Shaandaar

Shaandaar (2015, Dir: Vikas Bahl) is a desperate attempt to be mainstream, breezy and offbeat; it misses most of its already misdirected beats, it takes the wind out of any breathable air and it mainly streams in hiccups on a mostly dull network. Alia Bhatt's cute & bubbly child woman act is well childish. Recommended for the really daring and/or divine, with lots of patience downed with wine.

Bajrangi Bhaijaan

Deliberately bird-brained, please-all, made-to-order saga for a tainted superstar to redeem his 'being human' image. Save for Nawazuddin Siddiqui's spirited performance and the little girl's always-well-groomed Murphy-munna smile, 'Bajrangi Bhaijaan' has little to recommend itself. C minus, with 159 days of hard labour - a day for every minute of drivel delivered.

26 July 2015

Piku

Piku (2015), directed by Shoojit Sircar of Vicky Donor (I really liked it) and Madras Cafe fame, is a moderately entertaining feel good flick, with a glamoured-down Deepika Padukone (she is wow!), now-in-his prime Amitabh Bachchan (hamming & enjoying it) and out-of-sorts Irrfan Khan (romancing the cork) in the leads. The disease of make-believe Bengaliness is not as bad as Sanjay Neela Bhansali's magnum hocus-pocus Devdas, but could have been easily avoided by having the actors' real-life ethnicity right. For example our Bishu Babu (Bishwadeep Chatterjee), who excels in a minor on screen presence and a major off-screen avatar (Sound Design). There is no chemistry or physics on display in the game of restrained romance in motion in this ageing road movie gone home. Kolkata looks suitably sexed up as material for down-to-earth, greying, collapsing, quaintness personified dreams. Juhi Chaturvedi the writer often comes out with interesting situations/sequences/dialogues. But the well-intentioned hard-working performers are often not upto her inventiveness. Or is it the Director ?

Tanu Weds Manu Returns

Tanu Weds Manu Returns (2015, Dir: Anand L. Rai) is one of those rare movies where a return is not missing the turn. The two avatars of the very talented (and loving & living it) Ms Kangana Ranaut steal the show, sometimes from each other. The Haryanvi lass from Jhajjar, however, is a hard act to beat - the sports quota athlete from Ramjas college is an almost perfect impersonation, feisty and fragile, fairytale yet down to earth. Himanshu Sharma's script/dialogues are spot on, except in the end when the suddenly manipulative plot returns the chubby cheeks bye-candy Manu (Madhavan) to born again bhabhiji Tanu, instead of the Karate Kusum we have all by now fallen in love with. The music by an ex-NID Film & Video student (calling himself Krsna Solo now) is passable, except for the pretend Haryanvi-in-English ditty 'Old School Girl' (Singer: Kalpana Gandharv) and 'Banno Tera Swagger Laage Saxy' (Music Director: Tanishk & Vayu; Singers: Brijesh Shandllya & Swati Sharma). Deepak Dobriyal is mostly over the top, but sometimes funnily so. Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub’s Chintu is a well essayed opportunist with a heart on hold. The faux-topical treatise about Haryana khapdom gutturally against gung-ho lovers is one of the few but glaring false spots in the script.

Highway

A nubile chatter box, but otherwise well behaved, rich 'poor' girl (with a past) meets a rough & tough lower class but wealthy at heart jaat kidnapper (with a past, and a Marxian grudge), and discovers life and love on the run. Imtiaz Ali, of Socha Na Tha and Jab We Met fame, delivers an unusual dud in 'Highway' (2014). The only thing driving the film (pun intended) is Anil Mehta's cinematography, through some stunning landscapes and locations, in Rajasthan, Punjab and Himachal. The script, well-intentioned in most parts, asks of its lead (and subsidiary) characters a little too much, way beyond their histrionic abilities. The most glaring mis-casting is of Alia Bhatt, completely out of her depth and discernment. AR Rehman is overrated, except for one of the songs (Patakha Guddi). The child abuse recalls are the most non-happening and compare unfavourably to a similar situation so powerfully evoked in Mira Nair's Monsoon Wedding.

Highway - Zee TV (Rishtey) - Imtiaz Ali - 1999

Now this is more like it - The 'original' of Imtiaz Al's Highway, directed by him way back in 1999 as a 40 minutes episode for Zee TV's fiction series called Rishte. Despite the dated made-for-TV starved drama look, and despite being almost entirely shot inside Aarey Milk Colony in the suburb of Goregaon East in Mumbai, this Highway has some genuine flashes of excellence, especially the ending. The dialogues, despite being the originals of the later Alia Bhatt starrer, often sparkle. The lead performances, by Aditya Srivastava (of later CID fame) and Kartika Rane, are mostly good. And yes, the nightmare of child abuse recalled by the female lead, in a moment of fond vulnerability, is organically woven into the story, unlike the big budget pretender which it spawned later.

Madras Cafe

Madras Cafe, a 2013 film directed by Shoojit Sircar of Vicky Donor (2012) fame, has ambition to be a high-decibel political espionage thriller but in the end leaves one with a cacophonous, flat after-taste. Loosely based on events in Sri Lanka and Tamilnadu surrounding the assassination of ex-Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi by LTTE, the film promises to unravel the murky underbelly of geo-political stratagems, but the muck thus brought out is under-cooked, over-spiced and actively colour corrected. Dramatic bangs begin episodes (like when the protagonist Major Vikram Singh -John Abraham- is double crossed and abducted in Jaffna) but facile whimpers inevitably bring up the unexciting derrieres. There is grave talk of grand conspiracy, but given the already well-known facts of the LTTE-driven assassination plot, the revelations, when they eventually come, don't seem anywhere near the promised goodies. John Abraham would have worked, given a tighter, smarter story (and dialogues). Ms Nargis Fakhri as Jaya Sahni (a sexy news correspondent in designer war-wear, in conflict-green Sri Lanka) is eye candy for none. There are faint ripples of unintended condescension in the way Delhiwallahs treat Tamis / Malayalis / Sinhalese. And the title is misleading - nothing of interesting and/or fully-realised consequence ever happens in Madras Cafe (is it in Chennai or Singapore?) the actual space.

I am sure Shoojit Sircar has watched New Delhi Times (a 1986 film directed by Romesh Sharma and written by Gulzar) and Z (a 1969 political thriller directed by Costa-Gavras, set in Greece). Then why this kolaveri kolaveri da ?