Bombay Cinephile

Fast & Furious

Apologies to everyone for not posting in a while - had gone home for a week. But then couldnt have been at a better time - since there are no new movies being released :)

Although confusingly titled, this is actually the 4th iteration of the Fast & Furious franchise – and dare say, they have finally gotten their act together. Most of the people I know (including myself) kinda enjoyed the original, but were totally put off by the sequels. This one gets back to the original formula with the original cast – Vin Diesel, Paul Walker, Jordana Brewster and Michelle Rodriguez – and has a semblance of a story line to link together the car chases.

Talking of which, Fast and Furious opens with a cool truck heist scene that sets the furious tone – Dom (Vin Diesel) & Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) along with a new crew are hijacking trucks for a living in the Dominican Republic. But almost immediately, actions moves back to California, where Letty gets murdered by a drug lord – and Dom swears revenge on her grave. Meanwhile Brian O’Connor (Paul Walker) is back in the FBI on the trail of the same drug lord. So its but natural that their paths cross …

Dom and O’Connor continue off from the original movie – their interaction has the same combative yet humourous undertones. Vin Diesel delivers his punchlines with the same stoic face – but then you don’t goto this movie for the acting, do you ? You watch this movie for the races. Thankfully, director Justin Lin knows just how to – the races are superbly picturized, with that sensation of high speed all pervasive. The tunnel sequences, with its claustrophobic dimensions, add to the excitement and each of the car chases keep you on the edge of your seat.

The script nicely balances the car scenes with the story – and it feels more an action thriller rather than just a car video game – till the climax scene, where logic takes the back seat and its all engines revving and tires burning. I am rather partial to cars and bikes, so I really enjoyed the movie but I can say with confidence that anyone who found the original Fast and Furious an ok timepass would be pleasantly surprised with this one.

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Movies to look out for this week

8 x 10 Tasveer

Cast: Akshay Kumar, Ayesha Takia

Direction: Nagesh Kukunoor

Fast & Furious
(Fast & Furious 4)

Cast: Vin Diesel, Paul Walker

Direction: Justlin Lin

Feel The Noise
(Only released in PVR cinemas)

Cast: Omarion Grandberry, Zulay Henao

Direction: Alejandro Chomski
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Watchmen

Every once in a while ... the entire universe is out to con you :) !!

Seriously !! When IMDB tells you that a superhero movie made by Zack Snyder (the maker of the ubercool 300) is rated at 8.0 by the users and newspaper reviews give it a thumbs up, you just cant wait for the weekend to come - atleast I couldnt !

And after the long wait, when the movie begins with an awesome hand-to-hand combat in the graphic style of 300, you possibly couldnt have asked for anything more !! But that joy starts getting replaced with confusion and then boredom and finally irritation - at the ridiculousness of it all. Even 300 was ridiculous, agreed. But it had the coolness which made up for it - which Watchmen has precious little of.

Set in an imaginary 1985 when the Cold War is still on, a group of ex-superheroes who were disbanded/retired from public life get stirred when one of them, The Comedian, gets murdered in the opening scene of Watchmen. The masked Rorschach decides to try and uncover the secret of the Comedian's death - with the suspicion that maybe someone was trying to targeting 'the masks' ...
His investigation and the subsequent events reveal that there exists a plan allright, but the identity of the orchestrator and the final motive is much more than what he had imagined.

The story weaves back and forth between the past and present as each of the superheroes are introduced and we are told about them in detail. The most striking characters are the dead Comedian and the blue Dr. Manhattan - who has some amazing superpowers. However, even though the characters are more gray than, lets say, a Spiderman - but they are as exciting as a potato !! While the Hulk or even the Ironman werent great superhero movies, but atleast they got you rooting for them !! This has to the most boring bunch of superheroes ever !

I can go on and on, but I will try to summarize what is wrong with this movie. Watchmen is a movie for the REAL movie connoisseur - the ones who can give a 6 hour lecture on the significance of the .... green pants of the Joker in The Dark Knight. I am not even sure there was a green pant, but you get the drift. People who will go gaga over how dark the movie setting is, which is a reflection of how flawed each superhero character is - how Rorschach is a borderline psychopath and how The Comedian, even though a despicable human being, understood humanity more than anybody else etc. If you are the kind who raves about these things, then the movie is for you.If you are a regular bloke (like me), then you wont get jackshit out of the movie :)

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Movies to look out for this week ....

Watchmen

Cast: Jackie Earle Haley, Billy Crudup, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Malin Akerman

Direction: Zack Snyder (Director of 300)

The International

Cast: Clive Owen, Naomi Watts

Direction: Tom Tykwer

Aa Dekhen Zara

Cast: Neil Nitin Mukesh, Bipasha Basu, Rahul Dev

Direction: Sangeet Sivan

It is the first casualty of the Multiplex - Cine Producers dispute over revenue sharing and is being released only in single screen cinemas everywhere http://www.businessofcinema.com/news.php?newsid=12529

Anywhere But Home
Original Name - Four Christmases

Cast: Vince Vaughn, Reese Witherspoon

Direction: Tom Tykwer

Videsh
Original Name - Heaven On Earth

Cast: Preity Zinta, Vansh Bhardwaj

Direction: Deepa Mehta

Ek - The Power of One

Cast: Bobby Deol, Nana Patekar, Shriya Saran

Direction: Sangeet Sivan

Emotional Arithmetic
(Only released in PVR cinemas)

Cast: Susan Sarandon, Christopher Plummer, Gabriel Byrne

Direction: Paolo Barzman
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Barah Aana

This movie could easily call itself the Indian Slumdog Millionaire – not only does it have Indian artistes, the makers are also Indian :) !! Having certain similarities with both Arvind Adiga’s White Tiger and the runaway Danny Boyle success, Barah Aana is a story of three have-nots who are fed up of their wretched existence and decide to take matters into their own hands.

Shukla (Naseeruddin Shah), Yadav (Vijay Raaz) and Aman (Arjun Mathur) share a room in one of Mumbai slums. They are simple, honest people struggling to eke out an existence in the city – Shukla is a driver for a businessman but he has a painful past, Yadav is a watchman in a building and Aman is a waiter in a Barista. But life isn’t so forgiving - Shukla is constantly ridiculed and abused by his mistress, Yadav is being made to do double shifts and treated more like a peon, running errands all day and Aman harbours romantic dreams in his heart about the friendly Italian woman at his café.

Things reach a critical point when Yadav’s son at his village falls ill and he desperately needs money for the treatment – but his pleas fall on deaf ears. Desperation leads to an accidental crime and with it comes a realization that now they have a way to fight back the system for the dignity that they have been denied so far …

The story has very interesting possibilities, and the acting is certainly top notch. Naseeruddin Shah has only 3 lines of dialogue in the entire movie, that too in the climax – he communicates only with his facial expressions and shrugs in the rest of the movie – and that itself is a study in acting !! Vijay Raaz is the most vocal among the three and he is good as usual. Amrit Mathur (the guy was Farhan’s friend in Luck By Chance) does the aspiring young man role very well too. But I thought Tannishtha Chatterjee made the major impact in the small role of the phone-booth owner in the slum.

However, the director fails in one very important aspect - to innovate in the movie. The script is completely linear and the pace doesn’t vary at all. Sometime in the second half, I even started looking at my watch – even though the movie is just 100 min long ! The first 30 min is spent establishing the difficult lives of the three lead actors and the story then moves steadily towards the ‘accident’ – the plot is very guessable and the director doesn’t do anything to dispel the disinterest once you realize you got the plot. The humour scenes are very few – and some more funny scenes might have improved the pacing of the story.

The director, however has one big last laugh in the end – but that is not enough to redeem the movie. The plot was interesting, the acting flawless but Barah Aana is let down by a slightly unimaginative screenplay. Its not a bad movie, but just nothing special ..

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Firaaq

I admit that I was quite interested about Firaaq, mainly because of the international felicitation that it has received. Yet I was a little hesitant in going for the movie – especially after a long week at work - I didn’t want to watch a heavy movie about the Gujarat riots! I instead chose what I thought would be a light movie – Straight (and regretted it). But I couldn’t be more wrong about Firaaq ….

Yes its set amidst the Gujarat riots – a month after it, to be precise. But it doesn’t have any of the violence or bloodshed of the riots. It instead follows a set of people who are struggling to come to terms with life in the aftermath of the riots. Nandita Das has taken some ordinary people and showed us how they react when faced with something extraordinary – it brings out the worst in some like Paresh Rawal while some like Sanjay Suri look to escape.

It is a rare movie that can stir up a whirlpool of emotions inside the viewer – feelings as diverse as loathing, despair, hope and happiness and everything that is in between – all in a runtime of just 100 minutes. Nandita Das exceeds expectations in her directorial debut in Firaaq, taking on the Gujarat riots issue with a wonderful sensitivity. Sure, she has the advantage of having a stalwarts like Naseeruddin Shah & Paresh Rawal in Firaaq - but the finesse with which the screenplay seamlessly weaves all the story together is completely to her credit.

From a slightly disturbing opening scene, we are introduced to the different characters and their dilemmas - the hindu-muslim urban couple who are leaving town, a muslim couple who come back to their home to find it burnt down, the gujarati housewife struggling to come to terms with her guilt, a orphaned child looking for his family and an ageing singer oblivious to reality ….

Each of the actors’ performance has been stellar – you cannot help but loath Paresh Rawal and equally you share Deepti Naval’s agony and her wish for atonement. Naseeruddin Shah is in a league of his own, playing a musician from a forgotten generation who is disconnected from today’s world.

As if the multitude of stories were not enough, each of the stories tug at your heart in different directions. From the despair at finding her entire household in ashes to the suspecting her best friend, from the fear of the police to the anger at the bride’s silly remarks about the riots, Muneera (Shahana Goswami) bares her thoughts to us. The sharing of the bindi between friends and the intermixing of the names Mohan and Mohsin – the movie is replete with such subtle subtexts.

With its limited runtime, Firaaq doesn’t conform to the traditional norms of giving a background to each story or taking each of them to a logical conclusion. So maybe it might feel a little abrupt at the start to some. But such trifling irritants are completely forgotten by the time you finish watching Firaaq as you would find yourself overwhelmed with conflicting emotions.

PS – the word firaaq means both separation and quest – couldn’t have been a better name for this movie
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Straight

Parvati Balgopal's Straight tries to break the romantic comedy mould by bringing in a gay angle - but it doesnt succeed in making much of an impact on the viewer - atleast it didnt work for me. Wifey thinks it wasnt a bad timepass but I think the flaws overpower the good parts.

The movie opens with a very innovative aeroplane graphic to show the generations of the Patel family who emigrated to all corners of the world. Pinu Patel's parents landed up in London and he becomes a restaurateur (I kind of got a Cheeni Kum deja vu sometimes - but ofcourse, no comparison between Mr Bachhan and Vinay Pathak). Sticking to his simplistic image, Vinay Pathak plays Pinu Patel, simple and honest, who still shies away from girls and doesnt have much social life.

Till two people walk into his life - stand-up-comedian-cum-cook Kamlesh (played by ) and cartoonist-cum-accountant Renu (Gul Panag). Pinu is happy to have two good friends - and his restaurant also starts booming - till an accidental kiss happens. And as trailers have already revealed, Pinu Patel is horrified to realize he just might be gay.

But he just doesnt want to even consider the fact that he might not be straight and so begins com the misadventures as he desperately tries to lose his virginity.
The movie does generate laughs at some points - mostly of the sexual kind - and seemed to really entertain a group of guys sitting in front of me. Maybe thats the way to see this movie to make the most of it ...

But for me, the laughs were few and far between - rest of the movie was a slow drag mainly because of the way Pinu Patel's character is written. I really hope Vinay Pathak stops accepting there loser kind of roles - because stretched beyond a point, they lose the audiences' sympathy/interest. I am not saying that all movies about gay issues should be a Dostana, but does the gay guy have to be really sad loser in life ? Why cant a dashing handsome dude also be gay - atleast a normal guy ??

The other thing that really irritates in the movie are the songs - I think there were 5 of them in the movie and not one of them hummable. Yet, the director insisted on picturizing all the songs in full ! It was probably more of a torture than the loser act of Pinu Patel.

The good parts of the movie are the laughs - mostly by Vinay Pathak himself. The man can definitely act - like Dasvidaniya showed. The other cool part was Pinu's cousin Rajat - who is a pub singer - and mostly, he had a ubercool way of saying 'Pinu Baiiyya'. Ketki Dave refrains from going Ara-ra-ra-ra and acts well, especially in the climax. Gul Panag doesnt make any impression.

I dont think its especially worth your money at the theatres. Watch it when it comes on TV a few months later.