Fanaa

A pressing question before you read the review. Do any of you actually see any images in my posts? I insert them through URLs and they show up on some computers and not on others. Please tell me if you can/can't see them to help me decide to a longer, proper method of image posting. Thanks.

Fanaa: * and 1/2

Let's fake one last hug, shall we?

 

This is exactly what happens when an otherwise decent romcom director ventures to handle complex themes of national security, terrorism and physical handicap. The royal mess that he and his braindead script-writer create hurts all the more because Aamir and Kajol are the immediate victims. And its just downright painful for an ardent 90s Bollywood fan like me, watching them lend meaning to utterly spineless characters and B-grade Bollywood sequences.

The real reciever of all the brickbats should be Kunal Kohli, the director. Not a single honest, unseen moment in the whole frig*ing film. Now that's a feat. Neither is there even a remotest sense of plausibility in how the blind girl falls for the first guy she meets in the city (a tour guide who keeps on dropping not-so-subtle hints about having a penchant to bang girls and move on) nor is there any sense of thrill or dread in the army espionage bits. Jumping from one banal filmi sequence to the other, the film reaches a godawfully predictable finale, which is dealt so immaturely and shoddily you really wish you hadn't bothered spending £8 on this crap.

Seems like no critic can gush enough about Kajol's performance, but to be honest, she's woefully miscast. Kunal Kohli is no Prakash Jha or Aditya Chopra who can carve out the quieter nuances of Kads' head-strong wizened persona (remember Dil Kya Kare and DDLJ?) which means she ends up looking very lost mouthing corny dialogues and Urdu shero-shayari. All through the 90s, her contemporaries like Madhuri and Juhi played far more unbelievable characters in the trashiest of movies but with a zing that won us over. Why we loved Kajol back then was for her girl-next-door, urbane, natural charm and wit she lent to all her characters– and that is really where her range as an actor ended (watch K3G or Hamara Dil Aapke Paas Hai for proof). As the still-wet-behind-the-ears town virgin belle, neither has she gone that extra mile to make Zooni Ali Beg stand out from the plethora of characters she's played on-screen already (even Preity-with her cosmopolitan looks-managed to pull off Kashmiri girl characters in Hero and Mission Kashmir far more admirably) nor are there ANY sequences that'd bring out something unseen from her–making her comeback quite forgettable.

She has tried, oh yes she has, but in a film as unbelievable and trashy as this, one needed a far more dynamic actor to transcend the audience's disbelief. Watching her do the typical Bollywood heroine routine in Fanaa is just a bit… boring.

But mark my words, she'd be up there at the Filmfare Best Actress slugging it out with far more accomplished performances and who knows, might even manage to grab some more undeserving trophies.

Aamir's in for an even more lifeless character (something which'd have been lapped up by Anil Kapoor or Sunny Deol 5-6 years back) and it is such an apathetically sketched cut-out that even his Raja Hindustani would anyday be more identifiable. Rishi Kapoor's the only actor with some graph in the character while the rest oblige with their generic Bollywood sidekick/innocuous-hammy child routine. Tabu manages to turn in a below average performance (maybe they gave her the script after she'd signed on the dotted line… its a Yashraj venture after all!)

Granted, the idea wasn't to create something street smart but all the shero-shayari and the self-congratulatory background score after every "sher" that Aamir cracks on the spot makes your nerves grate. Mothers saying goodbyes to their daughters with advice like "tere dil mein meri saanson ko panaah mil jaaye, tere ishq mein meri jaan fanaa ho jaaye" (an answer to what if the blind daughter finds the man she loves) are unintentionally funny.

Unlike what I've read elsewhere, there's no sense of place at all. There isn't a single person except the actors populating the screen for the whole of second half (apparently, to get around this, an excuse of a snow-storm is in place) , its all too isolated and lifeless to transport the viewer to anywhere. Maybe it was a conscious decision to focus on the characters, but who'd give a toss for these done-to-death Bollywood versions of "real" people? I wouldn't and I didn't. The action scenes are probably there for comic relief and sure enough, each of them will have you rolling with laughter. There's also an attempt to comment on the Kashmiris and nuclear missiles which makes even Veer Zaara's in-your-face banter on Hindustan-Pakistan bhai bhai seem intellectual.

If there really is any respite, its for 5 whole minutes of a ditty "Mere Haath Mein". A superb haunting rendition by Sonu-Sunidhi is brought to life by some amazing cinematography and a duskily lit-and-made up Kajol (finally someone manages to shoot her more beautifully than in Suraj Hua Maddham). The song's shot with passion and instinct- two words that sadly can't be used for the rest of the 130 or so running minutes.

Please avoid this de-caffeinated, tasteless concoction of Satya meets Hero meets 80s Bollywood melodrama. Its kitsch of the most inferior variety.
More to come,

Cheers!

Some more film-watching 2006 (4)

Never expected the Match Point review to end up as big as it finally did. Hence this separate post for random films I caught on the big screen in the past month. Hope you enjoy these mini-ops!

When A Stranger Calls (2006): ** and 1/2

Blame it on my impatience. A wait of a mere 30 minutes more and I could have watched the French thriller Hidden (Cache). But my attitude of barging into the cinema and into the screening straightaway meant I ended up with this teenybopper horror-lite. As if the title couldn't be any longer and self-explanatory, its about a high school girl getting harassed by a prank caller (read serial killer) one night when she's baby-sitting at a posh and sprawling riverside mansion.

Its more generic and predictable than the words themselves convey but somehow the formula concocted doesn't end up being an absolute disaster. The menace in the atmosphere is well maintained by clever lighting techniques (stepping into every room switches on the room's lights–works bigtime in chase sequences) and the opening sequence where a lonely woman (living next to a local fun fair) gets called and then killed manages to terrify thanks to inventive camera and sound design. But then these plusses are never quite equalled by a screenplay which is ridden with stupid sequences, characters that behave less logically than kindergarten children and a lead actress that pitches in a consistently pale performance. The end product isn't even a patch on Panic Room but thankfully doesn't bore either.

Silent Hill (2006): **

You can count the pigeon-holes into which the contemporary horror films broadly fall into– Grimy Gore fest (Saw, Hostel, Wolf Creek), Supernatural Thriller (Sixth Sense, Others), Costume-n-Mask Horror Dramas (Ghost Ship, Exorcist, Descent, Evil Dead) and lastly fantasy horror (Constantine, Silent Hill). I normally try to avoid the last group like plague, but somehow landed up watching this.

Though the basic premise in this case–a concerned mother takes her daughter to the demonic place that haunts and possesses the latter while sleepwalking-does elicit some reaction, the actual film simply fails. And there are many reasons for this–first, there's absolutely no warming up to the characters. You have barely found your seat and bang! you see the possessed daughter standing at the edge of a cliff while her mom shouts off in the background. Barely 5 minutes after that, both mom and daughter are on the trip to the godforsaken place called Silent Hill. A crash later… mom finds herself amidst a foggy, snowing with ashes, town of yore replete with dilapadated buildings, empty streets. The daughter's gone but can be heard running. Mom (Rose) follows the sound, and suddenly a loud siren starts firing away. Mom continues walking down the stairs of a huge building and suddenly a huge black mass starts to entangle and numerous blackfleshed screaming children mutants start to materialise.

As the film unfolds, one comes to know that the siren represents the falling of "darkness"–a sign of evil that resides in the limbo land of Silent Hill alongwith the godfearing fanatical Catholics. But how clear the line really is, between the good and evil, is the premise for the remaining film as Rose unearths the dark secrets of the Silent Hill. Problem is, there's too much of such gibberish and it takes itself way too seriously.

The film is filled to brim with conflicts and showdowns between cacophonic characters who, because we don't know about, we just don't care about. Making it all just a pile of nonsense and in the process, boring us to death (a cardinal sin for any film). The only highlights being the two-three sequences of "darkness falling" which sees the otherwise unsuspectingly falling-to-pieces walls and floors transform into a network of blood vessels and inaninmate objects turning into yucky creatures like human sized roaches etc. A flashback sequence done in grainy film about witch-hunting towards the climax is a valiant attempt to unlock this puzzle of a film but just succeeding that is a so-bizarre-it-cracks-you-up vengeance episode of the devil which really makes you wince and wonder how you ended up watching this.

I can fill up paras on how tacky the CGI was but just to summarise my experience–I was laughing my humble a*se off everytime the crafted monsters (a plastic-pyramid headed devil or a team of zombie nurses that go on a twitching frenzy..LOL) came on the screen.

Please don't waste your time and money on this tripe unless you still haven't been spoonfed the message of being judged after death.

Ice Age 2: The Meltdown (2006): ** and 1/2

Though never quite as ambitious as Pixar's or Dreamworks' animated ventures, of late Blue Sky Studios have set about a good account for themselves with gorgeous looking but simple feel-good animations like Ice Age and Robots. Surprisingly enough, Ice Age 2 as a sequel doesn't quite entertain on the same level as Shrek 2 did. Simply because its just more of the same old thing. The principal characters still carry on walking and meeting more silly characters en-route, and a love story and a predictable conflict later its all over and they continue walking happily ever after. Don't get me wrong–it really is an enjoyable fare with two things working bigtime in its favour-Scrat (the acorn-obsessed squirrel who'll go down the annals of animation as the best character ever) and the wit in the dialogues, but one only wishes they hadn't rushed the scriptwriter quite so much as to pen such a wafer-thin, predictable plot that ends up boring us of characters we had come to adore in Ice Age.

Still, I know I am repeating myself (but what the heck), just watching Scrat struggling to keep up with the forever slipping and out-of-reach acorn through half-liquid peaks and half-frozen water bodies will have you rolling in an un-abating laughing fit. This is one amazingly conceptualised character and hopefully, Blue Sky would release the next Ice Age sequel with only 90 minutes of Scrat and his acorn. Now that'd be something!

More Later,

Karan!

Match Point

Match Point (2005): ***

The trophy for the singlemost theme about relationships that’s so over-done on the big and the small screen that there’s just no more to say, has to be presented to extra-marital affairs. Sparks at first sight leading to months of secret courting and sex to normal life getting progressively neglected to the doubting spouse at home to the finale. We know the notes, the moments, hell–even the reactions and dialogues for every character. So what does Woody Allen throw into the mixture to make it just a tad more exotic? The element of luck. Getting caught or going scotfree.

Chris (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), the protagonist and a tennis pro bumps into Chloe (Emily Mortimer), sister of his new student Tom (Matthew Goode). On a dinner night, he gets to meet Tom’s fiance Nola (Scarlett Johansson) who’s a struggling American actress and is absolutely enticed by her charm. But of course, he’s gone way too far with Chloe to turn back and Nola is Tom’s fiance anyway–reason enough for him to take the wedding vows with Chloe and start the job at his in-law’s super-successful company. As luck would have it, no sooner is he married that Tom breaks up with Nola fed up with his mother’s not-so-subtle criticism of Nola’s lack of direction in life. Chris, now somewhat bored of his new life and wife and in no mood to suppress his temptation second time around , kickstarts a steamy extra-marital affair with Nola and within no time has sowed his seed. Now that Nola’s reluctant to go through abortion yet again (remember Tom? Well, basically he had also banged and then left her), things start spiralling out of control as Nola pushes Chris everyday to take the leap and leave Chloe once and for all. Which is when Chris decides to take matters in his hands, rather violently. Watch the film to check out the brilliant climax which’ll have you swearing by Chris’s favourite line– “I’d rather be lucky than good”.

If his directing repertoire is to be believed (haven’t seen any of his previous films), Woody Allen is a thespian when it comes to delivering character-centric cinema. And deliver he definitely does with Match Point where he lets the characters drone casually from one cliche to another and another. Until the unsuspecting climax makes you jump up and take notice (surprisingly, even here, in the film’s most impactful 30-minute finale, the camera and sound would carry on to be as unsuspectingly quiet as in the rest of the movie but the whole sequence is such, it jolts you no matter what). Reading what I’ve just written I definitely have used stronger adjectives than I’d planned to but in such a genteel and lush film, the thriller elements towards the end really come across more shockingly than they’d otherwise be worth. A perfect example of genre-mixing that works.

Till the final shocker though, you have to sit through a surprisingly timeworn romp of an upper middle class British family that believes in leading a high life– watching operas, ordering rather immodestly at the best restaurants, practice shooting and tennis, drive around in Beemers and holiday in the Greek Islands. And yes, speak in a language reminiscent of pre-pre-Victorian era. Seriously, the dialogue of Match Point is either written by someone who’s read all his Dickens and Twains and Eliots so many times he’s lost touch with how people speak in the real 21st century London or someone too desperate to “construct” a prim-n-propah British feel. Either way, it stands out like a sore thumb and is unintentionally funny for the first few minutes (after which your brain just ignores it).

A much larger part though in keeping your attention from wavering is played by the drop-dead sexy Scarlett Johansson who gets to show off some real stuff (anatomically and vocally) and boy, does she rock or what. All my doubts about her acting talent (after watching her sleepwalk through Lost in Translation and Island) have really burned to ashes. And then there’s the good ole charming British ensemble headed by a certain Matthew Goode (playing Tom) who could really teach a thing or two to the leading man in question (Jonathan R.Meyers) about improvisation and voice modulation. Mr Meyers turns in a surprisingly self-conscious performance (or is it his calculating character?) with a rather strange accent and hilarious mannerisms but somewhow manages to pull it together in key sequences and doesn’t, thankfully, hamper the film’s energy.

Overall, an old fashioned caper about extra-marital affairs that’ll leave you with a smile (for all the wrong reasons) with its smartly canned finale.

Quoting from the film: “There are moments in a tennis match where the ball hits the top of the net, and for a split second, remains in mid-air. With a litte luck, the ball goes over, and you win. Or maybe it doesn’t, and you lose.” Watch it to see if the hero manages to get a match point.
More reviews to follow!

Donnie Darko

Donnie Darko: **

Given that Butterfly Effect, 21 Grams, Minority Report, Eternal Sunshine… and their ilk are the stuff I can't get enough of, the supposedly daddy of this surrealistic sci-fi-philosophy genre called Donnie Darko had surprisingly eluded my DVD player. Not anymore. Fresh from the viewing of the director's cut this weekend, I have to say that it left me sorely disappointed and nonplussed with an absolutely incoherent and cryptic-to-the-point-of-suicide screenplay.

A disturbed adolescent sleepwalking one night in the winter of 1988 meets a 6-feet-tall demonic bunny and is told that the world is going to end within 28 days. The next morning, he goes back home to find a jet-engine crashed into his bedroom, followed by him sleepwalking again the next night, then a school flood the very next morning, then a fire at the local inspirational speaker-cum-paedophile's home some days later, all of which are committed by Donnie either while he's sleepwalking or in daytime– with the sole "plan" to finally lead his mother and sister to board the very same jet whose engine had ripped at the start of the movie (through a wormhole or time-storm). Yes, you can either shrug it off as the bizzarest thing you would have seen uptil the end where *spoilers ensue* the same engine crashes into Donnie's bedroom with Donnie IN the room, killing him in the process. So what was all that you saw uptil now? In director's and script-writer's words it was a piece of the Tangent Universe and just so that this Tangent Universe doesn't play more havoc in the Primary Universe, Donnie has to go about doing the things he does to bring order back to the Primary Universe. To understand all of this and more, you have to sit through a director's commentary and/or a google search for a fictional pseudo-scientophilosophy book called The Philosophy of Time Travel–luxuries best reserved for the weekend. And yes, after much reading and listening, pieces of jigsaw puzzle do come together, but for me they were never quite enough to solve some of the inherent paradoxes (read plot holes) that are just left unexplained.

The time-split or the Tangent Universe corruption that actually causes the jet engine to barge from the future still does crash after 28 days of Donnie's hard-work to save the world into entering a black hole. All that work, just to save one or two individuals?!? Or does he know he's going to die at all? And was that some twisted form of telekinesis where Donnie creates a wormhole? For me, it just doesn't pay off. And plus there's a whole barrage of self-contradicting set of theories in the fictional book which the screenplay obeys page after page after page. So after all the head-spinning detail, ultimately the space-time corruption that the film tries valiantly to give a slice of, becomes more convoluted for its own good. Quite a pity when films like Being John Malkovich (more of person travel than time) and Butterfly Effect achieved all that Donnie Darko attempts to with far more identifiable and memorable characters, crackling dialogues, coherent structures–and they delivered it all with such a sure, confident and profound hand that DD can only dream of.

Still I'd like to thank the movie-makers for helping me read more on the concept of time (I have, indeed spent so much time and effort on the content that characters and actors are a distant fuzz) and yes, for changing my belief about Jake Gyllenhall being an absolutely uni-directional actor. Inspite of the convolutions and the distractions of the plot, his Donnie Darko has his moments–particularly when he's at his brainiest and practical best and gives a sermon to the phony motivational speaker or when he doesn't see the point of sympathising with a rabbit's demise in Watership Down in his English lesson or even when he has a conversation with his physics teacher on whether free-will and choice really do exist–Gyllenhall really brings forth the angst, the confusion and a wisened edge of his otherwise "classified as schizo" character laudably.

However, the point I really want to make is that Donnie Darko just isn't the sort of film I'll sit through again. Simply because I don't see how meritorious the director/screenplay-writer's talents are if his viewers have to sit through hours of commentary and read a fictional work before trying to make sense of it all. I have seen much more profound and thought-provoking ideas being brought across the screen in a way that never compelled me to go through the director's commentaries and look for supporting material etc. I guess its a trap that every science fiction film or series that takes itself too seriously, fall into. In a genre where there's no end to creating layers and layers of theories within stories, Donnie Darko is just too overwhelmingly ambitious in what it wants to say. Nothing wrong with that–just that because it  skims through the multitude of complex ideas in 2 hours, it ends up being quite hollow as neither the characters get any space to breathe (stifled by the plot) nor any solid message filters through. If this is of any consolation for any reader who swears by DD, its only a patch on the fiasco that Matrix ended up being.

Worth a watch to form an opinion on, now that its a contemporary cult classic. 

Mission: Impossible 3: Movie Review

Finally caught up with this third in the series of a rather tired franchise (hated MI2 with a passion) and caught myself pleasantly surprised. Read on!

Mission Impossible 3 (2006): ***

Entertainment at its nonsensical best. That probably sums up the latest Tom Cruise wannabe-Bond spy thriller directed by JJ “Lost” Abrams. Typical Lost style, Abrams first intrigues the audience with his characters and theme, then raises the bar with breathtaking action and visuals but finally cops out in an irritating, dissatisfying anti-climax. In MI3, add yawningly-predictable to the adjectives. Which is quite disheartening for a film as slick as this where the build-up, the characters, the action, the sleuthing, the gadgetry, everything pointed towards a more impressive shocker of a climax. But alas!

Still, there’s just about enough to justify the admission price. The action scenes, first and foremost of all. The one thing that MI3 will be always talked about are its long-drawn action sequences. Although the very first one-which involves Cruise rescuing a captive fellow agent and ends in a chopper chase amidst a windmill field-is fairly decent, its really in the second one where Cruise’s character plots to kidnap Hoffman’s character from inside the Vatican that MI3 is in its finest element. As if the whole sequence wasn’t exciting enough, the immediately following showdown amidst the top of the bridge with missiles, flying cars, blasts (you get the picture, right?) is splendid.

It’d be sacrilege to even think about things as human as endurance, ability to slide full-speed atop a skyscraper slope and still managing to hang on etc. This is the stuff impossible’s made of. Physics-defying and biologically-inconceivable, if you don’t think too hard, watching these on-screen spies turn into adrenalin-fuelled robots can be great fun.
What gives the action sequences an extra edge is the frenzied, flashily-edited handheld camera-like cinematography coupled with a thumping background score (remember Bourne Supremacy?). Gadgetery and masks–two other staple motifs of the genre are also used with innovation and some of the stuff like planting a time-detonated electrical charge right inside the brain of the captive is very thoughtfully sewn into the screenplay (yes, the hero gets planted with one too), besides being fiendishly clever.

Lead performances are of a high order too and given the writer’s penchant for driving into cliche after cliche after cliche, its really these actors who lend flesh into their otherwise bland characters and a plot-less collage of blasts and chases. Tom Cruise, for once. The energy and the intensity with which this actor enacts the lead role makes even the most humanely impossible stunts believable. Apart from doing the tendon-tearing runs and skyscraper jumps, we are meant to be seeing this “vulnerable, caring” side of his chararcter, Ethan Hunt and suprisingly enough, Cruise rises to the occassion and does far more justice to the scenes with his on-screen wife Keri Russell (who apparently was found recently quoting that her new husband kisses better than Tom–going by which I am not quite sure how this stacks up with my critique of their on-screen kisses but yea, they make a decent couple). Yea, so Cruise really looks very up-to-the-job and rather too serious for the role (so much so in fact that midway through the film you really want to shake him and tell him to take it easy. You want to tell him that he is the hero, and this is his own Mission Impossible. Come what may –he’ll have his wife, he’ll kill the baddie and even manage a promotion at his IMF).

Okay so I digressed. There are two more guys who really make MI3 worth watching once. One’s Philip Seymour Hoffman whose cool composure even when flung mid-air by Cruise is frightening. The opening sequence has him pointing the gun at Cruise’s wife and Cruise chained in front. Watching him count down as he enquires Cruise about a certain “rabbit’s foot” is spine-chilling stuff.

You normally wouldn’t find much comedy in these hung-up-about-action-and-gadgetery flicks, but thankfully there’s some snippets of comic genius by British actor Simon Pegg to be enjoyed. In his own clumsy, self-deprecatingly funny way, as he explains what the “rabbit’s foot” really could be and why the whole of the bad-world in the movie are mad after it is one great scene! His other Brit counterpart, Jonathan Rhys Meyers however gets stuck in the same-old superhero sidekick mode, and so does Laurence “Morpheus” Fishburne.

So, here’s what you have in the end-a brilliant opening sequence, some terrific action and spies for the most part of two hours along with actors who try their level best to convince how surprised they really are by the whole outcome. Take this bait and have a ball.

Or if you are one of those who have the misfortune of watching more than three B-grade spy thrillers, prepare to feel shortchanged. You’ll never know what the rabbit’s foot really is or what the whole fuss was about but still, despite these nibbling frustrating queries, you won’t mind wasting your popcorn, just this once!