The drama though limited, is very typical to that of any film which wants a grand finale. This unfortunately, makes the film even more predictable than it already is.

Save a few good performances then, Chalk N Duster is just another story about honest, diligent workers vs. big, bad management; about the common man vs. the system. Other than the ‘education’ angle there is nothing new, which is a shame because this angle actually has a lot of scope to be novel. Especially when it was in the capable hands of Shabana Azmi, Juhi Chawla and Divya Dutta.

…the movie was everything I expected from it – yawn and cringe inducing. But hey, that’s how little it takes to go from “Switch channels if it’s on cable” to “Watch if you have nothing better to do”.

A coronation set in present day India – it is fantasy world, alright. Within that framework too though, Prem Ratan Dhan Payo doesn’t have an interesting tale to tell. Neither do you quite ‘get’ the characters’ motivations nor their greivances. Also, all the extravagance you see in the trailer is all there is. The rest of the film is a visual drab too.

Undoubtedly, it is a mish-mash of ideologies, of film-making aesthetics. I cannot shake off the big question mark – why? Why would a perfectly sane director go about doing this? You can’t even call this experimentation because individually every thing that the film does has been done before. Maybe, true to the film’s theme – it was not a film, it was a business deal.

…is more or less what you expect, more of the same with a slightly better hand at direction. Storywise though if you enjoyed the first installment, you would like this one too. If you were disappointed /upset with that one, it will carry forward to this one. It is not just the fact that it is misogynist for I would have a problem with a man-hating movie too. There is no further insight or deeper look at the relationships.

It is not really a part 2, in that sense, it is a remake.

Jazbaa is superficial. The mother aches for her daughter, but it is the glycerin in those pretty wide eyes that tells you so. All characters are grey which is pretty rare in Hindi films but they don’t come together to make the film interesting. The motivations are unclear which builds an air of mystery but the conclusion so convoluted that the only reaction can be a resounding facepalm.

I am a little surprised that the sleaze wasn’t as bad as I had expected and it was refreshing to see a Bhandarkar film without a stereotypical, gay fashion designer. Yet, it is always a mark against a film when you start talking about the things the film could’ve done wrong, but didn’t.

No romance, zilch comedy in this rom-com. Should they stop trying so hard to remake movies and try their hand at some novel story-telling if not original stories?

The same movie still gets made. New faces, but no value addition to the film, no new stories. So used to expecting the same thing over and over again have we gotten, that we have even stopped getting bored watching them. You shrug, “what else did you expect” and move on.