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Thursday, October 19, 2006

Bollywood Celebrates With Don And Jaan-e-Mann

Like every year holiday season is back. Other than the country celebrating Diwali and Eid nowadays it’s about the big movies releasing on this weekend, and this year its Don and Jaan-e-Mann.

The Diwali/Eid release syndrome can be traced back to “Hum Aapke Hain Kaun (1994)” A movie that brought back the Family audiences back to theatres after more than a decade long of overdoses of Action or silly college style romances. From then the last few years have created a long list of movies releasing and getting successful on Diwali/Eid weekend.

It’s more than being auspicious for the release. Like some good lessons learnt by Bollywood in marketing movies, this is another thing that they have executed to some perfection. Last year saw average enough movies like Garam Masala and Shaadi no.1 doing well. Obviously with the sheer numbers involved it’s always a safe bet.

Anyway coming back to releases this time. It’s a Khan tussle at the box office but surely both have their territories and fan groups earmarked out. And with everyone running off to see the movies surely both can be declared hits before hand. On one hand NRI audience, City going Multiplex audience and Families tend to bend towards Sharukh movies, Salman rocks at small cities and obviously with the big city audiences too.

Don is one of the movies in a long list of wanna-be remakes of classics from 70’s. This is will be a acid test and some good lesson for other movies following suit. The trailers point towards quite slick and stylish version of the original Amitabh starrer. Though I must say the “Khaike Pan Banaras” number seems to be a let down. Though Shahrukh traditionally not made for such kind of roles and he looking somewhat similar to the bad guy in Duplicate (remember it was a Mahesh Bhatt directed disaster) but I personally am a big fan of Farhan Akhtar and obviously Sharukh. Add to that Kareena and Priyanka and the movie wont be a let down for sure. Kareena in “Yeh Mera Dil” is something to watch out for.

Jaan-e-Mann on the look of it looks to be a love triangle. For figuring that out you definitely don’t need to be a Pythagoras. Whatever is the hatke thing in movie the look of Preity and New York is sadly quite repetitive. But good enough music, presence of Anupam Kher as a dwarf (something which hasn’t happened after Kamal Hasan’s classic Appu-Raja) and Salman-Akshay makes the movie promising. Akshay Kumar the most successful non-Khan actor in Bollywood definitely adds value to the movie in an effort to continue on his string of successes.

But it’s festive season so most of times it doesn’t even matter what you see, but still this Diwali and Eid should be lots of fun for movie-buffs like me.

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