Jodhaa Akbar

In a standout scene, Jodhaa Bai and Jalal-ud-din-Akbar are sitting across each other. She’s written something she wants her husband to read. After waffling for a couple of minutes, he returns the beautifully-inscribed parchment to her, confessing he can neither write nor read: he was raised to be a warrior, not a litterateur. She lowers her eyelashes and says, “Ek patni apne pati ka naam kaise le sakti hai.” He gazes at her, love-struck, as she blushes becomingly: the thing between them is electric.

It’s confirmed. Dhoom 2 was no fluke. Hrithik Roshan and Aishwarya Rai are the hottest pair of lovers Bollywood has. You forget that these two are trying to be Shahenshah Akbar and his Mallika-e-Hindustan: this is a man and woman in the eternal act of finding love. And only in this moment, and others like this one, does Ashutosh Gowarikar’s Jodhaa Akbar spark to life, because this is the territory the director can traverse sure-footedly. He takes us into their boudoir, where they lie next to each other, a gossamer net keeping them less than an inch apart: you can sense their yearning. A sword duel between them turns into a stylised mating dance, where breaths mingle yet lips don’t meet.

For the rest, where history comes crowding in, Gowarikar keeps his distance. The altercations between hungry-for-power siblings and an emperor struggling to rule a fractious bunch of satraps, the discussions between Akbar and his wise men, the taking stock of his praja by a wise and compassionate ruler, the epic scale computer-generated battle scenes—are all observed at arm’s length. Clearly, even if he has done the smart thing and called his movie more imagination than history, the director wants to make doubly sure that he won’t get more slammed than he already has, in the authenticity department.

But even if you discount all the arguments being trotted out by angry historians and Rajputs—some claiming Jodha was theirs, some saying that she didn’t exist-you can’t get over the fact that Jodhaa Akbar, at nearly three-and-a-half hours, is much too long. The editing is bland, and the pace so slack in so many places that you drift off till the next time Ash and Hrithik come near each other, resplendent in their industrial strength jewellery and glittering costumes.

Neither Roshan nor Rai, despite the best efforts of the stylists, look like they belonged back then: he is pure eye candy, stripped down to his bronzed skin; she sports a stunning makeup-less appearance which doubtless takes longer than pancake to put in place. Except for Raza Murad, whose Urdu diction is pitch perfect, everyone else struggles: muaaff kar dijiye, they go, and it’s hard to keep from laughing. Of the ensemble, Ila Arun, with her raccoon eyes (she plays the evil dai-ma who tries to come between the lovers), and Sonu Sood (he is Jodhaa’s bhai-saa, who teaches her the fine art of duelling with swords), fill out their roles.

Watch Jodhaa Akbar for its beguiling moments of amour. The rest is window dressing.

Musical overdose

August Rush

To describe August Rush as a piece of shameless hokum doesn’t quite do justice to the potentially shock-inducing sugar content of this contemporary fairy tale about a homeless, musically gifted miracle child. August Rush hears music everywhere. Whether it’s the wind in the grass or the roar of a subway, the sounds of the world are a symphony to his ears, and the movie’s soundtrack offers a Hollywood realisation of a John Cage idea in which all sounds are music.

August, introduced as Evan Taylor, has absolute faith that music will mystically reunite him with his parents, who he is certain must be somewhere out there, although he has no clues to their identity. As we learn early in the movie, those parents —Louis Connelly (Johnathan Rhys Meyers), an Irish rock singer with a musical sweet tooth, and Lyla Novacek (Keri Russel), a classical cellist—fell in love but were kept apart by her conniving, ambitious father. Months after their night of love, the pregnant Lyla is hit by a car and gives birth prematurely.

In the most preposterous of the many ludicrous plot twists here, her father forges her signature on adoption papers, gives the baby away, then tells her it died. There is a lot of music in the movie. But except for a couple of gospel songs, most of it, including August’s Rhapsody, is amorphous, pumped-up schlock.

Unreal love

Enchanted

Happily-ever-after meets happy-never-after, sort of. Enchanted is the story of a girl who lives in a magical forest and is about to marry the prince of her dreams when the stepmother (of the prince) intervenes and sends her hurtling down to the nether land — that is us.

Now what happens when a girl like this in a voluminous white wedding gown, sewn for her by mice and rabbits, finds herself all alone in big bad New York? After a few mishaps, she finds a real-life prince with a mother-less daughter.

The fairy tale sequence of Giselle’s (Amy Adams) life in the forest amidst loving animals is all in classic Disney animation, no 3-D effects to jazz it up. When she is “banished” to New York, it is all real life.