Saif Ali Khan’s daughter Sara makes her film debut opposite Sushant Singh Rajput in the romantic drama/disaster movie Kedarnath, opening in Chicago area theaters December 7, 2018. It looks kinda awesome.
Kedarnath opens Friday at the AMC River East 21 in Chicago, MovieMax Cinemas in Niles, AMC South Barrington 24 in South Barrington, Regal Cantera Stadium 17 in Warrenville, and AMC Loews Woodridge 18 in Woodridge. It has a listed runtime of 1 hr 59 min.
After a $3 million opening weekend in the United States, 2.0 carries over in 3D in Tamil, Telugu, and Hindi at the River East 21, MovieMax (2D only), South Barrington 24, Cantera 17, Woodridge 18, AMC Showplace Niles 12 in Niles, Marcus Addison Cinema in Addison, Century Stratford Square in Bloomingdale, AMC Naperville 16 in Naperville, and Cinemark at Seven Bridges in Woodridge.
Badhaai Ho gets an eighth week at the South Barrington 24.
Other Indian movies showing in the Chicago area this weekend:
- Subramanyapuram (Telugu with no subtitles) at MovieMax and Seven Bridges
- Joseph (Malayalam), Kavacham (Telugu), Banjara: The Truck Driver (Punjabi), Mumbai Pune Mumbai 3 (Marathi), Naal (Marathi), and Taxiwaala (Telugu w/English subtitles) at MovieMax
I saw Kedarnath recently as part of a social outing and it had a couple of entertaining moments:
1. The seduction process was very well made in this suppossedly romantic film.
2. The mountain views merited a big-screen viewing mode.
I had wondered and hinted at in a previous comment whether they script would include the Lisbon-earthquake-religious-crisis theme. That did not happen.
The trailer hinted at the female protagonist replicating Ms. S. Blair’s clarity of thought as Liz Sherman in the Hellboy sequel [ ” … The Golden Army”] when she said, indicating Hellboy, “Him” in response to a question from a supernatural force, viz., ” … make the choice: the world or him.” Ms. Blair’s character knew fully well that it had been stipulated that Hellboy’s reason to exist was to the cause of the equivalent of what the Abrahamic faiths informally call the end of days. Given the tone of Kedarnath prior to the depcited natural disaster, there was a shift from the literal to the figurative in the film’s story-telling style that I thought made the film’s viewing awkward. That tonal shift continued towards the climax, leading to irritation instead of pleasure for conventional audience members. Ergo, there was no dramatization equivalent to Ms. S. Blair’s utterances, which would have been more consistent with Kedarnath’s initial tone.
To end my comment on a less critical note, nostalgia questers will enjoy the skilled replica of her mother’s acting persona that Ms. S.A. Khan brought to this film and this movie does use Mr. B. Chatterjee’s Chameli Ki Shaadi as its muse, where her mother was the character known as Chameli. The questers can live in the hope that a similar progression would enable Ms. S.A. Khan to eventually deliver an exceptional performance like her mother did years later in 2 States.
Regards.
Coming through with yet another unexpected cinematic parallel, Thank You. 😉 You make a great point about the literal-to-figurative tonal shift. It seemed like the filmmakers didn’t quite have a handle on where they wanted to go or the true nature of the rules governing the world they were creating. Did Mukku really believe she could summon a flood, and depending on her answer, how does that influence our interpretation of the film’s final scene? Complaints aside, the setting is extraordinarily beautiful.
Thank you for your kind words.
In Re: final scene, inadequate scripts tend to cause some degree of introspection about interpreting climaxes. In the case of this film, it can be reasonably argued, that (a) physiologically gifted humans, such as professional porters, are tougher than smart phones, so if Mansoor’s smartphone survived, so did Mansoor, (b) Mukku [a child of religious orthodoxy] wearing white [the color of widows in the Hindu faith] means her husband is dead, ergo, a civilized character like Mansoor would not find it inappropriate to publicly broadcast gestures of affection via a romantic song on the radio, and (c) the film’s screenplay writers used the WYSIWYG [“what you see is what you get”, with apologies to the manufacturers of Lotus 1-2-3 add-on features, take that you juveniles, who only know Microsoft Excel] standard when it came to whether their characters step out of character, so hence (d) it’s a ” … happily ever after” for the romantic pair.
If the filmmakers thought that their ending, would generate conversation, they have my well-meaning pity, as a couple of anonymous messages posted within the digital world is what some British colonials would call “weak tea” to measure the extent of the conversational response.
Personally, the reason I went to see the film was because the film’s trailer promised pretty mountain views. That was my entire expectation, an obviously low one, and I was satisfied.
Regards.