Chandni Chowk to China

• Have you ever dreamed of being more than your circumstances? Sidhu (Askay Kumar) longs to escape his dreary existence cutting vegetables at a road-side food stand in Chandni Chowk, one of the oldest and busiest markets in Delhi, India. When two strangers from China proclaim he is the reincarnation of a Chinese war hero, Sidhu envisions fame, fortune and adventure. Journeying with them back to Chin

Have you ever dreamed of being more than your circumstances? Sidhu (Askay Kumar) longs to escape his dreary existence cutting vegetables at a road-side food stand in Chandni Chowk, one of the oldest and busiest markets in Delhi, India. When two strangers from China proclaim he is the reincarnation of a Chinese war hero, Sidhu envisions fame, fortune and adventure. Journeying with them back to China, Sidhu meets the alluring Sakhi (Deepika Padukone) and love blossoms. But can it survive the vicious s! muggler, Hojo (Gordon Liu) and his cadre of kung-fu assassins? Megalomaniacal villains, crazy inventors, Chinese mystics and outlandish kung-fu assassins all get thrown together in this joyful, uplifting adventure full of beautiful landscapes, attention-grabbing songs, and high energy dancing. Featuring top Bollywood actors Akshay Kumar and Deepika Padukone and produced by acclaimed father and son duo, Ramesh and Rohan Sippy, Chandni Chowk to China promises to excite.It's a rare Bollywood show that gets a healthy stateside push, but in 2009 Chandni Chowk to China invaded U.S. theaters with its crackpot blend of music, slapstick, and melodrama. The plot itself couldn't be clearer. (Just kidding.) Akshay Kumar, leading light of Bollywood, plays Sidhu, a Delhi nitwit who slices potatoes at a food store in the chaotic Chandni Chowk neighborhood. After discovering the unmistakable image of the god Ganesh in the skin of a spud, Sidhu is proclaimed the reincarnation of a ! legendary Chinese hero. A trip to the Great Wall and a job def! ending t he much-abused population of a small town can't be far behind. Mix in a pretty TV-commercial spokesmodel (Deepika Padukone) visiting China to bring closure to a childhood tragedy, plus martial-arts goofiness, a villain (legendary Kill Bill star Gordon Liu) with a razor-edge bowler hat--take that, Goldfinger--and the occasional musical number, and you've got yourself a thoroughly entertaining piece of absurdity. Kumar is spirited, Padukone is gorgeous, and Ranvir Shorey and Mithun Chakraborty provide amusing support. Arguments can certainly be made about whether Warner Bros. could have thrown their weight behind some other Bollywood offering for a U.S. push (this film's chopsocky similarities to Kung Fu Hustle, which rang up tidy profits, might explain the choice), but taken on its own zany terms, Chandni Chowk is a good time. --Robert Horton

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My Boy Jack

• Its 1915 and World War I has been declared. Aged only 17, Kiplings son, like most of his generation, is swept up in the enthusiasm to fight the Germans, a mood stoked vigorously by his father. Jack is cripplingly short sighted and the army has rejected him twice, rendering him too myopic even for an army suffering thousands of casualties a week and desperate for recruits. Yet Rudyard is undeterred

They share the same birth month, so the orphanage calls them December Boys. But these teens â€" Maps, Spit, Spark and Misty â€" have much more in common. With no hopes of ever joining a family, they form their own familial bonds. Then the unexpected news comes that a young couple may adopt one of them, and the long-time pals suddenly share something else: a rivalry to be the chosen one.Oscar® nominee Laura Linney (Kinsey) stars as Laura Marshall, an overzealous, evangelical Christian do-goode! r who fills her home with down-and-out boarders, including a senile, cross-dressing murderous mute. Desperate to expand his horizons, Laura’s shy teenage son Ben (Rupert Grint, of Harry Potter fame) lands a job tending to self-proclaimed "Dame" Evie Walton (Oscar® nominee Julie Walters, Billy Elliot), an over-the-hill actress with the mouth of a drunken sailer and an insatiable lust for life. The battle for Ben’s soul begins as Evie shanghais Ben away from his repressive roots and takes him on an adventure that transforms him from boy to man. A winning entry at the 2006 Moscow International Film Festival, Driving Lessons is an experience Stephen Farber of Movieline calls "a delightful coming-of-age story."More down-to-earth than Auntie Mame, Driving Lessons imparts the same simple, but enduring messageâ€"be yourself. In the directorial debut from screenwriter Jeremy Brock (Mrs. Brown), 17-year-old Ben (Harry Potter's Rupert Gri! nt, sluggish yet sympathetic) lives with his vicar father, Rob! ert (Nic holas Farrell), and pious mother, Laura (Laura Linney doing a passable, but inconsistent British accent), in a tree-shaded London suburb. Soft-spoken Ben writes poems and looks forward to passing his driver's test. When his mother encourages him to get a job, he becomes an assistant to retired actress Evie Walton (Billy Elliot's Julie Walters, hunched up to look elderly). He finds her overbearing at first. Still, Evie is preferable to Laura, who may do volunteer work with her husband's parishioners, including bizarre boarder Mr. Fincham (Jim Norton), but also cheats on him with Reverend Peter (Oliver Milburn) and engages her resentful son in the subterfuge. Then Evie tricks Ben into driving her to Edinburgh for a poetry reading, where he learns to assert himself and she learns to put the dramatics on holdâ€"at least for a few minutes. Ben also loses his virginity to a woman he just met, sending a secondary message some parents might not appreciate (the film's sprinkli! ngs of profanity earned it a PG-13). Driving Lessons itself seems stranded between coming-of-age story and character study. Ironically, Farrell gives the most convincing performance as Ben's bird-loving father. Engaging if uneven, this parable about hypocrisy and self-expression might have been more interesting if presented from his perspective. --Kathleen C. Fennessy

Stills from Driving Lessons (click for larger image)

Beyond Driving Lessons at Amazon.com

More Films about Coming of Age

The Films of Julie Walters

Learn to Drive

Its 1915 and World War I has been declared. Aged only 17, Kiplings son, like most of his generation, is swept up in the enthusiasm to fight the Germans, a mood stoked vigorously by his father. Jack is cripplingly short sighted and the ! army has rejected him twice, rendering him too myopic even for an army suffering thousands of casualties a week and desperate for recruits. Yet Rudyard is undeterred, determined that his son should go to the front, like countless other sons, and fight for the values that he, Kipling, espouses so publicly. Using his fame and influence, Kipling persuades Lord Roberts, on his death bed, to get Jack a commission in the Irish guards. This intervention is barely tolerated by Carrie and daughter Elise (Carey Mulligan), as they disagree that Jack is fit to fight and fear for his safety on the front line. Jack is instantly popular with his troop he is a great leader and trains tirelessly to overcome the disability that is his eyesight. Six months later Jack sails to France as a lieutenant. Jack went missing in action during the Battle of Loos and his mother and father carried out an increasingly desperate search for him, spanning many years and many miles.

DVD Features:
! Deleted Scenes
Interviews

As affecting! as it i s thought-provoking, ITV's My Boy Jack illustrates the dangers of unbridled patriotism. To grow up the child of a famous author is burden enough, but when the boy must embody the beliefs of the man, the consequences can be devastating. In the case of John "Jack" Kipling (Harry Potter's Daniel Radcliffe in his most mature role to date), 17-year-old son of Rudyard Kipling (Four Weddings and a Funeral's David Haig), his father's passion for King and Country leads to a preventable tragedy. Based on Haig's play, the proceedings begin in 1914, prior to the outbreak of World War II. Jack attempts to join the army and the navy, but both reject him due to severe shortsightedness, so Kipling Sr. pulls strings to place him with the Irish Guards. Jack's sister, Elsie (Bleak House's Carey Mulligan), and American-born mother, Caroline (a brunette Kim Cattrall), would rather he serve the war effort at home. Through hard work and determination, Jack scales the ra! nks from private to lieutenant, but goes missing in France, and many months pass before the family solves the mystery of his disappearance. In the end, My Boy Jack, which aired in England on Remembrance Day, concerns itself more with paying tribute than apportioning blame, and Haig skillfully portrays Kipling's guilt in putting his son in harm’s way and pride in a brave soldier who "played his part properly." Special features include interviews and deleted scenes. Parental advisory suggested due to situation-appropriate language and teen smoking. --Kathleen C. Fennessy

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Apocalypse Now (Apocalypse Now / Apocalypse Now Redux / Hearts of Darkness) (Three-Disc Full Disclosure Edition) [Blu-ray]

• Condition: New
• Format: Blu-ray
• AC-3; Closed-captioned; Color; Dolby; DTS Surround Sound; Special Edition; Subtitled; Widescreen

Digitally remastered with 49 minutes of previously unseen footage, Apocalypse Now Redux is the reference standard of Francis Coppola's 1979 epic. A metaphorical hallucination of the Vietnam War, the film was reconstructed by Coppola and editor Walter Murch to enrich themes and clarify the ending. On that basis Redux is a qualified success, more coherent than the original while inviting the same accusations of directorial excess. The restored "French plantation" sequence adds ghostly resonance to the war's absurdity, and Willard's theft of Colonel Kurtz's beloved surfboard adds welcomed humor to the film's nightmarish upriver journey. An encounter with Playboy Playmates seems superfluous compared to the enhanced interplay between Willard ! and his ill-fated boat crew, but compensation arrives in the hellish Kurtz compound, where Willard's mission--and the performances of Martin Sheen and Marlon Brando--reach even greater heights of insanity, thus validating Redux as the rightful heir to Coppola's triumphantly rampant ambition. --Jeff Shannon APOCALYPSE NOW REDUX - DVD MovieApocalypse Now / Apocalypse Now: Redux
In the tradition of such obsessively driven directors as Erich von Stroheim and Werner Herzog, Francis Ford Coppola approached the production of Apocalypse Now as if it were his own epic mission into the heart of darkness. On location in the storm-ravaged Philippines, he quite literally went mad as the project threatened to devour him in a vortex of creative despair, but from this insanity came one of the greatest films ever made. It began as a John Milius screenplay, transposing Joseph Conrad's classic story "Heart of Darkness" into the horrors of the Vietnam Wa! r, following a battle-weary Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) on ! a secret upriver mission to find and execute the renegade Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando), who has reverted to a state of murderous and mystical insanity. The journey is fraught with danger involving wartime action on epic and intimate scales. One measure of the film's awesome visceral impact is the number of sequences, images, and lines of dialogue that have literally burned themselves into our cinematic consciousness, from the Wagnerian strike of helicopter gunships on a Vietnamese village to the brutal murder of stowaways on a peasant sampan and the unflinching fearlessness of the surfing warrior Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore (Robert Duvall), who speaks lovingly of "the smell of napalm in the morning." Like Herzog's Aguirre: The Wrath of God, this film is the product of genius cast into a pit of hell and emerging, phoenix-like, in triumph. Coppola's obsession (effectively detailed in the riveting documentary Hearts of Darkness, directed by Coppola's wife, Eleanor) informs every! scene and every frame, and the result is a film for the ages. --Jeff Shannon

Hearts of Darkness
Hearts of Darkness is an engrossing, unwavering look back at Francis Coppola's chaotic, catastrophe-plagued Vietnam production, Apocalypse Now. Filled with juicy gossip and a wonderful behind-the-scenes look at the stressful world of moviemaking, the documentary mixes on-location home movies shot in the Philippines by Eleanor Coppola, the director's wife, with revealing interviews with the cast and crew, shot 10 years later. Similar to Burden of Dreams, Les Blank's absorbing portrait of Werner Herzog's struggle to make Fitzcarraldo, the film chronicles Coppola's eventual decent into obsessive psychosis as everything that could go wrong does go wrong. Storms destroy sets, money evaporates, the Philippine government continually harasses the director, Coppola has romantic affairs, and he can't write the story's ending. Everything is c! aptured on film. In the most disturbing scene, we watch Martin! Sheen h ave a drunken nervous breakdown while his director goads him on (he eventually suffered a heart attack, but finished the film).

Other incredible footage is not visual, but aural as the film includes tapes Eleanor Coppola recorded without Francis's knowledge. In them, he truly sounds like a madman as he confesses his fears about making a bomb of a movie. But while Hearts of Darkness is an amazing, voyeuristic experience, its importance lies in the personal reflections offered by those involved. Sheen, Coppola, and Dennis Hopper speak frankly without embarrassment, offering us an essential piece of film history. --Dave McCoyFrancis Ford Coppola's timeless classic comes to Blu-ray for the first time!

This 3-Disc Deluxe Edition includes Apocalypse Now and Apocalypse Now Redux in stunning new transfers supervised by Francis Ford Coppola - and presented for the first time in their original 2.35:1 theatrical aspect ratios. Also included is the feature-length! making-of documentary Hearts of Darkness, presented in a new 1080p HD transfer.

Additional features include a 48-page collectible booklet with never-before-seen archives from the set, over 9 hours of bonus features, plus a storyboard gallery, image galleries, marketing archives and an original script excerpt from John Milius featuring hand-written notes from Coppola.Apocalypse Now / Apocalypse Now: Redux
In the tradition of such obsessively driven directors as Erich von Stroheim and Werner Herzog, Francis Ford Coppola approached the production of Apocalypse Now as if it were his own epic mission into the heart of darkness. On location in the storm-ravaged Philippines, he quite literally went mad as the project threatened to devour him in a vortex of creative despair, but from this insanity came one of the greatest films ever made. It began as a John Milius screenplay, transposing Joseph Conrad's classic story "Heart of Darkness" into the h! orrors of the Vietnam War, following a battle-weary Captain Wi! llard (M artin Sheen) on a secret upriver mission to find and execute the renegade Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando), who has reverted to a state of murderous and mystical insanity. The journey is fraught with danger involving wartime action on epic and intimate scales. One measure of the film's awesome visceral impact is the number of sequences, images, and lines of dialogue that have literally burned themselves into our cinematic consciousness, from the Wagnerian strike of helicopter gunships on a Vietnamese village to the brutal murder of stowaways on a peasant sampan and the unflinching fearlessness of the surfing warrior Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore (Robert Duvall), who speaks lovingly of "the smell of napalm in the morning." Like Herzog's Aguirre: The Wrath of God, this film is the product of genius cast into a pit of hell and emerging, phoenix-like, in triumph. Coppola's obsession (effectively detailed in the riveting documentary Hearts of Darkness, directed by Coppola's wife! , Eleanor) informs every scene and every frame, and the result is a film for the ages. --Jeff Shannon

Hearts of Darkness
Hearts of Darkness is an engrossing, unwavering look back at Francis Coppola's chaotic, catastrophe-plagued Vietnam production, Apocalypse Now. Filled with juicy gossip and a wonderful behind-the-scenes look at the stressful world of moviemaking, the documentary mixes on-location home movies shot in the Philippines by Eleanor Coppola, the director's wife, with revealing interviews with the cast and crew, shot 10 years later. Similar to Burden of Dreams, Les Blank's absorbing portrait of Werner Herzog's struggle to make Fitzcarraldo, the film chronicles Coppola's eventual decent into obsessive psychosis as everything that could go wrong does go wrong. Storms destroy sets, money evaporates, the Philippine government continually harasses the director, Coppola has romantic affairs, and he can't write the story's! ending. Everything is captured on film. In the most disturbin! g scene, we watch Martin Sheen have a drunken nervous breakdown while his director goads him on (he eventually suffered a heart attack, but finished the film).

Other incredible footage is not visual, but aural as the film includes tapes Eleanor Coppola recorded without Francis's knowledge. In them, he truly sounds like a madman as he confesses his fears about making a bomb of a movie. But while Hearts of Darkness is an amazing, voyeuristic experience, its importance lies in the personal reflections offered by those involved. Sheen, Coppola, and Dennis Hopper speak frankly without embarrassment, offering us an essential piece of film history. --Dave McCoy

Read more »