I Can't Think Straight Reviewed

“I Can’t Think Straight” deals with an issue often taboo in most cultures and manages to deal with it without going over the top. Lesbians and Gays have been fighting for their rights and dignity for years now but still there are enough and more societies where they are proclaimed evil and it is treated like a disease or a phase that they are passing through.

It is neither. It is a choice that they choose to exercise. It is the way they have been born. Some people get attracted to thin people, some to tall and some to their own gender.

Unfortunately these views are not shared by most people I come across and it quite explains why it takes a lifetime for someone to come out of the closet. The film deals with 2 women, Lisa Ray who plays an independent fiery girl from Jordan and an Indian Muslim girl Laila. The story takes one through their realization that they are actually gay, their coming to terms with it and finally taking the decision that their happiness is theirs for the taking.

To be frank, most people would at the back of their head know that they are watching the film hoping to see the two hot women making out. But the beauty of the film is that it takes you along into their lives and makes an easy watch. The sensitivity with which the roles have been played out, make it equivalent to cinema like Bend it Like Beckham. Any of the two women could have been replaced with a man and the film would still be as impactful.

Both the leads give good performances. Not award winning but captivating enough. The one thing that struck me in the film is how the fiercely independent woman from Jordan is the one who is ready to live her life in denial as her society wont accept it while the more demure and shy one from India is the first to take a stand and come out clean.

All in all, a good DVD watch. Keep some popcorn handy.

Rating: 3 on 5

Paisa Wasool Moment: In the credits, when Lisa’s mother tells her friend that Lisa is lesbian, the ignorant lady says “So what? Many of my best friends are Lebanese”!!!!

"Wanted" Reviewed - Watch at your own risk.

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Q) What does a certain hero do after he's had a flurry of flops and has reached the point where he doesnt care anymore?

Ans) He decides to go out and have a ball.

And thats what Salman Khan did. Let me guess how this happened. Prabhu Deva (yes the same crazy dancer we all love has turned director) and Salman are sitting over a couple of drinks one night where Salman is cribbing about how he's sick of movies and how he mostly sleep walks through them these days. Prabhu Deva in his drunken state, blurts out "Sallu, why dont I make a movie where you have all the fun you want....you can have as many weapons at your disposal as you wish....dance some random steps that people will later hate me for....say what it is that you want...diss your girl....and have some really funny dialogues to ensure you enjoy on the sets". "But Prabhu, what will you do for money"? "I have that figured out....we'll just get someone like Ayesha Takia to prance around, act dumb and pretend that you're god's gift to mankind"!! And the pact was made. Unfortunately, a pact that even Prabhu Deva couldnt get out of once he sobered up and realised what he had done.

And so, Wanted was born.



I mean, come ON. After something like Kaminey, you give me 'Wanted'?? Let me add as a disclaimer that I was dragged against my wishes to the hall to see this film. With all my logical judgement screaming for me not to. But I guess I had to see it to do this social service of telling the world about it.

So my advice? Dont go. Stay home. Watch TV, water the plants, take the dog for a walk. Just dont go watch this.

Why am I being so judgemental you ask? Well, remember the conversation Prabhu and Sallu had? They actually carried out their threat. The movie is an out and out Salman Khan film where he goes around killing whom he wants (he's a hitman who changes gangs for money). For the most part, he looks old, haggard, pudgy and a little too cocky. Give me the shy Salman from Maine Pyaar Kiya anyday....the one who innocently says corny dialogues like "Dosti ki hai...nibhani to padegi hi"!! Surprisingly, the only scene where I thought he looked hot was when he was fully clothed in a uniform but ofcourse he managed to rip off his shirt within 10 seconds of that.

My anger at the film also went up a couple of notches at the director's obsession with Salman and the complete ignoring of other actors. The movie has some great actors like Vinod Khanna who are so brilliantly wasted that future generations will never be able to guess what good performers they really are.

Ayesha Takia is the reason this movie is a commercial hit. She prances around, pouts when asked to and acts like she's the little dainty bird. Someone needs to give her a good shake and tell her to drop the act! Its a shame though, coz she really did some wonderful work in Dor. She has some help in the get-the-rickshaw-walas-to-the-hall-strategy with the gangster's girl who's only purpose was to wear tiny clothes and say things like "oohhh...I like him".

All of this you get a good dose of in the first half and if you're still awake, you will be highly tempted to walk out. Don't. Now that you have spent money and are watching it, stay for the 2nd half because that really is the saving grace.

The ONLY reason I liked the film was surprisingly the 2 villains. Mahesh Manjrekar plays the sleezy cop so well that you almost want to reach into the screen and slap him. Though the award goes to the big daddy hero - Prakash Raj (playing Gani Bhai). The National Award winner from South India has so much fun in the film that you cant help but have fun with him. His witty quips, dark humor and comic timing make him one of the best villains bollywood has seen in the recent past. If only for him, watch this film.

All in all, get a DVD, watch the first hour on mute for eye candy and skip to the 2nd half for Prakash Raj. Watch at your own risk.

Rating: 1.5 on 5 (with 1 for the villains)

Paisa Wasool Moment: When Gani bhai is being bashed up by the cops and he sudenly says "timeout, lets catch our breath". So both of them sit, catch their breath and then start fighting again!

Canada from the eyes of a Self Confessed Foodie

Canada's national dish - Poutine. Fries drizzled with barbeque sauce and topped with cheese curd


Burger and fries at Mont Tremblanc


Pasta made by me at the cottage


And this is just breakfast!! At Perkins in Ottawa


Huge Italian Sausage Hot Dogs with Poutine


Butter Chicken, biryani, daal, seekh kebab and naan at Lahore Tikka House in Toronto


Fish and Chips at Niagra-On-The-Lake


Rib Eye Steak at Niagra-On-The-Lake. Pure Heaven


Pizza avec fromage et basil; et Penne dans rose sauce in Quebec City


Spagetti Carbonara with Ham in Quebec City


French Crepes being prepared in Toronto topped with Nutella, Strawberries and Banana


Steak With Mushroom Sauce with a GIANT cheesy baked potato at The Keg


Wine tasting at the Vinyards at Niagara-on-the-Lake


The best Tandoori Chicken and Daal Makhani I have ever had!! Cooked by D&R

Fpriderman...fpiderman.....Kaminey Reviewed!!

There are movies that are nice and sweet …like a lullaby. And there are movies which give you a good shake and ask you to hop onto the roller coaster. Kaminey would fall in the latter as would Johhny Gaddar. Not a national award winner, but an entertainer nevertheless.

Kaminey is the story of twin brothers (Shahid Kapur) who have a fall-out. Predictably, one is a gangster and the other works with an NGO on AIDS awareness etc. But this is where the predictability ends. The movie moves through a series of events that are connected in some bizarre way and if you don’t pay attention for five minutes, you may lose the plot. So you strap on your seat belt and race along with the characters, impatient to know where the next scene will take them.

The movie wins on two counts. As everyone is falling over themselves to tell you, it brings to India the Quentin Tarantino style of making movies. Racy, edgy, quick cuts. Hand-held cameras used for many scenes, the camera too close to the character’s face for your comfort, shot mainly in the night, with a lot of rain. It is not cutting edge but it sure cuts through the chase. The movie doesn’t proclaim itself to be a film about Mumbai Mafia, neither is it a thriller. It is a car whose breaks have failed and is swerving into the traffic with you hanging on to your seat.



The second reason why the movie works is the brilliant characterization. There is barely anyone in the film who has not been given a certain character which makes him/her stand apart. Shahid does brilliantly. Sweet in some shots where you want to cuddle him like a teddy bear and rakish in some where he’s the bad guy your mother warned you about! Priyanka also plays her part well – the Marathi fireball, ready to take on the world for her love. But it is the gangsters who each help make this collage beautiful. Bhope Bhau – the crazy wannabe politician who can sell everything from his ideology to his sister, the Bengali brothers, who each look so non gangster like but often collapse into hysterics with a joke only they understand, Tashi – the suave gangster who deals with the Africans and doesn’t dirty his hands with Indian Mafia and my favorite – Mikhail (played by Chandan Roy Sanyal) who is forever doped, crazed out of his wits and treats Charlie (the Gangster Shahid) like his brother.

It isn’t an award winner, it may not even be a box office super duper hit, but Kaminey reminds you somewhat of the joker in Dark Knight…where you are repulsed by his face, you are intrigued by his antics and his dark humor and you just cant wait to get more.

Go watch it!!

Rating: 4 on 5

Paisa Wasool Moment: Charlie singing Spiderman with Mikhail…only that Charlie has a lisp – he says ‘f’ for every ‘s’…so he jumps around singing ‘fpiderman…fpiderman…’

PS – Did I mention I completely LOVE the music...and cant get enough of Dhan te nan....

Of Wineries and Beaches

I better keep writing or the backlog will be too tough to clear. Take for example the fact that I wrote just 3 days back...and there's already so much we've done in the mean time!!

So day 3 started with us heading out to Niagara on the Lake, a small quaint town just 15 minutes from the falls. In an effort not to waste any time, we headed straight to the vinyards to start off on our wine tasting tours! We went to Hillibrand, Jackson Triggs (where we also did the tour) and Joseph's Winery on that day. The vinyards themselves are just breathtaking....acres and acres of wines growing in geometrically perfect straight lines....and the French Chateaux style wineries in the middle of them! Of course after the 2nd winery, everything else started blurring :P!! Each winery let us choose one red, one white and one ice wine to taste. The Ice Wines are my favourite...the story goes thus - when the winter came, and the grapes froze, they would collect all of them and throw them away. Until one day a guy said, let me try making wine with the frozen grape too...and lo behold you got the sweet dessert wine called Ice Wine! 1 bottle of Ice Wine is made from the same amount of grapes as 10 bottles of Table Wine...and they are priced like that too!!



Some more interesting tit bits - wineries plant a rose bush in front of the vines...and that is because the bugs that attack the vines, attack roses first and they would get to know of it. We also learnt the correct way of drinking the wine...the swirling, checking for sediments and swishing in your mouth! I can safely say, this is one day that the Husband is not going to forget soon!

Day 4 had 2 more wineries and our favourite - Peller! And we took off for our ride back to Ottawa enroute Toronto. Which ofcourse meant that we make a pit stop at R & D's fav joint - the Lahore Tikka House....the taste of hot naan after days of deprivation even found a convert in me!

Day 5 in Ottawa. We finally got to see R&D's gorgeous town house. The streets are so beautiful here, like a doll town. We walked down to the park and went over to the supermarket for grocery shopping...where I believe I had to be revived!! I mean - they had 4 sections only for cheese for heaven's sake....and 1 entire row of dressings and sauces!!!!! Wonderland! A quick lunch of Fajitas followed.

But the icing on the cake was our evening walk at the Petrie Island. A beach just 15 minutes from their place!! We watched the sun go down over the water as boats raced past and impromptu beach volleyball games broke...it was the perfect end to a perfect day!

We're not going home!

Travelogue Begins - Day 1 & 2

It’s 6:04am. I don’t have a clue what the date or the day is. I’m sitting in our suite of Crown Plaza by the French windows that directly overlook the Niagara Falls. The view is spectacular – for want of a better word. If there is one word that describes the falls, it is ‘Mighty’. It is a sight so awe inspiring that you can do nothing but stare! It has finally sunk in. I am in Canada.

7 years its taken for me to get here. In 2002 when my sis got married and moved here, I decided the trip was too expensive to ask my parents to fund. In 2005, I started working and got married in 2006. To cut a long story short, here I am now, 4 days from their 7th anniversary come to see whether the 7 yr itch is myth or not!!

Let’s come back to where we started. Please gear up coz this is going to be one heck of a journey. We flew out of Delhi at midnight on 7th Aug on Air France towards Paris. Watched Ghosts of GirlFriends Past and ate a very non appetizing VEGETARIAN meal(!!) of a tomato sandwich and cole slaw. Apparently we were flying over some airspace where non-veg is not allowed to be serve, but I personally just think they were just out of non-veg!!! The 4 hours stopover at CDG airport in Paris flew by and we continued our journey on Air Canada, which served much tastier food!! At noon on 8th August, we finally landed in Toronto, Canada.

Not willing to waste even a single day, we rested for a bit and were off to take the city on. First stop, CN Towers. THE place to get a view of the city – 147 stories up. A section of the landing has glass floor where if you stand and look down, you can actually see the bottom of the tower – trust me, it’s a sight not for the faint hearted! The hotdogs here are miles different from the ones back home. For one, the sausage is the size of 5!! We also topped that with a crepe with nutella, strawberries and bananas! Heavenly. The night was completed by a trip to the Greek Fest in town (Pilaros, Danforth). If you haven’t already, try their Gyros. The ones on offer were these wraps of chicken/ beef in pita with Tzatziki (a dressing of sorts). They are just purely scrumptious.

The next morning, we started early and with a breakfast of waffles and strawberries, we drove off towards Niagara. R & D had bought the all-inclusive passes for us and the entire day was spent visiting everything on offer. First up was journey behind the falls. They have built tunnels behind the falls and you can watch tonnes and tonnes of water cascading down in front of you as you stand right behind the falls! The board walk along the class 6 rapids had us convinced that they weren’t kidding when they said that these can’t possibly be tamed by rafters. The butterfly conservatory followed where thousands of butterflies flew around inside a tropical jungle setting. But it was the grand finale which was the cherry on the icing on the cake. The Maid of the Mist is a boat that goes to the mouth of the HorseShoe Falls at Niagra. And it is not an experience anyone can forget soon. With eyes that could barely open due to the mist, we squinted and held our breaths as we watched the fury of nature unleashed. There aren’t any words how I can explain the feeling of standing on that boat, staring at the falls crashing down just metres from where we were.

Absolutely exhausted by the end of it, we ended the day with a lovely dinner and beer sitting on the patio with live musicians playing on the side.

Life couldn’t have been more perfect.

Love Aaj Kal Reviewed....

Thats the thing about reviews. You should never read one before going for a film and you should never write one after reading others. The best time to write a review is as soon as you come back from the movie, with your opinion fresh in your mind. Take for example what happened with Love Aaj Kal. I walked out of the hall with a smile on my face and a spring in my step. 2 days hence, I am confused about what I felt about it as everyone seems to have a conflicting view. So let me clarify at the onset. My review may be drastically different from a lot of others you read. For the sole reason that I liked the film. I did not compare it to Jab We Met or Dil Chahta Hai or anything else. I saw it as it was. And that is a sweet back to basics, girl-meets-boy-they-have-issues-but-love-triumphs kind of romance. The types that we dont see much of in today's age of complicated films.

The film, runs 2 parallel stories - one of Saif and Deepika, the modern day love, practical and rational. They take their decisions based on how they think the future will pan out instead of how they feel. Then there is a parallel story that is set in the 1970s about Rishi Kapoor's love tale. Imtiaz Ali has used an interesting creative device by making Saif play the young Rishi Kapoor, that too as a sardar. I daresay, Saif makes a dashing Sardar in the pursuit of a simple but gorgeous Punjabi kudi. Of the two tales, I personally loved that of Rishi Kapoor. The period setting, the 'adab' as they call it or 'nazaakat' of them falling in love without ever speaking a word stirred the romantic in me.



In terms of the acting, this is Saif's movie through and through. I try not to be a fan of Saif for personal reasons but he took the audience through the film single handedly. With some able guidance from Rishi Kapoor who seems to be getting better with each film. The sardar Saif was brilliant, the typical brave jat who weakens in the knees for a girl....the modern Saif was funny too, with great comic timing but it was obvious in his dialogue delivery that it was Imtiaz Ali's signature style. The simple girl in the flashback story was cute and played her role perfectly...I can see why they would not want to cast Deepika in the flashback.



Which brings me to her. Because the moment you see this film, you will realise that besides her smile and her ravishing looks, she really is bad! When she speaks, you look around for the script from where she is reciting and when she tries to be funny, you cringe. She makes Katrina look like a National Award nominee!

The songs were fun and had me dancing in my seat (with everyone in the hall wondering what I was on).

I liked the film for its simplicity. For its belief in love. And in that nagging feeling that something is amiss. For its fiction of happily ever after. I dont believe in Soulmates and that there is one person for you in this world that you will keep searching for till you do find her/him. But its refreshing that someone does. The world needs some magic.

Go watch it without expectations. Its not the best film you would have ever watched. But its not one where you will be looking for the exit either. Sweet...simple...refreshing.

Rating: 3 on 5
Paisa Wasool Moment: Saif and Deepika in the Delhi Metro....he puts his arm around her as they always sat and suddenly realises that he can't do that anymore.