sees Akshay and Ritesh in ' compromising ' positions due to which he thinks that they are homos , are well developed ........though of course , they are inspired by the more famous Shah Rukh- Saif situations in ' Kal ho na ho '..........though those itself are inspired by the scenes acted out so memorably by Michail Caine in 'Blame in on Rio '.

The film being better in the second half , we come out of the theater feeling satisfied upto a certain extent.

This is in contrast to a film like ' Singh is king ' , which is good in the first half , but we have not-so-great impression of the film because it does not work in the second half.

This film should serve as a lesson to film-makers .....that if they dont have it within them to make both halves of a film good , then they would better make the second half better , so that the audience leaves satisfied !!
 

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Rajneeti---the mire of politics

This film is a ruthless political mahabharat set on a grand stage---the politics of north india ,the heartland of the planets largest democracy.

There is a kunti ( i did not catch the name of the actress ) ,who gives birth to karan (ajay devgan ) ,begotten from suryadev ( naseeruddin shah )........

..........and true enough , the karan grows up as a sutputra ( son of a mercedes driver ,to suit the modern era) ,to take the side of duryodhan ( manoj bajpai), in his battle against yudhisthir ( arjun rampal ) and his arch rival through the ages ,arjun ( played with aplomb by ranbir kapoor ),who are helped by krishna ( nana patekar ).....and there is even a draupadi ( katrina kaif ) ,who gets tossed between brothers.

the lesson for the modern era--politics is dirty ,and not even can the good people let their hands remain unclean in the process.......

the lesson from the mahabharat---victory in a brutal war can be won only on a pile of dead bodies.........

nobody is really a good person here---neither yudhistir ,nor arjun.........

the show is undoubtedly stolen by Ranbir Kapoor ,who plays a suave behind-the-scenes political operator with a cold-hearted bent ( shades of michael corleone from godfather ) to perfection .

nana gives a restrained performance ,arjun rampal is handsome ( who said he does not look good ? sutradharji ? ) ,katrina .........in the end she acts more like sonia gandhi in sari and foreign accent ......but ajay devgan is not at his best.

the characters may be in the mold of the mahabharat ( they are not really named arjun kunti etc in the movie ,they are just playing their roles ) ,but some fighting scenes are copied from the godfather .

sadly ,women's position has not changed from ancient times--they are just pawns in political games.........and the men ,even the best ,love their politics more than their women ........but they all look good ,especially katrina ......she looks oh-so-divine......so does ranbirs phoren wife......

verdict-----satisfying
 

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Kites---first day first show

Okay guys ,I reached the theater half an hour late , so I missed some of the movie

And thats half an hour of a short movie.....

For the movie gets over in about two hours.

Anyway , as the story goes , Hrithik is going to marry Kangana Ranaut and Barbara is going to marry Kangana's brother ,who is as mean and dangerous as his father Kabir Bedi ,brutal owner of a las vegas casino.

But they fall in love ,earning the wrath of the ultra dangerous people they are going to marry ,and have to elope........

Barbara Mori is hardly as hot as some of the photos I have posted of her on echarcha ,and disappoints........only one short bikini shot.......

Hrithik looks reasonably good , but his acting is only so -so.

What is inexplicable is some of hrithik's well wishers sacrificing their lives to protect him

I guess such friends are to be found only in the fantasy world of hindi movies...........Hollywood is too smart to show such people ........

Typically ,one of them is a muslim........Bollywood is deep into votebank politics

Overall , I did feel that it was a decent movie ,however .
 

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Road to sangam---

This is a small budget film,and the theatre was almost empty.

Its the story of a muslim motor mechanic ( played by Paresh Rawal )of prayag who is given the very special task of repairing the motor of the very same vehicle which carried Gandhi's ashes to the ganga yamuna sangam 62 years ago.

Apparently some ashes are left and are to be immersed at sangam by the mahatma's grandson Tushar Gandhi ( played by Tushar Gandhi himself ).

But bomb blasts occur in prayag and muslims are arrested .......leading to a call by the city's fanatical ulema for a bandh ........which means Paresh rawal wont be able to complete his work on time ...

Paresh is a god-fearing muslim who supprorts the bandh completely.........indeed has taken part in a violent protest against the arrest of the muslims.......but the fact that he wont be able to complete the august task he has been given , tugs at his heart .

He decides to go against the will of the entire community by completing the task even in the bandh........inviting violence and excommunication from the fanatics against himself.

To those who spew hatred against him ,he asks ,this man was killed by his own people for taking our side and fighting tooth and nail for our continued existence in this country ,even as hindus were being pushed out of pakistan,so i am working for the greatest well-wisher of our community in ths land !!

Having completed his task against the will of the quam ,he goes to see a gandhi exhibition........and having accumulated info on gandhi , takes a even more astonishing decision .......he ,who had openly defied a bandh ,must now convince the community to observe a bandh when the truck carrying Gandhi's ashes ( whose motor he had repaired ) passes through the muslim moholla , in respect for the prophet of non violence !!!!!

The movie is a emotional one ,made more so by a emotional music score.......and parash rawal's acting is truely what holds the film together.

I found it worth a watch......
 

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