X Men: Days Of Future Past

Tags

hollywood, Ian McKellan, James McAvoy, Jennifer lawrence, Michael Fassbender, Patrick Stewart, Peter Dinklage, Quicksilver, Wolverine

3 And A Half Stars!

(more in our eyes!)

Mini Review:

Our favorite mutants are back! This time blending the past and the future into one delish treat.

Main Review:

There’s a certain comfort of meeting old friends and watching them solve seemingly impossible puzzles. You know them so well, you can actually smell the cigar when Wolverine lights up. You feel a stiffening of your spine when Charles Xavier complains about his. You understand Magneto’s resolve and Mystique’s inability to belong. And there’s always betrayal to tug at your empathy…

It’s like slipping into something comfortable and spending two hours in visual debauchery, even though the giant sentinels in their original version look like Iron Man. Peter Dinklage, riding on his Game Of Thrones popularity makes for a great villain, although the X-Men theme for villainy remains ‘Mutants are dangerous to humans. Seek/Segregate/Eliminate them’. They could cooked up greater motive but with the past and the future meeting beautifully, there is no space for a more complicated evil plot. But yes, Stryker (played by Josh Helman) is scary even as his younger self.

Quicksilver makes an awesome entrance, and you wish there were more set pieces like that on in the movie, but things do move along rather well, even for those who do not like multiple parallel tracks. Of course Wolverine gets all the fun lines, but Micheal Fassbender, James McAvoy, Ian McKellan, Patrick Stewart, Jennifer Lawrence and even Nicholas Hoult (he plays the Beast) have their fair share of screen time. Fan Bing Bing Shawn Ashmore and Omar Sy were wasted in their bit parts, I felt. But the X-Men pantheon has grown so much, it had to happen.

And as Marvel fans, you should know better than to walk out before a taste of the next movie (after the credits). It made me laugh unkindly, but this franchise has given us so many awesome cinematic moments, that a huge benefit of the doubt can be given. And I am sure we have all wanted to have some secret power, a favorite mutant… But at this time, you only need to emulate Quicksilver and book your tickets to this movie now!

p.s. Still think that the face-mash of Patrick Stewart and James McAvoy on the movie poster is very very creepy.

 

 

Heropanti Nahi, Hampanti

Tags

bollywood, prakash raj, Tiger Shroff

One Hysterical Star!

Mini Review:

MuscleBoy And HammyDad In An Unwanted But Hysterical Tribute To Bollywood.

Main Review:

The MuscleBoy has one of the finest roundhouse kicks and must have aced his gym class. But they make him do that while lip syncing to pointless, completely forgettable lyrics in a disco. If that is not enough, they give him a wannabe Bachchan line to repeat until you want to go down on your knees and self-flaggellate without waiting for Dies Sanguinis. 

The poor lad is so embarrassed and self-conscious, he must have been glad to have the camera shift to HammyDad (played by Prakash Raj who is not just a super-sized Ham sandwich with rancid cheesy lines, he owns the pig farm!)

The heroine alas has been picked off the Lokhandwala Heroine Factory that produces assembly line gals: big hair, big eyes, narrow waist, long legs, glossy lips, able to eat paani puri, wears ethnic jewelry, prays prettily to the Gods… 

So why should you see this movie? Let me count the ways…

For the scenes where Prakash Raj  and his glycerine-laced tennis-ball sized eyes in ping-pong ball sized sockets channelises his inner Lalita Pawar to show disapproval.

Because the word ‘Heropanti’ is used as many times in the movie as Helen does the hip shake in Mehbooba-mehbooba.

Because this movie tests your Bollywood knowledge by stealing the scenes, costumes and even lines… And the scapegoat of these hysterical tributes happens to be MuscleBoy. 

Remember Anil Kapoor in 1942 A Love Story? The poor lad is suddenly made to appear like him white shirt, suspenders, beret et al!

Remember ‘Main Yahan Hoon, Yahaan hoon’ song from Veer Zara? The poor lad is made to romance the bride exactly like that.That’s not all, the Shah Rukh hangover is evident even in the extended run-into-my-arms thing the poor lad performs awkwardly (his triceps are so enormous, gravity is unkind to such poses). There is a painful to observe shower scene where you wish there was someone to stab him a la Psycho. Of course, with muscles like his, there is a Salman Khan tearing of the shirt thang as well. And while shirts and jackets are coming off at regular intervals, they are used Jason Statham style (Transporter movies) during the fights. You don’t mind the copy-paste fight much, but you will begin to despair when they make the young lad copy Rowdy Romeo. Puhleeeees! It was bad enough to see Shahid Kapoor grinning moronically when he sees Sonakshi Sinha and feel nothing when get beaten up, now we suffer MuscleBoy do the same in this movie. Come on! Think of copying something else from another Telugu film… 

But Prakash Raj gets the funniest lines (the ‘I am dad’ scene is the funniest most OTT scene ever!) and movie tribute scenes. The Heroine loves MuscleBoy whose name is Babloo (whatever happened to Rahul or Prem or Raj or Vijay. I wonder!) but her dad wants her to marry Rajjo (I had slapped my forehead so much by then, I suspect my forehead is permanently concave). I wonder if Shakespeare would amend his opinion about names (a rose does not smell as sweet if it were called Babloo). Of course there is a Babloo vs Rajjo fight before the wedding and you don’t shout ‘DDLJ Zindabad!’ because you are still trying to coax the popcorn stuck in your throat after you see Hammydad take MuscleBoy’s hand and place it on his own thigh and say, ‘What does my daughter see in you that I don’t’…

Recovered? Now remember the train scene in DDLJ. And then imagine the director getting clever with it. Correction. Getting ‘oversmart’ with it. They set the scene at New Delhi Railway Station. So you think there will be a heroine in wedding finery running to catch an extended arm while daddy dearest says, ‘Ja beti jaa! Jee le apni zindagi!’… Wrong! They make Amrish Puri chase a bus with Kajol aboard. Yes! Scene stealing HammyDad runs after a bus saying, ‘Beti! Beti!’

And if you are still hoping brain cells are alive after this mutilation of your favorite movies, they have this flute music from daddy’s movie playing every five minutes (this movie is almost three hours long)

Poor MuscleBoy. This movie will not receive favorable reviews. Maybe he can roundhouse kick his advisors (daddy’s chamchas?) and make better choices next time…

Fading Gigolo

Tags

Comedy, hollywood, John Turturro, Sharon Stone, Sofia Vergara, Vanessa Paradis, Woody Allen

2 and half stars

Every Lonely Woman Needs Fiorovante!

Mini Review:

It’s mellow, it’s funny, and the women make the ninety minute romp totally worthwhile.

Main Review:

Three gorgeous women teach a gentle, not so young man how to fall in love. And you will love the mellow quality of the movie, the light in which it was shot, and the calm confidence of the script that does not require any parkour type action that has become mandatory in movies today. No six pack abs displayed brazenly, no alcohol driven sweaty afternoon sex under a lazy ceiling fan in a tropical room, no bikini clad babe rising from the seas… Well, this movie takes any traditional ideas that you may hold about seduction, throw it out of the window and actually teach you a thing or two.

To be able to take that one little step inside your head and do things that you always wanted to do, is the greatest seduction of them all. Three fantastic actors: Sharon Stone, Sofia Vergara, and Vanessa Paradis take that one step and enamor you in ways you don’t immediately realise.

Follow the dialog which goes something like this:

‘How long have you known me?’

‘Ever since you were a kid who broke into this store…’

‘And I am your friend, right?’

‘Yeah…’

‘And you are telling me to sleep with your doc…’

‘She’s gorgeous, and her friend too. They’ll pay!’

‘So you want me to be your ho…’

This exchange between the understated John Turturro and the ever hesitant  yet funny (and personally speaking, annoyingly predictable) Woody Allen is so casual, they could be discussing the weather. But they’re not. They’re Virgil and Bongo. Bongo (Woody Allen) makes you laugh with his pithy observation. And the man with kind eyes (John Turturro in a marvelous unlikely role as a male prostitute) unlocks with his gentle hands that special something in the women, and they cannot have enough of him.

You will see John Turturro doing something with his hands in every scene. Arranging flowers, cutting and tying orchids, holding flowers, smoothing the creases on a sheet, undoing the woman’s dress…

The surprise package for me were the three women. Sharon Stone looks comfortable in her skin and still has fabulous legs. Sofia Vergara is the oomph package that could have been unpalatable (character wise), but is not. If you enjoy watching basketball, you will be surprised as to how a casual conversation about the game can become sexually loaded. Vanessa Paradis plays the repressed housewife and although jokes are cracked at her expense (the funniest one, I must share, apologies!) : ‘How can you smile, you are married!’, you cannot but love the exchange between her and Fioravante!

There is – for those easily angered by religious jokes – plenty to huff and puff about. If Woody Allen taking four black children (of his black girlfriend) through an all white Hasidic Jewish neighborhood is not funny enough, then his capture by otherwise kindly bunch will make you smile. A roomful of ancient elders talking about the strict Jewish laws and Woody saying, ‘I try to be Jewish, really.’ will put a smile on your face and make you yearn for bagels and latkes…

Speaking of food, there is a delicious food sequence that is perhaps the best food scene I have seen in a long, long time.

Trouble with movies that have been written with the tongue firmly in its cheek that you remember every funny line, and it has been a test to not re-tell the jokes here. This is a date movie for grown ups. Don’t miss it.

 

GODZILLA

Tags

cgi, Godzilla, hollywood, Ken Watanabe, Mothra

3 stars

Godzilla Is Spectacular

Mini Review:

The beast is so stupendously spectacular, it stomps across the screenplay…

Main Review:

The super gigantic IMAX beast is so much bigger and better, you want it to have a speaking part (preferably Morgan Freeman or Benedict Cumberbatch voice). Now that would have been a super awesome movie!

Because the ones with the speaking parts spout such silliness, you had better hold hands with the person sitting next to you, so you (and them) don’t end up with a concave forehead from all that slapping in despair. Perhaps ‘despair’ is too strong a word. But you do wish filmmakers counted how many times heroine comforts child by saying, ‘Daddy will be back!’ or hero to heroine, ‘I’ll be back, I promise.’ (anyone else saying this is a cliche except Arnie, who really, really meant it!) You also begin to count how many times the plan to kill the beasts is repeated. And you wonder how old the gorgeous Ken Watanabe really is if his dad gave his watch to him in 1945 and it’s 2014… Maybe he found it when he went to look for his parents after the war. And where was baby Ken when his parents died in Hiroshima? You better stay away from asking such questions because they take you away from the awesomeness that is Gojira! And there’s Mothra too! Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organisms they are called!

Their story track is sweet, you know, they’re like making babies and finding a home and I melted when mama creature and daddy creature nuzzled. If only they were Massive Ubersweet Teacup Poodles, everyone would be going, ‘Aawwwwww! So sweet!’… If only their creepy transparent glowing eggsacs didn’t remind you of the people farms in The Matrix…

Eat the blue pill and stay with the program, I say to myself…

And that’s easy, because the mist and the suspense keep you from breathing. The music and the CGI gets to you (you too will dream of Godzilla in technicolor and stereo sound) and you are drawn into the fear and the spectacle. You cringe when the creature eats up people and your heart skips beats when it appears from the mist or… Or from the sea.

And that brings us to the people dealing with these monsters. Let’s say, the kids in the movie are smarter than the grown ups in the movie. The little girl who spots Godzilla and the hero’s son who spots his mom in a stadium full of people are obviously smarter than the grownups who shoot bullets at something that’s chewing up trains and breaking buildings. But brownie points to the hero for attempting to act. His muscles are so buff, there’s no room to emote. And dare I say, he has a strange resemblance to Adhyayan Suman…

I wish there was more beast on beast action and the camera wasn’t so stuck on showing people running helter skelter. And as someone said, this is a dated movie. Not a single instagram picture, not a facebook update, nor a tweet is shown. The beasts are so spectacular you forgive everything dumb the humans do. You spend a couple of hours clutching your popcorn, barely breathing, and looking up in awe at the monsters fighting on the giant screen. And you are glad you are part of the collective whoop when your favorite beast wins…

 

P.S. Tell me if you got the Shivaji connect in the movie. Heh-heh-heh (cheap joke)

 

 

Manjunath

Tags

bollywood, Divya Dutta, NFDC, Whistleblower

1 star

Whistle-blowers Deserve Better. Including This Film.

Mini Review:

Wipe out the first half of the film. The second half is what makes this movie come alive!

Main Review:

By all means make a biopic about a whistle-blower. God knows we need heroes. But the entire first half of the movie makes you wonder if the hero was bipolar. Was he the cool talking dude who impresses girls in his MBA class, the devil-may-care chap who is a rockstar or was he the paranoid, sweaty, fraidy cat who was taking on bad guys without thinking or planning or even a modicum of common sense. At one point he even comes across as an old man who complains about everything.

Sure, you can turn paranoid when trigger happy guys with guns threaten you and follow you. But if you have the brains to have studied at an IIM and you have friends who work with you, then you would certainly talk things through instead of shouting at your friends and calling them names in the middle of a marketplace where the bad guys could be listening in. Or if the bad guys are threatening you, you could go to the police, If the immediate bosses are involved then send a mail to higher ups. At times during the first half, you actually have empathy for the bad guy who tells him, ‘Everyone adulterates diesel with kerosene, and you have many pumps under your jurisdiction, why are you constantly chasing me?’ or ‘What if your lab is fudging results?’

Now the last question made me stop and think. What made Manjunath trust the labs where the samples were collected? If everyone in the ‘system’ was corrupt, then how did he trust the lab reports? If his job was to sell diesel to the petrol pump owner, did it matter to him that the petrol pumps were reselling it after adding kerosene? Was the bad guy right? Was it really Manjunath’s business what the pump owners did with diesel once the company sold it?

It’s like you sold a salwaar kameez to a customer, then fined them for wearing the kameez with some other salwaar instead of what you prescribed. He looked less and less like a hero and thankfully it was intermission.

It is the second half that actually pick up when the young cop (the best actor of the lot!) refuses to take the news lying down that someone was shot down in his jurisdiction and they heard of the crime from cops in some other city.

‘It’s a Sunday, sir,’ the young cop tells his boss, ‘I am not allowed to work on a holiday unless you order me to.’

The police chief smiles, then orders him to go seek the truth.

If a non IIM policeman knows how to stick to the rules and still get his own way, why couldn’t Manjunath?

In fact the movie picks up pace when the police begin an investigation into the murder. Even though Divya Dutta shows up from nowhere and begins a legal search into the case, and the bad guy talks crap philosophy with the dead Manjunath in jail, the movie suddenly looks like it is going somewhere.

But there are things which make you laugh, taking away the gravity poor Seema Biswas attempts to offer to her role as Manjunath’s mother.

Like when Manjunath tries to figure out why they were mixing diesel that costs 30 rupees with kerosene that costs 30 rupees too and by writing ’30+30′ on sheet after sheet of paper, crushing them in frustration. It just looks like he was very poor at math.

Like when a very grown up Manjunath and his mother share a bed when there’s a perfectly adequate mat already on the floor.

Sigh. The credits show how whistleblowers in the country have been killed by people who had vested interests. We are told how difficult a court case it was, but we are not shown the case at all, except when the judge sentencing the culprits to death. What we are shown again and again is Manjunath singing with some rock band. The song might have had relevant lyrics too. But when the audience has lost interest in your sweaty, sniveling, foolhardy hero, you wish someone had looked at the script before they made it. With NFDC running script labs every year, this seems like a film that slipped under their radar.

 

 

Koyelanchal

Tags

bollywood, suneil shetty, vinod khanna, violence

1 star

Local Flavored Coal Colored Violencewa. What A Wastewa!

Mini Review:

Coal minewa, crimewa, henchmenwa, unionwa, godfatherwa, puliswa… Lemme outta here-wa!

Main Review:

Ram Gopal Varma made the violent Raktacharitra with blood spilling in Andhra Pradesh. Anurag Kashyap did a six-hour number on the audience with his Gangs Of Wasseypur in Bihar. Violence in Kashmir, the mafia movie based out of Bombay, the vanilla violence of Gunday, the tales of bullets in Uttar Pradesh have made us immune to the kind of violence we are subjected to in this movie which sets itself in Jharkhand (Bah, big deal! Bullets and body count is still the same).

And I’m sure, that even though these movies are writtenwa with a local flavorwa, somewherewa they knowwa thatwa it willwa not workwa with the peoplewa. Otherwisewa what was the needwa to includewa the songwa performed by menwa in sarees and a very very booby prostitutewa with a golden heartwa?

The funniest scene (inadvertant, of course) is when the big bad bully (long hair, veined biceps, zero expression et all) shows up at the prostitute’s door after having killed people ruthlessly. The prostitute is entertaining someone and opens the door because the baddie is practically breaking it down. But she doesn’t just open the door. She opens the door with feeling, and says, ‘Kya hai?’ And everyone in the audience bursts out laughing because the answer to her ‘what is it?’ really is, ‘Erm… Your… Erm breasts… Almost popping out of your blouse!’ We never hear the rest of her sentence. This body part is used again and again. And you should, but you don’t feel angry. That is probably the only way to keep the men in audience from walking out of the theater.

Why would you take an action star like Suniel Shetty and shoot him in the knee? Why would you want him hobbling around in the movie and make him emote? I wish they’d pay more attention to accents and less on trying to make violence appear scarier than it is. Who can put an entire hand inside a bullet wound and then use the hand to write perfectly calligraphic warning with that blood on a wall? It feels like a self congratulatory ‘kya powerful scene hai boss’ which looks asinine.

Speaking of asinine, to hear mister Iyer mainlining Boman Irani’s accent from Main Hoon Naa with his ‘Thoom’ instead of ‘Tum’ was ridiculous. At least Deepika Padukone in her daft South Indian Hindi in Chennai Express was cute. Here, it is not funny at all.

What is hilarious is the bad man and the baby track. The bad man has to deal with a wailing baby, and even the most die-hard fans of violence (what an awesomely violent movie Raid: The Redemption was!) could not help but laugh at the surround sound wailing and knew that we would not feel bad had he gagged the baby or abandoned it, despite his heavy duty loyalty to Vinod Khanna who plays big daddy with more voiceover than dialog… But what a voice…

Koyelanchal is just another violent flick full of snarling henchmen. The director’s Baabarr was far superior when it came to blood and slice and dice violence. Watch that instead.

Hawa Hawaii

Tags

amol gupte, bollywood, child stars, makrand deshpande, partho

3 stars

Predictable Tale But Priceless Actors

Mini Review:

Struggle and triumph of the have-nots is an old, predictable plot. But the four kids make this ride stupendous!

Main Review:

Before I get into anything else, a word about where the director Amol Gupte found the four gems who shine in this story. The kids belong to Aseema ( www.aseema.org ) an NGO that works towards education of the lesser privileged.

Hawa Hawaii is how four street kids: Thirupathi N. Kushnapelli, Salman Chhote Khan, Ashfaque Bismillah Khan and Maaman Memon help their friend Arjun (played by the director’s son Partho Gupte) who has dreams of being able to skate in a competition.

The story is obvious: poor kid has big dreams and against all odds, competes and wins. And there are no apologies for this formula. It’s just that the formulaic story is presented so beautifully, the kids make you believe in dreams and offer you hope. Now that kind of cinema is worth every penny you spend at the multiplex window.

Thirupathi plays the little scavenger boy, picking up gold from garbage every day, Salman sells flowers at stop lights, Maaman is employed at a zari sweatshop and Ashfaq is the sassy garage hand. No apologies are made about their lives as well. The characters are simply presented and their easy camaraderie that begins by sharing leftover butter chicken reminds you to google your own long lost childhood friends. You actually want to stick out your tongue to Hollywood and say, ‘Take that you silly Slumdog Millionaire creators!’

When asked if they would want to go to school like other kids, Gochi, the sassy one, points out that the schoolkids carry the weight of the world on their shoulders, while they have lighter shoulders even though they are working. Issues tackled cleverly, mister director!

Arjun, the obvious protagonist of the story has a backstory too. And here the child actor Partho, though wonderful, plays to the gallery. He’s being coached well, is what you think when you see him on screen, but enjoy his tale as well.

Saquib Saleem the bright eyed young man (Mere Dad Ki Maruti and Mujhse Fraandship Karoge) is a teacher who wants to help Arjun realise his dream of becoming a champion skater.

This is where the film stumbles. You think the lad just wants to learn to skate. There is no evidence that he has any championship dreams. But we end up rooting for the teacher and his student and the student’s pals as they work at something bigger than their tough lives.

In the tradition of movies like Lambada, Sister Act, Goal, Cool Runnings, where the less privileged kids turn out to be winners, here too, the chai-boy becomes a champion. But it is the four little boys who help the tea shop lad realise his dreams who will win your hearts.

These four children are flawless in their dialog delivery and body language. Their confidence in front of the camera is something many grown up actors should learn. This combined with some really really sharp writing makes you squirm in your privileged multiplex seat, makes you laugh and makes you cry.

Although Amol Gupte’s Stanley Ka Dabba was a far superior story, I was revolted by the extreme close-ups of food and the ugly process of eating. The smacking of the lips, the sound of chewing food, the crunching, the gulping, the snorting, the gorging, the masticating, the slurping, the sounds of short guttural breaths when someone eats food more quickly than they should was enough to put me off food. This accompanied by extreme close-ups again of a hirsute face licking fingers, food stuck on the moustache and beard and crumbs on clothes was not exactly happy viewing.

Give me the tried and tested heart wrencher of Hawa Hawaii over a the story of Dabba-stealing greedy teacher any day. There are practically no directors who can work with children as well as Amol Gupte is now established with this film.

Take your kids to watch this tale. Laugh, cry and clap for the kids who have done such a wonderful job.

P.S. Makrand Deshpande manages to wipe away memories of Sona Spa quite effectively with his dad act.

 

 

 

Yeh Hai Bakrapur

Tags

bollywood

half star

Better Make Biryani With This Bakra

Mini Review:

This one-trick Bakra takes the audience round and round until you want to whip out a ginsu and chop it up. 

Main Review:

You will spend the longest 97 minutes of your life wondering why they called the poor goat Shah Rukh Khan. The goat could have been named Sanjay and nothing would have changed in the movie.

The story is set in an unknown village where everyone speaks as though they’re talking to the person sitting farthest in the auditorium, and microphones have not yet been invented. It reminds you of school one-act plays where you ‘threw’ your voice so everyone heard. Remember early cinema where all action took place in front of a stationery camera? This movie feels exactly like that.

There is a shrewish wife, a poor useless husband and his fake fakir uncle, a little boy, and a silly daughter (predictably in love with the village romeo), and a few assorted villagers. And then there’s the goat. Just like making money off ‘Jesus image on toast’ the poor Muslim family manages to make money with the help of their goat. A goat inaugurating a bike showroom is funny, but then it goes nowhere. You think it is going somewhere once it hits the satire space when Shashtriji lays claim to the goat too. But the filmmakers choose to indulge in shallow humor with policemen saying the most jaw-droppingly bad, politically incorrect trash. Never have I thanked the Censor Board for bleeping the references to religion. They were just not necessary and not funny at all.

The end credits have actor Shah Rukh Khan’s movies strung together in a song. But since nothing has enamored you to the characters, you don’t really want to stay and watch.

So why the half star? It is for the person who chose the locations. Every location is so good, you wonder if it is a place you could visit on a weekend away from town…

The film alas, is eminently forgettable.

Purani Jeans

Tags

bollywood, Friendship

half star

These Jeans Are Moth Eaten 

Mini Review:

Grandpa’s threadbare, ill-fitting jeans were chewed through by bug called Nostalgia. Adding blingy patches to them doesn’t work either. Shoddy shabby ensemble this.

Main Review:

It’s good to take the audience on a nostalgia trip with a ‘friends forever’ theme. The idea of wearing memories like an old favorite pair of jeans is great. That’s why the half star.

Unfortunately, nostalgia here turns out to be a bug that chews up these jeans and the threadbare plot exposes so many flaws you cringe and cringe at first and then watch benumbed as this movie falls apart at its seams. The blingy patches added in order to look cool expose holes in the plot and make the jeans look ratty.

Unless you are particularly asocial or have lived alone under a rock, you’ll sort of give the Kasauli Cowboys a chance (despite the cheesy name). You’ll forgive the stereotypes too. One fatty, one nerdy, one good-looking rich lad, one from the wrong side of the track and a golden-hearted poor but intelligent boy. Fine. Let’s see what they do.

Oh no.

They drink. They sing a forgettable friendship song. They go to Chandigarh to watch mega music show of rock star Mika, who’s singing to an all skimpily clad woman band.

And then a very pretty girl with minimal acting skills and even lesser facial expressions shows up and shows how tenuous the brotherhood really is. Both the poor little rich guy with a magical guitar (it plays even when the lad is hugging or high-fiving his gang of brothers) and the poor intense poet type guy with a diary fall for this vapid girl.

Kasauli summer on screen heats up with dialog like ‘beautiful nun’ and ‘saint samuel’ again and again. The audience proceeds to wipe out any memories of Thorn Birds and Father Ralph they have held dear since they read the book. The audience also pukes in the near empty theater.

The PR folks for the film are kind. They have offered coffee with the usual popcorn. After declining popcorn, a good thing too (you puke at the mindless weather), the audience returns to find out why the director killed one of the boys. There is no ‘dost dost na raha’ moment at all but a childish ‘I hate you! I’m going to unfriend you on Facebook’. Wait a minute! They don’t have that in Kasauli.

In fact you begin to wonder what time warp are these people living in! So the gang breaks up and they don’t meet for 15 years. But no one is shown googling the names or searching on social networking sites for your best friends. Heck! they don’t even have cell phones! But they do weep copiously on graves, have a funeral in torrential rain (we did not miss how everybody at the funeral had grey umbrellas), and even argue in the rain. Never mind that there was no cloud on the horizon that very summer day.

Maybe it was the heat of the summer that got to the unit. That’s why the girls wore short floral dresses while everyone and their mothers wore sweaters and jackets and hats. If you argue that it is in the best of Bollywood tradition, even then it is tiresome. Speaking of tiresome, the choreography of the songs (they burst into one forgettable song after another or was it the same song?) is so childish, you want someone to teach the actors that the camera is meant to be invisible.

Another thing invisible is subtlety. The fact that the leading lads have mainlined Shah Rukh Khan is obvious (the heroine is impervious to everything except to that one expression we admired in the television commercial for a beauty product). It’s a poor launch vehicle for the boys where everything including the loyal manservant is a stereotype. That the director wants a Kuch Kuch Hota Hai type gloss is evident. But everything just falls short and comes up shabby.

By the time the grown up friends have reconciled, you have wanted to push every one of them off the cliff at least ten times. You come away wanting to never ever attend a school reunion. Or simply go home and delete your Facebook account. Friendships like phati purani jeans be damned.

 

P.S: Sarika is still beautiful. It’s a sin to cast her in the role of a lush.

 

 

 

 

The Amazing Spiderman 2

Tags

Andrew Garfield, Dan DeHaan, Emma Stone, hollywood, Jamie Foxx, Sally Field, Spiderman

2 and 1/2 stars

Mildly Interesting Spiderman 

Mini Review:

There are plenty of crashes, explosions and loud noises, Hindi fillum type melodrama too, but not a single memorable moment. Spidey, your zing is gone!

Main Review:

I hated Tobey Maguire’s Spiderman. He was too pimply, too unsure, too confused. But he gave us the momentous, truly cinematic upside down kiss with Kirsten Dunst. Andrew Garfield’s cool quotient is way out there, but his movie is too long, too cumbersome too noisy, and full of bad Hindi fillum type melodrama. And you wonder why its villains are so easily defeated.

Crash! Boom! Bang!

Lots and lots of NYPD cars crashing into each other, loud explosions, deer-in-headlight type onlookers whose only job is to run screaming, even more brainless cops firing away at something they don’t understand and infuriating it (in this case Electro) even more. You want to yell, ‘Hold you fire! Hold your fire!’ even before some senior cop yells that, which he predictably does, by the way. The explosions and the special effects (Electro looks like a cross between Dr.Manhattan and Ra.One and… Sigh. Varicose veins look better) are so many you are not alarmed any more. Much preferred the creepy effects in Transcendence because of the unpredictability.

Melodrama Bollywood Ishtyle 

If the car pile ups are not predictable enough for you, there’s the rehashing of the ‘how daddy died’ and the abandoned boy images. Thankfully they don’t show how the spider bites the schoolboy and how he discovers his powers. Was happy to see Spidey actually enjoy swinging from tree to tree… I mean the pointless building to building thing. He also has a sense of humor and the jingle as ring tone is tres cool too…

But why, why, why does Aunt May behave like a shabbier, unkempt version of Nirupa Roy? Just like a Hindi film mother she’s doing his laundry, insisting he eat, working two jobs to pay for his education, sobbing over ‘mera beta, mera beta’… Every time she mentioned his dirty underwear I was hoping to be distracted by a shampoo sachet ad ticker on screen which gave away a free comb.

Peter and his girl make up and break up so many times, you wish they’d fall off the dome they’re standing upon and fall into cactii. Peter crossing the busy street uncaring of the traffic as he stares at his girl is straight out of some really bad Hindi movie. And the dialog which goes something like: ‘Your smile should be outlawed’, ‘No, your dimples should…’, ‘Your eyes are incredible’, ‘No, the look in yours is’ is enough to make you want to jump head first into the big pool of electric eels. And when they separate, you practically hear Bollywood directors saying, ‘Insert a ‘sheesha ho ya dil ho’ type heartbreak song here!’

 

Science Is Dead

No matter how much of a Stan Lee fan you are, you can’t but remember Dragonball Z when Electro throws electrical charges at people and things. The light show is spectacular for a while until they throw water on the electricity consuming villain. What?! Isn’t water a good conductor of electricity? Makes you want to jump into a tub full of water with a hair dryer and switch it on…

No Time For Villainy

The movie is two hours and twenty two minutes long. But the villains get no more than fifteen minutes of villainy. That gives us no time to fear them, and worry for the hero, or care about the people terrorised by the villains. In the fifteen minutes Spidey fights three villains and you wish there was more of the Green Goblin (Dan DeHaan who was so amazing in Place Beyond The Pines is wasted here) than just his silly teeth-gnashing role. As far as Electro goes, Buddy Pine of The Incredibles had a better reason to hate Mr.Incredible than Max does Spiderman. And the Rhino? Why? He just comes across as stupid. Kangna Ranaut as shape shifting manimal in Krrrish 3 was scarier. And no one believes Russians stealing Uranium any more. It’s as bad as showing landlords razing slums in Bombay at the behest of seedy developers.

There’s no music score that is memorable either. And the only thing amazing about the movie is that a sixth version is in production. I must confess, I do love Marvel comics, but I prefer the X-men villains to what we saw here. The movie does have a sense of humor to begin with, but it loses the plot rather rapidly. And after two hour twenty minutes of it, you wonder where the zing is gone.