Rating**

Farah Khan tried all the industrial tricks to give a real hit during the Christmas with the hit pair Akshay Kumar and Katrina Kaif in Tees Maar Khan. However, all the hype created around ‘Sheila Ki Jawani’ could not safeguard this latest Farah Khan flick.

Akshaye Khanna plays a superstar Aatish Kapoor, who dreams to win an Academy Award one day. Katrina is a wannabe actress Anya, who also happens to be the girlfriend of Tees Maar Khan (Akshay Kumar).

The conman disguised as a Hollywood filmmaker ‘Tees Maar Khan’ plans a big train robbery of 10, 000 kilograms of antiques and goes for a fake shooting of a film. He even goes on signing Aatish Kapoor as the hero and appoints some villagers for this purpose.

But then, the viewers will scratch their hair to find logic behind Aatish signing for the act. The film does not have the typical flavor of Farah Khan films.

Sajid Nadiadwala won't be making the movie adaptation of Chetan Bhagat's bestselling novel, 2 States just yet.

In fact, he isn't even sure if he would like to produce the film at all. He also feels that the director attached to the project, Siddharth Anand is free to work with an outside banner, if he wants to.

As reported earlier (Stalemate over 2 States, October 10), the two locked horns over whom they wanted to cast as the female lead.

While the producer favours Deepika, the director has verbally committed to Priyanka. The producer, director and PC did their last film Anjaana Anjaani together.

Rating: **

Actipon Replayy overall story is; Bunty (Aditya Roy Kapoor) refuses to marry his girlfriend because he has seen his parents Kishan (Akshay Kumar) and Mala (Aishwarya Rai) fight since he was born. Even on their 35th marriage anniversary, they fight as if they were sworn enemies. A determined Bunty steals a ride on a time machine invented by his girlfriend's grandfather to go back in time to make it all right.

Doing this will be tougher than he had imagined as he finds his parents very different from what they are today. Parenting ones parents, Bunty would realise, is the toughest job in the whole wide world.

The basic premise isn't new. Even before "Back To The Future" made it famous, travelling to the past to correct one's present was staple food of science fictions. It is, after all, the ultimate human fantasy.

What is new is how "Action Replayy" lays bare the difference between two of the biggest commercial filmmaking centres of the world, Hollywood and Bollywood. While in "Back To The Future" the stress is on science fiction and survival of the time traveller, here it is on human relations and the various emotions associated with it.

Also the paper thin, cliched villains of the film shows that Bollywood is still in a time-wrap. But "Action Replayy" can perhaps afford to, it being a time-wrap story and all.

Lot of efforts have been made to get the sets right, and surprisingly it often works. Vignettes of ancient advertisements, painstakingly made a part of the set by the filmmakers, make it a thrill to watch, especially for those from that era.

Aishwarya and Akshay are as good as Bollywood can get, which isn't much. Pritam's music is average and only when we do an action replay from the high plinth of the future, will we come to know the corners of the world he has plagiarised from.

Ram Gopal Varma’s Rakht Charitra is arguably the most violent Indian film ever made. Humanbeings get their heads crushed in sugarcane grinders (this sequence comes long before Darshan Zariwala playing a contented cop, sucks benignly on a piece of sugarcane), heads are crushed with large boulders (easy enough, considering the film is shot on rugged rocky terrain) legs and hands are chopped off with sickles and hatchets…In brief, human life seems to be snuffed purely for anarchic purposes.

The violence in Varma’s new film could be considered overpowering in another context. Not here. Not this time.Violent tension is the crux and the core spirit of Rakht Charitra. You cannot take away the arms from the man, unless it’s one of those aforementioned limb-choppers at work again.Ouch.

Returning to a territory that Ramu knows by heart (if heart is the space you can mention in this film’s extra-aggressive context) the director has fashioned a bludgeoning homage to Coppola’s The Godfather. This is the Sicillian mafia transposed with frenetic fluency into the semi-rural Andhra milieu where the caste system fosters the most barbaric acts of violence that man has ever conceived.