Daawat-e-Ishq ..

Cast: Aditya Roy Kapur, Parineeti Chopra, Anupam Kher, Karan Wahi

Direction: Habib Faisal

Duration: 2 hours

Avg Readers Rating: 

Story: Wafting flavours of love simmer via the best-known route possible - stomach. The daawat looks good, but will it leave romantics with an unforgettable taste of love?

Review: Statutory Warning: Do not watch this film on an empty stomach, lest the growling belly overpowers the sweet of this gastronomic love affair.

Sunday, November 02, 2014 - By Unknown 0

NIGHTCRAWLER ...Full story

Dan Gilroy's thriller "Nightcrawler" is about about an amateur cameraman who parlays his eye and his nerve into a successful small business, deceiving, manipulating and exploiting everyone who stands in his way. Shot by Paul Thomas Anderson's regular cinematographer Robert Elswit through what could be a Night Vision Rot filter, it's a film about how sociopaths get over on everyone else, and a portrait of a disturbed, marginal loner that would fit perfectly on a double bill with "Taxi Driver" and "Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer." It's also a media satire in the spirit of "Network" and "To Die For" that takes the slogan "If it bleeds, it leads" to its horrifyingly logical conclusion. It's a comedy.

The movie's hero, Lou Bloom (Jake Gyllenhaal), is a man living on the fringes. He's first seen trying to cut through a chain-link fence to steal scrap that he can sell for pocket money. While driving late at night, he happens upon cameramen filming a car wreck. He asks the lead cameraman (Bill Paxton) what TV station they work for, and learns that they're freelancers who monitor police radios, chase down wrecks and fires and homicides, and sell their video footage to the highest bidder. The rates aren't great, but they're better than what Lou is used to, so he buys a camera and gets in on the action. 

This leads him to a local station whose news director, Nina Romina (Rene Russo), has been up and down the dial, as a certain sitcom's theme song once sang, and needs to raise her newscast out of last place to keep from getting fired. Any idealism she had was ground out of her years ago; only desperation remains, and she speaks frankly to Lou from the moment she meets him, sensing a kindred spirit. (She has no idea how kindred: soon enough he'll cajole, pressure and even scare her into unleashing her own inner Lou.) Nina tells him to avoid covering crime in poor or nonwhite neighborhoods because nobody cares about it; the sexiest crime stories are ones involving affluent white folks. At one point she flat-out tells Lou that the newscast's aesthetic could be boiled down the the image of "a screaming woman running down the street with her throat cut."  The newscasters' warning "These are extremely graphic images" is not, of course, a warning; it's a come-on. 

Sensing a golden opportunity, Lou feeds Nina footage that's more artless than the stuff offered by other local crews, but much bloodier. It starts with shots of a domestic killing that he obtained by sneaking past crime tape and wandering around inside the gore-strewn house (blurred by Nina's technicians, but only because they're required to blur it) and escalates, to the point where Lou is subtly goosing circumstances in order to produce more violence and chaos which he can then tape and sell. Lou and his easily cowed assistant, Rick (Riz Ahmed), breach barriers they aren't supposed to breach, and get close enough to police investigators and firefighters and EMT's that they break their concentration and sometimes interfere with their work, but their literally in-your-face footage sets them apart from teams that film from a discreet distance, with a zoom lens. 

Lou is also a sick person who, on first glance, might strike you as a reasonable, personable guy. He talks like a Tom Cruise go-getter from a 1980s hit—a comparison furthered by certain filmmaking choices, such as the "inspirational" montages of Lou hustling toward success while James Newton Howard's triumphant retro synth-pop pounds in our eardrums. The hero gets a number of Stick-it-to-the-Man applause lines, the best of which is a kiss-off to a rival who has figured out that Lou is for real and wants to co-opt him rather than compete with him. "I feel like grabbing you by the ears right now and screaming, 'I'm not fucking interested,'" Lou tells him, in the sort of tone one might reserve for, "What are your store hours?" or "I'll have a mushroom omelet, cooked with very little butter." 

But it would be a mistake to suggest that "Nightcrawler" is told from Lou's point-of-view, much less that it endorses his behavior. It's too attuned to the anxiety and misery of the people he manipulates to validate such a reading. But it does put a subtle editorial frame around Lou's odyssey.  "Nightcrawler" is the blackly comedic, Neo-noir, night-people thriller that I wanted the Travis-Bickle-as-Superman fantasy "Drive" to be. Like "Drive," it could be described as the best picture Michael Mann never made: a film about a private, ruthless loner who pursues his dream his way, always, and whose path through the world is marked by the bloodstains of the people he's rolled over. 

This is a classic film, not just because every scene and line is casually beautiful and devoid of extraneous touches, but because its tone is mercilessly exact. Gilroy, a first-time feature director who has written or cowritten many movies, including "The Bourne Supremacy," knows what he wants to say, and how to say it. He maintains just the right amount of distance from Lou, so that we get a buzz from his audacity while finding him revolting. We're not so much looking down on Lou as peering into an abyss that exists, to some degree, within everyone: the lightless home of that little voice that whispers, "You've just gotta do what makes you happy," and "It is easier to ask forgiveness than permission." 

There's a lively satirical aspect, and it's not confined to TV news or journalism in general, or even the modern, social media-driven culture of continuous surveillance and voyeurism. The entire film is, among other things, an attempt to treat certain American myths straightforwardly, within the context of a somewhat realistic drama, the better to pursue them to their bitter conclusion. It's warning against being fooled (in life) by people who remind us of can-do-All-American-hotshot heroes in fiction: incarnations of apple pie capitalism who see what they want (fame, money, a job, a mate), and go after it, and refuse to take no for an answer, even if the "no" is delivered through tears.  

That tabloid journalism rewards the shameless doesn't count as a breaking news flash, but "Nightcrawler" is not interested in stoking our outrage over what we already know. It's using TV news as a means to an end—to show how a man who presents as "normal," even "likable" and "motivated" and "capable," can be evil, and seduce us into being evil, too. Lou's inspirational aphorisms are chillingly funny once you realize they're devoid of generosity and decency, and that he sees other people only as possessions, allies or obstructions: "I believe that good things come to those who work their asses off." "Television news might be something I love as well as something I'm good at." Primitive cultures believe a photograph can steal a soul. This man is a master thief

Sunday, November 02, 2014 - By Unknown 0

Rajinikanth’s ‘Lingaa’ teaser out, goes viral within hours of release

Written by Sunitra Pacheco , Edited by Sarika Sharma | Mumbai | Posted: November 1, 2014 5:00 pm | Updated: November 1, 2014 7:39 pm

After a long wait, the makers of ‘Lingaa’ finally released the teaser of South film God, ‘Rajinikanth’s upcoming Tamil film.

The teaser is everything we hoped it would be – sharp, exciting and loaded with action. Rajinikanth, who somehow keeps getting younger each year, looks fantastic in the film. We also get a glimpse of B-Town beauty Sonakshi Sinha, who is making her Tamil debut in the actioner.

Within minutes of the teaser’s release, it went viral on social networking sites. Hashtags #SuperstarLingaaTeaser and #lingaateaser also began to Trend on Twitter. The first look of the film featuring the superstar was released on social media platforms on the occasion of Ganesh Chaturthi. Directed by KS Ravikumar, ‘Lingaa’ also stars Anushka Shetty. Double Oscar winner AR Rahman has composed the film’s music.

Saturday, November 01, 2014 - By Unknown 0

Microsoft releases new Outlook for Mac

Washington: Microsoft has released a new Outlook for Mac before its designated time.

Mashable reports that Microsoft rolled out an updated version of Outlook for Mac for Office 365 users Friday and revealed new details about when the rest of its Office software will be available.

The company wrote in a blog post that this release offers a more familiar and consistent experience between Outlook on the PC, Outlook on the web and Outlook Web App (OWA) for iPad, iPhone and Android devices

The latest and redesigned version of Outlook offers improved scrolling and faster loading along with an improvised Exchange functionality. 

Saturday, November 01, 2014 - By Unknown 0

Chelsea Handler Stands Up for Freed Nipples

Chelsea Handler pushed Americans forward in our struggle to get over hang-ups about exposed female nipples on Thursday night. On Instagram, Handler posted a photo of herself parodying Russian president Vladimir Putin's famous topless horse-riding photo. Instagram, not appreciating the hard work that had to have gone into getting Handler on a horse with her boobs out, took the picture down. Handler protested, putting up a screenshot of the "community guidelines" warning she got, writing, "If a man posts a photo of his nipples, it's ok, but not a woman? Are we in 1825?"

To be fair, I think that both men and women generally felt, in 1825, like they couldn't walk around with their nipples out. (A couple decades before is a different story, as see-through dresses were the rage in the very early 1800s. The more you know!) But her larger point stands: Men are so free to share their nipples with the world that world leaders have no problem letting everyone know what they've got going on under their suits and ties, but women's nipples are still treated like looking at them in public might blind you.

This discrepancy cannot be explained solely by the fact that women grow breasts as a secondary sex characteristic. After all, men aren't required to hide their secondary sex characteristics (beards) from the world in shame, though many parts of Brooklyn would be more aesthetically pleasing if they would. Not to mention that the parts of the chest area that are woman-only—the non-nipple parts—are not only acceptable but welcome in public spaces. Cleavage is one of the longest-standing popular accessories a woman can employ. The only part of a woman's chest that is considered too daring to display is the part that we share with men, the nipple. 

The taboo around the nipple encapsulates how ridiculous and contradictory our expectations about women, fashion, and sexuality really are. On the one hand, women are expected to be sexually appealing, even to the point of mutilating our feet to achieve that forever-sexy mystique. But we're also expected to avoid being toosexual, or else we're considered scandalous. The conflicting demands reduce us to counting inches of cloth and arbitrarily deciding that the nipple is a step too far. We'd all be better off in a more sensible society where women could walk around topless to look sexy but wearing 3-inch heels was considered over the top.

I'm not sure if Handler knew it, but she has come out in support of the Free the Nipple campaign, which supports public breast-feeding and fights against laws banning nipples in public. I don't have the ovaries myself to buck the system and walk around nipples out. But that's all the more reason I salute nipple warriors like Handler and Rihanna, who show it off and don't care what you think about it. Perhaps they will be trailblazers, creating a new world where women can wear whatever the hell they want without worrying about a "wardrobe malfunction."

Friday, October 31, 2014 - By Unknown 0

Deepika Padukone to romance Salman Khan?

Mumbai: Katrina Kaif may have been lucky enough to deliver blockbusters with all the three Pathans- Aamir Khan , Salman Khan and Shah Rukh Khan – of Hindi cinema but her contemporary Deepika Padukone isn’t far behind.

The dimpled hottie has worked in three films with SRK but is yet to romance Mr.Perfectionist Aamir and ‘Dabangg’ Salman!

However, if the latest buzz is anything to go by, then the leggy lass may soon share screen space with the ‘Being Human’ hunk in a Yash Raj film.

Reports suggest that the newest Box Office Queen and Brand Salman are being considered by the big banner for a film which will be directed by Ali Abbas Zafar.

Salman had teamed up with Yash Raj Films for the first time in 2012 for ‘Ek Tha Tiger’ which saw him romance his former real life girlfriend Katrina. The film turned out to be one of the biggest hits of Bollywood in the recent times.

And it would be interesting to see if Deepika and Salman’s onscreen chemistry outdoes that of Salman and Katrina’s.

There has been no official confirmation regarding the film as yet. But we do hope to see Deepika play Salman’s love interest on the silverscreen.

Friday, October 31, 2014 - By Unknown 0