What a kahaani mein twist! Four years they were seeing each other, no one bothered to see them on screen. Now that they have split off screen, they have united to create a little bit of magic on it.

Jab We Met is not only Kareena-Shahid’s best film together, it also marks Kareena’s and Shahid’s best performances individually. More than anyone else it is thanks to Imtiaz Ali the writer and Imtiaz Ali the director. He not only scripts a refreshing take on two strangers falling in love, he also completely deconstructs his lead pair’s mannerisms to make them behave like endearing newcomers.

In the most bizarre of opening sequences, young businessman Aditya Kashyap (Shahid) walks out of an important board meeting, drives down to his ex flame’s marriage and then zombies around the streets of Mumbai till he certainly discovers a train waiting at a station. He boards it moments before the typhoon hits the train — Geet (Kareena), the Sikhni from Bhatinda, who talks even in her sleep and proudly announces “main apni favourite hoon”.

What follows is the breeziest first half since Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (the analogy lies in the atmosphere both the films manage to create) replete with some of the smartest rom com lines written in a long time. “Aap convinced ho gaye, ki main aur bolun?” Geet asks the ticket checker after a five-minute talkathon. In fact, Kareena is so good in those first 70-odd minutes that you may tend to overlook Shahid who underplays his Aditya to perfection.

It is in the second half that the problems start. Not only for Geet and Aditya but also for the movie. It almost comes to a screeching halt and only then do you realise the power of the Shahid-Kareena chemistry. You start missing their chatar-patar and the two back-to-back songs don’t help matters. When they get back together with roles reversed — circumstances have made her a dead girl walking and he’s the biggest chatterbox around — it’s just not the same again.

But yet you go with the flow because Geet and Aditya are too loveable to be left beech sadak pe. The big fat Punjabi family — in true Yash Chopra style, complete with Dara Singh — welcomes them with open arms and so do we. The ending is predictable but then Jab We Met could have ended only one way. Anything else and ‘Sim’ would have really ‘ran’ away from Raj.

Jab We Met is indeed the perfect silsila for Shahid and Kareena. Both are brilliant even though it is Bebo who gets more scope to be the showstealer. And she is such a breath of fresh air, it’s almost like you have never seen her before. Shahid does the support job effectively, not once trying to steal the thunder.

There’s hardly anyone else worth mentioning even though Pawan Malhotra is hilarious as Kareena’s uncle who blasts Shahid. Tarun Arora as the man in the middle is fittingly bland.

For Jab We Met to work the music had to be good and Pritam doesn’t falter with Yeh ishq hai and Tumse hi being the highlights. Cameraman Nataraja Subramanian (Parineeta, Eklavya) shoots the winters of Manali as crisp as the summers of Bhatinda.

It doesn’t matter whom Kareena is romancing in real life, yeh picture bahut changi hai badshaon. Koi doubt mat rakhna dil mein.

Pratim D. Gupta

More smoke than fire

In No Smoking, writer-director Anurag Kashyap uses smoking as a metaphor for all addiction, rooted in man’s ego. John Abraham is K — just K. He can be separated from anyone, but to separate him from his cigarettes is impossible. Smoking for him is a form of self-expression, in all his stubborn, chauvinistic glory. Nobody, he declares, tells him what to do, least of all to quit smoking.

Yet he is afraid. He is afraid of how far he will go for his next smoke. This is a question he has to confront when his wife Anjali (Ayesha Takia) threatens to walks out of his life unless he quits. Though he has treated her with arrogant disrespect thus far, he decides to go to a miracle rehabilitation centre that everyone suddenly seems to be taking about.

From the moment K finds his way into Kalkatta Karpets, the front for the centre deep inside the Mumbai slum, there is no escape. He is plunged headlong into a dark world in which Baba Bangali Sealdah wale, played by Paresh Rawal, is a maniacal guru who will go to any — and we mean any — lengths to force K, and the troubled souls like him, to quit the soul-sapping cancer stick.

To say more would be to give away too much, and it would also be to venture into very uncertain territory. Kashyap blurs the lines between reality and nightmare, so K is not really sure of what is happening to him, or how. He is trapped, moving inevitably from one disaster to another, on the verge of losing everything.

The problem with the film is that K’s unanswered questions remain the audience’s unanswered questions. Why is this bizarre Hitler-loving Baba doing this? How is he gaining control of those who matter most to K? Is he a con artist or something far more sinister? And this is where Kashyap’s ambitious attempt at elevating the psychological/supernatural thriller to the realm of those truly surreal celluloid mindbenders fails by not going far enough. By following a relatively straightforward narrative flow which definitely has a clear plot, he makes the viewer expect an explanation. Instead, the screenplay, loosely based on Stephen King’s Quitters Inc, loses its way and you get the feeling that Kashyap didn’t quite know how to wrap it up after a promising start.

However, none of this takes away from its technical excellence. Kashyap’s use of actors is impeccable. His weak link is the very beautiful John, but not for one moment do you feel it. The treatment, editing and soundtrack (he even works in Sinatra!) are rich, quirky, and engaging. It is for this, more than anything else, that No Smoking is worth a watch.

Madhumita Bhattacharyya

Piece of garbage

So what do you think of the Second Amendment now? This is one of many thought-provoking questions asked, between barrages of gunfire, in the course of Shoot ’Em Up. I won’t answer the question here — I get enough angry e-mail, thanks — but I’m happy to affirm my general devotion to the whole Bill of Rights, in particular the First Amendment, which protects Michael Davis’s right to make this movie, New Line Cinema’s right to market it and, best of all, my right to tell you what a worthless piece of garbage it is. (I interrupt this burst of patriotism to note that Shoot ’Em Up was filmed in Toronto.)

First, let’s sample a bit more wisdom from the mouth of the movie’s hero, Smith, a righteous gunman played, with his usual charismatic glower, by Clive Owen. The person who profits, he advises, apropos of unraveling a nefarious conspiracy involving a United States senator, a firearms manufacturer, a lot of diapers and Paul Giamatti, is always the bad guy. Which leaves me off the hook, since not only did I not profit from Shoot ’Em Up, but I also lost 93 minutes I will never see again.

What I did see was Owen doing, as he did in the incalculably superior Children of Men, his utmost to protect a baby. Awwww. Sitting on a bench one evening, minding his business, Smith witnesses bad guys pursuing a pregnant woman. After a pause during which the person sitting next to me at the preview screening loudly beseeched Smith to help her, he did just that, dispatching a warehouse full of thugs and delivering a healthy infant.

The mother, sadly, took a bullet in the head, but her baby — it’s a boy, by the way — turned out to be pretty resilient. Wouldn’t you be if you had Monica Bellucci for a wet nurse?

Bellucci plays Donna Quintano, a lactating prostitute. That is not a sentence I thought I’d ever write, but I’m sure Ms. Bellucci feels the same way about some of her lines, like, “Does this give you any new ideas about who wants Oliver’s bone marrow?” Excellent question!

Oliver is the baby, by the way, and his bone marrow is needed to further the cause of gun control. Or to thwart the cause of gun control. In New Line’s press notes, Davis is quoted as saying that, in conceiving Shoot ’Em Up, “the hard part was to figure out the mystery and rationale as to why the bad guys want the baby”.

That task is no easier now that the movie has been made, though “made” (to say nothing of “movie”) is perhaps too generous a word for this slapdash assembly of hectic, poorly shot action sequences, lame catchphrases (tell me Owen didn’t say, “What’s up, Doc?”), sadistic gags and heavy-metal tunes. The body count is astronomical as Owen shoots ’em up while rappelling down a stairwell, driving a BMW and feigning intercourse with Bellucci. (Not all at once, by the way. Now that would be cool.) Also, he drives a carrot through the back of one man’s head and uses another one to put out an eye. Which is funny because, you know, carrots are supposed to improve your eyesight.

That’s about the level of wit to which Shoot ’Em Up aspires. Smith, described by Donna as “the angriest man in the world”, is full of large and small complaints, usually prefaced by “You know what I hate?” Again with the questions! He hates aggressive drivers and so forces one off the road. He hates the corporal punishment of children and so gives a guilty mom a spanking. He even hates guns, which is why he shoots down scores of bit players.

You know what I hate? Witless, soulless, heartless movies that mistake noise for bravura and tastelessness for wit. I’d never call myself the angriest man in the world, but after sitting through Shoot ’Em Up, I felt some sympathy for poor Smith.

A.. Scott (The New York Times)