The Vishal-Hrithik Roshan project

The Times of India reports:

Hrithik will star in Bharadwaj's next. The project in question is a deeply emotional romantic film, which will have two heroines. None of the leading ladies has been finalised.

Earlier, speculation was that such an alliance would be for Hamlet, but hard to tell.

{Vishal, Gulzar, Sukhwinder}'s Bajaj Allianz ad

The insurance company Bajaj Allianz has a new ad campaign titled "Jiyo Befikar". The ad features lyrics by Gulzar, music by Vishal Bhardwaj, and is sung by Sukhwinder. I do not know if Vishal has composed music for ads before, so until I'm informed otherwise, this seems to be a first.

Here's one of the commercials:



Courtesy: this post on the Gulzarfans Y!group

A Bangla mafioso is called "Dada"?

A nice new angle to "Kaminey" is revealed in this article:

Supratik Sen, one of the writers of the film and also Bhardwaj’s associate director, says, :At the outset, there wasn’t any specific reason for using Bengali characters in the film. We just wanted colourful characters, not your trademark Maharashtrian dons who were the staple of standard Hindi fare. Debu Mukerji, Rajatava Dutta and Chandan Sanyal play three Bengali book-keepers, involved in shady businesses with a screwball streak to them."

Given that this is supposed to partly be a 'caper' film, one wonders if this is similar to the Hasidic Jew angle in Snatch.

August 14 is less than two months away.

Kaminey's possible release date: 14 August

With the massive pile-up of Hindi film releases getting cleared in an orderly fashion after the recently concluded producers' strike, Kaminey is likely to see the light of day on the 14th of August. There's no word on the music yet, but one would expect it to be about a month in advance.

Sadly, this is gleaned from speculation from the Kaminey Facebook group - UTV needs to realise that creating social network spaces for promotion isn't enough - got to keep communicate to maintain the buzz & momentum around their product on the said space.

Meanwhile, this is the official UTV page for the film.

Dreams, wishes, and meanings.

With the multiplex owners flexing their muscles and nixing new releases, our film fixes have become few and far between. There is a clear knock on effect on movie news; with no reel news, same old crap gets regurgitated in newspapers and film portals over and over again.

Only half decent piece of info is that Kaminey seems to have an official Facebook page (I might be slow in catching this one as I still dont have a Facebook page. Yes, and I still live in a cave.)

But that's not why I wanted to write this post. It mentions an Urdu verse Vishal has used (composed?)

“Raat din giley (Day and night I have complaints)
Meri aarzoo kamini (My wish is a worthless)
Mere khwab bhi kaminey (My dreams are a cheat)
dosti dil se thi (My friendship was from the heart)
Yeh hazoor bhi kaminey (But that you too were a rascal)"

I cant access the page, so don't know if the translation is embedded on the page or is thanks to Bollyspice, but I read it thus -
(Agree to the first 3 lines - I have complaints because my wishes and dreams are traitors)
dosti dil se thi (My friendship was with the heart)
Yeh hazoor bhi kaminey (But the heart too was a rascal)" .

What say?

Vishal talk

Rekha Bharadwaj speaks about her background, her singing career and of course, the other Bharadwaj.

Arshad does a Kirk Lazarus

Thaindian reports that in Ishqiya, Arshad sports a dark look.

"Whenever Arshad arrives on the film’s sets every morning, hours are spent painting Arshad Warsi’s torso black".

Why, you ask? Do you people not get it. To win awards, maan, samman etc. etc. - why should every other actor get the Padmashri?

I wonder why they are painting just the torso black. There is no mention of the rest of the body. Hmmmm.

The film is slated to release late 2009. That would be two movies closely associated with Vishal Bharadwaj - Kaminey which he directs and Ishqiya which he produces. Lets all collectively rub our hands in glee.