Bizarre gags

Meet the fockers

Director: Jay Roach
Cast: Ben Stiller, Robert De Niro, Dustin Hoffman, Barbra Streisand, Blythe Danner, Teri Polo, Owen Wilson

5/10

Jay Roach of Austin Powers is no neophyte to the risque extremes of bodily humour. That won?t surprise you in The Fockers. What would though, is an absurdly classic that has Dustin Hoffman and Barbra Streisand playing the Focker parents ? Jewish liberated hippie types (a very wired ?stay-at-home-husband? and a ?sex therapist for senior citizens?, respectively) hosting this unlikely meet-cute between Gaia and the CIA at Focker Isle.

The layout of bizarre gags remains almost exactly identical to the prequel, only with the details revamped. The focal point of the Focker household, in counterpoint to Robert?s own gizmo-packed surveillance coop, is Barbra?s cosy study brimming over with good-natured erotica. Ben plays the usual crucified sufferer, babysitting not the housecat, but a very precocious toddler with a boob fetish and a fixation on ?poop?. The dinner table mishap has Ben?s well-preserved baby foreskin plopping into a pot of fondue. The weird pet is a tiny mutt that ?humps anything that moves?. A sultry Mexican ex-housekeeper threatens the integrity of the about-to-be-wed couple. And in one of the oddest moments, Ben is made to tentatively feel up Robert?s ?life-like? latex prosthetic boob ?made from an exact cast of? his daughter?s left breast used to feed the baby.

Paramita Brahmachari

Well-crafted sinful thriller

Zeher

Director: Mohit Suri
Cast: Emraan Hashmi, Udita Goswami, Shamita Shetty

5.5/10

They first meet on a dark night. He is a cop (Emraan Hashmi). She is a housewife in distress (Udita Goswami). He finds her sitting alone on a roadside bench: her face hidden behind her hands and her cleavage a yawning V. He drops her home.

Then one night, she calls him over. She is alone and his wife (Shamita Shetty) has just left him for a career. So when she drops her skimpy silk dress on the floor and looks imploringly, it is the kind of offer he cannot refuse.

But hold it! If you are beginning to think, Zeher is just another adulterous skin flick that infests Bollywood these days, you might miss out on a well-crafted thriller where, be it romping in bed or playing the dead, women are always on top. That is, if you ignore its obvious similarities to Denzel Washington?s Out of Time.

Shot in Goa, the film looks good. And it sounds better with a couple of great compositions by Roop Kumar Rathod, notably Ai bekhabar. Only, its cast is box-office poison.

Udita looks good. Most bare-backs do. But she ain?t like Mallika, who can lure the crowds. Nor is the trying-hard Shamita who looks tailormade for the saas-bahu serials.

You might yet like Zeher. Sometimes, there?s a pleasure in being poisoned.

Avijit Ghosh

Who shot what?

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

Director: Kerry Conran
Cast: Gwyneth Paltrow, Jude Law, Giovanni Ribisi, Michael Gambon, Laurence Olivier (digitised image), Angelina Jolie

3/10

There is much ado about a humble camera in a film that?s got nothing to do with camerawork and is entirely a digitised creation. Director Kerry Conran didn?t have to run through sea and space to shoot his film, Sky Captain And the World Of Tomorrow. Instead, he hands the camera to Gwyneth Paltrow, a reporter, to capture the effects of his tinkering with computer graphics.

All those robots swooping down on the city of New York, all those tentacled monsters, all seen so often in so many films, are a big yawn, actually. Not for Gwyneth, a reporter, clinging on to her camera, which has exactly two shots left, and the Sky Captain, Jude Law, with whom she has old scores to sort out.

While the scores to be sorted out are as vague and uninteresting as the save-the-universe or find-the-missing-scientists or discover-whatever mission they seem to be on, the shots to be shot do raise a flicker of interest and laugh. Because after all the hoo-ha over the camera by Gwyneth, none of the under-the-sea or somewhere-in-space scenes finally get shot.

One shot she clicks by mistake, as we think Kerry did most of the film, and the other she clicks with the lens cap on, which we wish Kerry too could have done.

Deepali Singh

Takes more to tango

Tango Charlie

Director: Mani Shankar
Cast: Ajay Devgan, Bobby Deol, Tanishaa, Nandana Sen, Kelly Dorji, (Sunjay Dutt, Suniel Shetty)

3.5/10

These guys keep whirring around in their helicopter like it was gifted to them by Vijay Mallya, at least the fuel, and try so damn hard to look useful that their attempted one-liners can?t bring out the laugh lines on their own faces. Sunjay and Suniel, as ?special appearance? sutradhars, only manage to lift a dying Bobby buried in snow and Suniel reads out his diary to Sunjay to tell the tale of Tango Charlie. Both Sunjay and Suniel save Bobby?s life in the end, after being ill-mannered enough to read through his entire diary in mid-air, but can?t act to save their own lives, in what must be the best known unpaid-for roles they ever did.

Director Mani Shankar, who?s done the formidable 16 December and the forgettable Rudraksh before Tango Charlie, attempts an episodic tribute to the BSF, ?the largest and finest para-military force in the world?. It?s a brave attempt, and Shankar?s idea has a clear focus: India is under attack all over by terrorists, and the uniformed guys, who are also humans beneath the uniform, do so much, sacrifice so much, but get no recognition for all that except bullcrap and bullets. It?s a ?starry? docufeature in the end, but Shankar doesn?t stitch the narrative together well enough, despite the good guys, the bad guys, the romancing, the cheescake, even frontstall masala. Mani Shankar could well have been the third guy in the mechanical dragonfly of Sunjay and Suniel, who seem to have lost direction right in the beginning.

A major incongruity is that the same set of BSF guys are placed in different terrorist situations, from the Naxalite period (late 60s) to Kargil (1999). There?s hardly any help from a stereotyped Ajay ? the great ?reality? actor even has coloured hair during the Naxalite period! ? whose ?intense? deadpan and paan-teeth emoting are beginning to make him look like he?s competing with the one-expression wonder John Abraham. His counterpart, Bobby, has been showing remarkable versatility and convincing makeovers,on the other hand, but remains one of our underrated actors. As he probably will even in Tango Charlie.

Tanishaa, playing the hugely grinning and mildly bullying girl, shows impressive abandon, rather like sister Kajol, and should make it to the top in Punjabi Jat films. Nandana Sen, playing a Bengali zamindar?s daughter, speaks Hindi with a Bengali accent and Bengali with an American accent. But when it comes to wardrobe she is sincere to father Amartya Sen?s economic philosophy ? less is more, and helps show the cleavage between the poor and the rich.

Kelly Dorji, one more model debuting in this film, pulls off the menacing portrayal of a Bodo with conviction considering that he?s not known to do all that gory ear-cutting of Lara Dutta?s other alleged boyfriends.

Anil Grover