Monday, May 25, 2009
And as strike goes on...
Detective Naani
The ‘old lady’ detective is a popular genre in fiction—Agatha Christie’s immortal Miss Marple comes immediately to mind – so Romilla Mukherjee can be commended for making a senior citizen the lead in her film Detective Naani, but that’s where the praise ends.
The film is painfully long, mostly boring, has too many needless characters, badly picturised song and a harebrained plot.
Ava Mukhejee plays the 71-year-old Mrs Dutt, known by all as Naani, a chatty, inquisitive woman living in a housing complex full of strange people. One day she happens to notice a little girl’s face in the window of the apartment above hers. More mysterious goings-on follow—a body that falls out of the window and then vanishes, strange phone calls and the sinister couple upstairs (Sanjeev Vatsa, Mahru Sheikh) up to no good.
The cops, lead by Inspector Bhatia (Ankur Nayyar) treat her with polite contempt, but her daughter (Amrita Raichand), grandkids (Zain Khan, Simran Singh) and an assortment of neighbours help her to solve the case.
But while the Naani is trying to figure out what is going on, the film wanders over into unconnected tracks like the romance between two teens (no parents?) next door (Shwata Gulati-Amit Varma), the cops interest in the divorced daughter, and the antics of two detectives given the job of watching the building.
When the case is solved, it turns out to be far-fetched, and the actual villain behind the exposed racket is never even seen. The man in the building who is supposed to be a key baddie, just grumbles about his car being hit by a football. There is no real sense of menace, and the climax has the old device of the Naani being kidnapped and the grandson hiding in the boot of the goons’ car to save her. All the while the smart old lady has a phone in her bag (she calls her daughter), but does not summon the cops.
Detective Naani aims to appeal to all age-groups, but kids will find it very slow, and grow-ups won’t find anything at all to hook them. It’s just a debut gone waste.
Ocean of an Old Man
Rajesh Shera’s first feature Ocean of an Old Man has clearly been made for the festival circuit, where audiences have more patience for slow and abstruse films. But for the multiplex problem, it may never even have found a commercial release in India.
In the tradition of a school ‘art’ films of yore, that believes in a flat, bland, mode of story-telling this one looks like it didn’t even have a script to begin with—just an idea and a location. So the cast and crews must have enjoyed shooting on the pristine, peaceful beaches of the Andamans, and communicated to the viewer just seemingly random collection of images—some of them lyrical, some oddly detached.
An old schoolteacher (Tom Alter) loses his wife, child and many of his students in the terrible tsunami of 2004. The film is about his attempts to cope with the devastation. You care for the old man, because of what he has suffered, but after endless shots of his rowing up and down in a boat, cycling to his forlorn hut, and looking at the empty desks in his rudimentary classroom, you find it hard to stay awake.
There is undoubtedly an audience for this film (like for the equally obscure Frozen, last week), but it is not for everyone. Tom Alter, who has seldom been given film roles worthy of his talent, brings the right amount of pathos and dignity to his performance. For his sake, you wish audiences looking for an offbeat movie experience sample this film, but you also know it is a lost cause.
Suno Na.. Ek Nanhi Aawaz
There is a very annoying kid in Suno Na.. Ek Nanhi Aawaz, and it isn’t even born yet. It keeps whining from its mother’s womb, driving not just her, but the audience nuts.
Amy Thanawala makes her debut as a filmmaker and chooses a mix of Kya Kehna and Look Who’s Talking as a subject—a film dead on arrival. Who’d want to see a wan Miss Anupama Iyer (Tara Sharma) be stupid enough to get pregnant and try to jump off cliff, only to be saved by this irritating voice inside her.
So Anu leaves her family and relocates to Mumbai, where she gets a welcome fit for winning cricketer by her friend Raina (Rinku Patel), as if deciding to be an unwed mother is such a major achievement. She also gets a job easily, and every man she meets seems to fancy her. So the kid inside, gets to choose his Appa (that’s because Miss Nair is South Indian).
The next door neighbour (Avinash Tiwary) turns out to be gay (though they primly never use the word), so he’s out. The boss is a lech, so he is cancelled. That leaves Anupama’s prissy South Indian colleague (Makrand Shukla) and a wimpy professor Dhruv (Dharmendra Gohil), first seen being molested by his students!
The kid picks Dhruv, and he is only to willing to go with Anupama to pre-natal classes and medical check-ups and buy her endless water melons. Thanawala makes it seem as if it’s perfectly normal and socially acceptable for a girl to get pregnant and then pick a partner out of the many suitors, whose family is happy to have a daughter-in-law with someone else’s baby, and get on with life with no hassles.
At least, if the director had been honest enough to see the flip side and mention the problems of unsafe sex and unplanned pregnancies, the film would have served some purpose. As it is now-- long, melodramatic, pedantic, boring and badly acted—it’s enough to put anyone off babies for life!
99
Raj Nidimoru and Krishna DK’s caper comedy 99 has been given that title, because it takes just one more run to make a century in cricket, and the several protagonists of the film are just short of winning.
There is no law against a bunch of friends getting together and creating a script that is a collection of characters and gags that they must have seen and liked in the many such ‘con’ films and making an ‘original’ film. So, in the end, a few of the stand-up comic ‘items’ work, but not the film as a whole.
Like, the name of a Mumbai don – AGM—(Mahesh Manjrekar) is supposed to generate guffaws; there’s a giant of a hitman called Dimple (okay, funny), and a fat sidekick called Zaramud (Cyrus Broacha, not at all funny!)
Sachin (Kunal Khemu) and Zaramud owe money to AGM, so they are sent to Delhi to recover from a defaulter – the luckless but passionate betting man Rahul (Boman Irani). They stay at a grand hotel, where Sachin befriends Pooja (Saif Ali Khan). The two hoods manage to get the money and it is all stolen. So Rahul and the two come up with a fool proof plan to win it all back, and it involves cricket match fixer JC (Vinod Khanna, wandering in the wrong film).
Also in the mess, are a small time crook Kuber (Amit Mistry) and his buddy Dimple, a Bhojpuri film star and Rahul’s disgruntled wife (Simone Singh).
There’s always some kind of activity going on, lots of hits-and-misses, plenty of yelling over phones with bad connections, but none of it hangs together – it’s like a kid trying to solve a jigsaw puzzle with mismatched pieces. For a caper, it has no thrills, and very few genuinely comic moments; but on the plus side are some of the actors who really look like what they are doing made sense to them—Mahesh Manjrekar, Boman Irani, Amit Mistry and Kunal Khemu get the right tone and attitude.
Maybe worth the price of a singleplex ticket and a chai, any more than that spent and it’s a waste of money. And if your friends ask what it is about, you won’t be able to tell them.
Frozen
Shivajee Chandrabhushan, the director of Frozen is a mountaineer, and the film is a heartfelt tribute to the rugged beauty of Ladakh—in gorgeous black and white, shot by Shanker Raman (who also wrote the script).
It must have been made under very difficult circumstances—the terrain is not easy to live in, forget conduct a film shoot—and you must appreciate the passion of the cast and crew. However, for viewers, who couldn’t care less what went into the making if they don’t get their money’s worth, and, moreover, are unused to snail-paced ‘festival films’, it could be very tough to sit through.
Karma (Danny Denzongpa) lives in a remote mountain outpost with his not-all-there daughter Lasya (Gauri) and son Chomo (Skalzang Angchuk Gultuk). It’s a hard life, Karma in debt and there are no takers for the apricot jam he laboriously makes by hand. Modern life is at the doorstep, whether it is in the form of the moneylender’s greed or the lust of a strange man called Romeo who chases after Lasya.
To make it worse, the army arrives and sets up a noisy camp nearby, so the peace and pristine beauty of the place is ruined. The film is not really plot or character driven, but documentary-like in its capture of the stunning landscape, and a bit detached in its narrative style.
Danny’s performance the brave yet battered Karma, and of course the dazzling location makes Frozen worth attempting, but even with sympathy for the people living such bleak lives in place, it could be as laborious as climbing a mountain.
The ‘old lady’ detective is a popular genre in fiction—Agatha Christie’s immortal Miss Marple comes immediately to mind – so Romilla Mukherjee can be commended for making a senior citizen the lead in her film Detective Naani, but that’s where the praise ends.
The film is painfully long, mostly boring, has too many needless characters, badly picturised song and a harebrained plot.
Ava Mukhejee plays the 71-year-old Mrs Dutt, known by all as Naani, a chatty, inquisitive woman living in a housing complex full of strange people. One day she happens to notice a little girl’s face in the window of the apartment above hers. More mysterious goings-on follow—a body that falls out of the window and then vanishes, strange phone calls and the sinister couple upstairs (Sanjeev Vatsa, Mahru Sheikh) up to no good.
The cops, lead by Inspector Bhatia (Ankur Nayyar) treat her with polite contempt, but her daughter (Amrita Raichand), grandkids (Zain Khan, Simran Singh) and an assortment of neighbours help her to solve the case.
But while the Naani is trying to figure out what is going on, the film wanders over into unconnected tracks like the romance between two teens (no parents?) next door (Shwata Gulati-Amit Varma), the cops interest in the divorced daughter, and the antics of two detectives given the job of watching the building.
When the case is solved, it turns out to be far-fetched, and the actual villain behind the exposed racket is never even seen. The man in the building who is supposed to be a key baddie, just grumbles about his car being hit by a football. There is no real sense of menace, and the climax has the old device of the Naani being kidnapped and the grandson hiding in the boot of the goons’ car to save her. All the while the smart old lady has a phone in her bag (she calls her daughter), but does not summon the cops.
Detective Naani aims to appeal to all age-groups, but kids will find it very slow, and grow-ups won’t find anything at all to hook them. It’s just a debut gone waste.
Ocean of an Old Man
Rajesh Shera’s first feature Ocean of an Old Man has clearly been made for the festival circuit, where audiences have more patience for slow and abstruse films. But for the multiplex problem, it may never even have found a commercial release in India.
In the tradition of a school ‘art’ films of yore, that believes in a flat, bland, mode of story-telling this one looks like it didn’t even have a script to begin with—just an idea and a location. So the cast and crews must have enjoyed shooting on the pristine, peaceful beaches of the Andamans, and communicated to the viewer just seemingly random collection of images—some of them lyrical, some oddly detached.
An old schoolteacher (Tom Alter) loses his wife, child and many of his students in the terrible tsunami of 2004. The film is about his attempts to cope with the devastation. You care for the old man, because of what he has suffered, but after endless shots of his rowing up and down in a boat, cycling to his forlorn hut, and looking at the empty desks in his rudimentary classroom, you find it hard to stay awake.
There is undoubtedly an audience for this film (like for the equally obscure Frozen, last week), but it is not for everyone. Tom Alter, who has seldom been given film roles worthy of his talent, brings the right amount of pathos and dignity to his performance. For his sake, you wish audiences looking for an offbeat movie experience sample this film, but you also know it is a lost cause.
Suno Na.. Ek Nanhi Aawaz
There is a very annoying kid in Suno Na.. Ek Nanhi Aawaz, and it isn’t even born yet. It keeps whining from its mother’s womb, driving not just her, but the audience nuts.
Amy Thanawala makes her debut as a filmmaker and chooses a mix of Kya Kehna and Look Who’s Talking as a subject—a film dead on arrival. Who’d want to see a wan Miss Anupama Iyer (Tara Sharma) be stupid enough to get pregnant and try to jump off cliff, only to be saved by this irritating voice inside her.
So Anu leaves her family and relocates to Mumbai, where she gets a welcome fit for winning cricketer by her friend Raina (Rinku Patel), as if deciding to be an unwed mother is such a major achievement. She also gets a job easily, and every man she meets seems to fancy her. So the kid inside, gets to choose his Appa (that’s because Miss Nair is South Indian).
The next door neighbour (Avinash Tiwary) turns out to be gay (though they primly never use the word), so he’s out. The boss is a lech, so he is cancelled. That leaves Anupama’s prissy South Indian colleague (Makrand Shukla) and a wimpy professor Dhruv (Dharmendra Gohil), first seen being molested by his students!
The kid picks Dhruv, and he is only to willing to go with Anupama to pre-natal classes and medical check-ups and buy her endless water melons. Thanawala makes it seem as if it’s perfectly normal and socially acceptable for a girl to get pregnant and then pick a partner out of the many suitors, whose family is happy to have a daughter-in-law with someone else’s baby, and get on with life with no hassles.
At least, if the director had been honest enough to see the flip side and mention the problems of unsafe sex and unplanned pregnancies, the film would have served some purpose. As it is now-- long, melodramatic, pedantic, boring and badly acted—it’s enough to put anyone off babies for life!
99
Raj Nidimoru and Krishna DK’s caper comedy 99 has been given that title, because it takes just one more run to make a century in cricket, and the several protagonists of the film are just short of winning.
There is no law against a bunch of friends getting together and creating a script that is a collection of characters and gags that they must have seen and liked in the many such ‘con’ films and making an ‘original’ film. So, in the end, a few of the stand-up comic ‘items’ work, but not the film as a whole.
Like, the name of a Mumbai don – AGM—(Mahesh Manjrekar) is supposed to generate guffaws; there’s a giant of a hitman called Dimple (okay, funny), and a fat sidekick called Zaramud (Cyrus Broacha, not at all funny!)
Sachin (Kunal Khemu) and Zaramud owe money to AGM, so they are sent to Delhi to recover from a defaulter – the luckless but passionate betting man Rahul (Boman Irani). They stay at a grand hotel, where Sachin befriends Pooja (Saif Ali Khan). The two hoods manage to get the money and it is all stolen. So Rahul and the two come up with a fool proof plan to win it all back, and it involves cricket match fixer JC (Vinod Khanna, wandering in the wrong film).
Also in the mess, are a small time crook Kuber (Amit Mistry) and his buddy Dimple, a Bhojpuri film star and Rahul’s disgruntled wife (Simone Singh).
There’s always some kind of activity going on, lots of hits-and-misses, plenty of yelling over phones with bad connections, but none of it hangs together – it’s like a kid trying to solve a jigsaw puzzle with mismatched pieces. For a caper, it has no thrills, and very few genuinely comic moments; but on the plus side are some of the actors who really look like what they are doing made sense to them—Mahesh Manjrekar, Boman Irani, Amit Mistry and Kunal Khemu get the right tone and attitude.
Maybe worth the price of a singleplex ticket and a chai, any more than that spent and it’s a waste of money. And if your friends ask what it is about, you won’t be able to tell them.
Frozen
Shivajee Chandrabhushan, the director of Frozen is a mountaineer, and the film is a heartfelt tribute to the rugged beauty of Ladakh—in gorgeous black and white, shot by Shanker Raman (who also wrote the script).
It must have been made under very difficult circumstances—the terrain is not easy to live in, forget conduct a film shoot—and you must appreciate the passion of the cast and crew. However, for viewers, who couldn’t care less what went into the making if they don’t get their money’s worth, and, moreover, are unused to snail-paced ‘festival films’, it could be very tough to sit through.
Karma (Danny Denzongpa) lives in a remote mountain outpost with his not-all-there daughter Lasya (Gauri) and son Chomo (Skalzang Angchuk Gultuk). It’s a hard life, Karma in debt and there are no takers for the apricot jam he laboriously makes by hand. Modern life is at the doorstep, whether it is in the form of the moneylender’s greed or the lust of a strange man called Romeo who chases after Lasya.
To make it worse, the army arrives and sets up a noisy camp nearby, so the peace and pristine beauty of the place is ruined. The film is not really plot or character driven, but documentary-like in its capture of the stunning landscape, and a bit detached in its narrative style.
Danny’s performance the brave yet battered Karma, and of course the dazzling location makes Frozen worth attempting, but even with sympathy for the people living such bleak lives in place, it could be as laborious as climbing a mountain.
Labels: Cinemaah
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