Cocktail:
Movies which are made with an eye on the story as opposed to commercial success are always good. Directors who understand emotions well and have the maturity to show those onscreen with sensitivity, can never go wrong at the box office.
Homi Adjania (the director) impressed me with his very first feature "Being Cyrus" in choosing a subject, which not many would have attempted in their first cinematic endeavour. Not only that he also proved (in that movie) that he stays focussed on his vision and does not stray from the plot.
Cocktail's plot is NOT new. Honestly, humans have only a few plots around which thier lives a posteriori their imagination revolves. It is indeed the expression and the handling of the subject, which make the audiences get sucked into the goings on. This is a love triangle, which we have grown up watching in Hindi Movies starting from Sangam (I am not sure if the subject was handled in any big hit before Sangam too) but that is where the similarity ends. This is a movie which all urbane audiences of our times would relate with. Most of us will see a reflection of our lives in many of the incidents in the movie. What makes this movie appealing is the director's successful adherence to the sensibility of the story. In most movies where the protagonists are the Jett Setting generation, the directors tend to end up focussing so much on the form that the emotional conflict gets drowned in the laser-lights, the loud music and the heady cocktails of urban life.
There are some characters which can be protrayed only by that ONE actor, which we can NOT imagine anyone else performing. Saif Ali Khan, the industry's Nawab is perhaps the only actor who could have played Gautam Kapoor with the mix of naughtiness and class which are so essential to the character that anyone even slightly less convincing would have proved disastrous.
I was unsure if I wanted to watch the movie as it starred Deepika Padukone. Thankfully she played a character which many of us think is very close to her off screen life, which perhaps is the reason that I could endure her presence in the movie. She speaks as if syllables are being manufactured in her mouth on different conveyor belts and are then assembled at the tip of her tongue before she finally spits those out as words. Like a digital signal perhaps, where packets of data instead of a continuous wave are sent out.
The size zero mania has been taken to the next level by Deepika and the new find Diana Penty. In fact, Diana Penty should be credited with having invented a size "-1 " now. Why don't women understand that THIN is NOT/was NEVER/will never be IN. With her vulnerability, she looks the part. In emotional scenes she looks awed by Saif, which one can forgive as her first-film-jitters. Boman Irani has now completely replaced Anupam Kher in the Mumbai film industry. He is not AS good as his bald senior but he is pretty good nevertheless.
The movie has good "repeat viewing" value, which will make it rock at the box office.
