Dil Se

Dark Shadows Starring:  Johnny Depp, Michelle Pfeiffer, Eva Green At:  PVR & others Rated:  8/10 Captain Jack Sparrow is back and so is Mad Hatter. This time, however, the two have merged into Barnabus Collins, the gentleman vampire from 200 years ago. But when Johnny Depp decides to rise from the dark after 200 years spent chained in a coffin buried deep in the fishing town of Collinswood, it has to be the rise of the most delectable, the most weird, the most eccentric vampire of all times. He is a vampire you would love to love not because he is dishy in looks but because he is awesome in demeanour. He is funny, he is old-world, he is reckless in bed, he is quirky and he is a brand with no rivals. Thanks to the deep dose of Deppism on  Dark Shadows  (had it not been for Depp,  Dark Shadows would have been, well, languishing in dark shadows), you won’t mind that director Tim Burton has treated a story shabbily, going more for apparellin...

Men in black 3 Starring:  Will Smith, Tommy Lee Jones, Josh Brolin, Emma Thompson At:  PVR & others Rated:  7/10 Well, there’s Agent O and there’s Agent K. So, one expected the film to be, well, OK. The good part about  Men In Black 3,  however, is that it is much more than just OK, which, in itself is quite an unexpected achievement if you go by the limp listlessness of its 2002 predecessor  MIB2. From 1997 to 2012, these men have come of age with space guns, neuralisers and, of course, 3D. Now 3D for going into the summer of 69 where even Andy Warhol is a caged agent and hippies are going around all glazed and unconcerned about America’s epoch moment — the launch of man to the moon — is somewhat of a waste. But that’s just a side niggle easily ignored.  MIB3  is not about technology as much as it is about the delectable leap into a past caught on reel delectably. As Will Smith, with all his one-line humour, takes the jump fro...

If there was anything that hit people harder than Delhi Daredevils’ skipper Virender Sehwag’s muddled decisions at Chennai on Friday night, it was the petrol bomb that the Government exploded all over the public without premise. Both the actions were felling, though the latter will haunt and hurt like a festering wound for a much longer time. While Sehwag can still be forgiven for having lost it in the mind or for being cavalier, the Government’s extreme insensitivity and the deliberate intention to injure is beyond redemption and should now become its undoing. A slew of jokes that popped up on the social networking sites just after the whopping Rs 7-plus increase in per litre of petrol were zany and tickled. One said,  agle janam mujhe  petrol pump  hi dijo , taking off from the title of one popular TV serial. The other showed Batman giving up his lean mean petrol driven vehicle to use Spiderman as his transporter. Yet another one showed a boy proposing to a girl ...

First we had some seldom-heard-before players pompously, and probably even falsely, declaring to a hidden camera that they draw more than their official auction figures. Next, Shah Rukh Khan emerges as a serial offender. First, he is caught smoking inside a stadium for which he is booked. Then he gets into a spat with MCA officials and security guards at Wankhede stadium on a night his team won over Mumbai in style and gets banned for five years, nothing less! The juice was just about drying up in the grapevine when another serial offender, Australian Luke Pomersbach, goes and gropes an American girl. He then beats up her fiancé and gets arrested for molestation and violence! There is still a week to go for IPL5’s grand finale, so one doesn’t really know how the off-field will be behaving with bad news hereon. But all said, the post-Lalit Modi IPL has been overtly wary of controversies. It has completely clothed its cheer-leaders (I can’t quite get used to the  rangarang k...

Did you cry with Aamir Khan last Sunday? Or did you smirk along with the sceptics? The younger generation, always spooked about overt emotionality and definitely not into crying over anything, could only react with scorn. “It was all about the power of glycerine,” a young one insisted with a strange kind of anger towards the show and its host. The other one could not get over the preach mode that Aamir usually gets besotted with. Still others felt there was nothing new in the show, that subjects like female foeticide can be Googled to lakhs and lakhs of articles which say much more than what Aamir did in the 90 minutes that he splashed the small screen on “ aapka  Bharat” time. A band of arguers sought an explanation about why the star fell short of exposing the names and clinics of doctors and the in-laws who had forced six abortions in eight years on a hapless housewife from Gujarat. Some vociferously argued that the show would have been a flat-out but for Aamir Khan’s star ...

T oday is the morning Aamir Khan has promised a revolution of sorts on the Indian television — a new experiment that might change the way programmes are conceived and distributed over the airwaves, also perhaps, ushering in the era of content sharing over and above channel boundaries. Aamir’s new show  Satyamev Jayate  hits the Indian screens in the morning slot and what is new is the fact that it will come on a variety of channels simultaneously, including Doordarshan and Star TV, and will be aired in as many as eight languages! Call it Aamir’s star power, or the leap of his creative imagination, but he has managed to convince Star CEO Uday Shankar to something that would have otherwise been considered harakiri — sharing content on rival channels. Also, in his own imitable style, Aamir has stepped out of the rat race for primetime slot and opted for what years ago, when satellite TV was just coming in, used to be prime slot — Sunday mornings,  Mahabharat  time ...