:::: Time Out Mumbai - city guide and fortnightly listing magazine ::::

Time Out Mumbai casts an eye on the performances of a selection of Hindie movies that have been released since we first hit the stands. We rate them for their independence of spirit and their technical accomplishment.

A television director gets close-circuit cameras installed at a wedding and sits back to watch the fun. Ishaan Trivedi’s debut makes welcome digs at reality television, but we’re never quite sure if it’s farce or satire.

Neeraj Pathak’s low-budget thriller, in which suspected terrorist Naseeruddin Shah gives police commissioner Anupam Kher the runaround, earned both money and awards. Yet, the movie is closer in spirit to a 1980s vigilante movie than to an indie.

A Muslim terrorist holds an upper-class fellow Muslim hostage and tries to force him to commit acts of destruction. A copy of the Filipino hit Cavite, Amir reinforces stereotypes about Muslim neighbourhoods. Nice camerawork, though.

Copying stories from foreign films isn’t the preserve of mainstream Bollywood. Onir should get no marks for ripping off Pedro Almodovar’s Live Flesh. But he gets one for suggesting love is a minefield rather than a bed of roses.

Homi Adajania’s English-language debut got more viewers after it was dubbed into Hindi. There was a fair deal of pre-release buzz surrounding Saif Ali Khan’s role as a Parsi sculptor who sinks his hands into a murder mystery, underlining why indie films need good marketing.

Sagar Ballary’s copy of French comedy Le Diner de Cons, made Vinay Pathak’s reputation as a comic actor par excellence. That said, the movie has the production values of a TV serial.

Hindie rating: _****

Based on journalist S Hussain Zaidi’s book of the same name, Black Friday’s complicated screenplay recounts the conspiracy behind the 1993 Mumbai bomb blasts. Anurag Kashyap’s movie packed with memorable characters is suitably gritty, with superb production design and camerawork.

Inspired by the Japanese horror genre, Marlon Rodrigues’s CU@9 is the kind of movie that gives Hindie cinema a bad name. The only thing that can be said in favour of this disaster is that if such an incoherent movie could get funding, every aspiring filmmaker should live in hope.

Kanika Verma’s Dansh uses Chilean playwright Ariel Dorfman’s Death and the Maiden, about torture, justice and forgiveness, to explore militancy and ceasefire efforts in Mizoram. However, Kay Kay Menon, Aditya Srivastav and Sonali Kulkarni aren’t connecting in their attempt to play Mizo characters..

Vinay Pathak’s character has three months to live and a list of 10 tasks to fulfil before he breathes his last. Director Shashant Shah doesn’t display much imagination in exploring a story that could have made for an insightful drama about rage against the dying of the light. Besides, Pathak is uncharacteristically off-colour.

Manish Tiwari’s debut explores the friendship between a wealthy slacker and a middle-class candidate for council president at a Delhi college. The interesting premise is shot to bits by bad writing and indifferent acting.

Anil Senior, if that is indeed his name, stays extremely faithful to Husbands and Wives, Woody Allen’s brilliant comic treatise on infidelity. Just watch the original.

Ek Chalis ki Last Local

Sanjay Khanduri’s debut is hugely derivative of the cinema of indie hero Quentin Tarantino – scenes are lifted from Tarantino’s films – but it’s so madcap that it’s difficult to dislike. Abhay Deol and Neha Dhupia miss the last local train and kill time by hanging out with the creatures of the Mumbai night, including gangsters, cops and eunuchs.

Gandhi My Father

Feroze Abbas Khan balances realism and melodrama in this fictionalised retelling of Mohandas Gandhi’s troubled relationship with his alcoholic son. This semi-Hindie was funded by Bollywood actor Anil Kapoor.

Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi

Hindie rating: _*****

Sudhir Mishra finished his career-best film in 2003, but it took two years to reach the cinemas. Hazaaron tracks the emotional and ideological progress of a woman and the two men who are in love with her. Chitrangda Singh made her debut in this, giving the Hindie world its much-needed sex symbol. Dibakar Banerjee chose Hazaaron as his Hindie pick. “It really shook me,” he said. “I hadn’t seen such a politically conscious film in India in a long time.”

Sriram Raghavan reinvents the mainstream heist-gone-wrong genre with some oddball casting and firecracker action. Rohan Sippy picked Johnny Gaddaar over other Hindie films. “It was great to see Bombay noir,” Sippy said. “The story had interesting characters and a great twist.”

Ruchi Narain sets out to critique the hypocritical and corrupt ways of the business elite, but Kal is a bit of a narrative mess. This is the film in which Hindie pin-up Chitrangda Singh showed the world that her acting skills were been a little overrated.

Hindie rating: _****

Sabiha Sumar’s drama uses its 1970s setting in Pakistan to explore that country’s experience with the Partition. Kirron Kher is outstanding as the widow who is forced to confront her past when her son becomes a fundamentalist.

Khosla ka Ghosla

Hindie rating: _****

Everybody’s favourite Hindie pick, written by Jaideep Sahni and directed by Dibakar Banerjee, is a throwback to the good-natured 1980s comedies by Sai Paranjpye and Hrishikesh Mukherjee. The Khosla family loses its plot of land to a nasty builder and decides to pay him back in his own coin. The secret of the movie’s success is its please-all character.

Khoya Khoya Chand

Sudhir Mishra’s period film about 1950s Hindi cinema wants to be the Hindie riposte to Farah Khan’s 1970s nostalgia trip, Om Shanti Om. This film wears its ambition on its puffed blouse sleeves, but the comings and goings of actor Nikhat (Soha Ali Khan) and her lover, director Zafar (Shiney Ahuja), are unmoving.

This ensemble film by Ankur Tewari and Siddharth Anand, made for Rs1 crore, has four plots unfolding around a party in a Delhi farmhouse. The movie is slick and believable, but the acting often gets amateurish.

Life in a…Metro

Life in a...Metro gave arthouse actor Irrfan Khan’s career a welcome boost, but it also gave a leg up to Pritam, the copycat king of Hindi movie soundtracks. Director Anurag Basu steals one of five stories interlinking nine characters from Billy Wilder’s The Apartment. How independent-minded is that?

Loins of Punjab Presents

Hindie rating: _****

We made an exception by including this English film. A bunch of contestants repair to a hotel in New Jersey and match vocal chords over a weekend to compete for the “Desi Idol” prize. This is Johnny Gaddaar director Sriram Raghavan’s Hindie pick. “I loved the whacky sense of humour,” he said. “It’s also marketed superbly. I still haven’t seen a single pirated DVD.”

Maine Gandhi Ko Nahin Maara

Critics loved Jahnu Barua’s allegory about the sickness that has afflicted the post-Gandhian world, but audiences remained indifferent. Barua explores his concerns through a retired professor who believes that he has killed Mohandas Gandhi.

Manorama Six Feet Under

Navdeep Singh relocates Roman Polanski’s Chinatown to a Rajasthan town. Abhay Deol plays a government official who stumbles into a viper pit of corruption. Singh sets the mood beautifully, but flounders when it comes to the climax.

Manish Jha imagines a village in which female infanticide has wiped away almost all traces of women. Only one young woman is left. She marries a family of five brothers, Draupadi style, and gets set upon by all her husbands, then her father-in-law and the village. Powerful but also exploitative.

Vinay Subramanium and Mridul Toolsidas made Missed Call on a tiny budget in 12 days. It’s a remarkable effort despite containing almost every cliché associated with first films – youthful rage against the system, contempt for Bollywood, a cerebral girlfriend who turns out to be a harridan, joints.

Rajat Kapoor’s stylish and assured gangster comedy, in which an underworld don is killed and replaced by his lookalike, is too busy having fun to ever get serious. The movie glides on a simply superb performance by Ranvir Shorey.

Rajat Kapoor tackles the delicate subject of partner swapping and takes a leaf out of Roald Dahl’s short story The Great Switcheroo. If the movie’s budget was low, it certainly doesn’t show in the camerawork or production design.

Mumbai Meri Jaan

Nishikant Kamat transplanted Paul Haggis’s Crash quite smoothly to Mumbai. He picks up five stories around the 2006 train blasts to examine the direction in which Mumbai is headed. The best story belongs to Kay Kay Menon, who plays a Hindu fundamentalist thirsting for vengeance.

My Brother Nikhil

Onir’s debut feature is the portrait of a family which loses its gay son to the HIV virus. Sanjay Suri, Juhi Chawla and Purab Kohli are entirely credible, and Onir tells

his unusual story with sensitivity and dignity.

Hindie rating: _****

Anurag Kashyap addresses his angst with mainstream Bollywood through the dystopian tale of a smoker (John Abraham) who tries to kick the butt and gets kicked around instead. No Smoking is the Hindie pick of Jabeen Merchant, editor of Manorama Six Feet Under.

“Oye Lucky is much more successful as a piece of cinema,” Merchant said. “Made in a very masterly fashion, good looking, clever, funny. No Smoking intended to do all those things and didn’t quite succeed. But I still thoroughly enjoyed it and the reason was its extreme independent-minded nature. I came out of the theatre and thought, ‘Wow. This guy managed to convince a producer not only to fund this sort of film, but give it a commercial release!’”

Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye!

Hindie rating: _*****

Dibakar Banerjee’s follow-up to Khosla ka Ghosla is a character study of a slick thief in Delhi. The movie impresses on several counts, including performances, production design and camerawork. Oye Lucky! is Manorama director Navdeep Singh’s pick of the best Hindie movie of the last few years. “Oye Lucky! has politics, it has a point of view,” Singh said. “ It is also entertaining enough.”

Pyaar Ke Side Effects

Saket Chaudhary’s battle-of-the-sexes yarn offers water-cooler observations on marriage, relationships and parenting. This Pritish Nandy Communications production is one of the few movies in recent times to have successfully incorporated the farcical quality of itcom into film writing.

Santosh Sivan is a mini-industry by himself. Every year, he writes, shoots and directs movies about whatever catches his fancy. Tahaan is an allegory about an eight year-old Kashmiri boy’s quest to retrieve his missing donkey.

Welcome to Sajjanpur

Hindi cinema moved out of the villages a few years ago. Hindie cinema flourishes in the cities. It was left to veteran arthouse filmmaker Shyam Benegal to find a middle path in 2008. Welcome to Sajjanpur is a rural comedy about a college dropout who makes his living writing letters on behalf of his unlettered neighbours.

Through the professional and emotional misadventures of a television writer, television producer Vinta Nanda attempts to expose the big price paid to work for the small screen. Koel Purie and Rahul Bose confront each other’s vulnerabilities with painful honesty.