input: Vipul Shah has done some really impressive work as a filmmaker in the past. 'Waqt - The Race Against Time' and 'Namaste London' were entertaining and interesting to watch. 'Singh Is Kinng' was fun, which he produced. His latest outing as a filmmaker 'London Dreams' comes up as his careers weakest fare.

'London Dreams' has a mediocre storyline, it's about how success turns friendship into hatred. Agreed, it has the potential but when you watch 'London Dreams' you wonder what's happening? This film has maybe the worst climax in recent times. Vipul Shah the writer puts Vipul Shah the director down.

The first hour is boring, The second hour is better; but again the climax is horrendous. How can anyone forgive a person who decided to destroy you? I won't. Ajay Devgn suddenly decides to go to India and ask forgiveness to his diaper buddy, thanks to his uncle Om Puri. When he reaches India, rather than slapping or abusing him Salman welcomes him with band baja and says he was the reason behind the entire fiasco? Was Vipul Shah's intension to show Salman's character as a GOD? If yes, than you've failed completely. The only question I want to ask Vipul Shah is that, would you welcome a person who destroyed you with such a great reception? Write what you feel, don't fool us {the audience}, we are sensible enough to understand what's good or not.

This is a musical but the music by Shankar-Eshaan-Loy is terrible. Not a single song stays in your mind.

Salman is superb though. He carries the film on his shoulders and does really, really well in the emotional scenes. But again his character is shown as a GOD, which makes him look like a retard in the end. Ajay is equally good, but Salman has over-shadowed him completely. Asin is wasted, and what is a great talent like Om Puri doing in this film? Rannvijay hams, though Aditya Roy Kapoor excels. Brinda Parekh is alright as the vamp.

On the whole, this dream remains a dream!

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pos/neg ans: negative

input: The problem is that the movie rode in on the coattails of the 60's-created concept that comic books could only be done as "camp" (i.e., the 60's Batman show) for TV and movie. Thus you have combat sequences with subtitles (come on!), a cluelessly unromantic Doc Savage (he was uncomfortable around women in the pulps, not an idiot), Monk Mayfair in a nightsheet (a scene guaranteed to give you nightmares for several nights), and the totally hokey ending with the secondary bad guy encased in gold like a Herve Villechez posing for an Oscar statute. And when they're not doing booming Sousa march scores, the tinkly little "funny" music undercuts much of the drama.

Even as such, this movie is...okay. It's fun, and when it stays serious it's a very accurate representation of the pulps. Except for Monk, as has been mentioned before: he's hugely muscled, not obese. And Long Tom, who is supposed to be a pale scrawny guy with an attitude, not Paul Gleason with an (inexplicable) scarf.

The Green Death sequences, for instance, are remarkably gruesome and not something I'd recommend for children. But they are very close to the feel of the pulps. When the writers and producers get it right, they do get it right - I'll give them that.

But if the producers had done Doc with the loving care and scripting of, say, Reeves' first two Superman movies, think what we might have had then. I think the problem is the movie's schizophrenic. There's a definite sense of trying to do a 30's homage, but they're also trying to give in to the "heroes must be camp" attitude that Batman created. One gets the impression there was a sober, pulp-style first draft and then someone came in and said, "Hey, let's make it funny - it worked with the Batman show 8 years ago!"

But Doc lives on, thanks to Earl MacRauch and Buckaroo Banzai. If MacRauch ain't doing a homage to Doc Savage in that movie, the man is truly demented. So when the series actually gets on TV (allegedly mid-season in '99-00), Doc Savage, updated to the 90's, will live once more.

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pos/neg ans: positive

input: Michael Williams, who works for BBC, finds a somehow impressive Italian picture which gets mixed in the material of his ongoing task titled DIABOLICAL ART: A DOCUMENTARY. But since his wife's mysterious death her daughter, Emily, has been emotionally disturbed, so he goes Spoleto, where the problematic picture is, with her and her nanny, Jill. And there is a Countess, who is also a psychic, and she informs him that the picture was somehow made at the night that a young witch named Emilia was executed. Michael doesn't believe her story, but after that Emily has hysterical spasm and Jill is killed... This Italian film is, of course, almost innocently influenced by THE EXORCIST, but this one is much cheaper, much simpler,and in a sense, much dirtier. First of all, it should be said this film is full of confusion. For instance, the story shows Emily is a reincarnation of Emilia. But when Emily sees her in the flashbacks, she perceives her exclusively from a third-person's point of view. But if she is the reincarnation of Emilia, she should and must see the past from nothing but Emilia's point of view. Confusions of this kind, which the film has many, are almost exclusively based upon a problematic fact that the film is too cowardly, rather than ambivalent, to specify its own quasi-Freudian theme, namely, pre-adolescent girl's one-way incestuous wish. To make matters worse, this film also has characteristic problem (if not confusion); every character is too naive and helpless to be realistic and/or believable living human. Regarding Emily (or Emilia), she is after all a child, and one can say it is difficult to blame her mainly for her naiveness and helplessness. (And according to the Freudian theory, every girl wants to have her father's child(ren) in her own way. In this sense, Emily is not exclusively pathological; only her way of excluding other women from her father's love is problematically pathological. But, as I already mentioned, this film per se is too cowardly to be Freudian.) The problem is that adult characters are as childish and naive and helpless as Emily is. And because of this characteristic weakness even the psychic who can see almost everything cannot do anything down-to-earth, and because of the same weakness the very story of the film is ended in a badly escapist way. In addition, special effects of this film are incredibly cheap and laughable. Although Stelvio Cipriani's music is noteworthily beautiful (indeed this one is so good that it seems to be worth having it alone), the film as a whole is nothing but a cheap B-film which can disappoint even the 1970s'-Italian- horror-film-lovers.

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negative