Movie Review : Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara

(Interior, bar in a five star restaurant; Farhan and Hrithik are at a table)

Farhan : So, are you interested in the vacation or not? Spain is a fun place.. we'll go sky diving, scuba diving, run with the bulls, get drunk.. you know.. the works..

Hrithik : (Leaning over to check out his profile in the bar mirror) Arre yaar, nahin hoga.. can't take that much time off... will have to check with the family.. also, this will cost a bomb yaar, doing all that stuff...

Farhan : Nahin yaar, I've got it all figured out.. This is how it'll work.. Me and Zoya will work out the script.. It'll be about three friends going to Spain... We'll throw in the standard stuff about urban angst, searching for meaning and all that bullshit.. I'll speak to dad man, he'll help out and also with the lyrics..Some of this stuff I've already done with DCH but in Goa. I've also spoken to Bobby and he's game so it'll be just us star kids.. Producers will fall all over themselves to get in on it. Think about it, we'll get paid to go on vacation (laughs)

Hrithik : (checking out his teeth using a silver spoon as a mirror) hmm... but yeh picture chalega?

Farhan : Of course man, I've got the sales pitch all figured out... you'll bring in the babes and the gay crowd by taking off your shirt, I'll bring in the intellectual hip crowd.. they've been coming to every movie of mine after DCH hoping against hope, pretty dependable... The hatke crowd will come in for anything that has Bobby and then we'll get someone like Kat. That'll bring in the guys. Maybe we could get you and Kat to writhe in tomato pulp... they have a festival for that in Spain. Will also make a change from the standard rain song or water dunking.. I've also been thinking that we could maybe get some sponsorship : the Spain tourism department, maybe a car company; after all this is almost a documentary.. just one of our vacation huh? (Grins) I love this multiplex crowd man, they'll buy anything as long as they think it's hip enough... I can also read the critics now...  "fresh, funny..." is how they'll see it. Cheers...

Movie Review : Urumi

Based on the history of Vasco de Gama in Kerala, this film builds around some key events of the period and is essentially a revenge drama. The story pretty much follows any Indian movie built around the historical events involving foreigners.

1. Incredibly evil and greedy foreigners commit atrocities on the poor and well meaning Indian population (dog ears grafted on to well meaning Indian envoy and so on).
2. The hero builds a rag tag, ill equipped team that stand up to the foreigners with much dialogue baazi and musical interludes.
3. Pitched battles are fought with this team overcoming superior odds but the hero (and his irritating sidekick) eventually succumb.
4. A point is proved?

Think Kranti, Mangal Pandey, what have you and this is the framework. No different here. The key to making a good movie out of this hackneyed premise is execution. That, this movie does not have.

First off, there is no character development. Everyone in this movie is two dimensional. In fact so little seems to have been done in this department that you come out feeling for Jagathy's role as Chenichery Kurup, for the sheer effort the man brings to playing the part. As far as the lead actor Prithviraj goes, it looks like the director asked him to continue with the expression used to play the possessed character in Ananthabhadram and sleep walk through the role. The bad to average acting is then made worse by the body language adopted by the actors, seemingly with the intention of making the visuals look attractive. Movements and poses are highly exaggerated, almost resembling a dance ballet at times.

Second, the action scenes are so badly choreographed that they are worthy of any B grade movie. The battle scenes consist of extras running onto fields and contorting themselves to strike pseudo-kalari poses. The climax is in a league of its own with this amateurishness lovingly enhanced by the excessive use of slow motion.

Third, the script is very weak. Character development I have already mentioned but the script or screenplay has no narrative fluidity. The narrative has a jerky, contrived feel as though random events are being cobbled together to fill in the time until the final battle.

As far as technical excellence goes, the sets and costumes are pedestrian at best - a pastiche of papier mache and Fabindia fabrics.

The film has excellent photography and is very lush but can you watch random pretty pictures for three hours?

Sitting at a Multiplex in Bangalore, waiting for this movie to end, I began to wonder when the Indian film industry will ever mature. Santosh Sivan is a classic example. An excellent cinematographer by all standards but a director? If you google this film, you will be hard pressed to find a negative review. Most talk of "fantastic performances, technical artistry" and so on. Santosh Sivan the cinematographer is held in so much awe that no one wants to acknowledge that he is not exactly the best of directors. Come award season, and there will be people falling over each other to fete this film. Granted, I have not seen his entire directorial body of work but the three that I have - Ananthabhadram, Ashoka and Urumi are enough for me to conclude.

Urumi - "The boy who wanted to kill Vasco de Gama." The tagline should have warned me that this one is worth a miss.

Considering what Santosh Sivan did to Asoka in 2001, Vasco de Gama would have been turning in his grave as soon as this film was announced.

As an aside, if you want to watch a good Malayalam movie, watch "Pranchiyettan and the Saint." Great movie even though it could have done with a reduction of half an hour of running time with no detrimental effect on the overall outcome.

Movie Review : Endhiran

So, I finally got to see Endhiran. In a half empty Bangalore multiplex on a Sunday morning, I realised that the Rajni magic is fading. When we look back at Rajni's career, there will be two phases - the growth to a pinnacle at Padayappa and the indifference and decline after.

Wait a minute, you say. What about the hits after - Chandramukhi, Sivaji even though they were balanced by Baba and Kuselan? All I say is two words - marketing hype. Sure the numbers are mind boggling, but then, the revenue streams are much more diverse and international now. Playing up the numbers is part of the machine. Rajni is too big now to fail. There is too much riding on him - and not just from a commercial perspective. He is our last Superstar, with a capital S. Can we let go? With him will end an era in Indian filmdom; one that has almost no real parallel in any other part of the world - a true star system, independent of the spin doctors.

Anyway, coming back to the much talked about Endhiran. Let me keep it simple - indifferent music, indifferent special effects (except for about fifteen minutes at the end, and most of it you've seen in the trailer) and most importantly, nothing Rajni about it, to coin a phrase. Since more people know the plot of Endhiran in India than can sing the national anthem correctly, let me not even talk about that. This should have been a Kamalahaasan movie. It would have done his ego good to duplicate himself about a hundred times, bereft of prosthetics and a need to act different parts.

For Rajni, it's a movie that is not about him. This is a director's movie and the show overwhelms the star. Me, I pay to see Rajni - the mannerisms, the dialogue, the emotion (please note that this movie is one where Rajni has no mother or family, which means no good son, brother thread to keep the hankies wet), the self deprecating humour and in-references (Endhiran has a bit of that). All I get here is a pastiche of I Robot, The Terminator, a Janet Jackson video, the Mask and Transformers. Rajni is incidental to the whole thing and for me, that's a no-no.

To be fair, the movie has a certain amount of philosophical sophistication in the script - debates on the nature of the creator-created relationship, Asimov's laws of robotics, the fusion of man and machine (Robo Sapiens!) and the nature of love. 

In the end, this is a movie about a robot Rajni on hormonal overdrive taking on the world to mate with a robotic-looking Aiswarya Rai. Given her acting range, that's only expected.

Movie Review : Dabangg

Once upon a time in a town called Bollywood, commercial films used to be fashioned around the ability of an individual to get butts into seats, a semblance of a plot and a heavy dose of emotion and dialogue-baazi. Over many years this town was taken over by urban educated, westernised people who brought in things like detailed scripts, realistic dialogue, special effects, elaborate sets, costume design and the like. The end result of this was a bunch of films that seemed to cater to either Indians living abroad or in cities. Even the names of movies started to change - Jab We Met, Once Upon a Time in Mumbai and so on. However, did the heartbeat of the old Bollywood die? No it continued to beat, albeit weakly with a few films a year.

Well, it beats weakly no longer. This year, Salman Khan has applied the defibrillator twice and we hear the beat loud and strong. First with Wanted and more effectively with the now released Dabangg. True Bollywood is back!

Dabangg is a UP western, complete with Spanish Guitar riffs and a suitably stark backdrop. This is a no-frills action movie with a family-centric heart, the way Bollywood used to do it. It succeeds due to direction of Abhinav Kashyap and more so due to the deadpan, take-no-prisoners approach Salman Khan brings to his role. He is the movie, pure and simple - whether taking on five baddies with a fire hose, delivering dialogues that get the seetees or paying homage to Dharmendra when dancing, the man is in his element, and the audience is with him all the way.

The movie has already grossed over fourty crores in the weekend of its release and is well on to blockbuster status. Salman Khan is now officially a real superstar. Not one like SRK who needs a tailor-made script and an NRI-Indian urban fan base, but a true one that can pull in the crowd anywhere in India, not just the multiplexes. Please move over a bit, Rajni and Mithunda..........

Over the weekend, there was a brawl in a Bangalore multiplex during the screening of the movie; of all places. Do you need a better recommendation?

Movie Review : Khatta Meetha

You have to admire Priyadarshan. He has identified a niche in Bollywood, build the support structure to enable exploitation of that niche and made a success of it. Remaking successful Malayalam movies.

Hulchul - Godfather
Gardish - Kireedam
Hera Pheri - Ramji Rao Speaking
Bhul Bhulaiya - Manichitrathazhu
Billu - Kadha Parayumbol

et al.

The Malayalam original was an enjoyable commentary on low level corruption in the Public Works Department with an entirely appropriate feisty performance by Mohanlal and a restrained one by Shobana. What you have in Hindi is a shouting match between Akshay Kumar and the rest of the cast.

The story revolves around the trials and tribulations of Sachin Tichkule, a civil works contractor, trying to make a go of it by navigating the corrupt system. What could effectively have been a commentary on the common man and the state of the system translates into a shout fest with Sachin letting off steam against the rest of the world (read cast) at a decibel level that makes your head ache.

The well meaning Sachin and his struggles are juxtaposed against the power brokers and high level corruption represented by the contractors in his own family (Milind Gunaji, Manoj Joshi) and their political connections. The tension and sarcasm that was underplayed in the original as representative of the closed gravy train system and those struggling to become a part of it is very much out in the open in the Hindi remake.

The vignettes that are representative of Sachin's struggles are set against a broader backdrop of high level corruption, rape, murder and tragedy. In the end, it is up to Sachin to stand up for his moral roots when pushed to the wall by the murder of his sister and bring the system down.

The common thread to most of the original films remade by Priyadarshan were strong narratives, appropriately subtle acting and good music. What is not clear is the need to amplify everything when translating the film into Hindi; dialogues, acting and set design. Is there an assumption that a pan-India audience cannot appreciate subtlety? Empirically this is not true, especially for comedies. You only need to look at the success of Angoor, Golmaal and many others to understand that people have a sense of humour and you don't necessarily need to beat them on the head with a joke for them to get it. As the greats have shown time and time again - Charlie Chaplin, Peter Sellers, our very own Mohanlal and Sanjeev Kumar - brevity and subtlety are the heart of wit, to paraphrase Shakespeare. Even in mainstream Hindi cinema, some of the funniest sequences ever such as Amitabh's wry wit in Sholay have been much viewed and loved by a large audience.

Unfortunately, comedy in Hindi films has come to be defined by the likes of Sajid Khan (have you sat through Housefull?) and possibly this is Priyadarshan's attempt to conform. I mean, come on, the man has directed multiple films in Malayalam that are not over the top, but very effective, during the earlier part of his career.

Having seen and loved the original malayalam, Vellanakulde Nadu, I went in to Khatta Meetha with low expectations and to put is simply, they were met. This is a hash of a much loved original.

Here's the road roller scene in the original Malayalam. Worth a see even if you can't understand the language.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-smi32g2bIs&NR=1

Movie Review : Once Upon a Time in Mumbai

What's with the English title? In any case, it was Bombay back then.

Intriguingly, the movie starts with a white ambassador being fished out of the sea. An underworld murder attempt? No, it's just angst ridden DCP whatshisname (a nicely brooding Randeep Hooda) attempting to kill himself. Apparently, he couldn't get his service revolver to fire.

The DCP feels responsible for the Mumbai blasts, having allowed the alleged perpetrator to grow into a don during his ACP days. He is referring to Shoaib Khan (hint, hint), who sowed the seeds of a spectacular career in crime during the time of none other than Sultan Mirza (hint, hint), the don of Mumbai. The Machiavellian ACP thought he would play one against the other but never realised that he was creating a Frankenstein's monster. Shoaib is played by the trying-to-brood-but- never-quite-making-it-even-with-the-Easy-Rider moustache Emraan Hashmi and Sultan is played by the intense-expression-in-all-my-roles Ajay Devgun.

We go through the standard rise, conflict, political shenanigans, protege taking down the mentor routine dutifully done with excellent technical quality. We also go through it with absolutely no feeling for any of the major players. This is a bland, emotionless film with none of the characters actually building any empathy with the viewer. Take, for instance, a comparable gangster movie like Vaastav. The movie hooks you because you feel for Sanjay.

This is why Ajay Devgun is unable to move into greatness. That undefinable quality that allows the audience to root for you. Very few have this. Take Sanjay Dutt - an uneven actor, two left feet, no real talent for dialogue delivery; but you come out of his successful movies feeling for him and quite enjoying the ride - Munnabhai, Vaastav, Mission Kashmir. In the new Lamha; technical finesse and contemporary relevance aside, Sunju baba carries the movie on the strength of his style - I wouldn't use the word performance.

Sorry to digress, this was supposed to be about Once Upon a Time. 

Wait a minute, in a way, that says it all about the movie.