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Co-produced by Pritish Nandy Communications and Daily Multimedia Ltd, the romantic comedy also features Gul Panag and Purab Kohli.

Director Rajat Kapoor feels the movie will prove to be a mass entertainer.

"This script has been with me for about three years and I have always felt that this might be the most commercial film that I have done so far," Kapoor said in a statement.

"Once in a while you get tickled by an idea that has the potential to be liked by a huge number of people. I believe Fatso has that potential."

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California: It was a heartbreaker for Tom Petty and the band when someone stole five of their precious guitars from a soundstage, but it was music to their ears when police in Southern California announced on Tuesday that the instruments had been recovered and a security guard was under arrest.

Police identified the arrested man as Daryl Emmette Washington, 51, of Los Angeles, a private security guard at The Culver Studios lot.

Police Chief Don Pedersen said the break in the case came when the suspect pawned one of the guitars at a Hollywood pawn shop for $250 (Dh917).

"Mr. Petty would have joined us, but he’s preparing for a concert in Denver," said Pedersen, who described the stolen guitars as collectively worth $100,000. A message seeking comment from the band’s publicist, Jim Merlis, was not immediately returned.

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Story By: by David Edelstein

Fellag, an Algerian comedian, plays the title character in the Oscar-nominated Monsieur Lazhar, who steps in to teach a class of middle school students after tragedy has struck their classroom.

Monsieur Lazhar

Rated PG-13 for mature thematic material, a disturbing image and brief language

With Mohamed Fellag, Sophie Nelisse, Emilien Neron

(Recommended)

‘After The Trauma’

‘Vacancy’

‘Bachir’

Teacher movies tend to be more alike than unalike, but Monsieur Lazhar makes the familiar unusually strange. The note on which it opens is shocking, tragic: A Montreal middle school student, Simon, enters his classroom ahead of the other kids and finds his teacher hanging from a pipe, dead by her own hand.

As the rest of the kids are hastily turned back, one girl, Alice, peeks in and sees the body. A week later, when the fuss has died down, a middle-aged Algerian immigrant shows up in the principal’s office and talks his way into the vacant teaching job, which no one wants. This is Monsieur Lazhar.

Kids bereft, caregiver floating in from nowhere … it could be a ghoulish Mary Poppins. The difference is that Bachir Lazhar doesn’t seem to have a clue what he’s doing. The curriculum confuses him. Administrators and parents reprimand him for trying to talk about the dead teacher, with the kids and even with them, the grown-ups.

At one point, he lightly smacks a student on the back of the head after the boy mouths off, which leads the principal to tell him that teachers are not allowed to touch students — not to smack them, not even to pat or hug or shake hands. The restriction has more symbolic than literal weight. But it reinforces Lazhar’s sense that he’s a million miles away from these kids.

I’ve read complaints that Monsieur Lazhar is too polished and restrained, which I think is bunk. Writer-director Philippe Falardeau does keep most of the emotional turmoil under the surface: The film is crisp and evenly paced, its colors bright and as sharp as the Quebec winter cold, with a gently beautiful score by Canadian singer-songwriter Martin Leon that never jars the mood.

But that unruffled surface is true to the characters’ forced repression. No one is allowed to express fully his or her grief. The mood is tense, pregnant with fear, increasingly, almost unbearably sad.

Monsieur Lazhar is played by an Algerian actor named Mohamed Fellag, who goes by his last name and is largely known in France for playing comic parts. I have no idea what he’s like in comedy, but now I want to see him in everything. He’s magnetic, his Lazhar self-contained but not, you can see, by choice.

Lazhar wants his students to share their feelings about their late teacher, but he won’t disclose his own past — not even to another teacher who likes him and whom he briefly dates. He channels his feelings into reaching these students. At first, the two kids who saw their teacher’s body are drawn together — but then they pull back from each other for reasons we won’t understand until late in the film. Simon is ravaged; Alice wants to talk, but no one will listen — except, of course, Monsieur Lazhar.

The more we learn about Bachir Lazhar, his tragic past in Algeria and his uncertain future in Quebec, the more we understand what not even he can fully articulate. The world he knows is full of senseless death, but he has a fierce conviction that the classroom is where all that is supposed to go away, where teachers must never let their own emotions interfere with the care and intellectual feeding of young lives. He couldn’t hear about a teacher killing herself in the classroom without wanting to rush in and work some kind of magic.

Within the context of the film, that might be a doomed enterprise. But he’s one of the best teacher role models I’ve ever seen. Monsieur Lazhar, the character and the film, are heart-rending. (Recommended)

Story By: by Banning Eyre

Vieux Farka Toure (left) and Idan Raichel, collaborating as The Toure-Raichel Collective, released The Tel-Aviv Session on March 26.

Idan Raichel is one of Israel’s top-selling pop musicians. Vieux Farka Toure is a virtuoso guitarist from Mali. The two met by chance in a German airport, and when Toure played a concert in Tel Aviv, Raichel sat in. He enjoyed himself so much that he invited Toure and two other musicians to come to a studio the next day and jam. The music they created is now an album called The Tel Aviv Session.

Sometimes, the best collaborations are accidental. If Raichel and Toure had planned a collaboration, it’s hard to imagine that they could have topped the casual charm of this impromptu encounter.

For this session, Raichel leaves aside his banks of keyboards and his large backing band, and mostly just plays piano, sometimes plucking its strings to create percussive, muted vamps and riffs. Toure, a rocking electric guitarist, sticks to his acoustic and shines. There’s a spare rhythm section, and some guests make appearances, but the soul of this session is two nimble musicians, unfettered and comfortably at play.

Toure tends to set the stage here, mostly with music reminiscent of Malian folklore, while Raichel plays the foil, sometimes smoothing out Toure’s rugged grooves and sometimes echoing the guitarist’s distinctive filigree phrasing.

The Toure-Raichel Collective is now becoming a touring ensemble, aiming to preserve and even enhance the spontaneous magic of Raichel and Toure’s initial encounter. The fact that the group features two Jewish Israelis and two Muslim Africans is interesting, but not really the point. These players delve into the swirling waters of our globalized music culture and pull out bright fish, almost perfect, as if designed instead of conjured in the heat of improvisation.

The history of the Paralympic Games is to be told in a BBC Two drama starring Rob Brydon and Eddie Marsan.

Best of Men will tell the story of a neurological doctor whose work with wounded soldiers led to the first official Paralympics in Rome in 1960.

Writer Lucy Gannon said Dr Ludwig Guttmann "revolutionised life for paralysed people".

The first unofficial games for disabled people was at Stoke Mandeville Hospital.

'Unsung hero'

German-born Dr Guttmann, who had been using sport as a therapy to rebuild strength on his patients, opened the games on the same day as the 1948 Olympics.

In the drama Brydon will play a paralysed soldier, who is admitted to Stoke Mandeville under the care of Dr Guttmann, who will be played by Marsan.

Now referred to as the 1948 International Wheelchair Games, it became an international event in 1952, when a team from Holland went to England to participate.

By 1960, the games were held in parallel with the Olympics in Rome.

Gannon said she found Dr Guttmann's story "amazing", calling him "an unsung hero".

Ben Stephenson, controller BBC Drama Commissioning, said: "Lucy Gannon has written a moving human story that reveals the largely unknown history behind the birth of the Paralympic Games."

Story By: by Egon

A detail from the cover of Minoru Muraoka’s collaboration with Herbie Mann, Gagaku and Beyond.

It took some time to count the stamps on my passports, but it turns out I’ve averaged one trip to Japan per year for the past decade. While crack-of-dawn sushi at Daiwa’s in Tokyo’s Tsukiji fish market and journeys to Hakone in search of the best onsens (rustic, mineral spring-fed inns) were on my early “must do” lists, as a record collector one of my main desires was to dig deeper into Japanese jazz.

Prior to my first trip to Japan, I’d searched for years for Headhunter Paul Jackson’s Japan-only Black Octopus album and, upon sourcing a copy, was disappointed in its plainness. While in college, I’d heard the superb, now-reissued (but always out of reach in its original form) Black Renaissance album by the late pianist and arranger Harry Whitaker. I’d run through the Japanese jazz label Three Blind Mice’s well-distributed catalog.

But most of my early ventures through the used bins in Tokyo and Osaka’s then-plentiful boutiques led to more American jazz scores than Japanese ones. Besides the wonderful novelty of the Yamaha-sponsored Electro Keyboard Orchestra’s solitary album and the official Japanese issue of Norwegian jazz vocalist Karin Krog’s We Could Be Flying, I didn’t hear any Japanese jazz worth shelling out the yen.

That was until a fateful visit to Shinjuku’s Universounds, where the shop’s proprietor, Yusuke Ogawa — a funk 45 collector with whom I’d been swapping since the 1990s — acknowledged that he loved “deep jazz” from the ’60s and ’70s. Wishing to illustrate the Japanese brand of this stuff, he pulled out a stack of wax from behind the counter.

One of the records was Minoru Muraoka’s Bamboo. I’d not come across Muraoka’s name in any of my searches, so I listened patiently to the koto (a stringed instrument similar to a zither) introduction to “The Positive and the Negative.” A rolling bass line set the stage for funky-enough drums that soon gave way to Muraoka’s shakuhachi, or bamboo flute. A cascading koto sat in for chicken-scratched guitar. “What in the hell do you call this?” I asked. “Shakuhachi Jazz,” Ogawa replied, with an “Isn’t it obvious?” air. He then sheepishly admitted that the album wasn’t for sale, as Muraoka’s discography was extensive and his records were rare.

So, over the past seven years, I’ve made it a point to buy any Muraoka album I come across. Some are goofy attempts at crossover: His cover of the ’30s jazz standard “Harlem Nocturne,” for example, is far from essential. But when Muraoka stretched out in the psychedelic era of the late ’60s through the mid-’70s, usually with his groups The Life Theaters and The New Dimensions, he created haunting, difficult-to-compare music that you file as “jazz” only by default. The dozen or so Muraoka albums that I’ve kept at home are by far my favorite examples of Japanese jazz.

Story By: World Cafe

Throughout the month of October, we celebrated the 20th anniversary of World Cafe and revisited some of the best and most memorable interviews of the past 20 years.

On today’s World Cafe, we look to Nigeria, Benin and Cuba and highlight some of our favorite conversations with world-music innovators.

King Sunny Ade visited World Cafe in 2005 to talk about Juju music from Nigeria — a lilting style of guitar- and percussion-based dance music — and describe how this almost turned him into the “African Bob Marley.”

Iconic and inspiring, Benin-born Angélique Kidjo discusses the impact of the African Diaspora on world music, her trilogy of albums exploring the movement of African musical traditions to the Americas, and her work with Dave Matthews on a track for her 2002 album Black Ivory Soul.

After years of collaborating and touring with his band The Flecktones, banjo guru Bela Fleck sought to explore the roots of his beloved instrument in Africa. He recounts the result of his travels — the album and documentary Throw Down Your Heart — in this excerpt from a 2009 session.

In 1996, Buena Vista Social Club helped expose the golden age of Cuban local music to the world. The album’s producer, Ry Cooder, came to World Cafe in 1998 to discuss the role of music as a source of cultural identity in Cuba, and to describe how he navigated this project amid the Cuban recording environment.

This segment originally aired on October 19, 2011.

Story By: by Will Shortz

On-Air Challenge: Name something in a given category where the last two letters of the category’s name are the first two letters of your answer. For example, given “U.S. state,” the answer would be either “Texas” or “Tennessee.”

Last Week’s Challenge: The answer is a two-word name. Inside this name are the consecutive letters I-L-E-H. Remove these four letters, and the remaining letters in order will name something commonly found inside the original thing with the two-word name. What is it?

Answer: A “folder” can be found inside a “file holder.”

Winner: Stan Chervin of Encino, Calif.

Next Week’s from listener Mike Reiss: Take the phrase “no sweat.” Using only these seven letters, and repeating them as often as necessary, can you make a familiar four-word phrase? It’s 15 letters long. What is it?

Submit Your Answer

If you know the answer to next week’s challenge, submit it here. Listeners who submit correct answers win a chance to play the on-air puzzle. Important: Include a phone number where we can reach you Thursday at 3 p.m. Eastern.

Story By: by Jacob Ganz

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See a photo gallery of the musicians who have made Marshall.

Jim Marshall helped make rock ‘n’ roll loud. The British electrical engineer, musician and owner of Marshall Amplification produced one of the most iconic pieces of equipment in popular music. Marshall died today in England after battling cancer and suffering multiple strokes in recent years. He was 88.

Jim Marshall, Amp Pioneer Known As ‘The Father Of Loud,’ Has Died

In the 1960s, when guitar players like Pete Townsend and Jimi Hendrix sought to make a louder and more distorted noise than the jazz and country players whose place in pop culture they would soon usurp, they turned to the amplifiers bearing Marshall’s name. Marshall began making the amplifiers from a small shop in West London in the early part of the decade.

Marshall amps became a key part of the rock ‘n’ roll sound. Hendrix grinded his guitar into one before setting it on fire at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967. Lemmy Kilmister, the bassist and singer for the heavy metal band Motorhead, plays in front of a giant wall of them and name-drops the amps in the song “Dr. Rock.” Pete Townsend, known for destroying his instruments, made them a trademark part of his assault.

In a 1993 interview on Fresh Air, Townsend said that he went into Marshall’s shop because he was unsatisfied with the two American-made amps he had been using. ” ‘The trouble is that I can hear the audience,’ ” Townsend said he told Marshall. ” ‘I can hear what they’re saying. I don’t want to hear them, OK?’ And I said, ‘So I need something bigger and louder.’ And his eyes lit up.”

For Townsend, Marshall amplifiers were a signal of more than just volume.

“I realized at that moment that what was actually happening was that I was demanding a more powerful machine gun, and Jim Marshall was going to build it for me and then we were going to go out and blow people away all around the world. And the generation we were going to blow away was the generation immediately preceding us, the ones who had the gall to tell us that we were wimps because we had long hair, wimps because we didn’t have wars to fight in, wimps because we couldn’t prove ourselves in military service, because we didn’t have it,” Townsend said. “Everybody wanted it to be bigger, louder. I wanted it to be as big as the atomic bomb had been.”

Marshall amps became known not just for their ability to blow away all other sound, but also for their visual impact. Guitarists looking for an imposing, minimalist prop were able to paint a picture of the very noise their gear created by stacking the large black boxes one on top of another. The number of Marshall amps a guitarist has behind him, and the accordant noise he can create, has become something of a shorthand for his power.

Speaking with All Things Considered, guitarist Yngwie Malmsteen offered his own tribute. “People say there are two man-made things you can see from outer space,” Malmsteen said. “One is the Great Wall of China. The other is Yngwie Malmsteen’s Marshall stacks.”

Editor’s note: Amber James is an editor at Celebuzz.com

Although it will be feeding off the tween demographic, this franchise will chew up those other guys and spit them out.

But what exactly is this “Hunger Games” wonder that has so many folks talking months before the movie (which just wrapped up filming earlier this month) is even released? Like many of the wildly successful film franchises these days, it began with a book.

Suzanne Collins is the mastermind behind “The Hunger Games” trilogy, which has been gaining momentum over the last few months for both its suspenseful plot and overarching message about society.

The plot revolves around a dystopian society where punishment for a previous rebellion has resulted in a televised event. One boy and one girl between the ages of 12 and 18 from each district (there are 12 total) are selected at random and forced to participate in the Hunger Games, where “tributes” must fight to the death until only one is left standing.

“The Hunger Games” gives us a heroine named Katniss, a strong-willed and unwavering spirit, who volunteers for the games in order to spare her younger sister. Once inside the death match arena, she must get down and dirty to outlive her competitors, but there’s one slight problem.

Her hot friend Peeta gets cast into the games, too. In the midst of all the slaying, Katniss finds herself embroiled in a love triangle with her longtime pal Gale, who is watching the games from his home, and Peeta, who confesses his love for her inside the arena. Katniss’ emotional turmoil of love or death makes Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” look like child’s play.

Apparently, Collins’ twisted plot came to her one night while she was channel surfing between a competition reality show and a news program about the Iraq war. She blended the two shows and “The Hunger Games” was born.

The first film of the franchise is slated for release on March 23, 2012, while the second film is already booked for November 2013. Fans can only hope director Gary Ross doesn’t soften the book, because the twists and turns will make for an edge-of-your-seat thriller. At this rate, the film is set to have more passion than “Twilight” and more action than “Harry Potter.”

The film has already faced some controversy.

When Lionsgate announced that Jennifer Lawrence had been cast to play Katniss, both fans and critics questioned the choice, believing she was too old, too blond and too pretty to play a ruthless warrior. However, if her success in “Winter’s Bone” and “X-Men: First Class” is any indication of her range, Lawrence has the potential to nail this role and pave the way for kick-butt female heroines.

The movie’s lead male stars will likely rise to instant fame, just as Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner did with “Twilight.” The relatively unknown actors Josh Hutcherson (Peeta) and Liam Hemsworth (Gale) will provide plenty of eye candy for the film. Other stars on the bill include Woody Harrelson (Haymitch), Stanley Tucci (Caesar Flickerman) and Lenny Kravitz (Cinna).

The film was originally meant to be low budget, however the hype has pushed the movie to a nearly $100-million production, the Los Angeles Times reported.

The cast and crew wrapped filming earlier this month after an 84-day shoot, and a recently released teaser trailer has given fans a taste of what’s to come. The hype may have escalated the budget, but the film may still exceed all expectations — and be one lucrative franchise that reaches audiences of all ages.

Now, with only a few months until the first film’s release, you still have plenty of time to pick up the book if you haven’t read it. But be warned, once you finish the addictive read, you’ll probably hunger for more.