Movies This Week

The Usual Suspects

The plot starts of with a man being murdered. From the conversation that happens just before murder, it appears that the killer is already known to the victim. He dies in a boat which is also the venue of so many other murders on the same night. Only a cripple(Kevin Spacey) and a Hungarian survive. The cripple starts narrating the story to the Customs Special Agent, Kujan, going back by 6 weeks. A group of 5 people gets interrogated in a case involving a missing truck carrying weapons. The cripple narrates how Keaton, Fenster, McManus, Hockney and Verbal (the cripple) - the 5 people then team together and gets involved in the story leading up to the massacre in the boat. Verbal mentions a lawyer named Kobiyashi on his narration, who makes the group to get involved in the task on the boat, on the advice of his boss. Further, the Agent gets to know of a man named Keyser Soze (the boss of Kobiyashi) from the injured Hungarian. Verbal gives the background of Keyser Soze and picturizes him as the ultimate Devil and also tells he is the one who killed Keaton (the first scene). But later he agrees that he saw a man (which he believes to be Keyser Soze) shooting, but he did not actually see Keaton dying. The Agent finds out who is Keyser Soze and convinces Verbal too. Verbal breaks out on finding who is Keyser Soze. Once Verbal leaves the office, the Agent senses something fishy and what gets revealed next is the twist in the tail (tale).

The plus point to the movie is the screen play and the narrating style. Very good performance from Kevin Spacey. The actor who plays the agent, Chazz Palminteri does a wonderful job. Some of the dialogues are very good. One cannot forget this one. "The greatest ever trick that the Devil pulled was convincing the world that he did not exist".

Bheja Fry

This has long been on my movie list; had a chance to see this week. Absolutely no masala stuff! The story is about how a talkative person gets involved in a tussle between a husband and wife. Inspite of his good intentions, he messes up everything. Ranjeet Tadani invites "talent" for his special dinner on every friday and makes mockery. He gets to know of Bharat Bhushan (Vinay Pathak), the talkative character who thinks too high of his singing talents and invites him for his special dinner. But unfortunately he breaks his back and is unable to go to the dinner. In the meantime, Bhushan arrives at Ranjeet's house. Sheetal, wife of Ranjeet leaves giving a message on phone that she will never return. From this point onwards, the story goes about how Ranjeet traces the whereabouts of Sheetal with Bhushan making a mess of every move. Further, an ex-girl-friend, ex-friend of Ranjeet, a tax-inspector - friend of Bhushan enters into the story and makes it humorous to the core. The movie even ends with a typical mess-up by Bhushan.

Cheeni Kum

Another movie which was on my list a while ago, but got missed then. The plot is about a 64 year old man and 34 year old lady falling in love with each other. The story does not put forward a good reason for the 34 year old lady to fall in love with the old man. There are a very few occasions in the story where it deals with this complicated 64-34 relationship. Otherwise, it seems to be an ordinary movie where that 64-34 could have easily been replaced by 25-25 or something. There can be many issues, psychological and social, which could have been brought up. But the movie misses out on those and tries to make a single point - there is no age for love, with no sufficient back-up. The Hyderabadi Zaffrani Pulav and the Umbrella sets up the stage and are the main characters in the first half. The "Sexy" little-girl is nice. Her beyond-age comments and remarks are awesome and interesting, especially the "Happy Sad" and the "Sad Sad" dialogues. In some other scenes also, the dialoges stand out. The background score by Ilayaraja is good. In fact, in most part of the movie, he keeps it silent. Lead roles by Amitabh and Tabu.