Sourav Ganguly, Shabbir Ahluwalia approached for Nach Baliye

Former Indian skipper Sourav Ganguly and his wife Dona have been approached for the sixth season of dance reality show 'Nach Baliye'

The others approached for the show include TV actors Kanchi Kaul with her husband Shabbir Ahluwalia and actor couple Jennifer Winget and Karan Singh Grover, according to sources. 

However, it is not yet known whether they will be seen in the show. Nach Baliye' is a dance, reality-television series aired on Star Plus channel featuring couples, mostly television stars, as contestants.

'Nach Baliye 5' ended this year in March which was won by popular TV actors Jay Bhanushali and Mahii Vij.

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John's Madras Cafe - Treading On Thin Ice

Looks like Madras Cafe is turning out to be a film which is too bold for its own good. With the film's second trailer release, a fresh bout of controversies is rising. Madras Cafe's second trailer is out and it talks about the assassination of India's ex Prime Minister.

The trailer also shows a Tamil rebel group leader Anna played by Tamil actor Ajay Ratnam. Call it a coincidence but the actor bears a very close resemblance to the LTTE leader Velupillai Prabhakaran. The look and the costume are similar to the rebel leader as well.

The Tamil group Naam Thamizhar have already expressed their objection to the film's release as they are alleging that the film is showcasing the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) in bad light. The group has also demanded that they should be allowed to preview the film before the release. However, the film's director Shoojit Sircar has denied the allegations.

Any fictional story will take things from real events. And for this film it is the backdrop of Sri Lanka, so, obviously, it refers to all those who were part of that time -- from the rebels, to civilians, to the peace force and the governments of Sri Lanka and India. Please watch the film before arriving at any conclusions.

Earlier Shoojit Sircar had said that There is a fictional rebel group in the film but we don't call them the LTTE and unless you see it you can't pass judgment.

Well! Simply calling the rebel group by a different name may not save the day for Madras Cafe if there is any protest post release. As of now, the makers of the film are very happy that the film has been cleared by the Censor Board and is releasing on the scheduled date of 23rd August.

'Madras Cafe' starring John Abraham and Nargis Fakhri has been directed by Shoojit Sircar and is slated to release nationwide in theatres on 23rd August. It is co-produced by JA Entertainment, Viacom 18 Motion Pictures and Rising Sun Films.

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Mika turns producer, actor with Balwinder Singh Famous Ho Gaya!

Singer Mika Singh, who has proved his versatility as a singer, now turns actor and producer with "Balwinder Singh Famous Ho Gaya!".

"Mauja hi mauja" fame singer, who is playing a lead role in "Balwinder...", will produce as well as present the movie.

"I'll be producing it too with Sunil Agnihotri and Vandana Jain. I am doing my bit. I am pretty satisfied and content with the way things have shaped up for the movie. I am working on a unique strategy for my favourite film," Mika Singh said in a statement.

Agnihotri, who has also directed "Balwinder Singh Famous Ho Gaya", said it is "overwhelming and satisfying to have Mika on board because India loves him".

"Having him as the presenter of the movie is an added advantage. This is going to leverage the movie. Mika is a fabulous singer that we know, but he is an amazing actor and a great human being too."

"Balwinder..." is in its post production stage and it will come out soon!

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Sanjay Gurbaxani plays Rajiv Gandhi in Madras Cafe

There has been a lot of media interest recently in the actor who plays Rajiv Gandhi in Shoojit Sircar's Madras Cafe.

While a still of the celluloid Rajiv Gandhi has been triumphantly flashed in certain sections of the media, the actor's true identity has been mischievously concealed to generate added curiosity.

It can now be revealed that the actor playing Rajiv Gandhi in Madras Cafe is a Maharashtrian named Sanjay Gurbaxani.

Gurbaxani is a theatre actor who has done bit roles in small-budget Hindi films including the forgotten 2011 disaster Jo Hum Chahein.

Shoojit chose Gurbaxani not so much for his physical resemblance to Rajiv Gandhi as his ability to look like a young restrained political leader.

Gurbaxani would apparently be enacting Rajiv Gandhi assassination.

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Bhaag Milkha Bhaag shortened for global release

Director-producer Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra has shortened "Bhaag Milkha Bhaag" (BMB) for its international release. He has reduced the playing-time of the biopic by 30 minutes and said the new version is suitable for a no-interval format.

Everyone loved everything about "Bhaag Milkha Bhaag", a film that chronicles the rise of Olympian athlete Milkha Singh, also known as Flying Sikh. The only area of quibble was the inordinate length of three-hour-and-10-minute. And that has now been taken care of.

Since there were no clearly demarcated areas in the narration that could be pruned down, and the songs carried the plot forward, Mehra and the film's editor P.S. Bharathi went through the process of looking through the entire footage to zero-in on individual shots and scenes where the verbal exchange could be reduced.

An arduous and challenging task -- but the job is now done.

The decision comes as a surprise considering Mehra maintained that the story had to be told within the time-frame afforded by the script.

Said Mehra: "Bharathi and I haven't forced cuts into the narration. We wanted to bring the length down to a no-interval format, since there is no tradition of breaking a film into two halves in the West. To eliminate the interval-point for the international version, we had to re-edit the film." 

At the home front, the film opened to positive response and if the viewers relished the narration, they thoroughly appreciated Farhan Akhtar's endeavour to play Milkha convincingly in the successful movie, which raked in approximately Rs.55 crore in the first week.

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Movie Review: Please, no Once Upon A Time In Mumbai... Dobaara

Starring Akshay Kumar, Imran Khan, Sonakshi Sinha

Directed by Milan Luthria

Rating: * *

How do I put this politely? This is arguably one of the most ill-timed gangster drama with most performances so loud and unassimilated that these characters could easily be contestants in a Eid special segment of Comedy Circus where the theme is 'Gangsta Rap' This is done-to-noisy-death gangsterism done with heartbreaking seriousness.

It takes some doing to wrap up such a time-worn love triangle into a pretence of modern storytelling. Milan Luthria's earlier films like Kachche Dhaage and Dirty Picture had some interesting conflicts between characters who are driven by a desire for revenge but are frustrated in their malevolence by their love for the very same people they want to hate. 

The problem with Once Upon A Time In Mumbai Dobaara is that the two main characters who love each other to death, literally, are people we've met over and over again. Most notably in Ram Gopal Varma's Company where Ajay Devgn and Viveik Oberoi played gangster and protege with great conviction and ballsy velocity. 

The subsequent spinoffs have gotten seriously diluted. 

This one is a sequel to Luthria's 2010 film where Ajay Devgn's imposing personality and gravelly voice had made the pale and sometime unintentionally funny proceedings bearable. 
Except for Sonakshi Sinha playing a starlet who talks too hard and too much and gets the male protagonists (who need to be spanked for playing with guns when their IQ level suggests video games would be more apt) into a serious conflict merely because she's too dumb to see they both love her. . . . Dobaara has no redeeming qualities. 

Akshay Kumar as a Dawood doppelgang(st)er is inept, to say the least. His dialogues meant to show his mastery over the hoary art of rhetorics, come out sounding like wimpy words of wacked-out wisdom picked up from messages in Chinese cookies, if not from forwarded sms messages. 
I'd just like to suggest to the dialogue writer Rajat Arora to go easy on the bumper-sticker wisdom next time. You can't make the hero look heroic by spilling tacky wisdom all over the frames in the hope that audiences would applaud the bombastic words without thinking about their relevance. 

This film wallows in a kind of imbecilic irreverence where the protagonists seem bold brave, sexy and even brazen but are actually cardboard versions of the triangular lovers in Raj Kapoor's Sangam and Vinod Kumar's Mere Huzoor. 

But at least love triangles of the past were honest about their melodramatic intentions. Once Upon A Time. . . Dobaara cloaks its outdated radical ideas in a rumbustious display of trendiness. 
Undoubtedly some sections shine brighter than the rest. Aslam (Imran Khan)'s friend making out with his girlfriend in the car while Aslam gives angrezi lessons to Jasmine (Sonakshi Sinha) is a nicely-conceived moment that loses its sheen in repetition. 

One of the 'jokes' that ties Sonakshi's character to her lover-by Imran Khan is his misuse of the word 'intercourse'. The film uses the word (prudishly beeped out by the censorboard) over and over again like a school boy that has just found a non-punishable way to say 'sex' in the classroom. 
A flavour of flagrant criminality is created through back-projected nostalgia. The film opens with an archival cricket match 'fixed' by the all-powerful underworld don. The sequences seems more 'fixed' by the director than the Dubai-based ganglord would have ever imagined. 

Fleets of black and yellow Fiat cars ply up and down Mumbai's roads in a show of periodicity. A wanton woman (Sophie Chowdhary, in a seductive cameo) cheats on her unsuspecting husband, making out with the dreaded don in the backroom at a noisy party. 

You can almost smell the cheap perfume and the discount-rated champagne trying to pass as the genuine stuff in Shoaib's party. This guy thinks he is menacing. He is actually a joke. And if the real Dawood is anything like the way Dawood-like gangster portrayed here by Akshay Kumar, we have nothing to fear except his cheesy dialogue-baazi. 
Where in all this self-defeating noise and activity is theslippery sinisterness on the streets of Mumbai? 

The gangster-villain (Akshay insists he is a villain, and who are we to argue with an overgrown brat of a guy who keeps smashing up furniture and appliances every time he doesn't get his way?) and his cronies appear to have walked out of 'loin' Ajit den in the 1970s, not quite sure which way they are supposed to head in the present-day milieu of such awe-inspiring gangster epics as Luc Besson's Taken and Amit Kumar's Monsoon Shootout. 
This one comes too late. Except for a skillfully-shot train robbery sequence featuring Imran Khan at the start, it has too little to offer in the way action and adventure. 

The stunts appear stunted. Except for Sonakshi Sinha who plays the self-seeking starlet with earnest air-headedness, Pritobash Tripathy who plays Imran's sidekick with misplaced sincerity and Sonali Bhendre who delivers the only truthfully-worded monologue in this verbally-cramped drama, the other performances are all of the watch-me-ham variety. 

And really, what this film has done to the Mohd Rafi Qawwalli Tayyab ali pyar ka dushman would make Manmohan Desai wince if he was alive. 
Dobaaraa done. Please please, no third helping. Otherwise, to rephrase one of Akshay Kumar's favourite dialogues in this film, Agar ek baar dobaara aur kiya toh sequel ka silsila bura maan jayega.

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