Shaapit Release Date 19-Mar-2010

Producer Vikram Bhatt, Manmohan Singh
Director Vikram Bhatt
Music T-Series
Writer Vikram Bhatt
Lyrics Sameer, Nazam Sheraz, Aditya Narayan
Release Date 19-Mar-2010

After proving his mettle in the horror genre, with flicks like ‘Raaz’ and ‘1920’, Vikram Bhatt does not disappoint you in ‘Shaapit’ as well. In fact, he even goes a step ahead with his storytelling skills. Like every Bollywood horror flicks, this one is also divided into two parts - the past in which the crime or mishap took place and the present in which the past comes to haunt people. And, the manner is which Vikram Bhatt blends the present with the past and vice versa is what makes it different from the myriad other, ineffectual Bollywood horror movies.

A good horror flick is one that has enough of scary scenes to keep you on the edge of your seat and in this regard, ‘Shaapit’ has more than enough. The audience gets its fair share of chilling scenes and doesn’t come out complaining. At the same time, the climax of the film, though a bit lengthy, provides the perfect culmination to its story. Even from the technical aspect, right from the background score to the cinematography and even the special effects, everything works in favor of the flick.

There are a few flaws as well. For instance, Shweta’s revival from coma, towards the end, seems archaic. And the two background stories that explain what the shaap (curse) was all about would have been better with a merger towards the end. Now, coming down to performances, Aditya Narayan deserves a special mention. He is a complete natural on-screen and even sings well. As for Shweta, she is good, but didn’t get much scope, especially in the second half. Rahul Dev was brilliant in his understated role, while Shubh Joshi, Natasha Sinha, Murli Sharma, and Nishigandha Wad were able. A must watch, for all horror lovers!

Shaapit Pre-release Review

After Raaz, 1920 and Raaz 2, producer-director Vikram Bhatt is back with another horror flick, titled ‘Shaapit’. The movie marks the debut of Aditya Narayan, son of noted playback singer Udit Narayan, and Shweta Agarwal, as lead characters. The music for the movie has been provided by Vikram Bhatt’s cousin, Chirantan Bhatt, who promises to impress the audiences with some fresh melodious tunes, while the lyrics have been penned down by Sameer. The movie is set to release on March 19, 2010.

The story of ‘Shaapit’ revolves around a young girl, Kaaya (Shweta Agarwal), who has been trapped in a generational curse that makes her family’s life miserable and distressful. Kaya is in love with Aman (Aditya Narayan) and the two get engaged. However, soon after they exchange rings, the young couple meets with an accident, as their car spins and bounces off the road. As soon as Kaaya’s parents hear the news, they rush to her side. This is when her father discloses the curse that was incurred on their family as many as 300 hundred years back, by an angry Brahmin.

According to the curse that has been plaguing Kaaya’s family from generations, any girl born therein will never be able to get married. And if she tries to do so, dangers will follow her on every step. Though Aman and Kaaya do not believe this initially, the constant accidents leave them with no other option, but to accept it as the truth. However, they love each other immensely and cannot let go so easily. So, Aman meets the master of the ways of the spiritual world, Pashupathi and learns about the evil spirit who is always at duty to pass on the curse down to each generation.

Aman seeks Pashupathi’s help in destroying the spirit and getting rid of the curse. The latter tells him that though there is a way to take over the spirit, it is not easy and the stakes will be too high. Aman decides to go ahead and soon, there is a war between man and the devil. Will Aman be able to win the eternal fight with the evil? Will he be able to get Kaaya’s family out of the dreadful generational curse? Will Aman finally be able to marry Kaaya? ‘Shaapit’ attempts to deliver an adventurous horror love story, the very first in its kind in India. Wait till 19^th March to find the answers to all the questions bogging your mind.

Love Sex Aur Dhokha Release Date : 19,Mar 2010

Producer Ekta Kapoor, Shobha Kapoor, Priya Sreedharan
Director Dibakar Banerjee
Music Sneha Khanwalkar
Writer Urmi juvekar
Release Date 19-Mar-2010

At the outset if you are expecting Sex and skin from this film, be prepared for a dhokha (betrayal). Don’t let the theme of voyeurism mislead you into believing that Dibakar Bannerjee’s Love Sex aur Dhokha is a cheap gimmickry to titillate your senses. The film is bold, bare, intense, stark and dark but Bannerjee’s storytelling is so superlative that it stimulates your senses without having to resort to tawdry elements.

At several levels, Love Sex aur Dhokha is at par with some of the best titles in world cinema in terms of its treatment. Like The Blair Witch Project or the more recent Paranormal Activity , the ‘entire runtime’ of the film happens to be video footage shot on handheld camera by one or the other member of the cast. But neither is the genre horror, nor is the feel docu-drama! Rather the film follows a hyperlinked storytelling pattern to come up with three individual episodes of voyeurism that intersect intermittently to form a non-liner narrative. One of the best films in this format is the less-popular Irani gem Ashkan The Charmed Ring and Other Stories and Love Sex aur Dhokha comes quite close to the masterpiece with respect to the storytelling genius. A dark sanguinary scene (in the otherwise lighthearted film) reminds of the Filipino film Kinatay which had a prolonged body-butchering sequence.

But despite all these global references, Love Sex aur Dhokha is absolutely original in its content and can’t be remotely inspired by any of these recently released titles. The referential analogy is just to corroborate how director Dibakar Bannerjee’s intellect is in sync with the best works around the world. While the prose of his story is splendid, the grammar of his storytelling is superlative that adds to the beauty of the film.

The narrative opens in three different subplots. The first has a final year college student Rahul (Anshuman Jha) gearing up for his diploma film which ends up being a shady spoof on DDLJ. Through the filming process he falls in love with the heroine of his film (Shruti) with whom he elopes and gets married. The second has a tech-savvy store manager Adarsh (Raj Kumar Yadav) attempting to woo the store salesgirl Rashmi (Neha Chauhan) to secretly film her in a sexual act on the store security camera. The third has a journalist Prabhat (Amit Sial) who rescues a girl Mrignaina (Arya Devdutta) from her suicide attempt and subsequently prepares her for a sting operation against the country’s top pop star Loki Local (Herry Tangri).

The first story starts on a comical note with a satirical shade and just when you think the entire episode is frivolous, it ends with a bang and hits so hard on your senses that you might not want to gulp down anything in the interval. The second story is almost a predecessor to the MMS episode that Anurag Kashyup filmed on Kalki Koechlin in Dev.D . It details the entire modus operandi and motivation behind the making of the sex clip. The third highlights the regular casting couch syndrome in glamour world along with the equally unethical sting operations devised by the manipulative media channels. Each episode in Urmi Juvekar’s story is derived from sensational headlines of national dailies and is well-sketched. But you admire the real beauty when you notice the correlation of each subplot with the other. The screenplay by Dibakar Bannerjee and Kanu Behl is designed like a game of jigsaw puzzle where your excitement rises the more you get close to assembling the interlocking pieces as the final picture becomes clearer at every step.

As mentioned earlier, the entire runtime of the film happens to be video footage shot on handheld camera by one or the other member of the cast. This happens to be its major highlight since unlike Paranormal Activity or The Blair Witch Project ; Love Sex aur Dhokha is not a single-setting film but has three subplots. Nevertheless the director justifies the use of camera in each episode and not once does it appear that the video footage is forced to take the story forward. This fact also amazes as to how a video camera is no more a sophisticated gadget and has become a common element and an integral part of everyday life in present-day society.

Dibakar Bannerjee shows his versatility as a director with his diverse choice of subjects but one aspect that he retains from his earlier attempts is the trademark Delhi flavour that comes across in the dialogues, characters and setting of the film. Cinematographer Nikos Andritsakis maintains the callowness with his unstable camera moments to add authenticity to the handheld camcorder sequences. Namrata Rao efficiently edits the cross-connections in the stories to amazing outcome. Sneha Khanwilkar’s music is as unconventional as the film with a rollicking title track by Kailash Kher.

The entirely new cast acts as an added advantage to the narrative of the film because with their relatively unknown faces you don’t tend to recognize their presence at first glimpse in subplots where they aren’t the focus. The performance from every member of the cast is absolutely brilliant. Anshuman Jha is unassumingly hilarious. Raj Kumar Yadav is expressive, especially when he brings out his jealousy pangs on seeing his girl getting friendly with another guy. Neha Chauhan is amazing in her breakdown sequence and the director uses her raw sex-appeal to good effect. Amil Sial (last seen in Hope and a Little Sugar) efficiently plays the straight-faced journalist. Arya Devdutta perfectly exemplifies a wannabe starlet and Herry Tangri plays a pop icon pretty well. The actor who plays father in the first story and the girl who plays Rashmi’s colleague in the second story deserve special mention for doing absolute justice to their typical characterizations.

Love Sex aur Dhokha shouldn’t be restricted with tags like experimental, offbeat, path-breaking, low-budget or multiplex cinema. While it happens to be all of these, it goes beyond with its smart story and superlative storytelling to be a brilliant and entertaining film. This autobiographical account of a camera is absolutely recommended!

Lahore Release Date : 19,Mar 2010

Producer Vivek Khatkar, J.S. Rana
Director Sanjay Puran Singh Chauhan
Music M M Kreem
Writer Sanjay Puran Singh Chauhan
Lyrics Junaid Wasi
Release Date 19-Mar-2010

Scowl, jowl. Ministers of every hue-hoo, from this and that side of the border, are casting those creepy-crawly looks straight from the Bollywood text books. Inference: these politicos just don’t want to sort out the Indo-Pak imbroglio. Oh oh, no no.

Okay, so Sanjay Puran Singh Chauhan’s Lahore seeks a state of pacifism, employing sport – kickboxing if you please – as a means for narrating a plot that has been bludgeoned to death. Alas khallas really. There you go again then: A man seeks vendetta for the death of his brother – this time in the boxing ring. Ping. Now, the Dharmendra-Sunny-Bobby Deol movie Apne wasn’t exactly like that, but hmmm, Sunnyji did step into the ring to avenge foul play on bro Bobby. Slight similarities, you guess, are purely coincidental.

To Chauhan’s credit, the muted colour palette, the eye-filling locations and a nail-biting climax are marvellous. The rest of the movie frequently verges on the absolutely exaggerated if not implausible. The characterisations are caricatured, and the montage songs are slower than a bullock-cart on three wheels. Oh well.

Over then to the brothers, one a kickboxer (Sushant Singh, competent as always) and the other a sixer-hitting cricketer (Aanaahad). Kick bhai is knocked out in the ring by a Pakistani opponent, and breathes his last on the spot. He is survived by Mom Nafisa Ali (okay types, but can’t really reprise Waheeda Rehman’s act in Rang De Basanti), a madly devoted fiancee (crying, crying, crying in close-up), and of course IPL Bro. Yo?

Meanwhile, a garrulous Hyderbadi-accented coach (Farouque Shaikh, first-rate) looks sad, a red-eyed minister strikes those meanie-beanie looks, and hello, Saurabh Shukla and the late Nirmal Pandey merely hang around the margins. Curiously, Pandey has no role at all except to dart uber angry looks at the camera. Whatever, the result doesn’t serve the actor’s memory well.

Next: A Pakistani, dupatta-enveloped girl (Glycerine Bano) apologises to the cricketer-turned-kickboxer now, and says, that the people in her country are not all bad. Huh, quite a tricky line of dialogue that. Anyway to cut a short story shorter, Cricket Bhai is in Lahore, heading the Indian Kickboxing team, and must of course beat the daylights of his brother’s `killer’ (Mukesh Rishi looking far too senior for the role). Throw a couple of fist-and-leg combatants in the ring, and you’re bound to muster up sufficient tension and throb. Gratifyingly, Chauhan handles the denouement with far more chutzpah than the rest of the dramaturgy which keeps bristling like a porcupine with cliches.

Technically, the film’s look is grittily styled (except for some unnecessary, cheesy special effects), and the sound design’s crisp. The editing and the music score are serviceable.

On the acting front, Aanaahad is singularly expert at the action stuff, but when it comes to emoting, he places your teeth at edge. Particularly weak at dialogue delivery, he fractures practical every line assigned to him. Shraddha Das and Shraddha Nigam don’t exactly reassure your shraddha in new faces. A pity.

In sum, this Indo-Pak treatise may have been wah-wahed at film festivals (carry a magnifying glass to read the names of the festivals on the posters please), but all said and seen just about makes it to a notch above the average.