Valentine’s Day, religiously followed by Archies employees, romantics the world over and jobless religious fundamentalists, has ushered three movies about love and loss into the cinemas.
Fitoor Abhishek Kapoor’s new movie after Kai Po Che! (2013) is an ambitious adaptation of Charles Dickens’s nineteenth-century novel Great Expectations. Shot in Kashmir and featuring a middling soundtrack by Amit Trivedi, Fitoor is about the enduring love of Noor for Firdaus, the ward of the eccentric Begum Hazrat. Leads Aditya Roy Kapur and Katrina Kaif will be hoping to convince the world that their acting skills are on par with their good looks, while Tabu is already stealing the scene as the local Miss Havisham.
How To Be Single A romantic comedy about singletons that is targetting a Valentine’s Day weekend release? Welcome to the new anxious world of dating. In Liz Tuccillo’s novel How To Be Single, described as Sex and the City meets Eat, Pray, Love, a paralegal assistant in New York City probes the most important question of all: how do companion-free women survive? (Quite well, we would assume.) The cast of the screen adaptation includes Dakota Johnson, fresh off her box-office hit Fifty Shades of Grey, break-out Australian comedienne Rebel Wilson, Leslie Mann, Alison Brie, Anders Holm and Damon Wayans Jr.
Sanam Re The third V-Day release has notched up a fair degree of interest because of the alleged real-life entanglements of its leads, Pulkit Samrat and Yami Gautam. On the screen, they play childhood friends who reconnect in adulthood as various melodious songs play in the background. This is, after all, a T-Series production, and in-house director Divya Khosla Kumar directs.
Deadpool Scarred for life in an experiment, Wade Wilson hunts down the people who are responsible for his transformation into a superhero with a perverse sense of humour. Billed as Marvel’s alternative men-in-latex franchise kickstarter, Tim Miller’s Deadpool stars Ryan Reynolds in the lead role. The character made a brief appearance in X-Men Origins: Wolverine, for those who track this kind of thing, and now has a whole movie to unleash his profanity and irreverent humour.
Trumbo Bryan Cranston, nominated in the Actor in a Leading Role (Male) category at the Oscars this year, plays Dalton Trumbo, the feted screenwriter with such films as Kitty Foyle, Spartacus, Exodus and Roman Holiday to his credit. Summoned by the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947 for his membership of the Communist Party of USA and his outspoken support for Leftist causes, Trumbo refused to show up, earning a blacklist that severely affected his career. The stellar cast of Jay Roach’s movie includes Helen Mirren as gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, David James Elliot as John Wayne, Diane Lane as his wife Cleo and Louis CK as his similarly debarred friend.