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Santa Fe, New Mexico  - A wildfire burned out of control for a fourth day in the steep mountains of southwestern New Mexico on Saturday, one of several blazes that have consumed more than 200 square miles (520 square km) of rugged land in six U.S. states.

 Efforts to contain the blazes spreading in sparsely populated areas of Arizona, Colorado, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico and Utah have been hurt by gusting winds and tinder-dry late-spring conditions.

 Several small towns, including the historic Wild West mining town of Mogollon - now nearly a ghost town - were ordered to evacuate, as the spreading fire torched miles forest, brush and grass.

 New Mexico's Whitewater-Baldy Complex fire, which was started by lightning 10 days ago, had raged across 82,252 acres as of Friday and officials said the area could now be much larger than that.

 "We know that there was significant growth yesterday, but we don't have a hard and fast number," said Fire Information Officer Dan Ware.

 More than 580 firefighters and support crew have been fighting the blaze.

 "This is the biggest show in the country right now in terms of fire size. So a lot of resources are available to us. We're just not sure we'll be able to do a lot of flying," Ware said.

 He said access to the fire had been the chief difficulty as it was burning in very steep, rugged terrain where firefighters were not able to cut through the brush and timber.

 "Fire activity was so extreme yesterday we had to pull crews out," he said. "We're expecting another day like that today. With such high wind levels and low humidity there's going to be big potential for some major growth."

 Smoke from the New Mexico fire wafted north into the Denver metropolitan area on Saturday, as firefighters battled a separate wildfire burning on the Utah-Colorado border.

 That 2,800-acre fire was burning in a remote area near Paradox, Colorado, U.S. Forest Service spokesman Steve Segin said.

 He said there were only a few isolated ranches in the area and no structures had been lost so far, although the wind-driven blaze was "very active." He said the cause was under investigation.

 Most of western Colorado has been put under a "red flag" warning for wildfires due to hot temperatures, low humidity and high winds, according to the National Weather Service.

 In Utah, officials said that a wildfire burning on the west side of Promontory Point, the tip of a peninsula that juts into the Great Salt Lake, had grown to 4,200 acres, but was 50 percent contained.

 The fire, which was touched off by lightning on Thursday, was burning uphill in the Promontory Mountains, on public and private land, the officials said. No structures have been lost, they said.

President Barack Obama faces new warning signs in a once-promising Southern state and typically Democratic-voting Midwestern states roughly five months before the election even as he benefits nationally from encouraging economic news.

Obama's new worries about North Carolina and Wisconsin offer opportunities for Republican Mitt Romney, who must peel off states Obama won in 2008 if he's to cobble together the 270 electoral votes needed to oust the incumbent in November.

Iowa, which kicked off the campaign in January, is now expected to be tight to the finish, while New Mexico, thought early to be pivotal, seems to be drifting into Democratic territory.

If the election were today, Obama would likely win 247 electoral votes to Romney's 206, according to an Associated Press analysis of polls, ad spending and key developments in states, along with interviews with more than a dozen Republican and Democratic strategists both inside and outside of the two campaigns.

Seven states, offering a combined 85 electoral votes, are viewed as too close to give either candidate a meaningful advantage: Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, Ohio and Virginia.

"As of today, the advantage still lies with the president, but there is a long and hard road ahead in this election," said Tad Devine, who was a top strategist to Democratic presidential candidates Al Gore and John Kerry but isn't directly involved in this year's race.

If Romney wins all the states Republican John McCain carried in 2008 plus North Carolina, as trends today suggest he would, he would still need 64 electoral votes to hit the magic number. That would require him to win a majority of the states that are up for grabs.

Obama, on the other hand, faces the costly and labor-intensive challenge of defending those states in a much different environment than the one he enjoyed four years ago.

Big-spending, pro-Romney political committees are certain to be a factor, and already are running heavy levels of television ads in states where Obama is vulnerable, such as Florida.

But Obama's early spending — more than $30 million on advertising before Memorial Day — and new glimmers of economic hope across the battleground states demonstrate the size of Romney's challenge.

The race is expected to be close, and the past six weeks have been volatile.

North Carolina is a case in point.

Obama announced his support for gay marriage on May 9, one day after 60 percent of North Carolina voters approved a constitutional ban. "That issue definitely hurts him down there," said veteran Republican presidential campaign strategist Charlie Black, a top aide to 2008 nominee McCain. Black's not directly involved in this year's race but is an informal adviser to Romney.

North Carolina's high African American and young voter population, keys to Obama's 2008 wins there, give him the edge, aides say. And the president so far has spent heavily there, $2.7 million on television, according to reports provided to the AP.

But Democratic Gov. Bev Perdue gave Republicans an opening by not seeking re-election this year. And union leaders, a key Democratic constituency, are upset that this summer's Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C., is being held in a state where union rights are weak.

In Wisconsin, embattled Republican Gov. Scott Walker's improving fortunes as a contentious June 5 recall election approaches could alter that state's landscape. Walker, who sparked mass protests by signing anti-union legislation last year, has pulled narrowly ahead of Democratic Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett in recent polls.

If Walker survives, Romney aides say they have a real chance to carry Wisconsin, which no Republican has done since Ronald Reagan in 1984.

"I don't think there's been any better dress rehearsal for a presidential election than what's going on in Wisconsin right now," said Rich Beeson, political director for the former Massachusetts governor.

Indeed, the Wisconsin recall could signal a GOP shift in an arc of states from Iowa to Pennsylvania that have reliably voted Democratic in presidential elections for a generation.

"Whether Walker wins or doesn't is going to be a big indicator of how Wisconsin goes, and how the whole upper Midwest goes," said Iowa's Republican Gov. Terry Branstad.

Romney has signaled plans to contest Iowa, where Obama's 2008 caucus win propelled him to the Democratic nomination. Romney also sees opportunity in his native Michigan, where Democratic presidential candidates have won since 1988.

Bright spots are developing for Obama, too.

Public polls this month showed the president narrowly ahead in Virginia, a Southern state Republicans had carried nine times before Obama won it in 2008. Obama's advantage among Latino voters is moving New Mexico his way. Neither campaign nor the super PACs have advertised there, despite close finishes in 2000 and 2004.

Obama also has seized on new economic data that could give him a lift across the contested map. April unemployment ticked downward in all of the up-for-grabs states except Colorado as Obama and Romney have fought over who is best equipped to lead an economic recovery.

In Des Moines, Iowa, this month, Romney blamed Obama's spending for the recovery's slow pace. A week later, on the other side of town, Obama said Romney's career as a private equity executive was more suited for the boardroom than the Oval Office.

Obama's attack dovetails with scathing ads on Romney's career at the head of Bain Capital, which ran briefly in Colorado, Iowa, Pennsylvania and Virginia. They remained on the air last week in Ohio, where Obama aides say Romney's opposition to the auto industry bailout in 2009 hurts him with workers in the region's auto manufacturing sector.

Obama has had an edge in getting out his message. For nearly two months, his campaign has aired spots across 11 states, heaviest in Florida, Iowa, Ohio and Virginia, according to the ad-tracking reports.

Romney has only been airing ads for two weeks in four states. But super PACs that support him have helped shave Obama's advertising edge, airing $10 million in ads across 10 states.

Obama aides point to an edge in state-by-state organizing that could be the deciding factor in a close election. While Romney is quickly arranging with the Republican National Committee to deploy staff to various battlegrounds, Obama's campaign has been up and running for years.

Said Democratic strategist Devine: "The president and his campaign have a real and potentially decisive advantage on the ground."

In a rather self-conscious manner, this film nods to the Priyadarshan-style anarchy and confusion in the plot but in truth, it's more like a C-movie version of his signature comedies (I mean it as a tribute to Priyan).

The confusion here is over a severed head of a man who looks like the poorest cousin of Bob Christo. The trouble is not that director Amol Shetge chooses to create comedy over a big-sized, bald man's severed head because in the end, all is fair in humour and if you recall, the corpse farce in Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro is the finest example to cite. The cause of real trouble is how ridiculous and absurd the situations are and the sadder fact is that this absurdity dominates much of this film, without any respite whatsoever.

If you still care, here's making some sense of the nonsensical plot. Pratap Singh (Manoj Joshi) is a retired top cop who loves all things Indian. And for some very stupid reason, he is against love marriage. So, when his daughter Tia (Rani Agrawal) falls in love with DJ Rahul (Suhail Karim) and his son Pappu (Vrajesh Hirjee) brings home an Italian bahu, it becomes imperative to lay the ground before they tell him the truth.

On another side, there is a love story between a South Indian female cop and her Marathi colleague, both devotees of Rajinikanth. If you still didn't get the connection, Rajinikanth is a Marathi who, having achieved stardom in Tamil cinema, made Chennai his home.

Practically all the ingredients in Love Recipe are flavourless. It offers nothing but consistent hamming (Hirjee's among the worst on display), terrible writing and tacky humour. The actors are simply sleepwalking through their roles or they just don't have it in them. I haven't consciously mentioned Upasana Singh yet to save you, dear reader, from third degree torture. If at all, this film is a sure-footed recipe for disaster.

Before the release of Dangerous Ishhq, I had heard that the film is about past life regression. After having watched the film I can confirm that it is indeed about past life regression. I can also confirm that the regression here is not confined to past life. It is also a regression into an era when Bollywood filmmakers could grossly underestimate their audiences' thinking capacity and get away with it.

The film brings Karisma Kapoor back on the big screen after a six-year hiatus. In the interviews that Karisma gave as a run up to the film, she described her role in Dangerous Ishhq as the most challenging role of her career. She essays four different characters across four time periods in the film.

Starting with a supermodel Sanjana whose fiancé Rohan ( Rajneesh Duggal) is kidnapped under mysterious circumstances, Karisma goes on to play Geeta, Salma and Paro across five centuries. All this made possible by her doctor who makes Sanjana delve into her past lives in order to identify Rohan's kidnappers. The doctor casually throws in references to famous psychiatrist Dr Brian Weiss and his past-life therapy in support of her treatment of Sanjana. And from here on things get increasingly bizarre.

Despite her claims of having worked very hard for the film, none of Karisma's four characters leave any impact on the audience. A ridiculous and faulty plot, superficial dialogue delivery and weak direction leaves the audience completely untouched and mighty annoyed at being taken for such a dumb ride.

However, a couple of impressive dialogue deliveries by Karisma's period characters do assure us that her acting prowess has not dwindled over the years. Given an opportunity, she can still pull off a Zubeidaa with the same panache and possibly more depth and maturity.

In the looks department, Manish Malhotra's impeccable styling ensures that Sanjana struts around in six inch heels through all the chaos and trauma of trying to find her kidnapped fiancé. And that the city slicker turns into a village belle with style and flair. While her wafer thin frame is compatible with Sanjana's supermodel looks, Salma and Paro's bodies could have done with better definition.

Rajneesh Duggal is a model-turned-actor. And whenever anyone mentions a male model turned actor, the first image that comes to my mind is that of a wooden Deepak Malhotra squeaking out "Pallo" in Yash Chopra's Lamhe. Lets just say Rajneesh Duggal does better than that.


Divya Dutta's natural performance tries to bring some semblance of realism into a preposterous plot but elements like Meerabai's (Gracy Singh) 'vardaan' to Paro and Durgam Sigh's (Ravi Kishen) shoulder mark across many rebirths  render any such effort ineffective.

The film was also being touted as a supernatural thriller. Supernatural it surely is, what with far-fetched characters like a sorceress (Natasha Sinha) and a villain who chases Sanjana through generations. But there is nothing remotely thrilling about the film -- unless some exasperated laughs at the sheer absurdity of the plot can pass off as thrills. And a convoluted ending doesn't make it any better.

Cinegoers have always been happy and willing to suspend their disbelief before entering theatres. And many great filmmakers thrive on this trait. But Dangerous Ishhq demands a suspension of not just disbelief but of all our thinking powers and even that does not make us take this incredible farce spread across five hundred years in our stride.

So here's a plea to all filmmakers -- regressive or progressive -- for the sake of Indian cinema and its viewers, Mirabai and Dr Brian Weiss should be kept as far away from each other as possible.

Synopsis

Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, Thor, Captain America, Hawkeye and Black Widow answer the call to action when Nick Fury, director of the international peacekeeping agency known as S.H.I.E.L.D., initiates a daring, globe-spanning recruitment effort to assemble The Avengers team to defeat an unexpected enemy threatening global safety and security. Despite pulling together the ultimate dream team, Nick Fury and longtime confidant Agent Coulson must find a way to convince the Super Heroes to work with, not against each other, when the powerful and dangerous Loki gains access to the Cosmic Cube and its unlimited power.



Review





The good versus evil mythology built on the bones of classic comic book legend needs for the right side to triumph, against seemingly insurmountable odds. Which is why when we walk into a comic book movie, no matter how formidable the foe initially seems -- no matter how humongous Mickey Rourke's  muscles and how many intelligent arms Alfred Molina  has -- we always know he'll be licked by the end of it.

Which is where Joss Whedon's The Avengers truly scores.

The film isn't about the bad guys -- even though it has a captivatingly slimy villain -- but about an ambitious assemblage of larger-than-life superhero icons; heroes yet aglow from their own individual blockbusters totting up over $2 billion over the last few summers.


Men, in short, with preposterous identities, egos and issues with authority. And it is by wittily mining their invariably tempestuous dynamic that Whedon strikes comicbook gold.

The Earth is under attack -- from spurned Norse God Loki (played by a creepy Tom Hiddleston) -- and the eyepatch-wearing Nick Fury (an appropriately commanding Samuel L Jackson) decisively begins to put together a squad of superheroes equal to the task. Forever the man with a plan, Fury's been glimpsed in all the component blockbusters leading up to this one, speaking of an Avengers Initiative, the heist-master putting together his ace crew, step by slow-burn step. Those familiar with the books and recent Marvel movies have more than an inkling, but the rest need only know the basics -- -- and trust in the fact that the gents gathered here can spank an army apiece.

After they find their own groove, that is.

A film throwing as many one-liners as it does punches, The Avengers consists of the drily snappy Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo), swiftly angered hammer-weilding God of thunder Thor (Chris Hemsworth), quaintly vintage Captain America (Chris Evans) and Robert Downey Jr's Tony Stark, that Iron Man treading on everyone's shoes with his serrated-edge sarcasm. Somewhere in the mix also lie Scarlett Johannson's redheaded Russian superspy Black Widow and Jeremy Renner's impossibly good marksman Hawkeye, but while they too have their moments, they simply aren't super enough to trade quips with the big boys.

There is much to admire and to applaud, and all of it too well-written for a review to play spoiler. The words and the cast deliver, earning guffaws, gasps and wolf-whistles.


It's Stark -- that Jack Sparrow of superheroes -- who takes the obvious lead, literally poking Banner with a stick to bring out his big green alter ego, and making Shakespeare jabs at Thor, but despite his immense quotability, the film's genius lies in letting each icon get a rightful piece of the pie.

Cap A is positively irresistible when he, frozen from World War II, triumphantly catches on to a pop-culture reference (to 1939 classic The Wizard Of Oz), Thor is quick to retract sibling-love hearing of his half-brother's homicidal madness, and Ruffalo's Banner is an absolute masterstroke, an in-control scientist who strangely but perfectly seems almost proud of the beast within. The role has been played before by Eric Bana and Edward Norton, but Ruffalo's Hulk is by far the truest to the character's spirit, and has a hilariously electrifying screen presence. (He is also responsible for the film's finest line, a two-word instruction given to him by Cap, one that will cause many a fangasm around the globe.)

Yet when the villain imperils the world, oneupmanship is instantly sacrificed as the Avengers do indeed assemble. Each member of the team finds a role and is ready for the banal as well as the big: in one brilliant scene, with every Avenger surrounded by volcanic chaos and striking more glamorous blows, Iron Man, the inevitable star of the piece, sees his task reduced to that of a welding job.

By the time the heroes arrange themselves into a unified force and take attack positions, Manhattan is being ravaged by gigantic alien vertebrae, skyline-crumblingly snaking through midtown. This is the cue for a long and ridiculously enjoyable action setpiece that -- while amplifying the ante for a big-screen 3D spectacle -- keeps things cheeky as it oscillates from Avenger to Avenger (once even in a breathlessly unbroken shot) each getting the job done in their own uniquely awesome way.

The Avengers is wall-to-wall action, executed with a fluid coherence we don't get to see in most superhero films, and yet what stays with you are the lines and, resultantly, the characters. As this big, meaty film -- this hero sandwich of a film, even -- winds down, Whedon makes us do something increasingly rare in these over-franchised times: root for a sequel.

The Avengers -- from ambition to scale to the way it justly balances each remarkable character -- is an absolute blast, and it's far easier to lose yourself than to find fault. It's the most spectacular superhero party of all time. And you're invited. Go smash.