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Good Newwz

It's Bollywood and more.

Good Newwz

Grade: B

Director: Raj Mehta

Screenplay: Jyoti Kapoor

Cast: Ashav Kumar, Kareena Kapoor

Rating: NR

Runtime: 2h 14m

By: John DeSando

“It's so lovely to know that people who you would never think know about Bollywood, they know about Bollywood.” Nargis Fakhri
 

Best known world-wide for its Bollywood musicals, Hindi cinema has an unusual example with Good Newwz, a smart comedy about two very different couples with the last name and mixed-up sperm for an in-vitro operation. Not only are there too-few musical numbers spectacles of brilliant color and rousing song and dance, but also important thematic issues for contemporary couples recur.

Varun (Ashay Kumar) and Deepti (Kareena Kapoor)  are the smart couple who argue about the difficulty of successfully conceiving and the issues like his labor in the process and her pressuring him to perform, much less care enough. The other couple, Honey (Diljit Dosanjh) and Monika) (Kiara Advani), are happy go lucky, and while  less intellectually capable, they are emotionally better able to deal with the mix-up.

The center of this dramatic stew is the Indian obsession with having children, including the superiority of bloodline over adoption. Allied is an unspoken matter of having a female child rather than a male, a topic thankfully never addressed. In between are challenges of men understanding women’s many issues related to the important nine months and the need for cherishing babies and parents regardless of their place in the tangled world of affections and parentage.

Director Raj Mehta twirls the camera in such different locations as hospital and dance halls while keeping it an intimate affair with couples overly wrought about having babies. Not much Zen but a whole lot of love. Hooray Bollywood, you’re challenging the American musical legend of matching song with sentiment.

“I would love to work in a Bollywood film as there is so much drama and colour in the films there.” Brad Pitt

John DeSando, a Los Angeles Press Club first-place winner for National Entertainment Journalism, hosts WCBE’s It’s Movie Time and co-hosts Cinema Classics. Contact him at JDeSando@Columbus.rr.com

 

John DeSando holds a BA from Georgetown University and a Ph.D. in English from The University of Arizona. He served several universities as a professor, dean, and academic vice president. He has been producing and broadcasting as a film critic on It’s Movie Time and Cinema Classics for more than two decades. DeSando received the Los Angeles Press Club's first-place honors for national entertainment journalism.