EKLAVYA STUNS HOLLYWOOD
Mumbai 26th March, 07:
Eklavya- The Royal Guard, Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s stylish epic stunned Hollywood luminaries at a special screening on Saturday, March 24 at UCLA. The screening was jointly sponsored at the Billy Wilder theater by UCLA and MCorpGlobal. The audience viewed the film in awed silence which was broken only for the prolonged applause and standing ovation at the end of the film.
Robert L. Friedman, the former President of Columbia Pictures and AMC Theaters applauded it as one of the great foreign films to have graced Hollywood in recent years. He expressed hope that the film will become India’s official entry for the Oscars. Dr. Rob Rosen, the Dean of UCLA’s film program found the film to be a kin of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s magic realism. Lionel Wigram, Producer of the Harry Potter films, said “he had seen nothing like this." Jeffery Silver, Producer of the film 300, found it to be “a thriller that elevates to the level of art.” Before the film, Ashok Amritraj introduced Vidhu Vinod Chopra to the audience as India’s “terrific” director
Friday, March 30, 2007
Saturday, March 24, 2007
Tonight - IOL review
Movie Review: Eklavya
February 23, 2007 By Debashine Thangevelo
Director: Vidhu Vinod Chopra
Cast: Amitabh Bachchan, Sanjay Dutt, Boman Irani, Jackie Shroff, Saif Ali Khan, Vidya Balan, Jimmy Shergill and Raima Sen
Classification: TBA
Rating : ****
If Eklavya is the result of Vidhu Vinod Chopra's six-year absence from the director's seat, I'm all for him taking more breaks. His last movie, Mission Kashmir (2000), also enjoyed rave reviews, with Sanjay Dutt and Hrithik Roshan heading the cast.Chopra has bagged Bollywood's finest veterans headed by Amitabh Bachchan, Boman Irani, Jackie Shroff and Sanjay Dutt, for his latest venture, which he also penned.As Rani Suhasinidevi (Sharmila Tagore), the queen of Devigarh, a centuries-old citadel in Rajasthan, lies on her death bed, she cries out for Eklavya (Amitabh Bachchan), the royal guard. Eklavya's family has been protecting the fort, the king and its secrets for nine generations. King Rana Jaywardhan (Boman Irani), horrified by the queen's deception, strangles her. Not long after that, Prince Harshwardan (Saif Ali Khan), who stayed in London to escape the suffocating traditions of his land, is summoned back to the fort to perform the last rites for his mother. His mentally challenged twin sister, Princess Nandini (Raima Sen) and childhood sweetheart Rajjo (Vidya Balan), are ecstatic about his return . But all is not well in the kingdom. Against the backdrop of angry farmers who have had their land taken away, the king is plotting the demise of Eklavya, who, as it turns out, is the prince and princess' real father.Meanwhile, inspector Pannalal Chohar (Sanjay Dutt) is called in to investigate a death threat received by the king.Chopra has woven a spellbinding tale that is dexterously executed. Each character is well-etched and all the stars get ample scope.Bachchan delivers a first-rate performance as a father torn between his duty and his love for his son. Ali Khan plays his character with flair, while Dutt and Balan are adequate in their respective roles. The lavish sets capture the royal era magnificently and the traditional garb and costume jewellery lend authenticity to the narrative. Excellent cinematography pits rustic splendour against regal opulence.This is a truly remarkable film that will keep you rivetted from start to finish.
February 23, 2007 By Debashine Thangevelo
Director: Vidhu Vinod Chopra
Cast: Amitabh Bachchan, Sanjay Dutt, Boman Irani, Jackie Shroff, Saif Ali Khan, Vidya Balan, Jimmy Shergill and Raima Sen
Classification: TBA
Rating : ****
If Eklavya is the result of Vidhu Vinod Chopra's six-year absence from the director's seat, I'm all for him taking more breaks. His last movie, Mission Kashmir (2000), also enjoyed rave reviews, with Sanjay Dutt and Hrithik Roshan heading the cast.Chopra has bagged Bollywood's finest veterans headed by Amitabh Bachchan, Boman Irani, Jackie Shroff and Sanjay Dutt, for his latest venture, which he also penned.As Rani Suhasinidevi (Sharmila Tagore), the queen of Devigarh, a centuries-old citadel in Rajasthan, lies on her death bed, she cries out for Eklavya (Amitabh Bachchan), the royal guard. Eklavya's family has been protecting the fort, the king and its secrets for nine generations. King Rana Jaywardhan (Boman Irani), horrified by the queen's deception, strangles her. Not long after that, Prince Harshwardan (Saif Ali Khan), who stayed in London to escape the suffocating traditions of his land, is summoned back to the fort to perform the last rites for his mother. His mentally challenged twin sister, Princess Nandini (Raima Sen) and childhood sweetheart Rajjo (Vidya Balan), are ecstatic about his return . But all is not well in the kingdom. Against the backdrop of angry farmers who have had their land taken away, the king is plotting the demise of Eklavya, who, as it turns out, is the prince and princess' real father.Meanwhile, inspector Pannalal Chohar (Sanjay Dutt) is called in to investigate a death threat received by the king.Chopra has woven a spellbinding tale that is dexterously executed. Each character is well-etched and all the stars get ample scope.Bachchan delivers a first-rate performance as a father torn between his duty and his love for his son. Ali Khan plays his character with flair, while Dutt and Balan are adequate in their respective roles. The lavish sets capture the royal era magnificently and the traditional garb and costume jewellery lend authenticity to the narrative. Excellent cinematography pits rustic splendour against regal opulence.This is a truly remarkable film that will keep you rivetted from start to finish.
Radiotimes - Eklavya review
Eklavya: the Royal Guard (2007)
****
Director Vidhu Vinod Chopra brings his trademark visual panache to this contemporary tale of intrigue, love, and betrayal set in Rajasthan. Amitabh Bachchan plays a royal guard to one of the kings of the ancient Ruritanian dynasty, whose loyalty is severely tested following the death of the queen and the return of the prince (Saif Ali Khan). As the peasants suffer under the weight of the king's murderous authority, terrifying secrets are revealed. Bolstered by a mighty performance from Bachchan, Eklavya delivers a particularly visceral kind of historical spectacle that Bollywood audiences haven't seen in decades. Also superb is Vidya Balan who is utterly convincing as Khan's love interest.
****
Director Vidhu Vinod Chopra brings his trademark visual panache to this contemporary tale of intrigue, love, and betrayal set in Rajasthan. Amitabh Bachchan plays a royal guard to one of the kings of the ancient Ruritanian dynasty, whose loyalty is severely tested following the death of the queen and the return of the prince (Saif Ali Khan). As the peasants suffer under the weight of the king's murderous authority, terrifying secrets are revealed. Bolstered by a mighty performance from Bachchan, Eklavya delivers a particularly visceral kind of historical spectacle that Bollywood audiences haven't seen in decades. Also superb is Vidya Balan who is utterly convincing as Khan's love interest.
The Guardian review
Eklavya - The Royal Guard
***
Peter BradshawFriday February 16, 2007The Guardian
Here's a robustly unassuming and entertaining Bollywood melodrama starring Amitabh Bachchan and Sanjay Dutt, set in a romanticised contemporary Rajasthan. It begins with a quotation from Shakespeare - thus underlining an interestingly persistent resemblance between the contemporary Bollywood genre and idioms of popular English drama from Shakespeare's day: kings, queens, fantasy, intrigue and romance.
Bachchan plays the decent, loyal manservant and royal guard to one of the Ruritanian "kings" of modern Rajasthan; he stumbles upon court plotting and soap opera-ish parentage secrets; there are terrible truths to uncover and revenges to carry out. Director Vidhu Vinod Chopra puts it over with some panache.
***
Peter BradshawFriday February 16, 2007The Guardian
Here's a robustly unassuming and entertaining Bollywood melodrama starring Amitabh Bachchan and Sanjay Dutt, set in a romanticised contemporary Rajasthan. It begins with a quotation from Shakespeare - thus underlining an interestingly persistent resemblance between the contemporary Bollywood genre and idioms of popular English drama from Shakespeare's day: kings, queens, fantasy, intrigue and romance.
Bachchan plays the decent, loyal manservant and royal guard to one of the Ruritanian "kings" of modern Rajasthan; he stumbles upon court plotting and soap opera-ish parentage secrets; there are terrible truths to uncover and revenges to carry out. Director Vidhu Vinod Chopra puts it over with some panache.
Friday, March 23, 2007
LA weekly review
Bloody Royals
Eklavya unites the best of Bollywood past and present
By DAVID CHUTE
Wednesday, February 14, 2007 - 6:00 pm
It’s all in the beard. (Eros International) The first good sign is Amitabh Bachchan’s real beard. As the eponymous royal bodyguard in writer-director Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s Eklavya: The Royal Guard, a battered human relic whose ancestors have protected the same family of Rajisthani kings (or Ranas) for nine generations, the most popular movie actor in the world sports a magnificent set of bristling whiskers, like a pair of Victorian muttonchops that have grown together and taken over his face. Not prosthetic fur, you understand, but actual follicles the busy Bachchan took time to grow out of his familiar neatly trimmed goatee. With this plumage, a costume that consists of turban, boots and jeweled dagger, and a pair of expressively watery bloodshot eyes that seem tailor-made for screen-filling close-ups, Bachchan is the perfect visual emblem of the central conflict of this story: the continued survival, in the present, of the crumbling splendor of the past.On the surface, Eklavya is vintage Bollywood melodrama, complete with fratricidal murder plots, revelations of illegitimate paternity, and a glorious final spasm of revenge that a bloodthirsty Elizabethan could envy. The Ranas of Devigarh, the ancient feudal clan Eklavya serves, are a royal family that in democratic modern India have been stripped of all but their ceremonial authority. But you’d never guess this from the life inside their hivelike palace, which feels self-contained and lost in time: It comes as a bit of a shock when, at one point, a helicopter touches down in the garden.The revelation that drives the plot is almost diabolically well-chosen: an issue of paternity that gnaws at the vitals of a patriarchal system. It occurs about two minutes in, so it isn’t exactly a spoiler. Nor does it seem at all far-fetched that the clan’s upstanding and responsible heir apparent, Harshwardhan (Saif Ali Khan), was actually sired not by the ineffectual current titleholder, Jaywardhan (the gifted comic actor Boman Irani, overdoing the sniveling depravity), but rather by Eklavya himself.Eklavya was filmed in two actual Rajasthan palaces, one for the endlessly receding gilded interiors and the other for the piled-up crumbling façade. But the action that unfolds in these enormous spaces is almost a chamber drama, all intense two-shots and vehement whispered exchanges. And because the entire cast (with the single exception of the national treasure in the title role) has been carried over en masse from the last several films produced by director Chopra (including Munnabhai MBBS and Parineeta), the movie often feels like a work created for a snug repertory company, with roles tailored to the talents of each familiar performer. Sanjay Dutt is note-perfect as the openhearted Dalit policeman, and Saif Ali Khan — in real life a hereditary Nawab, the Muslim equivalent of a Rana — looks like a Hindu hero out of the Ramayana in one shirtless funeral-pyre scene.Chopra had a privileged upbringing by Indian standards, but he was not a member of Bollywood royalty who went into the family business. Having abandoned an Oxford scholarship to join the first class at the arty National Film Institute at Pune, he was denounced as an apostate when he left the self-serious world of Indian “parallel cinema” for Bollywood in 1989, writing and directing the Bombay gangster drama Parinda. But the seriousness of his beginnings has survived in Chopra’s popular work, and in films like 1942: A Love Story (1993) and Mission Kashmir (2000), he has managed to revitalize the fulsome expressive conventions of old-school Bollywood music-drama. Eklavya contains only one song sequence, a lovely set piece for leading lady Vidya Balan (Salaam-e-Ishq), but it embraces the imperatives of dynastic family melodrama as fervently as any classic of Bollywood’s golden age. This is robust storytelling, with blood and thunder pumping through its veins, and real whiskers on its face.
Eklavya unites the best of Bollywood past and present
By DAVID CHUTE
Wednesday, February 14, 2007 - 6:00 pm
It’s all in the beard. (Eros International) The first good sign is Amitabh Bachchan’s real beard. As the eponymous royal bodyguard in writer-director Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s Eklavya: The Royal Guard, a battered human relic whose ancestors have protected the same family of Rajisthani kings (or Ranas) for nine generations, the most popular movie actor in the world sports a magnificent set of bristling whiskers, like a pair of Victorian muttonchops that have grown together and taken over his face. Not prosthetic fur, you understand, but actual follicles the busy Bachchan took time to grow out of his familiar neatly trimmed goatee. With this plumage, a costume that consists of turban, boots and jeweled dagger, and a pair of expressively watery bloodshot eyes that seem tailor-made for screen-filling close-ups, Bachchan is the perfect visual emblem of the central conflict of this story: the continued survival, in the present, of the crumbling splendor of the past.On the surface, Eklavya is vintage Bollywood melodrama, complete with fratricidal murder plots, revelations of illegitimate paternity, and a glorious final spasm of revenge that a bloodthirsty Elizabethan could envy. The Ranas of Devigarh, the ancient feudal clan Eklavya serves, are a royal family that in democratic modern India have been stripped of all but their ceremonial authority. But you’d never guess this from the life inside their hivelike palace, which feels self-contained and lost in time: It comes as a bit of a shock when, at one point, a helicopter touches down in the garden.The revelation that drives the plot is almost diabolically well-chosen: an issue of paternity that gnaws at the vitals of a patriarchal system. It occurs about two minutes in, so it isn’t exactly a spoiler. Nor does it seem at all far-fetched that the clan’s upstanding and responsible heir apparent, Harshwardhan (Saif Ali Khan), was actually sired not by the ineffectual current titleholder, Jaywardhan (the gifted comic actor Boman Irani, overdoing the sniveling depravity), but rather by Eklavya himself.Eklavya was filmed in two actual Rajasthan palaces, one for the endlessly receding gilded interiors and the other for the piled-up crumbling façade. But the action that unfolds in these enormous spaces is almost a chamber drama, all intense two-shots and vehement whispered exchanges. And because the entire cast (with the single exception of the national treasure in the title role) has been carried over en masse from the last several films produced by director Chopra (including Munnabhai MBBS and Parineeta), the movie often feels like a work created for a snug repertory company, with roles tailored to the talents of each familiar performer. Sanjay Dutt is note-perfect as the openhearted Dalit policeman, and Saif Ali Khan — in real life a hereditary Nawab, the Muslim equivalent of a Rana — looks like a Hindu hero out of the Ramayana in one shirtless funeral-pyre scene.Chopra had a privileged upbringing by Indian standards, but he was not a member of Bollywood royalty who went into the family business. Having abandoned an Oxford scholarship to join the first class at the arty National Film Institute at Pune, he was denounced as an apostate when he left the self-serious world of Indian “parallel cinema” for Bollywood in 1989, writing and directing the Bombay gangster drama Parinda. But the seriousness of his beginnings has survived in Chopra’s popular work, and in films like 1942: A Love Story (1993) and Mission Kashmir (2000), he has managed to revitalize the fulsome expressive conventions of old-school Bollywood music-drama. Eklavya contains only one song sequence, a lovely set piece for leading lady Vidya Balan (Salaam-e-Ishq), but it embraces the imperatives of dynastic family melodrama as fervently as any classic of Bollywood’s golden age. This is robust storytelling, with blood and thunder pumping through its veins, and real whiskers on its face.
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