Ta Ra Rum Pum

Went over to see this movie due to some obligations. Had zero expectations from it, and it lived up to them.

Summary
Rajveer Singh (Saif Ali Khan looking a little haggard and not as fit as usual) is a pit-crew worker in a racing team. Harry (Jaaved Jaaferi, reliable as ever) is a team manager for a racing team; Speeding Saddles, and he discovers Saif's driving skills on a taxi ride across the city.
Saif also gets to meet a music student, Radhika (Rani Mukerji, with a stupid hairdo), during the same ride; and falls for her instantly.
Saif becomes a race car driver for Speeding Saddles; and goes on to win a number of races, in the process shortening his name to a chic RV. On this journey, he also gets married to Rani and spares some time to sire two kids, Priya/Princess (Angelina Idnani, normal) and Ranveer /Champ (Ali Haji, trying too hard to be cute).
This fairy tale story is interrupted as the result of a racing accident (Days of Thunder anyone?) which keeps Saif away from the racetrack for an year. His comeback is not the stuff of legends, and his picture perfect world shatters when he realizes his credit line doesn't last as long as his race track.
How the family survives this downturn, and comes up all trumps forms the rest of the story.


Actors
Saif Ali Khan for a change, does not look the normally fit and energetic guy that he usually does. He probably realized the stupidity of the script and got disinterested in the movie. He tries to make up for it in the second half, but is not very impressive, sleepwalking through the entire movie.
Rani looks horrible for the first half of the movie, and is unable to carry off the short-skirt look made popular by Preity Zinta in Salaam Namastey. In the second half, she has to wear a no-makeup look, which doesn't suit her as much either. As regards to her histrionics, she is dependable as usual, though her shrieky avatar pre-marriage is irritating.
The kids do a fine enough job, but never register as endearing.
Jaaved Jaaferi is great in a small role and leaves you in splits as always.
The primary antagonist Rusty is so comically characterized that he ends up without a single dialogue and a sneer which reminds you of Shashikala in movies from the '80s.

Technique
Director Siddharth Anand showed some promise in his earlier movie Salaam Namastey, even though that too was inspired from Nine Months. For this movie, he lets the money do the talking. The lavishly mounted race track scenes almost scream out saying... hey, now that you have this to take home, why bother with a script.
The screenplay by Habib Faisal is inspired in parts by Days of Thunder, Cinderella Man and Life is Beautiful.
With such varied influences, it sometimes ends up with ridiculous scenes not having any relation to the main theme of the movie.
Surprisingly, the music by Vishal Shekhar is plain bad and the songs come as obstacles in this movie already crawling at a snail's pace.
This screenplay of convenience also ends up painting the car races as death duels where the racer's main aim is to create as many pile-ups as necessary to leave his competitors behind; and if he ends up killing a few of them, so much the better.


Trivia

1. Ali Haji, the child actor has earlier worked in Family (with Amitabh Bachchan) and Fanaa besides ad campaigns for Dabur Chyawanprash, Lifebuoy and Tata Tea.
   His forthcoming films include Drona (Abhishek Bachchan, Priyanka Chopra) and Partner (Salman Khan, Govinda, Lara Dutta and Katrina Kaif).
2. The other child actor Angelina Idnani has been a part of Phir Hera Pheri and Benares, and quite a few ads like Nutrela, Everest Masala, Haldiram, Montex pens and Mahindra Club Holidays.
3. Cinematographer Binod Pradhan, a veteran of films like Mission Kashmir, Devdas and Rang De Basanti, and also Ta Ra Rum Pum has a cameo in this movie in a group scene with Saif Ali Khan and Rani Mukerji.
4. Shekhar Kapoor had planned a movie named Tara Rum Pum Pum a long time ago with Preity Zinta (before her debut in Dil Se). But the movie got stalled like a number of other Shekhar Kapoor movies .
5. During the shoot of the film in the US, Saif stayed away from the unit, on his own in a studio-style apartment/hotel, and this caused a lot of gossip regarding how he shared cold vibes with Rani.
6. Director Siddharth Anand, all of 26 years; assisted Kunal Kohli during the making of Mujhse Dosti Karoge and Hum Tum. He also was a part of the team that wrote Hum Tum (which was inspired by When Harry Met Sally).
   Before joining the Yash Raj banner; he had also assisted Rahul Rawail in the comedy Kuch Khatti Kuch Meethi starring Kajol.
7. Siddharth had written this movie keeping Saif in mind. Rani was finalized only after the script was written in totality.
8. The hotel that Saif had checked in to, was in the middle of nowhere, opposite a cemetery without any windows. Saif used to smoke a lot and so, he got them to make him a window. Now they call that room the 'presidential suite' as it's the only one with a window there.
9. Rani and Siddharth know each other from their school days when they studied in the same school and traveled by the same school bus.

Opinion
Mostly a bummer, unless you are interested in watching a few race tracks or are die-hard fans of Saif/Rani. Also, if you are moved to tears at the slightest provocation and love watching emotionally manipulative movies, you could go for it. Would still recommend re-viewing Cinderella Man to achieve that end.

Bheja Fry

Let me admit at the start that even though this is a low budget movie, I had high expectations from it as it is directed by a former assistant of Rajat Kapoor (whose films I like), and most of my expectations were fulfilled.


Summary
Inspired in a large part from a French movie, (Le Dîner de cons), the movie is about Ranjeet Thadani (Rajat Kapoor suave as ever) who owns a music company, 'Soundman Industries' and is married to Sheetal Thadani (Sarika, looking a little tired, but great as ever).
Rajat and his group of friends have a very unique stress-busting technique: each of them brings over a fool for their Friday meet-ups; called "Talent Dinners" and then parades them around having fun at their expense. They consider it innocuous fun (and I for one agreed and even got a few ideas. :) Hey, I am not mean. The fools don't realize they are being made fun of, and they actually consider it recognition of their talent).
Sarika disagrees and has quite a few arguments with Rajat regarding this.
Rajat is given the reference of Bharat Bhushan (the extremely versatile Vinay Pathak) by a friend who knows Rajat is desperately in search of an idiot for the talent dinner.
Vinay is an income tax official and extremely fond of singing. He considers himself God's humble gift to mankind and intends to share his gift of song at the slightest encouragement (and quite a few times without that encouragement too).
He tries hard to please Rajat, but being the goof he is; ends up complicating matters. Sarika leaves Rajat and Vinay tries to help in his own way to hilarious results.
Ranvir Sheorey plays Asif Merchant, Vinay's colleague, and Milind Soman is Anant Ghoshal, a music director and former friend of Rajat. They contribute to the proceedings in their own goofy ways along with Bhairavi Goswami as Suman Rao, Rajat's girlfriend and a wannabe singer.

Actors
The movie revolves around two people, Rajat Kapoor and Vinay Pathak, and both do great jobs. Vinay is laugh-out-loud funny, and Rajat acts as the perfect foil, never once trying to upstage him. Vinay's accent and dialogs when he imitates a Bhojpuri producer are fabulous.
When Ranvir Sheorey comes in the picture, you expect the film to go into hyper-laughter mode, but it stops short of going that extra mile due to a surprisingly average performance by the usually excellent Ranvir.
Milind Soman only gets to giggle at everything and does an OK job.
Sarika's role is mostly playing the cribbing wife, but she has great screen presence which makes it wonderful to have her in the movie.

Technique
The script by Sagar Ballary and Arpita Chatterjee is a winner and is replete with laugh-out-loud situations. Sagar does a good job at direction and targets it at the right audience with the right emotions.
The editing by Suresh Pai does seem a little choppy in places, but that's nit-picking this nice movie.
The movie does have it's share of problems due to it's low budget, but none that cannot be overlooked.

Trivia

1. This movie is inspired in many parts by the French movie Le Dîner de cons (roughly translated - The Idiots' Dinner). The original movie has Vinay's character obsessed with building replicas of architectural works with matchsticks (maquette).
   
2. The director Sagar Ballary has assisted Rajat Kapoor in his films Raghu Romeo and Mixed Doubles.
3. His co-writer, Arpita Chatterjee is a journalist with the Mumbai tabloid Mid-Day.
4. The producer Sunil Doshi had also produced Rajat Kapoor's earlier movie Mixed Doubles, which is when he asked Sagar Ballary if he had any ideas for a movie. Sagar pitched this idea and Doshi immediately agreed to produce it.
5. The budget for this movie was Rs. 55 lakhs (Rs. 5.5 million), which is a paltry sum by Hindi movie standards. The reason it could be kept so low is that most of the actors waived off their fees for shooting it.
6. The original choice for the character of Rajat's wife was Yana Gupta, but things didn't work out with her, and then the director got to know that Sarika was planning a comeback in films (she was shooting for Parzania at that time). He went over to meet Sarika and she immediately agreed.
7. When the producer agreed to do the film, the title was 'Ding Dong Baby Sing a Song'. He didn't like the title and asked for another one, and Sagar kept delaying it. Finally, the producer; Sunil, called up Sagar as he was going to register the title. In a rush, Sagar called up his co-scriptwriter Arpita, and she said, 'Sagar don't bheja fry me right now”. She took a double-take after that and suggested Bheja Fry as the title, which Sagar hated. But when everyone was asked about it, they loved it as it was in sync with the theme of the movie, and so it stayed.

Opinion
A must watch. If you liked Jhankaar Beats, this is the movie for you.

Shaka Laka Boom Boom

Went over to see Shaka Laka Boom Boom, and must say this is probably the first Suneel Darshan movie I didn't hate as much as his Raja Hindustani not that that is much of a compliment.

Summary
A faithful rip-off of Milos Forman's Amadeus, SLBB is the story of AJ (an aged Bobby Deol), who is a popular singer/composer based in NY. He has had 5 consecutive chart-topping albums, and is working on his next one. Bobby is backed by the owner of a music company (Dalip Tahil, with a pierced right ear) whose wife has the hots for him.
He meets Ruhi (Kangana Ranaut) and falls head over heels in love with her.
Reggie (Upen Patel, probably ashamed of his real name, Raghav) is from the underground music scene, who is supposed to have a large amount of talent (not much, going by the tunes bandied around).
Upen seduces Bobby's PR person Sheena (Celina Jaitley) and then promptly ditches her after getting introduced to the company's top brass.
Bobby is upstaged on a number of occasions by Upen, and realizes that Upen is a much better composer. What proves to be the last straw is that Kangana falls in love with Upen, making an emotional wreck of Bobby.
He decides to get back at Upen and enlists the help of Celina who holds a huge grudge because she has been spurned by Upen.
Thus starts the fight between ruthless power and supposed talent (Yawn!).

Actors
Upen is wooden as always and is unintentionally hilarious when he is supposed to play a sick guy. His comic scenes; on the other hand leave you cold. He is probably the only guy alive who can get acting tips from Steven Seagal.
Kangana Ranaut looks distinctly uncomfortable essaying a role where she doesn't have to play the wronged girl, or cry her heart out throughout the movie. So she makes do with a constantly puzzled frown on her face.
Celina Jaitley provides the eye-candy, as usual coupled with deadpan dialog delivery which amuses us no end.
All these guys end up making Bobby the best actor of the lot, and he does show potential in quite a few scenes. Now if only he did something about those dreadful dreadlocks of his.
Govind Namdeo has a few redundant and repetitive scenes as Bobby's guru.

Technique
Suneel Darshan, for a change goes a little low on the traditions front, but makes it up by turning the dialogs a tad louder. As in all Darshan movies, actors shriek their lines instead of mouthing them; which is the reason why this movie is literally loud, not just in terms of treatment, but in terms of decibels too.
Since the movie is supposed to be about music, the composer takes center screen, taking over from the director. Himesh Reshammiya in usual style comes up with 1-2 hummable tunes, with the rest as fillers (please note that I consider myself musically deaf, so not much credence should be given to my musical judgment.) The English lyrics for the title song have to be heard to be believed.
Choreography by Bosco-Caesar is normal, and if I could have got my eyes off Celina, I might have been able to comment better on that aspect.
Background music by Viju Shah is shrill, and I refuse to believe it was his idea to put in a background score which sounds like a porn movie whenever a racy scene is on the screen.
There are a large number of goofs in the movie, and some are truly astounding.
Bobby's supposed house has a large number of frames shown in the background, which clearly have Upen's photos on them. This is witnessed in a number of scenes (Bobby fantasizing about Upen???).
Also, in two scenes, an hour apart (so the timeline is a good six-months apart), Upen's friend is seen with the same tabloid (with the headline: Dumb and Dumber) in his hands (probably the headline points to this guy himself... slow-reader anyone???).

Trivia

1. Sanaa Panscholi (Aditya Panscholi's daughter) was supposed to debut with this movie. But she was shunted out by Darshan after a few days of shooting as he was not pleased with her output. Interestingly, Kangana was brought in to replace her (Aditya Panscholi is supposed to have an affair with Kangana, and he is the one who brought her into the film world).
2. Isha Koppikar and Mona Chopra (now known as Sherlyn Chopra) were also attached to this project at a point of time. Isha was supposed to act the role of Dalip Tahil's wife, and Mona was to be Kangana's friend.
3. There's a song which was supposed to be shot on Upen Patel for a cost of Rs. 2.5 crores. None of the songs shows such lavishness.
4. Suneel Darshan reportedly had trouble paying his bills in South Africa (where this movie was shot) and there were labor issues due to this.
5. At one point of time Suneel Darshan was trying to promote SLBB as a story of the rivalry between Amitabh and SRK. This presumption of his was shot down by both his lead stars in their interviews.
6. Suneel Darshan has been so impressed with Upen that he has already signed him for two more films, one of which will be a solo-hero project.

Opinion
Can be seen by people who have been able to tolerate Raja Hindustani and Dhadkan. This is certainly a notch above those horror stories. In the absence of any other options this week, it's the only way out for people addicted to watching movies in theaters. For everyone else, avoidable.