Race 2: 1st Day Domestic Box Office Collections

Race 2 had an excellent Day 1 at the Domestic Box Office, as the movie collected about 15 Crores as per early estimates. The movie performed utmost in Mumbai, Delhi, Punjab and UP circuits.

The Abbas-Mustan directorial got mixed response from the critics, however, it seems the reviews just couldn’t affect the Box Office performance of the film. Race 2 had a huge opening at multiplexes across the Metros in India collecting full houses or near full. Its single screens performance at the mass belts was not as good as multiplexes since the movie is essentially a multiplex flick.

The Saif Ali Khan, Deepika Padukone, John Abraham, Jacqueline Fernandez, Anil Kapoor, and Ameesha Patel starrer is expected to show a good jump in its business today, being a National Holiday.

Seems, this multi-starrer will surely give 2013 its first HIT!

Race 2 Movie Review And ratings by different critics

Ratings:

Ratings:3/5 Review By: Nabanita Roy Site: OneIndia
Rating:2.5/5 Review by: Abhishek Gupta Site: India TV
Rating: 1.5/5 Review by: Saibal Chatterjee Site: NDTV
Rating: 2.5/5 Review by: Taran Adarsh Site: BollywoodHungama
Rating: 3.5/5 Review by: Prasanna D Zore Site: Rediff
Rating: 2.5/5 Review by: Ananya Bhattacharya Site: Zee News
Rating: 1.5/5 Review by: Shubhra Gupta Site: Indian Express
Rating: 1.5/5 Review by: Roshni Devi Site: Koimoi
Rating: 3/5 Review by: Rubina A Khan Site: FirstPost

Cast:Saif Ali Khan, John Abraham, Deepika Padukone, Jacqueline Fernandez, Ameesha Patel, Anil Kapoor
Director: Abbas-Mustan

SPOILERS AHEAD

A significant chunk of Mumbai filmdom’s creative output has changed for the better since the year 2008, the first quarter of which saw the release of Race, a Hollywood rip-off that had Bollywood critics run for cover.

Nearly five years on, the directing duo of Abbas-Mustan is still at it – cantering around aimlessly with a convoluted thriller that zips, zaps and zooms through an amoral landscape peopled by sharks and bloodhounds whose only trip in life is to settle old scores, hatch new conspiracies and, when necessary, lay murderous traps.

On the face of it, Race 2 is a glitzy, action-packed entertainer. Scratch the surface – in fact, that is all there is to the film – and what you are left with is superficial style bereft of logic and substance.

But, then, isn’t that the failsafe formula that has stood many a Bollywood pulp-maker in good stead over the years?

Race 2 proves how difficult it can be for a producer to let go of an idea that yielded a box-office bonanza the first time around. The makers of this film obviously haven’t heard of, or do not believe in, the law of diminishing returns.

Race 2 isn’t so much a sequel as an ill-advised rehash. Revenge, one character says, is a dish best served cold. Ideas, for sure, aren’t best served stale.

This is the second year in succession after 2012’s Players that Abbas-Mustan have the honour of unleashing the first Bollywood biggie of the year. Race 2, like Players, is big only on nausea-inducing clatter.

The obvious question is: does this slapdash scurry to the finishing line really have the steam to replicate the kind of runaway box-office success that the prelude had enjoyed?

Or will Race 2 go the way of the wayward Players, the Burmawalla siblings’ official Hindi remake of the British crime caper flick, The Italian Job?

At the heart of Race 2 are two wrangling men endowed with sculpted bodies and an ingrained air of masculine insouciance.

The brawny John Abraham (replacing the relatively scrawny Akshaye Khanna of the earlier film) ensures that the sequel has a markedly higher beefcake and testosterone quotient.

Keeping the boys company is a trio of bimbos all too eager to flash generous décolletage while playing second fiddle. All of the above is, of course, par for the course in an Abbas-Mustan film.

Many of the faces and the principal location have changed in the sequel, but the overall veneer is pretty much the same.

Race 2 is slickly packaged around dramatic twists and turns that fly at you thicker and faster than you care to count.

Race 2 moves at a fair clip and is packed with explosions, stunts and chases that might be crowd-pleasing. The trouble is that the narrative is too breathless for its own good.

To be fair, some of the implausible action sequences are startlingly good. However, they do not add up to a convincing enough whole that can paper over the holes in the narrative.

Some Bollywood directors tend to labour under the misplaced belief that a film must be crammed, end to end, with relentless excitement, extravagant dance routines and ear-splitting background music for it to find ready takers. Excess does not always yield success.

The action in Race 2 takes place in Turkey, where, we learn, that the Indian underworld is just as active as it is back home.

Ranveer Singh (Saif Ali Khan), a rare remnant from Race, scours the hot spots of Istanbul in search of the mastermind behind the killing of his beloved Sonia (Bipasha Basu in a cameo).

In his risky quest, Ranveer has to contend with a slew of men and women who, like him, are out to make a quick buck and get the hell out of here.

And, of course, there is ex-cop Robert D’Costa (Anil Kapoor), the only man who Ranvir seemed to be at ease with when the curtains came down on the first film.

The private eye has a gloriously daft female assistant in the form of Ameesha Patel. The actress isn’t seen much these days on the screen. Just as well!

Istanbul generally looks great as a backdrop through the lens of Ravi Yadav’s camera and much of the film is rather easy on the eye. But when the cars and bloodthirsty men get in the way, they only serve to muck up the view.

As for the women on the screen (Deepika Padukone and Jacqueline Fernandez), they strut around like wound-up automatons that are all decked-up but have nowhere to go.

Is Race 2 on your mind? Get rid of it pronto. This is a wreck of a movie strictly for action junkies who might be looking for a feverish two-and-a-half-hour ride that is far more giddy than heady.

Akaash Vani Movie review And ratings By different critics

RATINGS:
Rating: 3/5 Review by: Martin D'Souza Site: Yahoo! News

Rating: 3/5 Review by: Smitha Site: OneIndia
Rating: 2.5/5 Review by: Mohar Basu Site: Koimoi
Rating: 4/5 Review by: Subhash K Jha Site: FirstPost
Rating: 1.5/5 Review by: Abhishek Gupta Site: India TV
Rating: 3/5 Review by: Ananya Bhattacharya Site: Zee News
Ratings:3.5/5 Review By: Taran Adarsh Site: BollywoodHungama

Cast:Kartik Tiwari, Nusrat Bharucha
Director: Luv Ranjan

In one of the film's high dramatic moments shot on a small deserted railway station in the night, the film's protagonists, now estranged by an unfortunate series of circumstances, sit on the bench and... well, they sob. Yes, they simply cry their hearts out. First, the girl. Then in a melancholic celebration of the me-too syndrome, the boy, now alas no longer a boy (and he smokes to prove it), also breaks into little sobs that build up into a wail as the shehnai, indicative of a cruel marital joke, plays in the background.

The sequence in the hands of a lesser director would have fallen flat on its sobbing face. Luv Ranjan has the punch-filled boys-will-be-boys saga Pyaar Ka Punchnama behind him to prove his solid grip over the grammar of the hearts of the young and the confused.

Akaash (Kartik Tiwari) and Vani (Nushrat Bharucha) seem clueless about what they really want out of life, or from each other. Is Akaash fooling around with her in the college ? Is he serious in his filmy antics? Or filmy in his serious antics?

Ranjan's screenplay takes the lovers from the corny escapades and frigid philosophising of the college campus to the precipice of heartbreak. The journey, given a vivid visual manifestation by Sudhir K Chaudhuri's fluid camera work, is made with ample feeling and remarkable restrain.

Unlike other contemporary celluloid raconteurs, Ranjan is not fearful of silences. He doesn't fill up every conceivable nook and corner of the storytelling with words and music, though I must state here that Hitesh Sonik's background music and the songs in the later part of the film go a long way in building an appealing case for the lead pair's star-crossed relationship. If Akaash and Vani seem so lost without each other, it is a lot to do with the way their emotions are pinned down by the words and the music that underline the course of their togetherness.

On many occasions, Ranjan allows the lead pair to share silences. A rarity in today's cinema, where it is presumed that the average moviegoer has the attention-span of a sparrow looking for twigs before the rain starts pelting down. There are long meditative stretches of just simple non-verbal communication between the protagonists. It is a risk to allow audiences to get restive. But a risk worth taking.

Ranjan's lovers come across as people who do what they do not to impress others, but simply because their heart tells them to behave the way they are shown. Both the lead actors are extremely effective in showing their character's innerworld. Nushrat Bharucha has an author-backed role as the girl who must sacrifice her love to make her parents happy. Not exactly the most novel of ideas. The sincerity with which the young almost-new actress approaches her part, propels it to a level beyond the mundane.

Yes, you feel the girl is trapped in a marriage of compromise where the cruelty is so intangible and prone to sarcasm, that it seems negligible from the outside. Ranjan shows Vani's suffocation through some disturbing scenes of marital rape. Outwardly, Vani's husband is no brute. She carries no signs of his cruelty on her body. It is worse. The soul gets wounded.

In a languorously-shot lengthy stretch of post-marital escape into Utopian happiness, we see Vani united with her lover again. They spend time together, frolic in the snow, live out some of the dreams they had dreamt during courtship. They don't talk much. And when they do, the words are never meant to impress us. For a change, the couple seems to be talking to each other rather than to an imaginary audience.

Though the film belongs to the female protagonist, Kartik Tiwari manages to hold his own with an endearing performance far removed from what he attempted in the director's Pyaar Ka Punchnama. Both Kartik and Nushrat are here to stay.

Though there are patches of aridity in the relationship (what was Akaash doing while Vani was suffering in malfunctional domesticity?), this is a very good film about a bad marriage, or what havoc a wrong decision about one's life can create.

To his credit, Ranjan is able to hold the lovers' predicament in place. He has a keen eye for the inner life of his protagonists. Ranjan quietly sucks us into the story of Akaash and Vani.

Suffused in contemplative silences and deriving its dramatic energy from the age-old debate on arranged versus love marriages, Akaash Vani is thoughtful and absorbing, not prone to tripping over with nervous anxiety and excessive energy to hold our attention.

The world of Akaash Vani is far removed from the bantering bawdy backchat of Pyaar Ka Punchnama. But that is the beauty of the second film. It tells you that the director is not frozen in his initial world.

With first-rate performances by both Nushrat and Kartik, this is one love story you can't afford to miss

Fame came to me much later says Race 2 actor John Abraham

New Delhi: John Abraham's hunky looks have made more news than the roles he has played onscreen and the former model feels that's the reason he did not get the fame he deserved as an actor. John, 40, who entered the film industry with Bipasha Basu starrer Jism in 2003, said he was a rising star in the fashion world when he got his first break in Bollywood and so, people initially failed to explore him as an actor. "Fame came to me much later. I have been in the industry for the past 10 years and you can say that it is only now that I am being talked about for my films. I got a different treatment because I entered the industry as a model," John told PTI. The New York star said his good looks helped him garner a large fan base but it was much later that he was offered performance oriented roles. "I knew from the beginning that there will be a lot more emphasis on my body and looks than anything else. But, that was fine for me. I developed a huge fan following because of my looks. Still, I got roles slowly from people who believed in me, be it Sanjay Gupta, Shoojit Sircar or Kabir Khan. I am getting films now which are all performance oriented. My graph is on the rise now," John said. The actor will be seen in a series of films this year, beginning with Abbas-Mustan's Race 2 releasing today, where he will be seen portraying the main villain. John says the film reminds him of his first hit Dhoom. "Race 2 is a different film. It's typical Abbas-Mastan film. Barring Saif Ali Khan and Anil Kapoor, all the characters in the film are absolutely new. Every character has grey shades. The film reminds me of Dhoom. It is pretty much in that space minus the bikes," he said. John will next be seen in Gupta's gangster drama Shootout At Wadala, Sircar's Madras Cafe and romantic drama I, Me, Aur Main by a debutant director. "It's fun to shoot so many films together. People are worried about me because I force myself to space things out. My mind is not left with any grey space. It is a conscious decision to do different genres because I love to do different films. I am not one of those, who like sticking to the regular roles," he said. John, who changes his physique with every film, said portraying a different look each time has taken a toll on his body. "Changing your physique for every film is very taxing. Your body takes a blow everytime. I like to do my stunts myself and have hardly used any body double. But maintaining this action-hero image hurts a lot. You always face some injuries or the other," he said. The actor turned producer with Vicky Donor last year and his maiden production has been received very well by the audience. He says it was important for him to turn producer so that he could churn out strong but commercially viable films. "It was important for me to become a producer because the kind of films I wanted to do and the kind of content I wanted the industry should have was coming out less. I am trying to marry content with commerce," he said. The actor is currently producing three films under his production house, John Abraham Entertainment.

First look of Deepika Padukone, Ranveer Singh starer ‘Ram Leela’

The first poster ‘Ram Leela’, starring Deepika Padukone andRanveer Singh is out. The film is directed by Sanjay Leela Bhansali and will hit theaters on 29th November, 2013. The story of Ram Leela is based on Shakespeare’s classic love-story ‘Romeo and Juliet’. Initially, Kareena Kapoorwas appraoched for the film’s leading lady. Later on, Deepika Padukone replaced Bebo as the director did not want a married lady as his heroine.

The very excited Deepika Padukone, taking to Twitter, announced the release date of the film. She tweeted, “RAMLEELA releasing 29th Nov,2013!!!” This was quickly backed up with another tweet of the film’s poster.

Deepika looks super gorgeous in an Indian attire on the first look of the poster. Also featuring on the poster is Ranveer Singh, looking dashingly HOT.

Meanwhile, rumors are that Deepika and her co-star Ranveer Singh are the new couple in Bollywood. Reports state that, recently, Deepika was in Dubai, busy promoting her film Race 2. Ranveer Singh flew all the way to the Arabian land to spend some time with her.

Ranveer also confirmed the news. He said in a written statement to a popular newspaper, “I had a couple of days off between Ram Leela and Gunday, so I decided to go to Dubai for the shopping festival. Several of my college friends are also based in Dubai. The Race 2 team was also there so we all went clubbing together and had a good time.”

Shahrukh Khan is the richest Indian celebrity

Forbes India magazine has come out with its inaugural India celebrity 100 list, based on their popularity and income. Shahrukh Khan, who became the first Indian actor to appear on the magazine cover, has topped the list of the highest earning Indian celebrity, followed bySalman Khan.

Bollywood Badshah earned a whooping amount of Rs.202.8 crore, between October 2011 and September 2012, while Salman Khan made a total of Rs 144.2 crore during the same period. Indian cricketer Mahendra Singh Dhoni grabbed the third place with a total earnings of Rs. 135.16 crore. The top 10 in the list also included, Akkshay Kumar, Amitabh Bachchan, Sachin Tendulkar, Kareena Kapoor, Virender Sehwag, Virat Kohli andKatrina Kaif.

However, in terms of fame and popularity, Salman Khan is no.1. In the field of cricket, Indian captain, Mahendra Singh Dhoni is the No.1 sportsperson. WhileKaran Johar has been named the most powerful director, Maliaka Arora Khan is the leading TV personality.

The Forbes India’s special edition “decodes what lies behind the success of India’s biggest creative entrepreneurs across eight categories: film actors, directors, sport stars, TV personalities, singers/musicians, authors, models and comedians”,it said

The special edition of the magazine will hit stands Saturday.

Jacqueline Fernandez’s ‘Lat Lag Gaye’ a new rage!

Jacqueline Fernandez’s club number Lat Lag Gaye from her upcoming film Race 2 is making waves and the actress is getting a lot of compliments for her seductive moves.J

While Jacqueline received praises for her look and moves in the song, it went on to become such a huge rage that the actress has been approached by several sponsors for shows and has locked in on 6 stage shows across the country courtesy the song Lat Lag Gaye from her forthcoming film that released today.

Director duo, Abbas-Mustan were showering praises on the Sri Lankan beauty. They said: “Jacqueline has done a fantastic job on the song. When we approached her with the song we promised it would be her ‘Touch Me Touch Me’…it’s an out and out party number with a sensual touch and Jacqueline was the ideal choice. She is also very fashion savvy so all credit goes to her for the styling in the song.”

A source said: “Jacqueline has killed it with Lat Lag Gaye. Not only does she look fabulous but has performed to the song like a pro despite not having any professional training. She had already created buzz with the song Apni Toh from Housefull, with Lat Lag Gaye she has taken her popularity to an all new high.”

Jacqueline too was overwhelmed by the response she received. She said: “I enjoyed doing the number. I can’t compare it to any other songs so far but I am confident it will also be on the top. I loved working with Abbas-Mastan on the film and on the song particularly. They have so much drama in their films and for an actor it’s great to work under them as they never create any tension and make you feel comfortable to give it your best.”

Jacqueline will next be seen in Race 2, where she’ll set the screen on fire with her high octane action sequences!

Himmatwala made Ajay Devgn nostalgic!

At the theatrical promo launch ofHimmatwala, director Sajid Khanand lead actor Ajay Devgn went into nostalgia as they remembered a few connections related to the movie.

Sajid said that Himmatwala, which released in 1983, starring Jeetendra and Sridevi, was one of his favourite films. He said that he was “not remaking it.”

“We have not tried to copy anyone. I have worn white shirt and pants but not white shoes,” Ajay said. Ajay and Tamannaah shot the famous song Taki O Taki Re in Jaipur, while the team shotTathaiya Tathaiya song in Mumbai. “Dancing is difficult for me than acting. It stresses me out,” Ajay said. However, director Sajid Khan said, “Ajay dances like a superstar.”

“It was nostalgic during this film. As the film is set in 80s, it did remind me of my earlier movies when I had started in the industry. Then I had gone on the sets ofHimmatwala as my father was action director for that movie. I had also come to single screen theatre Gaiety Galaxy to see the reaction of the audience for my debut film Phool aur Kante. At my introductory sequence, people threw coins towards the screen, among them was a Re 1 coin which hit me on the head. I still have it,” remembered Ajay.

The launch was done with a retro theme as homage to the original 1983 version of the film. Tamannaah who is making her Bolywood debut with the movie was also present at the event.

Himmatwala, which is all set to release on March 29^th, has been produced by Ronnie Screwvala and Vashu Bhagnani. The movie is presented by UTV Motion Pictures and Pooja Entertainment and Films.

Shahrukh Khan is the most romantic actor : Anushka Sharma

Anushka Sharma made a debut romancing Shahrukh Khan in Rab Ne Banadi Jodi. She later continued wooing him in Jab Tak Hai Jaan. Anushka says that Shahrukh is the most romantic actor both on and off screen!

Recently at an event, Anushka who was present for the unveiling of a jewellery brand`s collection, spoke to reporters. When asked who was the most romantic Bollywood hero according to her, she said, “You really have to ask me that question? Obviously Shahrukh Khan. On screen and off-screen, everywhere, it`s Shahrukh Khan.”

“He (SRK) respects women a lot and I think that is something extremely nice. He is extremely charming,” she added.

Anushka says love is all about small gestures and not lavish and larger-than-life displays. “It (love) is a very subjective thing. To me, I prefer simplicity. I will find love in very small gestures and not in big displays or ways like booking a whole restaurant and all,” Anushka said. “I think it`s more about small, small things – like when unexpectedly someone can shower you with love and attention. To me that`s more special,” she added.

Anushka was last seen in Matru Ki Bijlee Ka Mandola as a spunky girl. Her forthcoming projects are Bombay Velvet opposite Ranbir Kapoor and Peekay with superstar Aamir Khan.