Abhishek Bachchan

Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna
$40.98
Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna, 2006, directed by Karan Johar is a wonderful film. It blends traditional values with modern issues in a story that deals with the price of fulfilling your own wishes at the expense of your family ideals. Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham (2001) is another impressive film directed by Johar that brings up the same dilemma. In this particular movie, set in New York, the main characters are two young, professional Indian couples. The movie begins at a turning point in each couple's lives. Dev (Shahrukh Kahn) and Rhea (Preity Zinta) are one couple. Dev has just earned a 5 million dollar soccer contract and Rhea has just landed an excellent job at a fashion magazine. They live with Dev's mom, played by Kirron Kher and their son, Arjun. The other couple includes Abhishek Bachchan, who plays Rishi, who is about to marry his lifelong friend, Maya (Rani Mukherjee). Amitabh Bachchan (Abhishek's father in real life) plays Sam, Rishi's father. This is an all-star cast and they all deliver wonderfully believable characters. You really feel for each character's misunderstandings, pain, and even happiness.

Dev meets Maya on a park bench outside her wedding, where she is in her wedding dress and contemplating not getting married after all. She asks Dev, "What if I meet my true love after getting married?" This is the central question of the whole movie. Both of their lives change irrevocably immediately after this exchange, where Rhea returns to the house and marries Rishi. After they part, Dev is hit by a car. This ends his soccer career, the 5 million dollar contract, and leaves him bitterly dependent on his wife, Rhea. The movie moves forward four years, and we are reintroduced to the couples. Dev is now very cynical and feels cheated by his life and marriage, and Maya has found that she loves Rishi like a brother, not a wife, and cannot have children, furthering her resentment. Dev and Maya meet up again in a very odd way, and realize they have a lot in common with respect to their marriages. They decide to get together to brainstorm ways to reignite the spark with their spouses, with disastrous results. They slowly realize that their friendship is becoming something more and ultimately end up cheating on their spouses with each other.

Although the topic of adultery is brought up in so many movies, Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna deals with it very delicately and maturely by reflecting how it causes pain to many people, for a long time. Because Rishi and Rhea move in the same business circles, the two families interact while the romance between Dev and Maya develops. There are some scenes such as when the two families get together for a dinner that is so awkward you also feel a part of the drama and feel shame and defiance along with Dev and Maya. In this particular scene, Dev reveals that he loves Maya to Rishi, Rhea, and both of their parents, and then plays it off like a joke, albeit a tasteless one. In another, Dev is walking to meet Maya and brings her flowers, but realizes both women are waiting at the opposite signal. The pain and horror on Maya's face when she realizes that Rhea is walking right next to her and also meeting Dev is heartbreaking to watch.

What I especially like about this film is that they are ultimately caught. The movie does not end when Dev and Maya cheat on their spouses, because selfish love conquers all(!), regardless of the consequences (which seems to be the message in many other films. Often, expendable, in-the-way-of-true-love spouses are killed off to evade the problem of adultery). The movie also does not end when both marriages fail. This movie takes the audience into the next few years and shows how adultery can have far reaching effects. Dev and Maya are caught by their parents Sam and Kamal, sharing a good bye kiss at the train station. Sam has a heart attack and dies shortly after (from the shock, you can deduce), and Kamal asks her daughter-in- law, Rhea, if she can stay with her rather than with her own dishonorable son when they divorce. Dev and Maya both spend the next few years alone with their shame and guilt. The movie ends with Maya finding Dev with the blessing of Rishi and Rhea, but the road they took was very difficult.

This is a good first film for those not used to Hindi cinema, the only problem I had was the subtitles did not follow the timing of the actual dialogue. It is also long, but so are most Hindi films. However, it does not have the flashy dance sequences that some object to.

Sarkar Raj (2008) Dvds Aishwarya Rai, /Abhishek Bachchan,
$7.67
Sarkar Raj is an intense political drama and is essentially a study of power; it explores the politics of development and takes a fresh look at the tradition versus modernity debate. When Anita Rajan (Aishwarya Rai - Bachchan), CEO of Sheppard power plant, an international Company, brings a power plant proposal to set up in rural Maharashtra before the Nagres, insightful Shankar (Abhishek Bachchan) is quick to realize the benefits the power plant can bring to the people. After convincing Sarkar (Amitabh Bachchan) who is against it for various reasons, Shankar undertakes a journey along with Anita to the villages of Maharashtra to mobilize support from the masses. However, things are not what they seem to be and Shankar's dream project gradually becomes a political minefield. It is in this backdrop the evil forces mightier than ever, mushroom and gang up to bring down the regime of Sarkar and obliterate Shankar's name from the political horizon.

Dhaai Akshar Prem Ke
$4.90

It begins where a soldier saves a girl from being attacked by men who want to kill her. They want to kill her because she saw them kill another girl.

Sahiba (Aishwarya Rai) comes from a wealthy family who sends her away to a city college. And three years into going to college, her father (Amrish Puri) calls her and tells her that he has arranged a marriage for her. Well, she sees that the girls that she's in school with all have boyfriends that they love and will want to marry on their own. But, Sahiba is expected to have a traditional arranged marriage that she does not agree with. So, she tells her father a "lie" and that she's already married to someone. This makes her father so very angry (and feeling humiliated and disgraced) that he tells Sahiba that she is not welcomed to come home and that he feels that he "has no daughter." So, she is alone. She has no more funding for college, and she is not welcomed at home. But, as she wanders the streets, hopeless, she witnessed a girl being murdered and so the murderer and his thugs started chasing her. Then, out of the blue, an off duty soldier named Karan (Abhishek Bachchan), sees the girl running away from those men so Karan saves the girl by fighting off the men and then he helped her get on the bus that he jumped on. Sahiba is lost and confused and when the bus stops, she sees that the road they're on is high up a cliff and she may just want to jump off the cliff and kill herself. So, again, Karan grabs her and saves her.

Sahiba tells Karan about her situation and said that she's got nowhere to go and basically has nothing to live for. Karan wants to get home to marry his love Nisha (Sonali Bendre) but he tells Sahiba that he will take her all the way to her home and will tell her father that he is her husband. This will help get her father to calm down and maybe then she can explain to him that she never did get married.

But, as luck will have it, Sahiba has a large family, and everyone takes to loving Karan right away. So, it gets difficult to be able to get everyone to listen when they try to explain that they are not married. At one point, Karan says that he must leave so then Sahiba's eldest aunt suffers a heart attack at the terrible news that he wants to leave. So, for this reason, he just cannot leave just yet, or tell them the truth that they are not married.

The family treats the couple like they are the most important people in the house. They are to take the master bedroom and they are to also have a traditional Indian wedding, which just makes this "lie" harder and harder to be able to bring to an end. Karan wants to get home to marry Nisha, but all the while, not only does Sahiba's family love him, she is also falling in love with Karan. With all this new pressure on them about this non-marriage and with Sahiba telling Karan that she loves him, Karan now feels that he must just run away in the night. Just leave immediately. Sahiba will just have to tell her father and her family that Karan is gone because they never were married in the first place. So, of course, this enrages her father. So, he decides that she must marry the first man he decides, and so an arrangement is made so quickly that Sahiba is scheduled to be married within three days to a man her family never knew before. The man Sahiba will marry, Vicky, is also that man she saw murder the girl at the beginning of the film. When Sahiba tells her father and her family that the man they want her to marry is a murderer, nobody believes her. She lied before, so to them, she would just lie again. Her father insists that she will marry Vicky.

Meanwhile, Karan goes home to be with Nisha, the love of his life whom he hasn't seen for over a year, but to his surprise, she got married. Nisha never really knew that Karan was in love with her. She thought that they were just good friends. So, now Karan, has nobody. But, with a hope in his heart, he goes back to Sahiba. And immediately, Sahiba's father is there to stop him from coming into the house. The whole angry family tells Karan to leave at once. But, Sahiba's uncle still had faith in Karan and arranged for Karan and Sahiba to meet at the temple. She tells Karan that she is expected to marry the man that she saw commit the murder, and this man Vicky knows that she was the one who saw him kill the girl. And so it's expected that her new husband Vicky will kill her and her father and take over the family's wealth. Karan runs to expose Vicky as the killer that he is and Sahiba's father finds out the truth. So Vicky and his father arrange to have Sahiba's father and Karan die in a fire while the wedding is taking place. ...........

"So, have I captured your interest in this movie yet? I'll let you rent or buy it to see how it ends. I hope you enjoy it."

It didn't end the way I wanted to, though. Let's see what you think.

Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna
$9.95
loved the movie also for the songs... that's why I had to buy the soundtrack as well! Pure Bollywood style - I guess, KANK is my very first Bollywood movie and even if it's 3hours long I loved it!