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    Reviews

    “A cerebral joyride”
    Karan Johar, filmmaker on REDIFF

    “Among the most charming and creative Indian independent films”
    J Hurtado, TWITCH

    ★★★★✩
    “You don’t really need a big star cast… you don’t even need a big budget to get the techniques of filmmaking bang on…”
    Allen O Brien, TIMES OF INDIA

    ★★★★✩
    “An outstanding experience that doesn’t come by too often out of Indian cinema!”
    Shakti Salgaokar, DNA

    ★★★
    “This film can reach out the young, urban, upwardly mobile, but lonely, disconnected souls living anywhere in the world, not just India.”
    Namrata Joshi, OUTLOOK

    “I was blown away!”
    Aseem Chhabra, MUMBAI MIRROR

    “Good Night Good Morning is brilliant!”
    Rohit Vats, IBN-LIVE

    ★★★✩✩
    “Watch it because it’s a smart film.”
    Shubha Shetty Saha, MIDDAY

    ★★★✩✩
    “A small gem of a movie.”
    Sonia Chopra, SIFY

    ★★★✩✩
    “A charming flirtation to watch.”
    Shalini Langer, INDIAN EXPRESS

    “Interesting, intelligent & innovative”
    Pragya Tiwari, TEHELKA

    “Beyond good. Original, engrossing and entertaining”
    Roshni Mulchandani, BOLLYSPICE

    * * * * *
    Synopsis

    ‘Good Night Good Morning’ is a black and white, split-screen, conversation film about two strangers sharing an all-night phone call on New Year's night.

    Writer-Director Sudhish Kamath attempts to discover good old-fashioned romance in a technology-driven mobile world as the boy Turiya, driving from New York to Philadelphia with buddies, calls the enigmatic girl staying alone in her hotel room, after a brief encounter at the bar earlier in the night.

    The boy has his baggage of an eight-year-old failed relationship and the girl has her own demons to fight. Scarred by unpleasant memories, she prefers to travel on New Year's Eve.

    Anonymity could be comforting and such a situation could lead to an almost romance as two strangers go through the eight stages of a relationship – The Icebreaker, The Honeymoon, The Reality Check, The Break-up, The Patch-up, The Confiding, The Great Friendship, The Killing Confusion - all over one phone conversation.

    As they get closer to each other over the phone, they find themselves miles apart geographically when the film ends and it is time for her to board her flight. Will they just let it be a night they would cherish for the rest of their lives or do they want more?

    Good Night | Good Morning, starring Manu Narayan (Bombay Dreams, The Love Guru, Quarter Life Crisis) and Seema Rahmani (Loins of Punjab, Sins and Missed Call) also features New York based theatre actor Vasanth Santosham (Bhopal: A Prayer for Rain), screenwriter and film critic Raja Sen and adman Abhishek D Shah.

    Shot in black and white as a tribute to the era of talkies of the fifties, the film set to a jazzy score by musicians from UK (Jazz composer Ray Guntrip and singer Tina May collaborated for the song ‘Out of the Blue), the US (Manu Narayan and his creative partner Radovan scored two songs for the film – All That’s Beautiful Must Die and Fire while Gregory Generet provided his versions of two popular jazz standards – Once You’ve Been In Love and Moon Dance) and India (Sudeep and Jerry came up with a new live version of Strangers in the Night) was met with rave reviews from leading film critics.

    The film was released under the PVR Director’s Rare banner on January 20, 2012.

    Festivals & Screenings

    Mumbai Film Festival (MAMI), Mumbai 2010 World Premiere
    South Asian Intl Film Festival, New York, 2010 Intl Premiere
    Goa Film Alliance-IFFI, Goa, 2010 Spl Screening
    Chennai Intl Film Festival, Chennai, 2010 Official Selection
    Habitat Film Festival, New Delhi, 2011 Official Selection
    Transilvania Intl Film Festival, Cluj, 2011 Official Selection, 3.97/5 Audience Barometer
    International Film Festival, Delhi, 2011 Official Selection
    Noordelijk Film Festival, Netherlands, 2011 Official Selection, 7.11/10 Audience Barometer
    Mumbai Film Mart, Mumbai 2011, Market Screening
    Film Bazaar, IFFI-Goa, 2011, Market Screening
    Saarang Film Festival, IIT-Madras, 2012, Official Selection, 7.7/10 Audience Barometer

    Theatrical Release, January 20, 2012 through PVR

    Mumbai
    Delhi
    Gurgaon
    Ahmedabad
    Bangalore
    Chennai
    Hyderabad (January 27)

    * * * * *

    More information: IMDB | Facebook | Youtube | Wikipedia | Website

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Browsing Tags Subhash Ghai

Black & White: Jaded & Faded

March 13, 2008 · by sudhishkamath

Genre: Drama
Director: Subhash Ghai
Cast: Anurag Sinha, Anil Kapoor, Shefali Shah
Storyline: A terrorist in black checks in to Chandni Chowk on a suicide mission, meets Urdu professor always dressed in white, sees rainbows and undergoes the usual.
Bottomline: Only for the colour-blind.

Yaadein gave us amnesia. It made us forget what Ghai used to be.

Kisna gave us insomnia. Ghai created arguably the worst movie ever made on Hindi screen.

And now, with Black & White, Ghai turns a full-blown terrorist, rabidly threatening to bomb us with bad films year after year.

The film’s flopped, people have been victimised. If this is not suicide-bombing, what is?

First of all all, Mr.Ghai, a terrorist developing a conscience is a beaten-to-death, blown-to-smithereens, bombed to stone-age-kind of a story-idea. It’s been told many times by filmmakers who’ve at least tried to make the narrative innovative.

If you really want us to look beyond black and white and see the different colours in life or film, you need to create characters who show us the hues and by that, we don’t mean you assign that brief to your costume designer.

What we have here are stereotypes: a terrorist whose wardrobe is full of black kurtas (and black shawls to cover himself if he’s wearing anything else) and a professor who can endorse detergent with his flawless white kurtas.

Anurag Sinha gets a nice meaty part for a debut, reminiscent of Vivek Oberoi’s Chandu in Company and Anil Kapoor breathes so much life and poignancy into a cliché that your heart goes out to the fine actor absolutely wasted in this preach-fest (The scene he breaks down has to be one of his finest performances in recent times). The casting apart, Ghai gets nothing right.

Ghai’s general assumption is not only that the mass comprises of low-IQ idiots, he also assumes they are visually challenged and/or that they have a hearing disability. Right from the first scene, he spells it all out, sometimes literally with sub-titles.

No joking, a sequence in the film plays out like this:

An investigating official from the CBI says: This time the terrorists are trying something new. They are sending suicide bombers. Whoa!

Cut to a conversation in a tea-shop where a bunch of fundamentalists are discussing the day’s headlines about police rounding up suspects as our terrorist hero chips in a statement that spells out his angst. Another quotes from the Quran to support hatred and the professor in white enters the scene to quote it in context. He then goes on to explain: “You are probably wondering how come I know so much about the Quran in spite of being Hindu. That’s because I’m Urdu Ke Professor and I’m Quran ke kareeb,” Ghai makes Anil Kapoor say that another two times lest we forget. He then has a supporting character spell it out again as he leaves: If the professor is the ‘zor’ (force) behind Chandni Chawk, his wife is the ‘shor’ (noise).

It predictably cuts to his wife (Shefali putting in an earnest performance) in the middle of a showdown standing up for a girl in the burqa who’s just been dumped by her husband. She orders someone to go fetch the TV-waalon.

No jokes, Ghai actually has a bunch of extras run up to a couple of readily available mediapersons somewhere in the area: “Ai TV-waalon, we have breaking news for you.”

As TV folks rush in to shoot, the professor steps in to tell them to stop all the drama and walks away as the TV crew promptly follows him, hoping to get an insightful byte or two.
Somewhere in there is a poster: Terrorism is a ruthless virus. The more you scream, the more powerful it gets.

Okay, why are we cribbing when he’s made films worse than this? Because, this is not exactly Ghai’s mainstream outing. This is produced by Mukta Arts Searchlight, a division of Mukta Arts that caters to niche tastes.

If this is Subhash Ghai’s brand of art-house cinema, aren’t we glad we have been warned appropriately before his commercial outings: Yuvraaj and Hello Darling?

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