Deca-dance
Jhoom Barabar Jhoom
Abhishek Bachchan as a fast-talking con artist. Again. Preity Zinta as a haughty miss. Again. In a film where nothing much goes on, except a bit of bouncy backchat, a few glib one-liners, and oh yes, scads of bright costumery, scintillating scenery, and frantic frippery: That’s the sum total of Jhoom Barabar Jhoom.
Shaad Ali Sahgal steals a couple of ideas from an old Hollywood movie (two people meet at a railway station, and create back-stories to ward off attraction). Shaad lifts his hero from his earlier hit (Abhishek is a Punjabi from Southhall here, not the UP ka chhora from Bunty aur Babli), but same difference.
So this is what we get: A crowded London station, Abhishek and Preity toying with their sandwiches, trying desperately to appear disinterested, Bobby Deol cocking a Cockney snook, innit, and Lara Dutta faking, very passably, a French accent. We get an impossibly-long stretch limo, a fancy 30-room mansion, a luxe hotel, a dance sequence with 100 extras in front of the Eiffel Tower, and a couple of pretty Parisian boulevards.
We also get a movie which is all about The Look. Each character is designed within an inch of their lives. Abhishek is all hoodies, tees, and facial hair. Preity does short skirts like they were going out fashion. Lara wears her cleavage on her sleeve. Bobby is resplendent in curls, velvet jackets and stubble. And Amitabh, the journeyman-wayfarer-sutradhar is so OTT, he’s almost classy, in his technicolour dreamcoat, a Tyrolean hat, feather sticking out at a jaunty angle, and a double-barreled guitar. There’s so much to be dazzled with, who needs a story?
It’s possible to be surface and slick and barrels of fun, but for that you need to be inventive and do new. Window-dressing is not enough. Shaad Ali’s Bareilly-Bahraich conceits in Bunty aur Babli may have been fake, but they hung by a tale, his characters had verve, and he lucked out with Kajra re. Jhoom’s lack of a plot is exacerbated by the oh-no-not-that-again feeling.
Amitabh’s singing minstrel, who doesn’t have a word of dialogue, and who comes on for 10 minutes or so, is the film’s most interesting prop.

Team work
Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer
THE story is bare minimum, the action sequences don’t light up the screen. But that’s wise of director Tim Story, whose film would have been competing hopelessly in the action stakes with the likes of Superman, Spider-man and Pirates. Instead he focuses, with some success, on what puts his comic book superheroes apart: That there are four of them.
Fantastic (or Reed, played by Ioan Gruffudd), Invisible Woman (Sue, played by Jessica Alba), Human Torch (Johnny, by Chris Evans) and The Thing (Ben, or Michael Chiklis) are different people brought together by an accident. In Fantastic Four I, they had been exposed to cosmic radiation during a space mission, giving them superpowers.
In the sequel, the four are still struggling to adjust, both to their powers and to living in a media-created fishbowl. They aren’t overtly nice or overtly heroic, just that danger won’t leave them alone. If Sue wants to go away somewhere and quietly raise a “normal” family with Reed, her brother Johnny loves the spotlight. If Reed is a mad scientist, Ben longs for the days he didn’t look like a rock.
The Silver Surfer is the agent of Galactus, who is going around the universe devouring planets. Needless to say, his latest target is the Earth. In their mission to stop the Surfer, the Fantastic Four have to team up with the villainous Dr Victor Doom. While he seemed to have died in Part I, he has inexplicably come back to life in the sequel.

Sorry, love
Breaking And Entering
CRAFTSMAN Anthony Minghella’s Breaking and Entering climaxes in a welter of apologies. Everyone in London, it seems, has cause for remorse and you tend to lose count of the number of times “I’m sorry” is uttered onscreen.
Breaking moves through a series of moral and social crises as if they were yoga poses. The star of the movie is Jude Law, as Will, a successful architect who shares a sleek townhouse with Liv (Robin Wright Penn), his half-Swedish girlfriend and her 13-year-old daughter, Bea (Poppy Rogers), who has autism. Bea’s condition, Liv’s remoteness and Will’s absorption in work combine to put a strain on their domestic relations, and Will’s nerves are further shaken by a series of break-ins at the office.
One of the perpetrators is an acrobatic teenager named Miro (Rafi Gavron), half-Muslim and half-Serb, who lives with his mother, Amira (Juliette Binoche), in a battered housing project. When Will discovers Miro’s involvement in the thefts, he does what any tormented bobo architect would do in his place, namely, has sex with the boy’s mother.
What saves Breaking from foundering in earnest self-regard is Minghella’s London; the director’s eye ranges over contemporary urban geography, finding beauty in building sites and alleyways.

A.O.SOTT/NYT