Cinemaah

The Monster At The Door

A rural cop tells an urban woman in distress, that where the malls of Gurgaon end, the Constitution ends. If water and electricity haven’t reached, he explains, what to say about the Constitution.

Navdeep Singh’s NH 10 (inspired by Eden Lake) shows what everyone believes about North India—it is lawless, patriarchal, cruel and corrupt.  Urban and sophisticated Delhi has to deal with this monster on its doorstep, on a daily basis. That’s why nobody would be foolhardy enough to get out of their cars when they see a crime being committed. People get shot for less; as a stoic toll booth attendant in the film says of his colleague—he asked some men for toll, they shot him.

It is in this crazy jungle that upper class working professionals, Meera (Anushka Sharma) and Arjun (Neil Bhoopalam), get trapped. When she is attacked by goons while driving alone at night, the cop they complain to has a typical ‘it happens’ attitude.  He advises them to get a gun.

To recover from this trauma, they set out for weekend outing, and witness a horrific crime. Arjun’s misplaced machismo ends up with them on the run, with the murderous goons, led by Satbir (Darshan Kumaar) chasing them. Their phones are locked in the car, the keys stolen, and no trace of civilisation in sight.

After some tense running and hiding, Arjun is wounded and Meera has to run about trying to dodge the goons and find help. She has to use all the energy and mental reserves at her disposal, and the film just never lets the audience breathe a sigh of relief. Every time it looks like Meera is out of danger, a larger threat looms.

It is fast-paced, tense and gripping, with a superb performance by Anushka Sharma. In the old days, when on a rare occasion, a filmmaker wanted to do a ‘woman-oriented’ film, they’d do films with titles like Insaaf Ki Awaaz, about revenge-seeking women. This is a better, more realistic melodrama-less version of those films.

But what’s the take-away from NH 10?  Don’t get involved in other people’s problems; Indian society is beyond repair; women are women’s worst enemies;  when push comes to shove all of us can channel our inner beast; there, but for the grace of God, go any of us.  All of them disturbing.

NH10 is a watchable-- though not enjoyable—film. It brings the director of the excellent (though plagiarised) Manorama Six Feet Under back into the reckoning, and hopefully this time the estrangement won’t be for so long.

Tepid Brew

The good thing is that in these market driven times, a small film without stars gets made and released. The struggle against mainstream might carries on.

Too bad then, that the film in which one is willing to invest support turns out to be a ponderous bore. The beautiful Coorg coffee plantation where a lot of the film is shot promises more than Manu Warrier’s Coffee Bloom delivers.

Moving back and forth in time, it tells of a perpetually disgruntled looking Dev Anand Cariappa (Arjun Mathur), who returns to the coffee plantation he grew up on and then sold to pay off debts. He runs a coffee outlet, but without much interest. Even though he makes moves towards renunciation, he has a strange relationship with a Bengali woman, and a tense one with his mother, who dies heartbroken and angry with Dev.

The plantation was bought by the annoyingly cheerful Vasu (Mohan Kapoor), who is the husband of Dev’s ex-girlfriend Anika (Sugandha Garg). The two had broken up years ago after a misguided suicide pact went wrong. Vasu, who is as passionate as he is ignorant about growing coffee, hires Dev to help him manage the estate, oblivious to the reigniting of the passion between Dev and Anika.

The characters are supposed to be complex, but just come across as underdeveloped. The story unfolds at a slow pace, by the time it splutters to life in the second half, the film has already lost its grip.

Arjun Mathur is a decent enough actor and manages to make something of the part of a man so self-centred that his woes don’t evoke any sympathy; the same can’t be said of Garg and Kapoor’s one note performances—she sleepwalks through the film, and he is hyperactive.

On a location made for romance, Warrier comes up with a tepid brew.

The Expendable

A poor sequel to a decade-old film, generates an inexplicably golden-glow nostalgia for the original.  Shimit Amin’s Ab Tak Chhappan was hardly a masterpiece; were it not for this needless Part 2, how many would even have thought of the 2004 film, unless there was some media focus on encounter killings.

This critic had written about Ab Tak Chhappan : “Imagine Satya from the point of view of the trigger-happy cop. Imagine Ardh Satya twenty years later. Imagine a milder Training Day. Shimit Amin’s Ab Tak Chhappan, coming out of the Ram Gopal Varma ‘Factory’ has the RGV stamp all over it. The same dark feel, gritty look, rough dialogue, excessive violence and the same moral vacuity as Satya or Company. Unlike Gangaajal, which at least examined the two sides of the issue – police brutality versus proliferating crime—Ab Tak Chhapan has no qualms in making a Hero out of a cop who thrives on killing criminals –never mind that innocent bystanders get shot as well. “

Eleven years later, there is no great change in the cop-gangster scenario to justify another gore fest.  There have been so many gangster films over the last  two decades, that there is nothing new to say or show.  Like the proliferation of Hollywood films that have plots about old/retired cops or FBI agents forced to return to solve some complicated case—which is just an excuse to prolong a has-been star’s career--  Ab Tak Chhappan has no discernible purpose, except giving Nana Patekar something to do in Hindi films. And then, director Aejaz Gulab doesn’t even give his hero a worthy antagonist—just handing him a gun, and writing in a huge dose of blood lust is hardly enough.

In the earlier film, Sadhu Agashe (Patekar) was tha Daya Nayak inspired ‘encounter specialist’, whose job it is to kill gangsters. After he is caught in a trap by his own department, Sadhu had escaped. Now, years later, he lives a peaceful life in Goa with his son, when he is invited by his former boss (Mohan Agashe) to rejoin the force and pick up the gun again. He is reluctant to return, but his son talks him into it—the boy gets killed a little later, giving Sadhu a personal reason to rid the city of vermin. (In the interim eleven years, no other cop has learnt to shoot straight? And the ‘system’ is still the same?)

Gul Panang plays a crime reporter, who wants to complete her late father’s book on crime, Ashutosh Rana a disgruntled junior and Raj Zutshi a wheelchair bound underworld don. They are just wooden props behind Nana Patekar, who wears stylish sunglasses and jumps right into Dirty Harry mode, with crazy camera angles-- Ram Gopal Varma style.

News is there is a Part 3 being planned—hopefully they will hire a better scriptwriter.

Revenge With A Twist

In these fraught times of random violence, what happens to a cheerful young family man, could happen to anybody. Most would grieve and rage, but with the help of family and friends would probably get on with life, the trauma buried somewhere where it cannot disturb anymore.

But when Raghu’s (Varun Dhawan) wife (Yami Gautam) and son are killed during a bank heist, he cannot let it go. One of the robbers escapes, the other, Liak (Nawazuddin Siddiqui), is arrested and sentenced to twenty years in prison. He claims he is innocent, but does not reveal the name of his partner. 

At first, a seething Raghu tries to use every means at his disposal, from hiring a detective to terrorising and raping Liak’s girlfriend, a call girl called Jhimli (Huma Qureshi), to find out who pulled the trigger. When he fails, he chooses a lonely and austere life in a place called Badlapur, digging at the scabs of his wounds, never letting the memory of his wife fade for fifteen years.

Meanwhile Liak, makes futile attempts to escape and settles into prison routine, patiently waiting for his release and the bounty waiting for him outside—his share of the loot.  (At least Siddiqui greys, Dhawan just grows a beard, but doesn’t look any older.)

Then, a social worker, Shobha (Divya Dutta) visits Raghu and starts the chain of events that cause terrible violence to erupt, as Raghu reaches the elusive partner (Vinay Pathak) and his wife (Radhika Apte), who is ignorant of his past crime. There is also a cop about to retire (Kumud Mishra), who hates the idea of an unsolved case.

Nawazuddin Siddiqui turns out to be the scene-stealer in this film too, a twisted, creepy man, who somehow gets the social worker’s sympathy, even though he feels no remorse for what happened.

Varun Dhawan does not, as yet, have the range to play a man as complex and Raghu, but in some scenes he does surprise with his intensity.

Sriram Raghavan works well within the noir genre, and Badlapur is unpredictable, but also contrived and ultimately pointless, because the director cannot get the audience to ruminate on right and wrong, guilt, forgiveness, redemption and the degradation of the revenge-seeker, to raise the film above a regular commercial thriller. It was disturbing to hear laughter whenever a woman is humiliated (many times) or a man mocked. The women in the film—girlfriend, wife or mother—they all seem to be treated with violence or contempt, which amused the mostly young male audience in the moviehall.

What Is Going On?

A filmmaker making his first movie would have to be very brave to attempt something as bizarre as Roy. It’s not a story just waiting to be told, neither is it something totally market driven, so just what was Vikramjit Singh hoping to accomplish with this film – except make Malaysia look mouth-wateringly beautiful.

There is a filmmaker, Kabir (Arjun Rampal), so successful that the media keeps track of his girlfriends (#22 is about to be dumped). He is in Malayasia making a film called Guns III about an art thief Roy (Ranbir Kapoor), writing the script as he goes along—on a portable typewriter, no less.

There is another filmmaker Ayesha (Jaqueline Fernandez) making a small budget film also in Malaysia. Their paths cross, he flirts madly, she seems to resist, but slowly falls for his charm. In the film being shot, Roy has to steal a priceless artwork from a solitary Tia (Jaqueline Fernandez with tomato red lipstick) and romance happens.

Then, Ayesha, unwilling to be #23 walks off, and Kabir gets a massive case of writer’s block, which excruciatingly enough extends almost to the end of the film. He broods all over the place, looking model cool, his hat always in place. There is some pseudo-philosophising on creation, love and even thievery, but in the slow-paced, self-indulgent, painfully long film, there’s nothing to engage the audience, except, maybe the wardrobes of the characters and the gorgeous locations—it is stylishly shot if nothing else.

For a film that’s trying to be all brainy, so that everyone frowns and smokes and Ayesha is seen reading seriously, wearing nerd glasses, it suddenly makes her dance in the streets to a Punjabi song!  This art –life overlap, parallel tracks, alter ego hovering, kind of film would be hard to pull off for an experienced filmmaker; Singh simply does not have the maturity for it.  And none of the actors look like they know what’s going on and why.  Least of all a Detective Wadia (Rajit Kapur), who turns up and vanishes without any reason or purpose, at one point confiding in a complete stranger sitting on a bench outside the Louvre!

That Magic Voice

A few years ago, there was a controversy kicked up over Kirron Kher getting a National Award forBaariwali, because her Bengali dialogue was dubbed by another actress. The question being, how much does the voice and dialogue delivery contribute to a performance, and if an actress has not dubbed her own lines, can she get an award?

R. Balki’s Shamitabh works with the idea of a voice being ‘lent’ to a very talented mute actor. It is also an unabashed tribute to India’s most famous baritone. In his earlier two films, Cheeni Kum and Paa, Balki had come up with unusual roles for Amitabh Bachchan, and the star if fortunate that he gets to play such parts instead of the conventional daddy roles that are the fate of stars over a certain age.

Danish (Dhanush) is like the millions of hopefuls who land in Mumbai with starry dreams in their eyes. Most of them fade into oblivion. But the scrawny, ordinary-looking Danish, who stars as a bus conductor (like his real life pa-in-law Rajinikanth) is helped by an assistant director (Akshara Haasan).  Danish needs a voice—the throat implant technology is provided by Finland, and the deep baritone by a drunk, failed actor Amitabh Sinha who lives in a graveyard. With Danish’s talent and Amitabh’s voice, the “mixture” is successful, but beset by ego clashes.

Unless the idea goes somewhere and makes the story soar, it is a waste. The old film Padosan in which the hero gets his buddy to playback for him in order to impress the pretty girl next door, was funny. Shamitabh struggles to find its tone and a convincing story. It depends too much on Bachchan’s soliloquies and ‘dialoguebaazi’ for its own good.

Balki also gets Rekha to do a cameo and praise the ‘Voice’ as god’s gift. She is as much an obvious in-joke as the many product placements that adman Balki smoothly slides in.

Dhanush is a good actor, but he is overwhelmed by that voice, which doesn’t really sound as if it is coming out of the Southern actor’s larynx. Bachchan get the meatier role and who would ever have any doubts about his ability to carry it off.

Despite its meandering over 157 minutes, the film is a one-time watch; when Balki was sticking his neck out anyway with an offbeat subject, he could have added some more depth to it, so that it would be a film worth mulling over long after the end.

Crash And Burn

It’s an inspiring story—of an ordinary Maharashtrian who invented the first aircraft in 1895, eight years before the Wright Brothers. But it has been made in such a clunky, uninspired fashion, that it turns out to be a waste of a great idea.

The struggle to fulfill an impossible dream would have been good enough if narrated with the right blend of imagination and emotions, but director Vibhu Puri takes frequent diversions into romance, scriptures and patriotism (with the usual evil caricature Brits), and makes a right royal mess, though it is a beautiful-looking one (shot by Savita Singh). However, a period film does not mean overstuffed interiors and a flea market look.

Shivkar Talpade (Ayushmann Khurrana) is what is known in today’s lingo, a loser. He has flunks repeatedly and is at the same academic level as his nephew (a bright Naman Jain). Then he falls in love with a dancer, Sitara (Pallavi Sharda) and gets thrown out of the house by his furious father. He is taken under the wing of eccentric scholar Shastri (Mithun Chakraborty), who dreams of making a plane, so that the first man who flies is a “Hindustani.”

The British not just want to stop him, but also want to get their hands on an ancient book that has instructions for building an aircraft (we are now constantly being told that everything was first discovered or invented by Indians in the distant past, so it’s not even possible to keep a straight face!) Instead of the excitement of actually seeing the prototype of an aircraft built, the film wastes time over too many songs (not one hummable number among them) and ends with rabble-rousing Vande Mataram-chanting nationalism.

Ayushmann Khurrana plays Talpade as mentally retarded, instead of a misunderstood genius, while Mithun Chakraborty’s weird get-up doesn’t help his performance any.

The story is heavily fictionalised, to the extent that it is rendered ridiculous. The recent release, The Imitation Man, was about the dry as dust subject of code breaking, but what an absorbing film it was. Puri is just unable to build on the germ of the idea, and ends up boring the audience over its seemingly endless running time. A better filmmaker would have had the viewer come out of the theatre awed and suitably proud about the achievements of a self-made Indian inventor. Pity, the real story will now never be told. 

Unfunny and Boring

The two good things about Ritesh Menon’s Crazy Cukkad family is its non star cast and it short running time.

One would want to see what Swanand Kirkire, Shilpa Shukla are capable of in a comedy, but the film turns out to be most unfunny.

A very rich man (Yusuf Hussain) is on his deathbed, and his four children rush to his estate to grab their share (the property is so big that it has its own pin code!) The family is too dysfunctional to be real, or likeable.

The good for nothing eldest son Pawan (Swanand Kirkire), needs money to get a criminal-politician off his back. The loud sister (Shilpa Shukla) wants to win a beauty crown. Aman (Kushal Punjabi), arrives from New York with an American wife (Nora Fatehi). The youngest Abhay (Siddharth Sharma), comes back from New Zealand and is targeted by a village item girl, though he is gay.  The characters are such oddballs, and Menon throws into the pot gays and men in drag perhaps to show what a sport he is.  By the end, of course, they realise the value of family, which is where the film was headed anyway.

The actors—Kirkire and Shukla in particular do the best the can with their roles, but the film is just not crazy enough. Most of is simply corny or boring.  Surprising that Prakash Jha chose to produce this film.