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Post by MrB on Aug 10, 2014 8:49:27 GMT
Is it wrong that I am proud of myself for squeezing five languages and as many decades (if you count Hera Pheri as a 90s film) into one order? It sounds something to be very proud of to me. Lovers of 1940s Bengali films might criticise the narrowness of your choice though
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Post by MrB on Jul 30, 2014 22:31:27 GMT
Sorry - I should have made it clear that I was only addressing the male part of the question, as that seemed to be the part causing most difficulty.
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Post by MrB on Jul 30, 2014 14:11:19 GMT
If we both mean the same thing by sherwani, how about Bole Chudiyaan from K3G? Or Jogi Mahi from Bachna Ae Haseeno? (Tell your friends every man looks like Hrithik when they wear a sherwani, or at least like Kunal Kapoor.)
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Post by MrB on Jul 28, 2014 18:50:44 GMT
I'm also a Chetan Bhagat fan, and a Salman fan, but Kick does credit to neither. I saw it yesterday and can barely remember it, it was so undistinguished. Salman does his thing in the normal way, but the film has no soul and no wit, giving him nothing to work with. The story is just too stupid, and the editing quite incoherent (for example, the bus chase scene happens partly in Poland and partly in London, and they don't even bother about the police cars changing colouring and spelling part way through). And Nargis Fakhri is an appalling item number dancer. On the plus side, this may well be Jacqueline Fernandez' best performance - she's quite acceptable in her part - and Nawazuddin Siddiqui enjoys himself hamming up the villain role.
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Post by MrB on Jul 23, 2014 7:56:49 GMT
Thanks for posting this , Odadune - I'm really underwhelmed now... Does anyone else see shades of Dhoom 2 and Kites in the action bits? Hrithik on the motorcycle with Kat facing him is a direct callback to the intensely sexy scene with him and Aish (in the exact same position) and the getaway scene is also reminiscent of him and Barbara Mori in Kites. The man-on-motorbike-with-woman-facing-him has been used in Hindi films for a long time. Maybe it's inspired by actual Indian traffic, but without the two children, a couple of cooking gas cylinders, and a goat that would accompany them in real life. I'm quite looking forward to it and, as you say, it has to be better than the original.
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Post by MrB on Jul 21, 2014 15:49:18 GMT
Following up on my own post: it turns out that the iPhone app does not display Devnagari very well. You can usually guess at what it's supposed to be saying, but only if you already read the script and know the words reasonably well. That's quite a black mark against Memrise, as it could have been great for commuting on the train.
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Post by MrB on Jul 21, 2014 15:23:08 GMT
Has anyone tried memrise.com for learning languages? It allows users to create flashcard-like courses for learning all sorts of things, and includes courses for the major Indian languages. It is available as a website and through free iPhone and Android apps. You have to sign up to use it, but some of the Hindi courses look useful for improving vocabulary, so it might be worthwhile trying out. But it does get difficult when they test your English -> Hindi knowledge and expect you to type in अलमारी quickly using an onscreen Devnagari keyboard.
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Post by MrB on Jul 14, 2014 10:41:06 GMT
This was an enjoyable piece of fluff. The keys to this sort of film are the leads' chemistry and a sharp script, and it delivers on both fronts. Varun does charming as well as Alia does feisty, and they worked well together. The script had a lot of laughs, most especially in the section where Alia's mother and grandmother tell her that foreign men are best because Indian ones just sit around with their feet up demanding to be brought the newspaper and food - that struck a chord judging from the loud female hilarity in the audience. The supporting cast are all good as well, particularly Virun's friends, who deserve huge payback for the number of beatings they take for him.
There are a few negatives, which didn't really spoil my enjoyment. The film fizzles out at the end, and is not well resolved. The music made no impression at all: I just have a vague memory of several identikit nightclub tracks. Most films made under the Karan Johar banner lazily plunder his old films for emotion rather than attempting originality; in this case they restricted themselves to a couple of occasions, and one of those was forgiveable in a film that so deliberately rehashes DDLJ. And, finally, Alia Bhatt does look disconcertingly young, and a lot less mature than the actions of her character, which raises occasional dissonances.
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Post by MrB on Jul 11, 2014 11:54:31 GMT
I always think of her dancing in Jiya Jale - just a brief moment, but hard to imagine many people being so graceful in their 80s.
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Post by MrB on Jul 10, 2014 18:03:37 GMT
But she was 102, and was in films well into her 90s. From Rediff.com: Zohra Sehgal, grand old lady of Bollywood, deadLegendary actress Zohra Sehgal, who essayed character roles with aplomb in a career spanning both theatre and cinema, died in New Delhi on Thursday. She was 102. A Padma Vibhushan awardee, Sehgal breathed her last at Max hospital in Delhi around 4:30 pm. "She died of a cardiac arrest this afternoon. She was unwell for last three-four days," daughter Kiran told PTI. Sehgal would be cremated on Friday at 11 am at the Lodhi Road crematorium. The news was broken in the night by historian Irfan Habib who tweeted, "Just confirmed that Zohra Aapa is no more..." In another tweet, he said, "Extremely sad to know about d passing away of Zohra Sehgal, a woman who lived a full life on her own terms. Great loss to art and culture. RIP." Sehgal, a vivacious personality, started her career as a dancer with Uday Shankar in 1935. She had appeared in many Bollywood films as a character actor as well as in English language films besides television series and plays. Often called the grand old lady of Bollywood, she last appeared in Sanjay Leela Bhansali's Saawariya in 2007. A Padma Shri awardee, she also received the Padma Vibhshan in 2010. Sehgal, called the "laadli" of entertainment and the doyenne of Indian theatre, was part of many a film and stage production over the past seven decades. She starred in films like "Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam", "Dil Se" and "Cheeni Kum" (with Amitabh Bachchan). She was a member of the Indian People's Theatre Association and in 1946 debuted in its first film production "Dharti Ke Lal", which dealt with the Bengal famine. She also acted in another IPTA film -- Chetan Anand's "Neecha Nagar". In 2012, daughter Kiran wrote Sehgal's biography named "Zohra Segal: Fatty". Kiran, herself an Odissi dancer, expressed grief that during her dying days, her mother could not even get the government flat she has asked for. "She was always so full of life and energy. I am in very different state of mind right now...But, what is more tragic is that during her dying days, she could not even get the government flat she had asked for," she told PTI. Meanwhile, tribute poured in from the film industry, soon after the news of her demise and celebrities took to Twitter to expressed their condolences. "Zohra Sehgal passes away at 102 yrs...What a journey and what an immensely lovable co-star! Prayer for her blessed soul!," actor Amitabh Bachchan tweeted. Filmmaker Madhur Bhandarkar paid his homage by sharing a vintage picture from the 1940 on the micro-blogging site. "Zohra Sehgal, during a stage performance..." he said on his account. Union Information and Broadcasting Minister Prakash Javadekar too expressed his heartfelt tribute. "My condolences on the sad demise of the veteran actress Zohra Sehgal. Her legendary contribution in the field of art & cinema will live on," Javadekar tweeted. Television producer Siddharth Basu tweeted," Forever young at heart & in spirit even at 102, the irrepressibly endearing Zohra Sehgal finally belongs to the ages. May she rest in peace."
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Post by MrB on Jul 8, 2014 16:15:32 GMT
Thank you both for reporting back-it's a shame that they overdid the airhead thing. There's room for stories about kooky women who are smarter than they look (I thought the first Legally Blonde movie did a good job of this) but a lot of filmmakers find it too easy to skip over the "smarter than they look" part. Yes - the scriptwriters were certainly too airheaded. They were just not smart enough to create a convincing character.
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Post by MrB on Jul 7, 2014 16:30:03 GMT
I found Bobby Jasoos disappointing. Vidya Balan of course gives as good a performance as possible, and Hyderabad makes for an interesting setting, but they are both let down by incoherent and implausible story telling. Bobby and her family have no back story, characters are thrown in without a proper introduction, Bobby's detective methods are too unbelievable, she takes far too long to suspect anything might be suspicious in the cases she's given, and the resolutions of the mystery and other threads are too hurried. The trailer and publicity made much of the many disguises, but this promising device is mainly thrown away in a few brief scenes near the start.
There are some things to like: Vidya Balan is always watchable, and one small section of the film is a paean to biryani that left my mouth watering. It's also good to see a film set in the Muslim community where they are just ordinary people and not terrorists or rioters. But overall a let down.
By the way - Ali Fazal is about the male equivalent of a Kajal Aggarwal character, but he looks more like Shreyas Talpade.
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Post by MrB on Jul 4, 2014 13:37:14 GMT
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Post by MrB on Jun 28, 2014 14:05:14 GMT
A Strange Kind of Paradise: India Through Foreign Eyes, by Sam Miller. From the blurb: I must declare an interest here, as Sam is a friend, but he's also very well qualified to write about India from the foreign perspective, having been a BBC reporter there for many years, and having married an Indian woman. The book is learned without being academic, wide-ranging and discursive, being full of fascinating historical titbits and giving an entertaining account of foreign views of India from the earliest times through to the present day. It's a light read, but informative, and the interwoven autobiographical elements are enlivened by Sam having been close to the centre of major recent events such as the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi. Some may find the style a bit prurient in places, or the footnotes slightly too digressive, but overall this is a very readable overview of the relationship of foreigners with India through the centuries.
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Post by MrB on Jun 26, 2014 8:13:15 GMT
Only tangentially on topic, but there was a BBC TV programme called Toughest Place To Be A... where they sent a London taxi driver to Mumbai to experience their taxi drivers' lives. I so wish they'd called it Cabbie Khushi Cabbie Gham.
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