Gurinder Chadha brings on her masala mix with the punningly titled Its a wonderful afterlife.
People in Southall are getting murdered rather gruesomely. In a homage to se7en one of them is forced to eat curry until he chokes and his stomach explodes. However all of the newly dead seemed to be stuck in a halfway ghostly state with their murderer.
Their crimes? They called the murderer's daughter fat, too big to get married. Goldy Notay is the slightly on the heavy side jilted fiancée with a good heart but causing her mum (Shabana Azmi) to be stressed as she feels Goldy is being left on the shelf.
Sally Hawkins plays Goldy's best friend who has acquiesced new age Indian beliefs after trip to India. Sendhil Ramamurthy is an old pal of Goldy who is also the police officer investigating the murders and has a thing for Goldy.
After a crafty title you feel the film will be a riff on the more famous James Stewart film but its a soppy love story which takes bits from other movies. There is a Carrie bit, some of it reminded me of Stardust. Some of the characters were not believable, why was Mark Addy's Detective Inspector hell bent on framing Goldy up for the murders when DNA evidence ruled her out?
There are a lot of fat jokes, many of them predictable and unfunny and overall although the film is amiable enough with a nice use of Black's hit song 'Its's a wonderful life' used in a sequence, I felt the film was undercooked both as a romance and a masala comedy.
People in Southall are getting murdered rather gruesomely. In a homage to se7en one of them is forced to eat curry until he chokes and his stomach explodes. However all of the newly dead seemed to be stuck in a halfway ghostly state with their murderer.
Their crimes? They called the murderer's daughter fat, too big to get married. Goldy Notay is the slightly on the heavy side jilted fiancée with a good heart but causing her mum (Shabana Azmi) to be stressed as she feels Goldy is being left on the shelf.
Sally Hawkins plays Goldy's best friend who has acquiesced new age Indian beliefs after trip to India. Sendhil Ramamurthy is an old pal of Goldy who is also the police officer investigating the murders and has a thing for Goldy.
After a crafty title you feel the film will be a riff on the more famous James Stewart film but its a soppy love story which takes bits from other movies. There is a Carrie bit, some of it reminded me of Stardust. Some of the characters were not believable, why was Mark Addy's Detective Inspector hell bent on framing Goldy up for the murders when DNA evidence ruled her out?
There are a lot of fat jokes, many of them predictable and unfunny and overall although the film is amiable enough with a nice use of Black's hit song 'Its's a wonderful life' used in a sequence, I felt the film was undercooked both as a romance and a masala comedy.