Search - Body on DVD

....Said the spider to the fly

Amanda Richards | Georgetown, Guyana | 11/11/2005

(3 out of 5 stars)

"Body, also known as Jism

(a most suggestive name)

Is not your standard Indian film

(though the acting's still the same)



A poor young man named Kabir Lal

(who drinks more than a fish)

Falls in love with a married gal

(who's man of course is rich)



First hard to get & then she's not

(she hooks him line and sinker)

She riles him up and sets him off

(poor man's wearing a blinker)



He'll do anything to get a smile

(he sings a perky song)

"From Here to Eternity" on the beach

(that scene NEVER looked so wrong)



John Abraham is really buff

(he's got a V-shaped frame)

He spends all movie stripping off

(too bad his part's so lame)



This movie's about greed and lust

(no graphic scenes, I fear)

What a man will do for a woman's love

(when he ventures in her lair)



Rated: 3.5 stars





Amanda Richards, November 10, 2005

"

Incredible

Manish | India | 05/03/2004

(5 out of 5 stars)

"The movie is a must watch. John Abraham's debut movie and with this he proved that models can also act. Bipasha basu his co-star in the movie and his girl friend in real life has equally performed well. The movie is shot in small town of India called Pondycherry."

Jism?

G. Newby | Memphis, TN United States | 10/06/2005

(2 out of 5 stars)

"The unfortunately titled "Jism" is a bollywood remake of Lawrence Kasdan's 1981 masterpiece, "Body Heat." That alone makes it worth watching, but the movie runs into a few problems along the way. In the first place it runs way too long for such a small-scale noir thriller. What Kasdan was able to do in a little under two hours, Jism draws out to seemingly Ben-Hur lengths. This is a problem, because the story is so compact that it can be told rather speedily, leaving the director little choice but to throw a lot of filler at us. There are a couple of musical numbers, for instance, which burn a lot of screen time, but leave the viewer wondering what the heck all the singing is about. True, this is Bollywood, so musical numbers are allowed. But the songs aren't even good ones, so the exercise is mostly wasted.



In addition, the film is over-acted in that soap opera kind of way that leaves you wincing just about every time the leads deliver their lines. On the other hand, it is obvious that neither star was hired for thier acting abilities so its a little easy to forgive. But the whole thing just smacks of cheesiness. Both Basu and Abraham are so super-sexy that they put the rest of us mere mortals to shame, but that's a problem since that makes it easy for the viewer to dismiss them. Their beachside sex scenes at high tide are just goofy. Watching them roll around in the sand, it's easy to imagine big Indian housewives eating bon-bons and finger banging themselves beneath thier saris. The movie is just that shallow.



Which is too bad, because the original story is really a good one, with charged characters and a nail-biting plot. But Bipasha Basu is no Kathleen Turner, and the only way she could ever carry a film is with her double dees. John Abraham's only a little bit better, which is why he spends most of the movie with his shirt off.



The only other thing worth noting about this film is the sweat. In fact, there's so much persperation that it almost becomes another character. The intent is to make us think we are watching something sultry and steamy, a plate of forbidden sex served up from the Indian subcontinent. But the sweat has so much sheen to it that one begins to think it's really just axle grease, rubbed on just before filming commenced. Either way, it really doesn't matter. This is just porn with the good parts cut out."

Body Heat: The Musical

James W. Picht | Louisiana, USA | 01/31/2007

(3 out of 5 stars)

""Body" is not at all a bad film. It is quite unashamedly a reworking of "Body Heat," the 1980s film that starred William Hurt and Kathleen Turner. It isn't just that the plot is the same - several scenes are lifted directly from the source movie.



The plot is a good one. Poor lawyer meets beautiful young woman who's married to a wealthy older man. They begin a torrid affair, she claims to be in love with him but too afraid of her powerful and dangerous husband to get a divorce, and out of passion for her he decides to kill the husband. Because he's been thinking with his genitals rather than his head he fails to see how he's been manipulated, fails to understand that a beautiful woman can also be calculating and smart, falls head-first into a plot within the plot and discovers that, like a sex toy, he's completely replaceable. This plot worked very well in "Body Heat" and has more than enough dramatic potential to survive transplant from the American south to India.



Then why do I give this film only three stars? First, the chemistry between the two leads is less sizzling than the chemistry between Hurt and Turner. The stars of "Body" are both attractive, and the female lead has the sultry presence (even when she breaks into the requisite musical numbers) to pull of her side of the film. The male lead (John Abraham - surely an odd name for an Indian) rarely rises above being attractive, though. He looks like a model rather than an actor, and he seems to pose his way through the movie. In fact, he's beautifully handsom even when lying drunk on a sidewalk, a mannequin who's partied too much rather than a man in despair. The Indian settings are lovely, but the film editing produces some jarring transitions (almost as if the film skips from one scene to another). The sound is very nice, the songs often quite pretty, but passion, lust and murder call for something more than pretty. The musical numbers are much less intrusive or jarring than they are in other Indian productions - the Bollywood aesthetic is relatively subdued in this film.



This being a Bollywood production, the sexual content is much more subdued than it was in "Body Heat." Given the subject matter, the Bollywood treatment feels oddly chaste. This movie is "Body Heat" with less sex, prettier actors, less sexual chemistry, prettier scenery, no sultry atmosphere, musical numbers, and less heat (the actors hardly even sweat; perhaps that's why it's only called "Body"). Not bad, but not terribly good. It is, however, entertaining, and sometimes that's good enough."