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Release date:	February 12, 2016
Director:	Divya Khosla Kumar
Cast: Language:	Yami Gautam, Pulkit Samrat, Urvashi Rautela, Rishi Kapoor Hindi

This is not a film, it is an embarrassment.

If you want to fully understand the struggles of newcomers without powerful godparents in the Hindi film industry, watch dear Yami Gautam from Vicky Donor (2012) and the very likeable Pulkit Samrat from Fukrey (2013) brave their way through Sanam Re. It is a cringe-worthy film with cringe-worthy pretensions to gravitas and grandeur, amateurish writing and the most ludicrous choreography ever seen in mainstream Bollywood.

Those who planted the label “Jumping Jack” on poor Jeetendra in the 1980s may feel inclined to mail him an apology if they see the hilarious dance steps in Sanam Re. In one scene, actress Urvashi Rautela shakes her ample booty dressed in a white outfit with what seems like macramé trimmings. She leans her back against Pulkit’s body, encircles his neck with her raised arms, jumps in the air, does a mid-air split, then sinks down with both legs spread wide apart. A few seconds after that laughable routine, there she is again, bending to plant both hands on the ground where Pulkit lies, then throwing the rest of her body up in the air in what appears to be an attempt at a hand stand, before descending on his prone body.

I suppose you could liken her to a gymnast performing floor exercises at the Olympics – except that the quality of those moves is so poor that she would be refused entry to gali-level contests.

Sanam Re’s inexplicable choreography is credited to the film’s director, Divya Khosla Kumar, who must be delusional considering that she pays tribute to herself twice within the first few minutes of the film. Divya, who? Did I hear you right? Precisely.

The lady had tried her hand at acting over a decade back before she married Bhushan Kumar, son of T-Series’ founder Gulshan Kumar. She made her directorial debut with 2014’s sleeper hit Yaariyan which some of you who have not seen it may still recognise from its signature song by Yo Yo Honey Singh with the truly cerebral lyrics, “Aaj blue hai paani / Paani paani paani paani paani / Aur din bhi sunny / Sunny sunny sunny sunny sunny.”

Within seconds of Pulkit’s emergence on screen in Sanam Re, his car radio plays Sunny Sunny. Moments later, along comes Divya, all limbs and no grace, dancing awkwardly at a party to a song titled Humne Pee Rakhi Hai. This is the only number she has not choreographed herself.

It would be unfair to the concept of time to waste it by recounting the story in detail. Here is a précis of a précis: a little boy called Aakash (Neil Tyagi) in a mountain town called Tanakpur is told by his grandfather (Rishi Kapoor) that he will find true love just 500 steps away from their home. Kid takes Dadaji literally and walks that exact distance, only to turn away from the girl he finds at the stop. His reaction has something to do with what Dadaji said about how the heart will beat faster if she is The One. His dildoes not go dhadak dhadak until later when he sees another little girl (Delissa Mehra) and remains in love with her till he, now grown up as Pulkit Samrat, leaves town for better prospects in the sheher without informing her (Yami Gautam).

They meet, they part, they meet, they part. Somewhere along the way, a second woman called Mrs Pablo a.k.a. Akanksha (Urvashi Rautela) falls in love with Aakash, Dadaji gets very very old, his Johnson and Johnson Photo Studio (estd 1902) has to be sold, someone mutters something about Aakash’s responsibility to his hometown and someone else has a heart disease. Don’t ask who. Who cares? I am too busy trying not to doze off. Meanwhile, the noisy couple a few seats away from me in this near-empty hall are taking calls from home and work, and issuing loud instructions on the phone to sundry people. I do not shush them as I usually would, since their rude interruptions keep me awake.

Also in this bland, desperately-trying-to-be-cool-&-clever potpourri is Aakash’s “Shackspeare”-spouting boss (Manoj Joshi) in his Mumbai office whose English we are clearly meant to laugh at when he says things like “How make me fun of dare”; and a yoga camp which Aakash attends, where the overweight instructor dispenses nuggets of wisdom that go something like this: Jhaanko back into your past, don’t drive in lane fast. When Aakash has nightmares, his roommate at the camp is even more profound. “Sensex bann gaya hai tu,”says the chap, “kabhi chadhta hai toh kabhi utartha hai (Like the sensex, you rise and you fall).” Umm…meaning?

By the time Shruti gets around to saying, “Aakash, pyaar woh safar hai jisko meelon main nahin, gehraee mein naapa jaata hai (Aakash, love is a journey that is measured not by miles but by its depth),” I am grateful – this pretentious line at least means something in a sea of nothingness. Clearly someone involved in this project thinks they’ve created an epic love story. They’ve not.

In a reasonably worthwhile film, I might have troubled myself to debate the bizarreness of a grandfather earnestly dishing out advice on true love to his possibly 7/8-year-old grandchild. Their conversations are clearly meant to be cute, when in fact they’re silly, even inappropriate. To say more would be to take the film more seriously than it deserves to be taken.

Correction to the previous sentence: Sanam Re is not a film, it is a non-film.

Rating (out of five stars): 0

CBFC Rating (India):	U
Running time:	120 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/bollywood/sanam-re-review-this-is-not-a-film-it-is-an-embarassment-2624630.html

Poster courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanam_Re

Release date:	February 19, 2016
Director:	Ram Madhvani
Cast: Language:	Sonam Kapoor, Shabana Azmi, Yogendra Tiku, Shekhar Ravjiani Hindi

In a week when defenders of violence and divisiveness are laying claim to a monopoly on patriotism, comes this unintentionally well-timed chronicle of service to country and humanity. Neerja Bhanot did not fly a 207-feet-high Tiranga over her home or beat up journalists at Patiala House while shouting “Vande mataram”, yet in this film’s closing moments, as her family announces an award in her name and her photograph smiles at us from a podium next to an image of the Indian tricolor, we are gently reminded that there is no greater way to make India proud than to do your duty quietly, determinedly and in spite of your fears, as she did.

This is a story worth telling.

Neerja is a biopic of the airline purser who lost her life saving passengers on the US-bound Pan Am Flight 73 hijacked by Palestinian terrorists in Karachi in September 1986. If you were around in that decade, you would remember her, a young woman who is now part of contemporary India’s folklore of courage. Neerja is said to have alerted the cockpit as soon as gun-wielding men boarded at Karachi airport, thus ensuring that the pilot and co-pilot deplaned immediately and nixed the intruders’ original plan to get the aircraft flown to another country.

As a result of her continued presence of mind under highly stressful circumstances, she subsequently managed to save most of the people in her charge and died shielding children from bullets. Her 23^rd birthday was just two days away. Neerja was posthumously awarded the Ashok Chakra, India’s highest civilian honour for peacetime bravery, Pakistan’s Tamgha-e-Insaaniyat and several awards in the United States, headquarters of the now-defunct Pan Am.

Her sacrifice could move an iceberg to tears. We already know that. The question here is how it is served by this telling.

This is the kind of project that a conventional Bollywood (or for that matter Hollywood) filmmaker would have been tempted to over-dramatise with voluble dialogues and music, while giving short shrift to facts in a bid to needlessly lionise the central character. The Ben Affleck-starrer Argo diminished many heroes to over-state the US’ role in a real-life escape of potential American hostages from Iran. The recent Akshay Kumar-starrer Airliftwent several steps further on this front, completely twisting the truth about a real-life evacuation of Indians from Kuwait, no doubt to create a fictional character deemed worthy of Akshay Kumar’s star stature.

Director Ram Madhvani and writer Saiwyn Quadras will have none of that. Ram is an advertising professional who debuted in Bollywood with the decidedly offbeat feature Let’s Talk in 2002. Saiwyn earlier wrote Mary Kom. Together for Neerja, they have stayed faithful to most available accounts of the happenings on that flight. Although an opening disclaimer insists that the film is based on true events but is not a biography, even for those of us who may not have read reams of news reports, it is hard to find a moment in Neerja that is evidently exaggerated for cinematic effect (barring one brief background song in the middle of the hijack, that could have been done away with).

Sonam Kapoor stars as the ill-fated airline professional-cum-model who gave her life that others might live. The film begins by intercutting between the terrorists’ preparations for their mission in Karachi while Neerja livens up a party in a Mumbai housing society. Without much ado, it is quickly established in those early scenes that she is a live wire, that her family – Dad (Yogendra Tiku), Mum (Shabana Azmi) and two brothers – dotes on her, that she is hard-working and sincere, and that she is a mega Rajesh Khanna fan given to finding an appropriate quote from Kakaji’s films for any given situation.

Though her cheery demeanour gives nothing away, she is still recovering from a personal trauma when we first meet her. Her friends and boyfriend (Shekhar Ravjiani) are encouraging her to give marriage a second shot, but she is hesitant. She is not Superwoman. She is Everywoman.

Perhaps that is the big takeaway from this film: that valour is often about ordinary people doing extraordinary things. From the moment the terrorists board that flight, we see Neerja’s tears and fears; we also see her squaring her shoulders, staying calm and not allowing those fears to conquer her.

The USP of Neerja is its realism and low-key tone. Everything unfolding on screen feels like something that must surely have happened off screen. It is the seeming lack of effort to build up melodrama that makes this such an intense, suspenseful and emotionally consuming viewing experience.

Each element, from the narrative structure to the recreation of a 1980s aeroplane, the costumes, styling and Vishal Khurana’s excellent background score are directed towards giving the film its authentic feel. The director makes a wise choice to stay indoors most of the time even when we are not on the plane; the outdoors are primarily visited in the night-time in the film. This justifies cinematographer Mitesh Mirchandani’s low-lit frames which are key to building up the sense of claustrophobia and foreboding that envelopes us as Neerjaprogresses. Editor Monisha R. Baldawa contributes to the film’s sense of urgency, not allowing the pace to flag even during those flashbacks to Neerja’s home in Mumbai and her unhappy marital experience in Doha.

Sonam gives us a highly pared-down version of her usual glamorous self for this role and in the bargain delivers one of her best performances till date. This is not an easy part but she internalises Neerja’s character well. Shabana as her mother reduced me to a blubbering, sobbing mess, especially in the climactic scene.

These women have the benefit of playing Neerja’s primary characters. The writer’s and casting director’s skill lies in the fact that in addition to them, at least a dozen supporting players in the film remain memorable even if many go nameless: like the brother who has absolute clarity that his sister should not return to an abusive husband, or that well-intentioned Pakistani airport official handling negotiations on the ground in Karachi, or the co-pilot who is tempted to break hijack protocol and stay on in the plane.

What elevates Neerja to a level of brilliance though is its treatment of the hijackers and their group dynamic. It is easy to caricature villains. Making them relatable and believable in spite of their evil intentions is an effort few film writers make. Saiwyn does. Hats off to him for that.

The figures flashed on screen in the end remind us that there were 379 people (passengers and crew) on board Pan Am Flight 73 when it was hijacked, and that 359 survived. News reports from back then tell us that Neerja was the prime mover in saving those lives. If she had been from any other country, chances are this film would have been made decades back. Indian cinema tends to steer clear of recent events, possibly because we do not invest enough money in writers to ensure that their research passes muster with the survivors of the tales they’re recounting.

It is a good thing this team chose to buck the trend, because Neerja Bhanot’s is a story worth telling and this film tells it really well. It is as if Ram Madhvani was there on that flight with Saiwyn, Sonam and the rest of them that day in 1986. It is as if Neerja’s soul resides in the film and whispers at us from the screen in those final moments. It is as if we too were there. For a filmmaker to stir up such a high degree of emotion while making no obvious attempt to manipulate us is an amazing achievement. Neerja is outstanding.

Rating (out of five stars): ****

CBFC Rating (India):	U
Running time:	122 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/bollywood/neerja-review-a-story-well-worth-telling-this-is-sonam-kapoors-best-performance-to-date-2633848.html

Poster courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neerja

Release date:	February 26, 2016
Director:	Hansal Mehta
Cast: Language:	Manoj Bajpayee, Rajkummar Rao, Ashish Vidyarthi Hindi

In terms of timeliness, Aligarh hits the bull’s eye like few others, in a country where film industries hesitate to touch contemporary history. It arrives in theatres in a year when the national debate on the rights of LGBT (lesbian gay bisexual transgender) persons is louder than it has ever been here, with the Supreme Court earlier this month agreeing to re-examine Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code that currently criminalises homosexuality.

Aligarh is based on the true story of Professor Shrinivas Ramchandra Siras who was thrown out of Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) in 2010 after he was filmed by intruders while having sex with a male rickshaw puller in his quarters on campus. This happened in the year following the Delhi High Court’s historic ruling reading down Section 377 to effectively decriminalise homosexuality (overturned in 2013 by the Supreme Court and now once again under the lens of a larger SC bench).

Professor Siras successfully sued AMU in the Allahabad High Court. Shortly afterwards, he was found dead in mysterious circumstances in his apartment, in what was at first suspected to be a suicide.

For those who refuse to see the reality, his tragedy is a perfect illustration of how homophobia can destroy people. National Award-winning director Hansal Mehta (who earlier made Shahid and CityLights) and writer-editor Apurva Asrani have chosen to chronicle his life through a friendship that developed between the shy academic and real-life journalist Deepu Sebastian who wrote about the case in The Indian Express (called India Post in the film). Therein lies the film’s strength and its Achilles’ heel.

Young Deepu’s well-meaning questions to the elderly gentleman are used in a telling fashion to convey the point that this story is not about LGBT rights or an individual’s homosexuality alone. This is also very much about invasion of privacy, the fluid definition of privacy in a conservative society, loneliness and the right to dignity. It is about marginalisation that results from social prejudice and a potential victim’s fear of ostracism. This is a story of a reticent man who balked at labels, was rudely shoved under the spotlight and became a reluctant poster boy for India’s LGBT rights movement though all he wanted was to be left alone with his books, his Lata Mangeshkar and his self-respect.

Were you thrown out because you are gay? Was the rickshaw puller your lover? Any journalist in those circumstances would absolutely have to ask these questions. The aim must be to ask with sensitivity, and Deepu does well on that front, which is evidenced by Professor Siras’ willingness to engage with him in the midst of fools who would thrust a mike into an old man’s face and ask about a personal calamity, “Aapko kaise mehsoos ho raha hai (How do you feel)?”

Aligarh’s screenplay deftly and delicately handles these matters while making sure that the film is not ‘about an issue’ so to speak, but about a human tragedy.

The writing is well complemented by Manoj Bajpayee, who is unrecognisable here in the role of the elderly academic. The transformation is not merely cosmetic, he appears to have absorbed the professor into every cell of his being.

Like the character he plays in the film, the actor would know a thing or two about the sidelines, having inhabited the outskirts of Bollywood for almost two decades after his career-defining performance as Bhiku Mhatre in Ram Gopal Varma’s Satya (1998). Life has been tough until recent years for artists like him who are not in the singing-dancing-and-romancing-the-pretty-heroine mould. He was back in the reckoning with Anurag Kashyap’s Gangs of Wasseypur(2012) in which he played a bloodthirsty, horny gangster. Chameleon-like though he was in that film, it is nothing compared to the genius of his performance in Aligarh.

Rajkummar Rao as Deepu matches up to the veteran, although he is done in by the excessive focus on his character and in particular, by an awkwardly handled scene in the end when he hears of the professor’s demise. This brings us to the film’s big failing.

Despite the pluses described in the preceding paragraphs, the screenplay appears to forget early on that the subject of Aligarh is Professor Siras and not his relationship with Deepu. It would have been fine to use the reporter as a narrative device, but the film gradually loses focus as it becomes equally about both men rather than about one observing the other.

In fact, a brief interlude in which we are shown a sexual encounter between Deepu and his female boss ends up harming the cause the film seeks to espouse. This scene is clumsily juxtaposed against Professor Siras in bed with the rickshaw puller, clearly in an effort to underline the stance that casual sex between consenting adults should be okay irrespective of whether the couple in question is gay or straight.

Apart from the in-your-face nature of this messaging, what is bothersome is Aligarh’s narrow, shallow understanding of consent and the effort to position Deepu’s boss as the epitome of coolth. Errr…there is nothing cool about a woman boss inviting a male subordinate to consume alcohol with her on a darkened office terrace and then sexually propositioning him. The point, dear Team Aligarh, is not whether Deepu agrees to drink with her or sleep with her but whether there might have been professional consequences for him if he had refused.

No, she does not physically overpower him, she does not literally hold a gun to his head (though figuratively speaking, who is to say that is not what she was doing?) and we do not know her well enough to know whether she might have victimised him if he had said no, but given the complexities of sexual harassment at work, it is extremely simplistic to not have considered these questions before choosing to insert this scene in the film.

The argument attempted here could well have been conveyed without the woman having been Deepu’s boss, but because she is, and because this scene is inter-cut with Professor Siras coaxing the rickshaw puller into bed, what the film has unwittingly done is to draw a parallel between the professor and a character who should rightfully be viewed as a sexual predator at an office.

Ask yourself this, Team Aligarh: would you not have been troubled by these doubts if there had been a gender reversal, if Deepu had been a woman and the boss had been a man?

Because of the contrived and very obvious effort to establish an analogy between the two relationships, the power equation at the office ends up showing the class divide between Siras and his lover in a bad light. This is particularly unfortunate because the sexual liaison between a middle-class teacher and an impoverished man despite the social chasm separating them should otherwise have been a cause for wonderment.

Professor Siras was much older, highly educated, an award-winning writer, Maharashtrian, a Marathi teacher, a Hindu in a university originally set up for the education of Muslims and, as he points out in the film, he was resented by some for being successful despite being an outsider. His partner was Muslim yet could perhaps be deemed the vulnerable one of the two in the relationship: young, presumably not educated, a rickshaw puller and poor.

That they could have found tenderness between them despite their differing circumstances is fascinating and intriguing. Yet we are robbed of any exploration of that beauty by the super-imposition of his initial reaction to Siras’ overtures against Deepu’s hesitation when his boss makes a move on him.

There is an eternal lesson in here for us all. The fact that a film is inspired by a moving real-life story does not automatically make it a moving film. The fact that a film supports a genuine and very important cause does not automatically make it effective.

Despite a sterling performance by Manoj Bajpayee and other positives, Aligarh ends up being an inconsistent biopic – on the one hand providing a beautiful portrait of reclusiveness, yet elsewhere doing a disservice to a man to whom this country owes an apology.

Rating (out of five stars): **1/2

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	120 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/blogs/bollywood-blogs/aligarh-review-manoj-bajpayees-sterling-performance-is-marred-by-inconsistent-writing-2644526.html

Poster courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aligarh_(film)

Release date:	February 26, 2016
Director:	Abhishek Sharma
Cast: Language:	Manish Paul, Pradhuman Singh, Sikandar Kher, Piyush Mishra, Mia Uyeda, Sugandha Garg, Rahul Singh, Iman Crosson Hindi

Every once in a while a film comes along that is truly ordinary yet worth watching anyway because of one actor alone or only the cinematography or just the amazing costumes or some such. That unfortunate and rare distinction goes this week to Abhishek Sharma’s Tere Bin Laden – Dead or Alive.

This spin-off from 2010’s sleeper hit Tere Bin Laden– which made Pakistani singer Ali Zafar an acting star in Bollywood – features Manish Paul as Sharma, a struggling director who makes a film with an Osama bin Laden lookalike called Paddi Singh (Pradhuman Singh). A series of twists and turns follow, including the killing of the real Osama in Abbottabad by American Navy Seals. US President Barack Obama is in trouble when his country’s media demands proof that OBL is actually dead. Meanwhile, in another corner of the world, terrorists are mourning the loss of their leader and the consequent loss of business.

Obama’s aide, pretending to be an Indian American Hollywood producer called David Chaddha, pursues Sharma and Paddi to make a feature film on OBL. In truth what he wants is to shoot the actor being killed during a re-creation of the Abbottabad mission, so that the fake video and photographs can be presented to US journalists.

Team Sharma-Paddi become hot property when they find themselves abducted by terrorists who want to shoot a fake video message from Osama’s doppelganger, this one to embarrass the US and convince the world that the man is very much alive.

This is the kind of storyline that could have bred a fabulously hilarious two hours of non-stop nonsense. Don’t know about you, but some of us sometimes need to let our hair down and laugh at nothingness. Except that in this instance, something goes wrong in the journey from concept to film, and try as Team Tere Bin Laden might, they barely manage to be amusing. Except…

Except when Obama and Chaddha are in the picture. More on that later.

It is not that the rest are not trying. Some of them ham till kingdom come, others act. Manish makes do with widening his eyes to Sridevi-like proportions. Pradhuman looks alarmingly like OBL and provides the occasional laugh with his take on a folk singer pretending to be an actor playing the world’s most dread terrorist. Everyone else throws themselves into their characters with a gusto for which they must definitely be lauded. All the energy and enthusiasm in the world is not sufficient compensation though for the absence of that X factor, that magical ingredient that transforms stupidity into comedy, that unnameable element that is born when the right writing meets the right direction. Except…

Except of course in the scenes involving Obama and Chaddha, when everything inexplicably seems to fall into place. Such are the mysterious ways of cinema.

It almost feels like a spoiler to tell you who plays Chaddha if you do not already know from the promotions, because he is so believable as a deliberately over-the-top white man disguised as an equally deliberately over-the-top Indian that the actor himself becomes invisible in the role. In fact, he is so good as a pretend gora that he makes up for all those terrible white extras Bollywood has thrust upon us in film after film for years.

(Spoiler ahead) Sikandar Kher is not merely good, he is brrrrrilliant as a devious blonde white American who dons body padding, a wig and a device that switches his accent from Yankee twang to guttural Punjabi baritone at the turn of a knob. For those who don’t know, Sikandar (who has dropped his surname for this film) is Kirron Kher’s son from her first marriage. He made his debut in 2008 as the lead in two films, the critically slammed Woodstock Villaand a highly under-rated, poorly publicised, well-made Hindi film called Summer 2007 directed by Suhail Tatari. Both sank without a trace and in the intervening years he has appeared in marginal roles in so few films that it is safe to say he disappeared into oblivion. It is a wonder why, because his talent and engaging screen presence were evident from Day 1.

As a US government official, Sikandar is more white and more American than most white people have ever been, and as Chaddha he shows us how it is possible to laugh with a community instead of laughing at them. A lesser actor might have been so weighed down by the accents and make-up as to not bother to add anything more to his performance. Sikandar is not that lesser actor. His comic timing, his body language and his investment in this madcap role are all 100 per cent on target.

While the rest of the cast around him struggles with the limited material at hand, he gets able backing from African American actor Iman Crosson whose crackling imitation of Obama could bring the White House down. It is not that Iman looks like the US President – all he has going for him on that front are that he too is black and tall – but his mimicry is so spot-on that you completely forget how he is actually a much broader man than the real POTUS.

Together, they – and the film’s mockery, through them, of the extent to which the US will go to maintain its global supremacy – save the day for this otherwise disappointing film.

It is only fair to point out that Tere Bin Laden 2 is not crude or distasteful in the manner of low-brow comedies we have seen emerging from Bollywood in the past. It is just proof – since so many people seem to need proof – that comedy is one of the hardest things to achieve in the arts.

If you must watch this film, watch it for Sikandar and Iman. If Sikandar’s poor visibility in Bollywood is due to a lack of trying, then it is his choice, but if it is due to a lack of roles, then the loss is totally ours. As for Iman…how I wish more Bollywood writers would write scripts that require the casting of an African American actor. He and Sikandar are a hoot and the only reason why Tere Bin Laden – Dead or Aliveis not a complete write-off.

Rating (out of five stars): **

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	110 minutes

Poster courtesy: https://www.facebook.com/TereBinLaden/

WHO’S AFRAID OF A HOMOSEXUAL WOMAN?

Carol’s exclusion from this year’s Best Picture Oscar nominations is a reminder of a continuing Academy discomfort with LGBT-themed films

By Anna MM Vetticad

The Academy Awards are upon us, and not surprisingly, the #OscarsSoWhite campaign has risen to a crescendo. The blistering condemnation this year of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences voters’ apparent racial bias though, threatens to overshadow criticism of another of their persistent prejudices evident in the nominations: homophobia.

Director Todd Haynes’ Carol, starring Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara as women who fall in love with each other in 1950s New York, has received nods in six categories: Best Actress (Blanchett), Supporting Actress (Mara), Adapted Screenplay, Cinematography, Original Score and Costume Design. It has not, however, been nominated for Best Director or the all-important Best Picture Oscar.

Now, it could well be argued that perhaps Academy voters genuinely did not consider Carol worthy. After all, our response to films is subjective and I may love a film (I did love Carol) that you may not like at all, without either of us being right or wrong. That being said, it is equally valid to ask these voters how it is possible that a film they deem well written, well acted, good looking and pleasing to the ear, is not good enough? They did not even need to drop any of the pictures in the present lot to acknowledge Carol. Academy rules permit 10 nominees for the Best Picture race, yet they chose to go with only eight picks this year.

Admittedly, it is possible for a film to have all its elements in place and yet not quite add up. In any cinematic venture, the director is the adder-uper (yes, grammar Nazis, I know that is not a word), the person who provides the glue that binds it all together, and it is no doubt possible that Academy voters genuinely believe Haynes’ cinematic mathematics was not right.

Possible.

The greater likelihood though, if we are honest about it, is that an Academy which is 94 per cent white, 76 per cent male and an average of 63 years old (source: indiewire.com) was simply uncomfortable with Carol. I mean, c’mon! What did you expect in response to two lesbian women who are not dead or broken at the end of the film, who shrug off the men in their lives, yet are not callous, and who – spoiler alert – prioritise happiness, peace of mind and being true to who they are above even that perceived Holy Grail of womanhood: maternity?

Over the years, many films on LGBT (lesbian gay bisexual transgender) themes and/or with primary or important supporting LGBT characters have earned Oscar nominations. The tendency though has been to award actors who performed these roles (Tom Hanks for Philadelphia in 1994, Philip Seymour Hoffman for Capote in 2006, Sean Penn for Milk in 2009, Jared Leto for Dallas Buyers Club in 2014) rather than the production in its entirety. Beautiful as these films are, it is important to point out that most possess features which might make them more acceptable and reassuring to an ultra-conservative viewer: an all-pervading sense of sadness and/or (supposed) degeneracy and in some cases, death for the LGBT character.

The Academy’s extreme aversion to homosexuality was never more evident than in 2006 when the eloquently heart-rending Brokeback Mountain was nominated for Best Picture but lost to the less deserving Crash. High-profile Academy member and veteran actor Tony Curtis said with undisguised disdain at the time: “This picture is not as important as we make it. It’s nothing unique. The only thing unique about it is they put it on the screen. And they make ’em (male gay lovers) cowboys… Howard Hughes and John Wayne wouldn’t like it.” Ernest Borgnine was too disgusted to even watch Brokeback. “I didn’t see it and I don’t care to see it,” he told Entertainment Weekly. “I know they say it’s a good picture, but I don’t care to see it. If John Wayne were alive, he’d be rolling over in his grave!”

Five years on, the lines had edged forward marginally when The Kids Are All Rightreceived four nominations including for Best Picture at the 83^rdAcademy Awards in 2011. The film’s protagonists were not gay men, they were lesbian women. Theirs was not a closeted relationship; they were married – to each other. It was not a depressing story; it was a comedy drama. The Annette Bening-Julianne Moore- starrer did not win in any category, but even its nominations were a baby step ahead.

You might expect the hesitation over LGBT themes to have diminished half a decade later, that too in the year after the legalisation of same-sex marriages across all American states by the US Supreme Court. It has not. Carol, as several American commentators have pointed out, is perhaps just too female, too positive and too life affirming for the notoriously conformist Academy to go all the way with it.

The film’s central characters, Carol Aird and Therese Belivet, could be disturbing to traditionalists who continue to see LGBT persons as “the other”. They are not filled with self-doubt, they are not ashamed about their sexual orientation despite encountering social opprobrium and confusion, and their parting shot to the viewer is optimistic.

Now if only they’d had the courtesy to be miserable, they might have had a shot at a Best Picture nomination. To be female and homosexual and sure of yourself, that too half a century back – now that’s going a bit too far, no?

(Anna MM Vetticad is the author of The Adventures Of An Intrepid Film Critic. Twitter: @annavetticad)

(This column was published in The Hindu Businessline on February 27, 2016)

Original link:

http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/blink/watch/whos-afraid-of-a-homosexual-woman/article8281138.ece

Previous instalment of Film Fatale: The Right To Offend

http://annavetticadgoes2themovies.blogspot.in/2016/01/freedom-of-expression-and-right-to-diss.html

Anna MM Vetticad’s Oscar Predictions for 2016

http://www.firstpost.com/bollywood/oscars-2016-predictions-leo-or-eddie-brie-or-cate-the-revenant-or-spotlight-our-picks-and-the-odds-on-favourites-2646756.html

Photo caption: Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara in a poster of Carol

Poster courtesy:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carol_(film)

Leo or Eddie? Brie or Cate? The Revenantor Spotlight? Our Picks and the Odds-On Favourites

By Anna MM Vetticad

The world’s most sought-after awards for cinematic achievement are once again up for grabs. The race this year is tough. Will the spotlight fix itself on Spotlight or The Revenant? Will the day belong to a small film about paedophilia, religion and good old-fashioned investigative journalism or to a gory, big-budget extravaganza about a clash between humans and nature, between settlers and the original inhabitants of a vast, challenging land?

The answers will come on the night of Sunday, February 28 in Los Angeles, that is Monday, February 29, morning here in India.

The Academy Awards a.k.a. the Oscars are given away by the US’ Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences each year. Winners are picked by Academy members’ votes, with the final results already lying secured in well-guarded envelopes.

Before their secrets are unwrapped by some of Hollywood’s most glamorous hands (remember, our very own Priyanka Chopra is a presenter this year), arguments will continue worldwide about who will walk away with the honours.

Until then, here are my predictions for the four most-watched trophies of Oscars 2016:

BEST PICTURE:

Nominees:

The Big Short

Bridge of Spies

Brooklyn

Mad Max: Fury Road

The Martian

The Revenant

Room

Spotlight

The Best Picture race this year appears to be a three-way fight between Spotlight, The Big Short and The Revenant.

Spotlight – a perfectly paced newsroom drama about The Boston Globe’s series of exposés on sexual abuse by Roman Catholic priests in the United States – was an early favourite in this category. The film was even praised by the RC Church whose failings it sought to highlight.

Its toughest initial competition was from The Revenant, a film that is almost seven times more expensive and infinitely larger in terms of spectacle.

However, the tide turned as the film awards season rolled on, with The Big Short winning the highly predictive Producers Guild of America (PGA) Award. The Big Short is a comedy drama, an unlikely genre considering that its setting is the US financial crisis of 2007-08. Going by certain trends, now this is the film to beat on awards night.

From 1990 till date, only seven times has the Best Picture Oscar not gone to a film that won the year’s PGA Award.

Here is an even more convincing statistic: since 2008, the PGA winner has gone on to collect the Best Picture statuette every time, with 2014 being an unusual year only because there was a tie at the PGA between Gravityand 12 Years A Slave. Then too, 12 Years went on to win the numero uno spot at the Oscars.

Before you think this means the deal is sealed though, keep in mind that Spotlight has picked up the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) Award for its entire cast, widely viewed by commentators as another Oscar indicator.

And as if that is not enough to confuse the hell out of bookies, The Revenant– a late release compared to the other two – appears to be picking up momentum, riding high on its rising earnings. It won a Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture - Drama in early January, scooped up the Directors Guild of America (DGA) Award in early February and the Best Picture BAFTA just two weeks back, which suggests that the buzz around it is peaking at the right time.

Let me place this on the record: two out of my three least favourite films in this category are poised to win the Best Picture gong. The Big Short, to my mind, lacked the clarity it was aiming for, both The Revenant and Mad Max lacked soul. Spotlight is a better film by a mile, followed by Room. Ah well, c’est la vie.

Likely winner: The Revenant

Possible spoilers, and very close: The Big Short, Spotlight

My personal favourite:Spotlight

Should definitely have been nominated:Inside Out, Pixar’s delightful 3D animation flick about the inner workings of a little girl’s mind that has even received salaams from psychiatrists and child psychologists in the West

Should have been in the reckoning: Carol, Beasts of No Nation (FYI the rules permit 10 Best Picture noms)

BEST DIRECTOR:

Nominees:

Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu for The Revenant

Adam McKay for The Big Short

George Miller for Mad Max: Fury Road

Lenny Abrahamson for Room

Tom McCarthy for Spotlight

This one appears to be a foregone conclusion in favour of Alejandro, considering that he has already swept the major awards so far: a Golden Globe and a BAFTA for Best Director, and – the clincher in this slot – the DGA Award. According to the Directors Guild website, “Only seven times since the DGA Award’s inception has the DGA Award winner not won the Academy Award.” That would be only seven times since 1948.

Since 2004, there has been only one occasion when the DGA winner did not go on to get a Best Director Oscar. That solo exception came in 2013 because Ben Affleck was not even nominated for helming Argo, though his film did win the year’s Best Picture Oscar.

Most likely winner: Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu

Possible spoiler, by a long shot: George Miller who won the Critics Choice Award for Best Director

My personal favourite: Tom McCarthy for his phenomenally controlled direction of Spotlight

My second choice: Lenny Abrahamson for Room

Should have been nominated: Pete Doctor and Ronnie del Carmen for Inside Out, Todd Haynes for Carol. If you’ve read my Best Picture notes, you know whom I would have liked to drop.

BEST ACTRESS:

Nominees:

Brie Larson for Room

Cate Blanchett for Carol

Charlotte Rampling for 45 Years

Jennifer Lawrence for Joy

Saoirse Ronan for Brooklyn

The top contender in this category is 26-year-old Brie with her restrained performance as a young woman kept hostage by her rapist in a tiny shed for seven years. It was an exacting role, especially since she had to share that space and its demands with a prodigious livewire by the name of Jacob Tremblay, playing her child from the rapist.

She has already got the year’s Golden Globe, Critics Choice, SAG and BAFTA Awards. A win by anyone else, wonderfully gifted though they all are, will come as a shocker.

Most likely winner: Brie Larson

Closest competitor: Saoirse Ronan

My personal favourite: Brie Larson

Should have been nominated: Alicia Vikander for The Danish Girl (she has received a Best Supporting Actress nom instead)

Should not have been nominated: Jennifer Lawrence who ought to have got minus marks for her inexplicably deadpan concluding scene in the unremarkable and joyless Joy

Most probably talked her way out of the reckoning: British veteran Charlotte Rampling with her comment that this year’s diversity row at the Oscars is “racist to white people”. An artist’s stupidity should ideally not affect her chances, but the already beleaguered Academy may avoid her considering the tongue-lashing it is already getting for ignoring non-white actors for a second year in a row.

BEST ACTOR:

Nominees:

Bryan Cranston for Trumbo

Eddie Redmayne for The Danish Girl

Leonardo DiCaprio for The Revenant

Matt Damon for The Martian

Michael Fassbender for Steve Jobs

Will this be the year Leo finally makes it? The Titanicstar has been nominated in this category a total of four times including this year, the other nods he has received so far being for Aviator, Blood Diamondand The Wolf of Wall Street. He was earlier a Best Supporting Actor nominee for What’s Eating Gilbert Grape.

Take it from me – his disadvantage all this time has been that he is too pretty for Academy voters. This lot seems to prefer rugged or pared-down looks, best exemplified by how gorgeous women greatly up their chances of winning when they tone down their glamour quotient. Cases in point: Nicole Kidman, Hillary Swank, Halle Berry, Charlize Theron.

This is not to say that Leonardo is not compelling in The Revenant. He is. He must be particularly lauded for rising above the limitations of the script to deliver such a heartfelt performance (there I go again, grimacing at this emotionally empty film). Good for him then that he has improved his odds by uglifying himself for this demanding role of a fur hunter in early 1800s America, battling the elements and his own people. His face is covered with muck, blood or gashes through most of The Revenant, he ate raw bison liver for one scene and went naked into the belly of a horse carcass in one of the film’s most unsettling moments. If that does not do it for our boy Leo, nothing will.

It will be a huge upset if one of his tremendously talented competitors pips him to the post.

Likely winner: Leonardo DiCaprio

Possible spoiler, by a long shot: Michael Fassbender

My personal favourites: Leonardo DiCaprio and Eddie Redmayne

Should have been considered: Jacob Tremblay for Room, Idris Elba for Beasts of No Nation, Tom Courtenay for 45 Years

One of them could have replaced:Matt Damon perhaps? I mean, Matt’s likeable as always in The Martian, but he has done more onerous roles in the past.

(This article was published on Firstpost on February 28, 2016)

Original link:

http://www.firstpost.com/bollywood/oscars-2016-predictions-leo-or-eddie-brie-or-cate-the-revenant-or-spotlight-our-picks-and-the-odds-on-favourites-2646756.html

Related article by Anna MM Vetticad: Who’s Afraid of a Homosexual Woman

http://annavetticadgoes2themovies.blogspot.in/2016/02/carol-attitudes-to-lgbt-themes-at.html

Photo caption: (1) The Revenant (2) Spotlight (3) Room

Posters courtesy:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Revenant_(2015_film)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotlight_(film)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_(2015_film)

Release date:	March 4, 2016
Director:	Prakash Jha
Cast: Language:	Priyanka Chopra, Manav Kaul, Prakash Jha, Ninad Kamat, Rahul Bhat, Vega Tamotia, Murli Sharma, Queen Harish Hindi

Is this film the fantasy Prakash Jha has been inching towards all these years? The writer-director of Jai Gangaajal has done well to cast Priyanka Chopra as Superintendent of Police Abha Mathur of Bankipur – a tough cop who is keen to play by the rules – and Manav Kaul as Babloo Pandey, a vicious politician who has a stranglehold on his constituency. Where he goes wide of the mark though is in casting himself in a prominent role and mistaking himself for Ajay Devgn.

The policeman he plays in Jai Gangaajal– Bhola Nath Singh a.k.a. Circle Babu, for whom integrity is a fluid concept – ends up as the fulcrum of the story. The dilution of Priyanka/Abha and Manav/Babloo’s storylines might still have been okay if Prakash Babu could act. He cannot.

When Abha and Babloo’s paths intermittently cross, we get glimpses of what Jai Gangaajal might have been. When, however, the spotlight repeatedly moves away from them and falls on Prakash/Bhola, the film sags. The result: an uneven narrative which works when Abha and Babloo are on screen but goes lacklustre in almost every scene focused on Bhola Nath.

The set-up is promising. The SP of Bankipur is transferred when he decides to take action against Bhola for selling his soul to the region’s netas. In comes Abha, whose political mentor assumes she will do his bidding while he works towards his goal of becoming Bihar’s chief minister. He soon discovers that Abha is no puppet.

Bankipur at that point is under a siege laid by Babloo and his brother Dabloo Pandey (Ninad Kamat) who are terrorising the local farmers into selling off their land to make way for a power plant being set up by a corporate giant. Every form of violence – from emotional to physical – is unleashed on those who refuse. This leads to a clash between Abha and Babloo. What follows is a set of circumstances that causes Bhola Nath to turn over a new leaf. The story subsequently examines this question: should honest police personnel stand by while the public takes the law into their own hands to settle scores with netas and goondas who are ruining their lives?

In a country where online lynch mobs are increasingly demanding kangaroo courts and “off with his head” medieval-era justice, where some news anchors and too many politicians back populism and sensationalism over sanity, Jai Gangaajal could have been a crucial commentary on the dangers of mobocracy. Abha’s determination not to bow to public pressure is important in this respect because she is simultaneously battling corrupt politicians on another front.

Unfortunately, Prakash Babu sacrifices his heroine and this significant theme at the altar of his ego. Too much screen space is given to Bhola Nath, too many close-ups, too many fights, too many dialogues, too many silences, in short, too much of everything, although the actor-director does not possess the acting talent or screen presence to back the faith he has in himself.

Watching him in action, I found myself getting nostalgic about Mukesh Tiwari’s brilliant performance as the corrupt policeman Bacha Yadav who develops a conscience in Gangaajal, the 2003 precursor to this film. Whatever your arguments may be with Gangaajal’s politics, you have to concede that it possessed energy, focus, a sense of urgency and a stellar cast. As Jai Gangaajal persists in wandering away from Abha’s confrontation with Babloo, it ends up being an overly long, terribly unoriginal production.

The film’s gender politics is superficial and skewed. Quite ridiculously, the fact that Abha is a woman SP of a conservative region seems to play zero part in the public and politicians’ response to her. This could have been one of the distinguishing factors between Jai Gangaajal and most of the other police dramas we’ve seen in Bollywood history, but the film fails to delve into this angle at all.

Priyanka has the pizzazz and the body for difficult stunts, as we have already seen in Don 1 & 2. This film is further proof that she is well-suited to the action genre. In fact, one of Jai Gangaajal’s best-executed scenes has her single-handedly bashing up a rapist in a town square (I am NOT commenting on police violence here, only her physical prowess). What the film needed was more wolf-whistle-worthy fisticuffs involving this charismatic star, more screen time for her and greater depth in her characterisation.

Sadly, Jai Gangaajal does not tick any of these three check-boxes.

As exasperating as that fatal flaw is its token feminism. When a film goes against the Bollywood norm by featuring a glamorous, commercially successful female star playing a no-nonsense policewoman in the lead, it is clearly positioning itself as being liberal on the gender front. Yet, Jai Gangaajal casually throws up dialogues about men being eunuchs/neutered if they are not empowered or courageous.

At one point, when a junior sees Abha taking on Babloo’s goons for the first time, he says admiringly: Aaj aap humey mard bana diye hai, hum toh soche thhey ki hum napunsak hi mar jaayenge(Today, you have made us men. We were afraid we would die eunuchs).He then proceeds to bash up some villains because…in Jai Gangaajal’s book, that’s what ‘real men’ do?

In a later scene, Abha herself uses the word naamardfor a man she views with contempt. This is what happens when you make an apparently feminist move, not out of conviction but because feminism is the fad of the day and faking it is the latest social trend.

Still, when the camera is on Priyanka Chopra and Manav Kaul, Jai Gangaajal is watchable. The film suffers sorely because Prakash Jha makes it too much about himself.

Rating (out of five stars): **1/2

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	149 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/bollywood/jai-gangajal-review-even-priyanka-chopra-cant-save-this-film-that-reeks-of-token-feminism-2656988.html

Poster courtesy: https://www.facebook.com/JaiGangaajal/

Release date:	March 4, 2016
Director:	Mozez Singh
Cast: Language:	Vicky Kaushal, Sarah-Jane Dias, Raaghav Chanana, Manish Chaudhari, Meghana Malik, Harmehroz Singh Hindi

It boggles the mind that one of the producers of The Lunchboxis a co-producer of Zubaan.

If you were to pre-judge Zubaan by its credits alone, you might assume that it is an artistic gem. After all, Guneet Monga’s Sikhya Entertainment earlier backed that cinematic jewel about two people anonymously bonding over food, which made waves in India and abroad in 2014; the male lead is His Royal Cuteness Vicky Kaushal who burst on to the national scene with last year’s Masaan; Vicky’s co-star here is model-cum-actress Sarah-Jane Dias who sparkled in Angry Indian Goddesses just months back; and Varun Grover who scripted Masaanis one of the lyricists featured here.

Aur kya chahiye? Bahut kuch, as it turns out. A worthwhile story, a solid script and strong direction, among other things.

This is the sort of film that could be screened for FTII freshers to illustrate that eternal cinematic truism: that writing is the foundation of any good film, direction is its cornerstone, and all the embellishments in the world cannot salvage a feature that is deficient in either of the above departments.

Debutant director Mozez Singh’s Zubaan is a meandering mess. It wanders all over the place as it purportedly tells the coming-of-age story of a Sikh boy called Dilsher Singh from Gurdaspur who comes to Delhi to become the protégé of a billionaire builder. The said builder, one Gurucharan Sikand a.k.a. Guru (Manish Chaudhari), had apparently started his career from scratch in Gurdaspur. Many years back, he gifted a pen to a shy little chappie (Harmehroz Singh) from his home town and imparted some unsolicited wisdom to the child, who was so taken in that he held on to the pen and zipped off pronto to Delhi as soon as he was able, to use the pen as a reminder of that interaction, sneak his way into said billionaire’s affections and I s’pose become wealthy himself.

To achieve these goals, he lies through his teeth, maims a man, betrays another and deliberately destabilises Guru’s family. Why? I mean, what is it about that single, passing interaction from all those years back that makes Guru so desirable over and above all the other rich guys in the city? What makes him worth all that deception and violence? Don’t know. Dilsher’s seeming motivations are simply not convincing.

Vicky plays the grown-up Dilsher. Somewhere between his pindand the sheher he cuts his hair and gets rid of his pagri for reasons not explained to us, until he returns to his turban and Gurdaspur in the end, which I guess is a way of saying he found himself during the course of the film. So deep. So very very deep.

The Zubaan mix has many elements that are no doubt meant to have equally profound implications: Dilsher’s stammer, his Dad who died in tragic circumstances, Guru’s disgruntled wife (Meghana Malik, best known as Ammaji from TV’s Na Aana Iss Des Laado), his son Surya (Raaghav Chanana) who he abhors, a pretty girl called Amira (Sarah-Jane Dias) who is coveted by Surya, her dead brother Dhruv who adds nothing to the storyline but is discussed anyway in mystical tones, and lots of shadowy spaces.

At one point in the story, Amira holds a memorial of sorts for Dhruv under the stars at a kinda camp she calls Dhruv Tara, in some unnamed desert region in Delhi or thereabouts. She erects a giant white cloth star there, sings a long song and has all her friends release floating lamps up into the sky. Why? What does this sub-plot mean? How does it contribute to Dilsher’s journey?

I repeat: Don’t know. And by now, don’t care.

There is an early scene in which Guru’s munim asks Dilsher point blank: Tumhara game kya hai? (What’s your game?) Having patiently sat through this excruciatingly soporific flick, I am convinced Dilsher himself did not know the answer and the writer-director does not either.

The production design is pretty in the spaces inhabited by Zubaan’s well-heeled characters but it is also self-conscious and studied, with too much emphasis being given to the look over all else. The film also does not live up to its promotional tagline “the musical journey of the year” – Music Is My Art is the only number that lingers, not for any richness or complexity, but because it is foot-tappingly, pleasantly poppish.

At the film’s premiere in Delhi, Mozez Singh announced that Vicky had shot for Zubaan before Masaan, which in his view technically makes Zubaan the actor’s debut film. Dear sweet, lovable Vicky, please say a prayer of thanks that Masaanreleased first. If Zubaan had come to theatres earlier, I am not sure I would have woken up in time to catch your next film.

Rating (out of 5 stars): ½ (half a star)

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	118 minutes

Poster courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zubaan

Release date:	March 11, 2016
Director:	Shawn Arranha
Cast: Language:	Himesh Reshammiya, Farah Karimi, Shernaz Patel, Kabir Bedi, Naseeruddin Shah, Monica Dogra, Shekhar Kapur Hindi

Himesh Reshammiya is a gutsy man. It takes courage to do what he has been doing since 2007, exposing himself to public ridicule by starring in film after film, only to be minced to bits by critics while even his fans gradually wander away.

His ‘acting’ debut in Aap Kaa Surroor – The Moviee– The Real Luv Story turned out to be a box-office hit on the strength of those very fans, people who have enjoyed his work as a music composer over the years, and were keen to see him before the camera in a full-fledged film role. Sadly, this initial success encouraged him to ‘act’ in more moviees (his spelling, not mine). Teraa Surroor is one such endurance test for viewers.

This is the story of an Indian chap called Raghuveer (Himesh) whose girlfriend Tara Wadia (Farah Karimi) is caught in Ireland with drugs in her possession. She is convicted, and to prove her innocence, Raghu must find Anirudh Brahman, the faceless stranger who befriended Tara on Facebook and invited her to that country. Also in the picture: Raghu’s Mummy (Shernaz Patel), Kabir Bedi playing a top gun in the Indian police, Naseeruddin Shah as the incarcerated crook Robin B. Santino who comes to Raghu’s aid, a lawyer called Elle (Monica Dogra) in Dublin who is clearly attracted to men old enough to be her Granddaddy since her husband Rajveer, the Indian ambassador to Ireland, is played by veteran director/actor Shekhar Kapur.

For the record, it is evident that a good deal of money has been spent on Teraa Surroor. Almost the entire film appears to have been shot abroad, no expense has been spared on the casting of the Indian supporting actors, and the production design, cinematography and sound design are top-notch. Inexplicably though, the foreigners in bit parts are – as has been the norm with Hindi cinema for decades now – uniformly laughably bad.

Actually, that is an understatement: theyare so tacky that they lend moments of passing enjoyability to an otherwise dull film. Bollywood really really really needs to find a better agency for white extras.

That being said, money can buy you good character actors, foreign locales and talented technicians, but I’m willing to bet that even the combined bank balances of Bill Gates, Carlos Slim, Amancio Ortega and Warren Buffet would fail to induce Himesh’s facial muscles to move.

In all fairness, the singer-composer-‘actor’ cannot be accused of maintaining the same expression on his face throughout the film. The truth is that he does not manage even one.

He is not Teraa Surroor’s only failing. This is the sort of film that feels the need to spell out every detail for the audience. When a character tells us that X befriended Y on Facebook, the next shot is of X typing a Facebook message. When Robin tells Raghu he must learn the map of Dublin well, we are promptly shown a map of Dublin the very next moment. You must be familiar with your getaway vehicles, Robin adds. Cut to shots of Raghu with cars. This happens so often in the film, that it almost becomes amusing.

In the midst of all the back and forth in the story, we get several in-your-face, occasionally even contextually irrelevant efforts to cash in on the hyper-nationalism plaguing our political discourse these days. In one randomly placed scene, a couple of shooting instructors in Dublin (more of those bottom-of-the-barrel extras) taunt an Indian man for being useless with a gun. They make snide remarks about how you just need to ask India’s neighbours about our incompetence in that department. When Raghu strolls over, these two mockingly assume he cannot understand English. Instead, he coolly fires several rounds from a gun and hits his mark each time – of course – then lectures those cheeky firangis about desi prowess in fluent English.

A desi hero in a foreign country admonishing a random racist firangiin public in impeccable English, a language that the random racist firangi assumed our hero does not know – this is such a Hindi film cliché now that you can see it coming from a mile.

Elsewhere, Raghu tells his girlfriend that he does no wrong and that his murderous, extra-legal activities should all be attributed to his love for India. Oh ok, if it is done in the name of desh prem, then I guess it is all right.

Still elsewhere, before exterminating an enemy of our desh,he gets the fellow to shout a slogan in favour of Bharat Mata.

Thump your chests, wave the flag furiously and sing a patriotic song or two, people. India has arrived, Bollywood style!

If mainstream Hollywood filmmakers diss the entire world to make America look good, then it is clearly the job of Bollywood filmmakers to make us look good by portraying all foreigners as brainless twits. The final climactic revelation in Teraa Surroor is not entirely uninteresting, but the embarrassing foolishness of the Irish authorities up to that point ensures that it is too late by then to salvage the film.

This is not MSG-grade poor quality with cheap production values. No no, Teraa Surroor’s abysmal quality is accompanied by a glossy package and music that is hummable even if unmemorable, generic Himesh material.

Even the star’s blank face is placed atop a well-sculpted, muscular body, achieved no doubt at a considerable cost. He poses around in ganjisthroughout the film to show off the results.

Now if only gyms had machines to build up acting muscles, there would be hope for him.

Allow me to summon up my inner Arundhati Roy for an appropriate simile to describe Teraa Surroor: this film is as flat as Farah Karimi’s enviably slim waist, as bland as Maggi Noodles without the Tastemaker and as pointless in its existence as the human appendix.

A moment of silence please, to honour the bravery of those who made Teraa Surroor.

Rating (out of 5 stars): ½ (half a star)

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	106 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/bollywood/teraa-surroor-review-himesh-deserves-an-award-for-exposing-himself-so-skilfully-to-public-ridicule-2669712.html

Poster courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teraa_Surroor

Release date:	March 18, 2016
Director:	Shakun Batra
Cast: Language:	Sidharth Malhotra, Fawad Khan, Alia Bhatt, Rishi Kapoor, Rajat Kapoor, Ratna Pathak Shah Hindi

When families such as this one surface in films, the norm is to label them “dysfunctional”. If, however, we confront the harsh – yet oddly consoling – reality that everyone’s parivaar is as flawed as our own, we might face up to a truth most societies seem to want to ignore. The truth that even regular families are like the Kapoors of this tale – a bloody, wretched mess, filling up an album of a lifetime with break-ups and patch-ups, misunderstandings, regrets and joyfulness, laughter and tears.

Producer Karan Johar’s Kapoor & Sons (Since 1921) stars Rishi Kapoor as the patriarch of a clan that includes his constantly squabbling son and daughter-in-law, Harsh and Sunita (played by Rajat Kapoor and Ratna Pathak Shah), grandsons Rahul (Fawad Khan) and Arjun (Sidharth Malhotra). Rahul is a bestselling novelist based in London while his younger sibling Arjun is a part-time bartender and struggling writer in New Jersey. Summoned back to the family home in Coonoor when their Daadu falls ill, the boys are compelled to confront the buried secrets that have kept them apart for so many years.

Destiny is often merciless. While in Coonoor, they meet a local estate owner called Tia Malik (Alia Bhatt) whose easygoing appeal, impetuous nature and romantic inclinations threaten to further widen the rift between the brothers.

When so many distractingly good-looking, talented and charismatic people occupy the same frame, it takes one helluva of a story told by one helluva storytelling team to keep the focus on the soul of a film without self-consciously downplaying anyone’s looks, talent or charm. It is the good fortune of all those involved – including us, the viewers – that this project is helmed by one helluva team. Director Shakun Batra has co-written Kapoor & Sonswith Ayesha Devitre Dhillon. The two had earlier hooked up for one of the best Bollywood rom coms of the past decade (also produced by KJo), the unfortunately underrated Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu (2012) starring Kareena Kapoor and Imran Khan.

The writing and direction of this film are so seamless– aided in no small part by Shivkumar V. Panicker’s editing – that it feels like an unscripted reality TV show set in the Kapoor home. Sure, if you count all the twists and turns, it might seem melodramatic, but the truth is that it is no more dramatic than your life or mine would be if it were to be compressed into a film of 2 hours and 20 minutes.

The conversations flow smoothly and believably, barring one exchange involving a very large bra when Arjun and Tia are virtual strangers. This somewhat harks back to the casual manner in which Ek Main Aur Ekk Tushowed a desi heroine’s parents quizzing her about PMS and her sex life. This conversation like that one seems to emerge from an imagined coolth that you would be hard pressed to find in India, though the rationale is perhaps that Tia is a Mumbai girl in Coonoor. Doesn’t work. A later chat on the same subject does, because they are better acquainted with each other by then.

Again, while Tia’s choice of teeny attire is credible, what is not is the fact that her wardrobe raises not a single eyebrow in this small hill station in Tamil Nadu. These are niggling quarrels though with an otherwise wonderful film.

The cast is uniformly, unequivocally good, with all the artistes distinguishing themselves in some way. In fact, Kapoor & Sons is the sort of ensemble film you rarely find in Bollywood, where each of the six central characters gets equitable treatment, without the spotlight falling conventionally on just two leads.

Sidharth in particular rises above and beyond that perfect face to effortlessly take us through the gamut of Arjun’s emotions – pain, confusion, hesitant stabs at happiness, insecurity, love and loyalty to a family he might possibly be hating. With this film he truly and completely arrives as an actor.

Rishi Kapoor is hampered by the heavy makeup used to make him look 90 years old. Parts of his face seem immobile as a result. It is to the veteran’s credit that he still does full justice to the humour that the script has invested in his character. Daadu’s scenes with Rahul and Arjun are the most amusing portions of this film.

Coonoor is a spectacular location and cinematographer Jeffery F. Bierman exercises immense control on his camera to ensure that we get the full blast of its beauty without taking away anything from the intimate nature of the storytelling here. His lens seems to know just when to close in on a face and just when to look away.

This brings up another interesting aspect of Kapoor & Sons: it features all sorts of communities, yet stereotypes no one. When was the last time a Hindi film was set in Tamil Nadu? How often in history has Bollywood visited south India without drowning us in caricaturish, oily-haired ‘Madrasis’ with sing-song accents and a vocabulary dominated by “aiyyaiyo”? Just as much of a relief is the portrayal of the Punjabis at the centre of the action – without a whisper or a whiff of a “balle balle’’or a Bhangra.

Equally noteworthy is the use of music in this film. The songs are pretty, contextually relevant and unobtrusive at all times. Bolna maahi bolna, especially, is an impeccable fit.

Kapoor & Sons is hilarious, heartwarming and heartbreaking rolled in one. It does not wear its social conscience on its sleeve, but make no mistake about this: it has one. This is a disarmingly entertaining, thoughtful film that evokes a fuzzy feeling of warmth. It left me with wet cheeks, a smile on my face and a chuckle welling up in my throat at the memory of Daadu.

It is only March and Bollywood has already made 2016 look good. Kapoor & Sons (Since 1921) gives tough competition to Ram Madhvani’s Sonam Kapoor-starrer Neerja for the tag of best Hindi film of the year so far.

Rating (out of 5 stars): ****

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	140 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/bollywood/kapoor-gives-neerja-competition-for-best-hindi-film-of-2016-2683566.html

Poster courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kapoor_%26_Sons

Release date:	March 25, 2016
Director:	Nishikant Kamat
Cast: Language:	John Abraham, Nishikant Kamat, Sharad Kelkar, Nathalia Kaur, Diya Chalwad, Shruti Haasan, Nora Fatehi, Suhasini Muley Hindi

If you call a film Rocky Handsome, you had better deliver what the title promises: action that would do Sly Stallone proud plus a handsome man.

RockyHandsome does not fall short on those fronts.

They say 1 Helen is the amount of beauty required to launch a thousand ships. The reference, of course, is to the legendary looks of Helen of Troy from Greek mythology– she who possessed “the face that launched a thousand ships”. What do the Greeks know of such things?

From this day forth, let it be said that the universal unit of beauty comes from India: 1 John is the quantum of gorgeousness it takes to send a woman into such a stupor that for 24 hours she cannot gather her thoughts coherently to write a review.

But seriously…

In a world that chooses to unrelentingly objectify women, usually in a degrading fashion, this film is a lesson in how different the treatment is when men are the ones being objectified. We are given shot after shot of John Abraham’s naked torso, the camera captures his bare chest, back and voluminous arms from various angles, yet at no point does it cheapen him or play a song in the background that is remotely the equivalent of “Main tandoori murgi hoon yaar, gatkaale saiyyaan alcohol se” (I’m a piece of flesh, consume me with alcohol) that Bollywood has unabashedly slapped on to female stars and unknowns over the years.

This is not a struggler hoping to get a foot in the door by making his body his USP or an established actor fighting for survival. This is a successful star and male producer (John has produced Rocky Handsome) in a male-dominated industry, holding the reins and all the cards in his hands and choosing, from a position of power, exactly how he wishes to be portrayed by a film.

Viewers are given the full blast of John’s exquisite physique and his wonderfully weatherbeaten-yet-not-apparently-Botoxed countenance throughout Rocky Handsome. There is more to the film than his sexiness though.

The action sequences dominating the narrative are completely breathtaking. Be warned: they are extremely gory. If you are not faint hearted and have a streak of masochism in you, the choreography of the fights is something to behold. Most are executed by John’s character. To watch him slaughter his enemies is to witness the grace of a ballerina combined with the energy of a troupe of Kathak dancers slapping their bare feet incessantly on the floor of a stage. He slices and dices humans with his bare hands, fists, legs, arms, knives and firearms, sometimes in slow motion and sometimes at a speed that could rival Superman.

Rocky Handsome also features a couple of neat club songs that are foot-tapping fun even if they – like the entire soundtrack – are too loud in the film. The bonus is that two talented artistes dance to them on screen: Nathalia Kaur for Titliyan (composed by Sunny and Inder Bawra), and Nora Fatehi for Rock tha party (the old Bombay Rockers’ number resurrected).

With so many elements hitting the bull’s eye separately, the team appears to make no effort whatsoever to stitch them together into a cohesive, emotionally resonant whole. Great-looking cast: check. Action: check. Music: check. Soul: ah now, therein lies a problem.

Rocky Handsome is an official remake of the South Korean film The Man From Nowhere adapted for Hindi audiences by writer Ritesh Shah. The story here is set in Goa. It revolves around a reclusive pawn shop owner, Kabir Ahlawat (John), who becomes fond of his neighbour’s neglected child Naomi (Diya Chalwad). The kid’s mother Anna (Nathalia Kaur) is a junkie who sparks off mayhem by stealing drugs from a gangster. Kabir goes berserk when the only person in the world he seems to care about is abducted. The destruction he leaves in his wake attracts police attention, which is how his tragic past is revealed.

Director Nishikant Kamat helmed last year’s Hindi version of Drishyamstarring Ajay Devgn and that celluloid gemstone, Mumbai Meri Jaan, about the July 2006 Mumbai train bombings. He debuted with the acclaimed Marathi film Dombivali Fast in 2005. Clearly he took a vacation from his cinematic vision for Rocky Handsome, which is high on style and visual gratification, but low on substance and passion.

Nishikant had earlier directed Force– a far better film – with John in 2011. Here he cannot see beyond his leading man’s physical appearance and penchant for fisticuffs. John too appears so confident about the appeal of those elements in the film that he does not even try to act. Except for one scene in which he weeps for a woman he loves, he wears the same two facial expressions from start to finish.

The child actor Diya is not bad in the cuteness department, but is burdened by the heavy-handed dialogues she is expected to deliver. The zero chemistry between John and the actresses playing the women in his life – Shruti Haasan in a cameo and Diya – is what keeps the film cold.

The director has cast himself as a drug mafia boss called Kevin with limited effect (he has done better before). In the role of his brother is an actor desperately trying to blend menace with eccentricity and falling flat in the attempt. For a reference point he should have checked out Prashant Narayanan’s brilliant turn as a serial killer in Mohit Suri’s Murder 2 (2011), yet another Hindi remake of a Korean film – that one was illegimately copied, but very well done.

If you plan to watch Rocky Handsome then, you have two options: you could feast your eyes on John and his feats, or make the mistake of seeking depth and feelings within that pageantry. Choose Option 1 and you are pretty much assured of paisa vasool.

I know, I know, that’s a terribly superficial thing to say. This critic is guilty as charged.

Rating (out of 5 stars): **1/2

CBFC Rating (India):	A
Running time:	126 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/bollywood/rocky-handsome-review-john-abraham-and-the-action-are-paisa-vasool-everything-else-lacks-soul-2694966.html

Poster courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocky_Handsome

Wherefore Art Thou, ‘Madrasis’?

The non-caricatured portrayal of Punjabis and Tamil Nadu in Kapoor & Sons is unusual in a Bollywood otherwise ridden by community stereotypes if not exclusions

By Anna MM Vetticad

Imagine a Hindi film revolving around a Punjabi family, with not a Bhangra in sight. Imagine a Hindi film set in Tamil Nadu, with not an “aiyyaiyo” or an oily-haired, clownish ‘Madrasi’ prancing around in the vicinity.

Actually, imagine a Hindi film set in Tamil Nadu where a song and dance is not made about the setting, but it just happens to be what it is because — believe it or not! — Tamil Nadu is in India.

If you have watched Shakun Batra’s Kapoor & Sons (Since 1921), you need not strain your imagination because all these elements — rare though they are in Bollywood — converge on this one canvas. The film has received glowing reviews, audience acclaim and excellent opening collections. Hopefully, its success will be a message to the rest of the film industry, that viewers are open to an unexaggerated depiction of the multi-cultural Indian reality served in an intelligently entertaining package.

There are two issues at hand here: first, the stereotyping of certain communities on screen; second, exclusion.

Though Punjabis have for decades dominated the Mumbai-based Hindi film industry a.k.a. Bollywood, the community has been inexorably caricatured by Hindi cinema, with Sikhs getting the worst of it. A foreign viewer of this fare is likely to assume that all Punjabis are loud, boisterous, unsophisticated, prone to dancing the Bhangra at the drop of a hat and punctuating their speech with the exclamatory “balle balle”.

“What’s wrong with the Bhangra and balle balle?” is the most common response to this criticism. Answer: nothing wrong at all. But a stereotype is a stereotype even if it is not negative, because it ignores the heterogeneity inherent in all communities. When perpetuated long enough, it can also be annoyingly reductive to those at the receiving end, even when accompanied by goodwill.

Unfortunately, most of us do not see this until we are at that receiving end.

A Malayali friend once told me of how he called out, “Oye Sardarji, ki haal hai? Balle balle!” when he passed a Sikh gentleman on a Thiruvananthapuram street. “They are jolly people, you know,” he said with evident warmth. All I could think of though was that he sees Sikhs as “they”, not one among “us”; and how irritating it has been for me, as a Malayali born and brought up in Delhi, to constantly hear stupid questions from seemingly educated people. “Are you a Madrasi?” … “Aishwarya Rai is so fair, how can she be south Indian?” … “You said you are a south Indian so what do you mean by saying you are not a Madrasi?” … And from the slightly well-informed lot who are aware that south India is not a single state, this: “Are you a Malayalam?”

Again, there is nothing wrong with being from ‘Madras’ (except that I am not) or being dark-skinned. Just as there is nothing wrong with being brilliant at mathematics, but is it not silly for a white American to assume that all Indian kids are great at maths? A stereotype is a stereotype, however positive it may be.

Sadly, most of Bollywood remains disinterested in portraying multi-culturalism realistically although it is the Indian reality. Sixteen years into the 21st century, the inclusion of a non-Hindu, non-north Indian or non-Maharashtrian character in a mainstream, commercial film is usually engineered with a pointed purpose.

Muslims? Explanation: secularism or lately, terrorism.

Parsis, Gujaratis? Explanation: comic relief.

Sikhs? Explanation: secularism and/or comic relief.

Four years back, when Shakun Batra named the leading lady of his first film, Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu(EMAET) Riana Braganza, he recalls being asked by several industry folk, “Why does the heroine need to be Goan Catholic?” Reason: his script did not typecast her as a quasi-foreign, skimpily dressed, sexually available cabaret dancer, secretary or gangster’s moll who could barely speak English, which is how most Christian women were once portrayed by Hindi cinema.

Bollywood dropped Christian characters in the 1990s, when it became socially acceptable to dress Hindu heroines in small outfits, get them to dance sexily and make them sexually active before marriage. It is not the Christian stereotype that has disappeared from Hindi cinema (that would have been a cause for celebration); what has disappeared is the community itself. It goes without saying then that EMAET’s atypical Riana seemed pointless to Bollywood in 2012.

Some critics slammed Chennai Express (2013) for caricaturing south Indians. Me? I was relieved to see it. If it was OTT, it was equitably so with all its characters; it did not revive the nauseating ‘Madrasi’ cartoon from an earlier era, exemplified by Mehmood in Padosan (1968); and it did not laugh at anyone, it laughed with. Besides, it got north India to watch a supposedly Hindi film replete with Tamil dialogues — without subtitles!

In any case, clichés can only be born of repeated, repetitive portrayals. With south Indians, the problem now is exclusion. Like Dalits, people of the Northeast and Christians, southerners too have now virtually disappeared from mainstream Bollywood films. It is hard to decide which is worse: absence or a trite presence?

It is only fair to state here that Bollywood is not the only Indian film industry guilty of such crimes. Discussing the misrepresentation of north Indians by south Indian cinema, for instance, would require more space than is available here. Try convincing a ‘Madrasi’ filmmaker of that though.

(This article was first published in The Hindu Businessline on March 26, 2016)

Original link:

http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/todays-paper/tp-others/tp-blink/wherefore-art-thou-madrasis/article8397741.ece

Photo captions: Stills/posters from (1) Kapoor & Sons (2) Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu (3) Chennai Express

Photographs courtesy:

(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kapoor_%26_Sons

(2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ek_Main_Aur_Ekk_Tu

(3) Disney UTV

Release date:	April 1, 2016
Director:	R. Balki
Cast: Language:	Kareena Kapoor Khan, Arjun Kapoor, Swaroop Sampat, Rajit Kapur, Cameos: Amitabh & Jaya Bachchan Hindi

What would happen if a couple reversed socially accepted roles within their marriage? Would their relationship survive societal opprobrium, ridicule and personal insecurities if he were to be a stay-at-home spouse and she the breadwinner?

These questions that form the starting point of Ki & Ka are no doubt intriguing. They are ever relevant too, in a world that upholds stereotypical gender roles within households, with horribly regressive expressions such as “she wears the pants”. India has its own backward vocabulary, like that pejorative term for a man who has the courage to cock a snook at convention and live in his in-laws’ home: ghar jamai.

The latter phrase comes up in Ki & Ka starring Kareena Kapoor Khan as Kia, an ambitious and successful young marketing pro who feels marriage is designed to destroy women’s careers by placing the onus of household management on the wife. When she meets Kabir (Arjun Kapoor), whose sole goal in life is to run a house (or be the “artist” his mother was, as he puts it), it is a perfect fit.

They fall in love. They marry. He cooks, cleans and supports her from home. She becomes a VP in her company and supports him financially. Cracks appear. Tensions arise. They fight. They make up. They move on.

The plot is not unconvincing. After all, unspoken power equations in most homes are governed by who earns money and who does not. Many of the individual episodes in the film are independently believable in the way they deal with the rarely explored, tricky territory Kia and Kabir are treading.

It is imaginable, for instance, that Kia would initially be embarrassed to tell her colleagues that Kabir is a househusband. Many modern-day stay-at-home wives struggle with the perennial question, “What do you do?” Similarly, it might indeed be awkward to handle “what does your husband do?” when he does not do what is socially expected of him.

There is plenty of humour too in the film, especially in the first half.

Where Ki & Ka suffersis in the narrative’s failure to weave each of these passages smoothly together. The result is a patchy, episodic feel.

Something like this. (Spoiler alert!) Episode 1: boy explains notion of their proposed relationship to girl (ergo, to audience) and establishes his liberalism. Episode 2: boy and girl meet each others’ parent/s. Episode 3: boy establishes his prowess in running house. Episode 4: boy is seen in scenarios usually populated by women in films and real life, such as kitty parties and afternoon shopping sprees. Episode 5: financial scare. Episode 6: pregnancy scare. Episode 7: fissures. And so on.

The film is so taken in by its concept that it rarely rises above it to become a fully fleshed out story about fully fleshed out people. This is in keeping with adman-turned-writer-director R. Balki’s body of work so far. He is a concepts man.

After the success of his first film Cheeni Kum, a smartly done older-man-younger-woman romance, Balki has been favouring concepts and gimmicks over stories and soul. His second film originated when he was struck by the thought of casting Amitabh Bachchan as the screen son of a character played by his real-life son. The outcome was an awkwardly executed Paa in which Bachchan Senior was a child with progeria, a rare genetic condition with symptoms resembling aspects of ageing, while Abhishek Bachchan played his Dad. Shamitabhfollowed, in which the Big B starred as a down-and-out actor lending his voice – yes, that famous baritone – to a mute acting aspirant (Dhanush). It was a tiresome testament to Balki’s Bachchan fanhood which, by the way, he has brought to this film too. The latest concept he has latched on to is gender role reversals.

It is unfortunate that a film taking a progressive position on man-woman relations should resort to clichés to elicit laughs, possibly to soften the blow to members of the audience who might be uncomfortable at the sight of a mainstream male star playing a stay-at-home husband. There can be no other explanation for visual imagery like Kabir wearing a mangalsutra on his wrist or Kabir in red high-heeled shoes in the closing song, High heels te nachche. What is that if not another version of the “she wears the pants” triteness?

Besides, to emphasise a point, Ki & Ka also sporadically gets characters to do and say things that are completely out of character. For instance, Kabir’s father’s aggressive, unkind reaction to their announcement of marriage is credibly handled, but Kia’s mother’s initial comments seem contrived. She asks him if he is a freeloader, a query that seems solely planted in the script to give Kabir an opportunity to ask her if she would have asked the same question to a prospective bride of a hypothetical son if the girl had expressed a desire to be a stay-at-home wife. I’m not saying a potential mother-in-law would not behave in this fashion. Point is, this conversation is inconsistent with this particular potential mother-in-law’s characterisation since she later turns out to be a genuine, out-and-out liberal, possibly more so than Kia.

Also, who are these Indian parents who seem to appear only in Hindi films to ask their daughters and future sons-in-law to their faces whether they have had sex because it’s “important before commitment”? It is as if the filmmaker is screaming into our faces: Look, look, see how cool I’ve made this Mommy! But wait, she’s a social worker. Phir toh that explains everything, no?

In its denouement, Ki & Ka draws some rather simplistic conclusions about gender oppression. Still, it would be unwise to brush this film aside, since a lot of its messaging is positive and radical, not just by Bollywood standards but by Indian social norms at large. Whatever be Ki & Ka’s follies, it is still interesting that a mainstream filmmaker thought it fit to make a film with commercially successful stars about a man who wants to be a stay-at-home husband and his careerist wife.

Kareena is the pick of the cast. She is particularly good in her emotionally over-wrought scenes. It is such a joy to see her playing a substantial role after a string of marginal parts in male-centric films. It is also nice to see her deservedly getting top billing in the credits, which is uncommon for women in Bollywood even today, except for the female leads of heroine-centric films.

Ki & Ka’s camera team and lighting technicians though have done the actress a great injustice. So many clear views of her bleached facial hair? We are not supposed to notice that, people! A word about Kia’s wardrobe. After 2014’s Bewakoofiyaan starring Sonam Kapoor and PK with Anushka Sharma, here’s another film that hits the nail on the head with its styling of a female professional.

Arjun’s brooding intensity is always attractive, but he has delivered better performances in the past. Hats off to this youngster though for his experimental chromosome, which has led to the wide variety of characters he has notched up in his filmography in just a four-year-long career.

Swaroop Sampat, who plays Kia’s mother in Ki & Ka, is cute and likeable but she just cannot act. It does not matter, because her presence in the film brings up a wave of nostalgia for a childhood spent viewing Yeh jo hai zindagi on TV with the family every Friday.

The production design too is noteworthy. If you are a train buff, you might want to watch this film simply for the manner in which Kabir redecorates his house.

Increasing numbers of Indian women are refusing to throttle their professional ambitions in favour of managing a home, while a minuscule number of Indian men are opting to take on roles traditionally deemed to be a feminine preserve. In this scenario, a romcom on a stay-at-home husband is very pertinent. Large swathes of Ki & Ka are fun, considerable sections of it are unexpectedly broad-minded, path-breaking for Bollywood and insightful. The problem is that we can section it off in this fashion. Ultimately, what fails the film is its mixed messaging and choppy texture.

Rating (out of five): **1/2

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	126 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/bollywood/ki-and-ka-review-arjun-kareena-power-through-but-the-film-tries-too-hard-to-be-cool-2706762.html

Photographs & video courtesy:Raindrop Media

Song video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_KpjLhJa1k

Release date:	April 8, 2015
Director:	Jon Favreau
Cast: Language:	Neel Sethi, Voices: Bill Murray, Ben Kingsley, Idris Elba, Scarlett Johansson, Lupita Nyong’o, Giancarlo Esposito English

In a sense, Gulzar and Vishal Bhardwaj have spoilt The Jungle Book for me. It is impossible for at least some of us Indians to watch any screen visitation of Rudyard Kipling’s 19^th century literary classics of that name without being filled with nostalgia for the old Japanese animated TV serial that has been dubbed in multiple Indian languages. The Hindi version telecast on Doordarshan in the early 1990s featured that song as its title track.

Remember Jungle jungle baat chali haiwith original music by Vishal – back when the nation barely knew his name – and lyrics by Gulzarsaab?

This is a Catch-22 situation for any non-Indian viewer because you cannot possibly appreciate the rambunctiousness of the number without understanding the un-understandable: lyrics that say nothing more than, “It has become known across all jungles that a flower has blossomed wearing underwear… A little bird is embarrassed, because it is naked. It was better off inside the egg and so it’s wondering why it bothered to emerge… A flower has blossomed wearing underwear.” (For complete Hindi lyrics, see footnote.)

It is with such formidable competition etched in our collective memories that this new Disney live-action-plus-CGI film comes to India. Jon Favreau’s retelling of the story of a human child brought up by wolves in an Indian forest is grimmer, less frothy and more adult than the aforementioned, much-loved TV series and Disney’s own animated 1967 version. Still, this Jungle Book has its own allure.

Mowgli (played here by Indian American debutant Neel Sethi) was found in the jungle as a baby by the kind panther Bagheera (voiced by Ben Kingsley). He has been raised by the loving wolf Raksha (Lupita Nyong’o) in a pack headed by the wise Akela (Giancarlo Esposito). Mowgli’s nemesis in the jungle is the human-eating tiger Shere Khan (Idris Elba) who hates him for reasons yet unknown until the second half of the film.

An unexpected turn of events takes Mowgli to another part of the forest where he meets the giant python Kaa (Scarlett Johansson), befriends the lazy sloth bear Baloo (Bill Murray) and clashes with the devious, power-hungry, orangutan-like Gigantopithecus, King Louie (Christopher Walken).

Like the original story, this film too is choc-a-bloc with lessons about life, the law of the jungle, peaceful co-existence with nature, mutual respect, teamwork, the inventiveness born of human imagination and basic decency. It is not overtly didactic though, and allows viewers to swim along with the narrative, gathering whatever messages we may choose to pick by the way without having any of them stuffed down our throats. Such as the oft-repeated mantra, “…The strength of the pack is the wolf and the strength of the wolf is the pack,” and so much else.

The plot has been pared down considerably from the 1967 version, with a very – interestingly – different ending.

The primary selling point of The Jungle Book is its dazzling CGI, which is used to lend amazing depth and detailing to the depiction of the jungle and the beasts. The elephants are a majestic presence, completely justifying Bagheera’s awe-inspired reverence towards them. Bagheera himself is suitably intimidating while Baloo is absolutely loveable. Shere Khan and Kaa are terrifying, and Louie is a nightmare-inducing yet not repulsive fellow.

Parents please be warned: This is a sombre film and some of the fight scenes could be genuinely frightening for under-10s, which should explain the much-criticised UA rating awarded to it by India’s Central Board of Film Certification. (For my column on the subject on Firstpost, click here.)

Another note of caution: While the 3D is worth every paisa paid for your ticket, much of the action takes place in the night, which puts a bit of a strain on the eyes since most Indian screens seem dim and dark, in any case, in 3D. That being said, the film’s impeccably timed, edge-of-the-seat action makes it as much a nail-biting, chilling thriller as it is a fantasy adventure.

All the special effects would have come to nought though if it weren’t for the voice cast who are brilliant while delivering their dialogues. Lupita Nyong’o brings great emotional depth to the role of a surrogate mother torn between wanting her child by her side and wanting what is best for him. As for Christopher Walken as Louie, he is pure genius here. The voice cast’s speaking portions are so well done, that they can almost be forgiven for some of their indifferent singing.

Almost.

The film not just falters in the music department, it trips, falls and is badly bruised. While Bare necessities– resurrected from the 1967 film – is used very effectively here in the background score, its tepid rendition by Neel Sethi and Bill Murray made me weep in remembrance of the up-tempo, full-bodied singing from that earlier film.

Ditto Louie’s I wanna be like you: dull here, so lively and memorable back then.

Scarlett Johansson saves the day with her jazzy, sensuous, ruminative take on Trust in me– don’t walk out when the credits start rolling, or you will miss it. It is one of the nicest parts of the film.

Twelve-year-old Neel bears the burden of being the only live human actor on screen in this film. He is a mixed bag: a competent actor, sweet, likeable, yet not take-your-breath-away charming. He lacks clarity in speech as a result of which I found myself struggling to figure out his words, especially the proper nouns, in the film’s initial 15minutes.

It is hard to write about a child actor, because you worry as a critic that the kid might be reading you. Hopefully, his parents have been sensible enough to keep him away from reviews.

One question: why are Indian characters in Hollywood films still saying Indian names with a colonial-era pronunciation? Hollywood has evolved beyond the stage when white actors used to play Indians because producers could not be bothered to cast Indian actors in those roles (sample: Peter Sellers as Dr Kabir in the 1960 film The Millionairess). In a more enlightened world, the most widely viewed film industry on the globe is making a concerted effort towards better representation, #OscarsSoWhite was a widely discussed campaign and actors of different races are being sought out to play characters of those races (such as our very own Priyanka Chopra and Irrfan).

In this scenario, it is hard to understand why actors could not have made the effort to say Sheir Khan (rather than Share Caan), Akeyla (not Akeela) and Baaloo/Bhaaloo (not Berloo). What next? A contemporary British film in which characters say Cashmere instead of Kashmir, Mirat for Meerut and Cawnpore for Kanpur? C’mon Disney, it’s 2016! You should do better than that.

This is possibly more troubling because writer Justin Marks and director Jon Favreau’s take on The Jungle Book is pointedly about inclusiveness and acceptance, especially with its choice of ending. It also emphasises the need for all creatures to be non-judgemental towards other species. Note, for instance, the wolves’ finely nuanced condemnation of Sher Khan – not for eating flesh, but specifically for killing as mere sport.

Such subtlety, among other reasons, is what makes this an appealing film.

The Jungle Book is too flawed to be among Disney’s best works of animation or live action set in the animal kingdom. That crown, when sparingly given out by this blog, must go to The Lion King (1994). Still, this film is thoughtful, thought-provoking, visually spectacular and features some A-grade voice work. It is also a significant part of Disney’s journey if you consider the lightness of the 1967 film and how much heavier this one is. The two interpretations are as different as night and day. That does not make this a lesser film. Just different in an interesting way.

Rating (out of five): ***

Related column on Firstpost by Anna MM Vetticad:“It’s tempting to mock Pahlaj Nihalani over The Jungle Book, but let’s mock the film censorship system instead”

http://www.firstpost.com/bollywood/its-tempting-to-mock-pahlaj-nihalani-over-the-jungle-book-but-lets-mock-the-film-censorship-system-instead-2720998.html

FOOTNOTE:

Here are the complete lyrics of Jungle jungle baat chali hai by Vishal and Gulzar:

Jungle jungle baat chali hai

Pata chala hai

Jungle jungle baat chali hai

Pata chala hai

Arrey chaddi pehen ke phool khila hai, phool khila hai.

Jungle jungle pata chala hai

Chaddi pehen ke phool khila hai.

Jungle jungle pata chala hai

Chaddi pehen ke phool khila hai.

Ek parinda ho sharminda

Thha who nanga.

Bhai isse toh ande ke andar

Thha who changa.

Soch raha hai bahar aakhir kyun nikla hai.

Arrey chaddi pehen ke phool khila hai, phool khila hai.

Jungle jungle pata chala hai

Chaddi pehen ke phool khila hai.

Jungle jungle pata chala hai

Chaddi pehen ke phool khila hai.

For a further wave of nostalgia, listen to the original song here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9RVgTX55vo

And this is a redone 2016 version of the song for the Hindi trailer of Disney’s The Jungle Book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnO1usyMyEoNot quite as nice as the original but, well, in addition to the child singers, this new video also features Vishal and Gulzar. Oh my poor heart, it just skipped a beat!

CBFC Rating (India):	U/A
Running time: MPAA Rating (US):	106 minutes PG (Rated PG for some sequences of scary action and peril)
Release date in US:	April 8, 2016

Photograph courtesy:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jungle_Book_(2016_film)

Hindi trailer courtesy: Disney India

Release date:	April 15, 2016
Director:	Maneesh Sharma
Cast: Language:	Shah Rukh Khan, Shriya Pilgaonkar, Waluscha de Sousa, Yogendra Tiku, Deepika Amin, Sayani Gupta Hindi

We have watched stars wave warmly at fans from their balconies and cars, saying a kind word here and there at sundry public dos. We have seen them interact with their admirers at well-organised corporate meet-and-greet programmes. What happens though after those few moments of engagement? Beyond the smiles and cordiality, how would a public figure react when a fanatical supporter demands more than some seconds and wants to play a larger part in his life?

Writer-director Maneesh Sharma’s Fan sets out to answer those questions not by dispensing grandiose philosophies about fame and achievements, but in a specific scenario featuring Bollywood superstar Aryan Khanna and a cyber café owner in Delhi, Gaurav Chandna, who is obsessed with him. Gaurav is not a routine fan-turned-stalker of the kind celebrities have been known to report to the police. His actions involving Aryan have far-reaching consequences in his own life and in the fortunes of the object of his devotion.

To say more would be to give away too much. Know this: this film is not a light-hearted affair as it might seem from the lovely promotional song Jabra fan. It is not a comedy drama, although the hugely entertaining opening 15 minutes might suggest that. It is funny and engaging to begin with, and then at one point changes gears in a completely unpredictable fashion to become an uncommon thriller revolving around one star who turns out to be a human being after all and one very foolish fan.

While the film establishes Gaurav’s Aryan fixation and his parallel career as an Aryan impersonator, it is unrelentingly amusing and believable. Adopting a patronising tone towards Gaurav would have been the easy thing to do, but it avoids taking that lazy route to elicit laughs or turn us against him. Yet it manages to make him a creepy, disturbing creature. When it switches modes, it remains gripping in a way you might usually expect in a crime flick. Again, it would have been so easy to paint Aryan as either satan or saint, but the film does neither. And though it has a couple of flaws that are exasperating to say the least, the narrative is so pacey and the acting so credible that there is not enough time to stop and think too much while events unfold on screen.

Shah Rukh Khan plays both Aryan and Gaurav with help from an excellent team of make-up artists who ensure that Gaurav bears an uncanny resemblance to his idol yet is clearly younger and, when you give him another glance, different. There is also some clever camerawork at play here, which serves to make Gaurav a slighter figure.

Their personalities are dissimilar not just because of prosthetics, creams, brushes and trick photography though. SRK alters his body language, his posture and his mannerisms to dissolve into Gaurav, in a way we have seen him do once before to differentiate his Don from Amitabh Bachchan. Through much of his career, Shah Rukh has played to the gallery with his performances, delivering that charming dimpled grin and the trademark quirky mannerisms that his dedicated followers are so in love with. It is such a pleasure to see his star traits take a backseat in Fan while he reminds us, as he did with Chak De! India and Swades, that he is a tremendous actor when he chooses to be one. C’mon SRK, give us more of this.

Two problems in the script by Habib Faisal pull this film down though. First, considering that he is such a major film star, Aryan seems to be accompanied by a rather minuscule personal team at a gala in Dubrovnik, Croatia – one manager, one lawyer, one securityman. Really? Don’t know about other industries, but Bollywood stars of that stature are usually escorted by large entourages including multiple bouncers, which makes this a very irritating flaw since any industry observer would know this. It is as though the writer could not think of an adequate ploy to explain how Gaurav manages to do what he does in this sequence.

Equally implausible are Aryan’s actions at the point when he decides to take matters into his own hands in Dubrovnik. His moves might have appeared natural if the script had spent time establishing him as an impetuous, quick-tempered man. Unfortunately, while a lot of effort is devoted to drawing us into Gaurav’s life in the beginning, we get to know Aryan far less as a person before he begins reacting to Gaurav’s behaviour.

These shortcomings in the writing are infuriating because they are what hold Fanback from being the great film it could have been. This is particularly disappointing because Maneesh and Habib had earlier too teamed up as director and writer respectively on the fantastic Band Baaja Baaraat (Fan’s story is by Maneesh, screenplay by Habib, dialogues by Habib and Sharat Katariya who made the heart-warming Dum Laga Ke Haishalast year). Fanis not BBB, but as things stand it is still a very good and very unconventional Bollywood film. SRK’s performance is so enjoyable and the question of what will happen next is so pressing at all times in this film, that it is impossible to look away from the screen.

Although this is not a regular cops ‘n’ robber flick, it features three very exciting, very well-handled, crisply edited chase scenes. Its use of music too is unusual, since Jabra fandoes not appear in the film nor is there any long ruminative number playing in the background while the protagonists go about their business, as is typical of Bollywood. For the kind of film Fan is, this is a wise decision. Andrea Guerra’s unobtrusive background music is effective in building up a sense of heightened tension and low-key poignancy as and when required.

The story is almost entirely focused on Gaurav and Aryan, yet the supporting cast use their limited screen time to good effect. It is also such a relief to see that producers Yash Raj Films have not penny-pinched while casting their European extras, as most Hindi films do. Whew!

As an aside, it is worth noting some of the detailing in the film. Fanis clearly made by people who know Delhi and Mumbai well. It is nice, for instance, to see a Hindi film referencing Golcha and Delite theatres in the national capital, and not feeling the need to have a character drive past India Gate, the Hanuman statue at Jhandewalan or Red Fort to convince us that we’re in Delhi.

Though Fan is far from being perfect, it urges us to think about issues relating to stardom, fandom, idolatry and public expectations from famous people without overtly appearing to do so. It is suspenseful without beating drums and clanging cymbals around its many twists and turns. Much of its appeal lies in the fact that the central characters are not stereotyped. Besides, when Shah Rukh Khan decides to go real and understated, it always makes for compelling viewing.

Rating (out of five): ***

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	142 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/bollywood/fan-review-unpredictably-gripping-with-a-very-convincing-shah-rukh-khan-2731444.html

Photograph courtesy:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fan_(film)

Video courtesy:Yash Raj Films

Trailer:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkS_Ar0Yad0&feature=youtu.be

Related link: revisiting my review of Maneesh Sharma’s first film as director, Band Baaja Baaraat:

http://blogs.intoday.in/headlinestoday/SWEET-SMALL-OH-SO-LOVELY!-62202.html

Release date:	April 22, 2016
Director:	Syed Ahmad Afzal
Cast: Language:	Randeep Hooda, Akshay Oberoi, Pia Bajpai, Meenakshi Dixit, Rajniesh Duggall Hindi

Let’s get this out of the way first. Randeep Hooda is hot. It is worth the price of a ticket just to see him wandering around in sleeveless vests throughout this film. He also takes off his shirt at one point, letting the camera linger on a really really admirable yet not obviously gym-sculpted, over-muscled back. That is a second ticket taken care of.

A it happens, this man – who we first saw in Mira Nair’s Monsoon Weddingin 2001 – is one of contemporary Indian cinema’s most talented, most under-rated actors. It is a mystery why he is not a bigger star.

Hooda’s talent and looks are very much in evidence in director Syed Ahmad Afzal’s Laal Rang. Question is: does the film add up to more than what he has to offer?

Laal Rang revolves around an extremely important subject: corruption in blood banks. It is set in Karnal, Haryana, where Shankar Malik (Hooda) runs a successful blood donation racket. To make his illegal activities easier by becoming a government insider, he enrols in a Medical Lab Technology course at a government hospital. There he meets the young and impressionable Rajesh Dhiman (Akshay Oberoi) who is so awe-struck by his charisma, his swagger, his inventive ways of making money under the table and his Yamaha RX100 (which, the film tells us, makes men irresistible to women) that he soon becomes his protégé.

Also in the picture is their straight-laced classmate Poonam Sharma (Pia Bajpai) and a late entrant into the story, Superintendent of Police Gajraj Singh (Rajniesh Duggall), the local Haryanvi boy who made it big.

The film’s supporting actors are a uniformly competent lot, though a special mention must be made of Rajendra Sethi – another excellent yet underrated actor – playing one of Shankar’s cohorts. Bajpai is good for the most part even though she is not entirely convincing with her fake bad English.

In what is one of the film’s nicest touches, the characters in Laal Rang are not built up as menacing repulsive villains, yet they are clearly an amoral bunch who, for instance, celebrate a dengue epidemic because of the gains it brings blood racketeers like them. What the film teaches us about their underhand dealings is terrifying. It is the kind of story that will make you hesitate to ever visit a blood bank again, though of course we do not have a choice in this matter, a realisation that would chill any normal human being to the bone.

The film’s undoing is what seems to be confusion over the tone it wants to achieve. And so, although large parts of the narrative have a very apt, realistic feel to them, Laal Rang never becomes as gritty as it needed to be because of its tendency to intermittently wander off into long, loud songs supplemented by stylised, slow motion shots. The insistent background score is used to underline every single emotion, twist and turn as if for fear that the audience may miss the point.

As standalone scenes and music videos outside a feature film, some of these are pretty impressive. In one passage in the film, for instance,Shankar takes Rajesh for a ride on his mobike and as the music plays and the wind blows through his hair, he seems to ask his young pillion rider to take the handlebars while he himself lets go and reaches into his pocket for a cigarette. Ooh. Neat.

While this scene works because it comes before we discover the horrid reality of the blood underworld that is Laal Rang’s focus, once we settle into that theme, the repeated musical asides become an irritant.

A great subject alone doth not a great film make. Relevant topics translate into good films when they are peopled with human beings that we become completely involved with. That does not happen here. There is a distant feel to Laal Rang, the air of a newspaper reporter recounting a corruption scandal as a detached observer would and should, rather than an insider’s account, which is what this is supposed to be.

There is a memorable moment early in Laal Rang when Shankar hails a cycle rickshaw, and an aerial shot shows us every single rickshawpuller on that street immediately freezing at his summons. They do it out of choice and not for fear of him, as we soon find out. One of the poor men tells Rajesh that they consider Shankar god (the choice of divine name for the character even comes up for a mention at one point). Later we realise that all the men in that scene were probably professional donors (PDs) whose impoverished existence was greatly improved by the extra money Shankar’s business brings in.

The film needed more of that kind of material minus the overdone music. Laal Rang tells us a lot about the fraudulent operations of the country’s blood banks. Wish it had got us to feel invested in the lives of the men and women who run the fraud, especially the likes of Shankar and Rajesh who have a straight path staring them in the face yet choose a crooked way.

This film has many interesting individual elements but fails to lift off in its entirety. So yes, Randeep Hooda is hot, but Laal Rang is not.

Rating (out of five): **1/2

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	150 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/bollywood/laal-rang-review-randeep-hooda-and-the-topic-are-hot-the-film-is-not-2743036.html

Photograph courtesy:https://www.facebook.com/LaalRangMovie/

Release date:	April 22, 2016
Director:	Akashdeep
Cast: Language:	Boman Irani, Vir Das, Vijay Raaz, Sanjay Mishra, Lisa Haydon, Ram Kapoor, Neha Dhupia, Johnny Lever, Vrajesh Hirjee, Ayub Khan, Guest appearances: Sonu Nigam, Vikas Bhalla and Manmohan Singh Hindi

Santa Banta jokes are a national treasure. Their long survival is, in a sense, an ode to the country’s Sikhs who are among the few Indian communities with the ability to laugh at themselves (an image that terrorists and sections of the clergy have been consistently trying to undermine, ever since bombs were exploded in theatres showing Jo Bole So Nihaal in Delhi in 2005).

Hindi cinema has also been guilty of unfairly exploiting the Sikh sense of humour by lazily and unintelligently stereotyping ‘Sardars’ as belligerent loudmouths and buffoons even in spaces where laughter is not relevant. There’s a thesis begging to be written here. Suffice it to say for the purpose of this review that director Akashdeep’s Santa Banta Pvt Ltd comes to theatres bearing the burden of a formidable legacy.

The film stars Boman Irani and Vir Das as small-time crooks Santeshwar Singh and Banteshwar Singh from Patiala. The two are mistaken for a duo of renowned and skilled spies going by the nicknames Santa and Banta, and are consequently roped in by India’s RAW (Research and Analysis Wing) to solve the kidnapping of the country’s High Commissioner to Fiji, Shankar Roy (Ayub Khan). Since the agent responsible for the confusion – a guy called Arvind played by Vijay Raaz – cannot afford to admit to his faux pas, Santa and Banta are packed off to Fiji.

There they meet the ambassador’s wife Kareena S. Roy (Neha Dhupia who also plays the love of Santa’s life, Billo), the wealthy antiques trader Sonu Sultan (Ram Kapoor) who is also the Roys’ friend, a RAW agent called Akbar Allahabadi (Sanjay Mishra) who is Santa-Banta’s pointsperson in that country, an undercover RAW operative called Queenie Taneja a.k.a. QT (Lisa Haydon), a Nepalese underworld don (Johnny Lever) and the gangster Antonio Kapoor (Ranjeet).

The multiplicity of characters introduced in quick succession justifies the text plates flashing on screen with their names and photographs in the beginning. You might assume that confusion over who is who would be the risk this film runs. That ends up not being the problem at all. The problem Santa Banta Pvt Ltd ends up with is: who cares who is who?

It is perhaps illogical to expect better from a film that takes itself so casually. When the opening Hindi voiceover speaks of “Hindu, Muslim, Isaai, Sikh”, the English words flashing on screen are “Hindu, Muslim, Catholic, Sikh” (umm, Catholics are only a sub-set of Christians). Actress-model Lisa Haydon’s name is spelt differently in the opening and end credits. And Ram Kapoor suffers from inexplicably inconsistent lighting and makeup – he is pink and perspiring in early scenes, after which his face seems to be cast in shadow. These are not crimes, as less finicky folk may point out, but they reveal a lackadaisical attitude towards the filmmaker’s own product which is bound to be in evidence in the rest of the film too.

And so it is. Irani and Das have personable personalities, good comic timing and the ability to let their hair down on screen. The film’s best scenes are the ones that bring them together and focus entirely on them. Oddly enough, the writers seem not to recognise that they and humour are Santa Banta Pvt Ltd’s USPs and end up spending too much time on a boring plot involving the High Commissioner that gives too much space to everyone and everything else.

Not that the rest of the cast do not deserve to be on camera. As you can see, they are a roll call of some of Hindi cinema’s best comedians. But good actors can do little when the script is so limited, and this one in any case has too little comedy and an abundance of nothingness.

Take for instance the sub-plot involving the Nepalese gangster. For some reason the man keeps getting phone calls from a voice addressing him as Bahadur and asking him to open the gate. Wit that draws on community stereotypes require high-IQ writing to be effective. This one is unimaginative and irritating and yet is repeated ad nauseam. Besides, if Lever contorts his face and body on screen one more time in his career, I think I might scream.

With Santa Banta Pvt Ltd, I was too busy keeping myself awake to summon up the energy to do so.

The film’s initial scenes feature the sort of wisecrack that regular Santa-Banta consumers know well. When they squabble over how to split Rs 1,000 between them, one of them suggests that they go 50-50. Okay, says the other, but what about the remaining Rs 900?

It’s the sort of light-hearted nonsense that should have filled the film. There’s simply not enough of it. Every 20 minutes or so, there is one really good, enjoyably silly joke (which proves the writers’ potential for this genre) and then – yawn, yawn, yawn – it is back to the dull grind. Considering that the film runs for about 113 minutes, that adds up to a total of approximately six jokes. Why?

Santa Banta also features too many noisy, unmelodious songs with redemption coming in the form of just one foot-tapping number, Machli Jal Ki Rani Hai sung by Sonu Nigam and Vikas Bhalla, both of whom make guest appearances to sing it.

Former prime minister Manmohan Singh also has a cameo of sorts in Santa Banta Pvt Ltd. Sadly for him, like the government he headed till 2014, there is little he can do to save this film.

Rating (out of five): *1/2

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	113 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/bollywood/santa-banta-pvt-ltd-review-needs-more-boman-irani-vir-das-and-less-of-everyone-else-2743738.html

Photograph courtesy:https://www.facebook.com/SantaBantaFilm/

Release date:	April 22, 2016
Director:	Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari
Cast: Language:	Swara Bhaskar, Riya Shukla, Pankaj Tripathi, Ratna Pathak Shah, Cameo: Sanjay Suri Hindi

WARNING: LONG REVIEW AHEAD

A struggling single mother, an only child who takes her for granted and a supportive employer – three bright women lie at the heart of this film by debutant director Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari.

Nil Battey Sannata is a reminder that there is no such thing as a life less ordinary. We are, after all, the heroines of our own existence. Writers who plagiarise are clearly not looking around them. If you must lift an idea, lift from life. Chanda Sahai is not the sort of person who would attract a second glance if she passed us on a street. Her sweet face is overshadowed by drab saris and a boring hairdo. Yet Tiwari, her co-writers Neeraj Singh, Pranjal Choudhary and Nitesh Tiwari stopped, not just to take a look but to weave an entire screenplay around her.

It is a good thing their collective imagination did not go in search of the millionaires, billionaires and bhais that Bollywood is so pre-occupied with. In telling us the story of a bai (housemaid) instead, they have ended up creating a unique, inspiring and exceedingly moving Hindi film.

Like many impoverished mothers, Chanda works relentlessly to make ends meet, holding down multiple jobs to supplement her income as a maid in Agra. Her daughter Apeksha a.k.a. Apu barely notices her labours though. Apu is in Class X and has been scraping through all her tests so far. With Mathematics, she does not even manage that (hence the song Maths mein dabba gul, meaning: useless in Maths) and Chanda fears the subject will cause her to flunk her finals.

Worse, Chanda is shocked to discover that none of this matters to Apu because she has no career dreams. Just as an engineer’s kid becomes an engineer and a doctor’s kid becomes a doctor, so also a bai’s kid becomes a bai, the girl tells her mother nonchalantly one day.

The lady of the house where Chanda works, the kind Dr Diwan, suggests that she return to school herself, in fact to the Xth (the class she failed as a student) in Apu’s school. This would put her in a position to help Apu with her work and also monitor her.

The film takes us through the ensuing tension between mother and daughter, the effect of the increased demands on Chanda’s time and how this decision alters the course of their journey.

Nil Battey Sannata literally means zero divided by absolute silence, stillness and desolation, which is a mathematical metaphor for hopelessness or an existence that could amount to zilch. Chanda is determined that she and Apu will add up to more than that.

It is a charming tale told with good humour, sensitivity and confidence. The characterisation of both the leads and the supporting players – including Apu’s classmates – is richly layered and plausible. They all come across as real people from a real world.

Even Apu’s extreme nastiness towards Chanda is straight out of reality. Is there a kid out there who has never ever been hatefully mean to a sacrificing, loving parent?

The team of Nil Battey Sannata wisely recognises that there is no need to artificially heighten the drama in their film when life is a drama in itself. The result is a minimalist directorial style that is apt for the realistic story at hand. Both are complemented by a background score so gentle that you could forget it is there. Just as you forget cinematographer Gavemic U. Ary’s camera that is self-effacing and self-erasing to the point that a viewer might believe she has herself entered the frame and is watching Chanda and Apu from the margins of their lives.

The film does falter occasionally. First, the girls-are-not-good-at-Maths stereotype is stated as a truism by a seemingly liberal character. The continuing worldwide prejudice against women in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics related professions) is not an imagined problem and it hurts when a sensible film casually perpetuates gender typecasting.

The other off-key point comes in the end with Apu’s response to the question of why she wants her chosen profession. Her answer is rather thin and poorly thought out. Surely the idea is not to belittle baisbut to have worthwhile goals and sound, specific reasons for zeroing in on them.

Besides, the ode to mothers in the climax is out of sync with the rest of the film’s non-schmaltzy tone. There are plenty of crappy parents (mothers included) out there. The point should be to acknowledge great parents because they are great, not merely because they happen to be parents.

These portions are especially jarring because they rear their heads in an otherwise lovely venture.

The film’s dialogues, for instance, are uncommon on the Bollywoodscape. There is a lyricism to the language these characters speak and Chanda’s vocabulary in particular. While the use of “bai” may have been more convincing in a western Indian setting, it is not unknown in north India with this meaning. Besides, there is such pleasure in hearing words like “kantaap” (slap) and “kandam” (useless) that so rarely find their way into Bollywood scripts. My pick of the film’s phraseology though is “nil battey sannata” and how it smoothly rolls off Chanda’s tongue.

It helps that the actress playing her is brilliant. With Nil Battey Sannata, Swara Bhaskar – a memorable satellite player in Raanjhanaa and the Tanu Weds Manu films– gets a lead role in a worthy project. A city-bred, educated woman herself (Bhaskar is an MA from JNU) she subdues her naturally sophisticated body language to slip into this role without becoming a cliche.

Riya Shukla is a flaming ball of energy and well cast as the little spitfire Apu. She is a discovery.

Ratna Pathak Shah plays the elderly doctor-householder who helps Chanda along with her ambitions. She brings warmth, empathy and dignity to the role which, incidentally, is vastly different from the part she plays in Kapoor & Sons that is still running in theatres.

She is the sort of employer about whom newspaper articles are not written because the media, justifiably so, is focused on those who ill-treat their domestic help. While their cruelty, casteism and classism ought to be chronicled and condemned, it is also good to be told about this benevolent memsaab who goes out of her way to help her bai,because such people too do exist.

Pankaj Tripathi is a scene-stealer and showstopper as the school principal and Maths teacher Srivastava Sir. Despite the thoroughly entertaining, quirky mannerisms and mincing speech, it is to Tripathi’s credit that he does not reduce Srivastavato a caricature. In this performance, it is impossible to spot the bloodthirsty Sultan Qureshi he played in Gangs of Wasseypur 1&2.

The writing of his character too is nicely shaded. Srivastava is well-intentioned, yet humiliates his weak students, perhaps thinking, like so many Indian teachers do, that he is motivating them. Extreme portrayals are easy, the challenge lies in the middle path. Nil Battey Sannatareminds us that as with all categories of people, among teachers, parents and children too there are the good, the bad and the ugly, and sometimes the entire spectrum within the same person.

The film’s finer details though are what make it an all-round interesting experience. Such as the unspoken caste, communal and gender equations. Dr Diwan’s husband is sweet but stays in the background and no information is offered about Apu’s father. Whatever happened to him apparently no longer warrants discussions. Chanda’s singleton status also adds dimensions to the story, such as the relationship of equals as much as mother and child in the household.

Even the use of the Taj is refreshing. Most films mindlessly latch on to architectural landmarks as city identifiers. Example: a character who lives and works in south Delhi passing Red Fort in north Delhi on her way from home to work. In this film, the Taj first makes a fleeting – and logical – appearance, and in the end forms the backdrop to a long monologue Chanda delivers to Apu. It feels right. If you have visited the Taj you would have experienced the calming effect of the monument which, here, matches Chanda’s sedate words in Bhaskar’s velvet voice.

Nil Battey Sannata has a light touch, yet is serious as hell. Despite the frenzied pace of Chanda’s days, the film itself has an air of composure. To see it merely as a lesson in the importance of education would be to limit it. This is an uplifting film about the importance of having dreams.

Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari, where have you been hiding all this time?

Rating (out of five): ****

CBFC Rating (India):	U
Running time:	100 minutes

Photograph courtesy: (1)https://www.facebook.com/NilBatteySannata/

(2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nil_Battey_Sannata

Release date:	April 29, 2016
Director:	Sabbir Khan
Cast: Language:	Tiger Shroff, Shraddha Kapoor, Sudheer Babu, Sunil Grover Hindi

Baaghi is a slickly packaged empty vessel. The action choreography is striking, the locations are exquisite, the camerawork polished, the art design impressive, the cast well dressed. Scratch the attractive surface though, and you get a dated, cliched storyline that compartmentalises hero, heroine, villains and comedians in the way Hindi films of the 1970s and 1980s did.

The story begins in the menacing Bangkok den of a rogue called Raghav Shetty, who is on the lookout for Sia Khurana. Cut to Hyderabad, where she is shooting for a film directed by her Daddy, when the numero uno baddie’s goons abduct her. Martial arts expert Ronnie Singhis called in to rescue the damsel in distress. Ronnie and Sia have a past. Time for explanatory flashback.

Cut to Kollam railway station in Kerala where boy and girl met, girl pretended to resist boy, they fell in love, fate split them up, reunited them, Raghav split them up again and so on.

It is a formula that is so dull and dusted that even Sunny Deol has stopped revisiting it.

Baaghi’s writer Sanjeev Dutta seems to have a thing for antiquity though. This is the sort of film where the hero is omnipotent and successfully bashes up dozens of men single-handedly, as did male leads of pre-1990s Hindi cinema who sought to replicate and cash in on the success of Amitabh Bachchan’s Angry Young Man formula. Here, like it was back then, the heroine’s only role is to be good-looking, charming and if possibledance sweetly/sexily enough to make the hero fall in love with her, thus providing him with a motivation to bash the bad guys in the end.

The villains here too are uni-dimensional cardboard cut-outs. Comedians are slotted in to relieve tension even in the middle of a hectic chase. Love happens at the first sight of a pretty face who fakes disinterest in the hero though of course she is keen on him because, well, you know, after all he is the hero. What else was she created for but to fall for him?

Besides, do we not also know that when a woman says “no” she means “maybe”? Ronnie, an absolute stranger who just met Sia a few minutes back on a train, blows a kiss to her from a station platform. She shows irritation but turns away to hide a smile. This film may not be as aggressive or overt as the song Koi haseena jab rootth jaati haifrom Sholay, Jumma chumma de defrom Hum, Jumme ki raat from Kickor Tu hi to hai from Holiday, but it does make that regressive point all the same.

The film’s only USPs are its only novelties. First, it is set almost entirely in Kerala, which translates into an eyeful of stunning locales, the famed snake boat race (vallam kali) in scenic backwaters and miles of greenery all around. Second, Ronnie is in Kerala to learn the state’s traditional martial arts form Kalaripayattu, which has a way of transforming men into Rudolf Nureyev and Birju Maharaj while they smash and slice other human beings to bits.

Tiger Shroff as Ronnie gets the bulk of the film’s fights and has clearly worked hard to learn Kalari. Many points to him for that and what he has achieved with his body. He must, however, control the tendency to pose about, which is never more evident than in scenes where he replicates his Guru’s moves and comes across as a mannequin, while the old man looks like a battle axe and a ballet dancer rolled into one.

In terms of acting, Tiger’s exaggerated expressions are one with the film’s penchant for overstatement. To be fair, he seems like he would do better with better direction, even if it is hard to ignore the fact that his Caucasian facial features make him a bit of a misfit in Indian cinema. He absolutely does not look Punjabi, although that is what he is meant to be in this film; he looks European. Perhaps he will figure a way around that.

And while I’m all for men showing off their beautiful bodies on screen, could someone explain why so many Hindi film heroes these days make it a point to rip off their shirts before a fight? Sure they look good, but is there a scientific logic here that has escaped me? Just asking.

Shraddha Kapoor as Sia is well turned out and gets a couple of fight scenes of her own. It is nice to see the actress throwing punches and kicks with such elan. Her acting in the early scenes though, is over-cutesified. Time to cross over into the adult world, girl. You are too good to waste yourself playing and replaying a child-like innocent who is an appendage to the hero.

Of the remaining performers, Sudheer Babu Posani merits a mention for his Kalari moves as Ronnie’s bête noir Raghav Shetty. It is curious though that Sudheer, who is a Telugu actor, manages his Malayalam diction so poorly in the film. He keeps addressing his father as “Aachan” when it should be “Achchan”, a word that even a north Indian might easily get right if you point out that the “chch” is pronounced precisely as it is in Bachchan. Simple, no?

Veteran Sanjay Mishra and Sumit Gulati (who we saw last year in Talvar) enter the picture at one point to provide what is conventionally called “comic relief”. If a blind man bumping into things or mistakenly feeling up a woman’s legs makes you laugh, then the director has got what he wants. Some people, hopefully, have better taste.

Director Sabbir Khan made his debut with Kambakkht Ishq in 2009 starring Kareena Kapoor and Akshay Kumar, which he followed up with Tiger and Kriti Sanon’s debut Hindi film Heropanti in 2014. Both films revealed his love for bombast.

In Baaghi, he adds to his shoulders the burden of targeting Salman Khan and Akshay’s traditional audience. And so, Tiger is given an old-style punchline to repeat through the film: “Itni bhi jaldi kya hai? Abhi toh maine start kiya hai.” (What’s the rush? I’ve only just begun.) It is hard to imagine why the producers thought this ordinary writing would be as memorable as, say, Salman’s “Ek baar jo maine commitment ki, toh apne aap ki bhi nahin sunta” (Once I make a commitment, I do not allow myself to hold me back) or that Tiger has the panache to elevate it.

More triteness comes in the form of Baaghi’s effort to cash in on the prevailing tension between India and our neighbour China, as Hindi cinema once did with Chinese-looking villains around the time of the 1962 war or before that in the just-post-Independence era when seemingly Western Roberts were the bad people. Here, Raghav’s henchman Yong tells Ronnie: “You killed my brother, you Indian. You think you can fight? We fight. Chinese fight.” Ronnie beats him to pulp before replying grandly, “Sorry, China ka maal zyaada tikta nahin hai” (Chinese goods do not last long).

Might as well have gone a step further with a crowd-pleasing, sarkar-pleasing “Bharat Mata ki jai!” yelled out by the hero. The chest-thumping suits the film’s emptiness. Gloss sans substance tends to make a lot of noise.

Rating (out of five): *1/2

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	140 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/bollywood/baaghi-review-as-plastic-as-tiger-shroffs-over-bronzed-body-in-the-posters-2756322.html

Photograph courtesy: https://www.facebook.com/BaaghiOfficial/

Release date:	April 29, 2016
Director:	Garry Marshall
Cast: Language:	Jennifer Aniston, Julia Roberts, Kate Hudson, Jason Sudeikis, Timothy Olyphant, Shay Mitchell, Britt Robertson, Jack Whitehall, Sarah Chalke, Margo Martindale, Hector Elizondo, Aasif Mandvi, Robert Pine English

The things star power can persuade us to do. This weekend, the combined allure of Julia Roberts, Jennifer Aniston and Kate Hudson drew me to a theatre on a maniacally busy, I-don’t-have-time-to-breathe sort of day to watch Garry Marshall’s Mother’s Day.

It is not that the film held out the promise of being another Pretty Woman, Marshall’s career-defining 1990 film that made Roberts a household name. It did not. Mother’s Day is in the same league as the director’s Valentine’s Day (2010) and New Year’s Eve (2011), with an all-star ensemble cast and multi-strand format.

With three female leads, one male lead and a couple at the centre of the action, Mother’s Day is less crowded than those other two films. The quality, however, is many steps down, which says a lot considering that V-Day and NYE were just timepass fare. Hopefully this brings to a close the director’s fixation on festival-related relationship sagas. God, please make him stop at a trilogy. A quartet will be beyond endurance.

Aniston here plays interior designer Sandy, a middle-aged, divorced mother of two young boys, who gets along well with her ex-husband Henry (Timothy Olyphant). Her travails in the film revolve around Henry’s unexpected announcement that he has married the young-enough-to-be-his-daughter Tina (Shay Mitchell from TV’s Pretty Little Liars).

Sandy’s friend Jesse (Hudson) and her sister Gabi (Sarah Chalke, familiar again to Indian viewers primarily from TV’s Scrubs) are having relationship troubles of their own. Both are keeping crucial secrets from their overbearing, prejudiced parents.

Meanwhile, Sandy bumps into a fitness trainer called Bradley (Jason Sudeikis). He is a widower with two daughters and is still pining for his wife (Jennifer Garner) who passed away an entire year back, so you know from 10 miles away where that thread is headed.

On the professional front, Sandy is sought out for a design project by Lance Wallace (Hector Elizondo), agent of the hugely successful writer-entrepreneur Miranda (Roberts).

Elsewhere in the same town, as Mother’s Day approaches, Jesse’s friend Kristin (Britt Robertson) is hesitant to marry the father of her baby, her comedian boyfriend Zack (Jack Whitehall), for reasons yet undisclosed, although she is very much in love with him.

Mother’s Day is clearly intended as a light-hearted yet emotional look at womanhood, motherhood and parenthood in general as the day commemorating maternity approaches. Its Achilles heel is its other obvious intention: to manipulate us by any means available.

To be fair, the film is harmless fun in the first half even when it is not being particularly original. Besides, Aniston, Hudson, Roberts and Sudeikis are so likeable that it is near-impossible not to succumb to their appeal, even if Roberts is given surprisingly little to do in comparison with the others and her body looks impossibly padded up to make her look older for reasons that will become evident when you see the film.

But as the second half rolls along, Mother’s Day gets mushier and progressively more emotionally calculated, till it feels as though Marshall is not aiming at even an iota of depth. Perhaps he feels secure in the knowledge that audiences are easily pleased when so much charisma and beauty are on display. Perhaps, like generations of Hindi filmmakers, he feels the mere mention of Maaaaa is enough to reduce us to messy puddles of tears.

He is right up to a point (I confess). But even a schmaltzy-pretty combine can go only so far when the writing is so lazy and so transparent in its effort to pull at the heartstrings.

The bottom-of the-barrel moment of maudlin manipulativeness comes towards the end when Zack goes on stage with his baby in his arms during a comedy contest, delivers just one funny line in his entire routine, yet wins, no doubt on the strength of the kid’s cuteness alone. Apparently, his audience is as easily pleased as the one Marshall is targeting with Mother’s Day.

The shameless mushiness leads to an unintentionally amusing moment at one point when the baby’s Mummy, Kristin, confides in Jesse that she was given up for adoption by her birth mother. “I have abandonment issues,” she says in a weepy voice that is unwittingly hilarious.

While parts of the film are purportedly liberal, Roberts’ character Miranda uses the word “career” as if it means “that thing women do to fill up an emotional void” or “the thing that leaves women with no time to have romantic relationships and children”. She says it twice in a tone that suggests these implications are obvious.

Mother’s Day is silly. It is a measure of the cast’s collective charm that the film is not entirely unbearable.

Rating (out of five): *1/2

CBFC Rating (India):	U/A
Running time: MPAA Rating (US):	119 minutes PG-13 (for language and some suggestive material)
Release date in US:	April 29, 2016

Photograph courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother%27s_Day_(2016_film)

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