paki lion
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LAHORE: Pakistani actress Meera has announced that she has signed on for her third film in India, Umraao Jan-e-Ada, with producer Afzal Khan. Ajay Devgan, the husband of actress Kajol, will star alongside her.
Talking to Daily Times on Wednesday, she said that she was going to India in July to take part in the shooting of the film.
Meera said that her second film Kasak with singer-cum-actor Lucky Ali, who is also producer of the film directed by Rajiv Babbar, has been completed. “I have performed the role of a nurse in Kasak and its songs are great,” she said. “I have done the songs according to the demand of the role.”
She said that she would perform in another film by Mahesh Bhatt, who directed her in Nazar. The name of the film had not been yet decided but its shooting would start in September, she added.
Meera said that Nazar did tremendous business all over the world and earned approximately Rs 180 million. She admitted that she had gained a bit of weight in Nazar and added that she was working to cut down.
The film caused controversy in Pakistan when it was reported that Meera was involved in some kissing scenes, but these were later dropped.
Meera said there were “radical elements” in the Indian film industry who opposed her, a Pakistani, starring in Indian movies, so she had got Canadian nationality “to shut them up”.
She said that she was performing in Indian films to strengthen the peace process between the two countries.
She is going strong! Well Done Meera, however, she must not signs too many films..
kool
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Movie Review
For those who expect a whole lot of oomph to be crammed into this thriller, there's bad news. Pakistani import Meera's Bollywood debut proves her to be a competent actress. But she doesn't have the quality that could have elevated the film's mass acceptance level.
"Nazar" is a poor man's - or woman's - version of this week's other film "Naina". The director's loose grip over her plot is matched by an absence of technical wherewithal in the story.
All through the longish drama we are treated to the protagonist's purportedly eerie hallucinations. Yup. Like Urmila Matondkar in "Naina", Meera can 'see' the dead before they die. Too bad she doesn't get us involved in the way the other film does. The fault lies not so much with the central performance as the failure of the director to create an ambience conducive to constant fear and foreboding.
There are too many destructive distractions. At one point in the second-half she runs out of plot and takes the lead couple for a song under the waterfall.
The plot never re-surfaces from the watery diversion. Though debutant director Soni Razdan doesn't apply brakes in the narrative for a song or a comic romp, she constantly keeps putting the characters into crises that seem complex from above but are pretty absurd in close-up.
The four main characters, an actress (Meera), a cop (Ashmit Patel with hair almost as lengthy as the narrative, the cop's colleague (Koel Puri, squinting her eyes into a Chinese grimace) and a doctor (Aly Khan).
The storytelling is pale and uninviting. The zero chemistry between the lead pair makes matters worse. While Meera looks a lot larger than Ashmit Patel, he walks around looking more like a drum player in a garage rock band than a cop. Given a crisis, she'd probably protect him instead of vice versa.
The tentative scene-stealer is the talented Koel Puri who struggles to invest a semblance of intelligence into a film that's structured like a de-escalating whodunit. Throughout we sense a catastrophe far beyond the immediate crisis, namely the serial killing of beer-bar dancers.
"Ha, serial killings happen only in Hollywood films," scoffs senior cop Avtar Gill.
They sure do, and far more professionally. The build-up and the denouement in "Nazar" are amateurish enough to make the next episode of the long-running TV series "CID" look like Hitchcock's "Psycho".
A serious psychological subtext is lacking in "Nazar". There is an attempt to introduce 'issues' such as the plight of beer-bar dancers and the HIV virus into the plot. But the narrative just doesn't seem to support ideas that go beyond the shallow slasher aspirations of the product.
Watch out for Gujarati stage actress Sarita Joshi in one sequence and Neena Gupta's sufiyana qawwali. They both go over-the-top. But no sweat. Self-control isn't one of this film's primary virtues.