Directed by Mira Nair

The dubbing does subject the content to some tonal drubbing. And one wishes the Indian distributors had just let the characters speak the way they felt. Misguided vocalization cannot take away from the power and inner strengths of Mira Nair’s newest work.

The abject isolation of an individual as he or she grapples with the shifting emotional and cultural dynamics of a society that doesn’t have much patience with dilemmas of the diaspora, is a recurrent theme in Mira Nair’s remarkable oeuvre.

It could be that sassy street boy Krishna in Salaam Bombay peering resentfully into the rolled-up windows of the rich and the privileged as they whisk away his unrealized dreams. It could  the high-flying Amelia Earhart  kissing the clouds as she flies that plane in splendid solitude in Amelia. Or it could be Tabu in The Namesake struggling with a language and culture in America that never could be her own even after decades of trying to build a home away from home. These are all Mira Nair’s fractured people, seeking and receiving a healing touch by tapping into their own emotional and spiritual resources.

In The Reluctant Fundamentalist (TRF) on several occasions, Changez (played with a fabulous flair freed of flamboyance by Riz Ahmed) reminded me of Tabu in The Namesake. The same blown structure of a life swept away by forces that the individual fails to control in spite of a great inner strength. The same desolation and dereliction masked in unquestionable dignity.

Changez, to begin with, is a Pakistani pursuing that nebulous state of bliss known as the American Dream in New York. Life’s darker reverberations catch up with Changez after the fateful date of 9/11 when America’s relations with the Islamic world altered radically (if one may use an ironic pun). But it wasn’t just the Americans who grew obstinately wary of all things ‘Khan’. The Muslim individual too lost his bearings and often his visa, vis-à-vis the Western hemisphere.

This is where Mira’s moving lyrical account of a life torn apart by a strife that he has no control over, acquires a relevance beyond all the 9/11 (and its desi counterpart the 26/11) films we’ve seen. For the first time we get to see, and yes, feel what it is like to stand on the other side in the crippling war that America has waged on the ambivalent world of militancy and terrorism.

The terror that stikes within the persecuted cornered Islamic individual has resonances that cinema has never before studied and captured so vividly. We can see right through Changez and we are most of the way, one with his journey into a restorative self-actualization. Mira’s majestic (e)motion picture opens up the polemical debate from Mohsin Hamid’s trenchant novel on Jehad and its ramification on the Asian and Western world, so that we are left looking not just at Changez’s life fall apart after 9/11. We also get a telescopic view of the entire socio-political and cultural relations between the Islamic world and the West come apart at the seams.

The view is disturbing yet magnificent.

While in Mira’s The Namesake we heard Tabu’s scream after tragedy struck her life with savage finality, in TRF the screams are stifled and subverted into visual and emotional images which emerge slowly. In a display of languid luminosity. The beautifully arranged drama with camerawork and music that are exquisitely evocative and apt, moves forward at a gentle unhurried volition creating a cocktail of pain and beauty mixed in a way that it is tough to tell one from the other.

A lot of the credit for the spiral of gathering despair and ultimate redemption that builds up in this sagacious saga must go to Riz Ahmed whose Changez is a tall stately dignified victim who never serenades self-pity or cultural surrender. Ahmed plays Changez with great dignity.

Of course Riz is lucky to have an actor as unassumingly accomplished as Liev Schreiber to lend Changez’s jagged saga a patient ear. No performance, not even one as nuanced and moving as Riz’s, could work without the co-star’s attentive reactive presence. We know Liev is listening. So are we.

Cleverly, the film casts politically savvy actors who bring to the screen an effortless back-projection and understanding of the complex theme. Whether it’s Shabana Azmi and Om Puri (alas, too brief in their appearances) or on the Caucasian front, Kate Hudson and Keifer Sutherland, the actors KNOW. And they let us know that they know without making a song and dance of it.

Declan Quinn’s cinematography confers a tremendous state of grace on the troubled life of the protagonist. It’s as if the camera doesn’t lie even when the characters do. And this film with its leap of time and space, moods and climates couldn’t have been easy to edit. Shimit Amin brings a sense of cascading crisis into the narration. Seamless stress is the term that would best describe the editing pattern.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a film of whispered understated resplendence and  quiet accomplishments. There is a bedrock of haunting pain in the narration buried too deep for tears or words. Unless the words happen to be the poetry of Faiz Ahmed Faiz.

And if at the end of this enlightening journey into the heart of a man who never turned to terrorism in despair, we feel Changez to be a poet whose wounded words pierce our sensitivities like shards of glass, then blame it on the world that we have inherited from generations of warring cultures and nations.

Thankfully, cinema as powerful as this heals even as it opens up old wounds. The Reluctant Fundamentalist makes us look within ourselves for answers to the chaos in the world around us. The view may not always be comfortable. But it’s the truth about the politics of  modern civilization.

What we see is what we regret.

“The Reluctant Fundamentalist makes us look within ourselves for answers to the chaos in the world around us.” – A Review by Subhash K Jha is a post from: BollySpice

The post “The Reluctant Fundamentalist makes us look within ourselves for answers to the chaos in the world around us.” – A Review by Subhash K Jha appeared first on BollySpice.

Directed by Amit Kasaria

The trouble with a well-meaning film such as this is it cannot take the story and characters to their logical conclusion and somewhere ends up ‘tale’-diving at crucial junctures in the plot.

To begin with, we are introduced to Yuvaan and his college friends in Delhi whose only past time is chasing dreams, preferably wet, and in short skirts. The ogling, gawking, giggling, nudging winking references to campus courtship, though neatly filmed by cameraman Saurav Vishwakarma, occupies much too much space in the first hour of the story when we we are told, with far less subtlety than needed, that Yuvaan is an incorrigible flirt.

Yuvaan says he  believes in “sex at first sight” and he isn’t joking. Later when he gets into a sexual situation with a girl, he jumps off his bedroom windowsill. This guys needs a shrink for his hard-ons.

Enter the NRI beauty, all sweetness and kindness played by newcomer Chetna Pande. Now here’s where the plot needed to get piping hot. We wait to see Yuvaan soften the innocent short-skirted campus queen, a sort of Delhi University version of Rani Mukherjee in Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, and push her to do things she, and he would regret later.

Instead the film goes into long-winded explanations on how Yuvaan doesn’t really mean any harm even when he ends up making sexual advances towards the trusting girl. Where the script should have shown Yuvaan as a young sexually over-active lout who takes advantage of the guileless girl it instead shows Yuvaan too as a victim and places all the blame for the MMS scandal on the over-zealous electronic media for over-sensationalizing the recorded clipping that “accidentally” gets on Yuvaan’s phone and “ accidentally” leaks out.

Though the efforts to portray the perpetrator as a victim are way too feeble and unconvincing the film does make some hard hitting comments on the excessive scandal-mongering of television channels.

The predicament of a hapless unsuspecting girl whose intimate clipping with her boyfriend gets leaked out, was far more poignantly put forward in Anurag Kashyap’s Dev D. I Don’t Luv U  tries to balance out too many moral issues and ends up neither here nor there. Nonetheless tackling a theme as provocative as a sex scandal is not easy. The film tries to weave a tender gentle love story around an MMS scandal. Thought provoking but not salacious, the film derives a modicum of credibility quotient  from Ruslaan Mumtaz and Chetna Pandey’s sincere performances.

Ruslaan does the emotional scenes far more fluently than the campus flirt act. That’s the problem here. The film takes up a sexual theme. But its heart is just not in it.

“The film tries to weave a tender gentle love story around an MMS scandal.” – Subhash K Jha reviews I Don’t Luv U is a post from: BollySpice

The post “The film tries to weave a tender gentle love story around an MMS scandal.” – Subhash K Jha reviews I Don’t Luv U appeared first on BollySpice.

Go Goa Gone is a savagely funny take on the mythic cult of zombies. Since we are new to the genre there are sly footnotes about them. Characters in the course of their casual and quite corny conversations tell us plenty about Zombie folklore. That zombies enjoy eating human flesh, that they cannot run fast and most of all , zombies are actually dead people.

Working backwards on the premise of heroes shooting the dead, the co-directors have fashioned a fiercely funny fable filled with loads of innocuous innuendos and rumbustious scare attacks that never quite reach the stage of stomach-churning gore-o-logy(to invent a term, and why not since this film is about inventive creation).

Go Goa Gone can be seen as a brutal burlesque of the horror genre. Scenes of ghouls/zombies chasing our puny heroes through the Goan foliage are more satirical than scary. This innovative ode to terror moves at a quirky yet measured pace, gamboling quickly from one well-written scene of mock-terror to another without losing track of the film’s ultimate ‘bro-mantic’ purpose.

For starters the three heroes Kunal Khemu, Vir Das and the quietly effective Anand Tiwari who travel to Goa for fun frolic and, ahem the fraulein(if you’ll excuse my German)  look like cocky offshoots of  the trio from Farhan Akhtar’s Dil Chahta Hai. Interestingly one of Farhan’s protagonists Saif Ali Khan here transforms into a blonde Russian zombie slayer named Boris whose accent keeps slipping off. And that’s fine because Boris is not really Russian.

Ha ha. And this is not scary movie. Not really. Ha ha again. The principal actors are fully in-sync with the zany mood. Saif as a pseudo-Russian zombie hunter gives a performance to ‘dye’ for.

The laughs flow with energetic gusto melting  into a tide of spooky gore without creating a genre-confounding mess. Kunal Khemu and Sita Menon’s Hindi dialogues catch the fervour of the tongue-in-cheek words cheekily. Here is one film that doesn’t lose its way in translation. Though the characters ‘think’ in English (Hardik, indeed!) and although the whole concept of a zombie flick is very B-grade off-mainstream Hollywood,  the hair-raising hijinks manage to stay relatively sleaze-free.

Peppery and with a pinch of ‘assault’, the performances are pitched at just the right flavour of fright. All the three main actors have fun with their parts. But it is Kunal Khemu who seems the most at ease playing a synthesis of the slimy and the slippery without falling out of character.

A true gem of an actor, why is Khemu not given more interesting work to do? Saif’s star turn as  the “Russian” sharpshooter is understandably self-mocking in tone. Saif’s character is in keeping with the film. You really can’t take the terror template seriously. And yet you get the uneasy feeling that the joke is on us.

A zombie fiesta that’s savagely funny and surreptitiously scary, who but the co-directors of the genre-defying Shor in The City could convert the kookie content into an experience of a ‘laugh’-time!

Oh yes, there’s the mandatory glam-quotient in the figure of  Puja Gupta. In her presence Hardik, giggle,  gets really excited.

Go for Go Goa Gone. It’s a stressbuster with balls nerves and chutzpah.

Oh yes, Goa as shot by Lukas Pruchnik and Dan MacArthur never looked more inviting. And less hospitable.

“A zombie fiesta that’s savagely funny and surreptitiously scary…” – Subhash K Jha reviews Go Goa Gone is a post from: BollySpice

The post “A zombie fiesta that’s savagely funny and surreptitiously scary…” – Subhash K Jha reviews Go Goa Gone appeared first on BollySpice.

Directed by Sanjay Gupta

Babli badmash hai, sings Priyanka Chopra in one of the 3 utterly wasted item numbers in this film about blazing guns, flaring nostrils, sanguinary revenge and bleak atonement. Babli is not the only one who’s a badmaash here.  The characters are all hardened players of the underworld from the 1970s. They all mean business in the business of being mean.

They sport the right clothes dialogues and attitude.

Yes, the detailing is deft.

Wordsmith Milap Zaveri who is the real hero hero of this film about fascist solutions to the conundrum of urban chaos, pulls out all stops to spread out an orgy of rhetorics and rhetorics all across the narrative. Everyone speaks as if they are reading out a copywriter’s wisdom from billboards and hoardings. Everyone is a smart ass in this film.

Take a character with an unmentionable name, played with energetic fervour by debutant Siddhant Kapoor. At some point in the trigger-happy proceedings he explains why if he was Shah Jehan he would have built the Qutub Minar instead of the Taj Mahal.

“Because it’s so old and yet it stands so erect!”

Ahem. Here’s to the celebration of phallic freedom . The men in Sanjay Gupta’s film are actually boys who never grew up. They fight, scream, throw tantrums and draw blood when all fails. These are  attention-seekers whose moms should have delivered solid spankings during their childhood.

This is director Sanjay Gupta’s return to direction after a longish hiatus. He is in a tearing hurry to sweep us into the vortex of his violent kingdom. Mumbai as seen through Gupta’s expertly sketched images, is a kingdom of the damned. Men pull put guns and knives as the background music (by Amar Mohile) settles scores.

Tempers run high. The body-count matches the exacerbated emotions. To his credit Gupta knows this world of internecine wars as minutely as Coppola knew his Sicily. The mood in the cat-and-mouse game is forever defiant and belligerent. There’s no room for dull moments in Gupta’s storytelling. The cat-and-mouse game tends to get breathless but never wheezy even when characters such as the one played by Manoj Bajpai splutter to a gruesome end.

Gupta keeps a firm grip on the proceedings on his out-of-control characters, all played by actors who understand the close link between oppression and violence. Shootout At Wadala reminded me of  two recent films Karan Malhotra’s Agneepath and Anurag Kashyap’s Gangs Of  Wasseypur where the law of the lawless prevails.

Sameer Arya’s camera  and specially Sabu Cyril’s art work(which blends bloody reds with nostalgic sepias) recreate an era of  fathomless violence . A great deal of thought has gone into creating a mood of anarchy. Every frame is saturated with colours and atmospherics. Almost every frame and dialogue is darkly underlined and emphatically italicized. There is no room for thought, let alone silence, in the narration. And why should there be, when the characters pull out their guns faster than John Wayne and Clint Eastwood did in the Wild West?

The performances reflect the absence of a moral equilibrium in the lives of the characters. While Anil Kapoor makes his ‘encounter cop’ a combination of the quirky and the kinetic, John Abraham in the author-backed central role tries very hard to remain in character. Going shirtless on a BEST bus in the bustle of Mumbai in the early 1970s is perhaps his idea of being in character. Wonder what the real Manya Surve would think of being in a body that unmistakably belongs to another millennium!

While Anil Kapoor and John Abraham in the central parts succeed in building an atmosphere of clenched crisis that threatens to blow apart their lives any minute Sonu Sood, Manoj Bajpai and Ronit Roy shine in briefer roles.

As usual Gupta invests a lot of time and attention to the images of violence. Shootouts and flare-ups in various public spots of Mumbai are shot with the arresting impunity of a storyteller who is profoundly fascinated by the violence that underscores suburban life.

Except for Manya Surve’s anxious and physical love interest (played by Kangna who looks annoyed throughout as though she wasn’t happy being in her character’s space) we  hardly ever see the characters in their domestic space.

Do these killers and cops ever sleep?  Shootout At Wadala is a bludgeoning saga of bloodshed, vendetta and ricocheting nemesis peppered with picturesque dialogues and episodes of frenetic aggression. This is Gupta’s big-ticket comeback. The sound and fury certainly signify something significant in the history of gangsterism in our cinema.

“This is Gupta’s big-ticket comeback.” – Subhash K Jha reviews Shootout At Wadala is a post from: BollySpice

The post “This is Gupta’s big-ticket comeback.” – Subhash K Jha reviews Shootout At Wadala appeared first on BollySpice.

So how is it that we rarely ever get to feel so good about the movie-viewing experience?

Bombay Talkies is that rarity which makes us thankful for the gift of the movies. What would life be without the stolen pleasures in the darkened auditorium where life’s truest notions are melted own to emerge in moving images that have defined lives for generations in one way or another.

Four stories directed by four of the most important contemporary Bollywood directors emerge and merge with seamless splendour into a pastiche of pain and pleasure. Like four scoops of ice cream, one yummier than the other, Bombay Talkies serves up a flavourful quartet of delights that leave us craving for more. It’s like that song written by the immortal Sahir Ludhianvi. Abhi na jao chhod kar ke dil abhi bhara nahin.

No, that song isn’t part of the film. But there are songs of the melody queen Lataji which haunt your senses as the restless edgy protagonists, each in search of an emotional liberation that strikes them in unexpected ways at the end of  every story, seek a slice of cloudburst  to nourish their parched spirits.

So on to the first and my favourite story directed by Karan Johar where a sterile marriage between an urban working-couple played by Rani Mukherjee and Randeep Hooda is shaken by the arrival of young ebullient homosexual who enters couple’s frozen marriage in a most unexpected way.

This story more than any other, pushes Indian cinema to the edge to explore a theme and emotions that have so far been swept under the carpet by those who decide what audiences should and should not be given to experience. Johar whose most brilliant film My Name Is Khan was also about a marginalized community, strips the urban relationship of all its shock value. He looks at the three characters’ frightening spiritual emptiness with a dispassion that was denied to the characters in Johar’s earlier exploration of crumbling marital values in Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna.

Thanks to the unsparing editing (Deepa Bhatia), a gently arousing background score (Hitesh Sonik), deft but credible dialogues (Niranjan Iyenger) and camerawork by Anil Mehta that sweeps gently across three wounded lives, Johar is able to nail the poignancy and the irony of  his urban fable in just 4-5 key scenes. This is his best work to date. Rani delivers another power-packed performance (and she looks gorgeous too). It’s Saqib Saleem who steals this segment with his unmitigated spontaneity and reined-in ebullience.

The second story directed by Dibakar Bannerjee features that wonderful chameleon actor Nawazuddin Siddiqui as a man who would have been an actor if only life’s drudgeries had not overtaken his life. Dibakar is a master-creator of vignettes from everyday life. Here his detailing of chawl life is unerring. Nikos Andritsakis’s cinematography doesn’t miss a single nuance in Nawaz’s sad yet hopeful, bleak yet bright  existence. The sequence where Siddiqui washes clothes with the chawl’s women is savagely funny and poignant, as is his life-changing moment when Nawaz gets to perform one shot with Ranbir Kapoor. No we don’t see Ranbir, we just FEEL his presence, and we also HEAR filmmaker Reema Kagti giving orders from the directorial chair but we don’t see her.

Nawaz in Dibakar’s deft hands, takes his character through a journey of profoundly saddening self-discovery without any hint of self-pity. This segment is quirky funny and tragic. Nawaz’s dialogue with his mentor (played by Sadashiv Amrapurkar) on acting and dreams is written in a caustic ironic tone where the element of tragedy is sublimated with tenderness and subtlety. No one is allowed to feel sorry for Nawaz’s character. Not even Nawaz.

Ebullient and enchanting are the descriptions that come to mind while watching Zoya Akhtar’s film about a little boy (Naman Jain, brilliant) who would rather dance to Katrina Kaif’s song than become a cricketer or a pilot, as per tyrant papa(Ranveer Shorey)’s wishes. Shades of Ronit Roy from Vikramaditya Motwane’s Udaan in Shorey’s character do not take away from the stimulating freshness of Zoya’s treatment. The household brims over with song, dance and giggles between the Kaif-enamoured boy and his sibling and confidante (a very confident Khushi Dubey). Charming warm  humorous and vivacious Zoya’s film serves up a very gentle moral lesson. Let a child grow the way it wants to. Zoya’s film makes our hearts acquire wings. And yes, it immortalizes Katrina Kaif.

Finally Anurag Kashyap’s homage to the unmatchable stardom of Amitabh Bachchan. A simple fable of a man journeying from Allahabad to meet the super-iconic Bachchan this segment of the story is more baggy and loose-limbed than the other three tightly-edited stories. This is not to take away from its power. As played by Vineet Kumar Singh the Common Man’s devotion to the Bachchan aura is manifested in the tongue-in-cheek spoken lines and the casual energy of Mumbai’s street life. Kashyap captures the sometimes-funny often-sad bustle around the Bachchan bungalow with warmth and affection. This segment certainly doesn’t lack in warmth. But it could have done with a tighter grip over the narrative.

Long after each story ends we are left wondering what would happen to the vividly written characters. No, that’s not a good thing in this case. For the story after the first, and then one after that, require our undivided attention.

Bombay Talkies is segmented and layered, yet cohesive and compelling from the first frame to the last. While unraveling the magic of cinema and its impact on the minds of audiences Bombay Talkies also displays how much cinema has evolved over the generations. This is a beguiling, beautiful and befitting homage to a 100 years of cinema. It’s also proof that different stories in an episodic film could comfortably have directors with different sensitivities staring in the same line of vision.

If you watch only one film a year make sure it’s this one.

Yup, thank God for the motion picture.

“Bombay Talkies is that rarity which makes us thankful for the gift of the movies.” – Subhash K Jha is a post from: BollySpice

The post “Bombay Talkies is that rarity which makes us thankful for the gift of the movies.” – Subhash K Jha appeared first on BollySpice.

It’s no coincidence that this surprisingly moving film is inspired by Frank Pierson’s 1976 drama A Star Is Born. And I deliberately mention the funky psychedelic 1976 version and not the older 1954 version of the same story. In spirit and in the way the two principal actors perform their parts of two soul-mates and singers torn asunder by their allegiance to the same competitive spirit of showmanship, Aashiqui 2 is robustly reminiscent of the Kris Kristofferson-Barbra Streisand film where he discovers a co-singer who steals his heart and also his career.

Hrishikesh Mukherjee made his lyrical melodious Abhimaan on the same theme. It was easy for Hrishida to portray Jaya Bhaduri as a better artiste than Amitabh Bachchan quite simply because she sang in Lata Mangeshkar’s voices. In Aashiqui 2 the two protagonists are pretty much left to their own devices to create that unbearable frisson between two people whose love is trapped in the whirligig of showbiz. For their love to be liberated from the rituals of competitiveness one of the lovers must make a huge sacrifice before the end.

For love to live the lover must die.It’s a curious tradeoff and one carried off in this film with an exuberance of emotions.

The premise for the plot presumes love to be selfless all-giving and unconditional. Just to see Shradha Kapoor’s eyes melt in mutating emotions of unflinching devotion to her alcoholic star-on-the-skids lover is a vision that makes us believe true love still exists. This petite beauty with eyes that never stay silent gives to her part so much heart, you want to just embrace her and protect her from her self-destructive mentor-turned-tormentor.

Aditya Roy Kapoor as a rock star who is rapidly slipping from the charts gives all of himself to the character. And then some more. In Aditya’s persona Rahul becomes a metaphor for all the success in showbiz that goes awry. In pursuit of pleasure derived from the bottle his character becomes a cross between Shah Rukh Khan’s Devdas, Ranbir Kapoor’s Rockstar and Kris Kirstofferson’s John Norman Howard.

Like all the heroes of Mahesh Bhatt’s cinema Aditya has to portray a man who frequently creates a scene and embarrases the person he loves the most. This young actor is not afraid to look compromised on screen. A fearless actor, Aditya falters in the higher notes. But then as I said, the singing here is not quite what we heard Lata Mamgeshkar , Mohd Rafi and Kishore Kumar do in Abhimaan. Having said that it must be admitted that the music by Jeet Ganguly, Mithoon and Ankit Tiwari stands by the characters and never lets them down even when the pitch gets really steep. The finely written poetry also helps to furnish the lovers’ journey with a feverish and fecund pitch.

Aashiqui 2 is a film with its heart in the right place. There are many moments of pure cliché between the lovers. And these moments, so deeply entrenched in the conventions of our cinema, blossom into fresh statements on modern love .It’s a joy to see writer Shagufta Rafiqui and director Mohit Suri ferret out those feel-good places in the script where the protagonists plonk their emotions with a confidence and conviction that reaches out to the audience.

Is that really acting that we see each time Aditya into Shradha’s eyes?

If cinema is all about faking human emotions, then I must admit this film does a very comptent job of making us believe that true love still exists in this world.

Man, woman, music, ambitions, dreams and despair…Director Mohit Suri traverses the angst-soaked territory with a sincere and deep understanding of the dynamics that destroy love and trust between couples in the glamorous and competitive profession. Yes, there are some clumsily-written episodes in the love story, for example the character of intrusive struggler who barges into the plot at the start during the opening music concert and again in the climax almost as if he was waiting impatiently in the margins of the screenplay.

What lifts the film beyond the realm of the routine are the jagged edges that the film constructs around the central relationship without wounding the film’s fragile core. Full credit to the actors who fill up the screen with a measure voluptuousness allowing the emotions to spill over without creating an excessive drama. Aditya Roy Kapoor is impressively implosive while Shradha Kapoor plays off against him with a steelwilled vulnerability that echoes Jaya Bhaduri in Abhimaan. Another fine performance comes from Shaad Randhawa as Aditya’s friend and manager.

Watching this smoothly-oiled drama of disintegrating love I couldn’t help remember Rahul Roy and Anu Aggarwal’s wooden performance in Aashiqui.

Our cinema has a come a long way, and not always in the right direction. Aashiqui 2 makes us grateful for the movement of the love story away from the standard Romeo & Juliet format into the dark destructive domain of A Star Is Born.

Sometimes love is just not enough.

Subhash K Jha: “Aashiqui 2 is a film with its heart in the right place.” is a post from: BollySpice

The post Subhash K Jha: “Aashiqui 2 is a film with its heart in the right place.” appeared first on BollySpice.

Without the risk of exaggeration we can ‘safely’ say Vidyut Jamwal takes the kind of risks in his action scenes that we haven’t seen in any screen-hero from any part of the world.The choreographic precision with which  Jamwal flips, somersaults, and fells his adversaries is a sign of an exceptionally skilled  action-hero.

Te be sure, a star is born in Commando.We saw Jamwal completely upstage John Abraham in the hand-to-hand heart-in-mouth  fights of  Force. Now,Jamwal proves himself a maestro of unequalled sinewy skills,gliding rather than  fighting, pre-empting the adversary’s moves almost like a chess game.

With tongue firmly in shriek mode Jamwal, in one of the early stunts scenes of the film rips open a poster of Force and attacks the baddies.The action never stops.And the song breaks specially an ‘item song’ in the second-half by Nathalia Kaur are unwelcome speedbreakers. We really don’t want to see Jamwal romance the pretty Punjabi damsel in distress played by Pooja Chopra who seems a tad too well-groomed for the rigours of the jungle.

Not that we care. We just want to see Jamwal take on the bad guys, full-force. And boy, does Jamwal deliver!

Admaker-turned feature director Dilip Ghosh keeps the plot wisely simple ramrod-straight and to the point. Apart from those utterly annoying song breaks there are no digressions from the dynamics of  instant score-settling. It’s a straight one-to-one fight-to-finish between the silently simmering Commando and a satanic goon from a small-town in Punjab with no eyeballs and apparently no  balls either,  who believes the power of the gun and the strength of Santa-Banta sms jokes  can be co-ordinated in one range of activity.

Jaideep Ahlawat (last seen giving a riveting performance in Kamal Haasan’s Vishawaroop) gives to the goon’s part a wacky spin. The man is half-devil half-imbecile. The goon makes Simrit an offer she can’t resist. Either a suhaag-raat with him after the wedding, or a suhaag raat with him and all his battle-stained cronies right away?Hmmm?

Is it any wonder that the pretty spunky Punjabi lass makes a run for the jungles rather than accept the goon’s marriage proposal.Predictably Simrit runs into the banished army-man, our Commando-hero who seems to have seen the collected Rambo series back-to-back at least 8-10 times. The first time Jamwal plays the saviour at a bus stand we know he means business.He is not just a one-man army,he is also the Indian army’s favourite bete noire. Despite the heavy burden of playing protector to country and Leading Lady, Jamwal’s fights manage to bring in a lot of warmth and some humour in their execution.

The narration is  an unabashed homage to Stallone’s jungle-survival saga. And yet, thanks to Vidyut Jamwal’s powerful screen presence the combat between the commando-hero and the goons never slackens in pace. The physical combats which are undoubtedly the crux of the theme propel the plot forward in leaps of inspired action.

Happily for Jamwal, his opponents are not shown to be ineffectual jokers. The back-and-forth of fists and rhetorics is uniformly engaging. Though we know exactly where the protagonist’s one-man battle against his enemies is heading we  never lose interest in the plot.

The film is shot on some interesting locations. The backwaters of Punjab and the thick jungles  serve as just the right ambience for the rugged actioner.

Vidyut Jamwal takes care of the rest. His action definitely speaks louder than his words. Sejal Shah’s cimematography and Ritesh Shah’s dialogues constantly add to Jamwal’s fist-power, imbuing his combat to the finish with some unexpected flourishes of serious socio-political comment towards the end when we are told we need to clean up our act if we want to protect the country from external threats.

It’s a one-man-showoff all the way. Vidyut’s co-star Pooja Chopra shows flashes of talent when she isn’t busy brazenly aping Kareena Kapoor’s voluble-Punjabi act from Jab We Met.

Not her fault. If the hero is a silent seething ball of implosive fire, and the heroine is a talkative Punjabi girl who runs away from home to escape an unwanted marriage , phir toh boss Jab We Met banta hai.

To its credit Commando creates a climate of clenched conflict for the hero to vent his voluminous talent as a martial artiste.

Indeed,  a star is born.

3.5 stars

Subash K Jha: “Commando creates a climate of clenched conflict for Vidyut to vent his voluminous talent as a martial artiste” is a post from: BollySpice

The post Subash K Jha: “Commando creates a climate of clenched conflict for Vidyut to vent his voluminous talent as a martial artiste” appeared first on BollySpice.

Wasseypur’s gangs never had it so good. Seeing the glorious guttural outflow of gore blood bullets and profanities in Zilla Ghaziabad one could safely(?) assume, Wasseypur is safe. So is the other release this week. Abhishek Kapoor’s Kai Po Che is as far removed from its Friday competition as flying kites are from speeding bullets.

To be fair one can’t compare two films as disparate in intent, purpose tone and treatment as Kai Po Che and Zilla Ghaziabad…except for the fact that somewhere down the line as we approach the crux and the core, both films say the same thing.

If you want to survive in this cut-throat world you have to recognize your own weaknesses and strengths. Not that I see the hurried restless unanchored strangely identity-less and vapidly violent characters of Zilla Ghaziabad ever doing any introspection.

Where is the time to sit and think when everyone is out for a kill? The biggest casualty in all this gore-mongering is a logical pattern of storytelling.The material is edited more to accommodate optimum punches and punchlines than to tell an anchored story. The narration leaves no room for any kind of emotion to take root.

We meet the characters as bloodbthirsty creatures of the underground. And we are most happy to leave them to their internecine intentions. This is the kind of staged drama where lawmakers and lawbreakers behave with equal impunity. Both sides are wedded to anarchy.Screw the emotions. This is an orgy of elemental escapades.

And that’s where the fun side of the film unleashes with fatuous fury. The action director is the real conductor of this disorderly orchestra. One violent outburst follows another as two clans of Zilla Ghazibad battle it out to a bloodied end.

Admittedly the action is staged with a whole lot gusto. Tragically the underlining humour of Salman khan’s Dabangg is missing here. These scowling, growling, barking and biting characters take themselves and their anarchic hinterland too seriously. They speak in a self-confident drawl in words about bodily functions that Vishal Bhardwaj or Anurag Kashyap’s characters might use on very lazy Sunday to shock their neighbours. But make no mistake. The people who inhabit Zilla Ghaziabad mean business.

The business of being mean is perpetrated in a torrent of rapidly-staged drama where aggression is King. The film has a sprawling banquet of actors ,and some very competent ones at that. Sanjay Dutt delivers a punch-filled performance as a cop inured to ambivalence. He strikes swaggering postures that suggest John Wayne never really hung up his hat and boots. Vivek Oberoi, who was gloriously goofy as a bumbling gangster in last week’s underrated Jayanta Bhai Ki Luv Story, here displayed a mean streak quite convincingly. So does Arshad Warsi, better known for his comic acts, here slipping into a rugged roguery with relish. If you look around Chandrachur Singh and Paresh Rawal also show up to add muscle to the mayhem.

Every character seems to have fun with his part on this Khichdi Western, a distant doomed dastardly spiced-up teekha cousin of the celebrated ‘Spaghetti Western’, though whether we as the audience share the characters’ sense of enjoyment or not depends entirely on the frame of mind we are in.

If judgemental one could be deeply offended by the unstopped flow of aggression and profanity. However if in a lenient mind-space the bloody battle for indeterminate causes could provide some amount of lowbrow fun.
As expected in this ode to mayhem and machismo, the ladies have little do besides shake a leg and shed a tear. Minissha Lamba shows up somewhere along the way trying hard not to look lost in the stag party.

It’s hard not to laugh out loud at these heroes of a subverted hinterland who live and die by the gun.They deserve the death they get.

But what about us?

Subhash K Jha: “Zilla Ghaziabad is an ode to mayhem and machismo” is a post from: BollySpice

The post Subhash K Jha: “Zilla Ghaziabad is an ode to mayhem and machismo” appeared first on BollySpice.

“Indians don’t have a mind to think,” mock-whispers Kay Kay Menon, playing the sort of slimeball you thought went out of style with Prem Chopra. Menon, who once was a formidable actor, hams it to the hilt as a kind of Mogambo of the dancing world who thinks dancing is for big bucks, and also for big… well you know the ‘f’ word that rhymes with bucks.

Prabhu Deva, God bless his ‘sole’, is the other polarity. He dances because…well, he has to. He imparts his skills to a ragamuffin bunch of street kids who seem to have auditioned for Breakin’ that street-smart film about using breakdance as a form of selfexpression that came way back in 1984. Indeed there is something very 1980s about Tushar Hirnandani’s screenplay which pitches the idea of Good Dancing Versus Bad Dancing with a heartwarming sincerity .

Movie plots based on dancing and dancers are rare these days. Choreographer-turned-director Remo D’Souza has hit upon a winning idea. Being a choreographer he is able to weave the characters into a web of dance-related episodes that culminate in that grand do-or-die competition that we have been witnessing in one form or another since the time movies came into being. It could be Rocky Balboa in the ring. Or the raring-to-go students from Prabhu Deva’s makeshift dancing school in this film…Heck, anybody can dance as long as the music is right.

Remo D’Souza’s film glides in expected but never dull ways. It winds its way through a series of selfconsciously constructed road-blocks for the sincere dance teacher and his students who learn, the hard way, that dance is for one’s own pleasure and not to show off. Ironically this philosophy of dance as a form of self-expression hardly fits into the the framework of cinema where the very nature of the medium invites the maximum appreciation.

What sees ABCD through is its sincerity of purpose. Director Remo D’Souza intends to do a ‘dance film’ with a sturdy plot to hold up the choreography. In that endeavour the film doesn’t slip up at all. The fact that it has Prabhu Deva at the helm certainly helps to keep the show on the road.

As an actor Prabhu Deva is restrained and effective in bringing out the idealism and discipline of a dance teacher. His thick Tamil accent is justified by the character’s origins being nailed to Chennai. You know when this guy explains the essence of dance to his students he isn’t faking it. But it’s when the choreographer-dancer’s takes the floor that we’re really floored. When Prabhu dances time freezes. The long pre-interval episode where he puts up what could only be termed the Grand Prabhu Deva Tour de Force is the film’s high-point.

The youngsters who play Prabhu Deva’s students are passable in their acting skills. But I suggest they should just focus on dancing as a career.The actor who plays the dopey-dancer Chandu(Punit J Pathak) corners much of melodrama in the second-half.
Honestly, the film just needed to get on with the dancing and leave the mapping of a back-story for the dancers to another time, another place. For this one, all we needed was what B. Subhash recommended in the 1980s. Dance Dance….I almost expected Mithun Chakraborty to show in support of Prabhu Deva’s shimmying shishya-log.

If you know how to dance or if you’ve ever desired to dance ABCD is the film for you. With Prabhu Deva’s astonishing virtuosity on the dance-floor to guide the characters’ and the film’s destiny and to provide a centifrugal scinitillation to the proceedings, there is little reason to quibble over the content.

Sachin-Jigar’s music and songs though adequate could have been more dynamic. Watch out for the number accompanying the end-titles where dancing legend Saroj Khan joins Prabhu Deva, Ganesh Acharya and Remo D’Souza.That’s this innocent and earnest film’s paisa-wasool moment.

“When Prabhu dances time freezes” – Subhash K Jha reviews ABCD (Any Body Can Dance) is a post from: BollySpice

The post “When Prabhu dances time freezes” – Subhash K Jha reviews ABCD (Any Body Can Dance) appeared first on BollySpice.

Gimme raid, said the fake CBI officers who in a daredevil swoop-down on a well-known jewellery outlet in Mumbai in 1983, escaped with a loot worth lakhs. If done today it would have been a heist worth crores.

But that’s the devilish beauty of Neeraj Pandey’s second feature film. Though set in a world where lakhs were a large fortune, he gives us a caper-thriller worth crores. The period detailing of the 1980s-the cars, hotel lobbies, clothes, hairstyle and most importantly, the attitude to wealth acquisition(scams were unknown back then, scandals were as far as the financials over-reachers went)-they all add a lustre of underscored believability to the proceedings.

Morality is a prime casualty in the tale. And if crime should not be allowed to pay in our movies then this one doesn’t qualify for a pat on the back from the moralists and purists, as the con-persons walk away from the scene of their outrageous crime richer and, yes, no wiser. They are coming back.

Get this. There are two sets of CBI officers on duty in this deviously-plotted tale of daredevilry and drama in real time. The real and the fake teams are helmed by Akshay Kumar and Manoj Bajpai. Both put in impressively understated performances. But since Akshay Kumar is a bigger star than Bajpai, he gets a bonus romantic track with the unimpressive Kajal Aggarwal. It’s like listening to a soft ballad at a New Year’s party minutes before midnight. It is sad to see M M Kreem’s elegant melodies (Mujh mein tu is specially evocative) wasted in speed-breaking romantic interludes which add nothing to the plot.

The high energy-level in the plot-how high, just check out Manoj Bajpai’s introductory chase sequence across Connaught Place, it leaves you panting for breath- comes entirely from the way the quartet in the core group plans its various pseudo-CBI raids across the country from Kolkata to Mumbai, bringing to the plot a meticulousness that doesn’t interfere with the entertainment quotient. After a point you don’t care about the headlines. It all about the deadlines.

The goings-on resonate in rapid-fire speed, imparting the kind of urgency to the proceedings that Oceans 11 would have achieved if it wasn’t a caper devoid of a moral centre, or Race 2 were it not devoid of a soul.

Special 26 achieves a rare synthesis of real-life credibility and cinematic flamboyance. Pandey’s perception of cinematic licence is liberating. The real-life incident involving the CBI scam which shook the nation and embarrassed the Rajiv Gandhi regime, is given a sensuous spin that culminates in a completely unexpected and spectacular culmination.

Cinema, Pandey tells us, is not only about being true to life. It is also about making life seem more engaging than it actually is. This is where the director’s ability to punctuate socio-political anomalies with edge-of-the-seat excitement comes into full play. The mix of fact and fiction was earlier applied by Pandey to the theme of terrorism and the wounded individual in A Wednesday. No character who goes so audaciously against the law in Special 26 seems particularly wounded or terrorized. You suspect they are all in it for fun. The characters are not in search of a moral payoff and we are not eager to find it for them.

Pandey weaves vivid vignettes into the main heist-format from each of the four protagonist’s personal lives. One of them played with compelling gusto by Kishore Kadam washes his wife’s clothes at home when he is not away carrying out fake CBI raids with his comrades. Another, played equally effectively by Rajesh Verma lives in a sprawling joint family where everyone is caught sleeping while he sneaks out to do his clandestine thing with his pals. These moments define the individual and the crime.

Anupam Kher who has a sizeable part is Akshay Kumar’s right-hand man. A nondescript family man with an unending brood of children Anupam is just your regular aging guy on the verge of retirement who wants to stop life from going by. Anupam’s Sharmaji could’ve been the reluctant terrorist Naseeruddin Shah in Pandey’s A Wednesday. Thankfully Sharmaji decided to protest against his inconspicuous life with some serious con-jobs and not something more…er, explosive. In one sequence where real CBI officer Manoj Bajpai grills him a hotel room Anupam nails the sequence’s parodic poignancy to give the kind of performance that is flashed on video monitors to announce awards nominations.

Another reined-in but riveting performance comes from Jimmy Sheirgil as a conflicted cop who must redeem himself before the final reel. And what a resounding redemption! Jimmy who has lately shaped into one of our finer actors imparts a secret life to his duty-bound cop’s role without being given leisurely space to do so.
Manoj Bajpai is in many ways the film’s main protagonist. In fact he gets the kind of breathtaking breathless introductory chase sequence that Akshay Kumar would normally secure for himself. Curiously Bajpai underplays his part in a film where the performances are purposely italicized. In just a couple of shots with his screen wife we get a full measure of Bajpai’s idealistic character.

“Would I get that raise or should I start accepting bribes?” Manoj asks his senior with a poker face. Luckily we’re spared the senior’s response.

Whether it’s the lucid and long-limbed writing or the performances or maybe a yummy yoking of both, one doesn’t know. But the narrative’s over-all mood is one of urgent crises-point reached with minimum fuss and optimum energy. Pandey adds considerably to his narrative’s credible climate by shooting on real locations, wherever the pseudo-raids take our ‘hero’and his three unlikely associates.

Akshay Kumar as the mainstay of the governmental masquerade moves away from his by-now patent and predictable comic moves to deliver a surprisingly subtle unassuming performance. His Ajay Singh is a bit of a loner, a bit of an enigma. The only character he bonds with is Sharmaji. Kher and Akshay bring a very understated father-son feeling to their bonding.

Feelings are frequently hammered into place in the no-nonsense plot by a background score by Sanjoy Chowdhary which goes way over the top, with all punctuation marks done in italics. It was the same in Pandey’s A Wednesday where the characters’ silences were loudly interpreted and interrupted by the background score.
Strangely the film makes no use of the songs and music of the 1980s to evoke periodicity. Maybe Pandey didn’t want to take the easy way out. Special 26 is not a film that favours soft creative options. It takes audacious the heist-story audaciously through a complicated maze of morality without getting snarled in sermons and messages. This is a film that engages you while letting the protagonists cross mischievously from one side of the line of morality to the other.

Special mention in this special caper must be made of the editing by Sree Narayan Singh which allows every character(even the small and cute cop’s role played by Divya Dutta) to breathe as individuals, and the unassuming but illuminating cinematography by Bobby Singh which takes us to the cities of the raid without pausing to define the location.

Bobby died months ago.

But then this film wouldn’t let him die.

“Special 26 achieves a rare synthesis of real-life credibility and cinematic flamboyance.” – Subhash K Jha reviews the movie is a post from: BollySpice

The post “Special 26 achieves a rare synthesis of real-life credibility and cinematic flamboyance.” – Subhash K Jha reviews the movie appeared first on BollySpice.