Movie Notes - Hate Story

With an intention to make short films and be a part of the serious hobby-followers who want to learn through watching more work, I have been watching movies for long. While I write movie reviews for planetbollywood.com, there are notes that I want to take on movies that I generally am not able to. Will try to put these notes here.

Over last 3 days I completed one of the controversial movies of this year – Hate Story.

A short review for it: A fast paced screenplay with a very clichéd story and pathetic acting from the female lead Paoli Dam on whom the whole movie rested is the show stopper for the movie. Marketing the movie as an erotic thriller in place of revenge drama was another mistake. I don’t think erotic thriller unless it’s planned and crafted with a strong eroticism value embedded in the story (e.g. Basic Instinct) , can work in Bollywood. Assembled Motley crowd as supporting cast is very good – whether it be Joy Sengupta as company CEO, his wife Irawati Harshe or Saurabh Dubey as a ruthless businessman and father, Mohan Kapoor as the minister – all are rightly casted. About the leading Men – Nikhil Dwivedi can’t act and Gulshan Devaiah is the one who makes the movie watchable.

Gulshan is one of the actors I would watch out for in future. Consider his filmography till now – That girl in Yellow boots (very well acted role of Chittiappa), Shaitan and hate story – Good in all of it. Next he will be seen in a movie called “Peddlers”. This movie is made by Vasan Bala. If anyone here had been following the website passionforcinema.com, he would know how the guy has grown. He had started as a blogger on PFC. Went on to win a short film contest (1min one) there, assisted Anurag Kashyap in all his movies after Dev D. And now here he is with his first film. I hope that the audiences watch more of these small budget , passionate movies and promote it.

Coming back to the topic of movie notes on Hate story, here are my notes – not arranged in any particular format. I would like to highlight, criticism is not as difficult a business as appreciation. Every movie is an effort of hundreds of people hence I strongly believe there will be something or other to learn out of it.

·         Background score of the movie was jarring. Long repetitive loops make the hamming of actors accentuated. Of course there were moments when the loops give you a feeling of time passing fast.

·         Dialogues of the movie were bad. But worse was the way they were delivered. Especially once Paoli Dam turns into a prostitute. Suddenly her voice turns husky. Suddenly she breathes like a Rhinoceros. In more than one ways there are dialogues to show the strength of women in the world, which very much defeats the original purpose and sounds pretty cheap and derogatory, just for the way they are delivered.

·         Film editing is something I really liked. No scene stays for longer period of time than expected. Outdoor scenes are processed differently giving mood to the film every time.

o   For e.g. here is a scene where they have shown a chase sequence in old delhi, and then a happy shopping spree and a board room. I felt that colors were adjusted well to suit each of the settings.

·         Cinematography in most of the films by Vikram Bhatt has been topnotch. Directors (though he hasn’t directed this) come in different flavor I think. He is a “Glossy-on-camera, weak-on-script” director for me. Cinematography here too is interesting. I could not the following things that were repeated as a motif within cinematography and I liked it.

o   Use of big large windows as source of light to light the scenes

 

o   Moving the camera 180 degrees in a over the head shots. It gives you a feeling of spinning your head. Must be quite effective in theatre and can really work well in thrillers which are made indoors.

 

 

o   Open air balcony shots, with traffic / houses going in the background at a distance.

o   Low light, shadow-heavy scenes with open mouths and wide eyes for love making

o   There are some neatly done backlit scenes as well. (one of it put above another one is with Joy Sengupta)

o   Frames are used at many places to give the idea of place. There are scenes at India Gate, at the lead characters houses and farmhouse that are used with frames in mind.

o   Shooting on moving cars and rain is also used multiple times

·         Writing especially the story and dialogues are the weakest part of this movie I believe. Every story needs to have a trigger, a logical reaction, a conflict and a resolution.

o   Conflict is the most important aspect of any story. Its conflict that keeps moving the story further. Here the idea was that Paoli Dam’s conflict of whether to meekly submit herself or take revenge was not strongly portrayed. This looks worse to me as the last one I saw was Soundtrack, which gives a very longish detailing of the push that a character generates to reach an action. Paoli’s character Kavya takes very extreme steps to take revenge and there isn’t enough justification of it.

o   The revenge keeps the story moving but the intensity of the revenge doesn’t look natural because of it. Nikhil Dwivedi’s character is badly underdeveloped. There is no point where you see his need in Kavya’s life and how he makes it better for her. The warmth in their relationship would have been a good comforter to take the story forward.

o   There are too many clichés in terms of events : e.g. Friend getting kidnapped for making the protagonist work, a Haryanvi Police officer, an unhappy wife who keeps sulking in front of her husband, a corrupt minister, a loser of a lover – who is just friends!  And so on.

o   About Eroticism – I don’t think foul language, nude body, husky voice and dusky skin are enough to create magic. There has to be stakes from both sides. There has to be this fine tension of boldness vs. vulnerability, natural instincts vs. socialized behavior that needs building up slowly.  For most of those scenes in Hatestory, there was not tension. You always knew what next. There was no doubt about whether she / he will or will not? I find Slice ads much more erotic than hatestory’s love making scene.

The director of the movie is Vivek Agnihotri. He surely has style (earlier films De dana dan Goal, Chocolate), given a good tight story, we might see Abbas Mastan follower here J. BTW he is married to one of my all time favorite actress – Pallavi Joshi.

Movies in line – Garam Hawa and I am Kalam and a couple of documentaries.

 

P.S. : Yes many of the things here might sound silly and please don’t hesitate to criticize that. Moreover because all I am looking at is basics, I might even have mentioned some very obvious observations as well. But I think this will help me look back and read my blogs and summarize whatever I saw in the film. Will try to focus on one particular aspect if I can in different movies. One that I find the most impressive.

 

Dangerous Ishq 3D - Movie review

http://planetbollywood.com/displayReview.php?id=f051212041612

Dangerous Ishq Review By Jaykumar Shah

Karisma Kapoor as Salma, Geeta or Sanjana gets news of death of her lover’s death / kidnap multiple times in the movie. Her dovey eyes turn red just too often, her voice cracks, she breaks down just as often. Every time she does this you don’t have dialogues but you hear loud Himesh vocals (as loud and as listenable as ever) in the background. You want to relate to the girl, you want to feel bad for the one who died or at least feel concerned. But you just cannot. Dangerous Ishq is a romantic thriller that spans across centuries to get the lovers connected but fails to connect to the one sitting on the other side of the screen. The movie marks the comeback of Karisma Kapoor, one of the most famous actress of the last decade who has earlier proved the mettle of her acting genes in films like Dil To Pagal Hai, Zubeida, Fiza andRaja Hindustani. So did she succeed in her lacklustre comeback film? Did Vikram Bhatt succeed in putting her comeback in a 3D success unlike Mimoh’s comeback in Vikram’s last film (Haunted)?

The movie is about a girl’s journey through various births to unite with her lover. Super model Sanjana’s (Karisma kapoor) boyfriend, Rohan (Rajneesh Duggal) gets kidnapped from his beach house. Sanjana is admitted to a hospital, and there starts the story which is told in a non-linear narrative and moves back and forth in her various births to give Sanjana clues for her current mission. There is an India-Pakistan partition angle thrown in with a Hindu-Muslim love story, there is a love story thrown in for Aurangzeb’s brother and there is one more from Chittorgarh at the time of Mirabai. There are various colors and shades in roles of a sisterly friend Neetu ( Divya Dutta), a brother (Ruslaan Mumtaz) and a cop who is trying to solve the case (Jimmy Shergill). The canvas is so big and ambitious that it wouldn’t have been easy for any director to make a success of it and if truth be told the director struggles throughout here.

To answer the important part first, yes Karisma kapoor comes up with an earnest performance. She surely enjoyed facing the camera after so many years and she looks beautiful in the movie. Her characters had many variations and major screen time. She was a supermodel, a Pakistani Hindu, a Mughal time lover and a maid to Meerabai at different times in the movie. But good actors alone can’t make good films; a script needs to support it too. Rajneesh Duggal’s roles were bad story writing and his acting made it worse. The story is about two lovers who are separated in every birth and they meet again in the next. But unfortunately the movie is only about one of them. You hardly relate to any of the roles that Rajneesh Duggal plays. In fact, you relate to the villains more than him and that was a pity, as you really don’t relate to Karisma’s stories because of it. In fact during a few points in the film I even thought that the leading lady should actually pair up with the villain, it would be a match of equals at least. Ravi Kissen, Arya Babbar, Sameer Kochhar and Jimmy Shergill, all played their roles with required fervour. Ravi Kissen shines in his small role of Durgam Singh. I wish Jimmy Shergill and Divya Dutta could have had a larger screen time. Both of them are grossly underutilized in this film.

Vikram Bhatt’s creation of a back drop and addition of gloss and technology is as beautiful as in all his movies. But unfortunately his story telling is just as bad as well. The biggest deal breaker for this movie is in the writing department. Story (Amin Hajee) is not paced well. Characters are completely underdeveloped particularly the ones like Mirabai (played with conviction by Gracy Singh), which are almost caricaturized along with the use of clichéd dialogues. Screenplay by the director himself gets bumpy at times. There are scenes like a false trap where police officers die- completely unnecessary and don’t add to the story. At the same time there are important parts of stories which we run through and don’t get time to soak in. Dialogues by Girish Dhamija are clunky. It is not easy to digest a Rajasthani Rajput senapati using words like “Berukhi ka Raaz”, daasi using words like “Kismat” and “Zindagi”. Surely the Urdu words are a part of life in today’s Hindi culture but language is an important tool to give a sense of time. Girish Dhamija misses it completely. Film editing by Kuldip Mehan also has nothing to negate the effect of writing. The pacing of the movie is also badly misplaced.

A special mention here for action director Abbas Ali Mogul and 3D effects from EFX Prasad. It is one of the first movies where 3D isn’t added as a gimmick and still is well managed. There are occasional in your face moments but mostly the 3D here adds another dimension and you can see the depth and space more clearly. Vikram Bhatt has to be lauded for his efforts in lapping up new technology and giving utmost detailing in framing of sequences. Pravin Bhatt’s cinematography is apt. Play of light and especially shadows during various stages of the movie adds to the non-existing story telling. Production design needs a very special mention here. Tackling various timelines and historical context setting is not easy but the sets and design completely lives up to it. Music by Himesh Reshammiya is always an highlight when he sings less. “Tu Hi Rab” and “Naina Re” though loud in their vocals, overpowers the scene they appear in. If the story telling was sharper, music would have gelled beautifully in the movie.

There is a scene in the latter half of the movie where both Sanjana and Rohan are declared dead. You almost feel that the movie ended. I was very scared that Vikram Bhatt was planning for a sequel but the end turns up like good news, even if it’s not a good climax. And that feeling more or less summarizes the movie. If you are watching the movie as a Karisma Kapoor fan, you will not be disappointed by her performance but the movie is at best average. The backdrop of the movie could have made it an interesting effort. Past life regression and finding “aatma ki aawaz” aren’t new themes but could have been presented in a more engaging manner. The movie doesn’t do anything interesting for the director and other actors, but surely Karisma Kapoor’s hard work would not go unnoticed. Welcome back Lolo.