Bol Bachchan Review

Bol Bachchan Review

Cast: Ajay Devgn, Abhishek Bachchan, Asin, Prachi Desai, Krushna Abhishek, Archana Puran Singh, Asrani, Neeraj Vora

Direction: Rohit Shetty

Genre: Comedy

Duration: 2 hours 30 minutes

Avg Readers Rating: 

Story: Abbas wants a job, Prithvi wants an honest man. But Abbas spins a tale of twin brothers and multiple mothers - what happens when Prithvi discovers his vivid truth and lies?

Movie Review: You know those heart-charts they have in hospitals, the ones that trace a person's heartbeat up and down in waves? Bol Bachchan(BB) reminds you often of one of those. Rohit Shetty's latest movie has a constant up-and-down aspect to it, one sequence making you shriek in your seat with laughter, another sending your mind wandering off to the mundane. But at the very heart of things - Shetty's madly in love with the movies and BB is his homage to that all-time classic, Golmaal.

In Shetty's version, Abbas Ali (Bachchan) is desperate for work after he and his sister Sania (Asin) lose their parental home. A family friend Shashtri (Asrani) brings them from Delhi-6 to the feudal village of Ranakpur where Prithvijit Raghuvanshi (Devgn) is the lord of all he surveys. Blessed with two obsessions - speaking nothing but the truth and hysteria-inducing English - Prithvi is super-impressed by Abbas, even swallowing his story of being called 'Abhishek Bachchan' when events lead to Abbas breaking open a temple door. As Prithvi insists on employing 'Abhishek', Shastri's son Ravi (Krushna, positively sparkling as he reprises Deven Verma's role in all this golmaal) adds more wheels to Abbas's clattering spin, creating a Muslim twin brother and a super-pious mother to convince Prithvi of Abhishek's propah antecedents. With the mother played by small-time mujra star Zohra Bai (Archana Puran Singh in a loud, colourful role she carries off with the swagger of a satinsharara), and Abbas playing a highly effeminate kathak teacher, hired by Prithvi to teach his petulant sister Radhika (Desai) some dance, things only get funnier.

Devgn's at the top of his form here, mouthing lines like 'Hard work is the keyhole to saxophone' and 'Boy in armpit, hyper-noise pollution in city', meaning bagal mein chora, etc., with deadpan face and shining eyes. Bachchan sags at the start but sizzles with later hilarity, even pulling off a crazy dance sequence to Dola Re. You wish there'd been more of his mad antics but instead, the camera spends considerable time lingering lovingly on Devgn's cleavage as he drives a jeep, pulverizes liars and takes on his weasly cousin.

In contrast to the male leads, the two heroines look pretty but bring little more than a wardrobe of delectable kurtis to the film. In fact, the stellar supporting stars - Asrani, Krushna, Puran Singh and Neeraj Vora as Prithvi's suspicious sidekick Makhan - bring far more zest to the party. With its hilarious moments and film-buff touches - bits of Singham imagery, Bachchan channeling some of that Yuva aggression his way, references from Deewar to Dostana - BB's fun and games. But it's way too long and diverts you needlessly with that wicked cousin angle, a power plant that doesn't progress out of paper, an odd double-role for Asin, jokes overloading on the cheese at times and music that is surprisingly unmemorable.

On the plus side, BB's a dialogue-lover's delight - lines like 'fish and chips without water', Devgn conveying the situation of a 'jal bin machli' - sparkle across the plot and you can feel the love as the actors reprise bits and bobs of vintage Bollywood. On the downside, it exceeds by about 30 minutes and has that odd, uneven heart-chart quality accompanying the film. But that aside, BB showcases Shetty as the maharaja of madness, Devgn clearly his crown prince. And Abhishek? His judwa bhai, of course.

Tip-Off: Don't strain your brain applying reason to this laugh-riot - but do buy more popcorn for that extra half-hour.

Aircel to introduce 4G services later this year

Popular mobile service provider, Aircel, will reportedly introduce its 4G services in the country later this year. Business Standard now reports that Aircel will be investing $500 million (Rs. 2,757 crores) to launch its 4G services in the country between October and December, and will begin rolling out 4G services from Chennai and other cities in Tamil Nadu. Aircel, reportedly has its spectrum in eight circles in the country. Quoting Sandip Das, CEO of Malaysian telco Maxis Berhad (which controls a majority stake in Aircel), the report adds that, “Our focus is on creating a big data business. We’ll award contracts for 4G equipment soon and launch between October and December. We are putting in $500 million. We’ll be an integrated provider of 4G services.”

Aircel 4G to come in later this year

Das, reportedly has also been quoted as saying that not only will Aircel be providing mobile 4G services, by the way of dongles and devices, but the popular mobile service provider in the country also plans to offer broadband Internet, broadcasting, video on demand, education and health care services, et al. In fact, as per this report, Aircel has also been working at creating a fibre optic backbone, which it plans to do partly by leasing and partly by the way of its own investments.    

Das, however cleared that the company is not aiming to be an all-India name in 4G, but prefers to be a 'large data player in certain circles.' When asked on whether the prices of 4G would be high as 3G, Das was quoted by this report as saying, "We have already equalised our 2G and 3G tariffs and have over a million subscribers. With China and India dominating the LTE market, we’ll see prices of devices fall.”

Only recently, Airtel grabbed national headlines when it launched its 4G services in India, first in Kolkata, then Bengaluru. Airtel for their 4G customers in Bengaluru and Kolkata offers, what it refers to as ‘Smartbytes’. This newly introduced feature, is Airtel’s 4G LTE top-up service and will essentially allow Airtel 4G customers to purchase add-on packs, which they can purchase once they have exhausted their free benefit usage. 

Yet another interesting feature, that users are being offered on Airtel’s 4G network is a movie catalogue. Airtel is introducing a movie catalogue comprising 35 movies for their 4G LTE customers. Airtel will offer 10 movie titles for free, for the first month, which they claim that over lightening fast Airtel 4G LTE, these can be watched without buffering,pixilation and lag. To avail a monthly subscription for the catalogue, Airtel 4G LTE users will have to pay Rs.149 /month for unlimited movies. Some titles on offer include - Rang De Basanti, Fashion, Shootout At Lokhandwala, No One Killed Jessica, among others. Airtel, further, as part of their introductory offer for their customers availing their 4G services, will offer a cashback for the CPE/ dongle, thereby bringing down the device cost to zero, while also encouraging more to adopt 4G services.

Thank Lenovo, world’s smallest desktop is here

Electronics major Lenovo today said it has launched the world’s smallest enterprise computers, continuing its efforts to strengthen the product portfolio for this segment.

Electronics major Lenovo today said it has launched the world’s smallest enterprise computers.

The products ThinkCentre M72e and ThinkCentre M92p Tiny desktop PCs are priced at Rs 23,500 and above (excluding taxes and without operating system).

Being the industry’s first enterprise 1L PCs, the M72e and M92p offer superior performance and high reliability, the Chinese company said in a statement.

Trends in the enterprise PC industry suggest that an increasing number of organisations now prefer PCs that occupy less space and consume less energy yet perform at optimal levels, it added.

Microsoft gives Office a 2013 touch-up

Microsoft has unveiled a touch-ready version of Office, the latest version of the company's market-leading productivity software suite.

In San Francisco, Steve Ballmer described Office 2013 as the firm's "most ambitious release" to date.

The software is primed for mobile devices, cloud computing, and social networking.

Office is the globe's most popular productivity application, with a billion users worldwide.

It is also Microsoft's key revenue driver, and keeping it fresh is how the firm intends to maintain its market lead.

'Visceral' software

Throughout his hour-long demonstration on Monday, Mr Ballmer and Kirk Koenigsbauer, vice-president of Microsoft's Office division, highlighted how the software had been adapted to keep pace with technology changes.

Office 2013 is fully touch-ready, as is Windows 8, the company's latest operating system, and its new tablet computer, Surface, which is expected to be available in October.

Surface will hit stores some two-and-a-half years after Apple launched its iPad onto the market, and analysts say the power of Office gives Microsoft its bet chance at gaining a genuine foothold in the post-PC market.

Steve Ballmer said new touchscreen controls made the software a good match for tablets

For the first time, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook are all responsive to touch-screen controls - taps, swipes, and pinch-and-zoom can be used within documents, files and presentations.

The user-experience is designed to be more "immersive," "visceral" and "multimedia-rich" compared to earlier version of Office, Mr Ballmer said.

• Documents, slides, and presentations can be marked up on mobile screens, drawn on, highlighted or annotated with a digital pen, stylus or even a finger.
• Skype, bought for $8.5bn (£5.4bn) in 2011, and Yammer, a social network for businesses, are being rolled into Office: live, multi-party conversations and meetings can be created with Skype video and accessed within Word, PowerPoint, or Outlook.
• New "People Cards" include an individual's digital "presence" - a photo, options to email, instant message, phone or video chat, and activity feeds from the social networks Facebook and Linkedin.
• Skydrive automatically saves and syncs all Office documents in an online, cloud-based storage service. This makes files and content created in Office available on demand across computing devices.

Compatibility

In 2011, Microsoft Office was worth $14bn, more than half the company's profits, according to Michael Silver, a research analyst at Gartner.

"There doesn't seem to be a lot of competition here because Microsoft still has over 90% of the market," Mr Silver told the BBC.

While less expensive and free online alternatives to Office like Google Apps and Zoho have become available, no company is taking away significant market share from Microsoft yet, he said.

"Microsoft has been competing against free for over 10 years with the open source products and in terms of cheap with Google."

Microsoft hopes the new Office suite will pair with its Surface tablet to win business customers over

"But the compatibility issues... [have] been a bigger hurdle for people than a lot of people would have expected and it has kept the vast majority of users in the Microsoft camp," Mr Silver noted.

'Lock-in'

Andy McLoughlin, co-founder of Huddle, a cloud computing start-up in San Francisco that competes with Microsoft's Sharepoint software for online content management, sees Office as dominant in the workplace, but faltering elsewhere.

"Office is still seen as the de facto productivity suite for the workplace," he agreed.

"I think it's got a few years yet. Microsoft is still pretty clever in terms of the way that they license the software for big companies and so there's a certain degree of lock-in."

"When you talk about consumers, though, I don't really know any people who, unless they have a licence through work, would keep Office on their machine.

"Why spend several hundred dollars on software when you are really only using one or 2% of the functionality?"