Is there a word for a male nymphomaniac? (If not, I strongly suggest ‘himphomaniac.’)

The film Hunterr chooses to use the word Vaasu — taken from the sanskrit word vasana, meaning ‘truly stubborn desire’ — and treats it like commonly used slang. “I am a vaasu,” says the man with great revelatory import, trying to tell the woman he loves that he is a sex addict. “Vaasu? As in?” she asks blankly, and here a truly smart film would have tossed in something bewilderingly funny and utterly unrelated. (“Vaasu? As in Sreenivasan Jain?”)

Alas, Hunterr is not a truly smart film. It is however brazen, ambitious and decidedly shameless in its celebration of sleaze. It features a tremendously talented and markedly unconventional ensemble cast, and they conjure up some stirring moments. Above all, there is a sincere attempt at naturalism: Hunterr tries to be the Malgudi Days of Masturbation. (It ends us being Mister Unlovely.)

It tries, flounders and — despite the actors outshining one another — fails rather miserably. Written and directed by debutant Harshvardhan Kulkarni, Hunterr is a deeply problematic film, one where young boys egg each other on to grope a lady at a fish-market, and where a man who coaxes a woman from airport waiting room to hotel room doesn’t consider asking her name or where she’s coming from. Misogyny forms the spine of the film, coming in many shapes: a schoolboy declaring that the best girl isn’t attainable but the second best is; a father describing a boy’s aunt by saying “she looks okay”; a brother telling another that he might as well keep lying to his fiancee and tell the truth once the marriage is done.

It starts off with promise, thanks mostly to Gulshan Devaiah’s wonderful performance in the lead as Mandar Ponkshe, a Marathi version of Alexander Portnoy who has — through indiscriminate standards and aggression — managed to bully his way into a series of conquests. It isn’t that he isn’t likeable; Mandar can be disarmingly warm and friendly, despite being a borderline sociopath. If I timed the film’s awful and sloppy back-and-forth-in-time structure correctly, Mandar should be just about 40. He’s hunting for a bride the arranged marriage way, and gets engaged, but can’t stop eye and zipper from roving.

Devaiah is overwhelmingly believable in the part, seeming to channeling Sai Paranjpye heroes as he slurps noisily from a straw or perpetually, needlessly fiddles with his belt. It’s a creepy role but he plays it very straight indeed. Radhika Apte is reliably excellent as Tripti, his progressive fiancee, though it remains inexplicable why this seemingly sorted woman — despite her sudden demand to know why someone may not have seen Mukul Anand’s Agneepath — would settle for Mandar. Sai Tamhankar brings power to the role of the attractive neighbourhood bhabhi, while a young man called Vaibhav Tavtavadi endows the studly-cousin character, Kshitij, with true charisma. The young boys playing the childhood versions of Mandar and Kshitij — Vedant Muchandi and Shalva Kinjawadekar — are really very good, enough to declare that if this film had stayed in that 1989 flashback instead of hopping messily all over the place, we’d have something special on our hands.

The performance of the film comes from Sagar Deshmukh playing Dilip, Mandar’s relatively reticent elder brother. He’s a bit of a square and a sap — a guy who tucked his knee under his outstretched t-shirt as he wept over a girl in college days, and, more importantly, the kind of guy who follows a drunken friend to the ends of the earth but not without taking the chicken lollipops along to eat in the auto-rickshaw.

There are, thus, nice little touches of detailing all over the place — kids crowning each other “Wing Commander” because of the way they rule over certain wings of the housing society; a portly friend encouraged to dance frenetically at parties and rip his shirt off like Hulk Hogan; young boys taking a bath together and using soaping-the-back as a metaphor — but all this does is make you believe a film like this should exist, certainly, and that you want to like a film like this, yet the flat humour left me mostly unmoved, and I doubt you’ll be quoting fondly from this one unless you find the mere mention of swearwords inherently funny.

At one point in the film Mandar ‘fesses up to Tripti, following which she enticingly proposes that they leave their marriage open and go pick up couples from swinger parties. She does this with eyes blessedly agleam (damn that Radhika Apte is good) and Mandar can’t believe his luck, till, it turns out she was messing with him only to see how depraved he is before she dumped him. It’s a good moment of Mandar being put in his place… except it doesn’t happen. The second half of the film consists of at least a half-dozen moments that are filmed but, we then realise, haven’t actually taken place. An unreliable narrator is one thing but Hunterr, like Mandar, cheats too often.

Which is why it should come as no surprise that, at the scene mentioned at the head of this review, not just does the woman not invoke the bearded journalist, but she refuses even to behave like that other TV anchor and “demand to know.” The hunt was never afoot.

Rating: 2 stars

~

First published Rediff, March 20, 2015

Byomkesh Bakshi — or, if we go with the spelling picked out by director Dibakar Banerjee, Bakshy — never liked to be called a detective. It is the same in this film too, the man abhorring the stigma and sensationalism a label like “gumshoe” (or, in Bangla, “goenda”) comes with, and instead focussing firmly on seeking the truth, on opening his eyes as wide as he can and drinking it all in.

Thanks to Banerjee, there is a lot for his man — and, indeed, for us — to drink in: this sumptuous period adaptation fondly recreates 1940s Calcutta right down to the tram signs and the posters for Jane Russell movies, and Detective Byomkesh Bakshy! is a gorgeous, gorgeous film. Yet for all its stylishness and period grandeur it is not as intelligent a film as it yearns to be, the plot isn’t cunning enough and the conveniently-unravelled puzzle never quite sucks the viewer in.

It is, in short, a mystery movie that doesn’t mystify.

There is nothing at all wrong with a slowly seared whodunnit, one that simmers long and hard before coming to the boil, one that makes you think. Like, for example, the superb 2011 adaptation of John LeCarre’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. But the narrative must intrigue and entice and seduce, taking turns obscuring the viewer’s vision and lifting the blindfold while doing the same (in differing degree) to its protagonists. Even laboriously slow mysteries should make us hunger for the next page, the mere promise of the next clue. Byomkesh stumbles considerably because of its simplistic plotting, with an original story which ups the stakes considerably for Saradindu Bandhyopadhyay’s terrific character without giving him enough to deduce. Ambition is both driver and culprit. There is certainly bigger game afoot here than in the classic television show or one of the new Bangla movies, but saving the world pales in comparison to pocketing a statuette when the latter is told intricately enough. All the intricacy in this new film lies in the exquisite art design, the sexy anachronistic soundtrack, and the period detailing; the plot is basic, largely guessable and tragically, never something to marvel at. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Why?

What one can marvel at, quite constantly, is the cinematography by Nikos Andritsakis, Dibakar’s longtime collaborator here armed with a splendid canvas and much stylistic room. The man is an absolute master of chiaroscuro, using shadows to reveal the mood and to conceal the obvious, and there are several sequences to rave about: my favourite is one stunner of a shot framed through the rolled-down window of one of Calcutta’s ubiquitous Ambassador cars, one that follows a character hurrying through a busy sidewalk and bumping into a stranger, who then, in turn, unerringly bumps into the man chasing the first character up the street. It is Hergé come alive.

Sushant Singh Rajput is exceptionally good as Byomkesh, a believably brilliant young man who is also — as a consequence of him being so wet behind the ears — believably befuddled. Rajput bestows the actor with a suicidal cockiness as well as a preternatural intelligence, his eyes often gleaming like smug saucers. As Jeeves would say, here is a man who likes his fish. Banerjee’s film focusses on building Byomkesh from the ground up, from his initial oversights to his intrinsic motivations, and Rajput runs with that monumental brief and creates an iconic character, one we believe in and root for, one we will champion and one who we — despite the mediocrity of this first mystery — hope to meet again. This Byomkesh himself is a highly nuanced character study, the kind we’ve seen Dibakar excel at before, and Rajput is smashing.

Most of the cast, in fact, is perfectly picked, though I hesitate to say much about their characters in fear of giving anything away. Anand Tiwari is quite super as Byomkesh’s pugnacious and easily-irked comrade Ajit, Divya Menon’s Satyawati is suitably captivating, Meiyang Chang and Mark Bennington enliven things up while staying consistent to the characters, even as Neeraj Kabi and Swastika Mukherjee, though given an awful lot of scenery to chew, do impressively well, especially Kabi who can — it appears — do anything at all.

Banerjee is a modern master, a man who has taken on drastically different films with each outing, and finally bungled up on this fifth film after a hot streak of four crackerjacks. Part of the reason, as stated above, is the sheer ambition. His clear attempt is to build a world — one where Chinatown has so much soul it looks like Seoul — and to set Byomkesh and his conflicts up before taking us on further adventures. This would work brilliantly as the pilot episode of a television series, but not as a standalone film. There have been many, many Byomkesh adaptations over the years and curiously, it is the auteurs, the most distinctive filmmakers, who have stumbled the most: Satyajit Ray’s funkily shot Chiriakhana might be the legend’s most embarrassing work, Rituparno Ghosh’s last film Satyanweshi was a catastrophically weak Byomkesh, and this is certainly Dibakar’s least impressive script.

Perhaps Saradindu Bandhyopadhay gets in the way. The original stories are so beautifully plotted, so inherently appealing on the most basic level, that even watching those old television episodes on YouTube grabs us immediately by the collar. The multiple Byomkesh adaptations Bengal keeps churning out might not make for great cinema, but, based as they mostly are rather slavishly on Saradindu’s work, enthrall new audiences regardless. Detective Byomkesh Bakshy! is the best looking and least captivating of the current lot. And, as said earlier, he didn’t like to be called detective. Defective Byomkesh Bakshy, then.

Rating: 2.5 stars

~

Also read: The Bakshiphiles: A history of Byomkesh Bakshi, the character, his creator and his screen incarnations

~

First published Rediff, April 3, 2015

An Indian courtroom is not a place you want to be. The universally slumped shoulders, the increasingly clerical lawyers, the incomprehensible antiquated legalese, all ticking away under a slow moving fan, creaking almost as slowly as the cases being argued. It is in this world that Chaitanya Tamhane’s impressive directorial debut Court is set, and the director takes his time making us watch paint dry.

The case we follow in the film is patently absurd: 65-year-old folk singer Narayan Kamble has been tossed into jail because, the State claims, a song he performed about suicide incited a sewage worker to kill himself. Many a question is asked through the unbearably long trial — Has he written a song like that? Does he sing about suicide? Does he have previous police cases against him? Is he an enemy to the state? — but at no point does anyone even wonder aloud how, even if the song had caused a man to kill himself, the singer is culpable for the suicide. Tamhane, who dwells on every detail, makes it clear that the tiny technicalities matter while the big picture is much less important.

Court, similarly, works far better in parts than as a whole. A highly understated film, it features some marvellous vignettes illustrating class divide and changing mindsets — the well-to-do defense lawyer strolls into a store and picks up three kinds of cheese, while the eagle-eyed prosecutor takes the local train home and muses dreamily about olive oil and whether it makes sense to buy the cheap kind advertised on TV — and while there are a lot of these moments that work individually, moments that viewers can carry home, taken together the points they make seem to be constantly, and repeatedly, laboured.

The reason these individual scenes are so captivating have a lot to do with Tamhane’s cinematographer Mrinal Desai, who composes his frames like a confident photographer would: you could frame a bunch of Court stills at random and gape appreciatively at them at the Jahangir Art Gallery. The shots are realistic and, for the most part, stunningly free of contrivance, and Desai masterfully ensures there is often some detail worth marvelling at: the shot of a worker at a printing press paginating a magazine, throwing different sections together with unthinking precision, motoring away at it again and again and again, while a man is arrested, is one of my favourites from this film.

The film’s cast is inspiringly good, especially Geetanjali Kulkarni as the public prosecutor, Pradeep Joshi as the judge and Vira Sathidar as the quietly dignified accused man, Narayan Kamble. Vivek Gomber, also the film’s producer, is impressively understated as the defense attorney, but his performance is marred by the way he self-consciously wears his belly like a costume, drawing attention to it and sticking it out, completely at odds with the rest of his character.

A constant problem with Court, however, lies in just how ghastly the film’s extras are, with almost every person in a non-speaking role doing a jarringly bad job. A woman sitting in the front row a propaganda-filled play nods along as she enthusiastically applauds the show, but the shot runs long and she just keeps agreeing, even though nothing else is said. Tamhane’s predilection for making a shot tick on longer than we expect — or, indeed, than it should — is an interesting way to build up audience discomfort but the extras squirm harder than we do. Four friends walk into a bar, order four beers — the bartender hands them two bottles of one brand, two of another, oddly enough, though nothing is specified — after which they sit down and make smalltalk where they sound so unnatural that the screenplay may well have said “friends make smalltalk” instead of writing lines. This, too, could have worked, but the shot runs longer — which is an overall issue with Court, and which is a primary reason why, as an indictment of our judicial system, it doesn’t prick as deeply as genuinely pointed satire, like, say, Saeed Mirza’s Mohan Joshi Haazir Ho.

Court — a singularly strong directorial debut — gives us stunning snapshots which should work sensationally well for a festival audience, but, to the Indian viewer, are not truly new or holding any strikingly original thought. We know this, all of this. But perhaps the point Tamhane is trying to make is that it isn’t important that we know, but that we know better.

Rating: 3.5 stars

~

First published Rediff, April 17, 2015

What is the worst thing a tacky filmmaker can do? Overblown dialogue, corny acting, big conceptual plot-holes, continuity errors, melodrama, weak subplots…. All of those are regrettable but forgivable. For the kind of B-grade movies a director like Vikram Bhatt routinely churns out, these are all par for the course. The most unforgivable sin is to be boring, and Bhatt’s latest, Mr X is an utter drag.

There is no reason for this film to be in 3D, or, indeed, for it to exist in the first place. Vishesh Films’ mascot Emraan Hashmi — who delivers grand compensation for keeping a straight face through this dreadful film — plays a character who turns invisible. Except, puzzlingly enough, he doesn’t. His character — whose leather jacket fuses with his body in a freak accident, I kid you not — becomes invisible but can be seen in sunlight and under all ultraviolet light. And given that every light in this film appears UV, there’s hardly a frame without Emraan Hashmi’s mug. Everyone in Mr X knows who he is and can see him 70% of the time. So much for plot/mystery/suspense.

What’s the point, again?

Around Hashmi stand many an untalented actor, from the waxen Amyra Dastur who delivers horrid dialogue about “bheeni bheeni khusbhu” with all the passion of a stuttering teleprompter, to that eternally ridiculous Arunoday Singh who here hams it up as an old fool. Oh, and there’s comedian Tanmay Bhat showing up as Popo, and while his character might merely be that of a plump plot-device, he at least embraces the b-grade silliness and says things like “didi, please, didi” with all the earnestness of an early Govinda.

Special effects have never been what define a great invisible-man film. Mr India, our one and only great superhero movie, is nearly three decades old and still captures the imagination. Hollow Man, which Mr X borrows from inconsequentially (and sloppily) was made 15 years ago. Even the tacky 1957 Mr X, starring Ashok Kumar — and for which people were paid with tandoori chicken instead of money — was enjoyable, campy fun. Mr X merely makes Ram Gopal Varma’s tedious Gayab look good in comparison.

Mr X is a stupid, slow, randomly ballad-filled mess that could still have been made entertaining with an interesting protagonist. But there is, as can be expected, zero subtlety. Hashmi pops on and off screen with gimmicky background score flashes, and his invisibility is absolute, without any gradations or gradual dimming, as if the digital effects guys were given ten bucks and shown the eraser tool.  A man who flickers a few times before showing up isn’t invisible; he’s a tubelight.

Rating: Zero stars.

~

First published Rediff, April 17, 2015

“So if I lift it, I then rule Asgard?” Tony Stark doesn’t even take his jacket off the first time he tries to lift Thor’s hammer, a laughable attempt to prove — in Thor’s baritone — “worthy.” The party scene in all the trailers shows Earth’s Mightiest Heroes ™ throw down over drinks as they play the weirdest party game of all: Who Dare Be God. And while this is classic caped camaraderie, the superhero backslappery that shone through director Joss Whedon’s first awesome Avengers film, the true punch lies in Stark’s second line, delivered solemnly by Robert Downey Jr: “I will be re-instituting Prima Nocta.”

It’s a throwaway gag, like all of Stark’s quip-a-minute lines. He tries, fails, and the line is forgotten. But the very idea of Prima Nocta — a mythic medieval rule about a king or high nobleman having the rights to sleep with a newlywed bride before the groom does — almost defines Tony Stark’s hubris, his absolute sense of entitlement, his testosterone-y bravado, his intensely desperate need to be racing ahead of those around him, to do more, to see more, to control more. It is also, surprise surprise, the last allusion you’d expect in a kid-friendly Disney film featuring a bunch of good-natured superheroes — one of whom even tut-tuts at the others for swearing.

And that, ladies and gents, is classic Whedon, mixing up genre, style and appropriateness to concoct something so delicious it’ll leave you giddy.

The film opens with a gobsmacking action sequence, one showing us every Avenger in action at the same time — stitched digitally together into a single-shot that instantly justifies the 3D glasses — and it never lets up. Unlike the first film which only really kicks into gear after the Beatles get together and start jamming, this sequel is the Magical Mystery Tour where the gang go from smash to smash, from one beautifully choreographed and clever set-piece to another. The action is constant — but that doesn’t, at all, mean you’re in for two and a half hours of things going CLANG! No sir, this is rock and roll revelry.

Because this is Whedon we’re talking about. Because in the middle of this mad comicbook epic, Iron Man and Captain America have a stare-down that is straight out of a Spaghetti Western, complete with the background score playfully riffing on Ennio Morricone. Because in a nightmarish sequence, a young Black Widow learns ballet and a tyrannical Julie Delpy, of all people, takes her apart. Because we see Banksy-like Iron Man graffiti all over a country that resents the Stark weaponry that tore it to pieces. Because Thor still corners the brilliant women-of-science demographic. And because — perhaps above all else, if you think about it — because it’s clear Tony Stark is getting older and a lot of his lines are now slightly pathetic bits of that’s-what-Stark-said innuendo.

It doesn’t show, mostly. It doesn’t show because of Robert Downey Jr and his majestically timed dry delivery and his ever-arched eyebrows — you can hear them bend even when he isn’t on screen and a couple of syllables hit us from afar, over the colossal noise of cities falling to the ground — and the wonderfully infectious glee with which he plays Tony as if his last name were Snark. But Iron Man knows the good times can’t last, and that he’s falling behind. There’s even a tiny pang of resentment in his voice when he says Captain America is the boss, the team-leader. Maybe that’s what leads him — and fellow scientist Bruce Banner — to create something that could save the world from the aliens, something that could think better than humans can. But you know as well as I do, fellow moviegoer, that stories about artificial intelligence don’t end well.

Thanks to Whedon, this one doesn’t even begin well. Ultron, a sentient intelligence voiced with sinister coolth by James Spader, starts off attacking the Avengers and continues to wreak havoc throughout the film: to save humanity you must first destroy humanity, and all that jazz. The Avengers disagree and there lies our film, a stunningly paced rollercoaster ride with such constant crescendo-ing — guitar solo after guitar solo, those lovely action scenes are — that it flies by quicker than we expect. It almost feels short, this huge hulk of a film. One badass moment shows up to trump another, and another. And so it soars, occasionally held aloft even by characters who are, improbably enough, just a day old.

Chris Evans — following the excellent Winter Soldier — now wields the Captain America shield with impressive nobility; Chris Hemsworth’s Thor is underused but charming, mildly oafish but in the most awe-inspiring way; Jeremy Renner gets a lot to do as Hawkeye, from self-deprecatory monologues to pep speeches; new kids Elizabeth Olson as Scarlet Witch and Aaron Taylor-Johnson as Quicksilver are fun enough despite shaky Soviet-type accents, fittingly thunderstruck by the way the Avengers roll; and, finally, we have the film’s best performers, Mark Ruffalo and Scarlett Johansson, kicking ass in style, sure, but crucially making their characters work wonderfully together, two terrific actors playing off each other and even turning cliches — like an inappropriately timed bit of affection — into fantastic moments.

And, as in the first Avengers film, this movie lies in those moments. I won’t give much away for there is lots to discover here, big dramatic revelations as well as small nuggets to keep both casual viewers and hardcore fans very happy indeed, but there is one specific bit of casting I feel the need to single out here and applaud: for a certain portion of the film the Avengers spend time with a pregnant woman, and Whedon — oh TV-faithful Firefly-maker Whedon — casts the lovely Linda Cardellini in this role, in the goofiest of nods: who better to be surrounded by all these freaks and geeks?

Is this Avengers sequel, you and I both wonder, better than the first film? It might be and it might not. I like it more, but it doesn’t seem as universally inclusive as the first film miraculously was, but, hey, that doesn’t matter — neither of them is the the best Marvel film anymore. The goalposts have moved in the last three years, and the spaced-out weirdness of Guardians Of The Galaxy and the old-school political intrigue of Captain America: Winter Soldier — not to mention the grown-up grit of the Daredevil TV series — are where the bar now lies. The Avengers may not still be the best, but they are what let Marvel create the best and most ambitious comic movies. Just like Stan “The Man” Lee didn’t create everything amazing at the House Of Ideas, Whedon isn’t spearheading all that is special at the House of Mouse. But it is the house Joss “The Boss” Whedon built.

I called that first Avengers hit a hero-sandwich, and this is certainly dessert. I, for one, still haven’t been able to wipe the pixie-dusted grin off my face. It does what the best summer blockbusters do, the larger-than-life megamovies that drop our jaws in theatres: it indulges our fantasies and makes kids out of us again, kids who want to play with our toys and who have fun watching the director play with his. (If in doubt, just leave a giant hammer outside the theatre exit and see who doesn’t try to pull at it.)

The Avengers: Age Of Ultron may well be a mainstream milkshake of a film, but it is one of those madly indulgent shakes — featuring Snickers bars and dark chocolate sauce and gourmet coffee and spiked with a few swallows of something decidedly adult. Something that’ll keep you giggling and energised and awake far longer than it should.

As Tony Stark would say about thousand-year-old whiskeys, drink up.

Rating: 4 stars

~

First published Rediff, April 23, 2015

Villains aren’t what they used to be.

I haven’t seen the original South Indian versions of many of the cruelly loud movies we’re subjected to every few months, but the ones they make in Hindi cinema are so definitively STAR VEHICLES that they deserve the all-caps rebuke. There is clearly no other purpose to these movies than to blatantly make the hero always look good, therefore, despite forever making good-versus-evil stories, they don’t create villains of true menace or charisma or even ones that look momentarily like they could whip the hero’s behind. Nope, these baddies just scowl and take their punishment.

Which is why I was, against all odds, vaguely intrigued by a film called Gabbar Is Back. Not because I believed any random ungainly retelling could possibly do the iconic Gabbar Singh justice, I hasten to clarify, but because I thought it could perhaps create an interesting villain or an anti-hero, someone who could actually seem like a threat and potentially up the stakes, making it look like the hero’s battle will actually be an uphill one.

Nope, what Gabbar Is Back delivers is a bearded Akshay Kumar facing off against some hammy actor I choose only to refer to as Evil Arvind Swamy. A shabaashi is, as you might have gathered, not on the menu here.

Akshay, a well-trimmed beard separating his character from most of his recent ones, plays a college professor who happens to also be a vigilante who orchestrates kidnappings and killings of corrupt government officials. He does all this under the guise of Gabbar, a name that becomes increasingly popular among the people while corrupt officers start returning bribes in fear that he’ll come a-whacking. “Varna Gabbar aa jaayega” and all that.

Dumbed down to a ridiculous degree, the film — directed by hotshot Telugu director Krish — tries to be a less-pathetic version of Salman Khan’s Jai Ho and might have succeeded on that count were it not for an absolutely daft script, with scenes featuring selfish doctors slapping each other’s backs and saying things that could be translated to “look how evil we are! Yay!”, and high-flying investigating officers coming in and proudly yelling (here I quote) that “I don’t have any reason to understand this.” (You and us both, bro.)

Akshay himself is customarily not-bad, and there’s something pleasing about a star who, even in these monstrous films, stays off the pedestal. Salman Khan doesn’t even try to act, and Ajay Devgn thrusts himself at us with pornstar brutality. Akshay, who doesn’t belong to the come-see-my-nipples squad, almost slacks off whenever he can, standing sloppily, casually clipping his nails in prison, and only occasionally picking the bad guy up over his head — while making the action look real. With a smile. He’s aging well, this guy, and the persona remains strong.

Nope, the main problem — no small feat in a film where Evil Arvind Swamy constantly boasts about how he is a “Brand!”, like a peculiarly proud cow —  is the girl. Shruti Haasan is hideous in the film, an imbecilic character played by a girl with clearly no charisma and dubbed when nobody cared enough to look. It’s easy to make a cutesy character insufferable and Haasan is so godawful in Gabbar that she makes the second-half of the film automatically stand leagues ahead of the first, simply because Haasan has only one post-interval scene. Meanwhile we’re subjected to the sight of the once promising Chitrangda Singh doing the kind of crass item number Rakhi Sawant might have turned down.

So yeah, not a great movie for women. Then again, Kareena Kapoor shows up for one song and shows off presence, chemistry and star quality, reminding us how good Akshay can be when playing off someone with talent.

Back to Gabbar, then. The basic idea of an anti-corruption crusader, a Kejriwal with muscle, could have been shaped into a compelling film, but besides one decent visual — a shot of everyone wearing Evil Arvind Swamy masks except for our hero, because it only takes one good apple to improve things — this is a constantly unimpressive film. At its best, Gabbar Is Back is barely watchable, and at its worst, it’s Shruti Haasan. Why would you even try?

And why on earth would producer Sanjay Leela Bhansali want to name this film Gabbar? Even as an exploitative gimmick, it could have been used more cleverly, but here we have a full-length cinematic equivalent of Bali Brahmbhatt’s Gabbar Mix. Using the very name of the most fearsome villain in our cinema should mean something, but here it just gives the filmmakers an excuse to cast a dark-skinned actor as an executioner just so Akshay can tease him (even though he’s just an innocent fellow doing his job) with the “Tera kya hoga, Kaaliya?” line. Ugh.

Stay away from theatres, I’d say. 50-kos away, even.

Rating: 1.5 stars

~

First published Rediff, May 1, 2015

Ben Stiller will turn 50 this year. Stiller, the zipper-inefficient walk-off winning man of a thousand comedies, is grey at the edges already and getting older — just like us, every single bloody day. Noah Baumbach’s While We’re Young is about the exhausting inevitability of getting old, sure, but at its profound core, it is also about the potential joy that lies in accepting it. (Charles Grodin, best known for being a VHS-conquering St Bernard lover for the ages, is, in this film, believably all-knowing and wielding tremendous gravitas. Things can indeed turn much better if you allow your prematurely-determined yardsticks to grey right along with you.)

On the surface, Baumbach’s film is a comedy. It is about a couple in their mid-forties discovering the thrills (and perils) of hanging out with a couple in their twenties, and thus many obvious resulting gags — about the nature of Cool and the evolving meaning of Irony — are promised and delivered, but this film, like some of its protagonists, is superbly deceptive. It is a film where power-giddy young executives eager to embrace Mad Men stylings drink from whiskey tumblers in the daytime — but where the glass is full of apple-juice.

Things begin on an entirely Woody Allenesque note, with fortysomethings Josh (Ben Stiller) and Cornelia (Naomi Watts) struggling with the idea of impulsiveness. We’re still young, Corneila insists, proclaiming that if they were to drop everything and going off to Paris or Rome tomorrow, they could. This “tomorrow” pricks at Josh, who wonders about last-minute flight prices and thinks they’d need at least a month in advance. A month still counts as impulsive, she says undeterred, mostly talking to herself. It is, as you can see, boilerplate Allen with a very Alexander Desplat-y score thrown in, but this may be to soothe us in before pulling the rug out from beneath our ol’ feet.

Josh is a documentary filmmaker, a fiercely committed artiste who has spent the decade milking a grant to create a film he believes in, a film which is, essentially, “about America.” One day, he bumps into a cool young fan. Jamie (Adam Driver) is an effortlessly stylish youngster with gimmicky ideas and that hipster-y fondness that often mistakes what is old for what is good, and Baumbach makes us wonder if his affection for Josh’s work is genuine, or the same as his love for Rocky III. Jamie and his artisanal ice-cream making wife Darby (Amanda Seyfried) start hanging out with Josh and Cornelia and invite them to radically bohemian ceremonies — where people wear white, drink sludgy psychotropic drinks, and vomit to Vangelis — but no matter how much fun they’re having, Jamie and Darby never, ever reach for the check.

This film is thus as much about the inappropriate sense of entitlement of the young — the anything-goes culture, the breakdown of the conventions we older folk take for granted — as it is about the ennui exhibited at any age, really. Two couples sit at dinner and start looking up their smartphones; one of them talks about how it’s awful that one person whips a phone out and suddenly everyone has to look at theirs, but that while it was rude earlier, it’s accepted now. “Like showing your ankles in the 1800s,” he nods, to the loud sound of nobody disagreeing.

The film informatively explores the very idea of documentary filmmaking in an age where everyone is recording what’s around them, poking at the changing relevance of the form and the undeniable shift in the documentary ethic. It is at these points in our culture when meanings are changing that it is hardest to stand straight, and Josh flounders horribly: when two younger men talk about “life” and “other plans,” he reflexively throws out the correct John Lennon quote. But nobody, he sees, realises the importance of what was really said and who said it. It’s all out there, it belongs to everyone. And this scares Josh just like it does many of us, even though his hurried parroting of Lennon wasn’t entirely accurate either.

Stiller is stunning in the film, his brow furrowed with consternation, and mouth half-open in incredulous indignation. This is the man unable to swallow the fact that the joke is now on him, that by rigidly sticking to whatever he believes in he is losing relevance amid both the older-and-wiser and the younger-and-crueller. Stiller, exceptional in Baumbach’s Greenberg a few years ago, attacks this part with a sense of naive righteousness, his Josh believing intent and purity are the same things even as he falls for the bait and buys a hat to blend in. At some point he’s asked if he’s success oriented, and he says “no” while his wife says “totally”, at the exact same beat, with her obviously knowing better. For a moment there we can see heartbreak in his eyes before the grin of denial takes over.

Watts, coming off a marvellous performance in Birdman, is one of those actresses who wears the suit of age with such weary believability that it almost masks her beauty — like Claire in Modern Family. And again, because of the cinematic baggage she carries, we begin to buy into Baumbach’s concept of aging: that after more than a dozen years even one who so gloriously pleasured herself in Mulholland Drive is now relieved to be asked to the party.

Driver is a compelling actor, a distinctively quirky looking chameleon who plays his part in a defiantly unreal way, which makes him great casting for this role where his young auteur doesn’t mind not really being an auteur at all. And Charles Grodin, as mentioned at the head of this review, wears omniscience so, so delightfully, just like he does in TV’s Louie.

It isn’t surprising how funny this film is, or how cleverly it’s written. We’ve come to expect great things from Baumbach who wrote The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou and who made the beautiful Frances Ha. While We’re Young is special not for its subversions of mainstream comedic genre — the end features a race against the clock only to realise the whole thing is also just that — but for its almost casual profundity, for the wisdom it carries and, miraculously enough, does so without an air of preachiness. It’s wise enough to know it isn’t wise enough.

This is the first truly great film of 2015. It is a film worth watching and recommending and loving, like a novel you can’t wait to lend to friends you care about. And as the end-credits rolled with Golden Years playing, I realised even David Bowie’s older now. And that doesn’t seem so bad. Just look at Woody Allen.

Rating: 5 stars

~

First published Rediff, May 1, 2015

We are never told Deepika Padukone’s actual name in Piku.

A Bengali nickname is an all-conquering wonder, a sticky and stubborn two-syllable sound that a person is straddled with when too-young-to-object, and one that follows us to our graves. And so Deepika’s character — be it in office or living room or on a relative stranger’s phone-screen — is always simply Piku, and, despite the peculiarity or cuteness of the nickname, its usage has become matter-of-fact. The fact that throughout the film, we never dwell on its etymological origin-story and aren’t concerned with what Piku means (or may perhaps be short for) illustrates honesty and a storytelling confidence rare to our cinema.

Shoojit Sircar’s Piku is a special, special film. It is a film about a cantankerous old man grumbling about constipation, a film about a young girl who knows how to drive but chooses not to, and a film about a young man who just can’t bear his mother. It is a film, then, about families and their foibles, about the small and large obsessions and habits that single us out for who we really are. It is a film with tremendous heart — one that made me guffaw and made me weep and is making sure I’m smiling wide just thinking about it now — but also a sharp film, with nuanced details showing off wit, progressive thought and insightful writing. Take a bow, Juhi Chaturvedi, this is some of the best, most fearless writing I’ve seen in Hindi cinema in a while.

Unlike Piku, her father has outlived most folk older to him — the people who would have called him by a nickname. And yet Bhaskar Banerjee insists on a unique spelling, a Bhaskor to differentiate him from the Bhask-err types he might encounter near his Chittaranjan Park residence. Bhaskor-da, frequent follower of laxative advice and incorrigible salt-stealer, is an imperious old coot fervently obsessed with his bowels. This may or may not be a Bengali preoccupation, for ours is a tribe where mothers and wives glug Isabgol side-by-side before bedtime or, as I grew up witnessing, grand-uncles spend their mornings hopping about in the hope of generating the elusively mentioned “pressure.”

All this, we’ve always been told, is not propah conversation. It is too intimate, too familial a topic to be discussed out loud or far away from the toilet. Chaturvedi and Sircar, however, clearly have a strange love for ‘bodily fluids’, and after making the nation titter about sperm in Vicky Donor, they take shit head on with this fine film. Unlike Mr Banerjee’s motions, the laughs come quick and fast. Yet scatology is merely one affectionate used aspect of Piku. There is a road trip, there are arguments, there is affection, and all of that I leave for you to discover. This review is, besides applause, merely a celebration of detail and of craft.

Bachchan, as Banerjee, is a delight, hamming it up in the way old Bengali men do, posturing for family and servants and wagging his finger reproachfully at those outside the clan — at one point he calls Irrfan “you non-Bengali Chaudhury.” He appears brash and dismissive but this, as he says, is because he is “a critical person”, which translates to him setting higher standards for those he loves. He’d be an old-school patriarch if he wasn’t such a vociferous women’s-libber, one who champions his daughter’s sexual independence. Having said that, he remains so set in his ways that he sits in Delhi and relishes a month-old stack of Calcutta newspapers. It may be old news but it’s the news he loves.

Irrfan Khan is characteristically flawless. Despite a less author-backed role than father and daughter, he imbues his character with enough authenticity to steal many a scene and give the narrative its consistency. It is largely for the benefit of Khan’s Rana Chaudhury that the Bengalis speak in Hindi and English through (most of) this film’s duration, and the character is fascinating. An engineer with a dodgy backstory, he’s morally sound enough to berate a pearl-pilfering sister and feels the need to call out selfishness even in someone he likes. Khan’s performance holds the film together, balancing the diametrically opposed — and fundamentally similar — father and daughter, sometimes by just a truly pointed look. One scene, where he glances at Deepika to necessitate a change of seating arrangements in the car, is an absolute stand-out.

Padukone is at her very best, the actress moving farther from her contemporaries with almost every successive film, and here she stuns with her casual body language and her inch-perfect intonation. She’s impatient and short-tempered, wearing her otherwise-adorable dimples dismissively, like a no-nonsense shield. She knows when to prescribe homeopathic pills, and goes into enough graphic detail on the phone to wreck her dates. This tightly wound Piku is a demanding part, and the film pushes her. She rises to the occasion, and her performance — which believably oscillates between a defiantly uppity woman to a girl half-proposing marriage with a mouthful of egg-roll and a giggle — is spectacular.

And, as if that wasn’t enough, Sircar makes Padukone say ‘pachcha.’ Piku uses this Bangla word for arse — a cute splat of a word, with a tchah-sound built right in — while at a dining table full of eagerly nostalgic relatives and Padukone plays the moment magnificently, her eyes twinkling and grin well in place, dropping her guard to say an ‘uncouth’ word and, simultaneously, thrilled to be saying it. Bravo.

The ensemble cast is spot-on, from the smug self-celebrating aunt played by Moushumi to Raghubir Yadav’s doctor, who thinks nothing of ordering a few dozen boondi laddoos from an utter stranger, and it’s lovely how Sircar uses them all. Just like he does Calcutta, making the city look big and sturdy and historic and, well, epic, without ever picture-postcarding it or resorting to obvious cliches. Except the cliches spouted by old Bengali men, pleased as punch to see their kids remembering old addresses long forsaken. (While on that, here’s a joke Bengali fathers will appreciate: “What are bowels? Things that hold up many conshonants.”)

There is an awful lot to love and appreciate in Piku, and, like the best of films, it sets you thinking but doesn’t rush to point out quickfix answers. “Not satisfactorily,” like Bhaskor-da reveals when asked how well a new bowel-coaxing remedy worked, “phir bhi kuchh naya karne ko mila.” Sometimes the joy indeed lies in trying out something new, and Piku is just the tonic.

Rating: 4.5 stars

~

First published Rediff, May 8, 2015

There are some filmmakers who scoff at the very notion of historical accuracy — like Oliver Stone or Quentin Tarantino — and Anurag Kashyap is one of that bunch, a man who prefers to create his own sumptuous version of history. Bombay Velvet looks to be, then, his very own Bob-Fosse-meets-Scarface take on what might have been, instead of bothering with what really was. An indicator of the same lies in the opening credits, as they claim to be “introducing Karan Johar” whereas that particular director first acted in the most successful Hindi film of all time.

Not on Kashyap’s watch, he didn’t. And that’s perfectly fair. We look to big, brassy cinema not to educate but to entertain, and let us not seek verisimilitude in this kind of cinematic explosion. And this Bombay Velvet is an obviously shallow film, an all-out retro masala-movie with homage on the rocks and cocktail-shakers brimming with cliché. It is a take on the nostalgia soaked groovy-gangster movie: Once Upon A Time In Kashyapistan.

On paper, this sounds like dynamite. Kashyap, a gifted visual stylist and a distinctively bold storyteller, taking on the mainstream and riffing on it his way, subverting the system. Except, um, that’s not what happens here. There is surprisingly little subversion, but that’s fine too, provided the result is compelling on its own steam. Alas, Bombay Velvet runs out of breath less than halfway through, and huffs and puffs as it tries to breast the finish line.

The new film clearly wants to be many things — noir, grand romance, a Broadwayesque musical, Prakash Mehra, Brian De Palma — but ends up indecisively skulking around the shadows of giant films, despite editing goddess Thelma Schoonmaker blessing it with her scissors. Several components work strongly, particularly a sensational soundtrack and a few excellent male actors, yet the film disappoints, and, due to the potential on display, severely so. The scale is amped up to grandness, certainly, but despite majestic intent, what we find here is a watered-down forgery, an imitation you can spot from a mile away: this Dahlia is barely Black-ish; the cloth muffling this revolver isn’t the real thing but merely velveteen.

There is much promise of magic, especially as the film begins. A raffish crook watches The Roaring Twenties, and, too weak in English to recite James Cagney’s lopsidedly-delivered lines, settles instead for the film’s famous last words, pointing a kerchief-covered finger at the mirror and saying Gladys George’s line about how her dead flame “was a big shot”, thus recreating a voiceover instead of playing a role — ironically making a wish and jinxing himself all at once.

Johnny Balraj is a character with character, a zoot-suit wearing tomcat with his eye on the prize, and Ranbir Kapoor plays him with slithery elegance. Spry as if eternally scalded, Kapoor glides restlessly through the film – hitching rides from people, situations and passing buses – without a second thought, forever sidling away from the real, the nitty-gritty. Balraj masochistically spends his nights TylerDurden-ing inside a steel cage (a la Amitabh Bachchan in Naseeb) and there are times the preternaturally talented Kapoor absolutely shines: a scene, for example, where he leers wickedly and stubbornly (but far from lasciviously) at his girl, while a tailor measures her bust, is priceless.

Balraj rides the coattails of Kaizad Khambatta, a sinister media baron with his nimble fingers in many oily pies. Karan Johar is a revelation as this character so obsessed with his all-powerful, all-controlling image that — in the film’s brightest moment — he steps out of a room in order to have himself a good giggle. The film ostensibly mirrors some tabloid duel from back in the day (Khambatta is once referred to by the rival tabloid as “a fruitcake!”) but real-life parallels can’t save a boring plot.

The striking production design and nudge-nudge-wink-wink Bombay allusions are merely window-dressing, though. This film suffers from fundamentally flimsy storytelling. Not just is it spelt out how some strips of negative hold the key to Bombay itself, but we’re shown how breezily (and even comically) said negatives were acquired, and they matter only because the film doggedly insists they do. It never feels vital enough. For some reason Bombay Velvet seems firmly opposed to the idea of mystery, showing off a weak McGuffin right at the start and later, after an explosive twist (albeit an obvious one) we are flashed that card too, in the very next scene. Robbing the audience of surprise isn’t the smartest idea for what turns out to be a predictable film.

Neither is it wise to entrust so much of Bombay Velvet to the earnest but woefully miscast Anushka Sharma, a fine actress entirely out of her depth as a stage-conquering crooner. She lacks the presence and vivacity, and it takes just two scenes featuring Raveena Tandon singing on stage — think Bianca Castafiore turned sexy — to show us the difference between prima donna and pretender.

Satyadeep Misra is terrific as Balraj’s best friend, Chimman, a loyal pragmatist who, unlike Johnny, looks before he leaps. Misra delivers a consistently measured performance, and his body language is masterful. A scene where Johnny and Khambatta trade platitudes has Chimman casually but forcefully motioning that the money be fixed on first, and Misra manages to convey, through one flick of the fingers, both the fact that he knows his place and that price matters more than place. The infallible Kay Kay Menon plays a police detective, sharply turned-out in a hat and high-waisted trousers but is given silly clues to smile at and decipher, and a laughably bad final scene. Quizmaster Siddhartha Basu shows up looking suitably authoritative and officious in that way that often accompanies ruthlessness, while Vivaan Shah bumbles around with a moustache, looking for all the world like a young Kader Khan.

There is a lot happening, all the time. Yet, after a while, as the corpses pile up – with increasing meaninglessness — and the Tommy guns appear, it all ceases to matter. Everything, it appears, can be solved by murder. This might sound like heresy, but even that awfully cheesy Once Upon A Time In Mumbaai movie had characters worth caring about despite the moronic dialogue they recited; Bombay Velvet has the skills but makes it awfully hard to feel anything for guy, girl or the world they’re in. With no true stakes, the film plods messily along to a climax that feels emotionally unearned and interminably stretched.

One song, however, makes time stand still. Amit Trivedi’s superb soundtrack comes to us mostly in snippets mimed by stage crooners, but, for one devastating moment, Bombay Velvet gives way entirely to let a song called Dhadaam Dhadaam take the stage. An emotionally overwrought aria — complete with black tears brimming down kohl’d cold eyes — the song transcends the film and strikes operatically at the heart. Both movie and audience hold their collective breath, and despite the tedium that follows this track, this cinematic sucker-punch is enough to remind us of Kashyap’s potent flammability. Too bad the rest of the film doesn’t really sing — or singe.

Rating: 2 stars

~

First published Rediff, May 15, 2015

A round-trip luxury cruise is a perfect metaphor for Zoya Akhtar’s Dil Dhadakne Do: it’s glossy, it’s picturesque, everything on board costs far more than it ought, there are some pretty people, a few of whom make a scene, a family shakes a leg quite memorably, there is some motion sickness and — for something that ends up precisely and predictably where it started — it takes a helluva long time going nowhere.

None of this is necessarily a bad thing. We need great movies and trashy movies and insightful movies and clever movies, sure, but sometimes we duck into a darkened theatre looking for comfort food, and that’s when we need movies that do just what they promise on the label.

Modest ambitions notwithstanding, Dil Dhadakne Do takes a while to hit its stride, starting off choppy and feeling — at least for the first ninety of its indulgent 170 minutes — like a weak sitcom. Society types sniping at one another while the background score functions like a laugh track? Ouch. It’s like a really long episode of Sarabhai Vs Sarabhai where Satish Shah doesn’t show up. And it doesn’t help that in DDD, the narrator is a dog. The Mehra family, the frustrated foursome at the heart of this film, have a fifth member, an adorable bullmastiff who happens to be narrating the film. (Not kidding). And he’s voiced by Aamir Khan. (I wish I were kidding.)

Thus does Aamir’s Pluto Mehra pontificate on about people and their peculiar ways, but this too-literal voiceover — full of homilies about how strange humans are — is shockingly reminiscent of Khan’s last film, PK, where he played an alien, full of homilies about how strange humans are. The gimmick could conceivably have been cute, but the film embraces it as an afterthought: it’s fundamentally messed up that Pluto has nothing to do in the entire movie except talk reproachfully about people; and secondly that Khan, delivering platitudes written by Javed Akhtar, does so with a disturbingly pompous all-knowing voice. Snapdeal-Dhadakne-Do, the dog appears to be saying.

The project is lifted by a couple of actors, Anil Kapoor and Ranveer Singh playing the Mehra father and son and injecting Dil Dhadakne Do with energy and repose respectively. The film is about a family on a cruise with their friends, a nearly-bankrupt family taking a last-gasp holiday because saving face is too important, and it is Kapoor’s undying ebullience and Singh’s perplexed inwardness that defines the film and sets it on course. Zoya Akhtar’s film doesn’t provide much insight and leans too heavily on repetitive, sitcom-like reaction shots to underline its own obvious points over and over again — this is a film that generalises too much, one where all the parents are regressive, all the women are marriage-bait — but in the cacophony of these belaboured caricatures, Singh provides tremendous calm and brings nuance to the table. He’s excellent. It’s as if an understated actor from a Pakistani TV show walked out into a deafening Balaji crowd.

To be fair, however, the crowd is mostly on point. Farhan Akhtar, who has done a spiffy job with the film’s often sardonic dialogue, is rather charming in the film. Shefali Shah is reliably strong as an unhappy, delusional wife, though she does appear to be channeling Shabana Azmi too much, and intriguing new actress Ridhima Sud is memorably cool as a young girl who knows when her shotglass needs another splash. The striking Priyanka Chopra can carry of a yellow sun hat with immense flair, but her Beyoncé-level swagger (and her auditioning-for-America accent that randomly makes some English lines jar) is at odds with her character’s innate mousiness in front of her parents. Anushka Sharma, playing a dancer but assuredly more comfortable on stage here than during her last debacle, is pretty great here as she concocts heady chemistry with Singh, the two infectiously grinning at each other as they fool around.

Sharma and Singh are smashing together, starting off their courtship hurriedly, with the kind of conversation people used to have on the Internet back in the day — throwing factual stats about their life out onto the table as if playing verbal Uno — but rather than seeming unnatural, it works because they make it seem believable that these two characters urgently want to get really close really fast. Sharma, more world-weary, is at times hesitant, and Singh — playing a leading man, who, refreshingly enough, has achieved nothing and knows nothing about where he’s headed — approaches the romance bullishly, in that reckless way we do when we finally know what we want. There’s a fine, fine moment where he pins her down and declares his love to her theatrically, in blustery, Bollywood-y dialogue, and she yanks him down for a kiss — tenderly, yes, but also simply to shut the fool up.

There is much, thus, that is wrong with Dil Dhadakne Do — the way it treats chauvinism as an absolute aspect of personality, the awful Priyanka Chopra plotline, the total lack of progressive parental figures on board the ship (where is that Daadi from Queen when you really need her?) — but it has a few sharp character-driven moments and, unlike most Hindi films, it ends stronger than it started, an impressive feat considering it always intended to finish things off in obviously feel-good fashion.

Despite its flaws, I find myself looking back at Dil Dhadakne Do and smiling. Because of Kapoor, a man who is unerringly good when given enough elbow room, and here he’s silvermaned and smooth and selfish and playing his part with superb gusto. His character is so self-obsessed that in his head he’s frequently confounded by just how obvious things seem to him and not the rest of the world, and Kapoor is superb as he restlessly swells up while waiting for everyone else to catch up to him. And because of Singh, who owns his moments of frustration, of resignation, of outrage, of wry comebacks. There is a scene where he loses all his calm and throws out the facts threateningly, like a grenade bobbed at his family, that he’s in love with a girl. “She’s a dancer and a muslim,” he says, daring them to react, and Singh is scarily good. But he’s even better when wordlessly standing on the deck, helplessly looking at his own shoes instead of daring to embrace his sobbing sister.

Dil Dhadakne Do translates to let the heart beat. The heart, it wants what it wants, and that’s all very well, especially if it wants the kind of watery climaxes where hugs solve everything. But ah, how I wish this film hadn’t gone doggystyle.

Rating: 3 stars

~

First published Rediff, June 5, 2015

Vidya Balan cries throughout Hamari Adhuri Kahani.

Her character, Vasudha, is a timid and relatively mousy woman, one who has let herself be cowed down by patriarchy even when no patriarch is present in her life, and she frequently flies into panicked hysterics. But the character and her motivations are not why I think Balan — one of our finest actresses — is crying; I think she’s weeping her eyes out because, with every take, she realises how unforgivably atrocious this film is.

Mohit Suri has been an efficient director of plot-heavy cinema (with plots often filched from other places), a man who trades almost exclusively in weatherbeaten movie cliches but has always done so with some speed and slickness. This time, working from a script written by Mahesh Bhatt, his focus appears to be not story but, simply, sadness. Everyone in this film, in virtually every frame, looks pained. The relentless background score swells to a crescendo, and then swells up again, to another crescendo. The characters are all pathetic folk with twisted childhoods. The word ‘mangalsutra’ is made massively heavy (while the word ‘terrorist’ is used with remarkable casualness) and there is much, much bad parenting on display. Merely totting up many a sad element doesn’t create heartbreak, however, and grand tragedy cannot be stitched together like Frankenstein’s monster. What we have here is Suri’s monstrosity.

Hari (Rajkumar Rao), an old, limping man, has vanished with his dead wife’s ashes. He has left, in their place, a novel he has apparently written on the fly instead of a letter of explanation, and it is this that his long-neglected son reads and sobs over. It is a novel, that ,peculiarly enough, is not told from the narrator’s point of view and contains too little about himself, preferring instead to dwell on voyeuristic imaginings of what his wife Vasudha and her lover Aarav must have gotten up to. Awkward.

The film is a dreadful drag, with godawful dialogue. “Looks like you love your job,” Aarav says, played by a bored Emraan stating revelatory facts so often here that his name may well be Exposition Hashmi. “How can you tell?”, Vasudha (rather needlessly) gasps, but despite lovin’ it, soon resignedly declares. “Mere ghar ka choola isi kaam se chalta hai.” Okay then.

Aarav, a self-made billionaire with a truly miserable childhood, offers Vasudha a job in Dubai. Vasudha, who has been lying to her young son about the father, Hari, that mysteriously deserted them five years ago, decides with much deliberation to take the job — and promptly deserts said child instead of taking him along. As for Hari, he may or may not be a terrorist, depending on what you want to believe about a story where trees double up as get-out-of-jail-free cards. Also, Hari is the worst kind of misogynist, believing he owns Vasudha forever. Vasudha… It is a name that unfailingly reminds me of Jaya Bhaduri in Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s classic Chupke Chupke, where at some point while spelling out her name she is interrupted by her sister and called an ass. Balan’s Vasudha is far more asinine, an apparently independent and well-educated woman who is aware of her husband’s appalling behaviour, is freshly disgusted and surprised by it each time. When told he’s a terrorist, that seems to matter less to her than the fact that he hasn’t called.

Meanwhile Suri ladles on the sad cliches, lifting clumsily from the most iconic tragedies. At one point Hashmi stiltedly caresses Balan’s chin with a flower, presumably thinking of Mughal-E-Azam. The film’s most catastrophically bad scene comes from An Affair To Remember, in which Hashmi takes Balan to see his piano-playing mother (as opposed to Cary Grant’s piano-playing grandmother). The mother plays said piano while Hashmi, standing in the same room, tells Balan about her sad life. He then walks up to the mother and she’s stunned to see him. (Time and again in this film, characters are startled by other characters already being in the same room as them; this, I wager, is because the background score makes sure they can’t hear anyone approach.) They talk for a bit before the mother notices Balan. She turns to her and asks, with a beatific smile: “Arre, yeh banjaaran kaun hai?” Then she, a former cabaret performer and apparent clairvoyant, starts telling her about how she shouldn’t live in the past, should not be a sati or a Sita — even as this mother herself is spending her life playing muzak to her comatose husband. (I’m told this mother is played by the lovely Amala Akkineni; I choose, for her sake, to not believe this.)

It is a film where three fine actors all play idiots. Hashmi’s character keeps going off to literally smell the flowers, Rao’s character is a possessive neanderthal, and Vidya’s character is plain dumb — for one thing, she needs to know that yelling “Hari! Hari!” as she runs behind a police jeep will only make the cops drive faster.

Now let’s talk about what’s good in Hamari Adhuri Kahani. The thing is…

Rating: One Star

~

First published Rediff, June 12, 2015

Like in Game Of Thrones, nobody’s innocent.

We’ve all casually — or intentionally — let out details about what someone else may not have seen or read. Sometimes it’s purely inadvertent, like when an intern once called me up, found out I was watching Top Gun and asked “ooh, is Goose dead yet?,” understandable given I was watching an all-time blockbuster decades after it had come out — but a memory that stings, to this day. Sometimes it’s vindictive, like the popcorn-seller a friend’s father dismissed while watching Jewel Thief back in the 70s, only to have him snarl “Ashok Kumar villain hai” during the interval and ruin said gent’s evening. Sometimes it’s friendly, the desperate urge to high-five over a shocking twist. Sometimes, in the zeal to describe or recommend a film, we reviewers go too far and tell more than we ought — this is a tricky line, indeed — and I remember a daft film where, since nothing made sense at all, I took matters into my own hands and started the review off by revealing the preposterous climax in the hope that readers could perhaps watch the film with the end in mind and, as I explain here, find their own puzzle-solving entertainment.

The fact is that spoilers happen and that we’ve all been guilty — to varying degree — of spilling what we shouldn’t. Or, at the very least, what we ought to be more careful with.

Our behavorial approach to spoilers is outdated. It’s convenient to endorse a caveat emptor method — Let The One Who Watches Later Beware — to say it’s your fault you didn’t watch the baskeball game live and now you’ve exiled yourself to a day without newspapers and sports channels with your fingers crossed, but the fact is that in these over-communicated times, the Sensory Deprivator 5000 just doesn’t cut it anymore.

It’s time we started being more considerate.

Exactly one week ago, on the Game Of Thrones season finale, shocking things happened and people died. That could well be a summary for every episode of the show based on George RR Martin’s sprawling fantasy series where leading characters routinely get poleaxed, but this time — more than any other television event I remember — the Internet went freakin’ nuts. This whole week, there have been spoilers everywhere. Twitter, Facebook statuses, even bloody newspaper headlines, all going out of their way to give away huge revelations. Everyone appeared out out to punish the viewer who has a day-job and thus didn’t watch the episode at the crack of dawn Monday morning (the first telecast in India happens simultaneous with HBO in the US, at 6:30 AM our time) and all those who thought they could savour a finale on their own time.

No way. Current social networking behaviour seems to be “You didn’t watch it? Boo hoo, now let me rub these GIFs into your face.” But must we all be such Ramsay Boltons? Is that who we’ve become?

There is something deeply obnoxious about the need to crow about being the first person to have watched a show, seen a film, read a bestseller. We all have the Internet, we all watch stuff, and seeing it first does not equip us with any greater understanding; the head-start isn’t a real head-start. This, by itself, isn’t as problematic, despite the hollow bragging: the main issue lies with the sadistic way we flaunt our latest discoveries instead of letting people discover them on their own.

A television drama is not a sports broadcast and the plot of a movie isn’t a news story; there is just no need to fire up our keyboards to report on fiction as if it’s freshly emerging fact. 

There is a lot to be learnt from readers of George RR Martin’s novel, who experienced the death we are now gasping about in the books four years ago, and yet they have been considerate enough to not rain on our parade but instead let us stagger for ourselves, when our time came.

Do I want to write about the finale, throw in my theories, discuss it with my geekdom? Sure. But I need to write it somewhere two-clicks away where you can come choose to read me — after a clickbaity “You Won’t Believe Which Character Didn’t Really Die” headline, if need be — and I cannot, should not, must not thrust a spoiler in your face, without warning, like an unsolicited dick pic.

And yes, that dick pic — the worst kind of online trollery and harassment — is what I compare the thoughtless spoiler to. As a critic who has routinely been threatened and abused and harassed online for eleven years — before Facebook opened its doors and well before Twitter existed — I know what I’m talking about here. Blankly and ignorantly hurled abuse can hurt, can disconcert, can depress — but it can (and must) also be shrugged off. The worst thing about spoilers is that they come from within the little social substreams we’ve curated for ourselves, they come from ‘our people,’ and — really — do we want to believe that even the little corners of the Internet we make our own are just as obnoxious as say, the commentators on YouTube videos?

There are no rules about this sort of thing. I can file a complaint about a nameless troll harassing me on Twitter, but I can’t call the cops on a smartass making a weak pun about a character’s death and ruining the fact that I was saving up a half-dozen episodes to bingewatch over a weekend. It’s not a crime to give away a spoiler, but it is a rotten thing to do, and I feel we need to police ourselves. Let’s not just groan and move on to the next book or show, in the hopes that this time we’ll watch and read faster. We shouldn’t have to.

Why can’t we all realise that while we really want to discuss something really cool/shocking/unbelievable with someone, there are other people in the room? This is the Internet. There are always other people in the room. Share what you want to on a forum, behind spoiler-warnings, with those who choose to read it and react and have awesome conversations with you about it. Don’t screw up someone else’s day just because you can.

This, then, is a clarion call to start a culture of spoiler-shaming.

We can start by identifying the jerks who are flippantly giving things away, calling them out in public, telling them they’re being jerks — honestly, most of them (us) don’t even know. Often it’s just eagerness to share, to make a worthy GIF, to take our thoughts to the world, to be witty about something that matters to many of us.

But this is when the rest of us need to tap a person — or, indeed, a publication — on the shoulder, and tell them they need to take a post down or delete a tweet or change a headline. We need to inform them that they need to, at the very least, word their thoughts differently because it stings to have something you enjoy ruined for you, and social media does so en masse. A headline or a tweet or a status update should not, in a civil world, be allowed to contain a spoiler. It’s plain rude.

Therefore, I apologise for any such indiscretions on my part in the past, and promise to be far more careful in the future. Like I said, this sickening boorishness might not be intentional, but that is no reason to let it continue unchecked. The rulebook is in our hands, and I say we start by calling out the offenders — and letting them know how offensive they are.

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First published Rediff, June 22, 2015

It is always hard to stay under the radar as you slip into a classroom, and much as young Chinmay wants to carry on undetected in a new school in a new little world, he’s singled out immediately and identified as the new student from the city who has won a scholarship. The 11-year-old cringes as the teacher forces the class to applaud him and then, immediately after that, tells the other students that all of them must, like Chinmay, win scholarships in the coming year: be so special, in short, that nobody remains special. Being told by the teacher that this city mouse, this ‘outsider’, is smarter than them immediately raises hackles. Chinmay, a fine student and square enough to fit right into his Camlin geometry box, is aghast. He isn’t sure he wants to be friends with these unruly, egg-headed small-town boys — but he desperately needs friends.

As do we all, especially at a time when we seek to discover and find our own voices through them. Avinash Arun’s beautiful directorial debut, Killa, is a poetic and subtly philosophical rumination on childhood and displacement and the very notions of friendship. Chinmay’s father passed away a year ago and his mother is frequently transferred from job to job, with a smart but inevitably restless 11-year-old on her hands. There isn’t much money in the house — Chinmay frequently complains about the food — and yet his mother lays great importance on her son calling his classmates over for dinner; because sometimes making ends meet is less important than making friends eat.

It is a melancholic film, to be sure, but one that breathes thoughtfully, like its quiet protagonist. Arun’s film is anchored by brilliant performances — Archit Davadhar comes across as wonderfully impressionable as Chinmay, Amruta Subhash is heartbreakingly good as his mother, and Parth Bhalerao is a hoot as messy scamp Bandya — but Killa is made truly special by its calm and understated storytelling, the way its narrative displays a fluid ebb and flow. The restraint is stunning; it is a film set in the 90s but barely draws attention to that fact, save for a TV show theme hummed in a classroom and an old phone used in one scene. It isn’t afraid to be choppy — or, indeed, to surprisingly cut away just when we think something momentous is about to happen (a cycle race is promised eagerly but only delivered much later, for example) — and thus it develops its own rhythm that, while always unhurried, remains impressively riveting. The music is old-world but energetic, used sparingly and efficiently. Arun, also the film’s cinematographer, shoots his lush, rained-out greens and soothing beaches with a near-impressionistic eye; it is a moody film that looks ordinary one instant and utterly spectacular the next.

The new wave of Maharashtrian filmmakers are responsible for some of the most extraordinary work in Indian cinema right now, and Arun’s first film exemplifies their storytelling strength and artistic sophistication. Killa is a deep film with lofty ambitions, and there are parts — like the unpredictability of a moment that ends in a bite of fish — where the film soars jawdroppingly high. Yet I suspect the scenes that leave you awestruck aren’t the point of Killa. This is even better. This is a film you should watch for its lovely, lovely lulls.

Rating: 4.5 stars

~

First published Rediff, June 26, 2015

‘What is your favourite colour?’ I always found that a dashed impossible question. Purple leaps to mind because of how cool and wizardly it is; I’m partial to pretty girls in Yellow; Blue is the colour of ink and jazz and skies; and, like Ferraris, I look best in Scarlet — but then Holly Golightly made us realise how mean Red can be. There truly can be no one favourite colour, merely one best-suited for a moment. It’s as pointless as using one singular feeling to label a moment, a memory, a thought. At every given time, we’re a jumbled up mess, our feelings and emotions questioning and contradicting and second-guessing each other as they jostle for attention — and with Inside Out, Pixar’s latest and arguably finest film, we get a glimpse into what goes on behind the scenes.

The film takes place inside the head of a little girl, Riley, an ice-hockey-loving 11-year-old moving with her parents from Minnesota to San Francisco. But woe is she, for San Francisco puts broccoli on their pizza. Disgust, a green glitter-haired sprite inside Riley’s head is appalled. Alongside her, astride a control bridge, are the red and inflammable Anger, the nerdy purple Fear, the despondent blue Sadness and — leading the pack — the giddily ebullient Joy, bright yellow and impossibly determined to keep Riley happy as can be.

This is a startlingly new landscape, even for the imagineers over at Pixar, and there is tremendous fun in watching these five emotions take turns at making Riley live and feel and react. Joy — voiced by the irrepressibly buoyant Amy Poehler — is an obvious favourite, not least because she looks a bit like Tinkerbell and because her motive is wanting Riley to be happy. So happy, in fact, that Joy chalks out a little circle and asks Sadness to stay within the lines. If you’re astonished by such an elegantly simple metaphor about Repression in an animated film, buckle up: this film goes deep. Significantly, psychologically, educatively deep.

Director Pete Docter has done something absolutely stunning here. Inside Out is certainly a candied Pixar adventure-comedy, wickedly witty and polished till it shines, and yet there is tremendous insight as the film intuitively and evocatingly zigzags through a brain. There are, for example, racks upon racks of bright coloured memories — like a giant gallery of M&Ms — of which some are fading and being forgotten, because of misuse and because they aren’t accessed often enough, but where some peculiar ones — a theme-tune to a gum commercial seen in childhood, say — are frequently tossed into the foreground of the brain, just for the heck of it, where it will persistently rattle around all day. There is Abstract Thought, which dices our characters into Picasso edges, and there is The Subconscious, “where they take all the troublemakers.”

Inside Riley’s mother’s brain.

Choo-chooing somewhere in the distance is a locomotive, a literal Train Of Thought, and seemingly holding the structure together, formed out of Riley’s core memories, are her Islands Of Personality, themeparks inside her head for the things most important to her: Family, Hockey, Friendship, Honesty and Goofball — the last working well when Riley needs to make monkey-sounds with her parents. Things, naturally, go wrong somewhere near the control panel, and while much can be said about the grand adventure taking place inside Riley’s head — but why give it away? — the most glorious thing about Inside Out is that it meanders away from obvious storytelling and gives us room to think about ourselves. I, for example, caught myself wondering what islands I’d have inside my head. (Despite making a film that necessitates repeat viewings to capture all the multitiered genius of its confections, Docter makes it a point to make us wonder thus, nudging us briefly toward other brains, dog-brains and cat-brains and father-brains and, best of all, a Cool Girl brain, where the emotions eventually confess that “Being cool is so exhausting.”)

Riley, voiced by Kaitlyn Dias, is a perfectly nice girl, but the fun characters all lie within her. Joy is almost unbearably bouncy, and Poehler — with her Leslie Knope infallibility in place — nails the crucial balance; Mindy Kaling is sneeringly spot-on as Disgust; Richard Kind is wonderful as Bing Bong, an imaginary friend who cries candy and can “blow a mean nose”; and the film’s most nuanced performance comes from Phyllis Smith, making Sadness so darned irresistible. Inside Out’s crowning achievement may be the parity it achieves, the way it illustrates how one emotion isn’t better than another, that each is important and makes a difference. Why, sometimes you need to heat Anger up just to use it as a weapon. Thus it’s unfair to aim exclusively for happiness. (Could it be the yellow M&Ms don’t taste better than the others after all?)

A staggeringly original film, Inside Out is a cinematic miracle. There has quite frankly never been anything like it before, and it is an essential film for lovers of the movies, children, parents and inner-children everywhere. It is insightful, intoxicating and incredible, and when I was done with it, scrubbed and sobbed and sated, I felt I’d been scribbled on by Pixar crayons. The detailing is exquisite — Joy, using a french fry to do a pole-vault pauses to lick her salty fingers right after — Michael Giacchino’s music is fantastic, and there is something in the film to speak to each of us. I, for one, was particularly captivated by the sound-stage on which dreams were being produced, like a live television show with scripts and actors and directors… And what critic dare rebuke a film he’d pick over a dream?

Rating: 5 stars

~

First published Rediff, June 26, 2015

It was merely a matter of time before someone cracked the Rajkumar Hirani code.

The most memorable tent-pole filmmakers — the big mainstream showmen and pleasers of crowds — often create their own self-celebrating genre. They strike upon and cautiously hone a formula (something Manmohan Desai, for example, managed to do with near-mathematical precision) and then they reap. Till, that is, someone new figures out this formula and replicates it to great effect. It is an invariable and unsurprising cycle, and it happens even though some masala filmmakers take longer to milk than others.

Bajrangi Bhaijaan is an overearnest, oversimplified, preposterously sweet and frequently schlocky film, which shouldn’t work because of how predictable and soppy it is. Yet, because of a finely picked supporting cast, some sharp lines of dialogue and, most crucially, because of its overall heart, it works, and works well. This may well be a Kabir Khan film, but for all those who wished to see Salman Khan in a Raju Hirani project, consider that mission accomplished.

Over in the part of Kashmir that lies with our neighbours, a mother-to-be watches a cricket game on television, all but blowing kisses to a handsome green-clad batsman. The match is conquered and the kicking infant is to be named after the swaggering strokemaker, but it happens to be a girl. We meet Shahida at age six, and she’s pretty as a picture but has never spoken a word. The mother decides she’ll take this daughter to the grand wish-fulfilling dargah of Hazrat Nizamuddin over in Delhi, but things go wrong and, mostly because the poor child is unable to cry out for help, she’s left behind in India.

It is in Kurukshetra that this lost little girl runs into local good-for-nothing Pavan Kumar Chaturvedi, a Hanuman-worshipper who believes she’s a brahmin — “who else could be that fair?”, he reasons — and tries to find her parents. Eventually, after naming every city he can think of, he figures out that she’s “a Mohammedan” from Pakistan, is shocked, but decides to go drop her back across the line, all while chanting Hanuman’s name and bowing to every monkey he sees. A mace-shaped pendant hangs from his thick neck, and it must be said that the well-meaning Pavan has an equally thick head.

Kabir Khan cleverly cast his usually invincible hero as a smiling dullard, a man who took ten years to reach the tenth grade and eleven more years to graduate college (a nice parallel, then, to the much-mocked eternal youth enjoyed by Afridi). The thought of another film with Salman Khan flexing his biceps and ripping his shirt off to beat up a dozen men with one pelvic punch is nauseating, and thus seeing him as an emotional fool (who is too ticklish to wrestle) is automatically refreshing. The little girl is played quite wonderfully by Harshaali Malhotra, a seraphic child with gleaming eyes and it is she who smoothens over the film’s roughest edges — like, for instance, an unnecessary fight scene in a brothel — just by looking at Salman with such sheer awe.

Nawazuddin Siddiqui leads the supporting cast, playing a Pakistani news-scavenger based, oddly enough, on Chand Nawab, a real-life reporter who went viral following a clip where passers-by (and his own concentration) couldn’t make room for his modest intentions. Siddiqui nails that particular scene and brings much credibility to the proceedings, excelling with his body language here while laughing uncontrollably lying on a bed of corn or when grabbing an old man’s hand to get himself forcibly slapped. Siddiqui sinks his teeth into a good part and runs with it; at one point, when putting up a story he has shot himself on YouTube, his character — so used to desperately slapping his credit on the videos he sells to news channels — signs off, out of habit, “cameraman Chand Nawaz ke saath, Chand Nawaz…” Perfect.

Kareena Kapoor Khan looks dazzling but has far too little to do, Sharat Saxena and Rajesh Sharma are routinely excellent in their gruff roles, and Om Puri has a warm little cameo, but the film is set up by the overwhelming earnestness of Meher Vij in the role of Shahida’s mother, who wears her heartbreak very believably indeed. The filmmakers even throw in one of the old men from that great Kashmir film, Haider in a bid for credibility, and having all these fine actors even in tiny parts helps things considerably.

Also helping things along are a few deft writing touches about bigotry, religion and neighbourly love. A lot of this is hamhanded, but a fair bit is rather interesting, like Pavan being the son of an RSS-man and being revulsed by the smell of meat in the morning, and him threatening to throw out a Pakistani Embassy official from India who turns out to be “just another Indian.” Or like the fact that Kashmir and Switzerland look pretty darned alike.

At two hours and forty minutes, Bajrangi Bhaijaan is seriously long and the climax feels it might never end, but hey, haven’t classic Bollywood weepies always gone on forever? At least Kabir Khan has done his tearjerking properly, added in some burkha tomfoolery and, at one point when the young girl wants chicken and her guardian can’t deal with it, even thrown some Benny Hill madness into it. I tell you, that Hirani code stands cracked good.

In one scene a Pakistani cop, suspicious of his quarry, brusquely interrogates them and Nawaz foxily conjures up a tale of star-crossed lovers and elopement. The policeman breaks into a grin, his ears perk up, and he immediately wants to know more. India, Pakistan, whatever: we’re all just suckers for story. Jai Shri Drama.

Rating: 3.5 stars

~

First published Rediff, July 17, 2015

Some superheroes have the same problems we do.

The tiny Ant-Man and his equally puny adversary, Yellowjacket, rattle around waging war locked inside a briefcase and one of them trampolines against an iPhone’s home-button while saying the words “I’m going to disintegrate you.” Siri, confounding in that sweet, untimely way of hers, decides to obey an unsaid command and plays Disintegration, by The Cure. Bravo.

Over the last few years, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has buffed the superhero story into a squeaky-clean template, but the blockbuster goalposts keep moving. At a time when we’re coming alive to the cheeky action stylings of Kingsman and the exposition-free awesomeness of Mad Max Fury Road, can an Ant-Man movie drop our jaw and make us say wow? No. So, no, we don’t care if honey, you shrunk the superhero, and no, we don’t fear a supervillain best sized to ruin picnics. The wow simply will not happen.

The good thing is that Marvel knows it, and thus hands us a surprisingly slack and refreshingly modest superhero film. Paul Rudd, who we love ever since he crushed on his blonde stepsister in Clueless two decades ago, is the incredibly unlikely man in the suit. The entire film is a deliciously old-school heist picture — the kind of heist film where Roy Ayers’ Escape theme from Coffy kicks in every time plans are being hatched, in fact.

It is also rather unmistakably a heist film mostly for children, and thus a film that is never clever enough to be genuinely surprising or enjoyable. There are moments of fleeting fun — including toys blown up to larger-than-life size, and Michael Douglas digitally retouched to look so young you feel Sharon Stone must be contorting her legs somewhere nearby — but this film, while passably entertaining and pop-up-book thrilling in 3D, is by no means anything special even though it sufficiently sets up a potentially endearing character (or two).

Ant-Man, directed by Peyton Reed, was originally an Edgar Wright project before that terrific director was taken off the project. It’s all rather heartbreaking, and while the script still retains his flourishes (and screen-credit), the overwhelming feeling is one of squandered promise, despite the scene-stealingly good Michael Peña. Ant-Man slides around the grooves of a record spinning frantically in a nightclub, which is all swell, but it’s all a bit been-there-done-that, a bit Eega, even. It’s a pretty watchable light movie, but ah, it could have been a Wright movie.

Rating: 3 stars

~

First published Rediff, July 24, 2015

It’s bloody hard to create controversy, you know? Yes, I know it’s all done for release-dates and ratings and eyeballs, and you’re right, naturally, but the very act of it — of summoning up scandal or sparking off a storm — is damn near impossible in this day and age. Just think, if you will, of the last time something genuinely shocked you. A piece of news that made you sit up and take notice, made you call up a friend to discuss it, got you gobsmacked enough to keep you from tweeting sarcastically about it for five dumbfounded minutes. It doesn’t happen anymore, it just doesn’t.

We’ve all heard the weirdest rumours — about everyone from Amitabh Bachchan to Shah Rukh Khan to men named Modi — and read about the saddest exposés — involving everyone from Cary Grant to Bill Cosby — and I don’t think anything can significantly raise our eyebrows anymore. In a world where everyone is constantly out to “break the Internet,” all we have left are a few cracks.

Can controversy sell a film? No. The public today is too cynical to really care if x slept with y — unless they like how x and y look on screen together, in which case, of course, they’ll queue up for their movies anyway. According to the old-school publicity pundits, what controversy does is keep a film’s name in the headlines, but my point is that when a blockbuster is coming up, we’re bombarded with its name regardless of gossip. It doesn’t matter how little we may care, we know when the next Rohit Shetty film will release. And smaller independent films have budgets too measly — and are too star-less — to manufacture any effective buzz through the grapevine. Who would care if two actors the public doesn’t know about are brawling? (The few hundred people who already revere these actors too good to be super-famous could care less about a blind-item column.)

The truth of the matter is that visibility does not equal success. We go to the movies for all kinds of reasons — we like the actors/filmmakers/posters, we’ve heard good things about what’s playing, or, in some cases involving certain superstars, we go because we are comforted by the fact that we know exactly what we’re going to get — but I don’t think any of us think someone else’s scandal is worth spending our own money on. People tallying up ‘trending topics’ should remember that retweets don’t cost a rupee. The loudest of the noise comes from preaching to the choirs. If success could be determined by the amount of newsprint one can swallow, Bombay Velvet would be a historic hit. And Gajendra Chauhan would be our megastar.

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First published The Hindustan Times, July 25, 2015

Some movies appear on our viewing doorstep carrying far too much baggage. Drishyam, for instance, is a Hindi remake of a Malayalam film of the same name made into several languages with leading men of exceptional pedigree, and which has also, I believe, stolen its set-up from a Japanese mystery thriller, The Devotion Of Suspect X. That’s an awful lot of suitcases all right. As with too-eager houseguests, there are ways for filmgoers (and critics) to deal with such visitors, and in this particular case I decided against homework, invited the film in and asked it to leave its luggage out by the door.

I’m glad I did, because while I haven’t watched any of the other Drishyams or read Suspect X, this Hindi version is an utterly unremarkable thriller, one that could have been potentially cool and wily, but one that falls well short of being memorable. It’s a depressingly ordinary film, and the allegedly stolen plot — about a crime being covered-up — is something we’ve seen many, many times before.

Heck, if you want to see a genuinely great thriller about a movie-inspired protagonist buying tickets and meeting people to construct a watertight alibi, go watch Sriram Raghavan’s fantastic Johnny Gaddaar instead of reading the rest of this review.

Ordinariness aside, Nishikant Kamat’s Drishyam is watchable and even builds tension effectively from time to time, but ends up an overlong, overbaked drudge, largely because of Ajay Devgn in the lead, trying to look cerebral and calm while assuming solid-coloured shirts will absolve him of the artlessness he has flaunted in recent movies. It would be unfair to compare most leading men to masters Mohanlal and Kamal Haasan, but Devgn — who used to be a striking brooder, a man who appeared to know how to simmer on the inside — is now just talking softly while essentially swaggering along regardless. Vulnerability? Perish the thought. The idea of subtle internalisation has led this man to sheer cardboard.

The way the film sees him doesn’t help. Even while playing an everyman who loves his family, a song montage in Drishyam has Devgn standing away from his wife and daughters, wearing sunglasses and striking a hero pose till the family comes and coos over him. (Later in the same sequence his wife tries on heels and slips; Devgn sits back and laughs, making no effort to help her.)

Devgn’s Vijay is a cable-operator who lives in a giant villa with a fawning family, and one day things go quite bizarrely awry. Something must be done to save his world, and Vijay — a film-lovin’ orphan who prefers spending most nights with a tiny TV in his office instead of his moronically indulgent wife — takes inspiration from the movies. Except, and here is one fundamental problem with this meta film-within-film setup, he doesn’t really do or learn anything of actual brilliance, with films having apparently taught him the mere value of being stubborn. There are times he gets a lump in his throat watching Bachchan ham it up hard (or one in his trousers watching Sunny Leone do the same), but it all appears too forced. Save for a couple of scenes, the cinema-beats-life trope doesn’t really pay off.

What does pay off, as always, is casting Tabu in a meaty role. Despite first showing up in a bewilderingly tight police shirt — which then leads to her striding through a corridor in slow-motion, almost a la Baywatch — the actress is characteristically impressive in her role of a no-nonsense cop. There’s a case, she has a stake in it, and she knows what she’s doing — something Tabu expresses with brilliant weariness as she rolls her eyes at her husband who objects to her brutal methods. She’s a badass superstar who looks like she means it when she munches over dialogue about ‘visual memory’ et al, but her epiphanies are too conveniently arrived at, while her methods are too thickheaded.

Drishyam starts far too snoozily. The narrative intent is clear — to normalise the world (and Devgn) before shifting into thriller-mode — but the film is clumsily written, with dialogue that sounds wooden; the first hour of the film sounds like an amateurishly dubbed film instead of one we’re watching natively. There are a few smart flourishes, but the filmmakers linger on the one or two good twists for so long that they render them tedious. (There is even a cheeky reference to Suspect X, I believe, in the throwaway mention of a “retired professor” who lives nearby.) But mostly there is more tackiness than craft, demonstrated best by the ill-produced recreations of the movies Vijay watches and in the way fake newspapers are visibly made up of computer printouts with Times New Roman taken too literally.

Don’t get me wrong, several parts of the film work and, for the most part, Drishyam motors along far more efficiently than most Hindi films — but isn’t that too low a bar? Is it too much to ask for a ingenious, tight thriller?

At one point in the film Tabu makes the link about Vijay and the movies, and this is where I rubbed my hands together and thought we were (finally) in for some intriguing traps that subvert or mock cinematic cliché, a truly brilliant cat and mouse game. Alas, nothing comes of it and we never get a battle between equals. Perhaps because she’d have eaten him alive: lug, luggage and all.

Rating: 2.5 stars

~

First published Rediff, July 31, 2015

That Tom Hollander, he’s come a long way. Back in 2009’s brilliant In The Loop, Hollander played the dumbfounded Simon Foster, a Secretary Of State of some kind and a smalltime MP. Now, in Christopher McQuarrie’s Mission Impossible – Rogue Nation — the fifth film keeping that inflammable Lalo Schifrin theme-tune from the sixties still hot — Hollander has flown up the ranks enough in order to play the Prime Minister of England. Which isn’t to say that he is any less inept.

Nearly everyone, as a matter of fact, in the new Mission Impossible movie, appears significantly dunderheaded with the exception of the all-conquering leading man and — in a rather nice switch — the leading lady (who is, refreshingly enough, not his leading lady). We’ll get to her soon, but let us first deal with the well-cast but often clueless men: there’s Alec Baldwin, every bit the CEO of GE, using words like “salvageable assets” while describing a spy organisation; there’s Jeremy Renner, wearing a well-cut suit and a permanent scowl; there’s Simon Pegg, playing Halo wearing exquisite headphones and, later, doing all the damsel-in-distress screaming a movie can handle; there’s Ving Rhames saying he can handle it (in a thick voice) and then failing to do so; and there’s Sean Harris playing a big cold villain who is basically Blofeld without a monocle — pity, that. He could have used some reflection at the end of this film.

All these men, at various points of the film, look utterly useless. This is obviously by design, since the film is meant to glorify one astounding superstar who can hold his breath for six straight minutes and then carry off, in broad daylight, a shirt only meant to be worn in a nightclub as nefarious as the Viper Room. Tom Cruise is 53, and, having swigged from the elixir of eternal youth, eager to show off the results. He is — in the best sense of the term — an old-school superstar, the sort they don’t make anymore. He’s a cocksure, attractive Hero with one helluva smile who wears his invincibility casually, like a light sports-jacket. Despite the name of the franchise, nothing seems remotely impossible — or even unlikely — for Cruise’s Ethan Hunt. He the man.

And — in a move Bond-movies can learn from — she the woman. Rebecca Ferguson plays a crafty double-agent called Ilsa Hunt, a woman introduced to us, one must confess, a bit too sexually, but one who promptly throws off the femme fatale stereotype to picks up a sniper-rifle instead. She might look good in heels but she slips ‘em off whenever action calls. (And action presses redial pretty often.) There is a scene where she commands Hunt to take her skyscraper-high shoes off so she can run across rooftops more efficiently, and then, before running, she takes them from him. Throughout this film, she holds her own. Mercifully, there is no romantic subplot to muddy things up.

McQuarrie — who directed the ineffective Jack Reacher but also wrote The Usual Suspects back in the day and, more tellingly, the very cool Cruise-killing Edge Of Tomorrow — was handpicked by the star for the director’s chair. This marks the first time the director isn’t a distinctive stylist, with the four films before this one boasting of Brian De Palma, John Woo, JJ Abrams and Brad Bird. What sticks in the mind most is De Palma’s dizzyingly complicated but thrillingly sexy first chapter. Yet while McQuarrie might not already have a directing voice per se, this frees him up to go straight for the meat instead of trying to add his own directorial stamp. As a result, the new film is almost entirely free of fat, a lean thriller that is so slick it feels lubricated.

It’s all good, and it looks spectacular. Robert Elswit shoots this film both briskly and beautifully, and a Hitchcock-saluting sequence at the Vienna Opera House borrows from The Man Who Knew Too Much while, using a beautiful vertical panorama shot, nearly triggers vertigo. The action is forever coherent, with special attention being paid to the tinier nuances of the gigantic setpieces. We see Cruise’s cartoonishly pained expression when strapped outside a flying plane, we hold our collective breath when he drifts his car like a boss, and, during an assassination gone wrong, we cut away briefly to see the intended target make a Monty Python joke and brush it off as “just a flesh-wound.”

There is one glitch, though. This Mission Impossible villain is, as said, a pale Blofeld imitation, which automatically makes him a Dr Evil imitation: running a secret organisation and trying to acquire a sum way too small to endanger the world or require the Prime Minister’s retinal scan: in this film we talk about 2.4 billion dollars. It’s not small change, sure, but we all know Avengers 3 will make more than that.

Still, this is a smart, constantly engaging ride which doesn’t spend long on exposition. Much of the shadowy work now looks much better done by day, and stunts are based on ingenuity even more than they are about spectacle. We frequently don’t remember how tall the building was, but do remember sweat falling onto a glove. This fifth instalment might not be as iconic, but it is genuinely compelling. Also, as a bonus in this comic book blockbuster age, you can enter this Tom Cruise film knowing nothing of backstory or mission history, and come out massively entertained.

It’s hard not to be awestruck. The 53-year-old leading man hasn’t self-destructed in five films, and I, for one, can’t wait to see Cruise lunge forth a sixth time. This is his kind of, um, risky business.

Rating: 3.5 stars

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First published Rediff, August 7, 2015

Some films age remarkably (and endearingly) well. My review, from exactly eight years ago:

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The prodigal Khan returns.

Chak De! India is the basic, every-single-sports-movie story of a disgraced player, here called Kabir Khan, pulling together a team of misfits to do the impossible — here winning a World Championship.

This is also a return to glory for Shah Rukh Khan, the superstar doing excellently as he tackles a cast with (almost) entirely deplorable acting chops and makes you believe. Director Shimit Amin shoves a hockey stick into the actor’s hand, and — fitter than he’s looked in years — Khan flies across cinematic AstroTurf, and shines.

Stop looking up Miracle, A League Of Their Own or The Mighty Ducks DVDs — it’s a straight sports film, and you walk into the theatre knowing how it’s going to turn out.

We start, of course, with the fall. Kabir, India’s most successful Centre Forward of all time, flubs a crucial penalty and is castigated by his nation — an Islamic last name and a meteoric temper make for a media-unfriendly mix — as Pakistan win the cup. Thus surrounded by awful actors, Khan bids farewell to his beloved sport, even as insufferable little kids clamber onto shoulders to get a better look at the traitor. Insert typically strained background music here, and you’re cringing for both Khan and the film.

Seven years later, mercifully cutting out the tiresome Rambo-esque routine of having to persuade the self-pitying hero to return, Khan is raring to go. He hasn’t been on a field since, and is eager to resolve — as evidenced by strategic fidgeting with waiting-room bottle caps — hockey issues.

His plan is simple: to start from the very bottom. The Indian Women’s Hockey Team is an outfit so utterly neglected that its administrators aren’t even actively seeking a coach. Anjan Srivastava dips a Marie biscuit in tea, raises an eyebrow, and not having anything at stake, lets Khan go for it.

So girls, then. A motley assortment of Reddys, Boses and Sharmas are picked from the length and breadth of the country, each falling into conveniently label-friendly stereotypes, but — and here’s what makes all the difference — the tags are affectionate, the cliches run warm and friendly. And we grow to see a mostly-gangly gang of 16 indisciplined non-actresses, trying to keep up with a coach who actually takes himself seriously. And pushes them hard.

It’s completely par for the genre-specific course — dissent, pressure, defiance, infighting, lack of self-belief, external skepticism, and of course, ego. Again, what matters is the fluidity with which writer Jaideep Sahni has coloured inside the lines. The film’s true star, Jaideep’s ensured that screen-time is divided mostly evenly among the lot, yet separating a few characters for obvious star roles — Experienced, arrogant Bindia (Shilpa Shukla); attractive, ego-driven Preeti (Segarika Ghatge); massive, Punjabi Balbir (Tanya Abrol); and pint-sized, defiant Komal (Chitrashi Rawat). The rest are all warm and likeable enough — Vidya Malvade plays almost-sobbing homemaker Vidya; Anaitha Nair’s Aliya is tremendously pretty — but these are the four players leading the pack by far, taking the story towards the goalposts.

The first half takes its time to buildup, predictably. There’s no surprise as the tale unfolds, and the horrible, overwhelming background score tries too hard — this is, after all a Yash Raj film, and considering that they’ve gone for a no-heroine authentic sports movie, we ought allow them that major concession — and is further undercut by trite, jingoistic dialogue. Granted, these come at occasional moments, but the melodrama truly jars. A stellar Khan holds the film together as Amin and the girls gradually get to grips — with both lines and sticks.

The second half shuts you up, with a McMasterstroke. Here, they play. And, considering you watch several sections of hardcore women’s hockey — my personal viewership of womansport is limited to tennis and the occasional game of beach volleyball — in silence, glued to the screen pretty much throughout, Shimit’s done very well indeed. The film is compelling, constant, and leaves little room for filler. While certain tracks are painfully obvious, the fact that the director neatly cuts through several at the same time ensures a drastic reduction in complaints.

And by now, the girls actually seem to be acting okay — well, either that or the more impressive achievement, that we’ve warmed up to the characters enough to like them despite their raw edges. Preeti and Komal, warring attackers, keep us nicely hooked as the director tries to keep their angle unpredictable; Bindia does well to get frustratingly under our skin; and Balbir gets us to chuckle, sometimes despite ourselves. Vidya is a bit of a moaner, an essentially unimpressive goalkeeper, adding to the lamentable Indian knack for choosing less competent captains.

Khan, of course, is King. This is a bravura performance, a gritty drive by an actor who clearly has sport in his blood. The fit of Shah Rukh as a hockey coach — inspiring, canny, frustrated, helpless and profoundly hopeful — is so naturally perfect that it’s a wonder he hasn’t done a sports film before. It’s been a while since we’ve seen him visibly relish a role like this, and while he has to mouth some clunky dialogue, Khan is simply super.

Chak De! India isn’t quite a Lagaan or an Iqbal, selecting the sport less trod rather than the one conventionally heralded, and so it isn’t likely to expect applause in the aisles as the team manages to unite together. It is, however, more of a sports film than both those, the story of a team overshadowing the story of an individual. It’s shot nicely, but my wishlist for Amin would be that he had found a better commentator to do the play-by-play and, for heaven’s sake, taken some aerial shots.

Shimit Amin’s film struggles a bit, clearly trying hard to strike a balance between classic melodrama and the sporting genre. There are times when it tries to straddle the fence hastily, even failing badly, and as a result the movie, while a perfectly good sporting film, seems to have lost the edge we might have expected from the Ab Tak Chhappan director. It’s a fine, true-blooded sports movie though, and deserves applause.

Sure, you know what’s going to happen, but it’s a good ride — and especially satisfying to see Swiss flower-fields replaced by Australian stadiums. Not to mention the return of the King.

Rating: 3.5 stars

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First published Rediff, August 10, 2007