New flavours at box office

Bollywood is gearing up to treat the audiences with Phir Milenge and Dhoom - brand new recipes to tickle the audience?s taste buds.

For last two weeks real-life couples were trying to woo the audiences, now it's time to swing away from romance into unexpected territory with Revathi's Phir Milenge and Sanjay Gadhvi's Dhoom. Both Revathi and Sanjay are second-time directors.

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Sanjay's first film was Mere Yaar Ki Shaadi Hai starring Uday Chopra, Jimmy Shergill, Bipasha Basu and Sanjana, a not very successful remake of the Julia Roberts starrer My Best Friend's Wedding.

Revathi scored a critical success with Mitr - My Friend, a NRI tale about a neglected wife trying to find her bearings that brought the amazingly talented Shobana a National Award for the best actress.

Pundits are already predicting a National Award for Shilpa Shetty in Phir Milenge. She plays an HIV positive patient and so does Salman Khan - a fact that's being conveniently tucked away from the moviegoers' attention so that they rush to see a typical Salman Khan starrer with Shilpa Shetty as icing on the cake.

Would a Salman starrrer, where he plays an HIV positive patient, and that too in a role secondary to his leading lady, be acceptable to the audience?

Shilpa Shetty in Phir Milenge

A moot point, and one that needed to be seriously addressed before the film's release.

It has been seen that issue-based films that turn apologetic about their concerns and use stars as bait to lure audiences into theatres tend to backfire badly.

Let's hope for the sake of quality cinema that Phir Milenge whets audience appetite, though those looking for the chest-thumping flamboyant super-hero Salman will find it hard to digest his new subdued avatar.

Abhishek Bachchan, who plays a lawyer fighting Shilpa Shetty's right to work in Phir Milenge (shades of Denzel Washington in Philadelphia), will also be seen in Dhoom as a cop hunting down a criminal (John Abraham).