One of the few things more inscrutable than the mind of a woman — more complex, harder to unspool, if you will — is the collective mind of a couple. Not just the joint decision-making, shaped via pragmatism and compromise and societal positioning, but their decisions re: each other. What makes them fight all the time? Does he really like her? How bizarre for those two to have a spark… No matter what, we the observers remain perpetually outside the fishbowl while they grow to think as one, however perfect or discordant. We can pretend we’re in on the joke, but they’re the only ones who get every layer.

This appears evident in the freshly-forged collaboration between director David Fincher and author Gillian Flynn, who, with Gone Girl, have taken her characters and his characteristic style and run with it, staying loyal to her riveting novel but, well, true to his cunning methods, loyal like a fox. His form and her content play off each other with obvious glee, but this mutual admiration dulls the edge off both text and technique. The two of them might have a blast, but us mortals closed off from the fishbowl might find this adaptation a little less satisfying — and a little too convenient.

It becomes gapingly aware that Gone Girl is not a novel (and that it perhaps wants desperately to be one) when we see the first chapter title next to Ben Affleck’s Nick. “The Morning Of” works in the novel, but on screen the words dangle in the air, as if waiting for some specific: The Murder/The Misunderstanding/The Massacre. They aren’t, and Nick is as unfinished as the phrase. He goes to a bar, greets his sister, starts playing the Life board-game over a morning glug of Bourbon. The dialogue, however, true to the book, jars. In Fincher’s expert hands, it all initially rings too hollow, too expository. Till you get used to it, which takes a little while.

And then we hear her. Amy Elliot Dunne, Nick’s wife, unwilling muse for children’s books that dub her Amazing, and a woman with a voice so cartoonishly fluffy it could launch a million Elizabeth Gilbert audiobooks. Like in the book, she has her own side of the story, and it is a warm, romcom-my one, full of sugardust and cutesy marriage proposals. This is not the story Nick is in right now; it is the morning of their fifth wedding anniversary and Amy is missing. The world mostly suspects Nick, not least because he doesn’t look as worried as they feel he should, and because he has the smuggest grin in the world.

It is this grin that makes Affleck such an ideal choice for the part. Nick is a broad-shouldered Missouri boy, a cornfed Homecoming King type whose mother raised him to be polite to casserole-carrying strangers even when his world is collapsing around him. At a press conference talking about his missing wife, he stands awkwardly next to a large picture of her — a perfect picture, professionally shot and lit, just the way Amy would like — and one of the photographers inappropriately asks him to smile. Slumped shoulders notwithstanding, he obliges wryly for a split-second, more a muscle-reflex than an actual smile, but even this one frame is enough for the press and for us. It is a winner’s smile, a grin so entitled it dazzles the rest of us into inadequacy.

The he-said/she-said narrative style of the book was always going to be a challenge, and Fincher gets it half-right. Amy, played by Rosamund Pike, initially effervescent and later icy as a sucked-on lozenge, is a methodical diarist. A method diarist, even, going by the way she tops her pens and pencils with thematically aproppriate props — a stork, a wedding-cake couple — while writing out entries in voices first besotted then beleaguered. Nick, on the other hand, never quite gets a say: we follow him stumbling ineptly through the proceedings, looking as guilty as someone who forgot to take out the trash but not someone who killed his wife. Is there a difference, though?

Fincher thinks there is, and leaves it to his master composers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross to underscore things, and this they do with magnificent ease. The background score is equal parts serrated (for Nick) and silken (for Amy) in the first half of the film, the he-said/she-said portion, and were the score less masterful — layering simple groove upon less-simple groove in spirals, creating a repetitive and most meticulous disharmony — one might well ask if there was too much music in this film. As it stands, though, the music is the best thing about Gone Girl.

As an investigative procedural, Fincher (who also made Zodiac and Se7en) has us more than covered. Kim Dickens, looking like a flintier version of Amy Adams, plays detective Rhonda Boney with an easy efficiency that wouldn’t be out of place in a Coen film. Tyler Perry is perfect as the narcissistic lawyer who specialises in defending the indefensible, talking the talk, calling himself Elvis and hurling gummybears with admirable precision. Carrie Coon, as Nick’s wary twin sister Margo, is scenestealingly good.

But for all the players who shine, twice as many get the short end of the stick. Sela Ward doesn’t get to snap her talkshow-host fangs nearly as much, David Clennon and Lisa Banes don’t get their due as Amy’s parents (despite Banes proving great with acid dialogue), Neil Patrick Harris is fine as Desi Collings but is far too inadequate minus the terrific, terrifying mother character the book has but the film doesn’t. Also, casting an actress instead of Emily Ratajkowski might have allowed the Andie character a bit more room. The investigation works but the media circus — and the townsfolk taking selfies outside Nick’s bar — needed to be focussed on more sharply.

The reason, one surmises, that so much was excised has less to do with length and more to do with making Gone Girl about the titular girl. Much of the film is obsessed with Amy, and while Rosamund Pike throws herself gamely into the part — in particular, she snaps a Kit-Kat loud as a pro and says the word “idiot” wonderfully well — this serves to only make us like her less.

It’s topnotch craftsmanship, but to what end? There is a sensational scene with Amy and a hammer, and while it made me jump both times I saw it, and continues to haunt me, it doesn’t entirely make sense. But then Sense, at least the big-picture version of the word, has never been Fincher’s end-game, has it?

Gone Girl is a finely-made frustration, often too polished for its own good. It’s almost as exasperating as trying to write the review for a mystery without giving anything away. For those who have read the book, all you really need to know is that Fincher criminally sucks the life out of the ‘Cool Girl’ monologue. For the rest, this is a solid mystery film that falls short of greatness. In a nutshell, to quote Nick’s magazine-writerly complaint about Amy’s diary, it rests on too convenient an endnote.

Rating: 3 stars

~

First published Rediff, October 31, 2014

Tabu has balls.

Cheeni Kum could have been just another romance between an arrogant old perfectionist and a smitten waif, but the woman here has spirit. She rides the patriarch into a corner, constantly putting him on the spot, and her stoically unblinking, deadpan retorts are a perfect match for her cocksure suitor. That character, Nina, lends the pair contrast, gives it chemistry, makes the film work.

R Balki’s debut is, thus, a deftly made May-December love story that ends up being both relatable and romanticised, both honest and hysterical. A mostly delicious repast of repartee and repercussions, the script isn’t over-baked and the characters simmered to perfection. Although, for a film with that title, there are indeed a couple teaspoons sugar too many, by the very end.

But we get ahead of ourselves. Lets start from the beginning:

Amitabh Bachchan plays Buddhadeb Gupta, a London restaurateur who prides himself on the finest Indian food. His is a cellphone-free kitchen, where the master believes a perfect biryani is more monumental an achievement than Da Vinci’s Last Supper — the former impacts several more senses. And while his British waiter struggles over the nuances of mouthwatering frontier food names, Buddha’s bar serves up magnificent desi dishes to London.

One typical evening, while the ponytailed, preachy perfectionist holds forth to his white-hatted troops on the unbearable lightness of hing, or some such, he gasps at the realisation that a customer has actually sent back a dish. Tabu is the strongwilled Nina Verma, a confident woman currently visiting a friend in London. Buddha storms out and laces the lady with unsubtle sarcasm, laying it on thick and making said friend aghast, leading to the ladies storming out of the restaurant.

Buddha, forced to acknowledge his staff committed a cardinal sin, is compelled to offer an apology, an act he is not used to. Meanwhile Nina, conveniently caught up in London’s trademark squall, frequently borrows the chef’s umbrella. Romance is obviously — underscored more than adequately with shots of Tabu walking and turning back (wash, rinse, repeat, repeat) — in the rainy air, and the days get pleasanter as the wit flies freely and the evident is never quite that.

Which brings us to the premise: He’s 64, she’s 34, and all is hunky dory. Except her 58-year-old father, played by Paresh Rawal, who objects to this union in as melodramatic a manner as is possible. Thus, as they say in Bollywood script sessions, ‘Conflict.’ This results in much chaos, a second-half with far less steam than the pre-interval opening, and a contrived, heavy-handed approach the film really didn’t deserve. Add to that a cancer subplot and a nice supporting character turns into an emotionally manipulative angle Cheeni Kum should have done without.

It’s a crisply written film, the dialogue mostly working very well. For all the talk of sarcasm, the lines aren’t likely to bowl you over with superb irony, but occasionally a clever gem shines through. The repartee between the lead pair is tight, as are Bachchan’s conversations with Sexy, his 9-year-old neighbour played by an impressive Swini Khara — the former are earnest, as funny as real life often it; the latter tend towards the pithy, but usually stop short of it. It’s a very unBollywood script, and it takes some stellar actors to pull it off.

A big wow then to Amitabh Bachchan, the film’s marvellous pivot. We shouldn’t be surprised by anymore Bachchanism, but the man — currently, constantly pushing himself onto a limb, decidedly making 2007 his own — is an undisputable rockstar. His Buddha is smooth yet suffers from occasional social awkwardness, and Bachchan manages both the rough brat and the annoyed old man tones with such ease. He’s arrogant and self-assured, yet feels the need to impress her — while never admitting it. This is one of his finest performances to date, because he sticks to the consistent key of the character, and while the film itself changes genres in the end, he stays Buddha. And is irresistible.

Tabu is a great actress, and with a role that calls for far less bravura than her leading man, she is comfortably understated. As mentioned, their banter runs deep through the film, and her Nina, whom you never know when to take seriously, is a perfect foil to Buddha’s don’t-ask-the-obvious derision. There is a fantastic moment where she berates Bachchan for being too forward, for daring, like all men would, to ask a girl out and assume she’s available, just because she’s smiled at him a few times. The tension is palpable as Bachchan falls silent and you wince, suddenly ill-disposed toward her character. ‘I do hope you won’t be late,’ she ends, still deadpan, immediately confirming both date and smirk.

The inimitable Zohra Sehgal plays Bachchan’s wrestling-loving mother, a terrible cook who lectures him on gymming and knows him inside out, and is evidently the source of his scornful tongue. Paresh Rawal unfortunately plays the film’s sole caricature, an over-written character working more for ha-has than realism, and while the actor is inevitably good enough to make us chuckle, his character needed to be leaner. As mentioned, Swini Khara is pretty good, holding her own in demanding conversational scenes.

The crackling first half coasts along wonderfully, relying almost solely on Bachchan’s formidable charm. The second half sees trouble with a hammy third act. Cheeni Kum is a very neat film, but the messy end — the last three lines of dialogue exchanged by Bachchan and Tabu are the film’s very worst — leaves a peculiar aftertaste.

This isn’t a groundbreaking film, but it didn’t set out to be. It’s a maturely written film with great characters, tremendous performances and some fantastic moments. It could have been perfect, but the lesser said about that end the better.

Watch it. A brilliant sequence involving the chef, a chemist, chhatris and chachas is absolute movie magic, and in itself well worth the price of admission. Bravo.

Rating: 3.5 stars

~

First published Rediff, May 25, 2007

Christopher Nolan doesn’t like three-dimensional cinema. This is a curious compunction for a maker of blockbusters, a director whose releases have become events in themselves, especially at a time when the most creative minds — Steven Spielberg to Martin Scorsese to Jean-Luc Godard, masters from across generations — are exploring the depths and possibilities of 3D cinema. Yet Nolan, who shoots on film stock and refuses to go quietly into the digital night, wants more. With Interstellar, he delivers a movie so vast and so universally resonant that it makes the audience question space and time regardless of our preparedness for the subject matter. Why, indeed, worry about three dimensions when you’re working with five?

Dinner plates are laid upside down till they need to be used in a dustbowl future, an arid world with dying crops and an immediate need for students to become farmers. In a corner of this world lives Cooper, a widower and former NASA pilot who now grows corn. Matthew McConaughey, who plays Cooper, does so with his trademark slowed-down drawl, his voice suitably sandpapered as if by decades of dust. He says “skaaai” when he means “sky”, and, were it not for the blessed fact that Indian theatres are seeing Interstellar with subtitles, this could get cumbersome since Nolan makes McConaughey talk a great deal.

Every word, however, is riveting. The hazy world is teetering on the edge of extinction, a brutal death by famine. But then one day Cooper’s formidable bookshelf begins to talk, something only his daughter, Murph (a wonderful, wonderful Mackenzie Foy) notices. This leads them to a secret NASA base, one that requires Cooper to pilot a craft into a distant wormhole on the edge of Saturn, one that could lead to new galaxies and potentially habitable planets. Murph, a brilliant kid devoted to her father, doesn’t take this decision well and Cooper says he must mend their relationship before he goes. “Then I’ll keep it broken so you have to stay,” she asserts. He doesn’t stay.

For the first hour or thereabouts, Interstellar feels like an extraordinarily well-crafted Spielberg-by-numbers exercise: McConaughey’s character is close to that of Tom Cruise in War Of The Worlds; Michael Caine, who plays scientist Dr Brand, gives a tour of NASA’s top-secret facilities with the same smug glee Richard Attenborough displayed when showing off Jurassic Park; and there’s a father-child relationship at the heart of the film. But then somewhere in space, as their craft (called Endurance) locks onto a floating base station, Hans Zimmer’s music becomes operatically ominous and the lock clicks on with a near-Kubrick perfection. The film changes gears immaculately. It might pay tribute to visionary directors, and even current tentpole movie gods (the word “Tesseract,” which nowadays appears trademarked by the Marvel Cinematic Universe, is used) — but there is distinctly, unmistakably only one man at the helm of Interstellar.

Visually, it is an astonishing, awe-inspiring film, one that may want you to hunt around your IMAX recliners for a seatbelt. Cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema (responsible for Her, my favourite film from last year) captures both earth and space with starkly dry brown-blue palettes and yet manages to throw in frames composed like paintings. Tiny spacecrafts skim past giant planetary rings, waves the size of mountains look down upon ill-equipped humans and beautifully boxy robots, and a bookshelf is worth its weight in immortality. Christopher Nolan, who made Paris fold in on itself so magnificently in Inception, clearly has a feel for galaxy-sized origami.

The performances are uniformly striking. McConaughey doles out exposition and theory with a smart everyman curiosity; Foy makes the first-act riveting following which Jessica Chastain takes over most evocatively; Anne Hathaway, bright of eye and sharp of cheekbone, is efficient and cool and inch-perfect as a no-nonsense pilot; David Gyasi and Wes Bentley, as frequently arguing astronauts, ground the film with credibility; Michael Caine is, well, Michael Caine; and Bill Irwin is terrific as TARS, the robot set to 90% honesty because, quite frankly, we can’t handle the truth.

Interstellar is an incredible ride, a film that will scare and stupefy and drop jaws and make us weep, the kind of film that makes our hearts thump against our ribs for forty straight-minutes and makes us believe in the glory of the movies. And that isn’t even the best part.

The best part — not the Pledge or the Turn but, the very best bit, the Prestige — is Christopher Nolan’s absolute mastery of time. Storytelling is a manipulative art form, and by relentlessly plying plot upon plot and event upon event, Nolan slows Interstellar down — even as the narrative itself attains hyperspeed. Its 169 minutes feel unbelievably, achingly long because of how much happens within them, the broadstrokes, like a two-year drive to Saturn, taking place briskly, while more time is dedicated to unzipping a cryogenically frozen sleeping bag, or an astronaut helping out another by giving him earphones full of chirping birds out in space. The balance of narrative heft is spectacular. And this feeling of an immeasurably long film — of thinking back in the third act to an opening scene and feeling like it happened many hours ago, many episodes ago, many seasons ago — is what gives Interstellar its epic breadth. We feel like it’s a film we lived.

By the end of it, Interstellar spins so forcefully and compellingly that it renders wristwatches helpless and makes us collectively travel in time. And, somewhere in the middle of it all, there’s even a girl called Lois. Oh my. All those Batman movies were a mere smokescreen; Christopher Nolan is Superman.

Rating: 5 stars

~

First published Rediff, November 7, 2014

Remember how it felt, as a kid, when cousins visited in the summer?

When an aunt’s children show up for a few vacation weeks and you hang with them and let them into your life and your room, when you’re briefly privy to more than your playground’s share of secrets, when you get to play with their toys and their ideas. And then they leave, only to show up again next year or the summer after that, when they’re different — taller and smarter and with extremely new kinds of problems, like acne, girls, board exams — and you get to catch up and fill each other in and, while doing so, realise how well/weakly you yourself are doing.

Richard Linklater’s magnificent Boyhood — filmed across 12 years — gives us characters we see in fragmented scraps of time every year, but, arranged next to each other with linear grace, the experience is a spectacularly intimate one. Like flipping through several photo-albums at once. We see a young boy grow into a young man, and this journey — which is never ever just one person’s journey — is shown to us in minute detail, detail we can both relate to and learn from, documentary-level detail that remains incredibly fascinating.

It is a ridiculously ambitious setup: shooting for a few days a year, making us live with the actors as we see young Ellar Coltrane, 7, who plays the film’s leading lad, Mason Junior, make his way to young Ellar Coltrane, 18. We don’t so much witness his journey as spy on him, and see how he — and his family — changes over the years: his face turning angular, his mother shedding her defiance, his father wisening up. These alterations are far more than skin deep (though watching physical changes play out in a tender, thoughtful film like this feels miraculous in itself) and Linklater makes sure the characters grow as much as the actors.

There has never been a film like this. This is cinema as epic-timelapse, and with it Linklater changes the very idea of time in storytelling.

Life is Boyhood’s plot. We watch Mason Jr and his sister Sam (Lorelei Linklater, the director’s daughter) deal with long car-rides, divorced parents, adolescence, and variously fogged levels of clarity. Their father, Mason Senior (Ethan Hawke) goes from fun to undependable, idealistic to comfortable. Their mother, Olivia (Patricia Arquette), tragically and heroically, copes, doing whatever she can to make things fall into place. Our job as viewers is so easy we ought to feel blessed, but so poetically and evocatively does Linklater turn his film into a time-capsule that it’s hard not to feel personally thrust into the narrative from time to time, to drift away into our own boyhoods and girlhoods and early neighbourhoods that looked remarkably different just because we were then knee-high.

The writing is, unsurprisingly for a Linklater film, extraordinary. Mason Jr, who collects arrowheads, tries sharpening rocks in his teacher’s pencil sharpener; his sister does an insufferable Britney Spears impression (which probably means it’s spot-on); they line up to buy the new Harry Potter; Mason Sr is swashbucklingly pro-Obama (till he’s older). The performances are magical, but largely because of the format. Coltrane is a lovely boy, who grows serendipitously into a Hawke-ian collegeboy, but it is the parents who really make this film feel more than fiction. Hawke — who is heartbreakingly sincere, especially when trying to pass on his love for each Beatle to his boy — brilliantly conveys the helplessness of a faraway father, and Arquette (who I had thought will forever remain mad, hot Alabama from True Romance) delivers a devastatingly touching performance, one that may well define her cinematic legacy.

As I said, there hasn’t ever been a film like Boyhood. It is a director’s ultimate what-if thought come true, the most monumental way to get past finding lookalike actors and getting periodically authentic detailing right. It is painfully real to be around, watching, as a boy’s voice cracks. As he takes his first steps towards being his own man, a free Mason, as it were, he feels like someone we have known for far longer than Linklater’s long running-time. The closing credits are depressing merely because they exist, and we want to know what happens to Mason next. Unless, as the director jokingly (?) said, he boarded a train in Europe and ran into a nice girl…

Go, get to know Boyhood. Soak it in and let it enrich you, amuse you, hold you close. Let it open your mind a little bit more toward the possibilities great cinema holds. Live it. Let this film be your jam. To paraphrase John Lennon, life is what happens when you’re busy watching other films.

Rating: 5 stars

~

First published Rediff, November 14, 2014

“AJ,” the girl gasps into her cellphone, breathlessly and furtively while gangsters surround her, “Some people are after me.”

Efficient to the last word, her man wastes no time in getting to the point: “What are they wearing?”

This is but a taste of the relentless absurdity served up by Action Jackson, the peculiar new film from Prabhudeva. It is an uneven, tacky, cheesy actioner, a film that has much going catastrophically wrong (the brunt of it involving Sonakshi Sinha) but it is also — surprise, surprise — at times incredibly zany and, much more importantly, a film that strikes back against the unending misogyny routinely perpetrated by our heroes in these larger-than-life movies. In many ways, Action Jackson can be read as a feminist statement, a film that shows girls proactively leaping onto the top rung while the leading man languishes several footholds short of heroic.

That’s right, Ajay Devgn is anything but a ‘hero’ in this film. Sure, he kills way too many people too easily, but at various points in this film, he’s a coward, he’s a liar, he’s clearly dishonourable, he’s easily tempted to cheat on his girlfriend, he’s a horrible dancer, and at one point, in order to laugh at the villain (with a too-elaborate gag borrowed from Farhan Akhtar’s ghastly Don remake), he lets his wife get walloped around by the bad guy for a while before swooping in to try and save the day.

Meanwhile, as mentioned, the girls are the ones carrying the narrative forward and inciting the story, no matter how ridiculously they do so.

Sonakshi Sinha, playing the jolly dullard she plays in every single movie, is a chronically unlucky girl who walks into a changing room where Devgn is trying on some new orange underwear. Yes sir, the superstar likes to try his briefs before he buys them. Anyway, she is thus scandalised by a look at Devgn Jr, following which her luck changes. This happens again, and she’s convinced that viewings of his schlong are key to her good fortune. Therefore she (naturally) plans to drug him in order to sneak a peek at his junk, which will, in turn, give her the luck required to dazzle potential America-based in-laws. (No, not kidding. Tell me you’ve seen this film before, I double-dare you.)

Also, a gangster’s sister finds herself abducted by a lecherous villain who starts peeling off her shirt buttons. This lady, played by Manasvi Mamgai, the unquestioned highlight of the movie, happens to be unashamedly randy and seems to be enjoying the attention. Devgn, samurai sword in hand, breezes in as an odd, Bond-inspired English song plays, and the film turns to a Wild Stone deodorant commercial as the girl — still tied to the chair — looks increasingly (and cartoonishly) aroused by the bloodshed. She huffs and puffs to show off her brassiere, developing quite the crush on Devgn. A couple of scenes later, she’s rising out of the water in a yellow bikini, reaching out for the fellow’s zipper. But he’s having none of it; leaving ambiguity to the wordsmiths of the world, he cuttingly tells her “I don’t like you” and walks away eating a candybar. (Because, as we all know, chocolate really takes the edge off these poolside situations.)

Mamgai too, like Sinha, decides obstinately to stay aimed at Devgn’s pants. The film, from this point unfolding with all the slick-but-unsubtle schlock of a video game cutscene, bombastically explores both her libido (as she sits on couches with her legs splayed gynaecologically wide) and her obsession, as she decides to hack away at Devgn’s loved ones till he’s forced to be with her.

Therefore both halves of the film — which involve an Ajay apiece, since the film has two of them — are about women wanting Ajay’s, um, piece. Flattering as this may seem, it turns the leading man into a led man, a prop for girls to fight over and build a story around. And considering how rare it is to see a masala blockbuster actually giving girls the reins, for this we must give Prabhudeva props.

Analysts of between-the-lines repression and sexuality, too, will have an absolute field day with this irredeemably and unstoppably metaphoric film, positively throbbing with visual and verbal innuendo: the Mamgai girl vamps it up and shakes her bottom in a song, but the audience-applause moment, the money-shot, bewilderingly enough comes when Devgn strips off his vest, fires a couple of blanks in her direction, and kicks the girl. Much later, just so he’s left nothing to chance (and no imagination un-abused), he penetrates the villain. Yup.

It’s all tremendously weird stuff, weird enough to be worth recommending. Visually, the film goofs around a fair bit — a villain shown in silhouette to look like The Undertaker turns out merely to be a Johnny Lever lookalike on steroids; superhero posters show up all through the film; Devgn talks about his shock and this is underscored by a flashback of, yes, him looking shocked; all the shots in Bangkok involve either samurai swords or dojos or conference rooms festooned by red lanterns — and parts of it pass by in a silly haze. It’s a loony trip.

Which isn’t to say there aren’t painful problems. The first half is a complete assault on the senses, Sonakshi Sinha cannot possibly be allowed to channel 90s Govinda anymore, and it’s cruel to make us watch Devgn try to dance. Or worse still, watch him fight to music, resulting in highly effeminate Dance Fu, where he clutches at floating toothpicks as if threading invisible canapés. And Kunal Roy Kapoor, man, is just… No. No Kunal, no. For not casting you in anything following Delhi Belly, this industry owes you a million beers. But aargh. It’s also at least a half-hour too long, even for a B-movie masochist.

Still, as trashy films go, this is properly nutty garbage. Action Jackson is a drinking game of a film, one well over the so-bad-it’s-good line, its main merit being that in a sea of superstar-massaging vehicles, it holds some genuine surprises — and makes sure its hero looks like a jackass. Skip the first half and smuggle in a quart of something bitter, and you’ll be just fine. Not least because of how valiantly Mamgai shows up in the second half to combat Devgn’s monopoly on cleavage. He still does his GaGa-hands, but she more than steals the show and gives us a new-age vamp with genuine potential.

Prabhudeva, bless him, gives us something too warped to be predictable, and it hurts how thrillingly close he came to getting the name just right. A film this focussed on what lies under the jeans should really have been called Action Johnson.

Rating: 3 stars

~

First published Rediff, December 5, 2014

You can tell just how vintage a film aspires to be by the films it steals from. KS Ravikumar’s Lingaa may be set in today for the most part, but as an opening heist — borrowed moronically yet loyally from Peter O’Toole and Audrey Hepburn’s How To Steal A Million — shows us, here is a new film that would prefer to rip off a 1966 comedy instead of one of these modern English movies. Simply because nothing out there today quite has the understated charm of old Hollywood.

That includes Rajinikanth. Sure, that most iconic of our leading men is anything but understated, but watching him in action shows us not just the most old-school of swaggers but also a self-assured coolth missing from most heroes anywhere today. It is because he has absolutely nothing to prove that Rajini shines brightest, an unmuscular gent who may sing songs about breasts but who touches young ladies in a most avuncular vein. His heroism comes with a grace that makes all the stereotyping bearable, Rajini always smilingly in on the gag — the biggest punchline being that he’s a parody of himself — rather than an actor taking his screen image too seriously.

That said, Lingaa is a deliriously scripted film about Lingaa, a present-day thief (and engineer of William Wyler saluting heists, as mentioned) who enchants a young, hefty TV news anchor to the point of pirate-fetishising dreams. The song as the girl dreams of him is particularly priceless, with glorious subtitles reading (from him to her) “Mona, my catalyst gasoline darling” and her replying, as she invitingly unbuttons her blouse, “Your Mona is like Fort Knox treasury; shall I open so coins you can carry?” It’s all magnificent, stirring stuff, and Benny Lava ain’t got nothing on these romantics.

But the cops are after Lingaa — whose face is magically devoid of a single crease but whose hands often appear gnarled — and he begins ducking from the cops while his sidekick brilliantly questions him, “Why hide like you saw your father in a wine shop?” Like I said, old-school.

Soon enough, Lingaa and his gang (plus the smitten TV anchor) decide to hotfoot it to a small village where Lingaa’s grandfather, Lingeswaran, was king. Now, in keeping with saluting the vintage, this is the real dude, a highly educated Indian ruler who was so smart he read Joseph Cambell’s The Hero With A Thousand Faces ten years before it was written. Now this original Lingaa is the true leading man, even though he falls for the most unteenagerly teenager of all, played by the younger, heftier Sonakshi Sinha, playing up her bovine ways in a desperate attempt to appear doe-like. It’s not a great move, but everything is worth watching Rajinikanth grin slyly as he says “naughty girl.”

Plot-wise, Lingaa has a lot of meat, particularly the 1939 flashback wherein grandpa Rajini gets the better of our British overlords with impressive nonchalance and dignity, even as director KS Ravikumar amps up the film’s giant scale with hundreds of extras and lavish sets. It’s a compelling watch of a man with unquestioned nobility falling from grace but never once doing what is less than ideal — even if Sinha invitingly sings “from basics to base 4, let’s have an encore,” making her intentions rather clear. (I’d say naughty girl but what’s the use when you can’t say it the way Rajini can?) The hero does it all, from obliterating caste barriers to daintily feeding British governors cake to frying up appalams for unannounced guests.

At 175 minutes, Lingaa can get tiresome, especially with the too-long fight scenes, but remains constantly watchable because of the miraculously light way in which Rajinikanth continues to wear his megastardom around him, like a chiffon cloak. In it’s own way the film tries to be progressive and forward-thinking, but this isn’t about that. It’s about a man who brings pleasure to his people. Much like its ridiculous hot-air balloon climax, then, Lingaa is a gas.

Rating: 3.5 stars

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First published Rediff, December 12, 2014

In Rajkumar Hirani’s latest film, a character steps to a blackboard and chalks up, for the benefit of a befuddled engineering college classroomful of students, the word ‘Farhanitrate,’ daring them to tell him what it means.

The word is a pun on the character’s best friend, Farhan, and while it may be a non-existant gag word in the film, the compound seems to exist in real life — Hirani’s film is doused liberally with Farhanitrate (in an Akhtar sense of the word) and several other directorial scents — including Hirani’s own touch, which is why by the time the end credits eventually roll around, you have a ‘been there, sniffed that’ feeling about it all.

There’s also a tragic, overriding feeling of futility. Why, you ask yourself, does a college film have to be made with middle-aged men playing the lead? Can we not trust younger actors to deliver, or has the insecurity of the star system blinded us to all reality?

Why must Aamir Khan, a man who told us of the last day of college 21 years ago, still play a fresh-faced student? He does adequately, and is impressively bereft of age-lines, but we really have seen it all before. For the actor, it’s probably yet another disguise, that of the young man. But it’s a role he can do in his sleep.

Ditto for Hirani and his partner in wordplay, Abhijat Joshi. 3 Idiots is a very average bit of fluffy Bollywood masala that tragically pretends, at times, to be making a profound point, one it loses in repetition. The result is a confused film, one that doesn’t know exactly where it stands, torn between lump-in-the-throat filmmaking and amateurishly written juvenilia. There are a few moments which click, but coming from the duo that created the finest film this decade, this is a massive letdown.

This is a film, as you have gleaned from the inescapably omnipresent publicity material, about three students in an engineering college. Yes, indeed. And while it borrows its principal cast from Rang De Basanti and a vibe from younger-voiced filmmakers like Nagesh Kukunoor and Akhtar, it never quite gets going. It sorely lacks that magic touch, that trademark broadstroke of Hirani sincerity. That lick of good ol’ honest filmmaking is enough to gloss over many an underwritten scene or overwritten soliloquy, but this film remains washed up, without that all-absolving coat of paint.

Anyway, back to the story. Aamir, Sharman Joshi and a portly R Madhavan are students in an engineering college run by Boman Irani, the actor reduced to a caricature so unreal that shaving his cartoon moustache takes away even Irani’s ability to keep a straight face through the farce. And what a stretch this farce is, as Hirani plays out his now-familiar tropes: college ragging with pants dropping down; cheering up a paralysed patient; and a short fellow given a length-deriding nickname. Stats are thrown in about college pressure and suicide rates, and they really don’t fit into the narrative.

Nothing quite does, to be fair. There is ludicrous fun to be had every now and again, but Hirani seems ill at ease, borrowing a Farah Khan-style old school flashback but refusing to go all-out funny — and instead labouring really hard to make a point, the aforementioned one about college and suicide. I repeat it because he does, and he does it over and over again.

The film really tries too hard. A wonderfully endearing character named Millimeter shows off a group of pups, calling the little one Kilobyte and the bigger one Megabyte, and there is a pause before he calls the mother Gigabyte. Sigh. The principal is called Virus. It’s an engineering college, get it? And so the jokes groan on, far more obvious than any of us Hiraniphiles would have liked — even as the dramatic twists and reveals emerge inadvertently funnier than the gags.

The cast is strictly okay, nobody really sparkling except for Millimeter and the girl, who isn’t around much, darn it. Kareena Kapoor dazzles with her brief role, and even though a lot of her spunk seems significantly Jab We Met in tone, she lights up the screen when she’s around. Aamir manages to sell some scenes strongly enough to make you laugh, while Madhavan proves to be a really bad choice for narrator.

This isn’t a bad film, though. By which I mean it conjures up a few moments, it will doubtless make some people cry, and every now and then we glimpse some heart. Yet it hurts to see that this is traditional Bollywood masala schlock, with scenes calculated to tickle and to evoke sympathy. It’s not awful at all, but since when did ‘not bad’ become good? Dr Feelgood doesn’t make the cut this time, and we need to measure him by the high bar his previous excellence has set — by which degree this is a whopper of a disappointment.

Rajkumar Hirani’s one of the directors of the decade, a man with immense talent and a knack for storytelling. On his debut, he hit a hundred. With his second, he hit a triple century. This time, he fishes outside the offstump, tries to play shots borrowed from other batters, and hits and misses to provide a patchy, 32*-type innings. It’s okay, boss, chalta hai. Even Sachin has an off day, and we still have great hope.

Rating: 2 stars

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First published Rediff, December 24, 2009

How must it feel to look at life through really wide eyes?

Cynicism is always easier than sincerity, and few filmmakers can nail the latter quite as consummately as Rajkumar Hirani, an old-school teller of fables who specialises in giving his audiences lumps in their throats. His are comforting films, ones with their edges sanded off and their seams showing, films unashamedly lacking in subtlety because he chooses to paint only in broadstrokes. We can all stand around and point fingers at the indulgently laboured way he makes a point, but the fact remains that PK is a ridiculously effective film, a triumph you are likely to walk away from with a gladder, lighter heart — and, perhaps, a moister handkerchief.

Aamir Khan plays a visiting alien, a head-nodding explorer out for a recce of our planet. He’s buff and eager and comes from a planet where they don’t need clothes, and seconds after landing here, one of us steals his intergalactic transmitter, the remote to signal his ship from home. Thus is the naked feller stranded and stumped, hunting for his amulet with merely a boombox for cover and company. God help you, say the folks he confounds with his bug-eyed questions, sending him for answers toward temples, mosques and churches. Madness, as you rightly imagine, ensues.

His tale is being told to us by a girl called Jagat Janani, who, for sanity’s sake — and possible Jackie Shroff fanhood growing up — calls herself Jaggu. Jaggu’s a plucky girl who has just joined a Delhi-based television news channel. Still a rookie (and thus still armed with the kind of eager-beaver enthusiasm not yet decapitated by actual time in a newsroom) Jaggu chances upon the alien and, reasonably enough, considers his story more newsworthy than one about a manic depressive dog.

The alien, PK, looks at life as laterally as an aborigine given a copy of the New Yorker, and his uniquely coherent perspective enchants Jaggu. This is all run-of-the-mill stuff, really, an old trope that could easily be taken from, say, Ron Howard’s classic Splash (right down to the nakedness), that of a disarmingly naive outsider taking us at face value. But the telling is in the details, with Hirani and co-writer Abhijat Joshi giving PK enough genuine insight to keep us hooked. They do hammer their points home in overlong fashion, however, perpetually taking several scenes to illustrate what a clever setup and punchline could do in two shots.

This foolproofing, it appears, is very much a part of Hirani’s process. The background score is used in the style of a seventies melodrama, all orchestras set to swell; characters hear things which then echo around in their heads; and there is a fond reliance on age-old cinematic cliches like characters going to a performance only to imagine themselves singing and dancing on stage. It’s all cinematic saccharine, but then, given that Hirani takes the opportunity to aim some potshots at organised religion and its gatekeepers, is the familiar a worthy method to sneak in a message? A spoonful of sugar to make the medicine go down?

Either way, religion — not God — is the enemy here, and while PK doesn’t load up the cannons quite as potently as Umesh Shukla’s OMG Oh My God did a couple of years ago, it musters up the drama in much more stirring fashion. And its protagonist is quite extraordinary.

Aamir Khan is exceptional in PK, creating an irresistibly goofy character and playing him with absolute conviction. He laughs at his goblin-ears and walks around with his eyes on high-beam throughout the film, but his transformation isn’t restricted to the physical — though I must single out and applaud the skittish way he runs, his arms straight by his side with his palms stuck out, reminiscent of Steve Carrell in Little Miss Sunshine when his character was running toward automatic doors, willing them to open fast. That, there, is the impressive thing about Khan in this film, taking a few one-shot gags and stretching them feature-length so strongly and gamely that he wins us over with sheer heart.

It is this heart that really counts in a Hirani movie. There is a passage where we see Khan’s PK going desperately from god to god, mosque to church to temple, seeking the way to his precious remote, festooned with more talismans than Saurabh Ganguly’s arm. In lesser hands this would smell like an empty exercise in audience manipulation, a cheap and easy means to unearned applause. But it’s striking how Hirani and Khan layer it on with visible earnestness, giving us something unexpectedly remarkable in the sight of that megastar immersing himself hungrily in our diverse, demanding rituals.

The rest of the cast is in fine nick. Anushka Sharma is suitably spirited and full of beans, Boman Irani makes for a fine boss who has felt the ire of a trident before, Sanjay Dutt is wonderfully droll, Sushant Singh Rajput is very likeable indeed and Saurabh Shukla, playing the antagonistic godman, is great at being a pompous god-invoking gasbag. But this is an out-and-out Aamir film, and he soars.

PK is no satire — it’s a bit too toothless for that — but it is a rollicking mainstream entertainer with ambition to evoke some introspection, one with compelling moments and some genuine surprises. Including a humdinger of a last scene. Make one more, Mr Hirani, make a sequel and take us to the planet of the naked. (We promise not to stare that hard.)

Rating: 4 stars

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First published Rediff, December 19, 2014

The cop wants to know how caller ID can display the picture of the person calling. It is a nightmarish situation, with your daughter kidnapped, your wife unaware, and you panicking in a police station, desperate to get things moving in… well, in some direction. Any direction. And the cop wants to know about smartphones and caller display pictures. It’s best, you think, to just show him so he can stop picking needlessly at this minor detail, so you decide to take a picture of him. At which point this Inspector straightens his policeman peak-cap and poses for the phone camera.

This moment from Anurag Kashyap’s Ugly is an absurd but pitch-perfect sequence, one of existential exasperation and harrowing helplessness. A little girl has been kidnapped from a car and here we are all of us — victim, friend, audience — standing at a police station, watching an Inspector smile into a phone. The horror is kafkaesque, and yet, because of the way the director plays it, entirely relatable, macabre to the point of being satire and yet chillingly all-too-real.

Ugly — a constantly riveting, ticking timebomb of a film — is by far Kashyap’s finest film. It is a visceral, frequently surprising ride, a dark thriller (not for the faint of brain or the morally queasy) that surpasses the shadowy greatness we witnessed in Kashyap’s masterful Black Friday several years ago. Ugly works even better perhaps because here, unencumbered by the need to stick to facts, he can give his characters and their demons free rein over the proceedings.

All we know is that a girl has been kidnapped. We think we know things around that, but Kashyap surrounds us with enough moving pieces (and their furtively shifting motives) for us not to be certain of anything else. The girl’s father is a desperately struggling actor, her mother is a whiskeyed-out wife too jaded to lift an eyebrow, and her new father is a tough-as-nails police chief who hates the actor his wife used to be married to. And that’s just the simple bit, Ugly is all about wheels within wheels.

The film could have been a gripping enough police procedural, but it is in these frisky, fickle motivations that the film finds its odd, brutal rhythm. Every character in the film looks to be hiding something, everybody’s lying to somebody around them, and as things heat up and masks are worn and discarded, Kashyap makes all his characters supplicate in front of the deity of Opportunism. This is where the storytelling excels, in shifting gears and making you root for one character, then another, then another, without ever pointing in the obvious direction. Just like a chase sequence right before the police station sequence I mentioned earlier, nothing here turns out like you expect — and there are things that may well make you gasp.

The performances are striking, but it’d be criminal to not single out three in particular: Tejaswini Kolhapure, who, as the mother of the kidnapped child, wears the hangdog look of surrender so hauntingly it hurts;  Girish Kulkarni, playing the sharp but frustrating police inspector and grounding Ugly into a very real zone; and Vineet Kumar Singh, playing a slimy casting director who has lots to hide up both his sleeves. Ronit Roy is solid as ever as the cop who doesn’t mind cracking a few harmless skulls if they lie in his way, and Rahul Bhat does well as the actor so convinced of his own star-quality that he’s already changed his name.

Kashyap’s cinematographer Nikos Andritsakis (who has previously excelled with Dibakar Banerjee films like Shanghai and Love Sex Aur Dhokha) composes frames that appear highly natural and yet are highly dramatic frames. The actor’s blue-walled little house, for example, is shot almost as if a graphic novel was the storyboard, all blues and blacks and a disarming use of contrast to hide details that might otherwise tell too much. Kashyap’s use of visual motifs — bindis on a mirror, scratches on a car — is present here but in more blank-verse style than overtly poetic. The result is a cinematic universe so teeming with possibility that, like Fargo, it could have a television show living within it.

This is, in many ways, Kashyap’s least indulgent film, because, having cooked up a meaty plot, he chooses not to obscure it with style and gravy, but instead thicken his pot with intrigue. Then again, sculpting a film this dark and twisted, a nearly nihilistic film, may well be called a work of misanthropic indulgence in itself. There are a couple of moments where he goes overboard, one of which accompanied by a song and celebration, but where would the fun be in an Anurag Kashyap film without flourish?

Ugly is a tale of torment, masterfully woven around the universally urgent trigger of a disappearing minor — and yet where, in the larger scheme of things, that kidnapping itself becomes, I daresay, a minor detail. Genius.

Rating: 4.5 stars

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First published Rediff, December 25, 2014

2014 was a great year for our actors, and a lot of them did exceptionally well. Restricting this annual fixture to a list of ten was harder than it is in most years, and the credit for that goes to filmmakers who celebrated underrated actors by giving them meatier roles, those who armed them with sharp lines and characters, and those who pushed established artists out of their comfort zones.

Here, for my money, are the actors who led the class of 2014. Bravo, gentlemen.

10. Manav Kaul in Citylights

Hansal Mehta’s turgid remake of the exciting Filipino film Metro Manila was a limp, disappointing affair, but Manav Kaul took a supporting role and ran with it, creating a character far more intriguing than in the original film. His Vishnu, a street-smart security guard, is one for the books, and Kaul plays him with a sly, easy believability and significant magnetism.

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9. Pankaj Kapur in Finding Fanny

The first time we meet Kapur in Homi Adajania’s Finding Fanny, we see his bare, hairy chest with a drop of sweat running down it. This is a grimy, sultry, lecherous performance, one that borders close to being a caricature — that of an overbearing, pompous artist — and while it certainly appears that he’s pretending his way into a certain lady’s pants, Kapur’s genius lies in the way he is later repulsed by the muse he’s been chasing. It is a moment of hardcore disgust, unfiltered hatred. It might not be obvious throughout the film, but this Don Pedro is indeed all about high art.

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8. Rajkumar Rao in Queen

Queen, directed by Vikas Bahl, is by no means a film that has room for a leading man, but Rajkumar Rao does the next best thing (or is it an even better thing?) by playing the perfect foil. He’s excellent as an indefatigable Delhi suitor, carrying more balloons than should be legal, he’s terrific when replying to his fiancee’s Hindi questions evasively and coldly in English, and, later in the film when he realises that the girl is out of his league, his helplessness is quite perfect.

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7. Narendra Jha in Haider

Most of us walked out of Haider in a state of wonderment, and one of the key questions had nothing to do with crossborder politics or Shakespeare. We had to know who was the tremendous actor playing Haider’s father, a man of such unwavering calm, such striking sobriety. Jha, hitherto seen mostly on television, lays down the firmly real tone for Vishal Bhardwaj’s Hamlet adaptation, and is the kind of doctor we would all like to know. An inherently thoughtful man, he brings an air of gravitas and grace to everything he says — even to the platitudes. How perfect for the Bard’s words.

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6. Girish Kulkarni in Ugly

There are a lot of fine actors in Anurag Kashyap’s Ugly, but the film reaches a true boil only when — minutes after a man is killed and a girl kidnapped —  Kulkarni’s Inspector Jadhav infuriatingly yet meticulously takes his own time at a police station. It’s a shining performance, that of a cop who can be both commanding as well as sycophantic, and in a film full of characters arguably too dark to be real, it is Kulkarni’s Jadhav who brings in the believability.

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5. Sanjay Mishra in Ankhon Dekhi

It’s always heartening when a powerful yet underutilised actor finally blooms into his own as soon as enough elbow room is made available, and the greatest triumph for director Rajat Kapoor was to let Sanjay Mishra reign over Aankhon Dekhi. His character — who literally believes only in what he can see — is one that could well have been farcical, but Mishra succeeds in creating a poignant, emotionally stirring (and utterly unconventional) hero.

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4. Aamir Khan in PK

It takes some serious commitment for an actor to go through a long film with his eyes stretched perpetually to lid-ripping point, but that is by no means the only impressive facet to Khan’s fresh-faced performance as an alien giddily eager to explore the Earth. Straitjacketed by that ridiculously wide-eyed expression, he nevertheless manages to convey wonderment, helplessness, epiphanies and loss very effectively indeed. Rajkumar Hirani’s film might have its detractors, but few will contest that Khan is at his best.

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3. Irrfan Khan in Haider

The greatest ‘hero’ entry of 2014 belonged to Irrfan as — with the snowy white screen diffused into a long blur — he gradually came into focus, wearing snow-goggles, a limp and armed with the baddest, awesomest bass-line. A fiendishly clever update on Shakespeare, Hamlet’s father’s ghost was transformed into a man with ghost identities, a slithering merchant of motive. He may or may not be worth trusting, but, thanks to Irrfan and his compelling screen presence, is definitely worth following. His character, Roohdar, may well have been called Rockstar.

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2. Vijay Raaz in Dedh Ishqiya

Once in a very blue moon, an actor takes a part originally grounded in pantomime — that of the moustachioed villain, in this case — but turns in a performance so disarmingly nuanced that he rises above the label of what he does to the why of it, fascinating us with a character so richly textured that we care about him more than any hero-type.

In Abhishek Chaubey’s delicately crafted and beautifully tongued film, Raaz plays a politician and goon, but with such heart that we may spend the film guessing at his motives. Is his bullying merely bluster because he is expected to be rough? Would he carry on Mexican standoffs forever if his opponents were armed with the right rhymes? Instead of forcibly abducting the begum of his dreams, he kidnaps a portly poet so he can pretend to craft verse, wanting desperately to impress instead of to intimidate.

It all sounds comical (and most of it is splendidly droll) but Raaz brings such wary wistfulness to the part that it becomes impossible to ignore his grand pathos. As I’d mentioned in my review, this is the kind of role that, in an American production, would have been played by great chameleons like Javier Bardem or Christian Bale. And Raaz owns it.

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1. Kay Kay Menon in Haider

In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Claudius is a villain. He is a schemer, a cunning uncle, a plotter to the throne and a pretender defiling his brother’s bedchamber with grand designs on his wife. It is a part that has traditionally required powerful theatrical credentials as well as a certain dynamism of character.

Vishal Bhardwaj’s Haider requires even more, demanding that Kay Kay Menon embody all of these vile things — and yet none of them. The adaptation is carefully balanced on a tripwire of deceit, with a lie at its centre, and depending on where you stand, Kay Kay’s Khurram is either dastardly or dashed. As a result, the actor plays everything double-edged, and thus, when, for example, he pleads to his nephew’s better sense and speaks about the need to avenge his missing brother, he could be either sincere or a scoundrel. Or even a mix of both.

It is remarkable how much of this dualist balance Kay Kay brings to the part, leaving everything crucially open to interpretation. He makes the character appear shifty and sly, though — thanks to his ever-evident discomfort — he could as well just be ashamed of himself for coveting his brother’s wife. But that doesn’t mean he engineered his demise. Or does it?

In one of that great film’s most striking departures from the original text, Menon’s Khurram sits as this Hamlet performs his Mousetrap play with the Bismil song, watching with a smile on his face while everyone around him is repelled by Hamlet’s naked audacity. In the play, he’d stormed out of the performance, propelled off-stage by his fury. In the film, he watches, applauds and — even with mud on his face — smiles an indulgent smile. Does he know better than we initially believe? Thanks to the sheer mastery of Kay Kay’s performance, we can only guess.

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First published Rediff, December 30, 2014

Take a bow, ladies.

It is truly a thrilling and liberating time to be an (established) actress in Hindi cinema, a time when risks are smiled upon and when roles are pushing various envelopes. The ten women singled out for applause this year have played characters that include a cop, a lesbian, a hostage, a tourist and a boxer — what an amazing range, and those are just the labels. The true magic lay in richly textured and well-etched characters they created.

Here, then, are the ten terrific ladies leading the class of 2014:

10. Priyanka Chopra in Mary Kom

Omung Kumar’s Mary Kom is an abysmal excuse for a film, one of the worst biopics I’ve ever had the misfortune to sit through, but leading lady Priyanka Chopra worked her derriere off for the part, and it shows. Prosthetic debates aside, Chopra puts in a plucky, emphatic performance as the already-legendary boxer, playing her with a committed bravado.

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9. Seema Pahwa in Ankhon Dekhi

Rajat Kapoor’s slice-of-life fable about a lower-middle-class Delhi family centres around the patriarch caught in introspection and whimsy, but the glue holding the family together is the beleaguered wife and mother, played by Pahwa. Nagging, miserable and often exasperatedly talking to herself, Pahwa nevertheless conjures up a mother character we recognise — and one who, when asked point blank by her increasingly eccentric husband if she thinks he’s going mad, is loving enough (and resigned enough?) to assure him he isn’t.

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8. Sonam Kapoor in Khubsoorat

Remaking a Hrishikesh Mukherjee film was always going to be an uphill task, but director Shashank Ghosh avoided all comparison by turning his update into a glossily Disneyfied confection, with Kapoor as its ideal candified centre. Channelling her inner Emma Stone, Sonam delivers a breezy and energetic performance that is klutzy, refreshingly free of vanity, and full of gif-worthy faces.

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7. Rani Mukherji in Mardaani

Rani is scary in Pradeep Sarkar’s Mardaani — and I don’t mean her hefty, unflattering look. Cops are often called tough as nails, but Mukherji exemplifies it with a hardline, no-nonsense performance that provides a spine to an otherwise feeble film. Sure, the film is a showcase for the actress, but when she is this effective — closer to the intensity of Nawazuddin Siddiqui’s cop in Kahaani than to the cartoonish bravado of Salman Khan’s cop in Dabanng — that’s not a bad thing at all.

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6. Deepika Padukone in Finding Fanny

We’ve always had a problem with actors trying to emote in English, mostly coming off as overdone or badly accented or merely, tragically unnatural. Padukone, however, is stunningly candid in Homi Adajania’s film, serving as narrator and muse and resident stunner but doing it all with a merrily light touch. It’s a strongly believable performance — she’s restrained even when hornily jumping a guy — and this kind of easy candour is rare in our cinema.

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5. Alia Bhatt in Highway

A sheltered girl kidnapped the night before her wedding, Veera Tripathi has no business pluckily falling in love with her dour abductor. And yet she does. She confides in him, sings to him, provokes him, and — atypical even to Stockholm Syndrome — begins to mother him while envisioning a future together. It is all beautiful to look at but decidedly deranged, and Bhatt shines effervescently and credibly in the demandingly odd part.

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4. Tejaswini Kolhapure in Ugly

Shalini Bose doesn’t care. About her ex-husband. About her current husband. About what whiskey is filling her glass. About what the domestic help might think of her outbursts. About how she looks. About how she’ll get through tomorrow. About her daughter. Everything is a burden to this miserable character, and Tejaswini Kolhapure, shrouded in fatigue, ekes out a performance through silences, small but telling gestures and sad, sad eyes. Once upon a time when trying on a red dress for a stranger, those eyes could manage a sporadic sparkle but by now they’ve glazed over. Apathy this absolute has to be this haunting — or so we may only imagine.

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3. Madhuri Dixit in Dedh Ishqiya

It’s all about the words with Begum Para, be they the words of besotted poets vying to win her beautiful hand, or the strategically-plucked words from handmaidens who know better. Dixit, as the imperious Begum with a mischievous smile, impressively enunciates her finely chosen words with appropriately italic lilts, but — even better — reacts with glorious grace to the words surrounding her, no matter what is said. This is an elegant, un-showy performance made up of precise, subtle tonal shifts, and it is a treat to watch Dixit dazzle like only she can.

Also read: The Madhuri Dixit Interview

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2. Kangna Ranaut in Queen

In any other year, Ranaut would be champion.

Carrying off Queen, directed by Vikas Bahl, is no small feat, for the entire film rests definitively on the shoulders of one actress. Ranaut, playing the simple Delhi lass Rani Mehra, excellently — and seemingly effortlessly — captivates us from the start as she hungers for the right selfies and sangeet steps. She comes so close to the audience that we can almost hear her heart break, and we’re curiously perched on her shoulder as she decides to fly solo for her honeymoon.

And then someone tries to pinch her bag. This is the moment that Rani and Ranaut dig their heels in and hold on tight, throwing out hysterics in hyper-real fashion and making sure she’s won us all over, this gritty girl who refuses to fade. Ranaut, who has written her own dialogue in the film, fashions a character with undying spirit and verve — who also, as it happens, is most unlikely to be able to spell verve. Or even say it right.

The way she says “hawwwww,” the thrill she finds in a lassi drinking competition, the infectious twinkle in her widened eyes when telling a “non-veg” joke, her brilliant unselfconsciousness… Nobody enchanted us like Rani, and there’s never been a character like her. As said, in any other year… But sometimes a character we know — or think we know — can be even better.

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1. Tabu in Haider

She’s all about family. Her husband, a noble doctor, constantly imperils their very existence, and we come across her teaching a classroomful of children to parrot the definition of a perfect home, in perfect unison. Ghazala Meer is Shakespeare’s Gertrude but armed with Indian-mother possessiveness, a woman who rushes onto a cricket field and points a gun at her own head to banish her boy, to keep him from mixing with militants.

Many years later, walking through a field, mother and son discuss that memory strung violently high. He accuses her of bluffing, and it is at this point that Tabu — so far luminous, emotional, inscrutable, all arrows we know well from the formidable quiver of her filmography — smiles a heartbreakingly wry smile, the smile of a mother who knows so much more. And, equally, of a woman who wistfully, earnestly, longingly wishes she didn’t know better.

As lover and as liar, Tabu is sensational in Haider. She screeches, she sobs, she succumbs — all with a miraculous consistency, elaborately crafting one of Hindi cinema’s most memorable characters. It is the kind of performance that reveals more magic with each viewing, one that embeds itself in audience memory and one that, standing as it is boldly left of centre, becomes the heart of the film. And throbs so damn strongly it changes the beats set by the Bard.

In other words, the mother of all performances.

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Also read: The life and scenes of Tabu The Fearless

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First published Rediff, December 31, 2014

Yawn.

Tevar — yet another of those mindless South remakes we’ve been indulging in so faithfully ever since Aamir Khan showed us the way in Ghajini — is a tiring slog, devoid of personality, riding unfairly on the shoulders of a young lad.

Arjun Kapoor, owner of said shoulders, isn’t bad at all. He’s likeable as the local hoodlum, gnashes his teeth with suitable enthusiasm during a fight scene, and the first time he runs into Manoj Bajpai, he chooses to smash Bajpai’s head into the hood of a jeep with a loud and rather pleasing ‘clang.’ Later, when Sonakshi yells shrilly at him, he looks understandably dumbstruck: “Man, did I pick the wrong girl to nab.” Also, to his eternal credit, he calls her a watermelon.

That aside, however, Kapoor can’t quite manage the buffoonish heavy-lifting the most imbecilic of our blockbusters demand: the kind routinely carried off by Akshay Kumar, Salman Khan or Ajay Devgn’s nipples. Here, Kapoor sings about being a Salman fan, which poses the box-office critical question: we know people go to see Bhai, but will they go to see, um, Bhanja?

Because there is no other reason to sit through Amit Ravindernath Sharma’s directorial debut. This simply-plotted film sloppily carries on and on, and while some action sequences have an intriguingly gritty texture — at one point a goon slams Kapoor in the chest with a giant old-school istri — Tevar emerges an overdone, underwhelming film with zero charm. A murder you can see coming a mile away is drawn out long and stretched interminably, made literally into a bloody procession celebrated by the town as folks sing and dance and pray around the gradually slaughtered victim. There is clearly no room for efficiency in this crappy narrative.

And crappy it certainly is. A young Agra ruffian, quick to wallop local lotharios, accidentally saves a Mathura girl from a bigtime Mathura baddie, and much chaos ensues — predictably bloodily, predictably loudly. It’s a chore to sit through this thing, a hundred and sixty inane, hammy minutes. It is so unendingly filmi, in fact, that by the time the hero gets to his feet in the climactic fight, even the villain can’t help rolling his eyes.

Manoj Bajpai, chewing on scenery as if Prakash Jha hasn’t made a movie in months, does however make for an entertaining villain, at least at the start. For example, he proposes marriage with brutal honesty, confessing to the girl that he is a badmaash, sure, but even badmaashes are slaves in front of the missus, and so would miss like a slave? It’s as sincere as slime can be, and if only there was an actual actress in front of him — someone with a spark, capable of stinging with their eyes, like vintage Hema Malini or even current Priyanka/Kareena — it would have made for quite a scene. Unfortunately, all we have is Sonakshi Sinha, reacting to things with a stunning, all-encompassing blankness.

Other decent actors are short-shifted. Raj Babbar isn’t bad as the gruff cop, but the legendary Deepti Naval gets no role, just like the reliably excellent Rajesh Sharma. Shruti Haasan swings by for an item song and looks scorching hot, but is tragically made to lip-sync to a song sung so crudely she soon becomes reminiscent of those hot girls in college you wish you never heard speak.

Things could have been improved with even a smidgeon of character development. If Kapoor’s character Pintoo wasn’t shown just as a friendly fighter but a guy opposed to all exploitation of women, for example. Like the feminist Sonakshi’s dad Shatrughan Sinha played back in Naram Garam. With just two-lines of hero-describing dialogue, Pintoo’s character and motivations could have been established. What we have here is a highly generic ‘Sunny Deol type’ hero, and — in possibly a spoof of the Anurag Kashyap magnum opus — a villain who vows not to put his pants on till he finds the girl. Um, okay then. And since one can’t, in all good conscience, let anyone stray into Gangs Of Jockeypur, consider yourselves warned. Stay away.

Rating: 1 star

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First published Rediff, January 9, 2015

Remember the first time you heard the last Pink Floyd album? No, not that recent bit of noodley-guitar nonsense, but The Division Bell, twenty years ago? I was thirteen and instantly heartbroken, because, despite most of the same band placing most of the same old sounds in the same old places, they didn’t have anything to sing about. No soul. There was craft, certainly, and David Gilmour can wring poetry out of a fretboard like the best of ‘em, but this was not the Floyd of Barrett or even the Floyd of Waters, this was just a talented set of architects trying very hard to sound like Pink Floyd — without ever feeling like them. In other words, an imitation game.

It’s much the same in Morten Tyldum’s new film about British genius Alan Turing. There is wonderful biopic-meat to be found in the story of a mathematician who succeeded at war against the Nazis, pioneered computers and was eventually — and tragically — done in for happening to be a homosexual. There are some fine actors preening under their respective spotlights, most of all Benedict Cumberbatch who wields that lead guitar like an acoustic boss. And yet this is a bland, flavourless film, a film that runs smoothly but too predictably, a film that cries its heart out (with much sincerity) but one that never, ever sings.

Which means, naturally, that some people will love The Imitation Game. It is an unsubtle film that delivers exactly what you expect in the most predictable way, and one which repeats its mantras over and over; one line,  “it is the people no one imagines anything of who do the things no one can imagine” is repeated at least four times, clearly marking it as this movie’s great power and great responsibility. For the undemanding viewer who doesn’t mind spoonfeeding — in a stiff English accent, no less, with two actors from Downton Abbey just for good measure — this is a perfectly watchable film, even though every scene predictably ends with Cumberbatch’s Turing getting the last word or having the last laugh. Fans of The Division Bell, those blokes who sit in bars with frozen playlists and raise their whiskey-sodas to Pinkish Floyd and celebrate a lyric like “the grass is greener” only because they remember the words, may just have a field day.

Despite the wasted potential, The Imitation Game is a competently made film, telling the story of a British hero who envisioned computers many years before anyone else, a man who developed codebreaking machines to interpret Nazi codes during the second World War, and a man convicted of being gay. Cumberbatch is excellent in the part, though his part is ridiculously straitjacketed by antisocial stereotypes: he comes off like a fey, attractive-version of Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory, a dreamy blue-eyed man who can break the enigma machine but who can’t decipher an invitation to lunch.

It is also exasperating, in a film that pivots around the persecution of a man for his sexuality, to watch Cumberbatch play Turing with such utter asexuality. We know, from Sherlock, that Benedict can do aloof better than most loofs, and he brings a poetic vulnerability to the role, but the film doesn’t explore his heart, his instincts, his cravings — it just lets him use the word “logic” a lot, to the point where we start examining his ears for Vulcan sharpness.

Kiera Knightley does a fine job as Joan Clarke, his female foil — and the woman who can solve cryptic crosswords even faster than Turing — and it’s always good to see Mark Strong in anything, but this is a structurally spineless endeavour, with actors like Charles Dance made to play Charles Dance without really letting them get into nuance.

Historical experts are up in arms about many inaccuracies in the film’s narrative, but there is one particular inconsistency that is quite befuddling: for drama’s sake, the screenwriters let Turing cross paths with a Soviet spy (one he never met, according to history) and the spy, in order to keep Turing from exposing him, threatens to reveal Turing’s homosexual secret to the army. Turing capitulates, and in that moment is bewilderingly enough shown as a traitor to the English cause.

If you do end up watching The Imitation Game and rightfully applauding its performances, do so with gusto but do also look up the facts of Turing’s life. As for this critic who expected more from yet another obvious biopic-shaped piece of Oscar-bait, well, as that feeble Floyd album sang, High Hopes.

Rating: 2.5 stars

~

First published Rediff, January 16, 2015

This just in: Amitabh Bachchan, an actor some of you might have heard of, has a pretty good voice.

What? Not exactly breaking news? Yet director R Balki seems newly aware of that revelation, and, it appears, believes that mere worship of the Big B-aritone is enough to make for a fine film. An ode to that voice might have made sense in the 70s, before the Bachchan voice was absolutely everywhere, mimicked by anyone, used to sell us anything. The radio stations who rejected Amitabh Bachchan have become as legendary in their infamy as the record producers who first passed on The Beatles; that voice has literally launched careers; and, even today, over 40 years since we first heard it, it overwhelms — in fact, as evidenced by the televised reaction of unsuspecting citizens across the country when they receive a gameshow phone-call that starts with that silken-yet-growled Hello, it strikes like lightning.

To dedicate a whole film to applauding that voice, then, seems like a stretch… but then Balki, despite ingenuity and quirks, always ends up tugging at initially inventive ideas out till they feel like week-old bubblegum. Shamitabh, a film where a mute actor is voiced by an older actor, sets up the premise so completely and obviously with the opening scene that it’s hard not to wonder where the film will go over the remaining 150 minutes. The answer: it meanders on and on, like an old man lost in a car park. Bachchan is excellent, Dhanush does well, but both are straitjacketed by a flimsy, uneven story that is eventually just exhausting.

It starts off with promise. Dhanush plays Danish, a village boy fathered by the movies, a mute boy who believes he can act better than the biggest superstar, who turns his head at 48-frames-per-second, and is passionate enough to believe his voicelessness won’t get in the way of his impending stardom. Starting off as a bus conductor (just like another superstar you may have heard of) he makes his way to big bad Bombay, impresses an assistant director, and is then whisked off to Finland.

It is at this point that I decided Balki was giving us not a film aiming at truth but a preposterous fable, because his Finland is a ventriloquist-worshipping country dedicated to making state-of-the-art human puppets, fitting voice-boxes inside human throats and letting the mute person lip-sync someone else’s time-delayed conversation. It’s awful writing, immediately removing the “How?” struggle from the equation; in Woody Allen’s Hollywood Ending, when a blind director tries to direct a film without anyone knowing he’s blind, the results are hilarious because he’s trying to find on-set help, memorising floor-plans, and so on. Here we see Dhanush speaking in the Bachchan baritone and when we wonder how it’s come about, we’re told simply that the filmmaker wanted to make it happen.

Add to that a drunken mentor — Bachchan, as an old drunkard hired to voice Danish — and the first half of Shamitabh is basically Nagesh Kukunoor’s Iqbal with a lot less heart and a lot more indulgence. It’s tiresome, poorly shot, suffering from an atrociously patchy sound-design and inconsistent dubbing, and — despite an an energetic Dhanush, and Bachchan revelling in his self-aggrandizing role, painfully armed with ‘look-how-great-my-voice-is’ lines designed to elicit taalis  — the film never quite gets going. And that’s the good bit. Following intermission, it careens off the rails so catastrophically it feels an uncredited Bhandarkar/Bhansali lent the writing team a hand.

Dhanush is a highly effective actor (and when miming actors, his shorthand from Hrithik to Ranbir is particularly brilliant), but Balki, keen to keep the focus on The Baritone, doesn’t show us any of Danish’s skills; his audition is ordinary, his histrionics mediocre, with the point underscored by Bachchan repeatedly telling him that he doesn’t look good, and (in a particularly distasteful line) that The Baritone is enough to make even a dog shine on screen. Danish’s part is a thankless one, that of an ambitious, opportunistic jerk who never cares for those around him, while Bachchan is given everything from the idiosyncratic life to longwinded Scotch-and-water soliloquys to a horrible face-off with a Robert De Niro poster. All that and, like Captain Haddock, he can curse in every letter of the alphabet. It’s a depressingly one-sided match. (Somewhere in the middle is a frustrated, interesting yet occasionally too-loud Akshara Haasan, perhaps thinking wistfully about the time her dad Kamal did a silent film…)

What Balki subverts truly cleverly, though, as an ad-man, are his advertisers: there’s a whole lot of product placement here — Lifebuoy, Amazon, Seven Hills — but each brand is mocked: the soap’s tagline is ridiculed, the online-retailer doesn’t have the books they need, and the hospital only holds bad news. In a way, also, this film can be considered a commentary on the unfair, unbelievable omnipotence of the superstar in Hindi cinema: he chooses the project, the story, the director, the co-star, and even decides how to shoot the song.

Or maybe Balki’s okay with all that. Just like he’s okay with taking a clever Rekha cameo that should have been a sly moment and stretching it into a long, wordy, needlessly dramatic scene. That, in essence, is the problem with Shamitabh: it spends all its time explaining its own jokes. And that never sounds right, no matter the voice.

Rating: 1.5 stars

~

First published Rediff, February 6, 2015

Let the right one sin.

Right, of course, depends entirely on where we’re standing. Is this character in the right, or is he merely stage-right? Or should we be standing here instead, where we can see what he’s holding behind his back, an anniversary present or a bloodied knife? In the world of noir, Right is less a fact and more a perspective — a shifting perspective, even — and one that must ideally be questioned.

No Hindi film director treats noir as finely and uncompromisingly as Sriram Raghavan, making the most of each shadow and each secret, feeding us lies and making us read between them, his films unfolding with the stark alacrity of well-thumbed graphic novels. Badlapur is all fury and fog, a revenge saga that plays out with such eyebrow-singeing intensity that I could imagine a gravel-voiced narrator filling us in on dames and dreams and dark, stormy nights.

The absence of this all-knowing narrator — or one, at least, made wiser by hindsight — cleverly obscures Raghavan’s own position in the whole affair: Is he showing us a simple good-versus-bad tale? Is he taking a side at all? Is he shifting allegiances from performer to performer nimbly, like a tightrope-walker with a roving eye? Raghavan, like the film’s leading man Raghu, plays his cards close to the chest and lets the audience simmer in anticipation as he slow-cooks the meaty, meaty plot and lets the story unravel.

As a premise, Badlapur appears simple enough. A young man shockingly loses his wife and child, and is hellbent on revenge — revenge that is hard to come by because he isn’t sure exactly where to look — and helplessly wrings his hands in despair as his world falls to shreds. It is a fascinating, frightening origin story, in a way an antithesis of the Batman origin, where a child sees his parents shot dead; here Raghu, who fancied himself Batman, has his son, named Robin, snatched away. The superhero threads run strong as the father emotionally tinkers with his son’s Thor figurine. By the time the film winds down, Raghu, who was struggling to grow a moustache when he became a father, has gone full-Thor: he wears a heavy beard and wields a heavy hammer.

On the other end stands Liak, a slimy criminal imprisoned for twenty years, the only man who knows who killed Raghu’s wife and child. He’s a bristly one, making his way into many a jailyard scrap, but he holds his ground and continues to dream ambitiously — often absurdly — of escape. What he lacks in terms of hope or future, he makes up for with swagger. Razor-tongued, brusque, packed to the gills with suicidal bravado: say what you want of him, Liak is a character. So much so that while this film might well be Raghu’s story, the first half has a lot more Liak — he gets more narrative heft, if not more screen-time.

Raghavan hides both their endgames very effectively, weaving a murky tapestry of femme fatales and false leads and fat policemen, the ever-intriguing narrative taking turns being sharp, funny and brutal. There are ruthless scenes in Badlapur, moments where the background score is as hushed as the disbelieving, squirming audience in the theatre, and there are scenes dripping drily with the tense humour the director played with so wickedly in his Johnny Gaddar. That film, in fact, is a fine companion piece to this one; that was sexy and relentlessly stylish while this is a moody, less aesthetically overt tale, and three Johnny actors shine bright amid the brilliant Badlapur ensemble. Like in the new film, Johnny unravelled tightly, its protagonist almost always ahead of the audience, but only the last few frames of Johnny are about vengeance; Badlapur, as the superbly chosen name suggests, is a roaring rampage.

The acting is exceptional. Varun Dhawan, playing Raghu, sheds his easy-breezy charm — but, crucially, not his slightly hapless natural likeability — and bubbles up volcanically, his eyes frequently doing the talking. There are moments in which he single-handedly commands the film, scenes where we have no idea how far his character is willing to go, and Dhawan handles these with just the right amount of inflammability. This is the kind of performance that opens up a career, and given what he did in Humpty Sharma Ki Dulhaniya last year, Dhawan looks to have the kind of range his contemporaries should fear. Nawazuddin Siddiqui, meanwhile, coats his Liak in oil and desperation, creating a powerful yet slippery character — one hard to get a handle on — with a reckless, go-for-broke energy. He might be a villain, but in his eyes he’s the wronged hero making the most of it, and the balance Siddiqui strikes between loathsome and irresistible is striking. You can’t take your eyes off him.

There are some terrific women in Badlapur. Yami Gautam looks lovely but doesn’t quite get enough material to shine. Huma Qureshi (who also played Siddiqui’s love-interest in the second Gangs Of Wasseypur) is hauntingly good as a call-girl, especially when she distances herself while dancing for a customer she doesn’t like, gyrating freely but disconcertingly enough avoiding all eye-contact. Ashwini Kalsekar is super in a small role as a female private-eye — the kind of character that demonstrates how everyone in a Raghavan script could well deserve their own spin-off movie — and Divya Dutta is characteristically perfect as a woman who looks tired of knowing better than the men she talks to. Radhika Apte is sensational as a wife willing not just to go out on a limb, but to kill herself doing it. One particular scene where her character is forced into a corner shows her dig deep and give us an uncomfortably stark and superb moment, possibly the film’s finest.

Alongside Apte, a major part of the scene-stealing is done by Kumud Mishra, playing a portly policeman who sums up the last decade and a half as 3 promotions and 2 bypass-surgeries. He’s clever, canny and almost alarmingly credible, and there are moments he quivers with apoplectic rage, fit to burst, where he’s fiercely good.

Raghavan — who kicks off this movie with a thank-you note to Dirty Harry director Don Siegel, and has a character reading Daphne DuMaurier’s Don’t Look Now on a train — makes it clear Badlapur is less of a thriller (his earlier characters read James Hadley Chase on screen) and more introspectively chilling. It is a film where a husband and wife, each innocent of their crimes, weep vainly to convince the other that nothing happened. It is a film where an alert policeman spots something through an eye-hole but, a few inches below it, is another opening that could well be a glory-hole. It is a film that broods, and one that refuses to put a fun spin on things, Raghavan preferring instead to put the ‘dead’ in ‘deadpan.’ The last one-third of the film drags a bit — the final lines of dialogue are jarringly laboured, especially compared to the rest of the film’s flawlessness — but overall this is a stunning, beautifully crafted film. Like an expensive, gorgeously made revolver you just want to run your hands over even if you don’t dare shoot it.

As the curtain falls on Badlapur, any argument on rightness feels both moot and muddy. This is a noir world, its aftertaste like chocolate with 85% cocoa, and the answer is deceptively simple: Who gets right of way? The one in a greater hurry.

Rating: 4 stars

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First published Rediff, February 20, 2015

“There are no two words in the English language more harmful than good job,” says Terrence Fletcher, the black-clad perfectionist conductor driving his orchestra insane with his demands. Fletcher wants more, always. Emotion, excuses, bloodied hands, commitment: none of it impresses him unless accompanied by actual greatness. And it never is. “Good job,” words many an American parent uses to condition a child, a verbal pat on the back for tying shoelaces or finishing a plate of spaghetti, thus, is naturally something that isn’t quite Fletcher’s tempo.

But then what does measure up? Fletcher demands the best, and his students bend over backwards trying earnestly, dutifully, vainly, suicidally to give it to him while he bites their heads off like an easily irked dragon. JK Simmons plays Fletcher with firebreathing abandon, using awful verbal guillotines every bit as lethal as the cymbal that almost decapitated Charlie Parker and spurred him to become the legend known simply as Bird. Near-death, Fletcher seems to feel, gave Parker his wings.

An unforgiving silhouette teaching at New York’s famed Shaffer Conservatory of Music, Fletcher’s longstanding dream of finding a Bird and letting him loose seems all but impossible till he runs into Andrew (Miles Teller), a young man craving to be pushed to perfection, one who fanatically sees himself as one of the greats, one who deserts romance because it may possibly distract him from the drums some day. After all, as the Buddy Rich quote on his wall screams at him, “If you don’t have ability, you wind up playing in a rock band.”

Director Damien Chazelle’s stunning and absorbing Whiplash takes these two freaks – this old man with a tongue made of daggers and this youngster with alarming amounts of focus – and pits them against each other in a delicious, deadly battle of jazz. They glide toward unscaleable peaks forsaking their lives, their careers, their families, their sanity… and all for what?

Whiplash is a sexy, sexy film, strikingly shot and beautifully paced, a film that captivates right from the start and reels in the viewer in that seductive way only the finest jazz can. The music is jawdropping and works its magic regardless of how unschooled the viewer may be, perhaps because of how Fletcher makes them play the same sections over and over again, especially the Hank Levy piece, ‘Whiplash,’ that lends its name to the film’s title.

Teller, playing the surly, self-absorbed Andrew, does spectacularly well as a character impossible to like, not to mention a phenomenal banger of the drums, a man savaging drumheads as if he were doing kung fu with chopsticks. Simmons, playing the maniac, is even better, all quips and one-handed quietening and the single-minded focus of a fascist who truly believes in himself. Scary good.

Chazelle’s film starts brilliantly and soon turns brutal, and it can be construed by some as a romanticisation of tyranny, a film that gives far too much importance to unrealistic standards and puts striving for them on a pedestal, but my reading is that Whiplash doesn’t idealize either of its two leads – though it is at times a tad sympathetic toward them – but rather shines a glaring, (mostly) unforgiving spotlight on both sets of unreasonable expectations, a spotlight that is best witnessed flashing across Simmons’ eyes at the very end of Whiplash.

We dream different dreams, and if two men tear their own lives apart in pursuit of something they treasure above all else, then who are we to dictate the price they ought pay? As a certain Mr Inarritu will attest, there’s something to be said about embarking on an impossible hunt for a Bird.

Rating: 4 stars

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First published Rediff, February 20, 2015

The good guys won.

Actually, it was bigger than that. I’ve annually whinged about and berated the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences shortsightedness and predictability in columns like these for far too many years now, and this is the first time I sat back through the Oscars — occasionally tense with fingers crossed as often as befits the occasion, naturally — but with a smile on my face. It was very clear that despite the eight nominated films, there were only three frontrunners this year, and each was majestic.

I loved ‘em, I loved ‘em to bits, these brave and visionary and beautiful films: Birdman, which I reviewed breathlessly, Boyhood, which I reviewed with moist eyes and lumpen throat, and The Grand Budapest Hotel, which I reviewed with jaunty fingers and a candied grin.

And this was their year.

Just let that sink in for a moment. That the three films tipped to win, the three films that held the most nominations and got the most awards, the three directors singled out for career-revolutionising triumph… were all masterworks. They were all brilliant and incredible, films any cinephile around the world should be proud of. The fact that it was these three films who led the pack and battled for the spotlight — instead of some dastardly Academy-friendly choice that upset a great yacht —  made this year’s Oscars a spotlight worth sailing through.

There was no King’s Speech to mug The Social Network, no English Patient to shoot Fargo in the foot, no Crash to rob Brokeback Mountain, no Forrest Gump to hold up, unforgivably, both Shawshank Redemption and the revolutionary Pulp Fiction. No, this year, instead of the big, the gun-toting, the maudlin, the British — and, most criminally, the obvious — films, the cool kids this year, the ones tipped to win were a Boy, a Bird and Budapest. How can you not love this year?

Sure, signs pointed to a Birdman/Boyhood split, with Alejandro González Iñárritu possibly taking Best Director for Birdman and Richard Linklater’s Boyhood taking Best Picture, or vice versa, a peace treaty that would leave the filmloving world in peace, but that wasn’t, alas, to be. As Iñárritu said while picking up the Best Director trophy, moments before he picked up Best Picture, “We’re talking about that little prick called ego. Ego loves competition, right, because for someone to win, someone has to lose.”

And that’s possibly why it hurts us, the film fans. Because we don’t want to see Linklater win over Iñárritu, or Budapest director Wes Anderson leave the other directors in the dust, or even young Damien Chazelle, helmer of the electrifying Whiplash, be left behind or spoil anyone’s party. We aren’t used to seeing these underdogs competing at the top of the heap; we just want ‘em all to enjoy playing together and all go home happy.

To a large extent, they did: Boyhood won for Patricia Arquette, Whiplash for JK Simmons, The Grand Budapest Hotel for everything to do with how beautiful films look. All while grumpy veteran Clint Eastwood sat grouchily, his American Sniper not showing up to ruin our film-lovin’ fun, while Oscar host Neil Patrick Harris wagered he’d do a Kanye West and disrupt the proceedings.

As for Neil Patrick Harris, alas, he didn’t sparkle. He started with a terrific musical number about the love we have for ‘Moving Pictures’ — as I’ve written elsewhere, rhyming “Brando” with Sharon Stone going “commando” is a moment of genius that will linger forever — but the rest of the evening he was flat and unfunny and just not very good.

But — and here’s the thing — are we expecting the wrong thing from an Oscar host? Earlier the Oscars were the only show we’d all watch, and we’d eat it up because it was the only choice. So we’d love Steve Martin and tolerate David Letterman. Now, not only do we have far more wicked and irreverent, alcohol-aided shows to watch, from the Globes to the Independent Spirit Awards (which, seriously, is must-see), but we’re all tweeting and pronouncing judgement immediately, rating a joke on a sliding scale before we even get through with the show.

Last week I assembled a list of the best ever Oscar hosts, an amusing (albeit cumbersome) process that made me realise something. In this age of sharp, biting jabs — started by Globe host Ricky Gervais and surpassed by Amy Poehler and Tina Fey — we’re too quick to dismiss anyone who doesn’t immediately match up. That Frank Sinatra opening monologue from 1963, for example, one of my very favourites, would be ripped apart mercilessly on Twitter.

The Oscars are in a quandary: they’re classy, they’re big, they’re universal and they need to be family-friendly — otherwise morons like Seth MacFarlane sing about breasts. It’s clear they can’t be like other wilder award shows. Perhaps they just need to concentrate on the class and the charm and leave out the comedy, except in little unscripted bits and occasional dance numbers. No matter what people say about too many dances, this year’s top moments had to include the touching Glory performance and Lady Gaga’s Sound Of Music tribute. Pomp, done well, shines bright at the Oscars. Leave the jokes to the other shows who can perch out farther on the limb. Let the grandeur do the talking instead of the gags.

Overall, as I said, it was a show to celebrate. Because with every gunfighter on our side, we’re all winners.

~

First published Rediff, February 24, 2015

There’s a lot to be said for the nineties, and Kumar Sanu doesn’t make the list.

Not only is it hard to look past the impossibly nasal voice, he’s also a singer who flourished at a time when Hindi film music was actively choking the Hindi film, forcing formulaic ditties into movies made for the sake of holding them. Looking back from here, he had a few good ballads, but that’s it.

And yet, twenty years ago, the very idea of  a young man — in this case an an audio-cassette retailer — falling in love with a singer’s voice automatically meant it could only possibly be for Sanu, who unquestionably ruled many a male heart.

Our Haridwari audio-cassette shopkeeper is named Prem, a fact that must indubitably have thrilled him to bits when Hum Aapke Hain Koun? released. We meet Prem a year after that in 1995, a barely-educated good-for-nothing who is being shovelled into a financially convenient marriage. His bride, Sandhya, is a sharp and well-educated girl with ambitions of being a teacher. She’s fat, he’s foul-tempered, and they have nothing at all in common…

And so it goes, a truly simple story. So simple, in fact, that Dum Laga Ke Haisha never gives you a single moment of unpredictability. It’s a two-hour film, and yet drags its feet enough to feel long and stretched. There are superb actors performing a sweet script, but after a while all you have is flavour. And we’ve tasted it before.

Or something like it, anyway. The fascinating Haridwar — its tongues, its street-side sass, its love for the metaphor, its intricate signboard-painting — might not itself have been the sight of many a recent rom-com, but several approximations have. From Bombay to Banaras, we know flavour.

Sharat Katariya’s film, however, is beautifully seasoned, with utterly fabulous detailing: a community wedding featuring rows and rows of scarlet brides dressed like thalis at a Jagran; a morse-code like frugal missed-call based moneysaver (two-rings-for-this, one-ring-for-this); pastries handed out instead of birthday cake, and — most critically — the shakha Prem attends.

The Shakha, the local branch of the right-wing nuts, is a fascist group, the type of thing Roderick Spode ran in Wodehouse’s  The Code Of The Woosters: Spode’s boys were called The Black Shorts, and included the measurement of male knees in their manifesto. Prem is the member of that very kind of wooly-headed organisation where grown men walk around in half-pants, and that’s what, we assume, shall define him somewhat.

Yet the potentially groundbreaking role of the Shakha starts with light humour, and is eventually completely ignored. It’s the same problem throughout the film: Katariya assembles a fascinating ensemble of quirky characters but worries more about the 90s feel and their lovely turn of phrase — “in a hurry to get your name on the in-law’s ration card?”, laughs a teasing aunt — as opposed to where the character is going.

The actors make it work, though. Ayushmann Khurana is great, giving his mostly pathetic character a sort of sullen, defiant dignity, and biting into the role rather sportingly. The new girl Bhumi Pednekar has a delightful smile, and is — part sassy, in part pitiful, part heroic —  mostly impressively real, creating a genuine character. Sanjay Mishra and Seema Pahwa from Ankhon Dekhi show up and shine here too, as does the excellent Sheeba Chaddha as the boy’s tyrannical aunt.

A word for the music: Anu Malik’s soundtrack is hugely enjoyable, retro in an affectionately genuine way — with Moh Moh, a tender, aching song written by Varun Grover, being the highlight — but there is one massive problem: Kumar Sanu’s truly distinctive voice doesn’t sound the same anymore. Too many digital bells and whistles are protooling it to sound better and better; but the nose is gone. Sadhana Sargam may as well be Shreya Ghoshal. Wherein the heart?

It’s not easy, making a Dum Laga Ke Haisha. A film with an overweight heroine that is, to a large extent, about that heroine’s weight, requires a finely sensitive balance. And while the film is perched loyally and well-intentionedly on Sandhya’s side, it still uses words about weight as insults — moti (fatty), saand (buffalo) — and also, sadly, leans on them for laughs.

For a second at the very end, I felt the film was about to flip predictability literally upside down and do something highly eventful, but the filmmakers backed out of it, happy with how far they’ve gone.That’s the regrettable bit, even though applause must go Yash Raj’s way as far as breaking the mould — I just wish they wouldn’t smugly keep pointing at it.

My other issue is with romance itself. The film dawdles so frequently on neighbourhood chatter and well-etched details that both leading man and leading lady get no chance to conjure up chemistry, they just get tired of fighting instead. Instead of making them connect, the film applauds the arranged-marriage theory of how being nice and resigned is the key to love. Settle, settle, settle.

And so may you, for this sweet, underachieving little film.

Rating: 3 stars

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First published Rediff, February 27, 2015

What do we talk about when we talk about Birdman?

It’s hard to know where to begin, for this is a film that makes us gasp, a breathless, rapturous, stream-of-consciousness fever dream, a film which unfolds dizzyingly and dramatically and takes us on a journey that, while a deeply personal journey for a character, holds so much for each of us to take back and so much to seduce us, to suck us in, the narrative visuals tugging us along as if we’re reading a novel that doesn’t allow pause – a novel disgusted by the idea of pause, even, a book that makes sure we can’t look away – and yet a book that makes us wonder about ego and life and self-importance, and perhaps fixating on the film’s novel-ty is just what director Alejandro González Iñárritu intended, with this singular comedic masterpiece surpassing all his previous, occasionally overwrought works, in fact surpassing most modern movies with a freaky flourish and with such gorgeous, gorgeous audacity… Allow me here to suggest that you think of these ellipses here in this piece not as breaks in flow but as drum solos, as wondrous bursts of force like the ones punctuating the film courtesy of stunning drummer Antonio Sanchez and his terrific score which lets us glory in all the magnificent detail Birdman offers, for example, Riggan Thomson is told he has a baby on the way, but that doesn’t seem to matter to him as much, which is somewhat understandable considering the fact that he, an actor best known for a superhero franchise he left behind two decades ago but can never quite shake off, not in any coherent way at least, is sticking his wrinkly neck out and putting it on the line by creating a Broadway showcase for himself, adapting a Raymond Carver short story, no less, in a bid to earn himself legitimacy as an actor and finally exorcise his superhero demons, but then is his spandexed alter-ego a hindrance or something he needs, a ridiculous but essential raison d’etre, one that defines him and holds him together even as he aims to spread his wings into the unfamiliar in order to more keenly etch out his own celebrity status, trying to make sure he leaves behind a legacy – a quest, it seems, that matters more to him than his pregnant girlfriend or his surly ex-junkie daughter, a bright girl burying her exceptional eyes under gothic layers of kohl and one who seems catastrophically attracted to Mike Shiner, a Broadway superstar who is literally potent only when on stage, stage, his arena of invincibility, but despite being a quotable, sharp, spectacularly talented actor who always thinks he knows best, Shiner is actually perhaps even more oblivious about his sense of self, but he is Iñárritu’s entertainer, his jack-in-the-box, the man we enjoy following around the most, at least when Birdman begins and we’re gathering up our fallen jaws at the way the director and master cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki make the whole film look like one shot, with clever, canny editing making long takes merge into one-another with magically few seams showing, a modern day take on Hitchcock’s Rope but on digital steroids, the kind of miraculous gimmick that could have been tiresome in the wrong hands but here the flight is a marvelous one, the film going from night to day without looking away – one shot with Shiner and Thomson’s daughter Sam on the roof of a theatre, the theatre most of the film takes place in, has the two talking and then the camera cants upward to the sky, following a swirl of cigarette smoke and then, after staying there for just a moment, the night melts into day and the camera swooshes down onto the bustling midday street, and this shot, with its poetry and its radical beauty, melted my mind and just typing about it is making my keyboard-drumming fingers tremble – and this is what Birdman does painstakingly but seemingly casually, using the tools at hand today to craft something previously impossible and present us with a film worth watching twice because the first time viewer is liable to just ogle this work of staggering genius; I, for one, watched it thrice in a week the first time I got the chance to watch it, and remain bowled over, besotted, enchanted, and who wouldn’t be, with the kind of actors on display here, Michael Keaton and Edward Norton and Emma Stone – who each come with superhero-movie baggage of their own, sure, but happen also to be people who have been replaced or killed off in superhero movies, movies notorious for nobody really dying or staying dead – and they each dole out virtuoso acts, with Norton showing off obvious mastery (while playing an obvious master), Stone gliding on the edge of ineffability with a crucial role and perhaps the film’s most important lines, and Keaton himself playing it close to the bone, playing his near-mythological hero with vulnerability and style while also putting on the bird-suit and rocking it good, but then, but then, everyone is so good in this film, from each of the screenwriters to Andrea Riseborough to the man playing a disgruntled Indian cabbie, everyone is at the very top of their game, everyone is poised to strike and to surprise, and by the time the film ends with a moment of heartbreaking perfection, the eyes have it – as do the ayes, for what good is a critic who remains closed off from the unobvious conjuror, a critic who can’t delight in this magical a wingspan, this film neatly putting us all in our place – and I don’t just mean us professional nitpickers and recommenders of movies – but each and every one of us with opinions that could be wiped out in an instant, for, as a sign in Thomson’s dressing room says so astutely, ‘A thing is a thing, not what is said of that thing.’

What do we talk about when we talk about Birdman? Everything.

Rating: 5 stars

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First published Rediff, January 30, 2015

Bad things happen in NH10.

That statement is both warning and promise: because Navdeep Singh’s new film is a tough film to stomach, a frightening and disturbing beast, and because it should be just that brutal, given how loyally it adheres to slasher/thriller genre conventions.

The thing about Singh is the way the director takes a familiar script or setup and makes it very Indian and very much his own — his first film Manorama Six Feet Under is a highly innovative grass-roots take on Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, and the new NH10 is many parts Eden Lake mixed with some I Spit In Your Grave, and yet a far scarier and more socially impactful film than anything slasher has a right to be.

The primary reason NH10 works as well as it does — and it works with smashing edge-of-the-seat flair — is the context Singh gives it. The idea of two young urban lovers finding themselves in very harsh rural territory is a basic one, but Navdeep is strikingly credible when it comes to dialect and flavour, and turns the Haryana belt outside Gurgaon into the most believable of badlands: everyone in those parts might not actually be evil incarnate, but from where we’re sitting, comfortably far away and constantly assailed by news of imperilled women and fundamentally messed-up defence lawyers, we’re all too willing to believe the nightmare Navdeep sets us. NH10 is more a pure horror film than any of its companions in the slasher genre simply because we believe what we want to, and it feeds our fears.

Meera and Arjun are a young couple who aren’t quite on top of their game: she looks at him with regret in her eyes, he looks to be constantly seeking some form of escape from the hard parts of a relationship, and when in bed they wield individual laptops and send each other on-screen messages. Things aren’t perfect, clearly, but sometimes a holiday can be potent tonic, and they head out to a small getaway not too far from the Gurgaon border. They run into some honour-killing violence, and end up angering the killers. Things turn ugly… uglier than one might think.

I admit to wincing frequently as fresh, more violent misery was piled onto Meera’s helpless lot, and that is because of Anushka Sharma’s amazingly committed performance. The movie’s masterstroke is to keep the audience squirming and the tension relentless by setting nearly 90% of the film in overwhelmingly linear fashion, pretending that the events are taking place in realtime, but this takes its toll on Sharma who — also brave enough to produce this film — features in virtually every frame of the film and carries it on her athletic shoulders. It is a bold choice as an actress and Anushka is at her absolute best as her eyes widen in disbelief at the growing horror around her. A moment when she realises the preposterousness of goading a policeman into “doing his duty” is particularly stunning, as is a rousing scene later where she yells at her attackers. She’s beaten down, on the run, powerless and defiant, and Anushka changes gears with immense authenticity, creating a character we can’t help but love. And, more importantly, one we can’t help but feel for.

Neil Bhoopalam’s Arjun has a tougher climb, a harebrained character who doesn’t just graze the hornet’s nest — as convention demands — but rather goes and treads on it, deciding rashly to engage in macho oneupmanship, a choice NH10 made that I can’t completely fathom. Bhoopalam is a likeable actor, but here seems a bit out of his depth. Darshan Kumaar is terrific as Satbir, especially when he’s slaughtering a girl as a rite of passage, and Ravi Jhankal is even better as his savage uncle, reproachful about Satbir using a revolver when tradition demanded a rod for the job.

The film isn’t as gory as its English counterparts, but the sadism comes across very strongly and effectively. It is a taut ride, one that scares us by providing a world of well-etched detail: the way a cop dismissively refers to the Gurgaon jungle of glass-and-chrome as a growing child, a “badhta bachcha”; the way the vibe in the badlands is noticeably hostile every time Arjun rolls down his car window, be it at a tollbooth or to ask for directions; a chilling conversation about caste that doesn’t entirely add up in terms of logic — we’re told that rules and structure matter but that the land away from the cities doesn’t need rules —  but sounds more familiar than it should.

Well shot and featuring mostly minimal background music, NH10 is starkly different from what we are routinely served up at the movies. It is a scary, compelling ride featuring an actress who surpasses herself.

One of my favourite shots in the film is where Anushka Sharma is riding a police jeep hard and fast, impressively adroit with the turns and momentarily getting the better of her pursuers. Then she skids onto the left, gets onto two wheels and, instead of gliding a la James Bond, topples her jeep into an ungainly heap. The frame before the crash shows her fleeting, well-earned smile turn into a wide-eyed and helpless “whoops” — another excellent Sharma moment — and that whoops is the best metaphor for NH10: it lets us know we’re on the edge and that one misstep could flip our lives around in an instant.

Buckle up.

Rating: 4 stars

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First published Rediff, March 13, 2015