Rajneeti (2010)

It wouldn’t be wrong to say that Bollywood fans have been craving for good cinema since quite a while and Prakash Jha’s Rajneeti seems to quench their thirst well. There is no doubt that the movie lacks Bollywood masala, glamorous clothes, dances numbers and romance, which Indian cinema thrives on but there’s something in this film which sets it apart from the rest!

Rajneeti is a complicated story about politics, democracy and elections in India. It’s a story that shows how some people have control on the lives and destinies of millions. It’s a story about how political ambitions make a person extremely bitter and violent. It’s a story about how the young generation becomes wildly involved in politics after the death of the family’s head. It’s a story about how an ultimate outsider to politics, Samar Pratap (Ranbir Kapoor) comes from abroad for his uncle’s birthday and gets involved into the battle-ravaged ground of family rivalry and becomes the mastermind behind the entire political warfare. It’s a story about how his life changes from a peaceful one to one that contains a lot of aggression! It’s a story of the woman who loves him and lost him and the one he loved and lost! It’s a story of a simple man’s fall into the moral hell, politics. To cut it short, it’s a story of the ugly side of Indian democracy, politics and beyond.

Rajneeti is a great attempt by Prakash Jha to shed light on the many social problems that prevail in the Indian society and he tries his best to expose them through this film. It also shows how politics is driven by corruption, greed and most of all revenge. Nothing more can be said about the plot because that would confuse you even further.

Ranbir Kapoor can easily be called the lead of Rajneeti even though there are many other actors with equally important roles. I never doubted Ranbir’s potential but this role was just performed to excellence. The way he has acted his role with such intensity shows that these young actors are not just eye candy and they can actually do serious parts. His acting in Rajneeti could easily give the best actors of Bollywood a run for their money. Throughout the film, his emotions were intense, his dialogues strong, his actions just perfect and can I also please add his looks were absolutely killing?

Surprisingly, Katrina too fit in the role perfectly, even though I never thought she would be able to do justice to such a serious performance. Considering Rajneeti is her first mature role, she has done a great job and the way she portrays her emotions leaves you in tears and shows that she has matured as an actress. Arjun Rampal has also shown great acting skills and portrayed the role of a violent politician perfectly while Ajay Devgan is just another actor in the film and it’s clearly not even near one of his best performances. The supporting cast has done an excellent job too.

The songs were beautiful especially ‘More Piya’, ‘Bheegi Si’ and ‘Ishq Barse’ and anyone can get addicted to them easily. Direction was beautifully done, the script was very well written and the dialogues were extremely strong, which breathed life into different roles. Coming to the technical side of Rajneeti, the camera work was brilliant, the art direction was superb and the background score was just ideal.

However, Rajneeti does come with a few flaws. To begin with, it takes a bit too much time to settle down the plot and narration and you need to watch it with a lot of concentration otherwise it will only make your head spin! 40 minutes into the movie and all that has been shown is politics. Those who want to see Ranbir and Katrina spark on the screen will be extremely disappointed as there are hardly five scenes of them together. I also believe that there were a few (read: very few) parts where the movie seemed stretched and a little more editing would have made it is flawless but this does not mean that one could get bored during the movie!

All in all, it’s one of those movies that make you enjoy every part of the film and the popcorn as your eye balls pop out at literally every scene and at times you even jump in your chair out of shock with what just happened. It makes you feel the money and time was well spent as you walk out of the cinema.

Whether Rajneeti makes millions on the box office or not is still a question considering a hefty budget of 20.91 million was spent on it and recovering such huge amounts is not that easy, but it’s one movie you shouldn’t miss this summer. It shows how Indian cinema is much more than sugar coated stories and happy endings – Hafsah Sarfraz

Cast and Production Credits

Year – 2010, Genre – Drama/Action, Country – India, Language – Hindi, Producer – Prakash Jha, Director – Prakash Jha, Music Director – Wayne Sharpe, Pritam Chakraborty, Aadesh Shrivastava, Shantanu Moitra, Cast - Ajay Devgn, Nana Patekar, Ranbir Kapoor, Naseeruddin Shah, Arjun Rampal, Katrina Kaif, Manoj Bajpai, Sarah Thompson, Darshan Jariwala, Shruti Seth, Nikhila Tirkha, Chetan Pandit, Vinay Apte, Kiran Karmarkar, Daya Shankar Pandey, Jahangir Khan, Ravi Khemu

PaathShaala (2010)

Recent times in Bollywood have seen filmmakers producing movies which are based on the concept of the flawed education system which children and teenagers are trying to cope with. Some movies projected this concept realistically, managing to capture the hearts and minds of many people, and hopefully teaching some much needed lessons along the way. Taare Zameen Par, and the very popular 3 Idiots (which was the biggest hit of 2009) are some movies that dealt with children and students and their issues (and it is also a coincidence that both these movies had Aamir Khan either as the producer/ director or as the actor) However, here is a movie which tried to show the same message and concept, but went horribly wrong.

PaathShaala is about a school that has been the best in Mumbai for over 20 years, and suddenly, the Principal (played by Nana Patekhar) decides to bring about some changes to the system to try to update the school and its policies. However, in doing so, he lets some morons take over the school, who only care about raking in profits, rather than focusing on the quality of education. All hell breaks loose, when the students start rebelling, supported by the entire staff of the school, as nobody can understand why the principal is letting the school be run by some of the most insensitive people in the world.

Shahid Kapoor plays the character of the new teacher who tries to help students in confronting the Principal, who till the end doesn’t explain what suddenly came over him.

Ayesha Takia plays the character of the school’s nutritionist, who is very close to the children and loves them as her own.

Adding to these three stars, there is an entire cast of teachers who played important roles in the movie. However, here’s the first disappointment: All those who were watching the movie in hopes of watching Shahid Kapoor prance around the building are in for a shock as the movie isn’t based on him, and he doesn’t grace the screen as often as we would have liked him to.

However, while promoting the movie Shahid did say that he wasn’t the main protagonist and had a 60 minute screen-space in the movie. So that was something that should have been expected.

The second disappointment was the amount of over-acting (and under-acting) some of the actors were doing. There were scenes showing so much exaggeration, and for a movie trying to portray a message, some parts of it weren’t realistic at all.

For one, there was horrible injustice being done to the children, that’s fine. Good enough reason to feel bad for the children. But everyone in the movie was always crying! The kids were crying, the teachers would start crying, even their tough-as-a-rock sports coach was teary eyed, at things that seemed so over-exaggerated that one cannot imagine them actually happening in private schools anywhere. You finally lose sympathy for any character in the end, since the fact that nobody could act out these emotions properly, and the silly music that would start playing each time somebody was about to start crying!

Shahid Kapoor looked good in the movie, but only when you weren’t looking at his face. Never did he ever smile, or look angry, or upset. He always maintained a stiff, emotionless expression, and talked so softly and slowly, that you could fast forward the scene for a few seconds, and he would still be talking about the same thing when you resumed the movie.

Nana Patekhar played the cold, quiet subdued card just fine, and was an object of fear and respect amongst the students despite the fact that he barely ever got angry.

Ayesha Takia played her character just fine too, but it was nothing memorable, just like some of the other various child stars and the teaching staff, who were either over-doing it, or just not delivering anything.

The music wasn’t nicely done either, and was a pain to listen to during the movie. The random songs didn’t help either, as all they were doing was simply increasing the duration of the movie.

The movie tried to show a certain message. However, it was definitely not a good attempt. It did not entertain; it did not strike the right emotions in the viewer; it was way too lengthy and repetitive. The ending also was very clichéd, long and uninteresting.

It might touch some people, or at least some parts of it. But in general, the movie is something one can simply read about to know what happens in it. But going through the entire two and a half hours seem like an unfair punishment for anyone – Manal Faheem Khan

Cast and Production Credits

Year – 2010, Genre – Drama, Country – India, Language – Hindi, Producer – Shaira Khan , Ahmed Khan, Director – Milind Ukey, Music Director – Hanif Shaikh, Cast - Nana Patekar, Sushant Singh, Ali Haji, Shraddha Arya, Shahid Kapoor, Ayesha Takia Azmi, Swini Khara, Dwij Yadav, Avika Gor, Saurabh Shukla, Nassar Abdulla, Sanatan Modi, Anjan Shrivastava, Vicky Ahuja, Preeti Kopikar, Anjan Shrivastava, Sunny Singh, Shraddha Arya, Chetan Motiwala, Rishabh Jain, Sagar Kale