Ye Lovelies, Save Yourselves (b’cos Raj is a killer!) OR Singh is Kinng… :)

I really liked Bachna Ae Haseeno. Admittedly the story is not without the usual cliches but one cannot help falling for a hero who is so unapologetic about his rakish tendencies – even the film does not make any excuses for his chaalupan. He dumps women unmercifully, gets dumped in turn but gets away without a broken heart… and so it goes on until Gayatri (Deepika Padukone) waltzes into his life, driving her own taxi, attending to the supermarket cash registers and boom, Raj is in love, for the first time in his life. This time, nothing goes the way he wants it to and he is forced to peek into his colorful past, take a new look at some of his old mistakes and think hard about some remedial measures. A trip to Amritsar, a Punjabi wedding (Bollywood film-makers seem to have perfected the art of the Punjabi wedding – mehendi, sangeet, dancing – the whole shebang! Is this how Punjabi weddings really are?!!), a glitzy party, an overnight flight to Italy, parties in sunlit villas with azure blue swimming pools, dashing across cobble stoned squares in Rome with dry cleaned clothes and a steaming cappuccino – phew, it’s all in a day’s work for Raj.

All is forgiven and the dashing dilwaala takes away the sexy dulhaniya… mending his past mistakes without a single tear in the stitch.

The casting is perfect: Ranbir Kapoor plays Raj and I felt that although he looks good, acts and dances decently enough, he does not have that oomph, that screen presence, that star quality (which his famous cousin possesses in good measure). Bipasha Basu is a good actress and she looks fantastic (a little too feline, for my liking!). Deepika Padukone looks ravishing and she HAS that awesome star quality… one look and the screen is on fire!

The music is upbeat, fairly peppy… and had I been fifteen years younger, I would have been crying buckets right now, nursing a massive crush on Ranbir…

Oh, we managed to catch the last few minutes of Singh is Kinng. The theatre audience comprised of so many Punjabis and they kept rocking in the aisles. The film is funny… and when you have superlative actors like Om Puri, Ranvir Sheorey and Jaaved Jaafri doing slapstick comedy, the end result has to be good. Or so the last fifteen minutes convinced me. Enough to want to go watch the entire film sometime.