Kites

Anurag Basu's ouevre is full of love in the shadows - and he manages to give anguish and understanding, instead of licentiousness, to the most basic of instincts and profane of relationships. His Murder, and more so, Life in Metro were landmarks of passion on the cliff-edge.

Hence he was the right person for this venture. Hrithik's stealing his betrothal's brother's to-be-bride from under the nose of the Mafia family's noses, was fraught with dangerous potential.

But, alas, he choses mush over edge, even when he had two full-bodied hot-blooded young stars ready to tear each other out. Instead of the dirty love-making the film was screaming for, we get virginal looks reminiscent of the squeaky-clean '70s.

And then, to make matters worse, the wisp of a story is not even given a bushy tail to wag.

But when one has given up on getting to see a great film, one sits back to check out the little pleasures. Mercifully, they do keep coming!

The film starts beautifully, interweaving the past and present. Hrithik's voice says "When kites fly together for too long they get cut." The barreness of the land is symptomatic of what is to come.

Hrithik's rake is seductive enough for a fragile Kangana to fall for. And his entry into her rich family starts the descent into deceit.

The first meeting of Hrithik with Mori, underwater, is beautifully filmed, with an Enya-like ululation playing out in the background, underlining the physicality of the tryst. Mori is a goddess worth the greek god.

And her boyfriend is, of course, a cad. He runs his hand over her thigh and says he flipped for her two legs leading to heaven. But at least he is honest in his grossness: the film's script is dishonest in having us believe that it is any different for Hrithik and Mori.

The Las Vegas sequences are deliberately garish, and Mori is a waif in the lights. And the rain-encrusted nights are beautifully captured. And so is Mori's knowing innocence.

The real tragedy here is the lack of connect between the lead players. Kangana's desperate love for Hrithik, delienated in just a couple of scenes has more authencity, than all the looks which the lead pair share. This is the most under-written part of the film, and a large reason for its lack of emotional resonance with the audience.

But the set-pieces come a-plenty.

The salsa dance is pulsating and cheoragraphed with panache, and itself worth the price of the ticket. The warmth of love-on-the-run glows in the way it builds. The landscapes of the song Zindagi do pal ki, Mori's and Hrithik's touching, kissing, the closeness and the radiance, along with the light-heartedness of the Mexico chapter are filmed with heart.

Unfortunately the chase scenes, which form a large part of the second half, fill you with a sense of deja vu, as uni-dimensional cops and villians try hard to make fools of themselves.

The penultimate scene is filmed in a white barren landscape against the blue sea, as Hrithik retraces - and follows - Mori's tragic fate.

The film ends where it started, under the sea, in a sepulchral, uplifting underwater dance of spirits. A scene which could have broken a viewer into pieces, only if, alas, it had been at the end of a full and fulfilling film.

~ Sunil Bhandari
Copyright © 2010 – All rights reserved.
May 28th, 2010

Sent on my BlackBerry

Iron Man 2

Remember David Niven as James Bond in the spoof, Casino Royale (which came out much before Daniel Craig made it there with Eva Green)? That was a deliberate spoof and an atrocious film, unfunny, and immediately consigned to the dustbin of cinematic memory.

Well, here is Iron Man 2, an unfortunate - and undeliberate- spoof, in its very second outing.

A Russian is plotting against Iron Man with his own personal agenda. A rival American businessman is trying to make the Iron of the Man a national property. And Iron Man is dying, and he wants to spend the last days of his life boozing and partying and generally letting himself go.

Robert Downey can take the tragedy of a soul and make you feel the pain - that's his calibre. Here he plays out the insecurity and the sarcasm of his alter ego as a continuing joke. And he is joined in this unenterprising endeavour by almost every actor. Until it becomes one big unfunny comedy.

The story had some potential - with the chance to bring out the angst of an arrogant Super Hero suddenly finding himself to be mortal, and the delicious Scarlett Johansson being set up for potential romance.

But the tethered story-writing and the untethered (and under-directed) Downey (showing more of his arrogance as an actor than that of his character), make the film sink.

Tragically, the best action set-piece belongs not to him but to Scarlett Johansson, who delivers some superb blows as she gets into the villian's lair. The final confrontation is tame and yawn-inducing.

With Gwyneth Paltrow, Samuel Jackson, Mickey Rourke, and Scarlett Johansson, if this is what they make of their franchise, Iron Man is already rusted.

~ Sunil Bhandari
Copyright © 2010 – All rights reserved.
May 8th, 2010


Sent on my BlackBerry

The Hurt Locker

Films are ultimately experiences. They touch a nerve, mostly tangibly, often intangibly. Some films hit you with a bat; some creep astride ( and then inside) you. And then there's The Hurt Locker, a film which does both.

A military squad in Iraq, which the film follows episodically, is doing a job of defusing bombs. One of the soldiers discovers tragedy. Another counts his days to escape. And yet another finds the job to be his personal escape.

Its all attitude. It could be another day in the office, with different people just doing their jobs in their own way. But this is war - a different kind of an office.

And that's what the film is all about. In its edge-of-the-seat construction, it brings in its layers and sub-texts.

The psychology of a passion, when life is taken over and everything else matters little. When what you do (here: work inside a pressure cook) gets inside you so completely that it touches your very soul. And leaves you cold to the warmest of human connections. War becomes drug.

And in its realization of this grim idea comes the reality of what a war can make of a person.

Its a frightening, liberating and an imprisoning thought. And that's what this film is.




Sent on my BlackBerry

Up in the air

You don't know how empty you are, unless you are filled up once. Its a lesson of life, which takes a while to learn; and often learnt with great grief. And once learnt, leaves you empty - and full - at the same time.

"Up in the Air" is all about how people change as the people in their lives change.

Ryan Bingham travels 270 days a year. He is soon to become only the 7th person ever to clock 10 million air points. His sisters don't get to see him at all. But he loves it all - the air terminals, the hotel rooms, the food at the terminals, the continuous moving around.

He fires people for a living, when employers are too squeamish to do it themselves.

He is smooth, terrific at his heartless job. And famous on the lecture tour for his treatise on how to live off a rucksack ("Your relationships are the heaviest component of your life. Lighten your bag of them. We are not swans, we are sharks. Slower we move, faster we die")

And then he meets his female counterpart - Alex ("I am you with a vagina!") And they find chemistry, and start to re-arrange their crazy travel schedules to meet, and mate.

And then along comes young Harvard graduate, Natalie, out to change how things work in the company Ryan works in. And Ryan is in danger of being set to start operating from the home-town office. No travelling again. Devastation is near. He abhors Natalie. And to add salt to the wounds, he has to show Natalie the way things work out there. And they are up in the air, together.

And, as so very often happens, life is never the same again.

The slickness of the film, the charisma of its actors, their seductions never ever give a hint of what is to follow.

Time and again, in film and life, we have seen the vulnerability of the lonely man. And the disaster which ardour wroughts. Someone who is tough in his job, just ends being clueless and guileless - and tragically, child-like - in matters of the heart.

George Clooney is beautiful, in his smugness, in his desiring and desirability. One realizes how much we miss him as a lover, when he lights up his life, and ours, as he delves into his affair with Vera Farmiga. The essential vacuity of his life stares at him starkly.

And when Anna Kendrick enters his life as Natalie, the essential pain his job causes, starts to show on his face, as he watches Anna do what he has done for aeons, and sees what it does to her, and what it does to him, but doesn't show.

And one sees he was never ever tough.

The film is continuously funny, and insightful.

Natalie is eager, ambitious, in love, but unable to understand a man like Ryan. When he tells her about his ambition to reach 10 million air points, all she says is "Why do men have to pee on everything, and put a name on it?"

When Alex is leaving a tryst, she tells Ryan "Call me when you are lonely." And he stops her and says "I am lonely."

In the end, after he returns to his lone-ranger life, Ryan is all set to start flying again, and as he stands in front of a gigantic flight-detail screen, his shoulders droop. As he gets into the plane, he tells himself that he was back where he loved being, and however bright the city lights below were, his wingtip would always shine brighter.

Alas, we know better.

~ April 25th, 2010

Sent on my BlackBerry

Wake up Sid

Its a nice place to be in.

Not in one's rich pad, but in an attractive friend's apartment. Never to worry about food, even when there is no money. And even if you are lazy, rude to parents, unwilling to commit, there is always a Director-writer to give you a nice internship for your photography talent!

Welcome to the Indolence Paradise of the Rich n Famous.

Sid meanders in a world of tequila and parties and car rides in the night. Since he is sensitive he watches the sea also.

He gets angry when his father wants him to work. And walks out of his home in a huff. He finds a place to stay in, he finds a job, he finds a lover. Period.

Ayan Mukherji, the Director, has obviously grown as a priveleged child. Maybe the biggest trauma in his childhood was when he couldn't order a Dominoes pizza when he wanted to.

The depth of this trauma shows in the superficial silly movie.

Oh there is the gloss, the show, the acting. And one is pleasantly entertained. It makes you feel good. You like the locations, you like the characters. And the music is continuosusly there in the background, pleasant and unmemorial.
Precisely what the film is too.

~ Sunil

Sent on my BlackBerry

Gulaal

A fevered tale of power-hunger, love and deception given a visceral and gut-wrenching treatment.

A feudal background has beer bars as residences, folk singers as conscience keepers, and student union elections as a metaphor of the Union of India.

Bravura acting, scathing lyrics and a director who doesn't believe in holding back, make for a truly compelling, though often difficult, viewing.

Sent on my BlackBerry

Revolutionary Road

A searing drama of the angst of daily living, of the desperation to feel special in an ordinary world, and how we are defeated by the very things which we need freedom from.

Kate Winslet is peerless, and her silences steal the show from a garrulous and edgy Leonard de Caprio.

A matchless film on unmatched ambitions.

Sent on my BlackBerry