Bombay to Bangkok

If your plot is completely cuckoo, then your treatment has to be spot on. Nagesh Kukunoor setting a fast-talking Mumbai ka chhora loose upon Bangkok massage parlours, and unsuspecting Thai damsels, should have resulted in unbridled merriment. But Bombay To Bangkok's is a drag, offering little drama or excitement.

Shankar (Shreyas Talpade) nicks a bag full of cash from “Mumbai’s most fearsome don” Khan Seth (Naseeruddin Shah) and finds himself flying out to Thailand in a fake white coat, with a bunch of thugs hotfooting after him. Soon, he is to be found peering at wrinkly nether regions of dirty old men dispensing Viagra to whoops of joy from the selfsame individuals and cooking up a steaming batch of desi khana. This is when he is not searching for his precious loot, and losing his heart to the lovely Jasmine (Lena Christensen), and trying to keep his head above the meandering script.

Kukonoor’s keen eye for drollery, his true strength, seems to have gone missing. There are enough oddballs in the movie to keep the laughs coming. An overweight, jolly Sardar (Manmeet Singh), translator of Shankar’s love-lorn ramblings, a suspicious salwaar-kameez clad psychiatrist who suspects Shankar is not who he is (we could have told you that, missy), and a Mumbai bhai with a rapper’s soul (Vijay Maurya), complete with the rings, gold chains, and the body piercings, and a troubled childhood. But the parts don't add up to the whole.

Maurya is a hoot, making you wish there was more of him. Naseer comes on as if he’d rather be anywhere else, even in his one scene, where he looks nothing like a menacing don. What, this is quid pro quo for Iqbal? The eminently watchable Shreyas needed more able support: he’s all over the place, making you wish there was less of him. The Thai debutant swings nicely between her lady of the night, and medical volunteer by day role, but is done in by the director's insistence on playing out the tag-line — ‘we are same same but different’.

So is the movie.

Counter culture

Across the Universe

From its first moments, when a solitary dreamer on a beach turns to the camera and sings, unaccompanied, the opening lines of the Beatles’ song Girl, Julie Taymor’s ’60s musical fantasia, Across the Universe, reveals its intention to use the Beatles' catalogue to tell two stories at once, one personal, the other, generational.

This risky hybrid of long-form music video and movie musical with clearly drawn characters tells the story of Jude’s (Jim Sturgess) star-crossed love affair with Lucy (Evan Rachel Wood), a girl from upper-crust East Coast suburbia. It follows the couple as they are swept up and come apart in the evolving counterculture of left-wing politics, sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll.

Most of the historical events are lightly fictionalised in a movie that maintains only the fuzziest of timelines. Yet Across the Universe feels emotionally true both to the Beatles, whose music today seems to exist outside of time, and to the decade it remembers.

Feminist Heist

Mad Money

In the breezy, amoral heist comedy Mad Money, Bridget Cardigan (Diane Keaton), an upper-middle-class homemaker in suburban Kansas City, Mo, develops an insatiable lust for larceny and financial crisis inspires serious theft. No sooner has Don (Ted Danson), Bridget’s husband, sprung the alarming news that he has been downsized from his cushy corporate job and is US $286,000 in debt, than she springs into action.

Bridget initially decides to steal just enough to allow her family to get out of debt and not have to sell its fancy house. But just enough soon becomes more than enough, as she amasses a basement’s worth of dirty money. Bridget and her partners — Nina Brewster (Queen Latifah), a single mother raising two children, and Jackie Truman (Katie Holmes), a flibbertigibbet who lives in a trailer with her husband, Bob (Adam Rothenberg)— are an oddball threesome calculated to appeal equally to the Woody Allen, Oprah Winfrey and Jerry Springer crowds. Mad Money is awkwardly structured. The confusion is a sign that the movie doesn’t trust its audience to stay seated until the caper is underway.

Stale nuts

Alvin and the Chipmukns

Hollywood continues its tired milking of old television properties with Alvin and the Chipmunks, a slick updating of the musical-cartoon franchise created by Ross Bagdasarian Sr in 1958. Remodeled over the years on television and recordings, the 'munks have been given a digital coat of paint this time out, but the movie doesn’t skimp on the memories of old.

Jason Lee plays a rejected songwriter who meets the mischievous Alvin, brainy Simon and pudgy Theodore, transplanted tree dwellers who have raided his kitchen. When he discovers their unique vocal harmonies, he’s off to a record executive, who whisks the trio away to exploit their talent.