1. Rajkumar Hirani Starts Shooting for Sanjay Dutt Biopic
Rajkumar Hirani’s next big venture - the Sanjay Dutt biopic starring Ranbir Kapoor as the controversial Khalnayak actor began on Saturday.
Hirani tweeted yesterday morning that he had taken the first shot of the film and that the entire team was buzzing with excitement. The clap for the first shot was reportedly given by Sanjay Dutt himself.
Actress Dia Mirza shared a picture from the sets of the film which had Ranbir, writer Abhijat Joshi, Hirani, Mirza and actor Vicky Kaushal cutting a cake.
Hirani reportedly got hooked on to the the idea of making a film on Sanjay Dutt’s life after having a marathon story telling session over days about the controversial actor’s life. At the end of the session which continued for 25 days, the filmmaker had about 200 hours of recorded conversation with Dutt, which he then used to script the biopic.
The final draft script was of course decided on only after Dutt himself gave it a nod, after (we assume) scanning it for anything that could be too sensational, private or exceedingly controversial.
As of now we know that while Ranbir will be playing Dutt, Paresh Rawal has been signed on to play his late father, actor and politician Sunil Dutt. Actress Anushka Sharma will be seen as a journalist in the film and Sonam Kapoor will reportedly portray the women in Dutt’s life. The actress to play Dutt’s mom, actress Nargis, is yet to be finalised.
Recently, Hirani had said that when he finally narrated the entire script to Sanjay Dutt, he was happy to see that Dutt laughed and cried through the narration. It was apparently an emotional moment for the filmmaker as he had not yet seen Dutt cry.
2. After Khaidi No 150, Chiranjeevi to Team Up With Ram Charan
Telugu legend Chiranjeevi’s new film Khaidi No. 150 , his first in ten years, is a huge success, currently shattering box-office records. In comparison Chiranjeevi’s son Ram Charan Teja’s latest film Dhruva released as few weeks earlier has proven to be a tame money spinner, thereby proving the irrefutable staying-power of star fathers from Amitabh Bachchan and Dharmendra in Bollywood to Kamal Haasan and Chiranjeevi in the South, who are doing far better in their acting careers than their progenies.
Sources in the know from the Telugu film industry say that father and son - Chiranjeevi and Ram Charan, now plan to share screen space in a two-hero film.
“Ram Charan’s career needs some fresh blood, that his father has shattered records after a 10-year gap is an eye-opener to Ram Charan. When Ram Charan appears in the film for a song with his father the theatres roar in approval. It’s time the two generations of Chiranjeevi’s family came together, and a project is being planned with the two of them as father and son,” says an insider.
Qualitatively Ram Charan’s Dhruva is a superior film. In Dhruva we could see the young actor attempting to change the way we look at Telugu cinema. The grammar of the action scenes were different and the presentation and packaging were far slicker. Ram Charan had worked hard on his body language, the lack of acting chops compensated for by the attention paid to building athletic muscles.
Except for the hair dye, Chiranjeevi doesn’t even try. Khaidi No 150 is an unabashed celebration of the status quo. Whatever Chiranjeevi’s fans have come to expect from their iconic star, he delivers, in ample measures. There is the action, dancing and romancing all done in the trademark Chiranjeevi style. There are two roles for the star to perform. He plays them with a gusto akin to twins occupying a kabbaddi match from two sides of the line. He brings no distinction between the two characters who are as interchangeable as two wheels of an automobile.
It is evident that Chiranjeevi has aged biologically. His cinema, though remains stuck at what he used to do when he was 24 or 35 or 48. In that sense, Chiranjeevi’s cinema is ageless, though the tell-tale signs of jadedness are scattered everywhere in this long rambling, at times incoherent but uniformly adulatory film about a do-gooder who could have been a politician.
There is a disarming pliability about Chiranjeevi’s personality in Khaidi No 150. He seems to be telling his fans that he would do anything to please them, as long as they don’t demand any unreasonably excessive levels of aesthetic gratification from his cinema. Khaidi No 150 with its garish visuals and an exaggerated emotional palate that has its origins in our naat-shastra culture, bombards our senses with furious volumes of noise, violence and melodrama. This could be a film from the 1980s masquerading as a new-age entertainer and getting away with the fraudulence because….well, Chiranjeevi can get away with anything, including the girl, Kajal Aggarwal, who re-defines the ‘damsel in distress’.
Everything is theatrical about the presentation. Nothing is what it seems, not even Chiranjeevi, who is actually a 60-year old man pretending to be as agile and rakish as 30-year old. To his credit Chiranjeevi pulls this charade off much more convincingly than his southern peer Rajnikanth. But not convincing enough to make us believe that the ten years he was away from camera have magically been erased from Chiranvjeevi’s birth certificate.
3. Rishi Kapoor Reveals He Met Dawood Ibrahim
According to reports, in his soon to be released autobiography titled Khullam Khulla, actor Rishi Kapoor has written in detail about meeting with India’s most wanted man - Dawood Ibrahim on two occasions.
The first time Rishi met Dawood was when the actor was invited over to the gangster’s house in Dubai for tea in 1988. Rishi explains that the meeting was before the 1993 bomb blasts took place and Dawood wasn’t an enemy of the state, so he didn’t think there was anything wrong in meeting him.
The actor goes on to describe how he was taken to an undisclosed location where he was met by Dawood himself and the two spoke for over 4 hours over cups of tea. During their conversation, Dawood told Rishi that he did not drink or serve alcohol, he also claimed to have only carried out petty thefts and got someone killed, but hadn’t killed anyone himself.
On another occasion, Rishi claims to have bumped into Dawood in 1989 while he was shopping for shoes with wife Neetu Singh in Dubai. The actor says that the underworld don was surrounded by 8 to 10 bodyguards and he offered to buy Rishi whatever he wanted. On both occasions Dawood had assured Rishi that he could contact him for anything he needed.
The actor incidentally played Dawood Ibrahim in Nikhil Advani’s film D-Day in 2013.
Rishi Kapoor’s biography Khullam Khulla published by Harper Collins will be formally launched in Delhi on 17 January.
(Source: Times of India)
4. Salman Khan’s Fake Voter ID
Salman Khan may have just turned 51 in December, but if you go by this voter ID card, the Dabangg actor is already 64.
This voter ID with Salman Khan’s picture and details has gone viral online.
Looks like someone’s been upto a bit of mischief having seen the names of Salman and Saleem Khan on this ID.
5. Salman Khan Remembers 21 Years of Karan Arjun With Shah Rukh Khan
It’s been 21 years since Salman Khan and Shah Rukh Khan’s biggest hit together - Karan Arjun released. Recalling the release of their saga of rebirth and revenge, Salman Khan tweeted a rare picture of himself, Shah Rukh and Hrithik Roshan on the sets of the film. Hrithik was incidentally assisting his dad and filmmaker Rakesh Roshan in the film.
Salman also congratulated Hrithik on 17 years of his debut Kaho Na Pyar Hai, to which junior Roshan replied:
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