Ishtam Review

Here's yet another college flick featuring nobody you know from this galaxy. Usha Kiron movies, hmmm... You can tell butter from stork. Butter cannot stand on one leg.

Kartik (Charan) is the widespread collegegoer that would see a pin and pick it up and all day long he'll have a pin. Neha (Shreya) is the freshwoman that his herd keeps picking on. In a strange turn of coincidences, Neha becomes the best friend of Kartik's mom (Poonam Dhillon) while he gets acquainted with her dad (Chandra Mohan). These coincidences, amazingly, don't give us enough time to build a boar from the gear. And the first half breezes through.

The second half has the lead couple expressing their love for each other through a scientifically bugging method of blinking flashlights at each other in a very firefly-in-heat manner. By this time your expectancy is intolerable. You can actually hear the 'built the tempo, built the tempo, built the tempo' playing over and over again in your agonizing think tank. So without much ado, the film turns mouldy.

Now Kartik's mom doesn't think that her snob of a son is good enough for a model of a girl like Neha, and hence disapproves of their marriage. Compliments must go to the cook for coming up with this new breed of hostel cafeteria salad.

Kartik, who now can sympathize with Hamlet, sets to prove himself potent in the eyes of his mother, and so he delivers pizza. In an arousing sequence of the climax, Kartik himself delivers pizza at a party attended by Neha's grandma too, since she loves pizza. Kartik's mom, shook up to the core, labels him man enough to wed Neha, but only after horrendous lip-syncing.

The sidelined comedy situations in the movie aren't too bland. Poonam Dhillon looks good - it's only that her lip sync partakes of everything funny you can ever remember from your past life as a dodo. Charan has that faraway look - the farther away he is, the better he looks. Sreya is the best part of the movie. She has a 'did the sun just come out or did you smile at me?' face. And she can act, too.

The music is the usual blend of cacophonous beats with lyrics but it wouldn't let you inhale too many fags in the hall. The debutant directorial duo of Vikram-Rajkumar tries, but what can they do if the world itself is round? The only way to avoid mistakes is to gain experience. The only way to gain experience... is to make mistakes.

In the end, worth watching if all you have to do is to sit up with a sick ant. Moreover, there aren't any good Telugu movies around as I write this. So if you can't lick 'em, join 'em.