Word: akhtar
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...year ago on a set in Mumbai, a young man in worn jeans decorated with patches shaped like marijuana leaves sprawled sulkily in a director's chair and demanded again and again that Amitabh Bachchan, the godfather of Bollywood, get it right. "Cut! Cut!" yelled Farhan Akhtar, the 29-year-old veteran of one movie, before marching up to Bachchan, the 60-year-old veteran of more than 100, for an urgent discussion. The scene featured Bachchan as an Indian army colonel banging two hammers on a table off screen to simulate the jolt of an incoming Pakistani artillery round...
...Lakshya?which opened last Friday everywhere from Mumbai to Kuala Lumpur, London to New York?looks destined to be this year's big Bollywood blockbuster. If so, the key to its success will be the fearless and fastidious professionalism that Akhtar has brought to an industry too often doomed by technical sloppiness and a numbing lack of originality. Unusually for Bollywood, where directors often turn out five movies a year, Akhtar took more than two years to bring the script and music (both by his father, Javed) to the screen. Breaking with the norm again, Akhtar insisted on a continuous...
...joins the Indian army on a whim and winds up finding heroic purpose fighting Pakistani troops who crossed into Indian-controlled Kashmir in 1999. The tragic context of a conflict that has cost up to 70,000 lives offers ample opportunity for that staple of Bollywood film: copious melodrama. Akhtar isn't so radical as to depart from such essential ingredients of the genre: song and dance, boy meets girl, and plenty of tears are all there. But everything is deftly updated. In the first of three dance sequences, for example, Roshan puts on a display of body popping...
...movie looks different, too. Popp brilliantly captures the starkness of Ladakh, the endless dustbowl valleys and vast plains of worthless desert that form Kashmir's unforgiving battlegrounds. As for the performances, Akhtar asked for, and got, very un-Bollywood and uniformly excellent understatement. Roshan, with his self-deprecating humor and subtle emotional depth, sets a new standard for the industry. "I went round to [Akhtar's] house to talk about the character just before we started shooting," says Roshan. "The meeting lasted maybe two minutes. Farhan said, 'I want you to be you. Nothing more, nothing less.' It's very...
...bottomless well of batting talent, and behind Warne's trickery is a trio of fast bowlers who can do just as much damage. Among other potential heroes to look out for: England's Marcus Trescothick and India's pint-sized maestro Sachin Tendulkar. Pakistan's Yousuf Youhana and Shoaib Akhtar, the "Rawalpindi Express," who can bowl a ball at 161 km/h, should be enough to keep them in contention. And don't miss Sri Lanka's man with the golden arm, spinner Muttiah Muralitharan, sometimes known as the smiling assassin because he grins incessantly as he mercilessly bowls out opposing...