Guzarish – Movie Review

Starring: Hrithik’s hair and Aishwarya’s cleavage
Director: His Intelligency Mr. Sanjay Leela Bhansali
Sufferer: Me

There are some things that one has come to associate a Bhansali film. The dialogues would be a lot in English, the sets would be opulent, the visuals stunning, and the story – boring.

Guzarish comes (joins thumb and index finger and makes a face) this close to breaking the mould, but alas, fails to.

Guzaarish is the story of Ethan Masceranhas, a one time magician (though all we see him doing is an extremely gay dance, and another trick in which he rises in the air holding a candle) who is now quadriplegic. Aishwarya plays his nurse who has been taking care of him for 12 years now. Ethan has been a survivor, for he has written a book inspiring quadriplegics to fight on. He is also an RJ who dishes out gyan to people in a tackily named radio station called ‘Radio Zindagi’. One day, he decides that he wants to end his life. Ethanasia – as he puts it.

Now, here is where logic is raped. If you want to take a crucial and personal decision like this, who would you consult? Your doctor, lawyer, mother? Na. Magic-boy asks his listeners to ‘vote’ for or against his decision. His lawyer grudgingly agrees to fight his case, but the judge and public prosecutor (terribly cliched roles)turn down his wish. Finally, he manages to find a solution.

Now that we are done with the storyline, I have some questions to ask. Why do the characters in Bhansali’s films always talk in English? And why is there a sense of loss of time and space in his movies? And why are they always about disabled people? And why does Aishwarya dress up as if she is going to attend the Boston Tea Party?

I think it is this pseudo sense of intellectualism that Bhansali wants to portray. Tell you what, we audiences are smarter than that. We don’t mind watching a film that is dumb, but acknowledges it. And yes, if we wanted to watch art movies, Torrent zindabad!

Performance wise, Hrithik is in good form. He is the only reason you can tolerate the movie, but in the end scenes, even he seems to have grown tired of this madness. His accent sounds fake and his long drawn speech seems like it was forced down his throat. Aishwarya has nothing much to do, except apply extremely red lipstick and flaunt her cleavage (which is a lot, actually. I am sure this is the most cleavage an actor has shown in recent times). The music is lackluster and seems to be lifted from Saawariya and HDDCS.

Guzarish, sadly, is another serving of pseudo intellectual bullshit dished out by Bhansali. Carry a pack of Eno with you!

Action Replay – Bakwaas Screenplay

It was a dark hall. The screams fell to deaf ears, as the miscreants came closer. Slowly but surely, they proved to be too much of a match. After it was finally over, my brain sat in the corner, crying, after being gang-raped repeatedly.

Action Replay, like the cliche goes, is one of those movies you need to leave your brains home and go watch. Trust me, its for your brain’s good.

Action Replay is the story of a guy ( I don’t even remember his name) who has parents who keep fighting with each other. His father is Akshay Kumar, who owns a big hotel, and his mom, Aish, who keeps spending his money and her time shopping. One day, he sees them fight and decides he needs to stop them from getting a divorce.

Go to a marriage counsellor? Try talking to them about it? No.

He decides to go back to the past and change their equation. Quite conveniently, his girlfriends’s grandfather is working on a Time Machine. This time machine looks like the skeleton of a huge egg with blue lightnings running all over it. The scientist, totally non-cliched, has a beard and wears shabby clothes. So, smart son goes back into the past.

In the past, we see that Akshay Kumar is a loser and Aish the hot chick neighbour who plays pranks on him. Very cute. The guy befriends his father, and helps him woo the girl. I slept off after that, and when I woke up, there was a dance competition going on in which the winner had to sing in many voices. There were quite a few voices in my head, all of them saying two words.

Anyway, so this guy finally wins her heart and the son comes back to the present. All is well. Action Replay ranks among the huge number of crappy films I have watched in movie theatres. The clothes are loud, the characters louder. Not a single scene in this comedy made me laugh. The only entertainment for me was to watch this set of girls laughing away to glory. I was sitting behind them trying to figure out which was the dumbest of the lot. I concluded they were all at par, together stretching the limit of dumbness known to mankind.

Anyway, the film is a sad comedy. Akshay Kumar must have charged three times his fee for the film, going by all the overacting he does in the film. Aishwarya is bearable in the scenes where her cleavage is visible. Neha Dhupia is wasted. The only surprise was Ranvijay. Somewhere in the movie, you wished it was Roadies, and he asked the leads to go and put their heads in a lion’s mouth as a ‘task’.

But even his ‘guy who can sing with two voices’ gag gets repetitive and can’t save the film. The music is not great either.

Do your brain a favour this November, don’t take it to Action Replay. You will be responsible for the violation it will be subjected to. Stay far away from this one.