REVIEW 536: RANCHI DIARIES

Release date:	October 13, 2017
Director:	Sattwik Mohanty
Cast: Language:	Taaha Shah, Himansh Kohli, Soundarya Sharma, Jimmy Sheirgill, Satish Kaushik, Pitobash Tripathy, Anupam Kher   Hindi

                                                                                                                   

Ranchi Diaries is meant to be a comic tribute to Ocean’s Eleven, with a bunch of quirky characters who get involved in a bank heist gone wrong. Writer-director Sattwik Mohanty seems to have a sense of humour that he might put to good use some day when he decides to write a proper screenplay rather than this lazily handled assemblage of scenes. I don’t know what it took to rope Jimmy Sheirgill and young Taaha Shah into this project. Maybe it did not take much convincing because these two talented artistes have been struggling long enough to get projects worthy of them.

Sheirgill made his debut in Gulzar’s Maachis back in 1996 and has since been seen in a whole host of films, though only a handful have been deserving of his naturally likeable personality and acting skills. Taaha Shah made his debut in Y-Films’ Luv Ka The End co-starring Shraddha Kapoor in 2011 and has since then hung around on the margins of the industry. He is a good-looking kid with a screen presence, stuck – like his senior Sheirgill – in this meandering mess that aspires to be a film.

The activity here is set in Jagarnathpur in Ranchi where Manish Pandey (played by Himansh Kohli) is a safe breaker waiting for his big break before he can run away with his girlfriend, the ambitious wannabe popstar Guddiyaa Sharma (Soundarya Sharma). Unfortunately for her, she has caught the eye of the local gangster Thakur Ranjhe Pratap Singh (a decidedly uninvolved Anupam Kher in a role that amounts to a guest appearance). Thakur Bhaiyya, as he is popularly known, spends his time leering at her Youtube videos. The only way Guddiyaa can make a career for herself or escape this elderly creep is to run away from that town.

Shah is Pinku, a local hooligan. Sheirgill plays senior cop Lallan Singh. Satish Kaushik is sub-inspector S.N. Chaubey whose most memorable scene involves him farting because he ate too much at a party. And Pitobash, who was so fabulous in 2011’s Shor In The City directed by Raj Nidimoru and Krishna DK, is wasted here as a Naxal leader with hardly any screen time or lines.

So ya, there is a bank robbery, there are Naxals and there is some tomfoolery going on. At first the accents are funny, as is the stupidity of this entire clueless gang. Soon after the opening scenes though, it becomes apparent that Mohanty is as clueless as his characters and does not know how to proceed further with his concept. So Ranchi Diaries flails its arms about while the editor falls off to sleep on the job and the hapless cast does whatever they can in this whatever-you-wanna-call-it.

Guddiyaa is the brains behind the bank robbery in Ranchi Diaries because, well you know, as the overbearing voiceover tells us: “Har bawaal ke peechhe ek aurat ka haath hai.” (Rough, not literal, translation: behind every major problem, there is a woman.) In a less pointless project, I may have taken the time to join issue with that kind of backward language, but Ranchi Diaries is not even worthy of being argued with. The nicest thing about it is that it is just over one-and-a-half-hours long. Ideally, it should have been a 10-minute short with the song Godfather – which too deserved to be in a better venture – playing in the background.

Kabhi kabhi mere dil mein khayal aata hai, ki yeh film na bani hoti toh mujhe aaj subah dedh ghante zyaada sone ko milte. To be fair, Ranchi Diaries is not repulsive or puke-worthy or anything of that sort. It is just one of those thingies that makes you want to ask: why did anyone bother to make this? Seriously, why?

Rating (out of five stars): 0 stars

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	97 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/ranchi-diaries-movie-review-jimmy-sheirgill-whatcha-doin-in-this-whatever-you-wanna-call-it-4139201.html

Poster courtesy: https://www.facebook.com/MyRanchiDiaries/ 

REVIEW 187: GIPPI

Release date:	May 10, 2013
Director:	Sonam Nair
Cast: Language:	Riya Vij, Divya Dutta, Doorva Tripathi, Arbaaz Kadwani, Jayati Modi, Taaha Shah, Mrinal Chawla Hindi

A teenager advises her friend about how to hide her newly emerging breasts so that everyone in school does not notice … One confides in the other about her periods while a third taunts her for having sat out the PT class and says, you think the boys don’t know why? … A mother measures out her daughter for her first bra … Puberty and girlhood are rarely if ever discussed with such frankness in Bollywood films, which is why these elements in Gippi come as such a breath of fresh air.

Writer-director Sonam Nair’s film is bursting with promise in the first half hour when we are introduced to the 14-year-old protagonist Gurpreet a.k.a. Gippi Kaur, her brother Booboo who she lashes out at with verbal cruelty of the sort that even the sweetest kids are fully capable of, Gippi’s newly divorced mom Pappi, her best friend Aanchal, her adoring classmate Aashish who she incessantly spurns and the over-achieving school snob Shamira.

Where the film falters is when it becomes clear that too much of St Mary’s School, Shimla, where Gippi studies is based on a template derived from numerous Hollywood teen flicks. In American films you generally have the nerdy and/or dowdy gang, the glammed-up bimbettes who are possibly cheerleaders or aiming to get there, the popular boys on the soccer/baseball/basketball team who are dating these cheergirls, the regular-looking smart kids who may/may not be popular and one boy from among the popular kids who is secretly interested in one of the nerdy/dowdy/smart girls. Gippi transposes this template on to an Indian setting with good intentions but confusing results. So we get the titular heroine who is an overweight, under-achieving kid in love with songs from Shammi Kapoor films and constantly tormented by her skinny, model-like classmate Shamira; while the boy everyone thinks is Shamira’s boyfriend is in fact surreptitiously eyeing Gippi.

Why “confusing”, you ask? First… In many Hollywood films, being a cheerleader is the epitome of ambition for a schoolgirl, the word going out to young female viewers being that the god-ordained role for women is to cheer from the sidelines while men play the game. Shamira’s goals, thankfully, are different. She does not want to be on the margins. She wants to be the school head girl, a woman at the centre of the action, and towards this end she works extremely hard to score good marks and stay on top of a bunch of extra-curricular activities. Professionally ambitious women and girls are rare in Bollywood. This character was a great opportunity to bust stereotypes. Sadly, by proceeding to make Shamira a “bitch”, what Gippi does is reinforce the socially widely held notion that ambition is good for men but a dirty word for women; that career-minded women are…what’s the word we usually hear associated with them?...ah yes, bitches.

Second… Through the central character Gippi’s journey, what the film is trying to do is overturn notions of what makes people popular and successful. Gippi ends up being liked simply by being herself; she has few goals but when she does acquire one, she puts her own nose to the grindstone to achieve it, and succeeds. What a lovely message for little girl viewers to get! Disappointingly though, in the denouement – which of course I can’t reveal here – another message being sent out is that deep down in their hearts, nice girls really don’t want to be achievers. I mean, c’mon, why would you want to do well in school if you could instead be loved by your best friends and dated by the cute classmate? It’s an either/or choice for women, you see, as most of the world is constantly telling us. What woman could possibly get friends and the cute classmate and still notch up a major achievement in school?! Oh no, as conventional wisdom goes, that would simply be asking for too much! And while this may not be the point Sonam Nair intended to make, it’s certainly what comes across.

A pity, because Gippi does have so many positives. The young cast headlined by Riya Vij (Gippi) is uniformly good, though a special word must go out to Arbaaz Kadwani (Booboo), Doorva Tripathi (Aanchal) and Jayati Modi (Shamira) for their natural ease before the camera. Taaha Shah has much less to do as the older boy who Gippi falls for, but he does that well. Besides, it must be stated for the record that he’s a hottie, a fact you may have noticed if you’ve already seen him on debut in Y-Films’ Luv ka the End in 2011 in which he courageously dressed in drag and threw himself into the song “Mera jism jism mera badan badan, Arrey main hoon taaza mutton mutton”. Bringing up the rear is the talented actress Divya Dutta playing Gippi’s mom who has her own demons to grapple with. The nicest parts of this film are the way it handles the onset of puberty without tiptoeing around it and the bond between Gippi, Booboo and their mother. This is where the direction and writing both fall into place. This is where the film feels completely natural. Unfortunately, the rest somehow has a been-there-seen-that-in-this-or-that-Hollywood-film quality to it.

Rating (out of five): **

CBFC Rating (India):	U/A
Running time:	97 minutes

Photograph courtesy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gippi  

REVIEW 40: LUV KA THE END

Release date:	May 6, 2011
Director:	Bumpy
Cast:	Shraddha Kapoor, Taaha Shah

“Just because we don’t have them, doesn’t mean we can’t kick them.” So says Rhea in the climactic scene of Luv ka the End before crashing her shoe into the titular hero’s most sensitive body part. By that point, Luv Nanda has been established as such a skunk, that the audience should have been cheering for Rhea. But the emotional disconnect is such that apart from fleeting amusement, I felt nothing.

Luv ka the End is about Rhea, the girl who’s dating the campus hottie Luv. No one knows quite how she bagged him because the verdict among the cool babes is that Rhea is a behenji. Luv is the rich son of a smuggler who wears his brands on his sleeve, rolls his R-s and does not let his girlfriend ruffle his hair for fear that she will mess up his style. Luv is pressuring Rhea to sleep with him. She agrees to do the deed on the night before her 18^th birthday. But then, she discovers that Luv doesn’t love her: she’s just a pawn in a game he’s playing as a member of the BBC, a secret Billionaire Boys’ Club where points are awarded for sexual conquests. Luv is barely ahead of his closest competitor, which is why he’s desperate for the 1000 points he’d get from sleeping with “the cutest, prettiest, simplest virgin”. Apparently, that’s ‘behenji’ Rhea.

The revenge she extracts is the story of Luv ka the End. Shraddha Kapoor – daughter of Shakti Kapoor and niece of Padmini Kolhapure – has an interesting presence and does a fair job of playing the seemingly sedate Rhea with the nasty streak. Her co-star Taaha Shah doesn’t get to do much beyond look cute although the gusto with which he throws himself into the Mutton song indicates that he must be capable of more. Any debutant who has the guts to get into a ghaghra-choli and dance to “Mera jism jism mera badan badan, Arrey main hoon taaza mutton mutton” deserves attention. Rhea’s gal pals show some spark but are done in by confused and clichéd characterisation: Sonia is the pretty airhead who seems mandatory in such celluloid girlie gangs and Jugs is fat+smart. Both are fiercely loyal to Rhea, yet in the end when she’s locked in a room with Luv and they fear the worst for her, what do they do? They run away!

As far as replicating a teen milieu goes, the film gets it right. Hindi melds with English, the songs are fun and frothy, the clothes and the dialogue writing are appropriate. When the mean girls have a confrontation with the supposedly behenji gang, “Sati Savitri” is countered with “Slutty Savitri” which is met with “Fatty Savitri”; and Rhea swears to turn “Luv Nanda” into “Luv Nanga”.

But a reasonably impactful first half (worrisome for parents, I’d say) gives way to a vapid, tepid second. For a teen revenge saga to be plausible, the protagonist’s plot needs to be cleverer. Everything Rhea plans is so easily achieved that it’s hard to root for her. Luv’s father is a notorious smuggler and yet, she blithely breaks into his house to stuff glue and itching powder into his underwear, and filch his credit cards. He doesn’t check his purse before leaving and so, quite conveniently for our heroine, doesn’t realise that it’s empty! Not once does he think of using his dad’s clout for payback. In the end, when they are locked in a room alone together, she tamely gives in when he wants to tie her to the bed. And as a crowd of teenagers watch the proceedings live on a big screen at a party, while it appears that Luv may rape Rhea, no one – yes, not one of them – deems it fit to intervene except those two friends who had ditched her just seconds earlier! Add to this mix, some embarrassingly tacky product placements and Rhea’s irritatingly precocious little sister Minty who is even more suffocating than “Sexy” in Cheeni Kum. I’m not saying such kids don’t exist, I’m asking why this child in Luv ka the End – who is probably 10 years old – feels the need to blackmail her 18-year-old sister into giving up her clothes. What about the size difference? Kid mentions that she’s investing in the future. Huh?

Luv ka the End is the first offering from Yash Raj Films’ new youth banner Y-Films. It’s supremely disappointing, considering that it comes to us so soon after YRF’s brilliantly conceived, written, directed and acted Band Baaja Baaraat. Even if seen in isolation, Luv ka the End can at best be described as mildly entertaining in parts; but in the ultimate analysis, it’s an unmemorable film. I’d rather watch F.A.L.T.U. with Jackky Bhagnani instead.

Rating (out of five): **

CBFC Rating:                       U/A with a few cuss words beeped out

Running time:                        107 Minutes

Language:                              Hinglish

Photograph courtesy: http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/LuvKaTheEnd