'Mars Needs Moms' needs stronger story

LOS ANGELES: Robert Zemeckis' performance capture system, which turns life-action into animation, gets quite a workout in Disney's "Mars Needs Moms," which opens on Friday.

Its characters, both human and Martian, tumble through space, slide down chutes, chase along corridors that turn every which way and dance around mountains and into caverns created out of huge mounds of trash. The process has also lost those weirdly inhuman faces that plagued "The Polar Express," Zemeckis' first foray into performance capture. In fact, so many things in this unique kind of animation, especially the designs and all its many details, keep getting better and better. So why does "Mars Needs Moms" feel so slight?

Other than "Beowulf," his most successful performance-capture film to date, Zemeckis has chosen to deploy this system in children's films. Which is just fine as far as that goes, but where the technical advances and story sophistication in his "Beowulf" pointed toward James Cameron's "Avatar," "Mars Needs Moms" points toward a ride at Disneyland.

This film from Zemickis' ImageMovers Digital and, appropriately, Walt Disney Pictures will certainly be a treat for younger family members. But for teens on up the generational scale, the interest level will plummet.

For that matter, it will be interesting to see how "Mars" in its first week fares against "Rango," an animated film with considerable sophistication and outreach to older audiences, in its second weekend. As with his "A Christmas Carol" movie, Zemeckis paints himself into a digital corner by ignoring adults.

"Mars" does do one thing much better than "A Christmas Carol," however: It has emotions. After all, it is based on a children's novel by cartoonist Berkeley Breathed, who admits the book came in reaction to a disobedient son expressing keen dissatisfaction with even having a (nagging) mother. Consequently, the entire story about a mom kidnapped by Martians and her rescue by her young son bubbles over with emotions. It's an illustrated laundry lists all the things moms do for their kids -- and that would include the laundry.

For this film, Zemeckis turns directing chores over to Simon Wells, who directed "The Time Machine" and co-directed the animated "The Prince of Egypt." Wells and his wife Wendy adapted the Breathed book with nearly every plot turn driving home the point that kids need moms.

Milo, age 9, is the focal point. He is enacted by Seth Green and voiced by a much younger Seth named Seth Dusky, age 11. The estimable Joan Cusack is Mom but since she spends most of the time under lock and key, the major roles fall to an extremely funny Dan Folger as Mars' only other human, a disheveled techo-wiz named Gribble; Elisabeth Harnois as Ki, a rebellious young Martian who learned English watching '70s sitcoms; and Mindy Sperling as the humorless, nasty Martian leader whose body appears as mummified as her heart.

Designer Doug Chiang has a grand time turning the Red Planet into a giant fun ride from those loopy Martians with triangular heads, no real noses and otherworldly bodies and gaits to an underground world of stark simplicity and sterility. Women run the place while men -- Gribble calls them the Hairy Tribe Guys -- get tossed down chutes with the garbage as they're apparently the most expendable resource on the planet.

The entire movie is set up as a race against the clock by Milo to save his mom but the film finds time to take in the Martian civilization in passing, a gag-filled and mostly lighthearted re-imagining of our own world if women ruled. (It is odd though how a movie meant to glorify moms is so riddled with anti-feminist concepts. These are, of course, Martian females not human ones but still ...)

Anachronistic dialogue rules for the most part as not only does Ki brim with the hep lingo of the Flower Children era, but Gribble, who is thirty-something, is stuck forever in the '80s when he left planet Earth.

The movie shrugs off any real attempt at science fiction other than oxygen helmets for the surface of Mars. The characters still dash around those surfaces in short sleeves in what should be an 87 degrees climate and make the round trip from Earth to Mars, which should take about 18 months, in a half minute.

The skill level of this motion capture animation is getting better all the time. So "Mars" is accomplished at every level. But the three most important things in movies are story, story, story so the movie never comes off as the considerable achievement it truly is. (Reuters)

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'Red Riding Hood' inspires dread

LOS ANGELES: A film of grimm banality, "Red Riding Hood" puts a bloodthirsty "Twilight" spin on a fairy tale already possessed of an unusually macabre climax.

As it thuds along from one wolf attack to the next, Catherine Hardwicke's first film since taking leave of Bella and her toothy friends adamantly refuses to provide any wit, humor or fun, concerning itself mostly with the heroine's taxing dilemma of picking between the rural village's two best looking boys.

Still, with Warner Bros. delivering a massive campaign aimed at a ready-and-drooling target audience, some big opening numbers lie in wait this weekend.

"Red Riding Hood" is in the vanguard of what appears to be an onslaught of live-action fairy tale-derived studio features over the next year or so. What triggered this trend remains unclear, but one can only hope that the level of cleverness and invention improves, as things hardly get off to an inspired start here.

Restricting the action almost entirely to a small Ruritanian community where everyone but the visiting Gary Oldman speaks in mundane American accents, the script by David Leslie Johnson ("Orphan") pivots on two central creative ploys -- to turn a mere wolf into a werewolf and to transform the ancient story into a whodunnit in which the lovely young Valerie (Amanda Seyfried) must figure out who among the locals nocturnally mutates into the massive black hound that killed her sister and converses to her, hoping she'll run away with it.

Is it Peter (Shiloh Fernandez), the cute but poor woodcutter who has been her true love since childhood and himself would love to take her away? Might it possibly be his rival, Henry (Max Irons), the prosperous blacksmith Valerie's mother (Virginia Madsen) has arranged for her to marry? Could it be Dad (Billy Burke, the sad-sack father from "Twilight"), who boozes it up with regularity? Or, heaven forbid, is the wolf perhaps Grandma herself (Julie Christie), a bohemian eccentric who lives on her own out in the forest and has yellowish-brown eyes quite like those of the wolf itself.


Officially taking charge of the case once the wolf begins attacking humans for the first time in 20 years is Father Solomon (Oldman), an itinerant werewolf hunter in cleric's robes who resembles his Biblical namesake far less than he does Torquemada, so convinced is he that his inquisitional techniques can elicit a confession of lycanthropy.

As in "Thirteen," "The Nativity Story" and "Twilight" before it, "Red Riding Hood" allows Hardwicke to focus on the emotional trials of a teenager thrust unceremoniously onto the rocks of extreme grown-up dilemmas and feeling her way toward solutions.

Unfortunately, the context here is hokier than in any of the director's previous films and, as she's not a stylist or genre specialist, she has little to bring to this sort of material other than a natural empathy for the lead character. The dialogue exchanges possess no spark, the action is indifferently covered by random camera moves and cuts and the only jolts are provoked by cheap shock-cuts to the growling or roaring wolf.

The only memorable image is the fortunately frequently appearing one of Seyfried with her blond hair flowing from beneath the eponymous scarlet cloak that matches her pillow lips. Otherwise, the young actress has seen better days than this before and assuredly will again. The local men are boringly one-note but the casting of Christie was smart, as she bestows her iconoclastic spirit upon the ambiguous grandma.

The Vancouver-shot production, mostly confined to a studio set, has a rather dreary look spiced here and there by unusual production and costume design details that lend modern touches. (Reuters)

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'Battle Los Angeles' cliched but a fun watch

"World Invasion: Battle Los Angeles"; Actors: Aaron Eckhart, Ramon Rodriguez, Bridget Moynahan, Michelle Rodriguez, Ne-Yo; Director: Jonathan Liebesman; Rating: ***

There is nothing original about "World Invasion: Battle Los Angeles". In brief, it is "Independence Day" meets "Cloverfield" meets "Black Hawk Down" meets "Saving Private Ryan" with state-of-art special effects thrown in. And this, as you would have guessed, makes it a fun film, a total value-for-your-money movie.

Gulf War veteran Marine Staff Sergeant Michael (Aaron Eckhart) has put in his papers. But when the world is under attack from an alien race, he unwillingly becomes part of a platoon with zero combat experience to fight an enemy with superior power.

As things escalate and most of the air power of the United States is wiped out, it is up to the Staff Sergeant to command the inexperienced group of soldiers and a few civilians to safety.

Along the way, he discovers he could be the key to defeating the undefeatable aliens and as the world is retreating to a defence, he and his motley band of soldiers, decide to go on the offensive.

"World Invasion" takes itself less seriously than even the fun-film "Independence Day". If you consider the patriotic rhetoric of that film, this is a good thing. And there's no politics of "Saving Private Ryan" either. Though there is a hint of politics when the reason for the invasion is believed to be the one resource that the earth has an abundance of - water - and an expert claims on TV, "Rule of colonisation states that you wipe out the indigenous population. Right now we are being colonised."

There was a scope to throw in more of how dominant nations have been doing to their colonies what the aliens are doing to earth - decimating them. That would have made the film much more exciting.

"World Invasion" has almost every conceivable cliché of the alien/monster/war movie genre. This would have made the film boring had it not been for the gritty ground zero view of a war zone, a la "Black Hawk Down" and "Saving Private Ryan", some breathtaking cinematography and some of the best and most believable special effects in Hollywood.

Thus you have the usual sacrifices just at the right time, the fight over who's in command, an unresolved enmity, an unsure commanding officer, a band of brothers unwilling to leave the wounded behind, the usual teasing where you are not shown the full view of the alien for long, a civilian with just the information needed at crucial times, the expected twist in the tale a little after centre point, the usual last crucial missile shot that can save the planet etc.

Yet, despite its slightly longish take at over two hours, the film does not get boring or lose momentum at any point.

Director Jonathan Liebesman who has given some forgettable films, finally makes one that would be remembered. Writer Christopher Bertolini, who seemed to have disappeared after his delightful screenplay of "The General's Daughter", over a decade back, resurfaces with this film that is just the beginning of a franchise.

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Bol, the much-awaited film by Shoaib Mansoor, is likely to be released after the cricket world cup

LAHORE: The film which was earlier set to be released in February is now likely to hit cinemas in mid April. The release was delayed to settle matters related to distribution. It was cleared by the Film Censor Board in November last year. It is the second full-length feature film by ace director Shoaib Mansoor.

Film pundits desperately await the release of Bol, the plot of which remains a hot topic of debate. Though it may have caused immense chatter in the film industry, the director’s lips stay sealed regarding the release date and the central theme of the said film. However, a reliable source confirmed to The Express Tribune that the movie is based on the plight of women — a sensitive issue in Pakistani society.

Based in the heart of Lahore, the story takes place in a house full of daughters, teeming with the vibrancy of life but restricted to bloom.

“Bol is a roller-coaster of emotions. It carries subtleties that make your heartbeat stop. It questions the worth of a human being, be it a woman or a person born with a birth defect. It questions the authority of reproducing human beings into this world without taking responsibility of acknowledging their worth,” a statement on the film’s website reads.


The soundtrack of the film is quite impressive, and includes the likes of Shabnam Majeed, Sahir Ali Bugga, Bina Jawad, Atif Aslam, Hadiqa Kiani and Faiza Mujahid. Mansoor has also written and composed a song “Sayyan Bolain” sung by Majeed, Bugga and Jawad.

The cast of the film comprises of Humaima Malick, Atif Aslam, Iman Ali, Mahira Khan, Shafqat Cheema, Manzar Sehbai and Zaib Rehman. Several students from the National College of Arts (NCA) filmmaking department have assisted Mansoor in the film.

Mansoor, who on principle does not market a project prior to its release, made an exception and issued the statement: “Having been so blessed in life, I often think of the things that I should be grateful for. The list seems to be never ending, but invariably it ends at one thing . . . that I was born as a MAN. Nothing in the world scares me more than the thought of being born a woman or a eunuch in a country like Pakistan, where obscurantism has deep roots. It is very unfortunate that we make tall claims, full of pride, about the rights of women granted by our religion and yet when I look around in the underdeveloped Muslim countries in general and Pakistan in particular, I find the ground reality to be the polar extreme. Tragically, our interpretation and application of religion seem to begin and end with women. Leaving the five per cent of the urban educated elite aside, women seem to be the playground (battleground) where we practice a medieval form of religion”.
The Express Tribune spoke to the actors regarding their experience and the delay of the release. Atif Aslam, who plays the character of a doctor wanting to become a musician in the film, said: “I am doing a lot of work and am not really relying as an actor on this film. I did this film because I wanted to do a film and didn’t want to play the ‘chocolate hero’. Bol gave me the opportunity to be a part of something substantial. I think it is for the director to decide how and when the film is to be released”.

Mahira Khan, who makes her debut with the film, said: “It was truly a learning experience for me, Shoaib saab is an institution in himself, we all are waiting for Bol; and I hope it brings great business to the cinemas”.
Mansoor’s first film Khuda Kay Liye went on to win several international awards and from the looks of it, Bol may well do the same.

Credit : The Express Tribune Pakistan

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The Adjustment Bureau

The Adjustment Bureau is an enjoyable piece of hokum – your basic doom-laden parable of metaphysical sci-fi mind control, only with a surprise romantic sparkle. It's based on a 1954 short story by Philip K. Dick (called ''Adjustment Team''), but even as the film gives you a taste of Dick's crazy-visionary the corporation ate my brain! paranoia, it infuses that twisty gloom with a spirit that's lighter and almost playful. It's like Philip K. Dick meets Sliding Doors.

Matt Damon, beefy and gregarious, has just the right expansive yet guarded charisma to play David Norris, an on-the-rise political star who gets derailed (because of his not-quite-tamed frat-house side) in his bid to be a New York senator. In a luxe hotel men's room, just before his concession speech, he meets Elise, a free spirit and professional dancer who had ducked into one of the stalls. She's played by Emily Blunt, and in the 
 extended scene that follows, she and Damon, jousting and then kissing, generate the rare connection that actually feels spontaneous.

Blunt, who has the big-eyed, straight-haired beauty of a '60s swinging-London model, is a magnificent flirt, with smiles that aren't just come-ons but an intriguingly telegraphed series of wishes and promises. And Damon makes David not only smitten but shocked, as if love had slapped him awake. Their bond grounds the entire movie. Because a little 
 later, when David, now with a corporate job, wanders into an office he wasn't supposed to enter, he sees that everyone in the office has literally been frozen. And is being worked on. By men in fedoras and dark suits (led, in an ideal casting touch, by Mad Men's John Slattery) who look like '50s FBI agents as reimagined by Kafka. From that moment on, David's dream of love may not be an option.

Who are these American fascist Mad Men? I don't want to give away too much, but let's say two things: They control…a lot. And though creepy and sinister and all that, they're not nearly as black-and-white evil as you first think. The Adjustment Bureau is the thriller as glorified philosophical videogame, with David dashing through doors that are like looking-glass passageways, trying to wrench his destiny away from the forces that claim he has no free will. In many ways, this is a dated and rather gimmicky movie. Yet it's directed (by The Bourne Ultimatum's coscreenwriter George Nolfi) with a wide-eyed spirit. It taps into your longing for the days when a sci-fi matrix could explain the world without making it a darker place.

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Take Me Home Tonight

There are deep-dish '80s nostalgia movies, like Adventureland and Hot Tub Time Machine. Then there's Take Me Home Tonight, which duplicates the car crashes, drug jokes, all-night-long plot twists, and robot hip-hop dance moves of low-rent '80s party flicks with such casual fidelity that you may ask: Why not just watch Losin' It, Bachelor Party, or License to Drive instead? I can't claim that Take Me Home Tonight, set in the summer of 1988, is much better than – or different from – the real (cheesy) thing, but it does possess a certain backward-glancing innocent appeal.

Topher Grace, as an MIT grad who has become the world's most overqualified L.A. video-store clerk, looks longer and leaner than before, and he's got a new confidence, too. He spends the film crashing beer bashes and pretending to be a big deal at Goldman Sachs, all to woo Teresa Palmer, who's like Kristen Stewart minus the storm-cloud moodiness. The more he lies, the faster he talks, but that's his rite of passage. (Any wuss can be sincere.) He also has to look after his pudgy-loser-sidekick buddy, played by Dan Fogler, who bounces off the walls like Jack Black and also evokes the smarmy-cute Curtis Armstrong from Risky Business. It gives you a jolt to recall, in this age of geek chic, that being unhip was once truly unhip.

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I Saw the Devil

Charismatic Korean star Choi Min-sik found international fame as a man bent on revenge in Park Chan-wook's Oldboy. In director Kim Jee-woon's wildly violent, genre-pushing vengeance pic (I Saw the Devil), Choi goes to town as the embodiment of murdering, torturing evil; Lee Byung-hun plays the equally mono-minded special agent seeking maniacal revenge for the death of his pregnant fiancée. Somewhere in all the blood (sickening realism is a selling point), a question is posed: When does the one fighting a monster become a monster himself?

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Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

Spirit, animal, and human worlds coexist in dreamy harmony in this (Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives) remarkable drama, winner of the 2010 Cannes Palme d'Or. The latest film from groundbreaking Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Tropical Malady) features Thanapat Saisaymar as Boonmee, who, nearing the end of his life, calmly waits for death in the lush countryside. Magical visitors include the ghost of his late wife, the spirit of his dead son (returned as a giant monkey with glowing red eyes), and a seductive catfish.

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happythankyoumoreplease

With very little modification, the relationship woes of the six chirpy young New Yorkers in this (happythankyoumoreplease) self-absorbed indie could be reworked into episodes of TV's How I Met Your Mother. The casting is in place: HIMYM star Josh Radnor — who also wrote and directed — plays a puppyish aspiring novelist with a knack for one-night stands (Kate Mara lasts a few nights longer). Good thing the guy's got nice friends: One, a pretty, bald woman (Malin Akerman), phones him before a job interview to remind him to tuck in his shirt.

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Hall Pass

Men and women, as every chick flick and buddy-slob comedy will tell you, don't just come from different galaxies — they're locked in a battle for supremacy. But Hall Pass, a light comedy of horny marital woe from directors Peter and Bobby Farrelly, makes a novel statement about the sex wars: It says that they're essentially over. And that the guys — in case there was any lingering suspense about it — have lost.

Rick (Owen Wilson), a real estate agent who dresses in amazingly dweebish plaid shirts, and Fred (Jason Sudeikis), a life-insurance salesman as genial and square as Howdy Doody, are suburban schlubs devoted to their wives and (in Rick's case) family. When Rick isn't taking out the trash or disciplining his children with textbook New Dad sensitivity, he, like Fred, has one topic on the brain: all the sexy, gorgeous women who, as faithful and loving husbands, they will never, ever get to sleep with.

All of which, I know, makes them sound like the most common and boorish of male movie characters. Except for one thing: These two, though they spend their hours fantasizing about straying, would never dream of actually doing it. They're like neutered dogs who carry their own leashes. When it comes to satisfying their libidos, they're whipped, defeated — by the demands of family life (who has time for sex when you're trying to get the kids to bed?) or just by their loyalty. The raunchy chatter spills out of them, and some of it is funny, but mostly because it's so pathetically vicarious.

Hall Pass presents these men as a new archetype: the frustrated middle-aged husband as randy adolescent virgin. Wilson, geeked out in super-square hair, knows how to use his gentleness to turn himself into a figure of soft desperation. And Saturday Night Live's Sudeikis, in his first major movie role, has an agreeably dorky, bootlicking officiousness. (Fred thinks that he's scored a victory if he figures out how to look at a woman's behind without his wife seeing him.) They are so domesticated, the joke is they don't even know their pent-up sexual frustration is driving them nuts.

It takes their wives, Maggie (Jenna Fischer) and Grace (Christina Applegate), to figure that out, and, under the influence of a pop psychologist (Joy Behar), to propose a solution: They will give their husbands a ''hall pass,” a week off from marriage during which the two will be allowed to sow their wild oats — and, in theory, purge all those demons of roving-eyed desire. It's a kind of high-concept therapy for a high-concept comedy that views the hidden and buried lusts of married men in the age of Internet porn as a ticklishly normal state of affairs.

The Farrellys, working from a script they co-wrote with Pete Jones and Kevin Barnett, set all this up with an innocent dirty-minded aplomb. Still, if Rick and Fred's dilemma is the film's amusing appetizer, the main course ought to be what they actually do when they're let loose. And the punchline is: Out on their own, Rick and Fred are such hapless, inept womanizers that even when ''freed,” they're still trapped — imprisoned — in their overgrown-teenage heads. They treat Applebee's as a pickup joint and eat themselves into a food coma. They scarf pot brownies on a golf course, with even uglier results. And when they do try to hook up, they're so wild-and-crazy clueless about how seduction now works (''R-O-C-K in the USA!” says Rick, thinking that he's just said something cool, which makes you want to dive under your seat) that women look at them as if they were another species.

That, however, is a joke of diminishing returns. Hall Pass would like to be as dunked in reality as Judd Apatow's best comedies, but the movie is thin. The Farrellys can't quite nudge the characters from two dimensions to three. When Rick and Fred get lessons in humanity, the movie seems to be about two sketch-comedy characters learning they have souls. As one of the girls they keep approaching might say, Ewwww! It would have helped if the women on screen, from the wives to the ''perfect” Aussie coffee-bar babe (Nicky Whelan), were remotely interesting. But they're not. Which raises the question: How shrewdly can a comedy satirize the arrested male gaze when the movie itself is trapped in it?

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Drive Angry

Shaven-headed men in tattoos and ugly goatees. Pretty girls who punch guys out. Hash-slinging diners and trashy neon honky-tonk bars. A jet-black 1969 Dodge Charger. A cherry-red 1970 Chevelle SS 454. (Wow, just writing that made me feel like I know something about cars.) Nicolas Cage in thatchy frosted-blonde Owen Wilson-as-biker hair. (Another Nic Cage hair joke? I bring it up only because there's nothing else to the character.) A devil-worshipping apocalyptic fundamentalist cult, led by a rapist in Jim Jones glasses, who murdered Cage's daughter and now wants to use his baby granddaughter for a blood sacrifice. A plot that's not so much off and running as off the rails and galumphing. 3-D that, except for a few bullets coming at the audience, doesn't exist.

After all the bad Nicolas Cage movies I've sat through, I got lured into seeing Drive Angry because the trailer made it look like it might have a certain shameless, demolition-happy American Mad Max excitement. It tries to, but it's simply not... well done. The car chases are rote and sparse, the gunplay is the usual lock-and-load fetishistic onslaught with heavy-metal trimmings, and even the film's one ''original'' twist is just a desperate attempt to link it up to Ghost Rider, the only lousy Nicolas Cage action film that is actually spawning a sequel. Cage has gotten too old for this stuff, yet one of the reasons people mock him for it is that, after dozens and dozens of paycheck thrillers, he still never looks a hundred percent comfortable in a movie like Drive Angry. His voice is too naturally expressive to lend credence to a somber howler like, ''Hell already is walking the earth.'' Cage has forged his own hell, and it's called: the movies he's addicted to making, even when they trash his brand.

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Tanu Weds Manu

Why should you watch "Tanu Weds Manu"? For R. Madhavan who will win you heart as a sweet lovable NRI doctor Manu who has the misfortune of falling in love with a Kanpur-girl Tanu (Kangana Ranaut) who not only rejects him as a suitor but also uses him to elope with her ruffian boyfriend.

Hiding his heartbreak and disappointment behind a smile, Madhavan fits into the role of a goody goody NRI like a glove. He is hopelessly in love with Tanuja who doesn't miss a single opportunity to hurt him. Rules, they say, are meant to be broken and that's what Tanu's agenda in life is - to break all rules that a middle-class family swears by.

Well, an NRI coming home to find a suitable bride for him is very common in Indian society and director Anand Rai's comedy opens with the same. He tries to be as close to reality as possible - from the backdrop, to clothes, to character artists - all bring out the element of a middle-class setup perfectly.

With a marriage in the background providing a perfect place for Tanu's second chance meeting with Manu, the movie traces the relationship between the girl and the NRI. Surely, perfect material for sentimental romances with 'comedy ka tadka'.

But there is something missing to make it a perfect romantic comedy. First, the script is punctured, then their is no chemistry between Madhavan and Kangana and if that was not enough, the narrative doesn't flow at the desired pace - it's slower than it should be.

Though the director picked up an interesting subject, he has not succeeded in executing his story effectively on screen - there are not enough laughs in the film. Whatever funny scenes are there, credit goes to the chemistry between Madhavan and Deepak Dobriyal who plays his friend Pappi.

Kangana's dialogue delivery puts you off and she lacks the spunk and spark to play the free bird that she is in the movie. In fact, Swara Bhaskar, who plays her friend Payal, holds the fort as the Bihari girl who is marrying a sardarji (Eijaz Khan) who also happens to be Manu's best friend.

Payal is impressed with Manu and even tries to drill some sense into Tanu's head but Tanu, a rebel, doesn't want to admit her feelings for the man who is picked by her parents.

Critics won't appreciate the plot but Madhavan fans would find enough material to enjoy the film.

Music plays an important role in a wedding-based romantic comedy and the director could have got it right if he had opted for fast-paced peppy numbers.

In the performance department, full marks go to Madhavan, Deepak and Swara. The supporting cast of K.K. Raina, Rajendra Gupta and Navni Parihar don't have much to do, but whatever role they have, they carry it well. Jimmy Shergill as Kangana's ruffian boyfriend is wasted, so is Ravi Kishen as his sidekick.

If you are looking for a great romantic comedy, this is not the one, but watch it for Madhavan and his chemistry with Deepak.

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Of Gods and Men

Gravely serene and suffused with tenderness, Of Gods and Men takes the simple, profound stand that how a person of faith lives matters more than the circumstances of his death. I stick with the male pronoun here because this superb, award-laden French drama — a surprising omission among this year's Foreign Language Film Oscar nominees — is so essentially about how men behave in the name of religious conviction.

The movie is loosely based on real events: In 1996, seven French Catholic monks in an Algerian monastery were kidnapped by Islamic terrorists and then disappeared, the circumstances of their murder unsolved. Prior to the abduction, the monks in Of Gods and Men know they're in danger — even though they have lived in friendly harmony with their Muslim neighbors for years. For the group decision of whether to leave Algeria or stay, every man must first decide for himself, and the movie grants each the dignity of individual struggle. (The understated cast is led by The Matrix Reloaded's Lambert Wilson as the elected head monk and Michael Lonsdale from Munich as the monastery's aging doctor.) But it is their shared strength as a band of brothers humble before their Christian God — and indeed before the God of Islam — that may stir viewers to an awe that transcends skeptical opinions about religion or politics. That devotion is never so movingly expressed as when the men join in the beautifully plain chant that fills the soundtrack. Tchaikovsky trend alert: Secular music makes one emotionally climactic appearance when, having absorbed the consequences of their choice to stay in North Africa, the men share wine and listen to voluptuous music on an old tape deck. Their selection: Swan Lake's grand theme, a button pusher in Black Swan.

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The Last American Virgin

When the teen T&A comedy Porky's scored at the box office in the spring of 1982, Hollywood quickly realized there was an audience — largely male, teenage, and horny as hell — itching to see guys as clueless as they were willing to humiliate themselves in the quest to get laid. Most of these knockoffs were god-awful. But a few, like the three in a new MGM '80s box set, added heart to the hormonal high jinks.

The Last American Virgin (1982, R, 1 hr., 
 33 mins.) Porky's rip-offs don't come more shameless than this tale about a trio of sex-hungry high school pals gunning to lose their virginity (it even has a locker-room peephole scene). But Virgin is also one of the few Reagan-era romps that could put a lump in your throat, as loser Gary (Lawrence Monoson) watches his skeevy best friend (Steve Antin) steal his dream girl. Thank-fully, the Cars keep things fizzy by shaking it up on the soundtrack.

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Big Mommas: Like Father, Like Son

There's no point explaining the flimsy buddy-com clichés that force an FBI agent (Martin Lawrence) and his son (Brandon Jackson) to go undercover at an all-girls art school in Big Mommas: Like Father, Like Son, a follow-up to 2000's Big Momma's House and 2006's Big Momma's House 2. It's all an openly lame excuse for Lawrence to hop back into the eye-assaulting muumuus of his alter ego Big Momma, a wheezing, overripe hybrid of a Southern dumb-belle and a Julia Child drag impersonator. The trouble is, once the movie drops its cop-drama trappings, it doesn't do any better as a comedy. Lawrence's gender-bending jokes are played out, and his slapstick is wooden and slow. It's understandable: Clowning around underneath that fat suit must be exhausting. Almost as much as watching it.

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Unknown

Has the dire situation in Unknown ever happened to you? You and the wife take a trip out of the country for a business conference in Berlin. When you get to your hotel, you realize you've left luggage behind at the airport — luggage containing your passport. (Who lets luggage containing their passport leave their hands? Not the point.) So you deposit the wife at the hotel reception desk, hail a taxi, speed back toward the airport, and (these things happen) end up in a crash that sends your car hurtling off a bridge into wintry German waters. When you emerge from a coma in a hospital bed (props to the taxi driver's heroic underwater rescue skills), you're pretty sure you know who you are. Trouble is, you've got no ID. And then, against your doctor's orders, you make your way back to your hotel, but the woman you know as your wife looks at you with utter incomprehension: She's never seen you before in her life. She's already got a husband. And he's got your name.

P.S. Assassins are now after you. What the #@*!?

Unknown says what the #@*!? too. Under the Euro-moody direction of Catalonian ad-and-music-video guy Jaume Collet-Serra (Orphan) and shaped by the big thumbs of producers Joel Silver and Leonard Goldberg, the movie whips up a big old puree of ingredients borrowed from other cinematic recipes. Then it dishes out the mildly spiced results as post-Oscar-quality snack food: You can sample a little identity confusion from the Bourne trilogy, wrong-man anxiety from Hitchcock, East German Cold War spy tactics from The Lives of Others, and a car chase from (insert favorite car-chase movie here). Continuing to pursue his options as an action hero, Liam Neeson runs around, angry and documentless, as Dr. Martin Harris. Mad Men's January Jones looks exceedingly blank and exceedingly blond as somebody's wife Elizabeth Harris. Aidan Quinn glowers belligerently as the other Dr. Martin Harris (with the passport to prove it). And Inglourious Basterds' Diane Kruger darts like a chicly scruffy Artful Dodger through the Berlin streets as the Bosnian-born taxi driver with the bad luck to draw Neeson's Dr. Harris as a passenger in the first place. By the way, at this point in his career, the appearance of Frank Langella — gray-haired, close-cropped, moving with vulpine deliberation — ought to trip audience triggers that the character he's playing has something up his sleeve.

To scrutinize the action-driven absurdities of Unknown is, surely, overkill in a movie in which Neeson barks,“Out of the way!'' with cartoonish ferocity as he pushes through crowds. (The screenplay is by journeymen scribes Oliver Butcher and Stephen Cornwell.) Still, it's worth pausing to marvel at the chutzpah (as Berliners might not say) of tossing a soupçon of concern for illegal immigrants, nostalgia for the bad old days of East German secret police, and optimism about ending world hunger into a doozy in which Neeson also intones, “Do you know what it feels like to become insane?''

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Memento

As much as I dig Christopher Nolan's Batman flicks, he's always been at his best when he's taking an eggbeater to moviegoers' brains. I'm talking about the Möbius-strip dreamscapes of Inception, the sleight-of-hand trickery of The Prestige, and most of all, his dizzying breakout behind the camera, Memento (2001, R, 1 hr., 53 mins.). Now marking its 10th birthday with a Blu-ray debut, Memento is one of those jigsaw puzzles whose pieces snap together more tightly with each viewing. Fueling it all is a performance by Guy Pearce that's as indelible as the tattoo ink covering his body. He's a mural of vengeance. Pearce's Leonard Shelby is a hero straight out of a '40s film noir — he remembers nothing...other than the certainty that he must track down and kill the person who 
 murdered his wife.

 Every time he wakes up, he's essentially starting from scratch with only the “facts'' stenciled on his body to guide him. Nolan, the merry prankster, unspools Leonard's story in reverse, so the audience is solving the case with him, always reevaluating whether to trust 
 the weaselly Teddy (Joe Pantoliano) and the femme fatale Natalie (Carrie-Anne Moss). The Blu-ray's extras are mostly leftovers from previous DVD editions, but the film itself has aged beautifully. It's a throwback to a time when indie upstarts like Nolan, Darren Aronofsky, and David O. Russell were flipping the bird to the establishment, saying, Hey, here we come. The good news is, 10 years later, all three are up for Best Picture. They are the establishment.

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Vanishing on 7th Street

Vanishing on 7th Street is a throwback of a horror movie that sets out to re-create the spooky, bombed-out, trapped-in-a-bunker atmosphere of such '60s and '70s B-movie landmarks as the Living Dead films and Assault on Precinct 13. But the director, Brad Anderson (The Machinist), apes those films without a hint of their gutter shrewdness. In essence, he's made a zombie movie without the zombies. Early on, John Leguizamo, as a shopping-mall movie-theater projectionist, wanders out of his booth to discover that seemingly all of humanity (except for him) has been literally sucked away, leaving nothing but piles of clothes on the ground. All the electricity has been neutralized as well.

He runs into three fellow survivors (played by Hayden Christensen, Thandie Newton, and the 14-year-old pop star Jacob Latimore), and the four hole up inside a bar, where an emergency generator powers a jukebox that wavers between speeding up and slowing down as it keeps on playing the Marvelettes' ''Darling Forever.” That's a good, queasy effect, and so are the ghostly shadows that crawl like smoke over the surfaces of things. But that's about all the tricks that Anderson has. Mostly, we're left staring blankly at a quartet of victimized ciphers.

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Saat Khoon Maaf

Chalk up an absolute winner for the Vishal Bhardwaj-Priyanka Chopra team. They make a coherent vision out of an inconceivable marital crises.

How do you make sense of a woman who's an incorrigible potentially-loathsome serial spouse-killer who when challenged about her weird passion for changing husbands by divine decree rather than the law of the land, turns around and says, "This heart of mine, it's to blame." Wicked laughter follows. And dammit, we are amused!

How does one make head or 'tale' of such a woman? Well, the first thing a director with a canny sense and sensibility does is sign Priyanka Chopra to play the wretchedly unfulfilled, genetically incomplete woman, a living, throbbing warning against the institution of marriage!

Priyanka, not for the first time, proves she is leagues ahead of all competition. She approaches this strange and sensual creature of the night from the outside and then quietly makes inroads into the woman's heart and soul. We can actually see the character's snarled inner-world on Priyanka's face! We don't even know when and how she does it. Priyanka is that kind of a player.

Vishal Bharadwaj has earlier made films about gangs and gangsterism. Every time the dark brooding atmospheric surface seemed to suggest a life of sinister suppressions. Those unspoken, intangible thoughts and visions that often guide a human being to his or her doom are outlined in "7 Khoon Maaf" with supreme poetic elegance.

This is Bhardwaj's most fluidly-narrated film to date. Of course, having Gulzar on board helps. He pens Urdu poetry for Irrfan Khan and rock poetry for John Abraham. For Priyanka poetry is not needed. She creates a kind of indecipherable poetic statement for her deeply dysfunctional character who kills 6 husbands and moves to the 7th at the end of the film with the profound satirical grief of a woman who has discovered that this world has no true love to offer her.

True love...ah! Now that's an idea. At heart Vishal's dark elegiac film is about the search for true love. The relationship that Sussanna (Priyanka) forms with a young boy(Vivaan Shah) as she goes from one husband to another remains at the core of the film. In a macabre subversion of the almost-pure love that Susanna shares with Vivaan's character, at one point in the narration she tries to seduce the boy who's almost like a son. It's a dark ugly moment, almost repugnant in its incestuous resonances but in keeping with the character's insatiable appetite for destruction.

Vishal Bhardwaj brings to the storyboard a deep sense of tragic grandeur even as Susanna slips from self-gratification to delusional spirituality.

Priyanka Chopra has already proved herself way ahead of her contemporaries in her earlier works notably "Fashion" and "What's Your Raashee". In "7 Khoon Maaf" she moves to another level, displaying a range of emotions and age-changes (minus prosthetics) that one last saw in Shabana Azmi's performances.

Priyanka's sequences with Irrfan Khan (playing a gentle poet who transforms into a sexual pervert in bed) are stuff poetic nightmares are made of. We can clearly see the cinematographer (Ranjan Palit) is not in love with the actress, but the character. His camera searches for intransigent images in Susanna's life, even as Priyanka's quest for the character's core takes her into areas of self-expression that are far beyond the reach of cinema acting as we know it.

A. Sreekar Prasad edits the life of Susanna with a surety that, alas,the character never comes close to achieving in her dealings with the opposite sex. Sreekar creates a symphonic seamless movement from one husband to another, sometimes joining segments in Susanna's life with visuals that would otherwise seem incompatible.

The husbands are all played by actors who have no qualms in stripping away their vanity to become the kind of suave but duplicitous untrustworthy spouses who cheat and betray for the sake of the opposite emotion to love. Irrfan Khan as a wolf in poet's clothing, Naseeruddin Shah as the affable old Bengali dietician (his Bengali accent is more dead-on than any true-blue Bengalis) and John Abraham as a stereotypical rock musician gone to poppy-seed, are pitch-perfect in their creating a drama of the callous for Priyanka's character.

But it's Neil Nitin Mukesh as her first legless army-man husband whose display of clenched menace jolts you.

As a storyteller Vishal Bhardwaj has never been more in command of his language. He punctuates Susanna's story with bouts of unexpected humour and poetry. Providentially the murders are committed in ways that appear more humorous than savage. And that's both a good and a bad thing.

The narrative shows a rare understanding of the gender dynamics and the sexual tensions between men and women. Priyanka Chopra's interaction with the unctuous and closet-horny police officer Anu Kapoor delectably illustrates the fable of the Temptress & The Besotted. And by the way Viagara never seemed funnier.

Priyanka Chopra goes from husband-to-husband with a mocking sigh of resigned surrender. She is not a victim. But neither is she the hero of the bizarre web of destruction and delusion that her character weaves around her.

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MOVIE PREVIEW

When was the last time you saw Akshay Kumar in a no-nonsense, sober role (not counting the bland Tasveer) where he didn't made a caricature of himself with his over-the-top comic antics? And when was the last time you found him extremely impressive while underplaying his character?

The first and the best thing that Patiala House does is redefine the typecast Akshay Kumar from the slapstick clown to a splendid actor.

The second thing that the film does is give us back the fabulous filmmaker whom we lost to the never-ending Salaam-e-Ishq and the fully formulaic Chandni Chowk To China. Picture this scene in the final reel of the film when Akshay Kumar is bowling for the last over of the cricket match. His father who never approved of his son's dream arrives at the stadium just on time. While any other director would have exploited this situation with a sentimental bonding between the father-son or a jingoistic call for victory by the father, Nikhil Advani avoids any such confrontational cliché. He steers away from stereotypes and cuts out every trace of melodrama and every foreseeable formula from the film, thereby bringing freshness to the otherwise predictable family drama.

Bauji (Rishi Kapoor), the patriarch of the Kahlon family, has been fighting against racism faced by Indians in England and has brought respect and individuality of their community in Southall. He has always been the dominating head of his extended joint family (that can put Rajshri to shame) and his diktats have decided everyone's destiny. His elder son Gattu (Akshay Kumar) had to forsake his dreams of playing cricket for the national England team since Bauji was never in favour of the firangs, despite residing on foreign lands.

17 years later, when Gattu gets a chance to be a part of the England team again, Simran (Anushka Sharma) encourages him to live his dream. After much probing by the younger generation in the Kahlon family, Gattu agrees to play, but without informing his father. Until Bauji learns of it just before the final match.

From characterizations to conflicts, one can find references galore in the writing, though thankfully nothing is blatantly duplicated. Rishi Kapoor's authoritative patriarch character who has things go his way has been a popular family figure in Hindi films from Dina Pathak's Khoobsurat to Amitabh Bachchan's Sooryavansham. Further Gattu facing opposition from his father to play cricket is reminiscent of Gurinder Chadha's Bend It Like Beckham where the NRI Punjabi father (Anupam Kher) doesn't approve of his daughter's football fervour.

The screenplay by Nikhil Advani and Anvita Dutt Guptan has a systematic approach towards the storytelling. A quick prologue explains the racial discrimination plot and a fleeting flashback establishes Gattu's rise and renouncement in cricket. With the joint family setup, the narrative expectedly proceeds with a wedding in the household, as a dozen characters are erratically introduced and confuse you with their correlations. The story subsequently works towards Gattu's resurgent induction in the sport and humour comes naturally in the narrative with the family's attempts to cover up Gattu's field performance from Bauji. The concluding reels make way for heartrending dramatic moments between the father-son and an obvious yet exciting cricket match.

What's commendable about Advani's writing and direction is that he never overdoes anything though there is a common tendency with the theme he tackles. He never goes jingoistic in the racism track nor does he overstate Indian tradition and culture on London lands with the NRI setting. Again the family drama is never overblown and is treated with subtlety and maturity. Anvita Dutt Guptan's restrained yet powerful dialogues help achieve that in a big way. The first half might appear slow and one-dimensional but it works steadily to bring conviction to the protagonist's journey. The horde of familial characters might baffle you at times but they are all driven by a common conflict – living their dream over Bauji's.

At a broader level, the film gives a subtle social message of breaking boundaries of regionalism and nationalism. Patiala House doesn't need an all-Indian or an all-Asian team, like in the John Abraham – Arshad Warsi starrer football film Goal, to incite nationalistic sentiments in the viewer. Even as an Indian audience, the director compellingly makes you root for an NRI who plays for the England cricket team and defeats Australia.

Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy's music is refreshing and the theme song that frequently plays in the background adds value to the proceedings. Santosh Thundiyil's cinematography is competent and Manan Sagar's editing is just perfect. Remo D'Souza smartly choreographs the song Rola Pe Gaya as an Indo-Western fusion.

Akshay Kumar underplays his character with absolute sincerity and gives one of the best performances of his career. So used are we with his histrionics that, at times, it seems he is overtly toned down here. But then he remains in his character and is impressive. Rishi Kapoor is superlative in his commanding character. His body language, dialect and expressions are impeccable. Anushka Sharma isn't ignored in this father-son drama and stands on her own. She has a well-etched role and is confident as always. Dimple Kapadia is decent in her part. Hard Kaur is amusing. Geneva Talwar is good.

Nikhil Advani's hold on the film is so strong that you don't want to leave the hall even when the end-credit song is playing. Patiala House simply bowls you over.

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