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 This Week MAG Recommends
Love Breakups Zindagi
When during a long wedding festivity in Chandigarh the affable Beejee (Farida Jalal) quietly passes away, you are suddenly awakened into a world beyond the love and breakups that consumes the zindagi of the average 20-something urban youngster today. Blessedly the characters in this plot are young, urbane, hip and happening, but not annoying in their shallow concerns. Jai (Zayed Khan) will get rid of his bossy fiancée and Naina (Dia Mirza) will be out of a suffocating association with a man who loves her but not in the way she yearns to be. You know how it will finally turn out and yet you get involved with the lives of these mismatched pairs looking for love warmth and togetherness in a fast-moving world of cut-throat dreams. Jai and Naina are almost 'settled' in their life but are missing something or someone who will complete them. Jai feels that magic and serendipity have passed him by and Naina has taught herself that a less than fulfilling life is enough for her. But is it? Govind (Cyrus Sahukar) has a colourful past and is on his way to another major, seemingly all wrong relationship. But what if this 'mistake' is the love he has been looking for all his life? As the characters explore their own befuddled emotions and their misplaced devotions, the narration acquires its own momentum. There are endearing cameos by Shabana Azmi, Boman Irani and Shah Rukh Khan. But that isn't the reason why you'd want to see this amiable film.
 The Big Year
A comedy featuring Steve Martin, Jack Black, and Owen Wilson creates certain expectations, not the least of which is, well, laughter. But The Big Year is less concerned with eliciting big laughs than offering earnest insights on the meaning of success and the value of friendship. Delving into the subculture of hard-core birders, the film follows three men, semi-retired industrialist Stu (Martin), corporate drone Brad (Black), and suburban contractor Kenny (Wilson), as they vie in a year-long competition known as the Big Year. The goal of the competition is simple: to spot as many different bird species in North America as possible. As current Big Year record-holder, Kenny is something of a rock star in the birding world. His cocky, carefree manner masks a stark determination to defend his hard-won celebrity – and his fragile ego – against the likes of upstarts Stu and Brad, both of whom are Big Year rookies. None of the three leads stray far from type, but they do offer slight tweaks to their usual screen personas: Wilson is sly and Machiavellian; Black tones down the buffoonery, limiting himself to two pratfalls; Martin's sardonicism is tempered with humility.
 The Thing
In The Thing, a prequel to the 1982 John Carpenter film of the same name, a team of paleontologists, Norwegian diggers and rugged helicopter pilots unearth an alien creature with the ability to disguise itself as the organic material surrounding it, i.e. feeble humans. Ironically, the movie itself is also a deceptive shape shifter, impersonating its chilling, horror predecessor with the same beats, same characters and same scares—but completely void of soul. The movie forgoes character building, wasting no time flying us to the familiar Antarctic setting: Girl-who-examines-unfrozen-animal-corpses Kate is introduced by her friend Adam to sinister scientist Sander Halvorson, who quickly convinces her to throw away her life for a trip to the icy continent. When she arrives, Halvorson reveals his team has discovered an alien life form trapped inside a block of ice, and he needs Kate to watch him thaw it out.
 Footloose
In Craig Brewer's Footloose – newcomer Kenny Wormald plays Ren McCormack, a surly Boston teen forced to move in with his uncle's family in Bomont, Georgia, after the death of his mother. For the past three years, the youths of Bomont have suffered under a town ordinance barring all public dancing – the consequence of a tragic car accident that claimed the lives of five intoxicated high-school students leaving a dance party. This vexes Ren. Like all red-blooded teenage boys, he wants nothing more than to dance, dance and dance. He vows to have it overturned in time, placing him on a collision course with Reverend Shaw Moore (Dennis Quaid), the uptight local preacher who spearheaded the anti-dancing campaign after losing his only son in the crash. The storyline, steeped as it is in melodrama and sentiment, often borders on embarrassing. And yet, there's an irresistible allure to its prevailing tone of joyful exuberance, expressed most potently in the film's lively dance sequences.
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