Textual Overtones

Genre: Thriller
Director: Robert Luketic
Cast: Jim Sturgess, Kate Bosworth, Kevin Spacey, Laurence Fishburne
Storyline: A bunch of kids from MIT are trained by their math professor to count cards (cheat systematically) and make millions in Vegas casinos.
Bottomline: Worth the gamble even if you don’t know the game

If you know how Blackjack is played, you are in to learn a few cool ways to cheat, applying a little mathematics.

Unlike the casino heists that Danny Ocean and Co would pull off, this one is more believable because Robert Luketic’s 21 is inspired from ‘Bringing down the house,’ the bestseller that documented real life stories of students who made millions employing math-based techniques.

Here, a phenomenally talented geeky good-looker Ben Campbell (Jim Sturgess) needs $3,00,000 to pay for his medical school fees at Harvard, especially since he only has a long shot at the scholarship reserved for the one student who can jump out of the page and dazzle the jury. Heading a team of nerds who are building a car that can drive by itself isn’t going to cut it. Nor is a promotion that pays eight dollars per hour.

Prof. Micky Rosa (Kevin Spacey) finds the young man to have the perfect temperament for cheating at Blackjack and makes him join the team that usually scores at the casinos at Vegas.

But what gets the movie really going, in the middle of all that inspired con, is the sexual tension and volatile chemistry between Jim Sturgess (Jude from Across The Universe) and the incredible attractive Kate Bosworth, who plays that girl every guy in college wants to date and one of the team-members.

21 hardly deviates from the regular campus movie formula. There are socially ill-equipped geeks and there is the circle of ‘cool,’ the hero of the story jumps camp and gets the girl, becomes so cool that he forgets his fat beer buddies until life reminds him all about friends, love and who he really is… Yet, to director Robert Luketic’s credit, it feels like a hardcore heist flick – the music, cinematography and editing constantly providing the tension and a sense of adventure.

With the veteran Kevin Spacey and the menacing Lawrence Fishburne around to intimidate them, you know the kids are only puppets and thankfully, the film at no point tries to make the pros look like fools. So even if you don’t understand how Blackjack is played, you still have a lot to character equations to keep you hooked.

In the end, though it is quite entertaining, you are left wondering what 21 could’ve been had this material been given to the guys who made Knocked Up or Superbad.

Genre: Thriller
Director: M. Night Shyamalan
Cast: Mark Wahlberg, Zooey Deschanel
Storyline: A mysterious air-borne toxin forces people to kill themselves
Bottomline: Happening. Not.

After Lady in the Water, M. Night Shyamalan probably had a nightmare.

He could see people walk out of the cinema halls halfway into his film and kill themselves because they couldn’t take it any more.

He woke up and wrote and wrote and wrote… Different ways how people could kill themselves… They could jump off the roof, shoot themselves, lie down in front of a lawn-mower, bang their heads into glass windows, cut off their veins if car-crashing doesn’t work…

He didn’t have a plot as such, so he looked back at his films – he’s shown the living dead, a superhuman born on earth, aliens from outer space, a village that lived in the past, nymphs and scrunts from water – and realised that logical progression demanded paranormal activity out of thin air.

So he finished his script in a line: A mysterious air-borne toxin (which will remain mysterious till the end of the film) is making people kill themselves all along the West Coast of America. Coming up next in the order could be a film about weirdos from the future.

Now, we already know that Shyamalan has the knack of stretching short story scripts to a feature-length thriller and we’ve never had a problem with that because he manages to weave in a conflict (both for the protagonist of the film and the larger community) and resolve it with a little bit of logical reasoning.

Here, you are let down from the story department because he sticks to the most convenient of horror film explanations – that some things are just an act of nature and cannot be explained. Zombie films offer better reasoning.

There is one genuinely funny scene in the film. Mark Wahlberg, wasted thoroughly in this let’s-run-away-from-air misadventure, after figuring out that plants and trees are causing the plague that causes people to kill themselves, decides to apologise because he heard they respond to human stimulus… only to realise he was barking up the wrong tree made of plastic.

There are some truly spooky shots of trees in the wind but that’s where the horror quotient ends.

Most shots of people killing themselves look straight out of like a laugh out loud spoof. And since this starts happening right from scene one, at no point do you take this film seriously. But then, as long as you are laughing and being entertained, who cares what’s happening.

I’ll review the film after a second watch because I missed the first few minutes tonight. But here are a few thoughts:

Dasavatharam is the most entertaining B-movie made in recent times with a classy, intelligent subtext for those who care. I couldn’t help wonder if such an intelligent script needed to be made with a spelling-it-out-for-the-mass sort of sensibility. But then, budgets dictate sensibility, I guess. He hasn’t made this for the Oscars. He made it for Aascar Ravichandran who needs lakhs of people to watch the film to recover the crores he spent.

With not a single dull moment, Kamal Hassan’s screenplay moves at breakneck speed, with some of the best action scenes we’ve seen in Indian cinema. It is extra-ordinary effort as Kamal Haasan brings alive every single of the ten characters from under all that prosthetic make-up.

The accents may be a little unsettling and difficult to follow if you’re watching it in Rohini complex and it is tough to keep up with the Tamil subtitles… but the man’s face speaks volumes.

The film plays out through a series of adventures and like any good chase movie, the story is told and the conflicts unfold while the characters are on the run… with each character representing a type. There’s Govind Ramasamy who is a man of science while Andal (Asin) is the face of faith. Then, there’s the peace-loving Afghani, a daft American President, an old school Jap who could’ve been a Samurai, an ex-CIA agent who’s a meticulous killing machine, a contrastingly tame RAW agent, an entertaining Sardar, a senile Paati, a dark-skinned son of the soil and the Vaishnavite priest. Through these types, science meets religion, biological warfare meets martial arts, action meets comedy, conspiracy meets destiny and good meets evil… all seamlessly and at a scale that will make Indian cinema proud.

Most of the parallel-running narratives are tied up quite neatly towards the end while some are just tied up conveniently for the sake of the statement - that everything happens for a reason.

Yes, it’s a little cheesy but that’s the way we like it, don’t we?

Watch it with a bag of NaCl, minus all that hype and you are sure to have one hell of a ride. Get yourself a darshan of the demi-god’s dashavatar, at the price of a movie ticket.

Genre: Thriller
Director: Raj Kumar Gupta
Cast: Rajeev Khandelwal, Gajraj Rao, Shashanka Ghosh
Storyline: Homecoming turns into a nightmare for Aamir after he finds his family missing and a phone tossed into his hand on arrival.
Bottomline: Blows your mind

You can sense an original film two minutes into it.
Aamir is fresh right from the introductory montage of Mumbai waking up to ‘It’s a good day.’ We see everyday sights, like it would be cut for a documentary on one of the greatest cities in the world.
The common man and the general public are no extras in the film. They are the fabric the film is made of.
They are there all through the film, never letting you suspend your disbelief and that’s what makes Aamir one of the most engaging films ever made in recent times. That’s why the climax keeps you riveted and your heart pounding.
Debutant director Raj Kumar Gupta knows his craft. He knows the best way to make you buy his constructed reality is if he plants his character into a reality you are so familiar with – the reality of Mumbai with its dirty patli-galis and people so engrossed in their lives that they have stopped caring about others.
Screenwriting textbooks would tell you that if the scene does not take the story forward, it shouldn’t be in the film. Aamir works exactly because it does not follow these rules.
There are scenes that have nothing to do with the story as such but they portray reality of life. Haven’t you often got into the cab often hoping the driver knows the route?
Aamir is great storytelling because it employs moments like that to give its surreal narrative oodles of credibility and makes what’s an unreal situation extremely plausible.
Not only does in sparkle in form, Aamir is high on content too with its layering. At one level, it’s just the story of a helpless man trying to save his family, reduced to being a puppet at the hands of the people who’ve kidnapped his loved ones and is told that man does not write his own destiny.

At another level (*spoiler alert till end of the paragraph, select text to highlight*), it’s about the Muslim identity post 9/11 and takes you deep into the mind of the terrorist. Aamir, after being searched thoroughly by the Customs on arrival, is first sent to the lesser-developed pockets of the city. His first stop is at a National Restaurant where he sees a middle class family contemplating ordering cola, his second stop is a Gulistan building which is in ruins, all he has to do after that is make a call to Karachi to get into the bad books of the cops and little later, he’s walking through a slaughter-house and asked to halt at the Indo-Gulf lodge where he gets in touch with the men who provide the money which after a few scenes is traded for a bomb.

Yes, a few stereotypes do find their way into the film but then, the filmmaker does his best to debunk some of them. Like the bit where he casually shows us his fundamentalist villain sip MNC branded cola. It’s these casual cues that work better than the obvious metaphors like the slaughter-house or the monkey toy that is hit on the head when it stops dancing after being given the key.

Rajeev Khandelwal is such a terrific actor that it is impossible to believe he’s from the soap opera circuit. The support cast is fresh and raw, and all that adds to the fabric of realism as captured by cinematographer Alphonse Roy.

The score, though a little inspired from the ‘Requiem for a Dream’ theme, haunts you long after the film’s over.

Creative producer Anurag Kashyap once again proves that he is the best thing to happen to independent filmmaking of our times.

Overall, Aamir is one film you don’t want to miss, more so if you are a movie-buff.

Genre: Drama
Director: Ram Gopal Varma
Cast: Amitabh Bachchan, Abhishek Bachchan, Aishwarya Rai Bachchan
Storyline: The Nagre family has to pay the price for power.
Bottomline: Way too much talking but a return to form nonetheless

First, the good news.

If there was an award for the best lit film, this may be nominated for the awards next year. But then, if lighting is the first thing that you feel like talking about after watching the film… Ah yes, the good news…
RGV hasn’t entirely lost his touch after Aag.

We see glimpses of genius all through Sarkar Raj, it even has a better premise than the original. Though Sarkar had a great start and a brilliant finish, the middle was quite muddled up for want of a conflict and it ended up a decent film with a few great moments.

Here, the middle is solid – it is probably the best part of the film, the Bachchans impress again and how. But that’s where all the good bits end.

The bad news: As a whole, Sarkar Raj falls a few notches below Sarkar because of all that talking, over-excited cinematography and a climax that seems like an after-thought. There is some interesting framing but half the time it doesn’t mean anything more than an intriguing composition and play of light.
Not that the writing is bad (it’s quite smart by Hindi film standards) but man, can they talk prose!

Villains continue to be the weakest link of the franchise. Barring one, the rest of them are caricatures. There’s even the mandatory B-movie scene where all the bad guys sit plotting against the good guys and one of them does the evil plan laugh. Only that here, when asked about what the brilliant idea is, he adds: I haven’t thought fully yet. Now Mr.Varma, there is no place for the cheesy if you’re aiming at making a classy film.

And, how seriously do you want us to take a film with villains with funny names and stupid mannerisms?

A political thriller needs villains who will send a chill up your spine with what they are capable of. A powerful family needs equally powerful adversaries. There is a hint of that when a powerful kingmaker is introduced when the camera looks up to his feet from the floor below and in the background, we see the Nagre family stand respectfully in front of him. But then, we don’t see much of this guy – the one man who can actually give the Nagre family sleepless nights.

The father-son interaction scenes are the best part of the film. That’s where the meaty chunk of drama comes from and the Bachchans deliver. Together, they can make the prose come alive. RGV overdoses on the Bachchans not knowing when to stop. Spoiler alert, highlight to read: The man takes five bullets on his chest. For the sake of cinema, he better be dead, right? The last thing we want is a hospital scene where he’s admitted alive. RGV feels compelled to keep him alive for one more scene just to make way for a final father-son dialogue. Characters don’t always need to get time to say their Goodbyes. If you are aiming for Sudden Death, it has got to be sudden without any time for Goodbyes. A brilliant performance nonetheless.

We can’t say the same about the latest Bachchan though. She sends glycerin flowing down her make-up in one straight line so that it doesn’t mess with the way she looks – how self-conscious can one get?
The rest of her dialogue delivery is so flat and with the quirky camerawork, that last scene actually looks like one of those freaky twist-endings.

RGV continues paying tribute to The Godfather, by incorporating all those significant subplot points he had missed out in the first part. So though it maybe a fun exercise for RGV fans to see how he’s recreated these scenes within the context of Indian politics, it just makes the film all the more predictable.

But coming after Aag, Sarkar Raj is a great improvement that reminds us, in spurts, the magic that RGV is capable of.

Genre: Thriller
Director: Hansal Mehta
Cast: Sikandar, Neha Uberoi, Arbaaz Khan, Gulshan Grover
Storyline: A hairy, wooden player with three stock expressions finds himself as the villain responsible for kidnap and murder.
Bottomline: Not as bad as people say it is.

Introducing Sikandar, the new Suniel Shetty (remember Shetty when he first made his debut… this one’s comparable to that).

The introduction song is enough to rest my case.

Within the first ten minutes, whatever little expectations you had from a Sanjay Gupta production are reduced to zilch.

Which is the only thing that works for Woodstock Villa. That once you make your peace with the situation, things only get better.

The film begins with a hyperactive camera (Vikash Nowlakha comes up with a few gorgeous sweep shots otherwise) that doesn’t stay on anything for more than half a second as a couple (Arbaaz and Neha) have a fight in the middle of a nightclub and Arbaaz Khan ends every line of his with ‘Sara’ trying to drill her name into our heads. The next thing we know he’s yelling “You bastard” into the phone because a mysterious kidnapper is demanding ransom for his wife.

The kidnapper stays mysterious only for two minutes after which director Hansal Mehta decides to give him a full fledged cool intro song as he enters riding a Harley (he’s so cool that he can’t seem to take his hand of the clutch) and his sunglasses take care of the rest of the acting in the song.

One scene after another, the filmmaker goes to spell out the character: First, young Sikandar seems to take Love Thy Neighbour a little literally even if she’s married. Two, he owes money to his landlord Shakti Kapoor. Three, he’s in a nightclub with a friend telling us why he’s returned to India. Four, he owes money to bad man Gulshan Grover and five, even when he’s getting beaten up, has his pride in tact.

After getting beaten up, he bumps into the girl he met at the bar (poor thing hasn’t heard of valet parking) at the deserted parking lot late in the night and asks her for a lift.

Neha Uberoi looks like a sexier version of Soha Ali Khan, manages a decent debut, pulling off the cheesiest dialoguebaazi with a straight face. Sikandar can only do better than this by working within his limitations. All he has to do is steal roles from Suniel Shetty.

S.Farhan’s story is the only thing that keeps you hooked, in spite of all the plot holes. What sort of a con would take a bagful of money on board an international flight?

Smart storytelling is about tying up those loose ends, more so in a thriller. The film doesn’t become smart because you employ jump cuts, split screens and bleach the image. It looks like you just finished your first editing assignment in film school.

Hansal Mehta used to be a better filmmaker before he joined Sanjay Gupta. Now it’s hard to tell them apart. And, even Yeh Kya Ho Raha Hai seems more mature.

Yes, Woodstock Villa is juvenile filmmaking but it somewhat engages with its gimmickry.

Sorry guys,

Thank you for your emails and comments. Been a little busy with outstation trips. Just getting back to the routine.

It’s been a crazy fortnight or so. Finally finished casting for my new film and we’re likely to shoot by July end or August.

That’s also the time That Four Letter Word would be out on Home Video and on Video on Demand. Watch this space, will post a link through which you ll be able to order the film directly.

Thanks. And I promise to post the pending reviews and new stuff in a couple of days.

“You’re not the man I knew ten years ago,” said Marion, after meeting her old lover and the man with the Fedora hat famously replied: “It’s not the years, honey, it’s the mileage.”

That was when they together fought the raiders of the Lost Ark over twenty years ago. Guess what Marion will tell him when she sees good old Indy when the fourth installment of the Indiana Jones franchise opens today.

No matter what she says, the mileage has brought the franchise alive for a new generation of viewers.
What began as a fun exercise to pay homage to the cornball TV action heroes of yore who delivered lines topped with cheese is a cult by itself that has spurned scores of high-budget visual effects tributes.

According to the legend, George Lucas wanted to create something “even better” than James Bond and came up with Indiana Smith borrowing the name from his dog. Turned out that his good friend Steven Spielberg didn’t quite like Smith. And George casually tossed up Jones. And Jones it was.

And hence that the inside joke in the Last Crusade when Sean Connery as Dr.Henry Jones Sr. tells us that Dr. Jones Junior named himself Indiana after a dog.

Arguably, the Last Crusade has been the best from the franchise, thanks to the rip-roaring father-son chemistry between the Joneses.

After running out of ideas to revive the franchise, Lucas found just the perfect one after twenty years – as life comes a full circle for Dr. Jones Junior to play father figure to young superstar Shia La Beouf who will hopefully carry the Jones legacy into the future for the generations to come.

We know that because Shia La Beouf plays a motor-cycle riding greaser called Mutt Williams. If Indiana was named after a dog, a mutt cannot be too unrelated to the Jones family, right?

The plot has always been an excuse to unleash some fun and adventure…

If you’ve seen the first three films, you can write the plot down yourself.

Scene One: A super that tells us which year it is. Location, some ancient cave where Indiana Jones is looking for something, an adventure to get things started, cut back to the classroom where Indy’s alter ego (every superhero has got to have one) Dr. Jones teaches his students a thing or two about archeology, followed by a new lead that introduces them to *insert the subject matter of the movie title* (in this case, the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull) and soon enough the rival group of villains in search of the subject matter from the movie title attack Dr. Jones for the clue and before you know it, the adventure has begun… a map shows you where they fly to for the action to unfold, throw in crates of snakes, vampire bats, wasps, rats in caves, a little romance (Indy reunites with Marion again) and company (that would be Mutt Williams who we suspect is Henry Mutt Jones Super Junior) all accompanied to the unforgettable John Williams score (that till today doubles up as the score for every other film award function) and what you get is an Indiana Jones film.
With visual effects from Lucas’s stable of Industrial Light and Magic, we can be rest assured that cheap imitation Mummies will be put to shame.

Yes, the films have hardly been politically correct. Temple of Doom was banned in India for blasphemy and rightly so.

The franchise celebrates American Pride and give Jones the licence to stick his nose in matters concerning cultures the creators themselves do not understand.

Indian prince eating chilled monkey brain? Not in a million years, dudes.

But, let’s just let that pass. How seriously can we take a film that’s intentionally mindless and cheesy so that we can all have a little fun celebrating pulp fiction? So let’s just freeze our brains under Fedora hats and join Indy for another crazy adventure.

Genre: Drama
Director: Jason Reitman
Cast: Ellen Page, Michael Cera, Jennifer Garner, J.K.Simmons
Storyline: A 16-year-old gets pregnant and decides to give the baby away for adoption
Bottomline: Bitter-sweet heartwarming tale of growing up

What are the first few thoughts that come to your mind when you hear about a film that deals with teen pregnancy?

Disturbing, melodramatic, depressing, seriously heartbreaking with heavy-duty emotions?

Juno is anything but any of that.

It’s matter-of-factly real, incredibly light-hearted, funny and a heartwarmingly bitter-sweet tale of growing up and taking responsibility.

It’s one of the best-written films in recent times.

What’s the typical response you get from filmi fathers when they hear their daughter’s pregnant?
Here, a brilliantly restrained J.K.Simmons says: “I thought you were the kind of girl who knew when to say when.”

And Juno, the 16-year-old to-be-Mom admits: “I don’t know what kind of girl I am.”

Juno is the story about this girl who is dealing with things way beyond her maturity level, consequent to her decision to keep the baby and give it away for adoption without any of the morality baggage usually forced on to a subject like this.

If at all there’s any message intended, the only moral that comes out is: “Shut up. It’s none of your business” to all those who have nothing to do with a situation as sensitive as this.

When the ultrasound technician rebukes Juno with a seemingly harmless-but-loaded “Thank goodness for that” after learning she has found adoptive parents for her baby, there’s this stinging dose of snubbing she gets from Juno’s supportive step-mom: “I am a nail technician and we both ought to stick to what know…

You think you’re so special because you get to play Picture Pages up there. My five-year-old daughter could do that and she’s not the smartest bulb in the tanning bed. So why don’t you go back to night school in Manteno and learn a real trade.”

But for the smart and witty chunks of dialogue-writing (Screenplay by Diablo Cody), it seems all too real.

Juno knows she made a mistake, she knows she’s too young to raise a baby and is smart enough to take responsibility for her action, even if it includes finding caring parents for her baby and going the extra mile to keep them posted about every little development about the pregnancy, making a genuine attempt to be friends with them and discovers a few things about love and relationships along the way.

Juno is sunny, serious and funny at the same time without being even a wee bit manipulative of its melodramatic potential, exploring all aspects of teen pregnancy… Relationship between sex and boredom, contraceptives, abortion, morality, social stigma, the price to pay and the future at stake are all addressed and rolled out seamlessly in this taut 90-minute-narrative.

Young Ellen Page who’s already showed us what she could in Hard Candy (the two-character film set in a building), breezes through this role with multi-dimensional fluency, carrying the film on her shoulders.

If you are a teen thinking of getting sexually active or are a parent of young adults, you sure want to watch Juno. Because, more than teen pregnancy, Juno is really about modern-day relationships, supporting the ones you love, love and the baggage that comes with it.

Probably for the first time in the movies, a biological mother-baby bond isn’t treated with any sort of sanctity.

Juno never ever sees the baby as hers. She just sees it as a form of life which can bring joy to people who want it and gives it away, knowing fully well that there was no place for it in her life… without an iota of regret or sadness. That’s what makes Juno incredibly real and responsible.

After all, not all relationships are biological – the mother is not necessarily the one who bears the child but she’s surely the one who raises the baby.

Copycats from Bollywood, why don’t you rip-off something like this, with all its integrity in tact?

Genre: Adventure
Director: Andy Wachowski, Larry Wachowski
Cast: Emile Hirsch, Christina Ricci, Susan Sarandon, John Goodman, Matthew Fox
Storyline: After the death of his daredevil racer brother, the second son of the Racer family decides to step into his shoes to take on evil corporates.
Bottomline: Go Kids Go

If you are a kid or a child at heart, this is possibly the best summer in recent times.

Your favourite cartoon hero Speed Racer is zipping through town.

A word of caution if you are a Wachowski Brothers fan or if you still have your Matrix trenchcoats and black shades on.

This one’s for kids. So do not expect anything more than just that.

But Speed Racer sports the Wachowski signature in its subtext.

Like Matrix and V for Vendetta (which the brothers wrote and produced), Speed Racer too is a story about how one man takes on those who control the system. The philosophy remains the same – only the genre is different. It is about the quintessential triumph of the human spirit against assembly-line odds stacked up against him by those who govern our lives.

Like the first two movies, Speed Racer too looks towards anime for inspiration and creates a never-seen-before spectacle of form in animation films from Hollywood.

We’re not talking about the quality of animation and visual effects alone, we’re talking about the inventiveness in storytelling and form. The background landscape seamlessly makes way for a series of comic panels detailing the flashback segments as the hero in the foreground broods over it in the present.

There’s even some non-linear storytelling thrown in at the start to let you figure out what’s going on.
Because of this start, chances are you either start loving the film or completely hating it.

If you can sit through the first 15 minutes unfazed, you’re going to be in for the ride of your life. Thrilling races with space-age cars on roller-coaster racetracks, edge-of-the-seat action, the comic subplot with the adventures of the adorable Spritle (Paulie Litt) and his chimp Chim Chim, Speed’s love story with his childhood sweetheart Trixie, the drama between Rex and his father, the villainous Mr.Royalton… To put it simply, there’s action, adventure, mischief, fantasy, romance, comedy, drama, revenge and awesome animation giving it a larger than life canvas… This is the Wachowski masala film.

Lost fans will be glad that good old Jack (Matthew Fox) has found his acting cells after a disastrous outing in Vantage Point.

Even if you have not seen the original cartoon series Mach GoGoGo (like yours truly), you are going to want to see it.

For fans of cinema, Speed Racer packs in the best of both worlds – real emotions through live action set against a backdrop of awe-inspiring animation and visual effects.

So machchi, go, go, go…