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.