Guilty Pleasures – 2011 (Hindi)
1. Ra.One:
2. Singham:
3. Don 2:
4. Force:
5. Yeh Saali Zindagi
6. Mujhse Fraaandship Karoge:
7. Yamla Pagla Deewana:
8. Shaitan:
9. Bbuddah Hoga Tera Baap:
10. Dum Maro Dum:
One of the most underrated suspense films of the year, Dum Maro Dum may not have had the best casting (Read: Rana Dagubatti in a role that required a much more solid actor) and was rather inconsistent with its mood. Moments within you feel sorry for a man who has lost his wife, he turns into this rapstar dude singing to the camera, we never take the film seriously after that but it has some really cheeky pop culture references to make Sergio Leone smile.
Five that almost made it:
Speedy Singhs, Chillar Party, Chalo Dilli, Bodyguard, Not a Love Story
Five Films that were so bad that were good:
Chitkabrey: Laugh riot. Boobies plus bad acting guarantees it a cult status among lovers of grindhouse cinema.
Haunted: One word: Mimoh. Ok, Mahaakshay. Additional bonus, the epic ghost-raping-ghost scene.
Loot: Mimoh plus more bad acting from Suniel Shetty & some laughs from Govinda and Javed Jaffrey.
Thank You: Presence of Booby Deol in any film is an indication for a wickedly bad film and the fact that it’s directed by Bazmee absolutely guarantees it.
Rascals: To watch Devgan and Sanjay Dutt make excuses to grope fake Kangana boobies for real.
Best of 2011: The Year Bollywood Grew Up
Usual disclaimers: The top grossers of the year have absolutely no correlation to critical acclaim. Critics are not soothsayers of commercial success or representative of public opinion and every best of the year list around the world are at best a sum up of personal favourites – one person’s opinion – and not to be accorded any further importance than just that. Also, only films that have had a nationwide theatrical release have been considered in making this list.
2011 was the year when films stepped out of the safe zone. Here’s how.
10: Aarakshan | Rating: 6.5/10
Aarakshan was a political landmine that addressed the issue of reservation by advocating inclusion and insisting that the issue thrived on discrimination. After setting up the points of debate in the first half, the film soon assumes the drama and syntax of street-theatre (simplification of good and evil with archetypes) to get its point across to the grassroots, much to the disappointment of the urban elite. Rarely do filmmakers set out to make big political films and despite the sensibility disconnect, director Prakash Jha had his heart in the right place. Read the full review here.
9: The Dirty Picture | Rating: 7/10
Very rarely does the Bollywood heroine get a role with enough meat. Even if she did, very rarely did she flaunt all that meat. Vidya Balan was brave enough to get herself out of shape to play a siren from the South and faced the cameras with make-up designed to make her look ugly in the second half. We only wish the Milan Luthria’s film went deeper into her soul without shying away from darkness and tragedy as the film cuts to song and dance afraid to show us pain and suffering. Read full review here.
Number 8: Zindagi Milegi Na Dobara | Rating: 7/10
Zoya Akhtar’s confidently slow paced holiday film with the boys was let down by the blatant in-your-face promotion of Spain as a tourist destination and Hollywood hero issues (Daddy, girl, space issues respectively). ZNMD made up by creating some genuinely warm moments of fun and will be remembered as the day the mainstream Bollywood heroine took the initiative and rode a cruiser to seize the moment and kiss her man. A delightful role reversal. Read full review here.
Number 7: I am Kalam | Rating: 7/10
We complain that we don’t make films for children and that cinema is becoming too adult but when those rare little gems come out, what were the parents doing? Nila Madhab Panda’s I am Kalam is the film the man it is dedicated to will approve of. It’s a sweet little inspiring film about children and spirit that shows a young India at the cusp of change. After setting it up so credibly, it settles to be a regular entertainer with a happy ending. Read the full review here.
Number 6: Stanley Ka Dabba | Rating: 7/10
The freshness of Amole Gupte’s Stanley Ka Dabba is to be seen to be believed. It’s realistic, choking and a tad manipulative with that social message slapped on it towards the end, but an effective, engaging film that completely charms you with its ensemble and heartwarming moments of spirit. With no Aamir Khan, or any familiar name in the credits, Stanley Ka Dabba works magic with its innocence. Read the full review here.
Number 5: Delhi Belly | Rating: 7/10
Delhi Belly was like that street food that causes the condition. Unhealthy yet inviting. Bollywood finally became brave enough to swear and casually show oral sex on screen. With its laugh a minute irreverence and attitude, this patchy but funny film directed by Abhinay Deo and written by Akshat Verma was the night Bollywood got old enough to be allowed into the frat house and let out everything that’s been repressed. Read the full review here.
Number 4: I Am Afia Megha Abhimanyu Omar | Rating: 7/10
This one deserves to be up here among the best simply because it dared to tell stories no one ever told you before. Onir’s anthology film with a superb ensemble handled complex issues of identity, child abuse, incest and homosexuality with great sensitivity and understanding, without ever resorting to shock and awe to sensationalise the issues explored. Read the review here.
Number 3: Shor In The City | Rating: 7/10
An explosive film that captures the inter-connectedness of chaos and karma in Mumbai as a microcosm of India, Shor In The City and makes you fall in love with the noise. Raj & DK’s influences may be Western but the heart of this film beats for India with its non-judgmental take on morality, supremacy of karma and the overbearing force of the universe. Read the full review here.
Number 2: Pyaar Ka Punchnama | Rating: 9/10
This was a story on the bittersweet pangs of love told from an unabashedly male point of view. A rare perspective that showed men as the weaker sex. This has a bunch of stereotypical women just like how chick flicks paint men in monotones but what makes it all real is how it explores men and their vulnerability when it comes to relationships, yet keeping the mood light. No Hindi film has captured relationship angst better than that five-minute monologue in Luv Ranjan’s Pyaar Ka Punchnama. Funny and intense. Read the full review here.
Number 1: Rockstar, directed by Imtiaz Ali | Rating: 9/10
This sufi rock opera was the almost-perfect musical narrative in ages, fronted by a solid Ranbir Kapoor with Nargis Fakhri being the only jarring note. Indian cinema found another outlet for all that has been repressed. Romance, sex but most of all, choice and freedom. The angst of an alienated artiste who hates to conform has never felt more real. Hats off to Ranbir Kapoor, Imtiaz Ali and A.R. Rahman, the men who rocked 2011 by giving us most things that went right with our Hindi cinema. The film that gave the system the finger. Read the full review here.
(The ones that almost made the list: Bol, That Girl in Yellow Boots, Shaitan (didn’t get a chance to review it but was let down by the second half), Tanu Weds Manu, Dhobi Ghat, Yeh Saali Zindagi, No One Killed Jessica, Mujhse Fraandship Karoge (didn’t review, loved the acting but too many co-incidences to take seriously), Ra.One & Ladies Versus Ricky Bahl… in that order)
This list originally appeared in The Hindu.
Don 2: Two Plates and a Ham Burglar
Genre: Action
Director: Farhan Akhtar
Cast: Shah Rukh Khan, Priyanka Chopra, Lara Dutta, Boman Irani, Kunal Kapoor
Storyline: Don is a smartass. Don is a smartass. Don is a smartass. Repeat statement scene after scene.
Bottomline: Ra.One was the smarter SRK film this year.
Imagine this. You’re in prison. You haven’t eaten all day. And someone tells you: You have fifteen minutes to come up with a script for the Don sequel. And you can walk free.
No time to think. You start with the punchlines first. Obviously, you begin with the epic one that the 1978 film made popular. “Don Ko Pakadna Mushkil Hi Nahin, Na Mumkin Hai”. You come up with a couple of good ones. But since you’re running out of time, you just fill in Punchline Nos. 13, 26 and 49 with the same “Don Ko Pakadna” line.
Too much pressure. But you are in prison and need to get out.
Fine, put that in the first act. Don is in prison. But wait, he can’t get caught according to the best punchline you have. Ok, so he got himself in.
But why? You don’t know. Ok, so you write “Don smiles mysteriously.”
Ten minutes left.
You continue scribbling… Don is in prison. But Don has many a dushman (arch-enemy in Don-speak) there. Ok, let’s say Don has come to break one of his enemies out of prison. Say Vardhan (Boman Irani). Why? You don’t know. So you write “Don smiles mysteriously.” You can think of the why later.
Now you are really stuck.
All you can think of is prison and prison food. Stale fish served last week had inmates down with food poisoning. Brainwave. Engineer food-poisoning and break jail.
All that thought of food is getting you hungry. What you would not give for a plate of leftovers. A brainwave again. Don wants to steal plates. Plates? Five minutes left.
Focus. YOU want a plate of food. Don probably just wants to steal plates used to make money. How? Write “Don smiles mysteriously.”
Think harder. Don’s a chase film. You can’t just change genre and make it a heist film. That would be blasphemy. But you need to get out before prison changes the genre of your life to gay porn.
Fourteen minutes are up. Don steals the plates. How? Action scenes. Let action director figure that out. Also add, “Don smiles mysteriously.” Lame big shocking twist. Obvious one but time up. The End.
So you smile mysteriously and hand over your script. You’re free.
It turns out that Farhan Akhtar who has ambitions of making a slick looking film like Ocean’s Eleven with stunts from Mission Impossible has already started shoot before he’s read your script.
Since it’s the sequel, the actors already know what they are doing. Shah Rukh Khan walks in suits, reels of slow motion shots are canned and bottles of hair gel are sacrificed, take after take.
Lara Dutta shakes it to the tune of the title track of the previous film since she’s been told the song will be just like the old one.
Priyanka knows she has to say all her lines exactly the same way when she speaks to Don. In a tone that says: “I want to do you. I want to do you now.”
SRK loves the punchlines. They glorify him. Wait till Sallu hears them.
“Let me do it again,” says Shah Rukh after every line. “A punchline needs to be delivered in style.” But Mr. Khan, there are some 50 punchlines in here, says the assistant director. “It’s ok. They love me,” he opens his arms wide, smirks and delivers it like Punchline No. 51 looking at us.
They are at the scene where Don can just trigger off an explosion and escape but that would mean SRK doesn’t get a chance to say a good line. “Well, we have to shoot Roma then,” says the action director. Bang. Roma is shot. And timing presents itself. “Little does Don’s Dushman know that before he can make a move, Don has already made his next,” says Don. Boom.
The editor wishes his studio exploded and didn’t have to put this together. But he’s getting a fat cheque. He does his job to the best of his ability and is almost done when he hears that line “Don Ko Pakadna Mushkil hi nahin…”
Screw it, says the editor, stops it right before SRK could finish the line and walks out.
End credits slapped together with a song recorded even before the script was written. The film releases. And a critic scratches his head wondering if he should take this cheesy action entertainer seriously enough to dissect or analyse it.
“Ok, whatever I can type in 15 minutes,” he says.
This review originally appeared here.
The Dirty Picture: Choli Ke Peeche Dil… missing!
Genre: Drama
Director: Milan Luthria
Cast: Vidya Balan, Emraan Hashmi, Tusshar Kapoor, Naseeruddin Shah
Storyline: Small town girl runs away from home to become a star of dirty pictures
Bottomline: A fantastic Vidya Balan fronts this entertaining, titillating romp that delivers one tight slap on the face of hypocrisy of showbiz… but does little else.
Picture this: A sexy Scarlett Johansson (or Zuleikha Robinson if you want some Indian blood) in a Kimi Katkar biopic directed by Danny Boyle. There’s meticulous attention paid to recreate the feel of Mumbai with Hindi film posters, Bollywood dance choreography, low cut cholis etc. but… all the speaking parts and even some of the songs are in English. Except for one. Say Chamma Chamma! Think that would make for a credible biopic set in the eighties?
Yes, Milan Luthria may not be our Danny Boyle. But The Dirty Picture is just as out of place in Madras as that Scarlett film in Mumbai. All the posters and a lot of the production design is in Tamil but the songs and speaking parts are in Hindi. The only Tamil song used is the jingle-savvy Nakku Mukka, which is anything but representative of the eighties. And this fish out of water feel of this biopic considerably waters down the impact. We are never able to take this film seriously beyond what the title promises. A dirty picture. That too, almost.
Vidya Balan performs with an attitude that Scarlett may never be capable of. This is the single-most boldest performance by a woman in the history of Indian cinema not because of the reels of cleavage, in almost every frame in fact, but because of the large frame she flaunts and carries off on screen in an age where heroines are called fat if they cannot maintain a size zero figure. Vidya apparently put on 12 kilos for this film and they all show. It needs some amount of guts and sass to pull it off and she sizzles in this role tailor-made to show off her acting chops.
Like she says, “Films run only because of one reason: Entertainment, entertainment, entertainment. And I am entertainment,” this is a film that will truly run because Vidya Balan is entertainment. She wears slutty clothes, makes dirty noises, pouts out horny faces, dances with thunder thighs and delivers some great old fashioned dialoguebaazi, speaking mostly in punch-lines. She makes it impossible for you to take your eyes off the screen even when things get predictable in the later part of the film.
The makers (Milan Luthria and writer Rajat Arora) seem a little too afraid to get into the darker aspects of the tragic life of a star like Silk and most of the sadness is limited to showing the dark circles under her eyes. Even when her life is spiraling down, the film wants to go away from the tragedy and show you a love song. Clearly, they don’t want to depress you because depressing films don’t do well at the box office.
However, The Dirty Picture makes up for lack of depth with spirit and attitude. It is commendable that there’s no attempt to make a dirty picture look too clean or classy. Milan stays loyal to the genre and makes sure the frontbenchers get all the titillation. This is about bringing the subaltern into the mainstream and giving that genre and the women fronting that cinema their due. And that grand statement of the film comes a tad too early – at the halfway point. When Silk goes to pick up her award and calls the film industry’s bluff. “I am your dirty little secret,” she says.
She truly believes that what she does is ahead of her time and would one day be seen as a revolution against the male-driven film business.
For all that talk of feminism, the film regresses a little towards the later part when it strays into Madhur Bhandarkar territory when a broke heroine of dirty films has to resort to porn to save her house. And with that one scene, by depicting pornography as an evil compromise she must do, The Dirty Picture draws its moral line between the mainstream and the subaltern. All the good work is undone because we are told dirty pictures are OK for a woman of spirit but soft-porn… No, too low? Talk about hypocrisy.
If this film proves anything at all, it is this. We haven’t lost our appetite for dirty pictures. We are a country of voyeurs.
And poor Silk Smitha continues to be exploited even after her death.
For barring her screen name, this picture has nothing to do with her story.
Mayakkam Enna: High on love
You must have heard the story of a man who finds a near-dead snake in the snow. He tends to it, nurses it with warmth and soon enough, the snake springs back to life only to bite the guy who rescued it.
Director Selvaraghavan is that kind of guy who nursed an audience that comprised of misogynists, male chauvinists, stalkers, voyeurs, roadside romeos and assorted slackers pining for love that always went unrequited.
His films gave them warmth, stoked the fire to pursue the girl to the point of invading her space or gratifying their fantasies. Be it peeping into her room when she’s changing in 7G Rainbow Colony or making them sing ‘Variya?’ (Pudhupettai) to girls around the city. Be it fulfilling their fantasy of urban women fighting for/snuggling up to one of their kind (Aayirathil Oruvan) or making them cheer ‘Adra Avala’ (Mayakkam Enna).
Selvaraghavan has always had strong women in his films but the way they were treated has always been a little problematic. Men harassed and/or abused women in his films and hardly apologized for it. On the contrary, the crowd seemed to be rooting for these glorified anti-heroes.
There has always been the lower-middle-class single-guy unrequited love angst associated with his kind of cinema that instantly connected with an audience that formed the major chunk of movie-goers. Friends called him the poor man’s Mani Ratnam not because he lacked technique but because his heroes were always from the lower middle class.
From sex to voyeurism to abuse, he never shied away from showing what Mani Ratnam would be more discreet about. And that raw, edgy, bold crassness has always been his signature because people hailing from that lower middle class economic background were like that. Crude, rough and not the kinds who would look for euphemisms.
So when Selvaraghavan makes a film that works as an apology to womankind for all that misogynist, chauvinistic behaviour his films have been accused of promoting, his loyal but rabid lower middle class fan base that loved his old films seems to be unable to come to terms with the coming of age of Selvaraghavan’s cinema and its changing sensibility.
It’s not that Selvaraghavan has crossed over to cater to a more elite audience. He hasn’t entirely but this film surely seems like a transition into a more refined sensibility of restraint and understatement. Which is why the only jarring bits in Mayakkam Enna are the dramatic crying scenes that feel a little overdone ONLY because the rest of the film is so classy, subtle and understated.
So when the best scene of the film played out (one that is both disturbing and sentimental as Richa tries to scrub the blood off the floor – a better actress may have played this with greater restraint), the unruly college crowd, the snake Selvaraghavan provided warmth to, now bared its fangs. The crowd was laughing at the crying hero who is apologizing to the woman for what he has done.
And Dhanush cries quite a bit in the film. That’s a far cry from what heroes do. He also gets slapped by pretty much everyone he looks up to – first the girl, then the guy who steals his credit (slapped not literally but emotionally) and finally by his best friend.
They soon, as we, realise that the angry tough young man who sings ‘Adra Avala’ is actually a cluelessly lost, soft-hearted, sentimental fool who is weak in resolve. Whether it is getting the girl he is attracted to or claiming credit that is rightfully his.
Contrastingly, the girl here is the hero of the film. She wears the pants. She takes the initiative for the kiss (which we don’t see in a Selvaraghavan film – another indication of the director’s changing sensibility). She fights for him when he’s too scared to confront his best friend. She fights for him even when he has given up (by sending his pics to magazines). She fights for him even when he is consumed by self-pity and dejection. She does not give up on him ever. She is the breadwinner, the mother and the wife.
Again, not because she’s a doormat but because she believes that he’s just mentally ill with all that angst eating him up. She knows that the only cure for that mental illness is to make him get his confidence back. She has the choice to leave him but she doesn’t. On the other hand, she is not quick to forgive him. She takes her time.
If Gran Torino was Clint Eastwood’s way of saying sorry for having led a generation astray with his brand of cowboy justice, Mayakkam Enna serves as Selvaraghavan’s apology (even if unintended) to women for all the harassment portrayed (and unintentionally glorified) in his past films.
It’s a solid tribute to the strength and resilience of the Indian wife, who for years now, has stood by her husband no matter what an asshole he has been. Yes, the Indian woman has changed and she no longer puts up with shit. But it’s never too late to acknowledge the woman behind every successful man.
Hats off to Dhanush to sink his teeth into a role that required him to completely submit to the character of a despicably weak man who deserves our sympathy but not our respect (it’s not a role any mainstream Tamil film hero would have taken up) and still infuse it with a boyish charm of someone real we know. No character in the film, barring the photographer who steals the credit is entirely evil but even there, when the man asks his assistants to throw him off the set, there is no stereotypical portrayal of goons pushing him to the floor to dramatic music. (Here, as perfect it may be, I really don’t want to comment on GV Prakash’s score. I am afraid to credit this young composer with any good work because he has constantly proved to be a thief. That is the thing when you steal and do it more than once, nobody believes you when it is really yours. Once you are in the business of stealing, you are a thief no matter what else you do.)
It’s the shades of grey within relationships that Selvaraghavan revels in and he works magic in this area. Friends fight, some scars remain, some cracks stay open but everything heals with time. It’s that strong, credible human fabric binding the relationships in the film that makes Mayakkam Enna rise above all its logical oversights (be it the geographical accuracy of the kind of animals/birds shot by the photographer, the places it is featured in or the cosmetic detail of Dhanush’s wig in the final act) and overdone histrionics (the crying scenes and that humiliation scene where he has to act as a dog probably put in to cater to an audience that was missing director Vikraman and SA Rajkumar’s score). Elaborate points on what works and what doesn’t are in Baradwaj Rangan’s review here. I agree with Baddy on most points.
Like most of Selvaraghavan’s films, the first and the second half feels like two different films. Here, the first is about a guy falling in love with his best friend’s girlfriend and the second is about a frustrated man turning abusive unable to cope with failure. There’s no point asking him to do a screenwriting course or telling him that he lacks what is needed to make it big because some people are just happy doing what comes naturally to them.
And this is an intensely personal film about an artist who can put the camera in front of an old woman and make her look beautiful with all her wrinkles.
So it seems autobiographical when he calls his biggest critic and tells her in his moment of truth: “I don’t want to do a course to know how to shoot light and shadow in a studio. I know I can capture life as it is. With all its beauty. I rather be happy doing something I like doing than stay unhappy doing something I don’t because it pays. I may never become big but I will remain happy.” And ironically, that is what he thought back then. He does not stay happy. Such is the nature of man.
Selvaraghavan knows he can see the beauty of the wild side of nature. His films are an exposition on the nature of man. He’s high on that passion to capture that beast. He’s a man in love with what he does. There’s nothing that makes him happier than recognition for his work.
Well done, Selva in bringing us this unique love story about a man in love with his craft. And a heroine who brought them together.
Rating: 8/10
Rockstar: In search of the free bird
For long, for ages, our mainstream commercial cinema has made us believe that Aal Izz Well with the world.
Or at least, that it will all be well in the end.
And that the entire universe conspires to bring you what you want if you want it real bad.
It probably does but not always the way you want it to happen. As the saying goes: Beware of what you wish for, because it might come true.
Dreams came true as the fantasies of our society played out on screen decade after decade as characters went from rags to riches or from lost to found or from falling in love to happily everafter.
Our films taught us to believe. That there is a system or a God or a hero that makes everything all right or at least delivers poetic justice even in the darkest of tragedies. If we do the right thing.
Our films made us feel good.
But you know what, the world sucks and there is no right thing.
There is no God to make your dream come true.
There is no hero who will save you.
There is a system, of course. But one that tells us how we should lead our lives. That defines the rights and wrongs and judges us on the basis of our behaviour. We are rewarded for conforming and punished for straying out of line.
The more developed our societies got, the more civilized we became, conforming and learning to live orderly in groups.
It’s fascinating how issues in our cinema reflected issues in our society as they trickled down from as big as land (fifties), nation (sixties), society (seventies) to family (eighties) and to identity (nineties when the hero at least temporarily became a non-resident Indian).
But in love stories over decades, there was always a faux morality, a set of rules in the society that kept lovers away – from Devdas to Mughal E Azam to Pyaasa to Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak.
Real life lovers went to the movies to see their fantasies played out and wept when they didn’t work out.
Soon, three young second generation filmmakers Sooraj Barjatya, Aditya Chopra and Karan Johar started negotiating with the family structure. Romance in films started becoming about manufacturing consent from the family system or the head of it – the patriarch who slowly changed from a villain type (Dalip Tahil, Amrish Puri) to a father figure (Amitabh Bachchan, Anupam Kher) type.
And by the end of the nineties, our youth had a mind of their own. It was no longer about land, nation, society, family or even their identity. It was about the self. About what they wanted. About what the heart wanted. Dil Chahta Hai. Parents didn’t stand between lovers anymore.
In spite of all these changes, one thing didn’t quite change. The girl always had to be pure and virginal unless she was playing the other woman, usually a prostitute with a heart of gold pining for a lost hero.
If Kashyap’s Dev D for a first time in ages finally let out all the pent up repressed sexuality from between the scenes, Imtiaz Ali does one better – he makes his hero romance a “neat and clean, hi-fi” married woman, one who is certainly NOT a virgin. Of course, a boy and a girl can be friends. Till they kiss. And it’s never the same after that.
In Imtiaz Ali’s Rockstar, the kiss happens right at the halfway point in the film, two full years after the girl has been married, even if not happily.
But let’s rewind a bit to how they got to that point.
She was doing what Simran did in Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge, having one last blast of fun before her wedding. And he was a happy-go-lucky slacker trying to make it big, just starting his journey from boy to man, being comfortably cocooned in the nest of his family.
She knew when she should take off her leather jacket and ready up for mehndi and He knew that she was off-limits as great as she was. He had to find pain but he was simply incapable of heavy-duty emotions.
He was, as his mentor called him, a “halka aadmi.” A light-hearted dork, a stranger to pain. His life was just perfect. Or so he thought. Just like any of us.
We think our lives are perfect because we conform to a system. Because we have jobs that pay well. Or a loving family. Or at least basic education. We don’t live in the seventies. We aren’t part of any hippie generation either.
What do we have? We have nothing but the boring middle class family values. Janardhan knows that. He probably does not even like the way his name sounds. But when she calls him Jordan out of the blue because she likes how cool it sounds, he’s found a new identity – of a man being somewhere he shouldn’t be doing something he shouldn’t be.
He had to be at an audition for Platinum records and here he was in Kashmir. He had to be chasing his dream of being a pop star and here he was with a girl he liked to spend time with.
Rockstar is about being in that place – where you are not supposed to be, doing what you are not supposed to be. The forbidden.
This was the domain of porn films that slowly crept into the adult films over the last decade as Mallika Sherawat kissed away to fame. And the forbidden has finally found its way into a mainstream film for all audiences.
Indian cinema through Imtiaz Ali’s film has finally found an outlet for all that has been repressed. Romance, sex but most of all, choice. And freedom to do what is best for the self, not family, not society, not nation.
Rock music is not just about drugs or sex. It’s always been about the freedom to express. The rage against the machine. The system.
It’s interesting how Imtiaz Ali ducks the clichés associated with rockstars. Jordan is no Devdas who takes to the bottle nor is he sleeping around with other women.
He hates the taste of alcohol. He finds his moment of truth at the dargah of Hazrat Nizammuddin. Heer is not his muse. God is. He finds God in him during his journey (if you listen to the lyrics of Kun Faya carefully) and heads back home to channel that God through his music. He completely surrenders to it and where it takes him. He settles down and tries to conform to the way of single life in the big city, pretending to get drunk and dance away his blues.
He’s almost made his peace with his situation of being estranged from his parents and the girl he strangely misses when he finds an opportunity to go to Prague. But he’s already pissed off the system by laughing at it. It just came to him naturally. He didn’t want to laugh at it. And the only way he can go Prague is by selling his soul to the Devil. The Special Contract. He just does not care. He wants her.
Raj in Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge went from Europe to the bride’s home in India to get his girl. Here, Jordan goes from India to Europe to another man’s wife’s home to get her. Together, they tick off everything that’s forbidden there – the underbelly of Prague, the seedy strip clubs, gay bars and discos with neon lights. More importantly, they kiss.
Aditya Chopra was manufacturing parental consent. Imtiaz Ali is violating moral codes.
It’s a kiss that triggers off years of pent up repressed emotion and sexuality. Not just in Rockstar but in all of Hindi cinema.
Raj and Simran stayed all night in a hotel room (DDLJ) and he didn’t even kiss her because he’s Hindustani and a Hindustani boy will NEVER do that to a Hindustani girl, we are told. But here, they talk about it first. He kisses her. She resists, scolds him and then changes her mind and kisses him passionately. Beautifully done.
This is that halfway point where our hero and heroine stop being the typical hero and heroine because they “cross the line”. They go all the way and do it. (Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna had the perfect opportunity for this moment when he makes love to another man’s wife but squandered it by making it look like they were killing an infant – with that much guilt writ on their faces, it seemed like Rani and SRK were undergoing punishment than having sex there!)
Here, as much as Heer tries to run back to her city (the leitmotif in the film for orderly life), her home, she finds herself stopping halfway on the bridge between home and her lover.
The moment he breaks into her house, he’s crossed a threshold, a point of no return from the law, the system and the society. And the musician becomes a rockstar craving for freedom to do what he really wants to do.
From a pop talent behind an album poetically called Sheher (City, the leitmotif and metaphor for the phase of his life where he conformed to the way of life) to a criminal behind bars during the launch of his album Negative (He stops in between Sadda Haq to tell us that he is searching for those wild pigeons that used to be where the City today is) to a true-blue rockstar who has given the society the finger, signed on by a bigger evil foreign company, endorsing a perfume called Noir (the name once again serving as a metaphor for that phase of his life where he has sold his soul), Ranbir delivers the performance of a lifetime, always uncomfortable with structures as Jordan, even before he knew he was. He’s winning every single Best Actor award next year.
At an audition earlier, we see Jordan unable to get in tune with someone else’s composition. “He is a different jaanwar (beast). He won’t stay in your cage,” as Shammi Kapoor (RIP, God bless Hindi cinema’s original rockstar) tells the head of the label despite the boy admitting to the shehnaii maestro that he really didn’t understand classical music. Here was a boy who didn’t like anything rigid or structured. He was naturally drawn towards the improvisational, free-flowing riffs of the guitar.
The beauty of it is that Jordan has no idea why he does things he does. He is not doing it to be a bad boy. He just finds himself at home jamming “Dum Maaro Dum” with prostitutes (He sings the ‘Duniya Ne Hum Ko Diya Kya’ bit) than an evening with his old friends. When his mentor screams at him in the middle of the road for his rash unpredictable behaviour, he confesses that he does not know why. He says he’s burning from within and he feels like worms are eating him from inside. His angst grew stronger every day and he felt more and more alienated from society.
She didn’t know it either. Heer is such a triumph of characterization that I will totally forgive Imtiaz for casting Nargis Fakhri, the only jarring note in this soulful rock opera.
Heer didn’t plan to fall in love with him. She didn’t plan to sleep him with. She didn’t even know that she was depressed and needed psychiatric counseling because she missed him. From being mentally unwell, she was becoming physically sick because she was infected by his presence in her life. She needed his touch to feel better and the longer the doses, the more dependent she became. They needed each other but it was forbidden. She had become Satine from Moulin Rouge.
But here again, it takes two-thirds of the film and about four and a half years for him to understand the connection they shared. “Main Sirf Tere Saath Hi Set Hoon, Yaar.” That one line sums up Imtiaz Ali’s brand of romance perfectly. A late realisation of love, a sense of settlement, with an old friend.
This is the feeling he has been fighting throughout the film.
On returning from Kashmir, he tries to find escape in videogames.
After being thrown out of home, he tries to find his peace through God.
After coming back from Prague, he tries to find his soul through his music.
He doesn’t care about Tibet. He cares about freedom when he’s singing Sadda Haq. All those cribbing about Imtiaz Ali blurring Free Tibet, if you knew enough about Tibet, you would recognise the Free Tibet flag shown in pretty much every frame of the concert shots throughout the film. It’s a part of his costume. Good thing the idiots censoring it couldn’t recognise the flag in half the film.
Very rarely has an Indian film succeeded in crafting a cohesive musical narrative where the lyrics are an integral part of the storytelling. Why is it that we have lost the ability to listen to the words and soak in the meaning? They tell us everything we need to know about the characters, their conflicts, their state of mind and the angst.
A film mounted on a scale as big as Rockstar needed the music that would make it wholly believable that a stadium in Europe would go crazy for an Indian musician. And who better than the man with two Oscars and a worldwide cult following to provide music that is not just credible but also a soul-stirring quality. If you have to buy one audio CD this year, go pick this one up.
Ranbir’s powerhouse presence, Mohit Chauhan’s vocals, Rahman’s music, Irshad Kamil’s lyrics, Anil Mehta’s cinematography, Aarti Bajaj’s editing and Imtiaz Ali’s vision make Rockstar a compelling biopic of a fictitious rebel without a cause. Loved how it unfolds as a jigsaw puzzle with bits of documentary footage of an enigmatic persona as we piece together his story in an effort to understand him and his pain.
The angst here is the driving force, the engine and the heartbeat of Rockstar and is something you will appreciate more if you’ve been an artist yourself. If you’ve experienced unrelenting pain, prolonged frustration and pounding heartaches, and channeled that choking feeling into a creative process as a cathartic outlet for your emotions.
Rockstar is the journey of every artist who has refused to conform to a system, to a structure, to a society, to a set-path or process not because he thought it was cool but because that’s who he is. It’s a journey of a never-ending search of that elusive peace, truth, happiness and freedom.
Art is all about the depth of that journey of self-discovery and Rockstar does full justice to that. It’s not about “Oh look, she’s walking, she’s cured! What a Bollywood film!”
She’s never cured completely. When the mother rejoices that her daughter was able to get out of bed, the doctor quickly acts as the reality check and tells her: Woh Aisi Hi Hai (She is just as she was.) When the mother is later ecstatic that her blood count has increased, the doctor is still skeptical (He’s not saying: Wow, it’s a medical miracle!) and tells her: Be logical.
And the answer she gives the Dr. Animesh should shut every critic up.
“We think we know life. But it surprises us. Stranger things have happened.”
I was in Auroville a few weeks ago for a film festival when I met this man with a hole at the bottom of his neck. He had lost all his hair, had no eyebrows and had lined up his eyes with kohl. I instantly knew he was a cancer patient. But here, he was dancing around, blowing bubbles for children and giving flowers to women. The doctors had given him three weeks to live. He got sick of chemotherapy, told them he wanted to die in peace and left for home. That was over two years ago. He healed himself. Or maybe he will die next week, we don’t know! That is life but the only truth is that he is alive today.
Even after that explanation about the mysteries of life, Imtiaz does what he must – pulls the plug on the happy ending and proves beyond doubt that Jordan’s “magic touch” was not her cure. It was her disease.
Imtiaz had to leave the artist with all the fame in the world and yet experience an empty void of nothingness. That was the point of it all.
“Yeh Duniya Agar Mil Bhi Jaaye Toh Kya Hai” (as the lines from Pyaasa go). Rockstar is also the exact antithesis to Pyaasa in the sense that there Vijay renounces the world, his identity and disappears into anonymity, frustrated with the society but no such happy ending for Jordan here. He does not find himself at the doorway of the auditorium where no one recognises him. He finds himself on the stage under the spotlight where there is no escape from all that he once wanted as he looks away at the doorway – the common motif in endings of both films.
Nothing is private anymore. Not even his emotions. His screams of pain had become art. Part of the music they were swaying to.
He’s an empty man feeling nothing looking at the sea of people cheering for him. He’s just standing there wishing he was under that bed-sheet with the girl he loved and there’s no one around. His process of alienation is complete. Jordan has to live like that because he had sold his soul to the devil, to the system, to a company.
There is nothing more tragic than a man still in search of what is long gone.
And once you’ve seen life through his eyes, you will just laugh at the next person who tells you: Aal izz Well.
Yes, the world sucks. So does this business of art, music and entertainment manufacturing feel good, faux morality and happy endings.
Good to see someone showed it the finger.
Imtiaz Ali, A.R. Rahman and Ranbir Kapoor have given us that rare film that’s true to everything rock music once stood for. The angst. The pain. The rage.
Rock is not dead. And all’s not well with the world.
That Girl in Yellow Boots: That Sheep In Lion’s Clothing
Genre: Drama
Director: Anurag Kashyap
Cast: Kalki Koechlin, Prashant Prakash, Gulshan Devaiya, Naseeruddin Shah
Storyline: A girl comes to India in search of her father and works in a massage parlour servicing the seedy underbelly of Mumbai
Bottomline: A predictable but brave effort but not as bold as it pretends to be
For a film that with an ending you can guess even from the synopsis or just the storyline, it’s amazing how Anurag Kashyap keeps it all well concealed. If you thought a good film cannot be made with a bad script, Kashyap proves you wrong in his best directorial effort yet.
Direction is one department that becomes a whole lot easier when you have a strong script, good actors, the best of technicians, budgets etc. Here, all Anurag Kashyap has is a half-baked script full of clichés, indulgence, not the best actors for the part or the budget of a big film to hire the best of technicians or more days of shoot. Yet, every scene is crafted and staged with a touch of brilliance as Kashyap stamps his class over the most mediocre material he has worked with and turns it into a mood piece.
Didn’t think you would find clichés in a Kashyap film? Every guy in big bad Mumbai the 20-year-old girl turns to for help is a lech and wants sexual favours or money. How is this any different from a Madhur Bhandarkar film ridden with bad city stereotypes? If this film were made by Bhandarkar, it would be called Massage Parlour and he wouldn’t even need to change the script.
But at least Bhandarkar would not hold back the punches. He is more daring filmmaker than Kashyap in this regard. Kashyap’s heroine services this seedy underbelly of the ugly city by doing sexual favours to repressed men frequenting the parlour out of her own choice to make a quick buck but does not put out completely. She does not go all the way because apparently that would make it a movie cliché and is less disturbing than offering them her “handshakes”. It is obvious that the intention here is to shock and awe by employing something that’s rarely been spoken about on the Indian screen than do justice to what the film requires the character to be.
So, like most Yash Raj heroines, the girl is virginal, even when her profession demands the danger of it being threatened. So she has not even slept with her boyfriend because she can only think of finding her father. She would do anything to find her father and yet, when the situation arrives that she has to cater to a group of rich diamond merchants, the director checks that need with a convenient solution of her boyfriend showing up.
The bane of this film is that its idea of sex does not involve the act of sex itself. Since the girl hasn’t crossed the line of virginity, the ending of the film is way less shocking or disturbing than the script demands. Kashyap shows ambitions of being Gasper Noe but ends up being more conservative than even Robert Zemeckis. Even family-friendly Back to the Future showed more inappropriate behaviour than what’s in this supposedly bold adult film.
The impact is also diluted because of the way the rituals are shown in the film. We see shots her chucking tissues, washing her hands, routinely repeating it every day. While this “handshake” business may be shocking to the aunt next door, to people who are used to world cinema, this is a literally watered down version.
Yet, the film keeps you intrigued because of the way Kashyap has shot this material. His shot-taking (cinematography by Rajeev Ravi) and blocking will serve as a master-class for independent filmmakers with budgetary limitations.
The extremely natural, seemingly improvised quips of Gulshan Devaiya and Puja Swarup go a long way in providing the lighter moments the film needed to balance its one-note brooding mood. Kalki’s histrionic limitations are exposed when she has to share frames with Gulshan or Puja. Kalki is fantastic when she has to let her eyes do the talking (again, an example of director making up for the script without a single memorable line) and when she doesn’t need to get dramatic. It’s the screechy, high-pitched outbursts that she can’t seem to get right. They are always a notch above what the camera can handle, a performance that would’ve been more appreciated on the stage. Prashant Prakash is a victim of this stage-to-film transition too but shows great promise with his body language and timing.
How do you make a predictable plot less guessable? Throw in red herrings. That’s exactly what Kashyap does. It is gimmicky, of course, but without these misdirections, this is a film with an ending you would’ve guessed within the first five minutes.
In his efforts to divert and distract, he also gets the casting of the father wrong and the otherwise intense climax suffers hugely from this. The score by Naren Chandavarkar and Benedict Taylor is just what the film needed to get its mood right, especially towards the final frames.
Overall, this is a film that, like That girl, sits on the wall. It may be virgin territory for India but done with far more intensity outside. And the Yellow Boots remain far from soiled.
(An edited version of this review appeared here.)
Bol: Brave voice from Pakistan
Genre: Drama
Director: Shoaib Mansoor
Cast: Humaima Malik, Mahira Khan, Iman Ali, Atif Aslam
Storyline: A girl about to be hanged tells her story and of Pakistan’s population woes
Bottomline: World cinema corrupted by Bollywood
When you watch films like Majid Majidi’s Baran (Iranian) or Siddiq Barmak’s Osama (Persian), you get a haunting picture of how things work behind the veil in the Islamic world. It’s one of those bitter pills that hit you at the gut, so grim and with very little hope.
And then, in complete contrast is Hindi cinema’s take on the arthouse – the multiplex movie which still wants to end on a positive note and because films without any feel good rarely find takers at the box office. Maybe it’s also the effect of mainstream Bollywood on the arthouse that films end with hope.
Shoaib Mansoor’s new film (he had earlier made the critically acclaimed Khuda Kay Liye) takes us into the household of a hakim’s family in Lahore to give us a hard-hitting film on the state of affairs, treatment of women and transgenders in Pakistan but the impact of this punch is rather watered down because of its Hindi cinema influences – the need to end with feel good.
So we have the film begins quite dramatically with a woman facing death sentence, granted permission to call for a press conference – straight from the very spot she’s about to be hanged. Once you suspend your disbelief and ignore the filmy acting by its leading lady Humaima Malik in these opening portions, the film comes into its own in the flashback.
Considering that what the film wants to say is in the flashback and that it does it so effectively without holding back any punches, the very setting for the story to unfold seems unwarranted.
The narrator of the film was among the seven sisters born to an orthodox Hakim in Lahore on the brink of poverty with the advent of private clinics. After repeated efforts to yield a boy, the eighth attempt results in the birth of a transgender much to the frustration of the father, whose initial instincts are to kill the baby.
It’s a fantastic premise for the story to unfold as the family spirals further down into poverty, the father unwilling to let any of the girls work or step out of the house. It’s quite commendable how the filmmaker Shoaib Mansoor has managed to bring out the hypocrisy of the patriarch and his convenient interpretation of the Koran to justify everything he does. The laughs in this otherwise serious film come our way as his hypocrisy is further exposed when he’s asked to produce a girl child for a courtesan Meena (Iman Ali plays a Pakeezah fan) to pull himself out of financial trouble. Now this is a man so staunch in his beliefs and value systems that he threw a fit when his daughters playfully told him that they had crushes on Tendulkar and Afridi.
There’s surely a gem of a film somewhere in there in between of all that Hindi cinema packaging, one that’s so bleak and yet offers a little hope through its Atif Aslam-Mahir Khan romance track. Given the entire gamut of issues relating to gender, religion and social norms, it is tragic that the filmmaker ends the film choosing to spell out just one moral, the least interesting of them. “Why make babies if you can’t raise them?”
Bol has a lot more that’s interesting to say and show us than that issue. Despite its failings (in its the first five minutes and the last five), it’s a brave voice from Pakistan that deserves to be heard. Surely the pick of the week among the Hindi releases.
(This review originally appeared here.)
Bodyguard: Another showcase for Sallu’s body
Genre: Drama
Director: Siddique
Cast: Salman Khan, Kareena Kapoor, Raj Babbar, Rajat Rawail, Hazel Keech
Storyline: A bodyguard falls in love with a mysterious caller over the phone
Bottomline: Salman makes this tighter remake work
Salman Khan has clearly figured a way out to play it safe at the box office. Take films that have done really well from the South and then Salman-ise them with elements that fans expect from his films.
Though the original film (Bodyguard in Malayalam, Kavalan in Tamil) was a sappy, long-winded drama that relied solely on the twist at the end to deliver, here the twist is just an excuse to wrap up another full-blown Sallu showcase.
Like Salman really needed an excuse to take of his shirt and shift the attention from script to his body, this film gives him enough reason to go flex his muscles. So, right from the moment he’s introduced when he’s doing the muscle-dance, flaunting his biceps, he’s doing what he does best – the gym routine.
He’s walks around like the Hulk, fights bad guys and sends them flying and bullets never seem to find him, even if his frame occupies two thirds of the screen. Sallu is Lovely Singh, a bodyguard assigned to protect Divya (Kareena Kapoor) who prank calls him from an unidentified number, the series of phone calls leading to an unlikely old-fashioned romance where Lovely does not care what she looks like because love does not stem from the eyes, it stems from the heart.
If a playing a Bodyguard does not let him do all that he does in other films anyway, what will? There’s a scene where he slips into uniform that’s loose and works out just to fit into it. That says everything you need to know about the film. It isn’t a tailor-made role for Salman. It’s Salman filling out an already designed loose shirt with his muscle.
The writers haven’t been able to write many punch-lines this time? Does not matter. Salman will manage saying the same line three times in the film. “Do me a favour. Do me no favour.” Never mind if it makes him sound indecisive. But surprisingly, Salman is quite subdued this time and he also gets to put his acting muscle to use when he has to act all soft and sincere.
The laughs are entrusted to debutant Rajat Rawail who brings the house down with physical comedy, his huge frame and flabby torso in drag responsible for most of the laughs while Raj Babbar performs with the gusto of an eighties villain in a role that would have ideally preferred Amrish Puri.
It’s the Salman version of a Karan Johar film of the nineties that is bound to be compared with the sappiness of Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, given the drama at the end and another few-year-old almost saying “Tussi Mat Jao,” a cue for the ladies in the hall to weep silently.
Kareena puts in an effortless performance (her sister Karishma has dubbed for the phone call portions of the film for her) and looks absolutely ravishing in the ‘Teri Meri’ song placed before the climax. If the film works even somewhat, it is because of the presence the leads command. Kareena and Salman raise the game to a different level and this remake is probably the best this script can be.
So please, Siddique. Don’t make this again in another language. We have endured enough already.
(This review originally appeared here)
Mankatha: Ajith plays his cards right, finally
Ajith’s character does not exist in the film. That’s the ending.
He’s a figment of Vaibhav’s imagination. The Keyser Soze. The dangerous diabolic villain Vaibhav ‘Verbal Kint’ makes up as he comes up with a story he makes up in the interrogation room from plot points he remembers in Tamil films.
First Vaibhav creates a Nayakan character. A Dharavi don, we don’t know if he’s Nallavara Kaettavara (good or bad?).
Then he makes the Nayakan Don marry him off to the girl he loves like Mammootty does for Rajnikant in Thalapathy.
They plan a heist involving a geek hacking into the traffic light system of the city, like in the Italian Job. And there’s Ajith sporting his natural greys like Clooney in Oceans.
There’s a hint that he’s making up stories from Tamil films he watches because there’s a Kamal Haasan poster in his room and he’s sporting the same beard as Kamal. In a Trisha-Ajith song, there’s a song from Kireedam playing on the TV behind.
Vaibhav makes up this story about an imaginary character called Vinayakam played by Ajith and walks away into the sunset with “500 crores. Ainooru Kodi. Money. Money. Money. Money.”
Mankatha da!
Gotcha suckers! Was kidding. I made up that ending, to mess with those who are reading reviews before watching the film. “My f***ing game”.
On a serious note though… The pop culture nods/references are so many that you think you’ve cracked it but Venkat Prabhu keeps messing with your head, the references just used to tease and nothing more. Just as you think it’s going the Ocean’s way, it’s not. You think it’s going the Italian Job way, it’s not. You think it’s going the Usual Suspects way, it’s not. You think it’s going the Reservoir Dogs way, it’s not. It’s a fairly original film, even if long-winded and a tad conveniently slapped with a twist ending.
Personally, I would have liked one of the other boys in the film to emerge as the hero in the end but I guess mainstream Tamil cinema is not ready for that yet.
After Aaranya Kaandam, Mankatha is one of those rare Tamil noir films. Neo-noir, like the Thiagarajan Kumararaja film, with all its pop culture tributes, plot derivatives and spins on film noir narratives.
If at all you hear the film is ripped off from such and such film, it’s because whoever told you that has probably seen only that one film in that genre.
Noir is not just treatment, noir is a genre with a clearly identifiable template and recurring themes – evil dominates, almost every character is grey or black hungry for money and could kill for it, the deadly femme fatale, allies turning against each other, betrays, greed… you get the idea, a complete exploration of all that has to do with the dark side of human nature.
Calling it a noir film does not automatically become a compliment just like calling a chick flick a chick flick does not by default make it a good film.
I won’t get into the plot details (though it is pretty much what is expected from the genre template) but hats off to the director to take the genre that typically explores the dark side of man and turn it into a completely light-hearted mass entertainer. I can think of wickedly delicious and dark crime comedies that employ the noir template but it’s one of the first films (Farhan Akhtar’s Don did this too) that takes something that is primarily dark (and hence restrictive in reach by genre) and turns it into a celebration of the morally bankrupt by a mainstream hero worshipped by millions without failing to glorify its “hero” who is in reality the scum of all scums.
As the opening titles roll out, Venkat Prabhu gives you the first hint – Mankatha – Strictly No Rules. There are no rules for this “hero”. He drinks to the point of total memory loss, he cheats on his girlfriend, manipulates friends for his own gain and wouldn’t think twice about killing anyone. Yet, he’s still the Thala – that stupid sobriquet that blurs the line between the star’s real life persona and the character he plays in films. I hope he uses his head and drops that Thala baggage at the earliest.
Stars play the same role again and again in all movies (MGR, Rajni, Vijay, Ajith) because people pay to watch them do the same things while actors do different roles again and again (Sivaji, Kamal, Vikram, Suriya, Dhanush) because people pay to watch them do different things.
In recent times, we have had some stars preferring to do actor roles (Vijay with Kavalan, for eg. or Rajni with Enthiran) and some actors preferring to do star roles (Suriya in Aadhavan or Singham or Vikram in Kanthasamy) and that’s where our problems begin because here we have this blind idiocy of hero-worshipping the guy who can beat up people on screen.
He maybe bald, he may have a paunch or a triple chin or be as tall as a midget in real life, does not matter. As long he has a sobriquet (Ilaya Thalapathy or Thala or Little Super Star or Captain) and fan clubs, there will be idiots around who will pay to watch them do the shittiest movies in history of Tamil cinema and also have the nerve to defend them.
Which is why I respect Suriya, Dhanush and even Vikram (his Chiyaan is just based on a character he became popular for), unlike this Worship-Me-I-Am-Your-Leader self-styled sobriquets… Thala or Thalapathy, that flaunt their ambitions of being the Thalaivar (leader). There is no doubting that Ajith can act, so can Vijay. Like all actors do, why don’t they just do their jobs instead of being on this narcissistic trip of being worshipped by fans?
So I would be the first to applaud Ajith for taking a step in the right direction and playing an actor who essays a role that’s usually used to describe the villain.
Which brings us to the problem area, that in the context of our cinema for the masses, fans are so blind and loyal that they actually think that by virtue of the hero doing certain things considered inappropriate, it becomes acceptable and legitimate to do that.
Now, I watched this film with hardcore fans of Ajith on the first day. So it was disturbing that they seemed to applaud the fact that he would drink to the extent of memory loss every night. Like he just echoed their thoughts. I heard some of the most obscene, sexually frustrated comments every time Lakshmi Rai or Andrea made an appearance and I am really wondering if the time is still right for us to make a film where the hero can play evil, not grey… completely and absolutely evil, with no redeeming feature. Almost.
Spoiler alert (Highlight to read): If he is that unabashedly evil given the number of people he kills in the film, would he need the friend or ally when he could technically keep all the 500 crores to himself, instead of splitting it? Why not kill the friend as the last ultimate move of villainy? But no, this is commercial movie. There has to be some good to make Thala likeable. With this ending generating feel good, Mankatha becomes a complete celebration of greed just like how fantasy films celebrate the good.
The morals are a little unsettling in the Indian context of drunk fans and blind hero worship, at least given the bunch of people I shared the hall with. The last thing we want is drunk folk going around calling women “thevidiya mundais”.
To Venkat Prabhu’s credit, he uses quite a few alienation techniques to remind us that this is all just a story not to be taken seriously… there’s green blood to make it more children friendly, the jokes are of the nature of your best friend spoofing cult movie moments, the stunts are unbelievably larger than life and the really bad visual effects like glass shattering ensure that you always know that it just campy, cartoonish pulp fiction that you are watching, especially with Premgi’s presence (I found his quips to be the best part of the film) and Mahat. Good to see Action King Arjun and Laxmi Rai given something to play with but not enough but the rest of the cast, including Trisha, Andrea, Anjali, only get extended cameos. It’s quite nice that Venkat Prabhu is creating these small heroes who can support the smaller filmmakers – In addition to Shiva, Jai, Vaibhav, Premgi, Sampath, Arvind Akash, now add Mahat & Ashwin to that list. The biggest bonus is the goof reel at the very end that assures kids that it’s just a bunch of friends having fun making a film, playing a game rather, and that who dies and who does not is immaterial because it was just a story to be forgotten instantly.
Mankatha is just that. It is forgettable but fun while it lasts. But it lasts too long. Ajith is given ample scope to perform and play a badass and this is probably the best role he has done in a while (considering Billa didn’t involve acting, it just needed him to show up to work and walk, Vishnu even keeping dialogues minimal). It’s refreshing really to see this side of Ajith. Make sure you stay till the end credits to see him have a blast on the sets, enjoying himself. As an actor mature enough to play his age or take digs at his own paunch, Ajith is evolving into a down to earth, likeable actor.
Venkat Prabhu does not seem to have the heart to cut anything out of his though quite a bit of it is indulgence as expected from a mass film made for fans on the occasion of the 50th film. He also has no heart to cut out the rest of the ensemble and makes sure he gives them all a song each at least and quite a bit of importance than you would usually not find in a solo hero film. The result is a long film with which songs feels even longer though Yuvan does rock the score, the violin bit with slow motion action choreography being one of the best parts of the film.
Though it’s more thought out than most heist films made, the convenience with which everything is tied together in the end is a little disappointing. It’s as if the masses wouldn’t understand if it were any more complicated.
In the end, we have a film that looks more smarter than what it really is. Venkat Prabhu wins the guessing game (though you may guess the ending from a throwaway scene earlier on in the film) not by outwitting you playing by the rules but by cheating. Sorry, bongu.
But then, the tag line warned us. Strictly No Rules.
Rating: 6.5/10
P.S: I really hope Ajith and Vijay soon get tired of the hero-worship (and drop Thala / Ilaya Thalapathy from their names) and do their jobs as actors more often. The first step towards becoming a more serious actor is getting rid of the baggage that comes with the stardom. Yes, I am guilty of cheering for Vijay in the past too when Thirupaachi and Sivakasi came out. You know what that got me? One bad film after another. They kept making the same film again and again with him to the point of irritation that even the badly directed Kavalan seemed like a good break. The greatest disservice to an actor with potential is to worship a bad film. Stop defending the Aasals, aas***l*s.
Chitkabrey: Secrets Seven
Genre: Drama
Director: Suneet Arora
Cast: Ravi Kissen, Rahul Singh, Rajesh Shringapure, Svetlana Manolyo, Akshara Gowda, Pitobash
Storyline: Seven friends, each representing one of the cardinal sins, plus one more, meet at a reunion to find themselves trapped by an avenging junior from college
Bottomline: If you watch only one film a year, this is it. It will convince you why you were right staying away from films.
Promoted as the boldest Indian film made, Suneet Arora’s Chitkabrey – Shades of Grey, is indeed the most brave film to have hit the screens in recent times if it really thought that people will queue up to see a mostly naked Ravi Kissen.
There’s plenty of assorted nudity and love-making scenes thrown to spice up the amateur staging of what seems like a play with its Big Boss-like set-up. Like Big Boss, instructions are given by a mysterious stranger whose voice booms through the speakers to the occupants of the house.
So if you watch Big Boss as a guilty pleasure, you might just dig this. You will enjoy it for the same reasons as you watch the reality show. Laughing at it than with it most of the time. How can you keep a straight face and not laugh when a bad actor sobs to his wife that: “I let my boss enjoy with me” soon after a shot of two men sharing a shower.
A victim of ragging Rakesh Chaubey (Ravi Kissen) keeps the group captive at gunpoint and asks them to spill the beans on their dirty past.
Now, though Ravi Kissen’s character speaks chaste Hindi and quotes from his Hindu upbringing, he reproduces seven Biblical cardinal sins (and not the six arishadvargas from the Indian ethos) which is our first hint that the film has probably borrowed its core from another source and was desperately trying to find its footing in the Indian milieu.
A quick search online suggests a similar play by award-winning American playwright Kash Goins who wrote ‘VII Deadly Sins’ also about a reunion of eight classmates after a decade (changed to 15 years in this film though).
The caricatures that the makers of Chitkabrey give us:
Lust: Jaggi, the Sikh businessman with a big heart, is guilty of doing the naughty with a hottie and cheating on his wife. He was also the mastermind behind ripping off Ravi Kissen’s underpants during the ragging sequence.
Envy: The still-single Shankar betrays his successful rich friend Jaggi and also does the naughty with Jaggi’s wife on the sly.
Wrath: Angry young Deepak beat his 11-year-old because the kid got only 92 on 100 and also used to hit his wife because the salt in the daal wasn’t right.
Greed: Gujarati Jayan married for dowry and then ran off to Canada to start a fresh life with a brand new wife.
Pride: Rekha, the only girl in the gang, is so vain that she “prefers rape to a favour”. She “sells girls” for a living, while her husband is away picking up the soap for his boss. She used to be so vain that she once asked Ravi Kissen in college what he thought of her balls! Eyeballs, she clarifies after he uncomfortably says: Nice.
Gluttony: Aman Ali Siddiqui made a girl suck his pen in public back in college and is punished when his wife Fauzia Javed Khan has to eat kulfi in front of all his friends.
Sloth: Bengali babu Buddhadeb had taken to the bong (Yes, drugs in college!) and now dreams of being a bum in Bahamas because after ten years of marriage, he only thinks of his Biwi as his Behen!
Manipulation: New sin invented because the makers realised that they have eight characters but only seven sins, like in the American play. So smart South Indian Balaji who used to sell drugs in college goes chasing the Great American Dream and scores a Russian girl for a wife! Immoral foreign girl who likes to lure unsuspecting masseurs into a three-way with her husband in the middle of a massage.
Smell stereotypes? Just one of those things that makes this film so bad that it’s good. Enjoy with your friends. Not the way the word is used in this movie though.
(A censored version of this review originally appeared here.)
Not A Love Story: Did a horny midget shoot this film?
Genre: Drama
Director: Ram Gopal Varma
Cast: Deepak Dobriyal, Mahie Gill, Ajay Gehi, Neil Bhoopalam, Zakir Hussain
Storyline: A possessive boyfriend pays his aspiring actress girlfriend a surprise visit, finds a naked man at her place and kills him in a fit of rage and the two decide to clean up the mess
Bottomline: Part fact, part fiction, partly engaging, partly pornographic
Why would a filmmaker go all out to stick to details of real incidents (including geography, time, modus operandi and circumstances, also acknowledging the building that was the scene of crime) if he really wanted to take creative liberties with the consequence of it all to manufacture a twisted love story when the reality of the case is much richer than the clichés he has had to resort to?
While it can be argued that RGV’s fiction probably goes deeper into the reality of murder itself, there’s no doubt that the filmmaker was in such a hurry to make a sympathetic film before the judgement that he got social subtext of the case quite wrong. People will do anything to protect themselves, even if it means turning your back against love, Mr. Varma.
Meenal Baghel, the author of the book ‘Death in Mumbai,’ who has documented the Neeraj Grover murder in her book, raises a pertinent question. Though Maria was Jerome’s girlfriend, did she really love him? Even after her release, Maria has maintained that she’s not close to Jerome.
The casual sex angle is given filmy legitimacy as an act of thanksgiving by a helpless aspiring actress to the man to gave her a break and the love story between the accused lovers has been romanticised for the screen with absolutely no depth whatsoever, given the heinousness of the crime and the scarring consequences it could potentially have.
Instead of giving us that compelling, intense, psychological drama, the film chooses to linger up the skirt and down the blouse, with a pointless sense of perversion. The crotch-obsessed camera does not spare any man, woman or delivery-boy as unflattering bottom-angle shots distract from the emotional quotient. It’s tragic when the actors (Poor Mahie Gill is exploited with the shortest skirts and Deepak Dobriyal is reduced to playing an obsessed psychotic nut) are going all out, even if they are a little too loud than they ought to be.
While Ram Gopal Varma usually revels in crime stories given his intimate portrayals of the underworld (in Satya and Company), the only intimacy we see here is the underworld that’s below the belt. Why would any non-porn filmmaker repeatedly choose to go that close to legs throughout the film unless he has a midget crew running around with cameras unable to make eye-contact with actors?
The love story itself (written by Rohit G. Banawlikar), despite all its ambitions of projecting the love the accused shared (the film ends with text that informs us that they WANT to be killed together!) ends up looking like a passionate tale of inexplicable lust with the frequency that the boyfriend hogs her face. There is no tenderness or warmth in this love, just jealousy and lust.
If the film is somewhat watchable in between all the frequent distraction and constant assaults on aesthetic, it is only because of the inherent drama in the situation – the murder, what led to it and what happened after it.
If you set aside your basic urge to know what led to the murder, there’s very little that the film offers. It’s tabloid recreation, a sensational, titillating reconstruction of events that’s glossed over by a cosmetic psychological study and killed by sheer romanticism. In the hands of a more sophisticated filmmaker and any half-decent cinematographer (this film was shot by students), this is a story that could have ripped your heart out.
Too bad it lost focus chasing the skirt.
(A polite version of this review appeared here)
Chatur Singh Two Star: The Murder of Inspector Clouseau
Genre: Torture
Director: Ajay Chandhok
Cast: Sanjay Dutt, Ameesha Patel, Gulshan Grover, Anupam Kher
Storyline: A bumbling Inspector must solve a crime and find lost diamonds despite his epic stupidity
Bottomline: The film is a lot stupider than its hero and unfunny to the point of torture
Peter Sellers would regret he ever played something that inspired this. Steve Martin may just shoot himself. Sanjay Dutt, for the good of his own health, should never watch this when he’s sober. And Anupam Kher, we hope made a lot of money to sell his soul like this.
This insanely asinine adaptation of The Pink Panther is an insult to the franchise, one best avoided in loving memory of Inspector Clouseau. Sanjay Dutt is like a fish out of water, served roasted on a plate with chips on the side, completely exposed and burnt. His limited range never quite picks up the right vibe for the role, the hideous wig and the pencil-thin moustache making his face look worse than he’s ever looked all his life.
And there’s poor Ameesha Patel, ambitiously entrusted with comedy, not quite finding her feet, looking lost like a mermaid in the woods. Even her plunging neckline fails to distract your attention from her complete lack of comic flair while Gulshan Grover should consider himself lucky to be killed off halfway into this disaster.
Chatur Singh Two Star has absolutely no redeeming quality, not a single gag good enough to make you smile (unless you will settle for Sanjay Dutt trying on baby clothes in the trial room). It takes phenomenal talent to pull off half jokes and poor jokes. Given the absence of talent or half-decent jokes, the laboured attempts at humour result in a film that even Ed Wood would call dead wood.
The travesty of such bad writing is to be seen to be believed but please, trust the survivor who made it out alive. Take his word and skip this ticket to trauma. If you ever catch a glimpse on TV, make sure you have a remote to change channels or the reflexes to pull the plug, especially if you are a Clouseau fan.
P.S: This review has a lot more jokes than the film. Should you feel the need to still buy a ticket to the film, please also consider sending this writer a cheque as well, dear Chatur Singh. Two stars? Hello! They both can’t act.
This review originally appeared here.
Aarakshan: Why it must be watched
Remember how Jerry Maguire typed out a ‘Mission Statement’ in the middle of the night just because he couldn’t sleep because of bad pizza or an epiphany. He makes a case against commercialisation of sport, loses his job and has nothing to hold on to but just his ideals.
Cameron Crowe was lucky to embark upon a rather simple issue there. Replace Sports with Education. Add the extremely flammable issue of reservation. Then, caste politics, players and parties affected. This is India. Throw a stone in the air here and it will hit and hurt at least one person. How do you make a film that is treading into a territory rigged with land mines?
Writers Prakash Jha and Anjum Rajabali set up the debate through the key players in a private university called Shakuntala Thakral Mahavishvavidyalaya (STM). It’s managed by an idealistic disciplinarian Anand Prabhakar (Amitabh Bachchan may just win every Best Actor award for this role next year) unwilling to compromise on his principles, no matter how much pressure there is from the rich trustees of the college. He teaches underprivileged students irrespective of their caste free of cost at home and considers deserving cases for admission on the basis of economic background than caste.
It’s a nice touch that the poor University clerk’s son is not a Dalit but a Pandit and it is a Dalit (Saif Ali Khan is convincing as Deepak Kumar) who happens to be the University topper. Anand’s daughter Poorbi (Deepika Padukone, surprisingly effective) represents the love and friendship between the hardworking Deepak and the carefree rich upper caste kid Sushanth (Prateik Babbar in a career worst).
The ‘Us versus Them’ divide surfaces with the Supreme Court’s judgement on reservation as opportunists (led by the Vice Principal Mithilesh played by Manoj Bajpai) turn friends into enemies. The film then becomes a platform of heated debate between Deepak and Sushanth.
For Deepak, his identity is a sensitive issue. As he says, it’s a story that dates back thousands of years and reminded to him every single day. He has reached the top through sheer hard work fighting the odds. He is pro-reservation.
When Sushanth realises that he will not get admission in a government college to do the mass communication course he wanted to do because of the quota system, he’s bitter. He is anti-reservation.
“Earn it through hard work,” is Sushanth’s first argument. Deepak reminds him of the hard work and service his people have done over centuries.
“You people are too scared to compete,” Sushanth responds. Deepak tells him there have been no avenues open to them to compete.
“Why don’t you earn it through merit,” asks Sushanth. Deepak tells him they would love to but… “In a race, the starting line should be the same. If started from the same place we did, it would have been a fair race.”
When the Principal pulls them up both for indulging in politics inside the campus, Deepak wants him to make his stand clear. “You are either with us or against us,” he says. Deepak suspects that the Principal is helping the underprivileged as charity. He does not want charity.
The Principal represents the conscientious Indian teacher. To him, all students are equal. He would leave politics out of it and stick to teaching. Yet, he is forced to take a stand by every other character in the film, including his own wife. Even then, there’s a fine sense of balance. While the father (head of system) says personally he does not see anything wrong about the Supreme Court judgement, the mother of the home (Tanvi Azmi) says that any law that plays with the future of children is bad.
That comment straight from the heart, coming without even a wee bit of political intent, becomes what the Mission Statement was to Jerry Maguire. Sticking to his ideals, Anand prefers to quit than continue as a party to the dirty politics only to find that there is no escaping it. Now, here’s where Jerry Maguire becomes a Rajnikanth film (Annamalai, Baasha, Padayappa or Sivaji) in Aarakshan as the protagonist goes from zero to hero, fills the film with unbelievably fairytale idealism, manufactures instant change of hearts and mobilizes thousands, only not as fast as it happens in a Rajnikant film.
This is the portion of the film that is grossly misread by many critics. Political cinema or any mass communication of political nature needs to be studied keeping in mind historical context, representation, technology and social relations. Yes, I remember my political communication lectures.
1. Historical context demands you get to the root of the issue and study solutions employed in the past and modern day application. How did Gandhi address the divide? He worked with them, practiced pluralism and inclusion, leading by example. Anand Prabhakar does exactly the same, and Prakash Jha, unlike a more mainstream director like Hirani, doesn’t see the reason to brand it ‘Gandhigiri’ or have Gandhi talk down to the masses. He creates a modern day Gandhi (he says he does not believe in non violence and he responds to all insults by focusing on what needs to be done, choosing to respond in action and deed than preachy diatribe like Munnabhai would). These very critics who want subtlety here had no such problems with Munnabhai because it was entertaining.
2. Representation is not about looking at whether a character has bad hair dye or a big nose or if they are drinking red wine, these are cosmetic issues (which are certainly relevant if the film needs to be rated for technical flair alone). Sometimes men play women in street theatre. Sometimes they don’t even have the props they need to tell the story and it is possible that they are not always the best of actors. A bourgeois art critic may just be amused by this depiction and dismiss it as amateur without considering the purpose and the relevance of it to their lives. What needs to be checked in representation, the key issue in political cinema, is the basics of balance. Are all parties represented, if yes… How? So are all the rich upper caste folk drinking wine like villains? The three villains are representatives of Commerce (the Vice Principal Mithilesh who expressly says that education is a business), Politics (the Minister played by Saurabh Shukla and later, we learn the leader of Dalits is a petty politician himself – exactly the reason the film didn’t go down well with Punia, who objected to the release of the film) and power hungry Educationists (one of the Trustees of the college). Are all educationists bad? Not really, among the upper caste are also the protagonist himself (who does not hesitate to write a cheque or stand guarantee to help the poor) and the other Trustee played by Darshan Jariwala who offers his house for teaching.
Just because a film goes away from discussing reservation, it does not mean that the film has forgotten the issue. The ideology is very clear. The first step towards addressing the complex issue of reservation is to convince those affected that the head of the system is all for inclusion, he sees every student as the same and recognises that some students need more attention than the others and that every student who cannot afford education needs to be helped out. This is exactly how you get to the root of the issue. The issue thrives on discrimination. The film gets right to that and makes sure that the protagonist never discriminates and yet addresses the issues and forces that brought reservation and quota into play – the lack of avenues for education, lack of supplementary/remedial education for the downtrodden. How is talking about inclusion going away from discussing reservation? It is going deeper into the subject. The points of the debate were made in the first half of the film. Now, in the second half, the film was working at solutions, yet failing where Hirani succeeded – in appealing to the urban bourgeois because of its tacky execution, a shame given the scale and the budget of the film, something street theatre never has access to.
3. That brings us to the issue of technology itself. Cinema as a technology used for this communication has become bloody expensive and is governed by forces of its own. The plague of star system, the hyper-sensitive political groups, social climate and the economics of marketing a film when there are more films made and few channels of distribution open to reach a mass. Technology determines the content and it cannot be ignored while studying political communication.
4. Social Relations. The issue still evokes polarized reactions in society, caste system still prevalent, even among the educated urban elite whose sensibilities may have changed but biases continue. With globalization, they may have embraced high art and developed condescension towards anything downmarket unless it is to appear cool enough to be seen loving the Singhams and the Dabanngs or Robots. There is a hidden condescension in that too but that’s a different story. Which part of the social equation does the film address? Education.
Due credit must be given to the makers for reminding us that, reservation or no reservation, it is the duty of every teacher to empower the underprivileged, irrespective of caste, whether it’s inside a classroom or a cow shed. Forget caste, think economic strata. Education is a great leveller. When you provide quality education, the rich will have no choice but to sit with the poor.
The point is made when a rich father asks if the teacher can conduct private tuitions separately for the rich. “You know, they don’t bathe. They stink,” he says, rather stupidly only to be sternly told by the protagonist, the biggest superstar of the nation, “It’s your thought that stinks.”
Despite the sloppy second half that is long-winded and idealistic, Aarakshan deserves to be watched for it advocates inclusion as a solution to the issue of reservation. It’s a complex truth that needs to be examined by the easily provoked who need to be shown that not every leader representing the minority is actually looking out for them. Case in point, the objections raised to this film by Punia who selectively quoted some of the anti-Dalit dialogues without acknowledging the powerful responses given by the protagonist of the film. Some times, bad leaders make all activism look silly.
As the villain of this film ironically sums activism: “Azaadi hai. Jo chahe nautanki kar le.” (There’s freedom. Anyone can do any drama.)
Like Anurag Kashyap told Punia during a recent debate on TV, if I want to address the issue/reality that Dalits are not allowed to enter a temple in Orissa, the first person to object would be the head of SC/ST board. Why would then anyone be brave enough to tread into that territory.
By objecting to Aarakshan and raking up a controversy where it was not needed, Punia has turned this film completely meta. The film has become the stand and the answer to the question raised by the likes of Punia – If you are not with us, you are against us.
It needs to be seen so that people know that system is not anti-Dalit. In fact, the truth is that an upper caste filmmaker made a film whose heart beats for the Dalit as much as it does for every poor student who cannot afford education.
Before I have more art critics pouncing on me approximating Aarakshan to Madhur Bhandarkar (whose films have no depth or balance from the socio-political perspective. Yes, Jha who is described as ‘Madhur Bhandarkar with a JNU background’ with his understanding of political communication is any day better than a multiplex-audience seeking sensation who exploits stereotypes. Jha employs archetypes to make his point and advocate solutions through mass media. Jha’s caricatures reveal more about reality than Bhandarkar’s pseudo-realistic portrayals) or B-grade films depicting rape (exploitation films dishing out sex and violence) because of the inherent cheese and tackiness quotient in Aarakshan, let me clarify two points.
1. Not all cinema is high art or even good art. Social films by design need to simple not to because people are stupid but because our politicians/ people representing groups are capable of twisting the most innocuous representations for political gain – do look at the number of victims of caste instigated violence and self-immolations that are related to the issue.
2. Debate/Social commentary is not always good cinema, some of them are obnoxious enough to keep running their public service messages on a loop. Yet, we need our cinema to address social issues in a way that they reach the mass simply because cinema’s role as mass media as a tool for change has been grossly underutilized. How many set out to make a Mother India today? The economics and business of cinema has changed phenomenally from the days of Mother India. With the amount of marketing spends needed to reach out to a mass, stars are a necessary evil.
Aarakshan is not great or even good cinema, but there’s no denying that it is a balanced social debate in mass media, not bad at all given all that it achieves through representation. Also, with Bachchan at the centre delivering one of the best roles of his career, Aarakshan despite all its other failings merits a watch. Not because it’s the best in the genre. Because not many make films in this genre. Films close to the real heartland of India. Our cynical urban upbringing has taken us far away from the charms of street theatre and social films. Sadly, this curious hybrid spawned by a big budget is all we get these days.
Genre: Drama
Directed by: Prakash Jha
Cast: Amitabh Bachchan, Saif Ali Khan, Manoj Bajpayee, Deepika Padukone, Prateik Babbar
Storyline: A principled Principal gets sucked into a political debate he does not want to entertain & gets his focus back
Bottomline: A brilliant socio-political debate halfway becomes a Rajnikant film without Rajnikant
Phirr: What the hell was that, again?
Genre: Thriller
Director: Girish Dhamija
Cast: Rajneesh Duggall, Adah Sharma, Roshni Chopra, Mohan Agashe
Storyline: A man goes in search of his missing wife and takes help from a psychic who can just touch objects, people and even mobile phone-signals somehow
Bottomline: What happens when you throw a bunch of non-actors together and let the audience read their face? A social experiment that makes you wonder if you are being punished for your sins.
“You are being punished for your sins from your previous birth,” comes the answer when the clueless hero wonders why his wife went missing. If any of that reincarnation karma logic holds true, every person who bought a ticket to this film probably bored people to death telling stories in his/her previous birth.
Remember that “And then” joke from ‘Dude, Where’s My Car?’
‘Phhir’ (And then…) is that joke.
As the film begins, almost every other scene has a date and time, up to date till the second, like it actually has something to do the plot.
“And then?”
But, nope. It would have been a better idea to run a time-code that would tell us how much more of the film was left so that you could set your alarm accordingly and catch a few winks.
“And then?”
You would miss absolutely nothing at all even if you just woke up for the climax. The actors are unreadable. You can’t tell if they are happy or sad or angry or aroused half the time.
“And then?”
Even the supernatural element seems to be put in for convenience than for intrigue because there is no consistency, logic or limitations to what the psychic can see and what she cannot.
“And then?”
So, sometimes, she’s able to see the past. Sometimes, she gets premonitions of the future. Sometimes, she has to touch objects, sometimes people and once, she even gets a snatch of a visual by eavesdropping on a phone accidentally.
“And then?”
For some reason, the cops seem to need transmitters when they have their friendly neighbourhood psychic who helps them out regularly. What? You haven’t heard of it? Happens all the time in this world.
“And then?”
With its seemingly improvised make-it-up-as-you-go narrative, the film goes back and forth in time to tell us something it forgot. And sometimes it is because it has changed its mind about how a scene ought to play out.
“And then?”
A plagiarised film, at least, keeps you intrigued about what was stolen and how it was changed. But this is worse. This is a script possibly written by a ghost. Maybe in ghost ink.
“And then?”
Now if only I had the power the psychic in the movie had, a mere touch of the newspaper ad or the mouse while booking tickets online would have saved me quite a bit of money and time.
“And then?”
And then, nothing.
“And then?”
Aargh!
“And then?”
(This review originally appeared here)
I am Kalam: To Kalam, with love
Genre: Drama
Director: Nila Madhab Panda
Cast: Harsh Mayar, Hussan Saad, Pitobash, Gulshan Grover
Storyline: A street smart underprivileged kid befriends a rich Rajput prince and dreams of going to school
Bottomline: A thank you letter to former President Kalam for inspiring children
If someone were to take the most inspiring ideas from the books of APJ Abdul Kalam and made a movie to show its applications in contemporary India, it would be a lot like Nila Madhab Panda’s I am Kalam, a hit at festivals around the world. The film was rated 4.40 on 5 by audiences at the Transilvania International Film Festival recently.
“An ignited mind is the most powerful resource on earth, above the earth and under the earth”
Street smart Chottu (Harsh Mayar), who works in a Rajasthani dhaba that caters to the haveli-turned-hotel, catches Kalam’s address on TV and becomes an ignited mind. He already had a passion for books and education and dreamt of becoming one of those television models sporting ties on TV. But now, he finds a role model in the President and gives himself a name. Kalam.
“The right kind of education on moral values will upgrade the society and the country”
Little Kalam does not lie. He does not steal. He stands up for friends. He works hard and wants to earn to fund his own education. He’s a great example for kids. And this is one reason you must take your kids to watch this film.
“The ‘dream-thought-action’ philosophy is what I would like to be inculcated in each and every student.”
When Kalam catches the President’s four-step path to success (Dreams. Action Plan. Hard Work. Courage), he transforms into a student. So what if he’s not in school.
“A candle loses nothing by lighting another candle.”
The game changers in Kalam’s life happen through the friendless young rich Rajput prince (Hussan Saad) and a foreign tourist Lucy who share their knowledge with him. While the Prince teaches him English, the tourist teaches him French and the young lad himself teaches them everything he knows – from Hindi to Camel riding to lesser known aspects about India. The village in Rajasthan becomes a microcosm for what India represents today with one feet firmly in the past and one in the present. The haveli may open itself up to tourists but is still unwilling to go all out and start cooking in the palace to cater to them.
“Give one hour a day exclusively for book reading and you will become a knowledge centre in a few years.”
Kalam becomes a knowledge centre in months and shows great promise of becoming a leader. The filmmaker wants to ensure that we don’t dismiss this off as idealism and shows us change in Kalam, slowly and steadily. He learns simple things that any of us can in a matter of minutes – whether it’s about making tea, or wearing a tie, to basic greetings in different languages. And he connects everything he learns from people with what he reads in books.
“Music and dance can be used as an instrument for ensuring global peace and act as a binding force.”
There’s a beautiful scene in the middle of the film when a whole group joins in an impromptu jamming session led by Chottu. There’s a guitarist, there are folk artistes and there’s a foreigner playing an Indian string instrument.
“If India is to become developed by 2020, it will do so only by riding on the shoulders of the young.”
Thankfully, the change in Kalam does not happen because of the foreigner. It happens because of children. They overcome their obstacles and speak up for what they want by initiating a dialogue with the older generation.
“What matters in this life more than winning for ourselves is helping others win”
Kalam does not care about winning himself. He is confident. He knows he will reach his destination some day. And wants his best friend to win, whether it is a French test or a Hindi elocution contest in school.
“It is not a disgrace to not reach the stars, but it is a disgrace to have no stars to reach for.”
While many Indian youth (like Pitobash as Luvtund) grow up idolising film stars, we are really lucky to have Kalam. And it’s a good thing that someone made a film to give kids a role model, someone they can become.
Tree of Life: Prayer. Paen. Painting. Poem.
Genre: Drama
Director: Terrence Malick
Cast: Sean Penn, Brad Pitt, Jessica Chastain
Storyline: A family copes with loss and remembers time spent together
Bottomline: Malick digs deep into the DNA of man and life of all creation, a philosopher’s spiritual take on Darwin’s theory of evolution
This is an updated review coming when the film is on its way out of theatres, I guess it will be safe to discuss plot points and key aspects to unlocking the mysteries in The Tree of Life.
In a line, it’s about forgetting the stairs and reaching for the door.
Think about it. We spend all our lives climbing stairs and becoming someone important enough to be taking elevators in skyscrapers.
As a child, you want to know what’s in the attic. Because someone built stairs leading to it.
As an adolescent, you want to break in and peep into that girl’s wardrobe. And you will take the stairs leading to it. Because it’s forbidden.
As an adult, you want to climb the stairs of the biggest buildings believing that is success. And then elevators. Because, the world believes it.
You travel around the world looking for success and yet the place that brings you most happiness lies at the doorstep of your own home. Your children, wife and dog. At the end of the day, all you really want is for your wife and child to love you.
The thing about stairs is that they take you some place, but not anywhere new. The thing about stepping out of the door and looking at the larger, grander scheme of things is that you will find that there’s so much to explore and understand. It gives us the serenity to accept things for what they are and be grateful for all the happiness we have from family with all the domestic strife, accidents and violence around us.
In the final moments of Terrence Malick’s film we see the skyscraper indeed but what we see in it – is the magnificent reflection of something way bigger – the skies, which are just a small portion of all creation, not even a speck on the universe. We see the deadness of a bridge but what brings the frame alive is the flight of the bird.
If Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey had one of the biggest jump cuts in the history of time spanning some three million years, Terrence Malick, who comes up with a spiritual companion piece to epic sci-fi film, gives the biggest flashback in the history of time spanning over 13.75 billion years – and tells us the story of life from the very beginning.
Malick’s film, his most abstract till date, is certainly not for everyone, if comments from the bored folk at PVR are any indication. Talking does not aid listening, my friends. If you had shut up and listened, maybe you would’ve heard what he was trying to tell you.
Though it can be argued if this is worth the price of the ticket, and time, to the man on the street, there is no doubt that Malick fans and those who love pure cinema at its gloriously indulgent best will love his spectacular vision.
Also, it isn’t difficult to understand if you patiently surrender to its audacity and scale to tell a story that’s as macro as it gets at one level and yet microscopically intimate and personal at another.
The auteur achieves this by interrupting the story of a family dealing with loss over a period of time with the story of the creation of the universe itself to understand where we came from and the way of life as it has been over billions of years. The bigger picture.
As the mother observes in the opening lines of the film: “There are two ways through life. The way of nature and the way of grace. You have to choose which one to follow.”
Malick takes us back to the times of the dinosaur to suggest that the way of grace existed even then. A predator stamps on the face of a little injured dinosaur and changes its mind looking at the plight of the wounded, pretty much in the same place millions of years later where our young hero Jack (the eldest of the O’Briens) shoots his brother’s finger. More on that later.
Back in the world as we know it, we see the way of nature manifested through the tough father (Brad Pitt) and the way of grace epitomized by the mother (Jessica Chastain) as the O’Briens raise their three kids in the fifties in a town called Waco in Texas.
In contrast to the segment featuring the spectacle of the creation of the universe, this chapter plays out like an intimate home video as we get a glimpse into their world – how the kids were born, how they were raised, what they were taught. The family is the microcosm of the world itself. The father teaches the kids the boundaries of their home even before they could understand.
While the compassionate mother introduces the kids to God (she points to the skies and says: “That’s where God lives” as Smetana’s Die Moldau, the free-flowing composition inspired by Bohemian rivers, moistens your eyes), the strict father teaches the kids the hard truths of life (He lays down the rules of the house over Brahms, a classical music regular that we learn was improved upon for perfection, and demands their affection).
“Help each other. Love everyone. Every leaf. Every ray of light. Forgive,” she teaches them.
“Your mother is naïve,” the father tells the kids. “It takes fierce will to survive in this world.” Soon, he introduces them to evil. “The world lives by trickery. You wanna succeed, you can’t be too good.”
These life lessons are interspersed with doses of love as the kids ping-pong between the two biggest influences shaping their lives. We watch the kids play with the mother, we see her kiss them to sleep, and observe that she gives water to the thirsty, even if he’s a criminal.
The triumph of Tree of Life lies in its ability to connect with our personal stories. From all that the kids learn growing up, we try to understand ourselves and everything we learnt – through religion, upbringing and textbooks – and the choices we make. It’s a deeply meditative film on existence, a prayer of thanksgiving and a paen to motherhood.
Motherhood, because according to Malick, God is a woman. And the woman is God because she creates, she introduces the child to the way of grace. And Man is the child because he takes time to learn and takes to the way of nature quite early on. Which is why the father repents his actions way later in the film while the child picks up the way of nature as early as adolescence when he is consumed by lust and experiments with violence.
The conflict between the way of nature and grace is played out through the eldest son mourning the loss of his brother. The film does not tell us why he died and we can only speculate given the themes of Malick’s previous films that he died at war or any possible gun related incident, given how the kids were raised.
Also, the mother says: “The nuns taught us that no one who loves the way of grace ever comes to a bad end.” And the kid is shown to trust his brother, even when he is asked to place his finger at the muzzle of the gun. While the father teaches them to fight, the boys experiment with guns early.
The central conflict of faith is triggered when the family witnesses a random death at the swimming pool. They are taken to church and we catch the passage from Job that instantly explains the entire film. Why do the innocent have to die?
“Misfortune befalls even the good… Like a tree, we are uprooted,” a sermon at the church details a portion from the Book of Job that answers every question that grown-up Jack has. (Okay, didn’t type out the whole passage on my phone while watching because I thought I had enough to Google the rest online but I was wrong. And if you do know where this passage is in the Book of Job, please quote, will appreciate the effort!) But the point here is that though young Jack did go to church, he didn’t fully understand Job back then.
“Father. Mother. You wrestle inside me,” Jack’s voiceover says towards the end of the film summing up that internal conflict we all face. Why should we be good when so much shit happens?
The film is not just about why bad things happen, it’s also about making peace with loss and celebrating memories because that’s one place that death can’t take away. It’s about realising that the time we have on this planet is just too limited and with each other, even less.
A child may be content cycling in circles inside the attic because a tall man with the book told him that’s what counts. But how content are you walking around huge buildings with circular corridors or elevators that will take you up and down the same place?
Emmanuel Lubezki’s cinematography (my bet at the Oscars next year) will haunt you for long as Malick stamps his signature through all his favourite shots to constantly remind you of the intricate thread that connects his films – that man is just another form of life in the vast expanse of infinite creation as the camera often frames him against the bright light above or the deep blue ocean.
The special effects used to portray the creation of the universe, apparently, were done the good old way through chemicals at the laboratory and were not computer generated. Which is probably another reason the film reminds you of Kubrick’s masterpiece on the evolution of the human race over time. It just has to be seen on the big screen. Because it has a larger than life canvas. Life is just a character in this motion picture and it’s all really about finding what fills it with happiness.
“I’m more you than her,” as Jack admits to his father. It is the nature of man, after all. “Nature only wants to please itself… To have its own way.”
“The only way to be happy is to love.” As clichéd it sounds, it is love and acceptance of the way of grace, surrender yourself at Her feet and know that you are safe in God’s hand. Even after life itself.
Treat this film as you would treat a visit to the temple. Go with an empty cup and an open mind.
Else, just skip and don’t ruin it for those who want to pay attention to the God in Malick’s detail.
And yes, please forget this flight of stairs that I have taken you on. Submit yourself at the door and see where it takes you.
Post-Script about the Script:
The first draft of the screenplay can be found here. Be warned that the film is very different from that version. The scene at the church where the preacher quotes from the Book of Job is not there in this draft. As observed in the review above, that passage really is the key to interpreting this film. What I like is that huge chunks of dialogues have been edited out and replaced by visuals. While the script may sound preachy, the film itself lets you to absorb and forces you to read what’s between the lines. I am not sure if I would’ve liked the film if it explained as much as the script does. While the father is given more shades of grey, the script portrays a very bleak picture of the world and even takes us to the end of the universe as we know it. But, being the optimist, I love how the film ends.
Singham: No lion this, fakta cheater cock
Genre: Action
Director: Rohit Shetty
Cast: Ajay Devgn, Prakash Raj, Kajal Aggarwal
Storyline: An honest Inspector from a remote village is transferred to the big bad city for messing with ace-kidnapper villain
Bottomline: Singham, if you are an action film, be an action film. Don’t try to be police drama if it’s ends up looking like comedy.
When the villain of the film, Jaykant Shikre (a superbly comic Prakash Raj) tells the hero, Bajirao Singham (Devgn looking angry and stoned all through) “Yeh, cheating hai” when he’s outnumbered 1:500, you tend to agree with the villain.
Yes, boss. That is cheating. That is no way to treat a villain. And not when you’re a fearless hero who has just finished giving a lecture to the entire police force about going and doing “mardonwala kaam” (a man’s job) only minutes before that.
The climax of the film ruins all the good work done by the makers until then.
It’s unfortunate because two-thirds of the film is a fairly engaging, diluted yet faithful, technically improved adaptation of the Tamil mass entertainer directed by Hari.
The original wasn’t the best film around but it had a few smarts, pace and fury and worked despite its cheesy visual effects purely because of Suriya who made the corniest lines sound good. Devgn does exactly the opposite. He takes some half-decent lines (by Farhad and Sajid) and makes them sound outrightly cheesy. Yet, it should be pointed out that the man’s got piercing presence. Especially when he’s in a vest.
But it’s Prakash Raj who steals the show from right under his nose, making the most of his lines by playing it completely camp and relishing his role as the new baddie in Bollytown.
Rohit Shetty grossly underestimates the role of the villain here. The ace-kidnapper turned politician is pretty much harmless. It hasn’t occurred to him to hit the hero hard where it hurts (Hello, what’s the heroine there for, Einstein?) or at least make the bad guy grab a school kid when his life is in danger, more so when he DOES have a gun in hand and a whole bunch of kids to pick from.
As a result, we never fear the villain despite all his dialoguebaazi about being the hunter because Shetty only makes Shikre seem as dangerous as Shikari Shambu.
The hero is equally stupid. Inspector Singham is not required to do any sort of thinking either. No Sherlock Holmes like deduction or scientific approach to investigation because Shetty wants to conserve Devgn’s energies to jump around like a lion to chants of Singham that will ring in your ears for hours after you’ve left the hall. We cannot blame the villain for not kidnapping the heroine (Kajal Aggarwal wasted) in this version because the hero never seems to care enough for her.
While the original was just about a personal feud, this one has larger ambitions of being a meaningful ode to the police force heavily influenced by Rajkumar Santoshi’s Khakee. Maybe Golmaal finally got its revenge on the action director because Rohit Shetty ends up making you laugh (some intentionally and a lot unintentionally especially with the silly subtext of suggesting that the police department should become the new Omerta-enforcing-mafia in town) in the climax when he should be sticking to the basic promise of the action film. Offer stunts. Blow up cars. Beat up guys. Imagine an action film that promises unbelievable action choreography that ends without any dishoom dishoom whatsoever in the climax.
It’s the biggest cheat in the history of Hindi action films. It’s not even an interesting twist. Like Shikre said, it’s just cheating. No fighting.
Why Singham? Ran out of ‘dumm’? Or ‘faqta’ budget, umm?
Yes, ‘faqt’ apparently is an archaic Urdu word that means ‘only’. Even the Censors hadn’t heard of it but passed it because the makers insisted that they wanted Devgn to say: “Jisme hai Dumm, faqta Bajirao Singham” (Who has the guts, only Bajirao Singham). Yes, the writing in this film is that juvenile. Not to forget, twisted.
(This review originally appeared here.)
Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara: Live life like a Bollywood film
Genre: Drama
Director: Zoya Akhtar
Cast: Hrithik Roshan, Abhay Deol, Farhan Akhtar, Katrina Kaif, Kalki Koechlin
Storyline: Three friends go on a road trip to fulfill a pact made years ago
Bottomline: A laidback trip with stock characters dealing with standard Hollywood hero issues that makes up for its predictability with its camaraderie and spontaneous banter.
According to Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara, life’s like a Bollywood film with song, dance and adventure. You can just drop everything, pack your bags and go to Switzerland… scratch that, Spain, with buddies for a three-week, five-star holiday with everything from the tourist brochure thrown in.
Zoya Akhtar’s second outing as a director is way more filmi than her first about the film industry. This one only pretends to be real. It’s not. You get Katrina Kaif drenched in tomato pulp at the La Tomatina festival when she’s not holding you by the hand and teaching you scuba diving. If this is not fantasy, what is?
And like most fantasies, ZNMD employs standard archetypes to spell out the moral of the story, which is also the title of the film. What’s interesting, however, is how writers Reema Kagti and Zoya Akhtar have borrowed three simple rules for life from adventure sports on land, water and air.
1. Make every breath count, dive into the beautiful expanse of life — Scuba diving.
2. Let go, free-fall and embrace the feeling of powerlessness — Sky-diving.
3. “I get knocked down but I get up again and you nay ever gonna keep me down” — Running with the bulls.
And these life lessons are all about facing your fears/issues that the three archetypes deal with.
Calculative materialistic Arjun (Hrithik plays him like a robotic stereotype) has no time for friends or his girlfriends, impulsive artist Imran (though Farhan Akhtar works best when he’s brooding) on the other end of the spectrum masks his serious Daddy issues with humour and confused happy-go-lucky Kabir (Abhay Deol, his “mantally sick” accent and timing saving his girly dialogue delivery), the peace-making glue that holds the trio together, finds himself in a rather awkward situation after rushing into an unplanned engagement.
We saw exactly the same three kinds of guys in Delhi Belly — the materialistic Nitin (Kunaal Roy Kapur), the impulsive Arup (Vir Das) and the confused Tashi (Imran Khan) who was rushed into an engagement and the same three types in Dil Chahta Hai over a decade ago.
ZNMD’s three are from the world originally introduced to us by Farhan Akhtar. The rich guys with Hollywood hero issues. The guys for whom personal space is paramount and boundaries are sacred, even among the best of friends. It’s this space that Farhan and Zoya seem to know so well and it’s this space the siblings capture best and milk for drama through slice-of-life scenes and spontaneous dialogue that give the film its likeable character. In fact, the camaraderie between three buddies is the only thing in the film that feels real in Bollywood’s sober ‘Carpe Diem’ answer to The Hangover.
Even the setting is almost the same. Three friends go on a bachelor trip and take a ride on the wild side of life. And like Stu’s possessive fiancé who keeps tabs on them, Kabir’s fiancé Natasha (Kalki Koechlin convincingly annoying) wants her future husband to conform to the sober way of life.
Since just being hung over alone wouldn’t help the guys solve their issues, Zoya just wants them to get high on life with very minimal help from alcohol. Since their reluctance to share their secrets with each other cannot be resolved overnight, Zoya takes her time to build the mood.
It’s not an easy thing to do in our times when attention spans are shrinking, patience for storytelling has waned and kids are wired to their phone, even inside the movie hall. It doesn’t help that the jokes don’t always come naturally and Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy are nowhere close to the form they were with Dil Chahta Hai.
However, ZNMD works as a mood piece if you are in the mood to live vicariously through them. Hang out with the boys and Katrina, put up with bad jokes, surrender to the quiet of the ocean, the thrill of the free-fall and the atmospherics of bulls charging at you Spainstakingly captured by cinematographer Carlos Catalan.
(This review originally appeared here.)
Murder 2: Robbery and murder
Cast: Thriller
Director: Mohit Suri
Cast: Emraan Hashmi, Prashanth Narayanan, Jacqueline Fernandez
Storyline: When a call girl goes missing, a crooked ex-cop goes in search to save her from a cross-dressing serial killer.
Bottomline: Korean film The Chaser ripped-off, butchered and Murdered.
Imagine the level of creative impotence when one of the best films of last decade – Na Hong-Jin’s 2008 debut thriller, The Chaser – is blatantly ripped off almost scene by scene and is still unable to stir a single emotion. Except maybe hate for the makers.
In the original and this rip-off, the serial killer, frustrated with his inability, tortures and butchers his victims. The same can be said of Mahesh Bhatt’s banner that has been serially mutilating some of the best films made.
At best, Murder 2 is a showreel for the talented Prashant Narayanan, a men’s room glossy featuring the saucy Jacqueline Fernandez and just another day on the job for serial kisser Emraan Hashmi.
If Murder at least tried to be Unfaithful, Murder 2 is very faithful to the original, from the beginning to end, diverting only to show us Jacqueline make out with Hashmi in the song breaks and sometimes, to conform to the Bollywood rule book.
How can a pimp be a hero and the prostitute the heroine in a Bollywood film? So, Hashmi does not play the pimp. He’s the guy hired by the pimp (in the original, the pimp is the ex-cop who goes in search of the missing girl). And the girl is not a regular prostitute, she’s a college student on her first assignment to send money to her widowed mother and pay for her sister’s tuition as Hindi film tradition demands. And Jacqueline supposedly plays a model. So it is a little weird that Hashmi offers to pay her every time they go to bed. Even more weird that she loves him despite it. Also, how can a villain be just impotent in a Bollywood film? So, in an attempt to make him scary and dangerous, the makers make him a cross-dresser. Whoa! Talk about regression. Putting generous doses of kissing and sex alone do not make your films bold and progressive. On the contrary, a little sensitivity towards the LGBTs would be appreciated in these times.
This serial kisser chasing serial killer tale offers nothing but titillation from Yana Gupta and Jacqueline Fernandez for the front-bencher. There’s plenty of blood and gore but most of it flows from the ripped out heart of The Chaser.
Dear makers, there are more honourable ways to make a living than robbery. And Murder.
(This review originally appeared here.)
Delhi Belly: When life hits the bottom
Genre: Comedy
Director: Abhinay Deo
Cast: Imran Khan, Kunaal Roy Kapoor, Vir Das, Shenaz Treasury, Vijay Raaz, Poorna Jagannathan
Storyline: Three roommates are on the run from gangsters after having a particularly bad day when a package of diamonds gets swapped with a sample of stool
Bottomline: The film is like what causes the titular condition. Unhealthy yet inviting street food not necessarily in good taste.
As the opening credits roll out leisurely to the tune of Saigal Blues, there’s a cheeky mid-shot of a fat guy’s partially exposed lower back (as Mr. Chow says in the Hangover: It’s funny because he’s fat). We are shown this visual at least thrice just in case we miss the obvious wisecrack there. It’s the “hero introduction shot” to not-so-subtly let you know where most of the jokes in this frat-house film would come from.
Thankfully, though that is sort of true, there’s more to this film than just toilet-humour.
Not entirely mindless, ‘it’ from the film’s tagline, happens as a metaphor for a particularly bad day. It’s because you got “it” from something you did unwittingly. While the fat guy Nitin (Kunaal Roy Kapoor, simply the best thing in the film) gets ‘it’ literally from eating Tandoori Chicken by the street-stall, Tashi (a new improved thick-stubbled Imran Khan) gets into ‘it’ when his girlfriend Sonia (evergreen Shenaz Treasury) springs a surprise engagement on him and Arup (finely restrained Vir Das) goes through ‘it’ when he is stood up and subsequently dumped by his girlfriend. Not the perfect day to lose a package of diamonds that gun-toting gangsters led by Somayajulu (Vijay Raaz puts the sin in sinister) are looking for. And surely not the place to be in once you’ve sent him a sample of stool instead unwittingly.
That’s all you need to know about the plot because it’s really just an excuse to let out all that’s been repressed in Bollywood for decades together.
So when it proverbially hits the fan and brings the roof down and we see the shocked expression on the faces of the elite kathak-trained prudes from the floor above – a room that has its walls lined up with photo frames of Gods. That’s probably the reaction you will get from your older uncles and aunts because as one of the guys tell us right at the beginning, nothing is sacred here (we are specifically told this when photographer Nitin puts a flower on the ear of a corpse for fun when on assignment).
The problem when you are watching a smart film is that you expect it to be smart throughout unlike say, a stupidly inane Dhamaal or an asinine Ready. Delhi Belly isn’t able to stay consistent in tone though it makes up for it by keeping the laughs coming.
What’s not consistent?
One, though Hinglish seems like a smart choice of language between three Delhi-based yuppies, when the uncouth gangsters enter the scene, the English-Hindi-Hinglish jumps seem obvious.
Two, profanity, by itself, isn’t humour. Wicked application of it is. While associate director and writer Akshat Verma (easily one of the best discoveries of the year) tucks some of it in smartly between jokes, some of it seems used for effect rather than need.
Three, lack of depth in characterisation. Of the three central characters, the cartoonist Arup (Vir Das) gets a raw deal because his love story is too undercooked for us to care enough for him or understand his random need for a tonsured head while some like Menaka (Poorna Jagannathan) are just so well-defined in spite of her limited presence in the film. As a result of this uneven mishmash, Delhi Belly remains a few notches below the subversive comic classic it could have been. There are many fine touches that lend themselves brilliantly to a comic book adaptation. But surely, this is a film that’s destined for cult status with the youth simply because they haven’t seen anything like this out of Bollywood, however derived it is from Messrs. Farelly Brothers, Todd Phillips or Quentin Tarantino.
Oral sex is not just spoken about but also shown as a matter of fact. There are shots of arousal – both human and canine – used for comic relief. Many words, some expletive and some just explicit, never uttered on screen before make their entry into Hindi cinema parlance. Music is used creatively as a part of the narrative and not just as an excuse to choreography the most successful song in the album (Bhaag DK Bose just appears as a part of the score). And like Dhobi Ghat, there’s no interval here either. So, there’s plenty to party about. After all, Bollywood just turned old enough to check into a frat house.
(This review originally appeared here)
Bbuddah Hoga Tera Baap: Fanboy Bachchanalia
Genre: Action
Director: Puri Jagannadh
Cast: Amitabh Bachchan, Hema Malini, Sonu Sood, Sonal Chauhan, Raveena Tandon, Prakash Raj
Storyline: A retired gangster comes back to his old hunting grounds on a mission
Bottomline: B-movie with a heart that works because of nostalgia and the Bachchan-Dreamgirl chemistry. Strictly for fans only
Imagine if some Hongkong-based hotshot director who makes martial arts movies for a living, one day, decides to make a Clint Eastwood tribute with good old Clint himself and ends up making one steeped in Schezwan sauce instead of Salsa and noodles instead of spaghetti just because they seem to look the same! An Eastern interpretation of the Western International phenomenon.
Bbuddah Hoga Tera Baap is a lot like that. A Southern interpretation of a Northern National phenomenon. Distinctly South Indian in its sensibility and tone, Puri Jagannadh’s film thinks it has brought back the Chora Ganga Kinaarewala back to the big screen. Has it really? No and yes.
Though it must be said that hardcore Bachchan fans, like yours truly, should book their tickets right away to just watch the Go Meera Go medley featuring a remix of Bachchan’s Greatest Hits without reading any further.
In fact, throughout the first half, despite Bachchan’s presence, you feel like you are watching a Tamil or a Telugu film from the over the top glares given by stuntmen and of course, the choice of villain – Prakash Raj. Equally cheesy are the looks of awe on everyone’s face as he shows off his sharp shooting skills. Also, though it does remind you of a recent Suriya starrer in terms of it’s father-son/assassin-target plot, the knot here is just an excuse to unleash Big B’s larger than life persona through punch-lines and hero-worship. Whichever way you look at it, this is strictly a B-movie made for fans.
Puri overdoes his fanboy adulation quite a bit so much that he does not know when to stop repeating himself. His Viju (Bachchan) seems to get provoked and angry every time someone calls him a Bbuddah and each occasion turns into an excuse for him to say the film’s title just in case we forget what the film is called.
And there are needless unflattering long shots in slow motion that reveal age. Isn’t it the film’s core objective to show us that age hasn’t really taken a toll on what he can do? And though Bachchan is in top form, commands a presence and even shakes a leg with commendable agility, Puri lets quite a bit of unwanted flab get in the way of the film’s narrative. Throughout, Viju does nothing but walk around getting offended on being called old and flirts with women, young and old, when the villain seems to be in a tearing hurry to eliminate the honest cop ACP Karan (Viju’s own son).
Sonu Sood is cast so perfectly as the son that in the early portions of the film, you would be forgiven to mistake him for a younger Vijay in police uniform. While Raveena in a cameo looks ravishing though silly, it is Hema Malini who really works up the magic and brings the much-needed Hindi fillum feel and her scenes with Bachchan are easily the best in the film.
Not just because they share a great chemistry but also because suddenly, the drama in the film seems more mature and is served up just right as Bbuddah finally finds its feet in the third act. Even if he’s just narrating a story borrowed from a popular email forward, Bachchan makes it his own and delivers it in his own inimitable style. The Action Jackson. The School of Cool, as the title song calls him.
Senior Bachchan simply owns the climax, be it the action scenes or the drama heavy last scene when he forces that tear down your cheek. Now, that’s more like the Bachchan we know. And miss.
(This review originally appeared here.)
Pyaar Ka Punchnama: Punch Drunk Love
Genre: Drama
Director: Luv Ranjan
Cast: Kartikeya Tiwari, Raayo Bhakirta, Divyendu Sharma, Nushrat, Sonalli, Ishita
Storyline: Three guys deal with the bittersweet pangs of love
Bottomline: No matter how cool, strong or smart, every man is fool in love
When she says she’s leaving him, our hero falls in her lap and cries helplessly, like a child that does not want his mother to leave on the first day of school. He has no words, just helpless resignation and shameless tears. She’s broken him down good. She knows exactly what buttons to hit to reduce the most self-respecting man to a submissive child stripped of all ego.
It’s very rare to see an Indian film show this side of the modern woman and more importantly, this aspect of the modern man. The image of the macho hero is broken and shattered to bits, thanks to Luv Ranjan’s heartwarming bittersweet tale of buddies, bonding and girl trouble.
Be warned, this is not a date movie. Far from it. In fact, taking your girlfriend to this film guarantees a fight unless she can deal with what goes on in a guy’s mind. Pyaar Ka Punchnama is a film that’s straight from a heart that you never knew existed in men and it’s likely to be celebrated as a cult film for its depiction of man as the weaker sex, struggling to understand the complex creatures that women are and failing to cope with the pangs of living with them.
The Hollywood celebration of this vulnerability has resulted in some truly memorable films of all time. From Billy Wilder’s The Apartment in the sixties to Woody Allen’s Annie Hall in the seventies to Cameron Crowe’s Say Anything of the eighties or Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity in the nineties, all the way to the recent 500 Days of Summer, the hopeless romantic is a timeless type.
What’s refreshing in Pyaar Ka Punchnama is that director Luv Ranjan decides to tell us the story of not just one but three seemingly different men in three different kinds of relationships with a purposeful sense of capturing the larger truth about women and relationships. Rajat (Kartik), Choudhary (Raayo) and Liquid (Divyendu) are best buddies who fall in love with three girls with varying attitudes towards commitment. Rajat’s girlfriend is committed, Choudhary’s fling does not understand commitment while Liquid’s “just-friend” does not even acknowledge let alone accept their bond.
Never has so much relationship gyaan been pumped into one film and this is clearly the When Harry met Sally of our modern cinema. Sample the six minute long single shot monologue where Rajat lets out all the pent up angst after a fight with his girlfriend. Understandably, the audience in the hall was in splits for the entire duration of that rant because someone there on screen said out loud what not many men wouldn’t find words to articulate. A fantastic thesis on the behavioural patterns of the woman during an argument.
It’s interesting that the girls go beyond stereotype. They aren’t just evil, plain cunning or opportunists as films in this genre often turn out to be. They are real people who want love too and know to get it from exactly who they want and when they want. They can bring you extreme happiness, joy and shower you with love but are totally capable of hitting the demolish button at their will and fancy.
If the highly selfish, larger than life, rich kids from Dil Chahta Hai set the mood and tone for the youth over the last decade, the more relatable guys next door from Pyaar Ka Punchnama manage to do the same for this generation without commanding any of the star appeal and hype that the Khans brought to the Farhan Akhtar film. And that is testimony to the quality of writing and acting of this ensemble.
It would be unfair to call this a coming of age comedy. It’s an utterly romantic bromance that takes a candid look at relationships and that wretched thing called love. Luv Ranjan, clearly the debut filmmaker of the year, has an uncompromising vision and confidence to switch from laugh out loud comedy to indulgent drama to angst-ridden rock and even paces it as unevenly as life itself, something that may not go down well with those looking for just laughs.
But, Guys, if you will watch only one movie this year, this is it. Girls, if you have ever wondered what goes on in the mind of every guy, this is it.
Sometimes, the baby. Sometimes, the substitute and sometimes, the dog. Such is the life of man.
