Saturday, July 23, 2016
Madaari
Uncommon Man
Our roads
are potholed, flyovers and buildings topple over regularly, illegal buildings
proliferate, there is corruption everywhere, and political movements against it
have not yet succeeded; so the elementary vigilantism of Madaari is naïve and pointless; it’s not as if Nishikant Kamat is
exposing something hidden or shocking.
Still, if
the story had substance, the film might have been as effective, as, say, A Wednesday, which was also about the
rage of the common man. Taking the core from that film and the road movie style
of A Perfect World, Kamat comes up
with a weak rant against venal politicians.
Nirmal Kumar
(Irrfan Khan) loses his son in a bridge collapse and his world shatters. With
his compensation cheque (in real life, he wouldn’t have got it without greasing
some palms) he plans the kidnapping of the home minister’s (Tushar Dalvi) son,
Rohan (Vishesh Bansal.)
All stops
are pulled out for the investigations, led by the stony-faced Nachiket (Jimmy
Sheirgill), but as Nirmal taunts them, he is hard to trace because he looks so
common.
Rohan starts
out by being a brat, but turns surprisingly docile and pliant, as he is made to
change costumes and dragged all over North India by the kidnapper. He has any number of chances to escape, but
the kid explains his own feelings towards Nirmal as Stockholm Syndrome, and
also sympathy for the man’s dead child.
Turns out,
all Nirmal wants is a public admission of corruption by the people responsible
for the bridge collapse, right from the engineers to politicians, including
Rohan’s father, who has a monologue about the greed of the powerful, which
could not be more hackneyed, and Nirmal’s response about the gullibility of the
masses could not be more immature.
The film is
well-intentioned and has some powerful scenes and a few pithy lines, plus an
outstanding performance by Irrfan Khan, but as a ‘voice of the common citizen’
it does not quite work. The anti-politician vigilante does even see the irony
in the huge outlay of public funds spent to track him.
Labels: Cinemaah
Kabali
Damp Squib
When a star
is as big and powerful as Rajinikanth, he has a greater responsibility to pick
his films with care. Just because his fans flock to every film he does, he
should not allow his directors to throw him into substandard films in the hope
that his superstardom will make them float.
Pa Ranjith’s
Kabali is a plotless film that is
still recycling tropes from The Godfather.
The film is about two gangs in Malaysia, one is Indian led by Kabali
(Rajinikanth) and the other led by Tony Lee (Winston Chao) a Chinese, with some Indian cohorts. The “nek chal chalan wale” Kabali gangsters do not deal with drugs and
flesh trade; the bad gangsters have no such qualms. However, murder and other
crime is quite acceptable.
Kabali is
the descendant of Indian farm workers in Malaysia and became a kind of union
leader demanding equal rights for his people. After a carnage in which his
pregnant wife (Radhika Apte) is shot, Kabali goes to jail for 25 years, and
comes out grizzled and grey, but as powerful as before. He has a quirk—he dresses in flashy suits and
glares, and sits cross-legged like a king on a throne. Style maketh the man, he
believes.
Except for a
few quick punches, he doesn’t do much, except sneer and swagger, while his
devoted henchmen do the actual work. Instead of plot or character development,
the film spends an inordinate amount of time on scenes putting Kabali on higher
and higher pedestals.
The budget
of the film could not have been inadequate, still, the look is incredibly tacky
and most of the supporting actors look like amateurs picked off the
streets. For glamour there’s a
short-haired female ‘assassin’ Yogi (Dhansika), who provides the twist in this
sketchy tale.
Rajinikanth
is undoubtedly charismatic, but Kabali
is so senseless and boring, that it doesn’t deserve a star like him.
Labels: Cinemaah
Great Grand Masti
Cheap and Unfunny
The three randy lead characters of the Masti franchise are always sex starved, which means they always look like they have stepped on a hot tin roof—eyes popping, tongues hanging out, faces contorting with desperation or thwarted lust. By now the three should have had their lives sorted, but they are still as horny as adolescents in the third film, Great Grand Masti.
The reasons why they have such chaste marriages are idiotic—one has an interfering mother-in-law (Usha Nadkarni made to go through such indignities!), the second has a sister-in-law who insists on sleeping in the martial bed, the wife of the third has a twin who goes through the same physical sensations she does.
The women, who are not wives and mothers, are dressed in deep cut blouses, so the guys can ogle and drool and say dialogue about “seene pe bojh”. It is insulting to have a comedy this cheap called “adult”. It could only appeal to mentally challenged tweens or deranged adults. If our audiences find endless jokes about breasts and penises funny, the mental health of the country should be cause for serious worry!
The film opens with Amar (Ritiesh Deshmukh), presumably a sexologist, being visited by a couple—the man has been bitten “there” by a bee; just treat the pain not the swelling the wife says. The film is downhill from there on, with barely a line that is not vulgar. The absolute nadir is when women talk about a house, when the man they are addressing think it’s about them— the dialogue cannot even be dignified as double entendre—it’s just plain trashy.
There is nothing wrong with raunchy comedies, and the silly premise of this one could have made for a good one, but the writers and director Indra Kumar are incapable of anything but sexual innuendo of the worst kind.
Amar and his two cretin buddies, Prem (Aftab Shivdasani) and Meet (Vivek Oberoi), go to his village called Doodhwadi, in the hope of getting some action with the buxom village belles. His mansion there is haunted by a sexy, semi-nude ghost of a woman (Urvashi Rautela), who has been waiting for a man to mate with, so that she can exit the world.
The three walk into her trap--one of them has to sacrifice his life to the ghost’s lust, and all three of them feed each other Viagra! The ghost appears when she pleases, multiplies and dances at will, but still waits for one the men to make a move! Not a very effective evil spirit.
To make matters worse, is the karwa chauth kind of hypocrisy waved about in a film that has no respect for women. Not much for the men, and very little for the audience. There is no masti here, that is even close to grand or great.
Labels: Cinemaah
