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Cast:
Tushar Jalota, Mrinalini Sharma |
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Music:
Lalit Pandit |
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Lyrics:
Satish Mutatkar |
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Banner:
Vishesh Films |
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Genre: Drama, Musical |
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Producer:
Mukesh Bhatt |
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Direction:
Raju Khan |
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When Dhokha followed Awarapan which followed Woh Lamhe… that
came after Holiday, we knew that it was high and more time
that Vishesh Films and the three Bhatts changed their
formula. But they do not seem to have learnt their lessons
at all! |
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MTime was when their films were either straight
thrillers or made some subtle point (Murder, Zeher,
Kalyug, Gangster and even flops like Paap). But
somewhere that too got subverted. There is a message
in Showbiz, but it is overdone and so the effect is
underdone!
Time was when they gave breaks or breakthroughs to
music makers, directors, stars and character
artistes with good scripts that made for anything
from average runners to 50-weekers, with a stray
flop in between. Today they have had five flops in a
row. |
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Let us
not forget that the Bhatts were mentors and their films
launching- (or even re-launching-) pads for names like Anu
Malik, Nadeem-Shravan, M.M.Kreem, Kumar Sanu, KK, Shreya
Ghoshal, lyricists Sayeed Quadri and Neelesh Mishra, Vikram
Bhatt, Anurag Basu, Mohit Suri, Emraan Hashmi, Mallika
Sherawat, Shamita Shetty, Amrita Singh, Dino Morea, Shiney
Ahuja and Bipasha Basu. Sadly, in their over-confidence as
mentors they began thinking that a Vishesh protégé had to
become big, and thus they started endorsing mediocre
talents, now too numerous to mention, in every field
including off-key music makers from across the border,
charisma- and talent-less new heroes and heroines, and
filmmakers who were not up to the mark! |
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Showbiz is the latest and hopefully last of such
films. Not that it is as abysmal as some of the
other recent blunders. To straightaway move to its
assets, Lalit Pandit’s score yields two good
numbers, “Kaash ek din” and “Duniya ne dil toda”,
Tushar Jalota is a decent performer who needs better
scripts, Mrinalini isn’t as bad as she was in
Awarapan and we have seasoned performers competently
enacting the kind of roles they have long mastered,
like Gulshan Grover as the sleazy media-baron,
Sushant Singh as the grassroots goonda. |
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The trouble is that the fairly promising first half crashes
with a car-crash sequence, and the script never recovers
either calibre or freshness. But let’s go in order. Showbiz
is about rising pop icon Rohan (Tushar Jalota) who is
supposed to be such a TRP-driver (that’s like believing that
top singers can zoom TRPs sky-high, and we thought that only
Salman Khan’s presence causes music reality shows to break
TRP records!) that some media-persons decide to target him. |
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Rohan loves his agent (Mrinalini) who gladly
loses her virginity to him. But woe befalls
her when thanks to the machinations of the
sleaze-ball channel-wallahs, he is
spotlighted in the media almost dead, but
with a prostitute he is looking for, in a
car crash unwittingly caused by the same
people! The connection between Rohan and the
prostitute of course remains a mystery. |
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machinations of the media are based a lot on reality but
presented in a grossly exaggerated way. The second half
wherein Rohan decides to settle scores personally even if it
means driving a persistent cop up the wall is completely
illogical and senseless. In the end, we have the same old
law-in-my-own-hands drama, where we have a strong feeling
that the wrong kind of pressures were exerted on an
(unimaginative) writer-director team to fabricate a climax
that is the weakest part of a poorly-cooked recipe! |
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What a pity that a bumper year like 2007 has ended
on a double-dud note with the two releases this
week. Till last week, we were looking at a super-hit
entertainer in Welcome and a celluloid masterpiece
in Taare Zameen Par. |
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