Imtiaz Ali tried incorporating a lot of clichéd tropes into his protagonist in Rockstar to make him appear and behave like one – hippie-style dresses, baggy hair, “rebel without a cause” persona, social outcast, among others. Unfortunately, the director never managed to make him even remotely close to the James Hetfields and the Kurt Cobains of the world. Had Jim Morrison, who happened to be the biggest idol of Janardan Jakhar aka Jordan (played by Ranbir Kapoor), been resurrected, he would have promptly found a way to get back to his grave. Jordan’s character, in fact, turned out to be more of a caricature than anything else, despite Ranbir Kapoor’s admittedly valiant efforts. His journey from being a squeaky-clean college guy to a brazenly rebellious singer-song writer-composer-master guitarist-and what not, has been so ludicrously portrayed that even a new born baby would cry out in shame. It was therefore a great surprise how he managed to develop such fan-following even in Delhi, leave alone in Prague or elsewhere. And as for his lady-love, her character was so moronic that it would have been much better had she been killed right in the first scene of the movie instead of the last. To call Nargis Fakhri a wooden-actor would be to put all the wood-cutters to shame, so let me save them the humiliation. Even A.R. Rehman’s music seemed dull for most parts, expect the song Sadda Haq – the only song that can be qualified as a rock song (and a good one at that). It’s a shame that a storyline with such potentials was so ruthlessly massacred by all those involved in making this horrendous film.
Director: Imtiaz Ali
Genre: Drama/Musical/Romance
Language: Hindi
Country: India
Badmaash Company has tried really hard to be a stylish new-age thriller. To leave no stones unturned, the director employed a series of tricks he has learnt, possibly from watching a slew of popular Hollywood thrillers; he even mixed a number of stereotypical Bollywood tropes and clichés for old-times’ sake. The end result, if not entirely unwatchable, wasn’t particularly memorable either. Karan (Shahid Kapoor), like any “hero” worth his salt, is not just a jack of all trades, but also a master of all. However, the only catch is that he wants to earn a quick buck and is ready to bend a rule or two in order to do so. So he enlists the help of two of his friends, as well as a feisty pretty-young-thing (Anushka Sharma), and starts concocting elaborate plans of fooling the authorities and making some good money in the process. The plan with which they start their business was ingenuous and smart – if only the rest of the movie could retain that flavour my review would have taken a different turn altogether. With each new plan that our hero conjures, the director starts testing the intelligence (or rather, gullibility) of his audience more and more, until things start looking pretty ludicrous even for ones with gray-cell deficiency. And, as I mentioned earlier, heavy injection of standard and overused ‘Bolly’ plot devices, like the ‘honourable father-dishonest son relationship’, or ‘money turns good guys into self-destructive jerks’, or ‘hero seeking redemption and bloody well getting one’, among others, dash whatever promise the movie’s initial premise had. As for acting, especially that of Shahid Kapoor, the lesser said the better.
Director: Parmeet Sethi
Genre: Thriller/Con Movie/Buddy Film
Language: Hindi
Country: India
Why is it that all Aliens/Gods in Thor are white Caucasian hunks who speak English with American accents and always make their landings on earth somewhere in the US? Even if I understand these given that it is an American movie based on an American comic-strip, there’s something more profound that I failed to appreciate. Why is it that, despite being so advanced vis-à-vis the human race in terms of knowledge and ability, the Asgard-s still rely on horses for day-to-day conveyance, and haven’t managed to get monarchy and dictatorship abolished? To cut a long story short, I found the movie as brainless as the characters that populate it. Thor, an arrogant hammer-wielding alien/god, and heir to the Asgard throne, is abolished to the earth by his ageing father, where he befriends a pretty astrophysicist (who, as Rogert Ebert has pointed out, is more of a storm-chaser & UFO-hunter), while also fights his father’s enemy (why wasn’t I surprised that Thor’s younger brother turns out to be the villain?). The film is filled with clichéd dialogues, juvenile sense of humour, predictable plot, and utterly unimaginative action sequences that are not worth watching – leave alone in 3D. It was also really perplexing to see such accomplished actors like Anthony Hopkins, Natalie Portman and Stellan Skarsgard agreeing to play such wafer-thin, one-dimensional characters… perhaps the pay packets were really good.
Director: Kenneth Branagh
Genre: Action/Fantasy/Adventure
Language: English
Country: US
Directed by militant feminist Catherine Breillat, Anatomy of Hell doesn’t really deserve a review (by a professional, or as in my case, otherwise), even though the French lady has earned a certain reputation for her dare where tackling controversial subjects and depicting explicit content are concerned. Fat Girl, for instance, was a reasonably compelling watch. With Anatomy of Hell, however, she didn’t just blur the thin line between art and pornography, she crossed it with some distance to spare. The meeting of a bored lady and a misogynist gay guy, who she has paid to “watch” her, over a period of four nights, turned into a fest of one-upmanship where pretentious pseudo-philosophical rambling is concerned. It was in fact difficult for me to decide which was more intolerable – the director’s tawdry sermonizing (indeed, feminism has got to be a leading contender for the worst of all ‘ism’-s) or the nauseous flesh parade that would put even a porn director to shame.
Director: Catherine Breillat
Genre: Drama/Erotic Drama/Feminist Movie/Experimental
Language: French
Country: France
I went to watch Smritimedur with a friend, despite not knowing anything about the movie, for the simple reason that it was being played at one of the screens of Nandan, a movie theatre enormously respected among Calcuttans for being a bastion of good, non-mainstream movies. However, the powers that be perhaps decided to play a prank on us – or was it belated ‘April Fool’ ? – by screening a classic bad movie like Smritimedur. The basic skeleton of the movie might elicit interest – a cynical guy, who has recently fallen out of love, gets drawn into a relationship with a mysterious older lady while on a trip to North Bengal. Unfortunately, every single aspect of the plot’s execution was hopelessly pathetic – the pseudo-philosophical tone, the trashy dialogues, the inane characterizations, the ludicrous comic interludes, the B-grade song-and-dance sequences, the tele-film look, and the third-grade acting (if you can call that acting, that is). The only hope for us lay in leering at the bootylicious Sreelekha Mitra – for those who aren’t aware of this luscious lady, suffice it to say, if I start speaking about her, I might end up seriously offending the cyber police. The final nail on the coffin, regrettably, was that even her buxom presence couldn’t shield us from the atrocities aimed at us by the movie’s horrendous cast and crew.
Director: Sunit Bhattacharya
Genre: Drama/Romance
Language: Bengali
Country: India
Bollywood, in the last few years, has developed a ready-made formula for quick and easy success – plagiarize a famous/cult foreign flick, suitably modify/delete contents that viewers might find incomprehensible or controversial, ‘Indian-ize’ them by adding songs, dances, romance and comedy, and voila, your movie is ready to go for shoot. Ghajini is the latest in this crappy trend, with the source being the brilliant, mind-bending thriller Memento, but bereft of the bravura filmmaking of the Nolan classic. Ghajini is filled with inane characterizations, a complete lack of an eye for detail or rationale, filled with comic-book like action sequences that are a straight lift of B-grade Tamil movies and containing more bloopers than the makings of sitcoms; consequently we had a few more laughs (make that a lot) than perhaps was the director’s intent. And to make matters worse, the movie stars Amir '8-Pack' Khan, who, with his fame for Method acting, had created an enormous hype prior to release, thus making the show that much more ludicrous. Being afflicted with ‘Short Term Memory Loss’ can be a boon when you are watching a movie like this.
Director: A. R. Murugadoss
Genre: Action/Revenge Movie/Romance/Musical/B-Film
Language: Hindi
Country: India
Away with Words has nearly everything that could be there in the cinematography section – from point-of-view shots to flashforwards, from subdued blue filters to bright natural lightings, from standstills to motion blurs; and they are all a treat to the eye. Of course, coming from world’s most famous DOP Christopher Doyle (of Chungking Express and Hero fame), this was expected – more so since he had complete carte blanche given that this is his directorial venture. And one cannot deny the fact that his exceptional usage of visual montages has created an intensely surreal feast for the viewers. However, it can’t also be denied that Doyle’s directorial debut is an exceedingly curious, psychedelic and experimental movie devoid of any narrative, despite the theme of loneliness and alienation trough the tale of its two protagonists – a Chinese guy with the ability to associate physical dimensions with abstract words, and a hard-drinking Australian (undoubtedly Doyle’s alter ego). Too many liberties were taken where more restraint was necessary principally because Doyle the cinematographer strongly overshadowed Doyle the filmmaker. Hence the end product is a visual delight for the eyes but a bizarre jumble of undecipherable sequences for the mind.
Director: Christopher Doyle
Genre: Psychological Drama/Ensemble Film/Experimental
Language: Chinese
Country: China (Hong Kong)
A Lost Man is the kind of movie the only way of viewing which is at film festivals, where one often ends up watching movies which are stranger than what one might have bargained for. Ditto for this French movie; this was the first film that I saw at this year's Kolkata Film Festival. The movie, in the form of a loose travelogue, follows two protagonists – a trigger-happy French photographer with a lewd fetish for ‘live’ photography (if you know what I mean), and a mysterious, laconic and world-weary Middle-Eastern wanderlust who is running away from one thing that no one can ever escape – past. The movie is unabashedly artsy in nature, but hopelessly hollow in its intellectual content. The biggest failure of the movie is that it fails to add layers of these two otherwise enigmatic and deeply existential characters; in other words, the director, by stubbornly refusing to delve into their pasts and their thought processes, ends up presenting two characters who remain as two-dimensional and unknown to us during the end credits as they were when the movie began. And what happen in between seem inconsequential in hindsight.
Director: Danielle Arbid
Genre: Drama/Road Movie/Existential Drama/Psychological Drama
Language: French/Lebanese
Country: Lebanon/France
Kidnap – the tale of a mysterious young man kidnapping a wealthy guy’s daughter to exact a very personal revenge – has the kind of plot that had a dark, moody, psychologically stimulating thriller written all over it. Unfortunately director Sanjay Gadhvi messed up beyond salvage point; hence what we have is nothing more than a formulaic, song-and-dance, run-of-the-mill Bollywood thriller more intent on pleasing the audience than disturbing them. Sanjay Dutt, as a hulking but sensitive alpha-man, is good; Imran Khan as the brooding kidnapper is still not ready to play a role as challenging as this; Manisha Lamba as a silly, perpetually midriff exposing, fashion-obsessed nymphet cum hostage (whose mother looks same age as her with slightly lesser cleavage to offer), is truly terrible. And if, like me, you have watched Park Chan-Wook’s acclaimed Vengeance Trilogy, you’ll indeed do well to keep away from this one and save yourself the blushes.
Director: Sanjay Gadhvi
Genre: Thriller/Psychological Thriller/Revenge Movie
Language: Hindi
Country: India
