Rang De Basanti

Film: Rang De Basanti (2006)
Language: Hindi
Netflix streaming

Synopsis: A British film maker (journalist?) had been reading a journal written by her grandfather who worked at a jail during the Indian independence movement in the 1920s. She's inspired by the 5 freedom fighters he had written about and wants to make a movie based off of them, but is refused the funding. Sue then goes to India to make the film herself and becomes involved with a group of college kids whose lives start to prove similar as those of the 1920/1930s. A tragedy occurs that soon catapults them at the forefront of Indian politics fighting for justice.

The Good
+ The acting. This has to be the first Bollywood film I've seen with a foreign actor who was actually pretty decent. She didn't take away from the scenes like most do.
+ The large cast actually meshed well together and I felt like they genuinely got along well.
+ New-to-me storyline, kind of nice to see something other than a typical Rom-Com
+ Madhavan... again, I'm so crushing on this man
+ Aamir Khan really did look like a college-age student for once.

The Bad
+ I felt the movie was kind of long, but I also don't like political films that much, so really, it probably was fine.
+ Political songs are fine, but I didn't feel this was A.R. Rahman's best work (for what it's worth, I'm not a big fan of American patriotic songs)

Final Thoughts: Was it worth watching? Yes. I actually went into this film not realizing how much it was going to be about politics. That being said, the film doesn't revolve 100% around it, I'd say a good 60%. I did enjoy the coming together of the characters and their political activism for their friend's tragedy. A very realistic film, despite the fact they got a little carried away with their plans. I felt the worst for the female characters, though.

Rating: 3/5

Favorite Song: Tu Bin Bataye (loved the lyrics)

Alaipayuthey

Film: Alaipayuthey (2000)
Language: Tamil
youtube links

Synopsis: Karthik (Madhavan) is an engineer starting up his own company and comes across med student Shakti (Shalini) and after continuous chance meetings, they fall in love. Their relationship isn't easy especially when their families don't get along and call off the approval of their wedding. Therefore, they secretly get married with help from Shakti's older sister, yet still live in their same living conditions waiting for things to improve between the families. They don't, and they end up moving out of their homes into an unfinished apartment together where their marriage is tested.

The Good
+ The directing (another Mani Ratnam film) coupled with the nice cinematography = very well done
+ Madhavan and Shalini's chemistry. It was very natural and they played off very well with each other. Everything about this film was realistic and believable
+ Probably one of the only Indian films (that I have seen) where a relationship/marriage is realistically portrayed. Not everything is song and dance-worthy

The Bad
+ It's not bad at all, but some of the outfits/dancing were pretty hilariously awful, considering this film is from 2000. But it actually kind of adds to the charm of the film. Really, I can't think of any serious complaints about the film, since it was so realistic depiction of real life.

Final Thoughts: Was it worth watching? Yes! I'm a sucker for indie-like films that are character studies/coming of age/"slices of life". This definitely fit that category. Don't watch this expecting something exciting/fun with friends, it's not meant to be. Mani Ratnam has definitely sealed himself as one of my favorite directors. I've yet to see any of his work to be deemed 'crappy', although Dil Se has to be my least favorite of his films so far.

I adore Madhavan, and this is his Tamil film debut (also one of his first films). I think he's a fantastic actor and love to see more of his things.

Rating: 4/5

Favorite Song: Pachai Nirame. I loved it for the colors and the cute/goofy dancing of Madhavan's

Kal Ho Naa Ho

Film: Kal Ho Naa Ho (2003)
Language: Hindi
youtube links

Synopsis: Naina lives in New York with her family minus her father who had committed suicide some time ago. She's pretty irritable between the loss of her dad and her grandmother refusing to acknowledge her granddaughter, Naina's sister. Enter her visiting neighbor from India, Aman, who proceeds to initially irritate her more and turn her world upside down. And by upside down, I mean fall madly in love with him. But the entire time, Aman is hiding a secret and works his magic to get Naina together with her friend/classmate Rohit.

The Good
+ Acting, by everyone. Even though the storyline wasn't entirely anything new, it was very well acted.
+ The movie kept me completely invested the entire time. Typically if I'm watching a Bollywood film on my own at home, I never watch it all in one sitting. For this film, I actually did. It never grew sluggish at any point to me.

The Bad
+ The messed up "Oh, Pretty Woman" song. I guess it was great for the hilarity of it all, but bad song cover is bad.
+ The blatant racism against the Chinese. What was up with that? Totally not needed to be in the film and rather surprising it was. Even though, I have to admit the Lagaan song playing during that scene had me chuckle.
+ Some of the wardrobe choices. From SRK's crazy BRIGHT orange pants to Saif's questionable clubbing shirt, I don't know what was going on.

Final Thoughts: This is definitely one of my top 5 favorite Bollywood films, and probably my favorite SRK film. He tends to go over the top in his films (which, honestly, I don't mind typically until he starts crying), but I felt he kept himself in check in this film. It had the right amount of comedy, sadness, and all over joy.

Rating: 4.5/5

Favorite Song: It was hard to pick... It's the time to disco & Kal Ho Naa Ho. (Of all the playback singers, Sonu Nigam is the only one I know/can pick out easily. I LOVE his voice, and feel it fits SRK almost perfectly for his lipsynching)

I Hate Luv Storys

Film: I Hate Luv Storys (2010)
Language: Hindi
in movie theater

Synopsis: Jay (or sometimes J depending on what the subtitles felt like), is a director's assistant. Problem is, he hates romance and anything to do with romantic films, yet of all the jobs he could've had, he's working on one. Simran is a set designer who is obsessed with anything to do with romance and romantic films. She considers her job perfect and has a perfect boyfriend. That is until she meets Jay. They become fast friends both become determined to ruin the other's beliefs about love and romance. Their friendship turns into infatuation, first on her part, then on his. Will they ever see eye to eye?

The Good
+ Imran Khan. Good looking guy, a pretty decent actor, the camera loves him
+ I enjoyed the t-shirts they were wearing (I think it was Sonam's character that was wearing a Mario Bros. shirt at one point?) Very modern.
+ All the SRK-film parodies. I think most of the audience would be lost if they weren't familiar with all the references to these well known romance films.

The Bad
+ Some of the acting. Again, casting awful foreign actors, yet there were some poor acting on Sonam Kapoor's part as well as the actor playing her boyfriend
+ The subtitles were sometimes off or they left some things out. Also, they didn't subtitle any of the songs, which is quite strange. I know alot of the times, the songs don't have to do with the film, but I actually like to know what they're saying!

Final Thoughts Was it worth watching? Yes. It was a cute/funny film. Even though I've only seen Imran Khan in 2 films, he seems to be very promising. The scenery and cinematography were nice too for a romantic comedy. This isn't the best romantic film I've seen from Bollywood, but it's cute and worth a watch on a boring day.

Rating: 3/5

Favorite Song: I Hate Luv Storys

Krrish

Film: Krrish (2006)
Language: Hindi
youtube videos

Synopsis: A rough sequel to Koi...Mil Gaya (which I'll write the review eventually). Krishna Mehra (Hrithik's character) is a kid who is super awesome at EVERYTHING. He's super smart, super fast, and super socially awkward (albeit less so than his daddy in KMG). Anyway, he meets the love of his life, Priya (Priyanka Chopra with extremely long hair). Naturally, she plays on his super social awkwardness and adoration for her and convinces him to come to Singapore. When there, he becomes a SUPERHERO!

The Good
+ the graphics were pretty amazing. Very few Bollywood films are this well done.
+ nice action scenes/stunts along with cinematography

The Bad
+ TOO LONG
+ This movie was all over the place to me. Starting out in happy rural city, to Singapore, it just seemed so disorganized.
+ Bad acting. Bollywood really needs to stop finding random foreigners that agree to be in their films. Their poor acting just really makes a nice moment into a hilariously bad/awkward one.

Final Thoughts
Was it worth watching? Maybe. Yes, it was a campy film that gives you something to be amused with and smile about, but at the end you can't help to think you wasted 3 hours of your life watching something that should've been cut down to 2. Priyanka and Hrithik work well together, but I can't say they're a favorite pairing of mine. Apparently they're going to make a sequel for this, or at least there are talks of one. I'll wait for it to hit youtube or come on video. Can't say I'll go out rushing to see it. Also, all I could think about during this film was how much I wanted to cut Hrithik's Jesus hair. It was driving me crazy!

Also, I'm not really sure why I liked Koi...Mil Gaya better, since I'm probably the only person to say that. I just felt it didn't jump all around/be so disorganized. It at least had a consistent location. Who knows. Maybe Krrish 2 will be better.

Rating: 2.5/5

Favorite song Koi Tumsa Nahin

Raavan

Film: Raavan (2010)
Language: Hindi
in movie theater

This film was directed by Mani Ratnam, who was the director of the last film I saw (A Peck on the Cheek). No doubt he is an amazing director. I can't imagine Aishwarya and Vikram doing all this twice. They had to have some pretty serious bruises/cuts.

Synopsis: Based off Ramayana. Dev is a police inspector out on the hunt for Beera, a well known outlaw said to have "10 heads" who steals Dev's wife, Ragini. It's a wild goose chase that lasts 14 days, all the while Ragini stays fiercely loyal to Dev, she does witness the more human side of Beera.

The Good:
+ The cinematography! O.M.G. This director is known to travel all over the world to get the 'perfect shot' and rightly so! Next to Devdas, I'd have to say this was probably one of the most beautifully filmed movies I've seen in Bollywood.
+ The music! Again, A.R. Rahman doesn't let us down, but even the score was amazing. I really wish I could get the score... The music really fit the location and added to atmosphere. The songs never really seemed out of place or completely random (there were a couple moments in the score that did seem out of place, however)
+ Aishwarya was the best actor in this film. Again, I've never been crazy about her, but in nearly every movie I see her in, the more I like her (especially Devdas and now this one).
+ Abhishek was freaking CRAZY in this film. It's so different from anything he's done before. Despite alot of criticism he's been getting, I thought his performance was excellent. Unfortunately, it seems I'm in the minority here.

The Bad:
+ some of the camera work was a little crazy. They abused the whole 360 spinning around effect. At one point, I thought I was going to get motion sickness, because it was at least 2 minutes of spinning around and around Abhishek (granted at that time it did make sense), but there were times where I think the same power/emotions would've been felt if they DIDN'T spin around the characters.
+ Vikram's Dev. First of all, I think Vikran is a scary looking guy so he did work as the police inspector. But there were far too many frustrated/guttural war cries from him for my taste. I wonder what his interpretation of Beera is like. I heard him and Abhishek's performance are quite different.

Final Thoughts: Was it worth watching? Yes! Bollywood is looking more and more like Hollywood if they keep up at the rate they're going. I loved my friend's comment of "I'm amazed. I mean, it doesn't look like they shot it outside their garage or anything". I must admit, the first half I was kinda "ehhh" about the film, but by the end (esp the climatic Beera vs. Dev scene) I was like "Oh.My.God!"

Rating: I really debated whether it's 3.5 or 4, but I'm going to give it a 4/5 really to the beautiful scenery, music, and seeing Abhishek like you've never seen him before.

I really want to see the Tamil version, since I heard it's better.

Favorite Song: Behene de

Kannathil Muthamittal

Film: Kannathil Muthamittal (A Peck on the Cheek) (2002)
Language: Tamil
Streaming on Netflix

I've had this movie sitting in my queue for almost a year, and I finally decided it was time to watch it. As you can see it, it really is not a Bollywood film, but a Tamil film (I'm not sure what they call the southern Indian film industry?) I've seen "Tollywood" and "Kollywood". Ok, I just looked it up. Tollywood = Telugu films, Kollywood = Tamil films. The film industry outside of Bollywood is entertaining for the fact it's clearly lower budget, but anyway... Tamil is interesting because it definitely is different from Hindi. It seems more sing-song in my opinion - very pretty.

This film was directed by Mani Ratnam, who next to Karan Johar (kuch kuch hota hai, K3G, KANK, MNIK), is the only name I'm familiar with as far as Indian directors go. He did Dil Se, Yuuva, Guru, and now Raavan. So I knew this film would be visually appealing, and it definitely was. Also, A.R. Rahman did the score/music and he can do no wrong in my eyes.

Synopsis: The movie starts off in Sri Lanka with a man and woman getting married, but their happiness is disrupted by the fight with the Tamil Tigers. Fast forward time, there's a family in Chennai with a engineer/famous author father, mother and 3 kids: 1 girl and 2 boys. The girl's 9th birthday comes up and the parents decide to tell her that she's not their biological child, that she's adopted. This sets off her obsession to try and find her biological mother and finally her parents agree (after she runs away twice) to go with her to try and find her. The warring Tamils & Sri Lankans make things chaotic during this journey and is a bit of an eye-opening experience to the girl.

The Good
+ The first song is kind of silly, but the rest of the music is really good. Again, A.R. Rahman can do no wrong
+ Excellent acting by everyone
+ Different storyline from what I've mostly seen
+ The different viewpoints. Again, alot of Bollywood is told from a male perspective, and even though they have that here, I'd say a good 50% is from the child's POV

The Bad
+ the subtitles were kind of off. Sometimes they'd be slow, or obviously they had left out subbing something. There was 1 song where they didn't bother to subtitle at all, which I thought was weird. But it was never enough to where I felt like I lost meaning or didn't know what was going on

Final Thoughts: Was it worth watching? Yes! I thought the storyline was really well done, all the acting was excellent, and liked how they spliced storylines nicely (biological parents history, girl's story, and adoptive parents history). I never felt like the movie got too over dramatic either.

Rating: 4/5

Random thoughts: The actor Madhavan (who is totally hot, by the way!), is apparently well known in Kollywood, and has done a few Hindi films that are well known: Rang de Basti, Guru, and 3 Idiots. It took me a while to make the connection that he was in 3 Idiots, and then I found it hilarious because the 3 idiots, who were college kids, were played by much older actors. (Madhaven who had to be about 39ish during filming, Aamir Khan is in his 40's, and Sharman Joshi is in his early 30's)

Favorite Song Kannathil Muthamittal