Rajeev Masand – movies that matter : from bollywood, hollywood and everywhere else

October 19, 2012

Cast: Sidharth Malhotra, Varun Dhawan, Alia Bhatt, Rishi Kapoor, Ronit Roy, Ram Kapoor

Director: Karan Johar

The hardest job on a Karan Johar film set must belong to the cleaners, who I imagine spend most of the day on their knees scrubbing floors, dusting furniture, and basically making sure everything is spotless. The director’s new film, Student of the Year, is set on an impossibly chic campus where good-looking teenagers are invariably breaking into song or breaking into fights. Yet you’ll never spot a carelessly strewn cola can or even a stray sheet of paper lying around in the corridors or in the canteen. Oh those poor cleaners!

At St Teresa High School in Dehradun (think that Riverdale-like setting of Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, only swankier), trust fund brat Rohan (Varun Dhawan) is the coolest kid with all the hottest toys – a flaming red Ferrari, designer togs, and the prettiest girl in school, Shanaya (Alia Bhatt). That is, until Abhimanyu (Sidharth Malhotra) roars in on his bike. He’s the one with modest means – which is relative in a Karan Johar movie, because while Abhi’s family may not have enough makhan for their parathas, he can still afford the brands. After the typical teething troubles, the two boys become fast friends despite their drastically different ambitions.

What tests their friendship is the Student of the Year competition, an annual event devised by the school’s gay dean Yogendra Vashisht (Rishi Kapoor) to pick the one student who will land a full scholarship to an Ivy League college. Typically, however, it’s the girl…or rather their ishq wala love for Shanaya that drives a wedge between the friends.

Unapologetically aspirational, wearing its pedigree on its sleeve, Student of the Year plays out in a Gossip Girl-like universe, where feelings are surface-level and everyone’s a frenemy. The rich kids live it up extravagantly, while the rest (and even their families) aspire for membership into this exclusive club. In Johar’s world, clearly your biggest crime is being poor. This is the kind of world where the rich kid’s obnoxious dad flies half the campus to Thailand on his private jet to attend his son’s marriage.

But it’s also true that Student of the Year doesn’t ask to be taken seriously. This is Johar’s “holiday movie”; intended to show you a good time. So you have Glee-style introductions to the three leads in snazzily choreographed set pieces, a soundtrack of bubblegum hits, crisply edited sporting sequences, and outrageous humor like a track involving the dean’s crush on a strapping (and married) football coach.

Johar’s secondary players may come off as stereotypes on paper – the rich kid’s chamcha, the heroine’s nerdy best friend, the fat boy everyone makes fun of, and the opportunistic girl who makes a play for someone else’s boyfriend – but more than likely you’ll find traces of yourself or your friends in each of them. And therein lies the film’s secret weapon – look beyond the shiny classrooms and the sun-kissed Thai beaches, the brightly lit song sequences and the repeated shirtless shots of our heroes…and there’s heart to be found, particularly in the film’s second half when Rohan and Abhi truly lean on each other.

Karan Johar displays his trademark flair for light-hearted laughs and prettified emotions, capturing a world he knows inside out. This is the most extravagant launch any newcomer could have asked for. Good for them, Johar doesn’t know how to do things small.

The debutants, in turn, put their best foot forward: Sidharth Malhotra is earnest and has a pleasing presence, while Alia Bhatt is cute as the clueless Shanaya, if a little raw. It’s Varun Dhawan who stands out with a confident, charming turn, able to tackle both comical and vulnerable scenes with ease. Yet if there’s a performance that glues together this film, it’s Rishi Kapoor’s. He never flinches in an unusual role, playing the part for laughs yet also infusing soul into what could have so easily turned into a caricature.

Too long by about twenty minutes, the film could’ve done with some tightening – perhaps the clunky treasure hunt sequence could go? Nitpickings aside, this is a breezy, enjoyable film by a director who knows his craft.

I’m going with three out of five for Karan Johar’s Student of the Year. If fun is what you’re seeking, you won’t be disappointed.

(This review first aired on CNN-IBN)

October 19, 2012

Cast: Voices of Govinda, Urmila Matondkar, Boman Irani, Akshaye Khanna, Swini Khara, Sunil Shetty, Prem Chopra, Deepak Dobriyal, Saurabh Shukla

Director: Nikhil Advani

There are more than a few lessons nicely woven into the plot of Delhi Safari, but thankfully this 3D animation film from director Nikhil Advani never talks down to its young audience, or beats them on the head with its overarching message of wildlife and environmental preservation. At a crisp 95 minutes, the film is an enjoyable and entertaining adventure, despite never achieving Pixar-level greatness.

A young leopard cub, Yuvi (voiced by Swini Khara), motivates a group of animals to head to the Capital to protest against the takedown of their wildlife reserve, after their leader, and his father, Sultan (Sunil Shetty), is killed by redevelopers constructing a residential complex in its place. Bajrangi the chimpanzee (Govinda), Bagga the bear (Boman Irani), and Yuvi’s protective mum Begum (Urmila Matondkar) enlist the help of a domesticated talking parrot, Alex (Akshaye Khanna), as they head Delhi-wards to get their plea heard. But it’s a bumpy journey ahead as Bajrangi and Alex repeatedly get into scuffles, and the group encounters all manner of obstacles along the way.

Featuring a gallery of well-etched characters, Delhi Safari benefits from snappy writing and some solid voice work, particularly by Govinda, Akshaye Khanna and Boman Irani, who infuse real personality into their respective beasts. Govinda’s manic senapati monkey is the scene-stealer here with his Bhojpuri-laced dialogues, his devious plotting against Alex, and his interactions with his two cowardly sidekicks. Akshaye Khanna too, appears to be having fun with the part of Alex, who can’t understand why these animals would seek freedom and independence instead of enjoying the luxurious lifestyle of a kept pet. Boman Irani delivers plenty laughs as the posh bear who speaks in an Anglicized accent, and lands some of the film’s best one-liners.

Like so many Hollywood animation films, Delhi Safari is packed with clever pop cultural references and particularly film jokes. But there’s no escape from cultural stereotyping, you discover, as our group of desperate animals encounters a community of Garba-obsessed flamingoes as they’re passing through Kutch. It’s all done affectionately, though, stopping just short of caricature.

The film’s best scene is an Indiana Jones-style set piece in which our protagonists are chased through a quarry by a swarm of angry bees who assume different shapes, like that shoal of fish in Finding Nemo. On the flip side, too many songs stretch the film’s narrative pointlessly, and Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy’s score is serviceable at best. The animation itself is good, superior to many Indian animation features, but much bigger budgets may be required to achieve the texture and the detail one sees in films like Ratatouille and Madagascar.

You might overlook the one glaring hole in the film’s premise, a result of film logic clashing with ‘real logic’ – Why did the animals need to recruit a ‘talking’ parrot to convey their problem to the humans, when they speak the same language, and just as eloquently as the parrot?

Despite these quibbles, the film works on account of its charming characters and some hilarious dialogue. I’m going with three out of five for director Nikhil Advani’s Delhi Safari. Take your kids for this one, chances are both of you will come out smiling.

(This review first aired on CNN-IBN)

October 12, 2012

Cast: Rani Mukherjee, Prithviraj, Nirmiti Sawant, Anita Date

Director: Sachin Kundalkar

It’s love at first smell for college librarian Meenaxi Deshpande (Rani Mukherjee), who falls hook line and sinker for brooding artist Surya (South Indian star Prithviraj) the moment she first catches a whiff of him. Meenaxi, the protagonist of writer-director Sachin Kundalkar’s bizarrely fascinating Aiyyaa, is a middle-class Maharashtrian girl with a heightened sense of smell, and a tendency to slip into a dream-like fantasy world of Bollywood numbers to escape the claustrophobia of her eccentric family.

To be fair, no one’s entirely sane in Kundalkar’s world – not Meenaxi’s kooky parents, not her blind grandmother who zips around in a mechanical wheelchair, and especially not her colleague at the library, a buck-toothed Lady Gaga lookalike who dresses in S&M gear and pines for John Abraham. Meenaxi herself is prone to melodramatic outbursts and filmi nakhras, particularly when she’s being paraded about in front of prospective grooms.

Aiyyaa, with its bright visual palette, its strong female perspective, and its intentionally peculiar humor, is evocative of Almodovar’s quirky cinema, but the plot here is wafer thin, and while some elements work, it never all comes together as a satisfying whole. It certainly doesn’t help that the film unfolds over two hours and thirty minutes…an excruciatingly long running time for what’s essentially a slim story of a one-sided crush.

Yet, in a rare twist for a Bollywood film, it’s the heroine who does all the lusting here, cooking up saucy imaginary scenarios that invariably involve the hero flaunting his well-toned physique. Sportingly offering himself up to be objectified, Prithviraj bumps and grinds and heaves to the beats of at least two deliciously over-the-top song sequences.

Meenaxi, of course, is the film’s juiciest character…a woman conflicted between pursuing the man of her dreams, who barely notices her, and settling for a simple guy with simple tastes who has picked her to be his bride. Rani Mukherjee owns the part with a tremendous, uninhibited performance, switching superbly between the film’s exaggerated and understated moments.

In the end — the impressive camerawork and Amit Trivedi’s winning tunes aside — Aiyyaa is at best an original and promising experiment let down by its many indulgences. I’m going with two-and-a-half out of five for director Sachin Kundalkar’s Aiyyaa; an unusual film that could’ve been so much more.

(This review first aired on CNN-IBN)

October 12, 2012

Cast: Manisha Koirala, JD Chakravarthy, Alayana Sharma, Madhu Shalini

Director: Ramgopal Varma

In an interview he gave me two weeks ago, Ramgopal Varma said he thinks horror films “should never have a story”. According to him, an ominous setting alone can do the trick. That’s pretty much all he’s willing to offer in Bhoot Returns, his new film about a family that moves into a house only to discover that it might already be occupied by a supernatural presence.

The ghost in Bhoot Returns is Shabbo, and she is visible only to the six-year-old girl in the house (Alayana Sharma). While the little kid’s mother (Manisha Koirala) loses her patience quickly over repeated mentions of this ‘imaginary friend’, it takes a little longer for the father (Satya’s JD Chakravarthy) to be convinced that not all is well. It’s when things begin to go bump in the night that the family is truly spooked.

The flimsy plotting notwithstanding, Varma succeeds in keeping you on the edge during the first half of the film by relying on old tricks like an eardrum-splitting background score and some crazy camera angles. From above a ceiling fan and under a glass table, to behind a television set and inside a basin, Varma indulges his obsession with unlikely camera placements, and exploits 3D effectively to create a sense of foreboding.

Alas, the film nosedives almost immediately after interval, when Varma throws the oldest stereotype into the mix – a typical buffoon cop who’s insensitive and dismissive of the distressed family’s condition. There’s also some of the hammiest acting in the film’s underwhelming climax, and an abrupt ending barely 90 minutes into the film.

Bhoot Returns is no Paranormal Activity, although it does borrow at least three key moments from that popular horror franchise. It’s not entirely a waste of time either, because Varma does deliver a few good scares. I’m going with two out of five for Bhoot Returns. It’s the kind of film that the phrase ‘time-pass entertainment’ was invented to describe.

(This review first aired on CNN-IBN)

October 12, 2012

Cast: Manoj Bajpai, Delzad Hiwale, Nawazuddin Siddique, Jaideep Ahlawat, Rajkumar Yadav, Barry John

Director: Bedabrata Pain

Chittagong, directed by Bedabrata Pain, is a story culled straight out of history books, yet the film is so loaded with heart that it easily resonates with you. The theme is familiar – it does, after all, tread the same ground as Ashutosh Gowariker’s Khelein Hum Jee Jaan Se (2010), capturing the events surrounding one of the earliest chapters in India’s freedom struggle – the Chittagong uprising of the 1930s, led by school teacher Surya Sen against the mighty British. But the film’s greatest strength is that while it salutes the fervor with which the revolutionaries took on the administration, it never lets us forget that this army was mostly made up of mere school children. Their intent is brave, but their fear is palpable – handling weapons they never have before, the dread over the act of killing, and even the idea that they will have to lay down their young lives for the sake of their motherland. It is in capturing these details with an understated hand that makes Chittagong seem so real.

The film is told from the perspective of Jhunku Roy (Delzad Hiwale), the teenaged, privileged son of a barrister, who is set to follow the family tradition of studying in England. Those plans are waylaid by his association with Surya Sen (Manoj Bajpai), who is recruiting committed patriots for a revolt involving a daring takeover of the British armory.

What is impressive about Chittagong is the solid cast Pain puts together, drawing out convincing performances from dependable actors like Manoj Bajpai, Jaideep Ahlawat, Rajkumar Yadav, and particularly Nawazuddin Siddique as Suriya’s deputy Nirmal Sen. Amidst the otherwise caricaturish portrayals of British officers, only Barry John stands out as the local governor who caught between his duty to the Crown and his empathy for Jhunku.

Shot ever so beautifully, Chittagong is a textured film, but too many songs and an overlong narrative causes your attention to dither towards the end. Pain, an ex-NASA scientist, makes a confident debut with this moving drama. I’m going with three out of five for Chittagong. It’s a significant film that’s worthy of your time.

(This review first aired on CNN-IBN)