Bollywood Top Ten
- IndiaGlitz, [Thursday,June 24 2004]
Hum Tum:
Saif is the backbone of the entertainer, playing the cool dude with confidence. Karan, a cartoonist working with ÂThe Times of India,Ânever seems to hit it off with Rhea  in their meetings in India, America, or France - though they initially become friends when he shows her the albums of his male and female cartoon characters Hum and Tum. Rhea gets married to Samir but then Karan leans they are no longer together. So he attempts to bring the laughter back in her life by fixing her marriage with his friend Mihir. But fate has something else in store.
Main Hoon Na:
Choreographer Farah KhanÂs debut as director has all the ingredients of a commercial film. Shah Rukh Khan dominates but Suneil, Zayed and Amrita Rao are very good and Sushmita looks alluring. To fulfill the twin purposes of re-uniting his separated family and saving Mission Milaap, an ambitious project of the General towards Indo-Pak friendship, Major Ram Prasad joins a college in Darjeeling where General Amarjeet BakshiÂs daughter Sanjana is under threat from the terrorist Raghavan, and his own step-brother Lucky is a student there. Ram falls in love with his teacher Chandni. But he has to stop Raghavan, who has joined the college as the new professor.
Lakshya:
The story of this refreshing film with Kargil as the backdrop has been penned by Javed Akhtar. Hrithik is a natural as an actor changing from being an aimless young man to an officer with a mission. Karan is undecided about his future. He loves Romila, a smart young girl who decides to become a journalist. Karan ultimately joins the army but deserts, unable to keep up with the strict Army regimen. But he realizes his mistake and goes back to become a man with a mission. He later learns Romila has got engaged. But they meet again when the Indo-Pak conflict has broken out and she is reporting it. Karan learns that Romila broke her engagement because her fiancé asked her to choose between career and marriage.
Raghu Romeo :
Actor-director Rajat Kapoor has taken his own jibe at the entertainment world through the stylized medium of a common man enthralled by the soap opera world. The film has gone to several international festivals and won awards. Raghu is a waiter in a shady night club who seeks refuge in television to forget his woes and worries. He adores Neetaji, the main character of the popular TV show ÂDard Ka RishtaÂ. Mario is a gangster who eyes Sweety, the night club dancer who is in love with Raghu. Mario takes a contract to kill Reshma who enacts the role of Neetaji, and so Raghu abducts her to save her life. Though he succeeds in doing so, he realizes how she is totally different from her screen role.
GirlFriend:
This film was expected to create a storm in the manner ÂFire had done some years earlier. Isha is very good. Tanya and Sapna are close friends. When Tanya is out of town on official work, Sapna falls in love with Rahul and the possessive Tanya who has lesbian tendencies because of child abuse becomes obsessive and tries her best to break up the Sapna-Rahul
love story.
Aan:
The fights between the band of khaki-clad super-cops (Akshay Kumar, Suniel Shetty, Paresh Rawal, Shatrughan Sinha) and the gang of khadi and tuxedo-clad villains (Mohan Joshi, Milind Gunaji, Irfaan Khan, Rahul Dev) are so elaborate, you begin to wonder which came first: the police force, its brutality or films about the brutality of the police force.Don't believe me. Believe your ears. Close your eyes and listen to the over-saturated sounds of this tangy tale of fly-by-night heroics. The onomatopoeic soundtrack is overpowered by gun shots and wailing sirens.
Dev:
It talks about the isolation of the Indian Muslim in the post-Gujarat scenario when even secularists turned partisan, rendering the country's law machinery into a den of horrific violence.Dev, the film's lynch pin and conscience, has a much tougher job in going by his inner voice's steep graph. He starts off as a disgusted cop who point-blank shoots a sneering insulting young man who, by chance, turns out to be Muslim. Dev's fence-sitting political ideology lurches across a legion of metabolic changes. In a corkscrew turning point, he's attacked by a young Muslim, Farhan (Fardeen Khan) who holds Dev responsible for his old father's death during a procession that went all wrong. Here's where Nihalani steps in to show, as always, that oppression isn't peculiar to any one people.
Chot:
The story of Kishan Yadav (Ashutosh Rana)'s struggle to make a life for himself and his kid brother (Rohit)in Mumbai is strewn with potholes. There are gaping holes in the treatment. Better production values could have taken this milkman's tale through a new trail. Viewers find themselves growing warm to the real-life situations and characters, and then growing progressively cold as the director focuses more on building up to a commercially acceptable climax than in bringing the rugged narration to a logical conclusion.
Yuva:
Among the many absorbing facets to Ratnam''s storytelling is the way he uses time passages in the lives of the various characters and the delightfully inventive modes of plotting, whereby different perceptions are simultaneously projected into the various characters'' line of vision. It''s simply impossible to forget the three protagonists and their mesh of karmic adventures. The romantic side to the political parable about a student leader, a hit man and a drifter is brought out so sharply in so little space, you wonder if economy of expression is Ratnam''s mainstay
Murder:
With a story like ÂHawas as it is also based on Adrian LyneÂs ÂUnfaithfulÂ, this film is better made primarily because of Mallika who manages to get deep into the character of an adulterous wife and brings it to life. Simran, bored because her husband Sudhir is too busy in his business in Bangkok, meets and has an affair with former lover Sunny whom she had to leave when she was forced to marry her brother-in-law for the sake of her sisterÂs child. Sudhir hires a detective and is shaken by the truth. But Sunny is found murdered.