29 April 2011 has to be a date to be remembered, for a number of reasons. Whilst some of them are related to me in a big way, others, like this one, are a Bollywood-squeezed memory that will set standards and expectations for Friday’s to come.
It has to be, probably, perhaps the most bombastic Friday in the history of 2011 Cinema. With three releases, namely Shor in the City, I AM and Chalo Dilli, all with a Four Star, Four and a Three-and-a-Half Star rating respectively, the viewer [hopefully there] HAS to have a tough time making a choice. Here’s a tiny recap of the three:
Shor in the City
TOI Rating: ****
Viewer’s Rating: ****
Story: “Tusshar Kapoor, Nikhil Dwivedi and Pitobash Tripathi are three typical wasters who throng the streets of Mumbai, looking for a high adrenalin fix. They steal a bag from a local train, just for kicks, and find it to be full of guns in all shapes and sizes. Next stop: find suitable customers for their unusual loot. Add to this a wannabe cricketer who must find some big money to bribe his way into the Indian team and an NRI (Senthil Ramamurthy) who wants to set up his business in India, without paying the requisite security to the local mafia (Zakir Hussain) and you have a sizzling kaleidoscope on chaotic Mumbai.” [According to Times of India]
Chalo Dilli
TOI Rating: ***½
Viewer’s Rating: ****
IMDb Rating: 7½ [Out of 10]
Synopsis: “Manu Gupta (Vinay Pathak) and Mihika Mukherjee (Lara Dutta) are the most mismatched traveling partners who are forced to journey together from Mumbai to Delhi, when fate (or is it the maddening Mumbai traffic) pits them together. Mihika is an uptown investment banker. Manu is a saree trader from Chandni Chowk. It takes an arduous trip from Jaipur to Delhi for the two of them to bridge their cultural and class divide.” [TOI Synopsis]
I AM
TOI Rating: ****
Viewer’s Rating: ****½
IMDb Rating: 6½ [Out of 10]
Synopsis: “The story is divided into 4 short stories about issues and dilemmas that bruises the modern Indian society, It unfolds tales of individuals struggling to find their identity, and uphold their dignity in a world that is cold and unsympathetic.” [IMDb Synopsis]
And to back all of this up, we have Thor in 3D, a Visual Delight of sorts. With a Three-and-a-Half Star TOI Rating, it makes for a good alternative to these three Hindi flicks. If not that, the mind-blowing Inception-cum-Avatar-like Source Code, with a holy-crap Five Star TOI Rating is more than a cherry on the top.
So my point?
GET OUT OF YOUR HOMES, PEOPLE! This short piece has been written JUST to tell you to forget IPL 4 for ONE morning and savor the beauty that the virtual world of Cinema is bringing out for you! Because Bollywood is surely maturing and bringing out new concepts, it is EXPERIMENTING much more, it is DOING much more, and 2011 is surely, as I have earlier said, NOT a year to miss all of these small steps to a revolution.
Tut tut!
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