Tuesday, April 06, 2010
Three This Week
Tum Milo To Sahi
The true Mumbaikar would have so many Irani café memories, and also great respect for the hard-working Tamilian/Malayali clerks in every office who could make sense of any document. Two of these ‘institutions’ find their way into Kabir Sadanand’s Tum Milo To Sahi—a film that does no justice to the city or its people.
Dilshad (Dimple Kapadia) runs a favourite café and hang-out, that catches the eye of a ruthlessly expanding multinational café chain Blue Bell (the soundtrack trills the name every time a villainous member of the company enters the frame).
Subramanian (Nana Patekar) is just-retired lonely and eccentric bachelor, who finds a family and a cause to keep going in the form of Dilshad’s Lucky Café. In between the admittedly noble and topical cause – keeping the city’s heritage alive-- Sadanand’s film scatters all over the place, gathering along ridiculous characters and wildly unconnected episodes.
The love story of newcomer to Mumbai (Rehan Khan) and his birdbrained classmate (Anjana Sukhani) is just irritating, as is the pointless domestic chaos in the “four-bedroom” home of Blue Bell’s CEO (Sunil Shetty), his nagging wife (Vidya Malavade) and “stressed-out” kid. The many subplots do converge, but not convincingly, and a lot of characters (the man upstairs, the ambitious singer) float around without purpose.
Everyone tries to save Lucky Café, and the end in a courtroom is irrelevant and contrived. A lot of time is wasted in creating back stories and quirks for all the characters, but only Nana Patekar gets his stern Tamilian act down perfectly, accent, costume and all. Dimple Kapadia overacts outrageously, and as for the others, they are lost in the maze of a script that starts to go somewhere and ends up somewhere else.
Pankh
Thanks to films and some fiction, people outside the film industry have a picture of what the 'inside' world is like. A character in Sudipto Chattopadhyay's Pankh describes it as hell. The rundown, debauched men, and desperate women who appear in the film seem to confirm these ideas. Unfortunately it is people in the industry who invariably denigrate it.
This is not to say that the film industry does not have its share of pimps and exploiters, but the collection of cliches in Pankh is a bit much--- the mother pushing her unwilling daughter, crudely described “as fresh, juicy mango,” the casting director who demands his pound of flesh, the effeminate and depraved-looking writer. And above all the two main characters in the film, Jerry (Maradona Rebello) and his ambitious mother Mary (Lillete Dubey)-- she had forced the boy to dress as a girl and do movies in the past, and when he grows up, he is confused about his sexuality. To compound the problem, a young stuntman (Amit Purohit) was in love with the little girl and still fantasizes about her. Jerry, meanwhile, has imaginary conversations with an actress Nandini (Bipasha Basu).
Most of the film takes places in a dilapidated studio, where Jerry has to appear for an audition with a terrified girl (Sanjeeda Sheikh), who is being pushed by her mother (Asha Sachdev) into the arms of the sleazy casting man.
The film aims at a dream-trance-nightmare heavily Gothic atmosphere, but does nothing to create compassion for the boy around whose plight the film revolves.
While the idea is dated (today there is no shortage of girls aspiring to join the industry), it is still interesting, but the film remains on one hysterical note, and covers up for its lack of content with stylised visuals and loud performance styles, that make the film very difficult to sit through and even tougher to like or sympathise with the characters-- least of all Jerry. The film also ends on a very predictable note.
Lillete Dubey, who is usually a wonderful actress is made to shriek and ham and the new actor Maradona Rebello does not have the screen presence or acting range to pull off the complex role. No performance stands out really, in this noisy, excessively melodramatic mess, that gives the world “experimental” or “art house” a bad name.
The Great Indian Butterfly
Just because the banner is called Arthouse Films—underlined for emphasis—do the films that emerge from there have to be so self-consciously ‘arty’?
Sarthak Dasgupta’s The Great Indian Butterfly is an English-language film, obviously meant for urban, multiplex audiences. It can be assumed that this audience has been exposed to Hollywood-- maybe even other international-- films. Why would they accept a badly written, shoddily made film thrown at them?
This small genre of Indian-English films has some honourable antecedents—English August, Hyderabad Blues, Mr and Mrs Iyer. Unfortunately, Butterfly does not come anywhere close.
Bickering couples, woman having baby blues, a strange white man popping in with words of wisdom and Gibran… could tedium have come in a duller package?
Krish (Aamir Bashir) and Meera (Sandhya Mridul), a DINK couple seem to have no love left in their marriage. Their high-pressure jobs leave them no time for each other. Their vacation starts badly when he oversleeps and they miss the flight (why didn’t she set an alarm?). They decide to drive to Goa and fight all the way, screeching at each other and mouthing the most artificial-sounding dialogue imaginable. (Indian English literature has finally crossed that hurdle and people in books talk normally).
The trip is also meant to look for a mythical valley somewhere in Goa, where The Great Indian Butterfly, mentioned in the Mahabharat, is to be found, and seeing (or catching?) it brings love, luck, happiness, etc.
The couple lose their audience in the first 15 minutes, after that you don’t care if they make up or break up, or find the damned butterfly. Sandhya Mridul is unbearably shrill, Aamir Bashir just not up to the challenge of portraying a troubled man. Barry John’s guru type just evokes giggles. Koel Purie turns up in a meaningless cameo as the man’s ex-girlfriend. Might as well take a walk in the park and see some real butterflies.
The true Mumbaikar would have so many Irani café memories, and also great respect for the hard-working Tamilian/Malayali clerks in every office who could make sense of any document. Two of these ‘institutions’ find their way into Kabir Sadanand’s Tum Milo To Sahi—a film that does no justice to the city or its people.
Dilshad (Dimple Kapadia) runs a favourite café and hang-out, that catches the eye of a ruthlessly expanding multinational café chain Blue Bell (the soundtrack trills the name every time a villainous member of the company enters the frame).
Subramanian (Nana Patekar) is just-retired lonely and eccentric bachelor, who finds a family and a cause to keep going in the form of Dilshad’s Lucky Café. In between the admittedly noble and topical cause – keeping the city’s heritage alive-- Sadanand’s film scatters all over the place, gathering along ridiculous characters and wildly unconnected episodes.
The love story of newcomer to Mumbai (Rehan Khan) and his birdbrained classmate (Anjana Sukhani) is just irritating, as is the pointless domestic chaos in the “four-bedroom” home of Blue Bell’s CEO (Sunil Shetty), his nagging wife (Vidya Malavade) and “stressed-out” kid. The many subplots do converge, but not convincingly, and a lot of characters (the man upstairs, the ambitious singer) float around without purpose.
Everyone tries to save Lucky Café, and the end in a courtroom is irrelevant and contrived. A lot of time is wasted in creating back stories and quirks for all the characters, but only Nana Patekar gets his stern Tamilian act down perfectly, accent, costume and all. Dimple Kapadia overacts outrageously, and as for the others, they are lost in the maze of a script that starts to go somewhere and ends up somewhere else.
Pankh
Thanks to films and some fiction, people outside the film industry have a picture of what the 'inside' world is like. A character in Sudipto Chattopadhyay's Pankh describes it as hell. The rundown, debauched men, and desperate women who appear in the film seem to confirm these ideas. Unfortunately it is people in the industry who invariably denigrate it.
This is not to say that the film industry does not have its share of pimps and exploiters, but the collection of cliches in Pankh is a bit much--- the mother pushing her unwilling daughter, crudely described “as fresh, juicy mango,” the casting director who demands his pound of flesh, the effeminate and depraved-looking writer. And above all the two main characters in the film, Jerry (Maradona Rebello) and his ambitious mother Mary (Lillete Dubey)-- she had forced the boy to dress as a girl and do movies in the past, and when he grows up, he is confused about his sexuality. To compound the problem, a young stuntman (Amit Purohit) was in love with the little girl and still fantasizes about her. Jerry, meanwhile, has imaginary conversations with an actress Nandini (Bipasha Basu).
Most of the film takes places in a dilapidated studio, where Jerry has to appear for an audition with a terrified girl (Sanjeeda Sheikh), who is being pushed by her mother (Asha Sachdev) into the arms of the sleazy casting man.
The film aims at a dream-trance-nightmare heavily Gothic atmosphere, but does nothing to create compassion for the boy around whose plight the film revolves.
While the idea is dated (today there is no shortage of girls aspiring to join the industry), it is still interesting, but the film remains on one hysterical note, and covers up for its lack of content with stylised visuals and loud performance styles, that make the film very difficult to sit through and even tougher to like or sympathise with the characters-- least of all Jerry. The film also ends on a very predictable note.
Lillete Dubey, who is usually a wonderful actress is made to shriek and ham and the new actor Maradona Rebello does not have the screen presence or acting range to pull off the complex role. No performance stands out really, in this noisy, excessively melodramatic mess, that gives the world “experimental” or “art house” a bad name.
The Great Indian Butterfly
Just because the banner is called Arthouse Films—underlined for emphasis—do the films that emerge from there have to be so self-consciously ‘arty’?
Sarthak Dasgupta’s The Great Indian Butterfly is an English-language film, obviously meant for urban, multiplex audiences. It can be assumed that this audience has been exposed to Hollywood-- maybe even other international-- films. Why would they accept a badly written, shoddily made film thrown at them?
This small genre of Indian-English films has some honourable antecedents—English August, Hyderabad Blues, Mr and Mrs Iyer. Unfortunately, Butterfly does not come anywhere close.
Bickering couples, woman having baby blues, a strange white man popping in with words of wisdom and Gibran… could tedium have come in a duller package?
Krish (Aamir Bashir) and Meera (Sandhya Mridul), a DINK couple seem to have no love left in their marriage. Their high-pressure jobs leave them no time for each other. Their vacation starts badly when he oversleeps and they miss the flight (why didn’t she set an alarm?). They decide to drive to Goa and fight all the way, screeching at each other and mouthing the most artificial-sounding dialogue imaginable. (Indian English literature has finally crossed that hurdle and people in books talk normally).
The trip is also meant to look for a mythical valley somewhere in Goa, where The Great Indian Butterfly, mentioned in the Mahabharat, is to be found, and seeing (or catching?) it brings love, luck, happiness, etc.
The couple lose their audience in the first 15 minutes, after that you don’t care if they make up or break up, or find the damned butterfly. Sandhya Mridul is unbearably shrill, Aamir Bashir just not up to the challenge of portraying a troubled man. Barry John’s guru type just evokes giggles. Koel Purie turns up in a meaningless cameo as the man’s ex-girlfriend. Might as well take a walk in the park and see some real butterflies.
Labels: Cinemaah
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