BOLLYWOOD REVIEWS

Dileep Singh (Raja Chaudhary) the protagonist of Gulaal and the film have much in common. While Raja plays to the tunes of his manipulators, in the film the director is the manipulator who always has his way that can also be looked at as Anurag Kashyap's directorial signature.

Gulaal unlike “No Smoking” has a fairly earthly plot- a naïve man caught in the politics of ambitious, powerful and shrewd people. Dileep joins a law college in a fictitious Rajsthan city Rajpur, where he falls into the hands of a series of manipulators leading to his emotional devastation.

Provocative, evocative, violent, aggressive, poetic, commentative, powerful - prefix whatever adjective you will. Gulaal is all this, and much more. Gulaal is new Indian cinema at its angst-ridden best. It is the full-blown emergence of one of Indian cinema's most-original voices in recent years, who goes by the name of Anurag Kashyap.

Gulaal in Kashyap's film has nothing to do with the Indian festival of colour, Holi, or the colours that one plays with in the festival. Here it symbolises blood - blood that signifies relationships, betrayal, loyalty, patriotism, and many other hues of life itself.

After Rajat Kapoor's magnificent "Raghu Romio", here comes another brilliant reflection on our lives held hostage by the small screen. Television runs as the theme underneath the horror-thriller garb of 13B, a movie with a tagline "fear has a new address". However, it's one such little film, that to say the least, delivers much more than it promises!

Sushmita Sen, Randeep Hooda and Suchitra Krishna got into a minor catfight just on the eve of the release of Karma Aur Holi (originally called Karma Confessions Aur Holi). The issue was - Sushmita refused to promote the film, saying it is a badly-made film, and the other two sort of said that was an unethical thing to do after having acted in it. This, even as gossip writers claimed the real reason was some extended kissing the former Miss Universe had done on screen with her now ex-boyfriend Hooda. Well, what a waste, all this catfight was. Yes, the kisses are there, but the film is so devoid of any artistic soul, that nobody is likely to even notice them, because nobody is likely to even watch this amateurish effort...

Vikram K Kumar has an interesting premise for making 13B, simultaneously released in Hindi and Tamil with minor cast rejigs in the two versions. During the 2006 Assembly elections in Tamil Nadu, AIADMK promised 20 kg of free rice every month, ten sovereigns of gold for the daughter's wedding and a computer free to every eligible family if elected. DMK countered it by saying every eligible family would also get a free TV set. As we all know, the TV won. That, says Vikram, short film Silent Scream had won a National Award in 1999, think of developing a story with the ubiquitous TV set at the centrestage.

Delhi 6 at first appears to be the oft-repeated tale of an outsider viewing India for the first time. In this case the outsider happens to be an NRI Rohit (Abhishek Bachchan) who brings his ailing grandmother back to her haveli in the colony Delhi 6 where Hindus and Muslims lead a seemingly smooth existence and where a mysterious "monkeyman" has terrified the residents.