Wednesday, April 22, 2015
Mr X
Invisible Entertainment
With such sophisticated special effects technology available today, making and watching a film about an invisible man should have been great fun. No such luck, though, with Vikram Bhatt’s Mr X, which, in one word, is boring. Not only does it have a silly plot, it has one of the most annoying leading ladies in Bollywood history.
Raghu (Emran Hashmi) and Sia (Amyra Dastur) work with an anti-terrorist cell, and also live together. The day before their wedding, their boss Bharadwaj (Arunoday Singh) puts them to work on protecting the chief minister from a terrorist attack. Then he gets Raghu to kill the CM by threatening to kill Sia, who is unaware that she is on a sniper’s sights. The reason? The CM’s son wants the chair and Bharadwaj wants to be commissioner. There are less circuitous routes to attain this, but well…
Bharadwaj and his cohorts don’t just shoot Raghu, they chase him into a derelict factory and toss him into some kind of chemical vat. With the help of an idol of Lord Krishna and his sidekick Popo (Tanmay Bhat), whose sister just happens to work in a research lab, he is saved from horrific burns, but the untested radiation medicine that she gives him, makes him invisible in the dark. What sense does this half invisibility make? Because Raghu can be seen in daylight and under UV light, his powers are limited and so is the entertainment that could have been derived from his punishment of the bad guys.
Here he spends all his time running not from the villain, but from Sia, who, being a cop herself, is daft enough to believe in the Indian legal system and stupidly keeps shrieking at everyone that they must not take the law into their own hands. Instead of helping him as any sensible person would, she takes great pains to have him arrested.
Of course, by this time you are trying to stay awake by wondering how Mumbai looks so clean and sleek (because the film has been shot abroad); how come cops live in huge apartments with private pools; why Raghu doesn’t change his uncomfortable clothes and why people posing with guns, don’t use them-- would save a lot of time and misery all around if they did.
He took so much effort to be taken seriously as an actor, poor Emraan Hashmi deserves better films. This one threatens to turn into a vigilante franchise. Better luck and script next time.
Labels: Cinemaah
Margarita With A Straw
Girl Uninterrupted
Kalki Koechlin’s Laila in Shonali Bose’s Margarita With A Straw is a sock in the jaw of every conventional heroine of Hindi cinema. A young woman with such spunk is rare, so that you have to think twice before calling her differently abled. (Handicapped or disabled are now politically incorrect terms).
The admiration for Margarita With A Straw is as much for its courage, as for forcing audiences to look at people with disabilities not with pity or condescension, but with respect. Kalki Koechlin deserves every award she will undoubtedly get for her portrayal of a girl with cerebral palsy. A lot of research and hard work must have gone into it—she is inspired by the filmmaker’s cousin Malini Chib—but she makes it look like she became the character from inside out.
Laila is wheelchair bound and has speech difficulties, but also has a loving family—particularly her mother (Revathy). She is talented, passionate and as agile as her body allows her to be. After rejecting the disabled Dhruv (Hussain Dalal) and being rejected by the boy she fancies (Tanzing Dalha), Laila goes to the US for a creative writing course, accompanied by her devoted mother. There she meets a cute guy (William Moseley) in her class and feisty visually impaired woman (Sayani Gupta) and discovers another aspect of herself--that she bisexual.
People must wonder about the sexual desires of the physically challenged, and Bose answers the unasked question—yes, in matters of the heart and body, they are like everybody else. Maybe the film stresses too much on its heroine’s sex life, but there is so much more to take away from it-- Laila’s unbound spirit, fierce ambition and the relationships she is able to forge without any sense of inferiority or self pity. With all its flaws, Margarita With A Straw is a remarkable film, and Laila will remain a memorable movie character.
Labels: Cinemaah
