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Review: ABCD 2 (Any Body Can Dance 2)

A tiny plot and passable lead performances are bolstered by lots of dancing in ABCD sequel, and is worth one watch.
by Ravi Shet

The plot of this film is the journey of the real life Fictitious Dance Group’s from Mumbai’s Nalasopara to the finals of the World Hip Hop Challenge in Las Vegas. ABCD 2 (Any Body Can Dance 2) directed by Remo D’Souza, features a motley crew of dancers named ‘Mumbai Stunners’ with Suresh (Varun Dhawan) as their lead.

The group, also comprising Vinnie (Shraddha Kapoor) and a crew of others, are accused of copying each and every dance move from a famous dance group – Philippines’s ‘All Stars’ by the judges (played by Remo D’Souza, Terence Lewis and Seema Pandey) and are disqualified from a reality show. Post this incident, the group is taunted by one and all as a bunch of cheaters (a customer calls out to Suresh, who is working as waiter in a pub as a ‘cheater’, then sarcastically corrects it to ‘waiter’, a woman in a salon tells Vinnie she wants a haircut like Katrina Kaif, and says Vinnie can do it expertly since she is good at copying, etc.) Even a popular TV comic mocks the group on his show.

Suresh wants his group to participate in the World Starz Hip Hop Challenge in Las Vegas and prove to the world that they are not cheaters through their dance performances. Vishnu Sir (Prabhudeva), a struggling choreographer guides the team and also renames it as Indian Stunners. After that, the film follows a fairly predictable graph.

 

There are a few moments that drag it down, especially in the second half; however the dance sequences makes up for the movie and really hold your attention. Varun and Shraddha have put in a lot of effort with their dancing to match the likes of Dharmesh Yelande, Lauren Gottlieb, Punit Pathak, Raghav Juyal and others.

The cinematography by Vijay Arora is excellent, especially the shots taken in Las Vegas. Prabhudeva’s entry, followed by his dance and the last dance sequence of the film are standout sequences. Sachin-Jigar do well in the music department.

All in all, this is a good film to watch if you’re not looking for a very strong story and lots of dancing.

Rating: 3 out of 5

(Picture courtesy movies.ndtv.com)

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Film

Review: Sugar, Salt Ani Prem

A story of love, kindness, sacrifice and friendship, this Marathi film boasts of some stellar performances and a well-balanced plot.
by Ravi Shet

Producer and director Sonali Bangera brings a star studded ensemble in this film which tells the story of three women who are looking for their respective paths and the relationship they share.

The film starts with Aditi (Sonali Kulkarni) adding a sugar cube to a cup of tea, Ananya (Shilpa Tulaskar) picking up a packet of salt from the supermarket and Soumya (Kranti Redkar) picking up a greeting card from the Archies store – they are in the same mall and leave one by one in three different directions.

Aditi lives with her husband – Rahul (Sameer Dharmadhikari) and adopted son Om, who is autistic. Rahul is a wealthy financial expert, while Aditi was a high-achieving working woman with a lot of accolades and trophies marking her professional life. However, she chooses to stop working so that she can take care of her son – this creates a rift between her and Rahul. He tries hard to send their son to a boarding school for autistic children, so that he can get back his wife’s attentions.

 

Meanwhile, Ravindra (Prasad Oak), owner of Robo Tech lives with his wife Soumya and is busy building his dream – a robotic chair that can help the needy. The film also introduces his ex-colleague Pradhan (Yatin Karyekar), who wants to hijack Ravindra’s dream project for commercial purposes.

Ananya stays with her daughter and husband – Ajay (Ajinkya Deo), a well-established businessman in awe of status and money. He hardly has the time for relationships; this becomes a point of friction between him and his wife, who is always willing to help a person in need.

Ajay and Ravindra are friends; however when a financier pulls out of Ravindra’s project after Pradhan manipulates the deal, even Ajay offers no help. Ravindra gets killed in a car accident and his project gets stuck. This results in a meeting of the three women – Aditi, Soumya and Ananya – who are also struggling in their respective lives. The story then develops their relationship and how their friendship gels with sugar, salt and love (prem).

I loved how the film portrays the many dilemmas and the small happinesses of today’s women – a lot of women will relate to this. The plot is well-balanced and the performances – especially by Sonali Kulkarni, Shilpa Tulaskar and Yatin Karyekar – are top notch. Musician Siddharth Mahadevan has scored all the songs, and also appears in one of them. Overall, this one’s worth a watch.

Rating: 3 out of 5

(Picture courtesy marathistars.com)

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Film

Review: The Age of Adaline

Ponderous and quite boring, this film fails to sustain audience interest for very long– a pity, considering its intriguing plot.
by Ravi Shet

Adaline Bowman (Blake Lively), a gorgeous woman aged 29 years is born in 1908, and has a serious car accident that gives her the gift – or the bane – of immortality. She discovers that she has stopped ageing since the day of the accident, which means that she will be 29 years old forever.

With her miraculous power in tow, Adaline tries every trick she can think of to hide her immortality. She changes her name, her appearance and even her home town in every decade of her life.

In the present time, Adaline is now Jenny working in a San Francisco museum, and she is also a mother to a wrinkled old daughter, Flemming Prescot (Ellen Burstyn). At this point, the film becomes predictable: after refusing to fall in love again for eight decades, she decides to stop running and falls in love with the wealthy Ellis (Michiel Huisman). From here on, the film follows a Bollywood-esque predictable graph and becomes a bit of a snooze fest.

 

Directed by Lee Toland Kriege, the pace of the story is excruciatingly slow; a good reason to walk out midway and come back with snacks and soft drinks at your leisure. I was also disappointed with the film’s climax, which one sees coming much in advance..

Considering the intriguing plot, the film could have done something simply stunning with its story to keep audiences engaged. Instead, there are long periods of nothing happening, and sloppy stringing together of scenes. There are a few emotional moments in this movie which make an attempt to elicit a smile or a wistful sigh, but these are very rare. The pretty costumes and visually appealing cinematography also cannot bail out this underdeveloped story.

Acting-wise, Blake holds her own and is quite good, as is Harrison Ford, who plays Ellis’s father and Adaline’s former flame. Ford does full justice to his short role and is a good reason to watch this film.

Rating: 2 out of 5

(Picture courtesy www.hoyts.com.au)

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Film

Review: San Andreas

Fast paced, edgy and completely over the top, San Andreas has little to boast of apart from its visual effects.
by Ravi Shet

Within just a few seconds of the opening credits, a car crash happens and our hero Ray (Dwayne Johnson) essaying the role of search and rescue helicopter pilot at Los Angeles Fire Department (LAFD) arrives in a chopper along with his team to rescue the girl stuck in a car hanging in between the mountains.

After the rescue mission, Ray heads to his home to spend the weekend with his daughter Blake (Alexandra Daddario). Emma (Carla Gugino) wants to divorce Ray and she has planned to move in with her affluent boyfriend Daniel (Ioan Gruffudd) along with Blake. But a major earthquake at Nevada dashes Ray’s plans for spending the weekend with Blake since his team is required for the rescue effort.

Meanwhile, Dr Lawrence Hayes (Paul Giamatti), a seismology professor at Caltech has devised a mechanism to predict earthquakes, which involves tracking magnetic pulses. Before Dr. Hayes tells the public about the Los Angeles quake, a part of a swarm of tremors hits the town where Emma is having lunch in a restaurant in a high-rise building. Buildings start collapsing one after another like a house of cards, creating chaos and panic. Ray arrives to rescue Emma from the roof of the building in his chopper and heads straight to Blake, who has reached San Francisco with Daniel, where another quake strikes and she is trapped in a vehicle in an underground garage. She is rescued by the good looking Ben (Hugo Johnstone-Burt) and his younger brother Ollie (Art Parkinson). Blake somehow manages to contact Ray and she develops a plan with Ben and Ollie, to meet her parents.

 

A big thumbs up to the visual effects team working on this film – they have done an amazing job with the subject matter, bringing to life the destruction caused by an unrelenting earthquake. The collapsing bridges, ripped roads and crumbled buildings will make you gasp with their incredible detailing. But there is little else in the film that can be recommended. The plot is contrived, almost Bollywoodesque in its development, and somebody please tell me how an LAFD search and rescue helicopter pilot is allowed to take an official chopper to rescue his daughter, when others are looking for more immediate help in the same situation.

This one’s for Dwayne Johnson fans only.

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

(Picture courtesy lottecinemavn.com.)

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Film

Review: Mad Max – Fury Road

Unrelenting, furious action runs alongside a feminist statement on slavery, torture and the overthrowing of shackles imposed by a dictator.
by Ravi Shet

‘My name is Max’. This unrelenting action film starts with these words. Almost three decades after the original installment (starring Mel Gibson as Max), director George Miller comes up with this edition of Mad Max with Tom Hardy playing Max Rockatansky.

The film is set in an unspecified future, in a world grappling with little or no water and gas. Only one person, Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne) holds the reserves to these precious resources and he lets the inhabitants have access to them for only a minute every day. Immortan Joe is the ruthless leader of a band of bald, white body paint-covered crazed soldiers referred to as ‘War Boys.’

As luck would have it, Max is captured by Joe’s War Boys and termed as a Universal Donor. He is tied to a speeding car and used as a ‘blood bag’ (and referred to as one) for an ailing War Boy named Nux (Nicholas Hoult), along with other War Boys who are in hot pursuit to capture Furiosa (Charlize Theron), a solider with a mechanical left arm and a former trusted member of Joe’s army. For her part, Furiosa is on a mission to help Joe’s five wives, known as ‘prized breeders’, escape from his world of torment in an armoured tanker truck.

 

Max and Furiosa’s paths soon cross, but they start off on a bad note. However, as time progresses, they develop an excellent bond with each other, finally joining forces to battle their way in a furious, non-stop chase that will have you riveted and completely unable to tear your eyes away from the screen. Eventually, Nux switches sides and teams up with Max and Furiosa.

This is a relentless, extremely fast-paced and brutal film with a feminist narrative, and is backed by stellar performances. Tom Hardy does full justice to Max, and is superlative in both the fight sequences and the softer moments of the film. Meanwhile, in a deglam avatar and buzz cut, Charlize Theron is absolutely impressive and believable. Furiosa is one of the strongest women in recent Hollywood films, and is a new standard for other superheroines to live up to.

This is a must-watch for action and stunt buffs – with few dialogues, constant action and new heights in cinematography, Mad Max: Fury Road will keep your adrenaline high from start to finish in this mad drive for hope and redemption.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

 (Picture courtesy www.madmaxmovie.com)

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Film

Review: The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water

Watch this film only if you’re a SpongeBob fan who doesn’t mind a slightly weird storyline and tonnes of hamming.
by Ravi Shet

This week sees the release of the SpongeBob cartoon series famous on the Nickelodeon cartoon network turned into a full-fledged movie. At the outset, let me warn you that this film will leave you cold if you’re not a fan of silliness or SpongeBob.

SpongeBob (voiced by Tom Kenny) works as a cook at The Krusty Krab, a burger joint famed for its yummy Krabby Patties owned by Mr. Krabs (voiced by Clancy Brown) in the underwater town of Bikini Bottom. Squidward, Patrick and Sandy are SpongeBob’s buddies. Residents of Bikini Bottom are always in high spirits while gorging on yummy Krabby Patties, except for Plankton (voiced by Doug Lawrence) who tries every trick to steal their secret recipe. During one of his attempts he tries to steal the secret recipe, it vanishes entirely, leaving Plankton and SpongeBob clueless.

Deprived of their yummy Krabby Patties, the residents of Bikini Bottom go crazy and the fun loving place turns into a site of utter chaos. SpongeBob teams up with Plankton to find the secret recipe and get to the bottom of the disaster at Bikini Bottom. Through their team work, they build a photo booth time machine to travel back in time and get hold of the secret recipe.

 

It turns out that bad tempered and crazy pirate Burger Beard (Antonio Banderas) has stolen the secret recipe; he plans to retire from piracy and run a food truck business. The yummy Krabby Patties which were the most-wanted food item underwater at Bikini Bottom, score an instant hit with people above the water. SpongeBob and the gang soon realise that the person having the secret recipe is not only huge in size as compared to their miniscule selves, but he also has a magical book that has the tale of Bikini Bottom written in it – and he can rewrite the ending. Luckily, SpongeBob gets hold of the last page which helps him to rewrite the story – he adds superpowers and a huge size to himself and his gang friends.

These superpowers help SpongeBob blow powerful bubbles, while Sandy becomes a huge sized squirrel. Patrick is able to attract all the ice cream cones – this one makes you laugh out loud. Mr. Krabs’ retractable claws remind you of Marvel’s Iron Man, while Plankton develops a massive green-coloured body (like The Hulk) with a tiny head.

The film is strictly okay, with very few genuinely funny moments. I frankly thought the entire film should have been an animation instead of this weird mish-mash. However, there are a few trademark SpongeBob silly scenes which will crack you up – but only if you’re a kid and a fan of the Nickelodeon series.

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

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