Aye Circuit yeh apun ke jaisa chemical locha sab ka kyon ho raha hai re?” “Tum superhit ho na bhai aur tumhara mind bhi kitna beautiful hai.” “Lekin veeru sab to mamu nahin bana sakta hai re.”

Nanhe Jaisalmer is a one-line idea stretched too far. And that too a confused idea. The film opens with a line which goes something like if you dream, you can achieve, blah blah. No high philosophy here, not even an old Clingon proverb, just director Samir Karnik’s jaded quote. And he nails the film with another one — “Imaginations have powers you cannot imagine”. Amidst Karnik’s dreams and imaginations, khali peeli do ghanta fizool mein beet gaya.

Nanhe (Dwij) is a 10-year-old tourist guide in Jaisalmer who is obsessed with Bobby Deol because the star had singled him out and taken him into his arms on one of his Rajasthan shooting schedules. Nanhe was four years old then. Bobby is his Dost and the hundreds of photos and posters plastering his room bear testimony to that. Now, despite Nanhe speaking four foreign (‘touristy’) languages, he is illiterate, chews gutkha and does a lot of things he shouldn’t. These two strands are strung together when Bobby visits Jaisalmer to shoot again. Or does he?

Samir, who made the Vivek-Ash romance romp Kyun! Ho Gaya Na… and almost wasn’t allowed to make another film, doesn’t do himself any good with Nanhe Jaisalmer. He must have planned the film with some big star in mind because it is just not digestible that someone can go so lattu over Bobby Deol. As the actor himself says in the film “hit flops yeh sab hamare soch hai”. Zaroor, but zaroori soch hai.

The only thing that makes the film watchable is debutant Dwij’s high-energy performance. Yes, he too like all Bollywood child actors has that know-it-all attitude but thankfully that works for this film. And Bobby? Well, he tries to be himself which too turns out to be a huge ask.

The two real stars of the film are cinematographer Binod Pradhan and background music director Monty who make and sound Rajasthan as good as ever. But then Himesh Reshammiya comes with three of his nosy tunes to spoil the party.

It’s a two thumbs down for Nanhe Jaisalmer. Maybe Mr Karnik should buy a DVD of another film shot in Jaisalmer by a certain Mr Satyajit Ray and learn how to make a film for the adult in a child and the child in an adult. Khamaghani!

PRATIM D. GUPTA

Remaking his own make

It is perhaps only in mainstream Hindi cinema that the same director can copy almost each and every element of a previous film of his and try and pass it off in his new venture, albeit unsuccessfully. Five minutes into Aggar and the viewer can’t do anything but assume that he is watching a remake of Aksar, director Ananth Mahadevan’s 2006 attempt at a whodunnit. Barring the end, almost every frame, every situation and every dialogue of Aggar seems to have been unabashedly lifted from the Emraan Hashmi-Dino Morea starrer. Udita Goswami acts as the common link between the two films, playing the wronged woman yet again.

But even if Aggar had not been a copy of any film, it represents a poor attempt at film-making. The theme of obsession in love, superbly handled in Hollywood films like Fatal Attraction and even in Bollywood with Darr and Pyaar Tune Kya Kiya, is made a mess off in Aggar, with the film capturing neither the interest nor the attention of the audience. The two-and-a-half hours of this Tusshar Kapoor starrer is an exercise in futility and by the time the (predictable) twist in the story comes towards the end of the film, the viewer is simply not interested. The scenic Thailand locales also do not do much for Aggar. In a scene, there is even an attempt to pass off Pattaya’s infamous walking street as Mumbai!

Tusshar Kapoor puts in a below-average performance in Aggar. He is weak in the emotional scenes, distinctly uncomfortable playing the romantic and quite a disaster in the role of an obsessed lover. Udita Goswami, in a desperate attempt to do a Mallika Sherawat, shows ample skin all through the film. How we wish she would concentrate more on honing her acting skills instead. It is only Shreyas Talpade who manages to rise above the mediocre script of Aggar. As he oscillates between playing the good and the bad, we see flashes of the Iqbal brilliance, leading us to wonder what he is doing in a film like this. While Ananth Mahadevan delivers yet another dud after Victoria No. 203, music composer Mithoon who came up with a winning score in The Train clearly disappoints in Aggar.

With Heyy Babyy, Darling and Dhamaal still going strong, Aggar can only hope that the extra ‘g’ in its title works miracles to stretch its run at the box office.

PRIYANKA ROY

Juvenille junk

It was an education to see Date Movie with two dozen or so adolescent New York students and their teachers. Here are some things that members of Hollywood’s favourite demographic find hysterically funny — fat women, old people, enormous buttocks, homosexuality, amorous cats having a go at dead bodies and flatulent cats with diarrhoea. The source of the laughter appears to be a delighted revulsion.

Aaron Seltzer and Jason Friedberg, who wrote the screenplay, have crammed dozens of movie parodies into this deliberately juvenile spoof of romantic comedies. Seltzer, who directed, has made very few of them funny. The fake orgasm scene, for instance, borrowed from When Harry Met Sally and given to the male lead in this case, is just peculiar.

The likable Alyson Hannigan, who surely has better things to do, plays an obese young woman working in her multicultural family’s Greek diner. She undergoes an extreme beauty makeover at an auto body shop, meets the young blond Englishman of her dreams, Adam Campbell, and then must deal with competition and both sets of parents.

The film has a nascent sense of the absurd but doesn’t know what to do with it. And some of the references are to films (Pretty Woman, Sleepless in Seattle) made when the target audience was in diapers. Or in utero.

ANITA GATES (THE NEW YORK TIMES)

Melodramatic manipulation

Since it was shown at the Toronto International Film Festival last month, The Death of a President, a formally clever fakeumentary directed by Gabriel Range, has attracted some fairly predictable controversy. Since the president in question is George W. Bush and the death is the result of an assassination, the film has become a lightning rod for the usual forms of self-righteousness that often masquerade as political discussion. On one side, howls of “How dare you?” and on the other, ringing endorsements of free expression and artistic courage.

But The Death of a President doesn’t really deserve either response, even though its makers and distributors will no doubt be happy to exploit the brouhaha. The best that can be said about Range’s opportunistic little picture is that, at least in its first half, it faithfully recreates the tone and rhythm of a second-rate American television programme.

For a while, this is actually pretty rivetting. The film pretends to be a look back at the events of October 19, 2007, when Bush was shot and killed after delivering a speech in Chicago. After-the-fact interviews with witnesses and participants — a Secret Service agent, a presidential aide, various members of the F.B.I. and the Chicago Police Department (all actors, of course) — alternate with hand-held video, security-camera feeds and mock news clips to recreate the chaos of the event. Snippets of an actual speech Bush gave to the Economic Club of Chicago are used, and later on Ronald Reagan’s funeral is used as a stand-in for Bush’s.

In a few places Range’s ingenuity exceeds his skill, but he does sometimes achieve a hectic, nerve-racking realism. The president’s motorcade makes its way through an angry throng of protesters, some of whom scuffle with police and one of whom, a radical anarchist, will later become a suspect. Then, after the fatal shots are fired, consequences start to unfold: a frenzied investigation leading to an arrest, a new version of the Patriot Act, rumbles of war-talk if a foreign government turns out to be involved.

The real phoniness of Death of a President lies not in its counterfeiting of reality — the procedural details have a certain plausibility — but in its facile, melodramatic manipulation of current political anxieties. The extent to which its flat, documentary style is a manipulation becomes clear as its plot starts to follow the contours of a Law & Order episode. Some will find profundity in the film’s reversals and revelations, but its provocations are not particularly insightful or original.

The Death of a President is, in the end, neither terribly outrageous nor especially heroic; it’s a thought experiment that traffics in received ideas.

A.O. Scott (The New York Times)