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Zara Hatke Zara Bachke movie review: Vicky Kaushal-Sara Ali Khan’s love saga meanders between funny and boring

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Zara Hatke Zara Bachke movie review: Vicky Kaushal-Sara Ali Khan’s love saga meanders between funny and boring

We enter the world of Chawlas and Dubeys thinking it’s going to be a laughter riot with some fresh humour, edgy characters and a storyline that doesn’t rely on usual, tried and tested tropes that Bollywood films are used to. And Zara Hatke Zara Bachke makes us believe as it takes off that everything is quite normal and relatable. But, it all soon turns into a loud cringefest with actors overacting beyond our imagination, dramatic dialogues being said one after the other, a joint middle-class Pandit family living in a small house and Punjabi stereotypes served to us on a platter because there is a ‘chant’ bahu who they believe has lured their son and accidentally made them all have a cake that contained ‘egg’. Also read: Sara Ali Khan and Vicky Kaushal reach Lucknow for Zara Hatke Zara Bachke promotions, offer prayers in temple

Zara Hatke Zara Bachke movie review: Vicky Kaushal and Sara Ali Khan feature together for the first time in the Laxman Utekar film.

I never could wrap my head around movie trailers that give out the entire plot. Makers of Zara Hatke Zara Bachke made it worse with two trailers that revealed more than they should have and left very little for us to watch and find out on our own. Directed by Laxman Utekar, the romantic comedy has a lot going on at the same time and it does leave you with many questions at many places.

Zara Hatke Zara Bachke’s premise

Set in a small town of Indore, we are introduced to college sweethearts Kapil Dubey (Vicky Kaushal) and Somya Chawla (Sara Ali Khan), who are happily married and living in a small house alongwith Kapil’s vegetarian and religious family – his parents, maternal uncle and aunt and their young son. While Kapil is a yoga instructor, kanjoos and with a middle-class mentality, Somya comes from a modern Punjabi family, is quite outgoing, makes more money giving coaching classes and dreams big in life. The two are the happiest with each other but Somya does feel the pinch of not having any privacy in the house and is desperate to get her own dream house soon.

Since they can’t afford heavy EMIs, they fall for a government scheme and end up faking a divorce to be eligible for a lottery allotment. Pretending to hate each other, they separate and start to live separately. How far this drama goes and what’s the fate it eventually meets forms the plot.

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What works, what doesn’t

At 132 minutes, the film doesn’t look dragged or needlessly stretched, but definitely has its high and low moments. While the high never gets to a point that it makes you go wow, the lows are definitely loaded with flaws and loopholes.

The story that Utekar has co-written with Maitrey Bajpai and Ramiz Ilham Khan, starts of on a very funny note and keeps the momentum going with harmless jokes, natural light-hearted humour and some comic punches. But post interval, it just meanders without any direction and goes off track.

At this stage, I really wish it stuck to being a romantic comedy and not get so melodramatic at places it didn’t require to. The script has nothing that you haven’t already seen or something that will leave you in splits. If anything, it only gets a bit predictable in the second half and comedy of errors is only left with errors. The flaws in writing and direction are tough to overlook.

Performances somewhat try to salvage the situation but not for too long! Sara shows some restraint in her acting and it’s visible in her actions or reactions. There are some scenes where she goes overboard but never to the extent that it annoys you. Vicky showcases a myriad of emotions and like a smitten lover, he keeps that romance quotient alive onscreen. He portrays the small-town guy pretty convincingly and does keep that raw demeanour intact. I quite liked Vicky and Sara’s onscreen chemistry. I won’t say it’s extraordinary but definitely better than what we’ve seen in frivolous guy-meets-girl kind of rom-coms.

Supporting cast impresses

Among supporting cast, Rakesh Bedi and Sushmita Mukherjee as Somya’s parents are funny and true to their characters. There’s a sequence between Kapil and Somya’s father having drinks in the car where the father is trying to figure the reason behind their divorce. It’s not only well-written but also well performed without looking awkward.

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At some point, a nosy colony guard Daroga (Sharib Hashmi) is also thrown in to make things look funnier. While the actor doesn’t disappoint with this performance and screen presence, I have a bone to pick with makers here for wasting an artiste of his calibre and reduce it to a cameo. You wish his role was more fleshed out.

In fact, the man who plays Kapil’s lawyer friend helping him in the divorce case is a masterclass in overacting and didn’t really merit the screen time he has been given. Amid all this, the crooked and dubious agent Baghwandas (Inaamulhaq) delivers his part pretty well and brings a comic relief in the whole story.

Zara Hatke Zara Bachke’s music

What truly stands out in Zara Hatke Zara Bachke is the music. After a very long time, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed all the songs in a film. Sachin-Jigar’s music and Amitabh Bhattacharya’s lyrics create a whole vibe. Tere Vaaste plays in your mind for long and Phir Aur Kya Chahiye has already topped the charts while Sanjha touches you emotionally. Baby Tujhe Paap Lagega isn’t there in the film but it’s already a peppy party number.

Zara Hatke Zara Bachke is an easy-going family entertainer that won’t bore you. But, it won’t leave a lasting impact either. A few laughs here and there and some loud characters make it watchable, however the story needed way more depth and definitely a better screenplay would have helped.

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Film: Zara Hatke Zara Bachke

Cast: Vicky Kaushal, Sara Ali Khan, Inaamulhaq, Sushmita Mukherjee, Neeraj Sood, Rakesh Bedi, Sharib Hashmi

Director: Laxman Utekar

Movie Reviews

The Idea of You first reviews: Anne Hathaway-Nicholas Galitzine’s rom-com debuts with 100% Rotten Tomatoes score

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The Idea of You first reviews: Anne Hathaway-Nicholas Galitzine’s rom-com debuts with 100% Rotten Tomatoes score

Anne Hathaway, known for her slice of life romantic movies had been involved with serious and pathbreaking stories lately. Fans were eagerly waiting her return in light-hearted love stories for quite some time. The actor has finally made her comeback with Michael Showalter’s rom-com The Idea of You. The movie is being hailed by critics after its premiere at SXSW for its feel-good moments and sparkling chemistry between Anne and actor Nicholas Galitzine. The initial first reviews of the film has got it a stellar response on Rotten Tomatoes and IMDb. (Read more: The Idea of You OTT release date: Catch Anne Hathaway’s sizzling chemistry with Nicholas Galitzine)

The Idea of You starring Anne Hathaway and Nicholas Galitzine is soaring high in its first reviews.

Anne Hathaway shines in feel-good romantic comedy

The Idea of You scored 100% on Rotten Tomatoes on the basis of five reviews so far. A positive review by The Hollywood Reporter read, “The Idea of You functions best as a carefree treat — a feel-good romantic comedy that delivers some laughs and bursts with the magnetism of its lead. That it manages to wiggle in some lessons about self-discovery is merely a bonus.”

Hindustan Times – your fastest source for breaking news! Read now.

The Idea of You is a coming-of-age story on self-awareness

IndieWire lauded Anne’s acting prowess in its critique and wrote, “What makes the character fascinating and unique is how she is not trying to recreate her younger years or reclaim her lost youth. Instead, Solène is just finding herself in this new stage of her life, learning what she wants, and growing into her new self. Life doesn’t end on motherhood, let alone end on 40. There is still plenty of time to find yourself, find love, get a heartbreak and push yourself into more. Hathaway captures this with incredible vulnerability, but also a self-awareness and confidence in what she wants that makes Solène excel at both the comedy and drama of the story. Early on, Hayes says people don’t really know him, they know the idea of him. By the end of this adaptation, we get the full picture of this romance and the two people involved.”

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Anne Hathaway owns every scene in Michael Showalter’s rom-com

While appreciating the storytelling and characters, Variety in its review was quoted as, “The film version finds a solution that honors Lee’s intentions — the way Hathaway’s character puts any number of priorities ahead of her heart — while providing a more satisfying sense of closure for their on-and-off relationship. Galitzine, who played it so proper in Amazon’s Red, White & Royal Blue, turns up the emo charisma while relaxing his body language, letting the puppy dog eyes and tattooed torso do the talking (though the English accent doesn’t hurt). Still, this is Hathaway’s movie, and she owns it: independent, desirable and never, ever desperate. Solène’s a cool mom to Izzy, and when it comes to Hayes … ‘I could be your mother,’ she tells him. ‘But you’re not,’ he fires back. Wouldn’t want to get the wrong idea.”

The movie has also got a stellar 6.2 Score on IMDb. Anne will next be seen in David Lowery’s epic American melodrama Mother Mary.

The Idea of You is scheduled to release on Amazon Prime on May 2, 2024.

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‘She Looks Like Me’ Review: Family Secrets and Public Scandals Brush Shoulders In a Scattered Documentary

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‘She Looks Like Me’ Review: Family Secrets and Public Scandals Brush Shoulders In a Scattered Documentary

A tale of disability, abuse, expectations and family secrets, “She Looks Like Me” from director Torquil Jones has a headstart on most documentaries, given its subject matter’s winding twists and turns. Some key details end up obscured — there’s enough real-life material here to fill an entire miniseries — but the film has an alluring atmosphere, and is rife with enough intimate re-enactments, to be occasionally absorbing.

Dreamlike hymns echo off the walls of an ornate church in the movie’s opening scenes. These have little thematic bearing on the story, but they make for a vibrant aesthetic, appearing and reappearing during moments of quiet reflection. A now-adult Jen Bricker — a woman born without legs — narrates the broad strokes of her childhood, from her adoption in rural Illinois, to the way her parents and three older brothers raised her to believe she could do anything she wanted. Old photos and home videos paint a portrait of a precocious young girl, for whom interests like baseball, basketball and gymnastic tumbling weren’t insurmountable hurdles, but temporary challenges that she would inevitably overcome. However, when she finds herself drawn, as a seven-year-old, to the career of famous teenage gymnast Dominique Moceanu — to whom she bears an uncanny resemblance — family secrets begin to unravel.

While “She Looks Like Me” begins as a tale of Jen’s upbeat resilience and her curiosity about her biological family, its narrative becomes quickly bifurcated. It’s as much about Dominique’s childhood too. She occupies an entirely different world, to which Jones whisks us away by zooming into the corners of the Bricker family’s footage, to find TV screens playing broadcasts of Dominique competing. As Jen eagerly dotes upon the older athlete, she imagines a perfect life for her, but the truth is much darker, and is soon revealed once the movie switches perspective and begins telling Dominique’s story.

The actual connection between the two young girls (now women in their thirties and forties) isn’t all that hard to parse given the details laid out, and the movie is quick to reveal it too. However, despite Jen’s desire to meet her inspiration, “She Looks Like Me” bides its time and delays this tale of search and potential meeting, in favor of telling the stories of its two subjects in great detail. On one hand, it digs into the depths of Dominique’s rigorous upbringing by her gymnast parents, a pair of Romanian immigrants to the U.S. whose customs, according to Dominique, led to a culture of silence. This went hand in hand with an abusive environment on the USA Gymnastics team (a scandal that would eventually become public). On the other hand, it follows the ups and downs of Jen’s story after she leaves home for college, and brushes up against a world that isn’t prepared to treat a disabled woman with the amount of respect she has for herself.

Bodily insecurity is a major part of both women’s stories, from the expectations foisted upon young female gymnasts, to the surprising (and amusingly frank) admissions from Jen, whose self-image issues, it turns out, have little to do with not having legs. As Jen takes up a physically grueling passion of her own — aerial acrobatics — Jones and cinematographer Andrew White present graceful re-stagings of moments from her career, which make deft use of shadow and spotlight, and veer into rousing territory.

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However, the further “She Looks Like Me” goes on, the less it’s able to completely balance its competing narratives. Jen’s tale remains personal and familial. Meanwhile, as Dominique’s half of the movie becomes about her public advocacy, its framing becomes less intimate, widening its scope to include public figures like Simone Biles, rather than family members. This leaves a number of pressing questions unanswered when the two women’s lives finally intersect — questions Jen claims to have pondered as a child.

In pushing these elements into the backdrop, “She Looks Like Me” ends up skimming the surface of an emotionally explosive story, and rushes through its more discomforting beats, to arrive at payoffs that feel only semi-earned. Despite these flaws in its construction, the film proves riveting in isolated moments, enough to make it an intriguing watch, even though two women’s final steps toward much-needed catharsis unfold mostly off-screen.

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Argylle (2024) – Movie Review

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Argylle (2024) – Movie Review

Argylle, 2024.

Directed by Matthew Vaughn.
Starring Bryce Dallas Howard, Sam Rockwell, Henry Cavill, Bryan Cranston, Catherine O’Hara, Dua Lipa, Ariana DeBose, John Cena, Samuel L. Jackson, Sofia Boutella, Toby Haycock, Rob Delaney, Jason Fuchs, Jing Lusi, Alaa Habib, Alfredo Tavares, Tomás Paredes, and Richard E. Grant.

SYNOPSIS:

A reclusive author who writes espionage novels about a secret agent and a global spy syndicate realizes the plot of the new book she’s writing starts to mirror real-world events in real-time.

During a Q&A for her latest entry in her spy novel series Argylle, a reader asks if Elly Conway (Bryce Dallas Howard, giving a performance that, without spoiling anything, demands physicality that she capably pulls off) is also a real spy, much like how James Bond author Ian Fleming and others were. She shoots down the theory, assuring the fan that she is a regular person who puts much research into her writing.

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Directed by Matthew Vaughn, this is an adaptation of the recently released book of the same name (written for the screen by Jason Fuchs), which is penned by a seemingly unknown woman named Elly Conway. There is a massively unhinged conspiracy theory that it is a pseudonym for Taylor Swift, something that I don’t believe for a second and that Matthew Vaughn has gone on record denying, but there are so many silly plot twists here that if the worldwide pop sensation did show up at some point here, somehow it would have fit right in.

Remember that none of this necessarily means Argylle is a smart film. Elly Conway, the character, just also happens to be a writer in the narrative here, finding herself wrapped up in danger and hunted by a nefarious spy organization similar to the one in her stories (there are four books in the fictional universe, and one she is currently writing.) Elly thinks she has the ending of her fifth novel in the series all figured out, ready to send it to print with a cliffhanger ending (Henry Cavill is who she visualizes as Agent Argylle, with John Cena portraying his sidekick Wyatt), except it turns out she will have to keep the story going as there are good and bad spies tracking her who believe that her mind and wherever she takes the story next is the solution to finding the real-life master list of scandalous details regarding career criminals.

While riding the train to visit her mother (Catherine O’Hara), a bearded, unkempt, and invasive but otherwise well-meaning man named Aidan (Sam Rockwell) sits down to read one of Elly’s novels before informing her that he is a spy despite his rugged appearance and that she will have to follow his lead to escape a horde of bad guys. The film immediately launches into a refreshing, creative burst of action that sees Sam Rockwell’s average dude spy battling several generic henchmen, while Elly occasionally sees her Argylle, Henry Cavill, engaged in the same combat, all of which feels like a challenging feat in editing and choreography to pull off, not to mention pleasingly stylistic. 

Would I have preferred if the narrative was far less intentionally stupid and more interested in deconstructing spies as characters and the default, handsomely charming appearances we give them in our minds? Sure, but Matthew Vaughn is still having playful fun during these action sequences, juxtaposing not only fantasy and reality, but Elly and the audience’s perception of what and who a spy can be. Regarding visual flair, it also fits in as a constant reminder that her fiction is coming to life.

However, Argylle is unquestionably a nonsensical movie with so many outlandish reveals that one of the twists is essentially a common trope just so the film can do a hard reset on who and what these characters are and want. From there, several more twists occur but with different characters in the action while inside an entirely different subgenre. The most that can be said is this: it is frustrating that even when everything is seemingly revealed about Argylle, Elly, Aidan, and the rest of her spy characters (played by an ensemble made up of exciting names such as the aforementioned John Cena, Ariana DeBose, and Samuel L. Jackson), it also feels like nothing is learned about any of them as people. Bryan Cranston also leads the rogue spy organization with an army of assassins searching for Elly, who brings his impeccable comedic skills to the villainous character.

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Certain story beats that Matthew Vaughn goes for just feel impossible to properly land amidst all this insanity. There is also no denying that Argylle sags in the middle when it is doing that reset, entering the realm of seemingly endless exposition. Once past that, Matthew Vaughn is alert to how nuts this all is, with characters even commenting so. 

Vaughn also uses this to his advantage to crank the action up to further outrageously gonzo levels, such as a sequence where a character skates with knives placed underneath their shoes, shooting hordes of enemies, or one that incorporates impressively choreographed dance moves and brightly colored smoke bombs into a thrilling shootout. Like most Matthew Vaughn films, there is also an upbeat licensed soundtrack playing to the violence. Admittedly, there is also some shoddy CGI, including a truly rough-looking car chase opening.

Argylle most definitely isn’t Matthew Vaughn’s strongest work as a storyteller, lacking the raw emotional hook from something such as Kingsman: The Secret Service or the political subtext found within X-Men: First Class, but he knows how to take something preposterous and amplify what makes it immensely fun. There are certainly some mixed thoughts to be had here, but there is one glaring positive: bold, bonkers action. He knows how the plant a character trait and pay that off later with some ludicrous and electrifying set pieces. 

Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★ ★

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Robert Kojder is a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association and the Critics Choice Association. He is also the Flickering Myth Reviews Editor. Check here for new reviews, follow my Twitter or Letterboxd, or email me at MetalGearSolid719@gmail.com

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=embed/playlist

 

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