Mere Baap Pehle Aap (Released in 2008) - Trying to get Dad married - Can be missed, even though from Priyadarshan

It was a good cast, starring Akshaye Khanna, Paresh Rawal, Om Puri, Genelia D'Souza and Shobhana, out of whom almost all are known for good performances. And Priyadarshan has made some good comedies in the past, so it was a bit surprising that one good into such a non-interesting movie. The concept can be pretty good, with a great father-son partnership, the father trying to get his son married to the beautiful girl, while the son is trying to get the father married off to the mother of the girl, who is also coincidentally his old girlfriend. Can be interesting, right ? Well, not quite. Modern comedies try to put a lot of different incidents into a movie, hoping that the series of gags or incidents eventually ensure that the audience likes the movie and feel satisfied.
Now to the reality of the movie - this movie attempts to get a bit serious, or so the story tries to do in between. And in between, there are some sort of gags - but imagine wasting such stars such as Om Puri (portrayed as a comic skirt-chaser - why did he take such a role?), Sobhana (restricted to wearing good sarees and sniffing or making faces), or even Paresh Rawal (who has played comic roles in a great way in movies such as Hungama, but who does not get any comic roles in this movie); you get the idea. Maybe the idea was to change their personas in the movie, different from how they are regularly portrayed; would have been appreciated if the movie had worked, but it did not. It did not earn much at the box office either. The movie has music by Vidyasagar and Tauseef Akhtar.




So what is the story about (spoiler alert) ? Well, there is this widower Janaradhan Wishvanbhar Rane (played by Paresh Rawal), he has 2 sons Chirag (Manoj Joshi) and Gaurav (played by Akshaye Khanna). Janardhan has played a good father to his sons, bringing them up in a good manner; and over a period of time, his son Gaurav has gone to become very protective of his father; to the effect that it seems that Gaurav is the father, not his father. He is extra protective because of the presence of his father's dear friend, Madhav Mathur (played by Om Puri). Madhav, in the search for a bride who is not yet over-the-hill, gets into regular escapades and Gaurav has to get them out of trouble.
Gaurav now gets in touch with a lady, an old college friend Sheekha Kapoor (played by Genelia D'Souza), who in turn is staying with her guardian Anuradha (played by Shobhana). When Gaurav and Sheekha see Janardhan and Anuradha meeting, it seems strained, and they find out that both were in an old relationship; with this, Gaurav changes his mind and decides that his father should get married to this old companion; it also seems to his father that Sheekha is an ideal bride for his son; and so it gets confused. Who gets married to whom ?

Aamir (Released in 2008) - Starring Rajeev Khandelwal - A serious movie about a terror attack

Once in a while a movie comes along that is gripping. You have these romantic comedies that are released in thousands of theaters and go on to make hundreds of crores in revenue, but those movies leave you unsatisfied. And then you get a movie, made low budget, with unknown characters, that leaves you thinking, that grips you during the movie and you start thinking for the character in terms of what will happen next. Aamir is one such movie, a movie about terrorism, but an angle that is different from other movies. It is a simple story, but does not pull any punches, and makes you think about the tragedy that happens to the hero of the movie. Rajeev Khandelwal was not unknown before the movie, since he had made a name for himself in TV serials, but a movie is a different ball-game all together.
The movie started out slowly, since there were no major stars, but when a movie is good and is also praised by critics, it starts getting good word of mouth, and that ensured that the movie went on to earn a good profit and created a good name for Rajeev. The movie was directed by Raj Kumar Gupta (who later went on to direct the hit and serious, No One Killed Jessica). Music for the film was given by Amit Trivedi, lyrics by Amitabh Bhattacharya and the movie was produced by UTV.




A man is returning from Britain, back to his family, and suddenly, his life is turned upside down, thrown into a mix that will eventually take his life. Dr. Aamir Ali (played by Rajeev Khandelwal) is returning back to Mumbai, when he is given a cellphone by a stranger and told to wait for further instructions. The video in the phone scares him, since it is clear that his family has been abducted, and he has to now wait for further instructions. Further instructions make it clear to him that he has been caught in the trap of an Islamic terrorist who urges him to do something for his religion rather than the work that he is currently doing, and plays upon his name (Aamir means a leader).
From then on, it is a frantic series of movements, a lot of them over a red suitcase that has been given to him, and which gets stolen from him in between. It is full of cash, but when he finally gets to sit in a bus and is told to leave the suitcase under his seat and move out, he realizes that the suitcase contains a bomb, and the intention was to use Aamir to cause mayhem in a bus through the bomb. He finally makes a choice, deciding to ensure that no one else gets caught up in the bomb blast, clearing an area, and dying in the bomb blast - and all his tension, his sacrifice, is unknown to people around him, since he is suspected of being the bomber who died in the blast.

Woodstock Villa (Released in 2008) - Suspense film, but can be missed

Suspense films have several criteria that they need to meet. They should have great performances, they should be taut and with a quickly moving story, the scenes in the movie should make sense (even though the story and occurrences in a suspense movie will be out of the ordinary), the music and background score should make sense, and at the end, the viewer should feel that the story progression made sense. If a movie fails at several of these points, then it is difficult to praise a movie, but at the same time, the performance by the lead actor (played by Sikander Kher) is creditable and one of the few plus points of this movie. The movie stars Arbaaz Khan, Neha Oberoi, and a few other stars such as Gulshan Grover, Shakti Kapoor, Sachin Khedekar, etc. The movie had music by Anu Malik, and Virag Mishra.
The movie is made by the White Feather Films and is directed by Hansal Mehta, but suffers from problems such as a loud score, and the biggest problem being the story that does not seem to make sense through the movie, especially post the interval (and the interval is interesting, given that the movie is only 90 minutes long). This is the undoing of the movie, especially the fact that viewers do not appreciate the movie - and the reviews by critics at the time of the release of the movie were pretty harsh.



So what is the story of the movie all about ? Well, you have this down on luck guy, Sam (played by Sikander Kher), who is without a job (you don't far if you sleep with the wife of your boss), who owes rent on his flat and also owes money to a bad guy (Gulshan Grover); he needs a lot of money. And what does he find ? He meets this lady Zara (played by Neha Uberoi) in a disco, who tells him that she wants to test her husband's love for her, this husband being Jatin (played by Arbaaz Khan). So she tells Sam to kidnap her and demand a huge ransom. Now, since he so much needs money, Sam decides to go ahead, and that is where things start to go wrong.
He goes with her to a place called Woodstock Villa, and when he is out, Zara gets killed in the meantime; something that Sam comes back and sees, and is panic stricken. He gets a phone call that he has 30 minutes to clean up the mess, and so he buries the body in the forest and cleans up. It is later that he sees Zara in a video and comes back to the city to know the truth. He finds Zara and gets the truth from her, and the truth is very different from what he had experienced so far. There was a Zara and there was a Jatin, but the body he had buried, and the girl he was in touch with, one of them was Zara and the other was somebody forced to step into the role. How does he resolve this ? There is suspense, but some of the parts of the story are not so readily believable; and that loud score in the movie ? It needs to be done well to work well, but really does not.