Prem (Ranbir) is an ajab kind of guy. As life president of Happy Club, he’s always trying to maker everyone happy, but somehow it always ends in disaster.
Jenny (Katrina) is shy, sweet natured, hard working girl who loves books.
Prem kidnaps Jenny by mistake. Big mistake! Because now Jenny thinks he’s the worst form on earth. Ouch! But he thinks she’s beautiful. In his words, she’s “chalti firti vanilla ice cream”. She’s yummy.
Love can make you do the strangest things. And if Prem is ajab, his love is ghazab too.
But there’s a problem.
Jenny wants “ek achcha ladka jo kaam par jaaye…time pe ghar aaye”. But Prem has never worked in life. Now he’s spending hours and hours churning out laddoos and frying jalebis in a Halwai shop. Sweat and Slurp!!!
Prem has always been a shudh vegetarian. Now, he’s putting tigers to shame with all the chicken he’s eating. Chomp…Chomp!!
And as icing on the wedding cake, he even helps Jenny run away from her own wedding. With a furious father, frustrated bridegroom, greedy don and a wily politician running after them…Prem and Jenny have many odds against them.
What’s going to happen now? Prem’s prem kahani had an Ajab beginning, will it have a Ghazab ending.
Directed by Rajkumar Santoshi, the film has music by Pritam and action by Tinu Verma.
Kurbaan
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Singers: Sukhwinder Singh, Kailash Kher, Marianne D'Cruz Aiman, Salim Merchant, Vishal Dadlani, Sonu Niigaam, Shruti Pathak and Shreya GhoshalBlue
By Subhash K Jha
Starring Sanjay Dutt, Akshay Kumar, Zayed Khan, Lara Dutta, Katrina Kaif
Directed by Tony D’Souza
Rating: ** ½
First things first. The villain of the show is not Akshay Kumar. It’s the screenplay. What was the writer thinking when he wrote this underwater escapade with well-toned bodies posing against the breathtaking Bahamian backdrops?
The treasure-hunt could be straight out of Enid Blyton’s Famous Five…The quintet here are from an altogether different age group from what Blyton had intended.
Samjay Dutt and Akshay Kumar are friends. We are made to believe they are in the fishery business, though we don’t ever see them doing a day’s work. All they do is soak their lips in the bubblies and their toes in the pristine-blue waters.
Oh yes, they also get into the boxing ring. But their pugnacious proclivities never get beyond the first chapter of Enid Bylton’s ‘ Famous 4 Get Frisky’. If Enid never wrote it, then here it is. The screenplay writer doing the needful. The two grownup boys who relentlessly talk about undersea treasure.
This is Dhoom going thousands of feet under.
We get very little insight into what motivates these overgrown boys to think green –backs in their blue environment.Fast cars and furious wheels just don’t make for a meaningful existence. But who’s going to tell these people they are interesting only to themselves?
Interestingly the only rounded and remotely cohesive character is that played by Zayed Khan. We first see him as a brat in Bangkok racing mo’bikes and wooing the puckish and punky Katrina Kaif with bedroomy looks. Zayed penchant for the two wheels give us two very lengthy and very stylish chase sequences which are among the best we’ve ever seen in Hindi cinema.
But do skidding wheels and somersaulting cars constitute a substantial film? Often in the midst of the breath-taking stunts you look for a relevance beyond the cosmetic confection that Blue so insouciantly throws in your face.
The characters’ single-minded obsession with self-preservation in the most superficial sense, keeps us guessing about the true reason for their existence.By the time they find the treasure we still don’t have a clue as to what motivates them to skim the surface of existenc.
Director Anthony D’Souza is completely in control of the character’s outside world. The underwater sequences are truly a plunge that Hindi cinema has never taken. The camera follows the characters underwater with a masterly aplomb.
It’s the world above sea level that leaves us hankering for oxygen. The world that these characters inhabit is utterly devoid of a third dimension. A multiplicity of cameras are used to capture their rapidly-moving world. But that essential peep into the characters’ hearts and minds eludes the keen camera lenses.
Blame the writing. Lara Dutta looks wow in a bikini. But the cast could do with a serious crash course in how to have a whale of a time without getting in the way of the sharks.
Sanjay Dutt should have kost 20 kgs before getting into underwater gear. Oh yes that’s Kylie Minogue doing jiggwiggy to A R Rahman’s music. Does anyone really care ? These are scuba-diving hedonists busy having a ball. We really don’t want to intrude on their very private world of cars, cruiser boats and water sports.
At the end Akshay Kumar speeds into the ocean on his mo’bike. We don’t blame him for forgetting the difference between earth and water. Blue blurs the line between water and land somewhere in the first two reels.
And then it’s just a plotless journey into the heart of the ocean.
Neil Nitin Mukesh spent two hours in Tihar Jail
By Subhash K Jha
They were the two most invigorating hours of Neil Nitin Mukesh’s life. The time that he spent in Tihar jail on Monday afternoon as part of the campaign to make his film Jail connected to a larger reality about the life of prisoners, has left the young actor sobered and reflective beyond words.
“What I saw in Tihar was not just prisoners put in for punishment. But human beings who have been put in a 400-acre city with the purpose of reforming them and making them suitable for mainstream existence when they are released.”
Neil reached Tihar around 2 in the afternoon with his co-star Manoj Bajpai, director Madhur Bhandarkar and music composer Shamir Tandon.
Neil, Manoj and Madhur were immediately recognized and mobbed by the inmates.
Getting emotional Neil says, “Every barrack has a television with 20 channels. So they had seen our movies. What I saw in their eyes was an amazing pain. We had taken along a small orchestra.
Shamir Tandon and all of us sang Lataji’s Daata sun le maula sun le, followed by Kitne ajeeb rishte hain yahan par and Sikandar from Madhur’s Page 3. When we sang Sikandar the prisoners burst into a dance. This was the only time I saw them really let go of themselves.”
The Jail anthem Daata sun le will now be played at Tihar every morning as part of the prisoners’ daily prayer meetings. Bhandarkar’s film will also be screened on a DVD for the inmates.
The two-hour-thirty-minute visit was peppered with moments that have changed Neil’s life forever. “There was cage filled with birds. I hate to see caged birds. I requested the DG of police to please free them. He listened to me, allowed me to enter the big cage and free the birds personally. It was the most liberating experience of my life.”
Neil spent time talking to individual inmates, getting to know their minds and hearts. “Do you know they have 10-day meditation courses in there, a full Vipashana where the yoga guru comes and stays inside the prison?
There’s also a shopping arcade at Tihar where everything under the sun made by the prisoners is branded TJ (Tihar Jail) and sold. I was told the revenues from these handmade Tihar goods comes to 7.5 crore rupees every year. I bought a kambal (woolen blanket), shawl, kurta, sweets and other edibles.”
Understandably Neil feels a great pride of achievement in what he has done, “It is one thing to play a prisoner no matter how authentically it’s another to actually go into this world away from the free world and experience the feelings of isolation inside.”
Adds Manoj Bajpai, “I had last been to Tihar 12 years ago. The reform work that had been started by Kiran Bedi has continued. Tihar shouldn’t be the exception. All prisons should be modeled on Tihar.”
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