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

May 27, 2016

Cast: Sandeep Bhardwaj, Sachin Joshi, Lisa Ray, Usha Jadhav

Director: Ramgopal Varma

It would be a stretch to describe Ramgopal Varma’s new film Veerappan as a return to form for the once-maverick director, but this much can be said: the film is more coherent than a lot of his recent work.

Varma, who is clearly having trouble hiding his awe for Veerappan, describes the notorious smuggler as “the most dangerous man who ever lived” in a title card at the start of the film. He goes on to underlay every scene with a deafening background score whose chorus chants “Veer veer Veerappan” repeatedly, as if adding to the legend of the ruthless brigand.

The film is a fairly straightforward story about Veerappan’s rise to power in the dense Tamil Nadu-Karnataka forests that he lorded over for nearly 20 years before he was killed in 2004. We watch his gang brutally killing policemen and civilians, slaying elephants to procure their ivory tusks, and smuggling sandalwood across a well-connected network. In Sandeep Bhardwaj, Varma has landed an actor who looks eerily close to Veerappan, but the script reduces its protagonist to a one-note character that has little to do other than snarl menacingly and hack away at luckless victims.

A woefully inept Sachin Joshi (also the film’s producer) is cast as the leader of the Special Task Force that’s been set up to smoke the bandit out of his hiding place. Giving Joshi competition in the Olympics for bad acting is Lisa Ray, playing the widow of a slain officer, who’s recruited to help the mission by befriending Veerappan’s wife Muthulakshmi (Usha Jadhav) and passing on crucial info to the cops. Lisa, for her part, appears to have strolled onto the wrong set. She makes ominous faces at the camera, and eyes Muthulakshmi so creepily, it’s as if she’s auditioning for one of Varma’s horror films.

The body count piles up during the film’s two hours running time, but the brutal killings are not for the fainthearted. There are some skillfully executed shootout scenes like one in which the authorities close in on Veerappan’s gang while they’re making their way through a waterfall. But these are small pleasures in a largely disappointing film that never goes beyond the obvious.

Varma takes frequent liberties with the truth in this remake of his own Kannada film Killing Veerappan, but what you leave the cinema with at the end are shattered eardrums from the incessant background music.

I’m going with two out of five.

(This review first aired on CNN News18)

May 27, 2016

Cast: Naseeruddin Shah, Kalki Koechlin, Rajat Kapoor, Arjun Mathur, Suhasini Maniratnam, Ratnabali Bhattacharjee, Rajiv Ravindranathan

Director: Anu Menon

Anyone who’s spent substantial time in a hospital, caring for a parent, a friend, or a relative that’s sick, will tell you that the hours go by slowly in a waiting room. How many times in a day can you visit the cafeteria, how many times can you go over the same newspaper? Beyond one’s sorrow for the patient’s condition, and a fear of the worst, what one tends to be consumed by, sitting there killing time waiting for a doctor to show up or the relative to recuperate, is a feeling of sheer tedium.

Which is why it isn’t hard to be invested in the central conceit of Waiting, director Anu Menon’s film about two people who meet and form a connection – despite their yawning age difference – while biding time in the sterile confines of a hospital.

Newly married Tara (Kalki Koechlin) rushes to Kochi after her husband (Arjun Mathur) is injured in a life-threatening accident during a work trip. As he lies in a coma, hovering between life and death, Tara is overcome with sadness and prone to panic. Here she meets Shiv (Naseeruddin Shah), a retired professor, who can sympathize with her situation, as his own wife (Suhasini Maniratnam) has been in a coma for the last eight months.

Shiv, who is mild-mannered, composed, and selfless in his commitment to his unresponsive wife, couldn’t be more different from Tara, who comes off as abrasive, entitled, and flighty. Yet they’re connected in their grief, and Shiv helps Tara work through her emotions. In a charming scene that makes a pointed comment on the generational contrast between them, Tara rambles on about being alone at a time like this despite having thousands of followers on Twitter. “What’s Twitter?” asks Shiv, genuinely puzzled.

It’s a promising premise, and the friendship between Tara and Shiv yields some nice moments. There were times the film reminded me of one of my favorite movies, Lost in Translation, about a young woman and a much older man who are united by a similar feeling of disconnection in a strange country and a new time zone. But the truth is that Menon’s script quickly runs out of ideas and goes around in circles. It’s also a little too talky – you yearn for them to just shut up and soak in the silence. Each time they do, the film soars.

It’s not hard to see the point Menon wants to make – that hanging out and spending time together allows Tara and Shiv to evade the reality of their situations and to ponder the difficult question of what will come of their own lives if their spouses don’t wake up. It’s a question Shiv has been blanking out of his mind for a while now, even as his wife’s doctor (Rajat Kapoor) urges him to think of what she’d have wanted.

Yet Waiting feels longer than its roughly 90 minutes running time. Good thing we’re in the hands of such exceptional actors, you’re willing to stay with them even when the script stops being interesting. Naseer brings a whole lifetime of experience to his performance. He’s real, and in-the-moment, and doesn’t miss a beat. Your heart goes out to this man who’s unable to pull the plug on the companion he’s spent the best years of his life with.

Kalki, meanwhile, succeeds in endearing you to Tara despite her brash nature. Aside from a few clunky bits – which has more to do with the uneven shifting between English and Hindi – she gets the part just right, and makes the character’s journey in the film entirely credible.

Despite its problems – and there are a few – Waiting is well worth your time. It sags post intermission, and the plotting is weak. But it raises important questions about life, love, and letting go. Plus there are those two splendid performances. That’s plenty to merit a viewing. I’m going with three out of five.

(This review first aired on CNN News18)

May 27, 2016

Cast: Radhika Apte, Satyadeep Mishra, Ankur Vikal, Yashaswini Dayama

Director: Pavan Kripalani

Blending elements of creepy horror, psychological thriller, and black comedy, Ragini MMS director Pavan Kripalani whips up a surprisingly potent cocktail in the form of Phobia. The film is smart and reasonably slick, and benefits considerably from a knockout performance by Radhika Apte, even if the script isn’t always on solid ground.

Apte plays Mehak, a promising artist who’s developed a debilitating fear of stepping out of the house, after a terrible incident returning home in a taxi late one night. It’s the sort of condition that induces panic attacks, leaving one breathless, sweating profusely, and often unable to speak.

So how do her sister and friend decide to help? Well, they move her out of the home she shares with her sister and nephew, and into an empty flat. Because that’s what one needs when one’s sick, right? To be alone, and largely unsupervised!

Now completely by herself in the new house, not counting routine visits from her concerned friend and sometime lover Shaan (an excellent Satyadeep Mishra), Mehak becomes obsessed with the disappearance of the former tenant of the flat, and finds herself seeing things that may or may not exist.

Phobia succeeds where other thrillers peter out, on account of the sheer unpredictability in the manner that it unfolds. Kripalani masterfully plays on the viewer’s inability to decide whether Mahek can be trusted or whether she’s simply hallucinating most of the time. He draws on our sense on suspicion and paranoia again while asking us to consider other characters like Shaan, the creepy neighbor Manu (Ankur Vikal), and Nikki (Yashaswini Dayama), the spirited young girl next door who befriends Mehak. The film has its share of tense moments, and some well-timed jump-in-your-seat scares…but frankly it’s about more than that.

I’ll hold off giving away any more about the film except to say that it rests completely on the shoulders of its leading lady, and that Radhika Apte is in top form. Alternately fragile and fierce, she chews into the part, at once embracing Mehak’s contradictions and humanizing her complexities. It’s a nicely nuanced performance and Apte makes it look urgent and spontaneous.

I found myself chuckling at the end of the film, which is not usually the response one tends to have to a thriller. But Phobia is no standard thriller. I’m going with three-and-a-half out of five. Don’t miss it.

(This review first aired on CNN News18)

May 20, 2016

Cast: Aishwarya Rai, Randeep Hooda, Richa Chadda, Darshan Kumaar, Ankur Bhatia

Director: Omung Kumar

It isn’t merely a coincidence that Aishwarya Rai’s most memorable work has been in Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s films, her theatrical, heightened style of performance generally complementing his operatic filmmaking. In Sarbjit, directed by Omung Kumar (he incidentally served as art director on two of Bhansali’s films), the actress works herself up into a lather – all flared nostrils, bloodshot eyes, and flailing arms – to play Dalbir Kaur, the sister of Sarabjit Singh, who toiled away tirelessly over two decades hoping to secure his release from a Pakistani prison, where he was eventually killed in an attack by prison inmates.

Alas, Omung Kumar is no Bhansali. He cranks up the melodrama, but fails to deliver a coherent, riveting experience.

The matter of Sarabjit’s real identity has been a contentious one. Pakistan has repeatedly said he was an undercover RAW agent responsible for bomb blasts in Lahore and Faisalabad. His family has insisted he was an innocent farmer who accidentally strayed across the border while drunk. Told from the perspective of Dalbir, the film is a straightforward story of injustice and struggle. There are no grey areas here, and zero objectivity.

Sarabjit, played by Randeep Hooda, languishes in prison for 23 years – from 1990 to 2013 – and the actor’s transformation from a would-be-wrestler to a skeleton of a man, rotting away both internally and on the outside, is deeply affecting. As a man on death row, unable to fully grasp how he found himself in this situation, Hooda internalizes the helplessness and despair of Sarabjit to great effect. It’s a haunting performance that stays with you.

But the film puts Aishwarya’s character Dalbir in the driver’s seat. We watch as Sarabjit’s sister repeatedly chases after ministers, leads hunger protests, and campaigns relentlessly for her brother’s freedom. Aishwarya commits to the role, sacrificing vanity for her art, seldom letting her amazing beauty distract from the character. Too bad she’s required to scream and shout and weep copiously to express her anguish; the shrillness does her no favors. In quieter moments – like one in which Dalbir can’t bear to part with her stillborn baby – the actress shines.

It’s a shame the incredibly talented Richa Chadda gets very little heavy lifting to do here as Sarabjit’s loving but diffident wife Sukhpreet, who is left to mostly raise their two daughters, and stand by Dalbir as she moves mountains to negotiate her brother’s release. There is feeling even in Richa’s decidedly deadpan performance, but she gets only one scene, late into the film, to really show her chops.

Unlike the director’s last film Mary Kom, whose over-simplistic script never provided a broader perspective on key issues related to the protagonist’s journey, the screenplay of Sarbjit (by Utkarshini Vashistha and Rajesh Beri) reveals how the tense political relationship between India and Pakistan and repeated terror attacks on India impacted Sarabjit’s case. There is nuance and sensitivity in the portrayal of ordinary Pakistanis too, and a case is made against illegal detentions on both sides of the border. Still, the writers can’t resist the usual jingoism, and some easy jabs at our neighbors, particularly an angry outburst from Dalbir about their tendency to backstab.

One of the most moving scenes in the film is a reunion between Sarabjit and his family in prison; I found my eyes welling up during this bit. Not everything else is as convincing and effective, however. The matter of Dalbir’s marriage – her breakup, and sudden reconciliation with her husband – is never clearly explained, neither is the exact role of a Canadian Human Rights group that is fleetingly referred to. We are told the man actually responsible for the blasts that Sarabjit has been implicated for, is found and arrested in India. But that story thread is never adequately explored. Structurally too, the script is flawed, with flashbacks and song sequences routinely breaking an occasionally compelling narrative.

In many ways Sarbjit feels half-baked and wanting. But the performances – particularly Randeep Hooda’s – keeps you invested in what’s on the screen. It’s not a perfect film, but there is enough to appreciate here. I’m going with a generous three out of five.

(This review first aired on CNN News18)

May 13, 2016

Cast: Arvind Swamy, Himanshu Sharma, Aman Uppal, Ekavali Khanna

Director: Tanuj Bhramar

By all accounts, coming out can be hard in a society still fixated on archaic concepts of what’s normal. All of us know a friend or have heard of someone who has struggled to let his or her parents, friends, or partner in on their closely guarded truth. Most of those stories tend to involve at least some drama.

In Dear Dad, co-written and directed by Tanuj Bhramar, Arvind Swamy plays Nitin Swaminathan, a husband and father of two who decides to drive his teenage son from their home in Delhi to his boarding school in Mussourie, intending to use their time together to tell him the truth about himself. Understandably, it’s too much to take in for Shivam (Himanshu Sharma), who acts out in all the typical ways, and wishes things could go back to being the way they were.

It’s an interesting premise on paper, but the script unfortunately isn’t adequately developed. We never really get a sense of why Nitin has decided to come out at this exact point in his life, or that it’s because he’s tired of living a lie. A scene in which he makes the confession to his mute, ailing father feels contrived and labored, as does his outburst to Shivam which fails to pack an emotional wallop.

At only 90 minutes, the film still feels unmistakably long because there’s not a lot going on here. A sequence in which Shivam seeks out one of those all-knowing babas hoping to find a cure for his father’s condition feels tacked on for the purpose of providing laughs, but it doesn’t work. A big problem with the film is that Arvind Swamy, the charming star of Roja and Bombay never lets you forget that he’s ‘acting’. The camera loves him and it’s brave of him to take the role, but it’s an affected performance, and a result it’s hard to be fully invested in the character. In contrast, young Himanshu Sharma has a natural presence and performs without inhibition. He’s instantly easy to relate to, and likeable despite his tantrums.

Dear Dad is a well-intentioned film that wants to make some crucial points. But it’s weighed down by clunky writing, and a tendency on the part of the filmmakers to try too hard where subtlety might have worked better.

I’m going with two out of five.

(This review first aired on CNN News18)

May 06, 2016

Cast: Sunny Leone, Tanuj Virwani, Nyra Banerjee, Ninad Kamath, Khalid Siddiqui, Kanwaljeet Singh

Director: Jasmine Moses-D’souza

One Night Stand starring Tanuj Virwani and Sunny Leone is basically Fatal Attraction with a ki & ka spin. So after a no-strings-attached roll in the hay, a pair of perfect strangers return to their respective lives, until the man becomes obsessed and goes all Glenn Close on the poor woman.

Urvil (Virwani) has a loving wife, a promising job, and an insatiable appetite for casual flings. Yet he can’t shake off the memory of that one passionate night with Celina (Leone) in Phuket. When he tracks her down, he discovers she has no place for him in her life. Hell hath no fury like an idiot scorned.

Writer Bhavani Iyer and director Jasmine Moses-D’souza raise some interesting questions about our prejudices when it comes to sexual freedom and the politics of cheating. Why are we outraged when a married woman seeks out a little something on the side, but tend to brush off the same behavior by men, saying it’s in their nature to cheat. Why can’t a woman have sex without any feelings – is that the sole prerogative of men?

It’s an interesting prism from which to view a frankly predictable story, but the film itself is awfully dull. The plot offers nothing of any interest beyond its feminist perspective, and the acting is embarrassing. Sunny Leone is unquestionably beautiful, but she overuses what appears to be a set of stock expressions throughout the film. Surprisingly the love scenes too are missing any real heat. Still she does better than her co-star Tanuj Virwani, who is raw and presumably too young, too lacking in maturity to pull off his role. There’s virtually no chemistry between any of the actors or so much as a hint of flair in the performances. It leaves you feeling like you’re watching amateurs trying to put up a school play.

At 97-odd minutes, One Night Stand moves briskly but fails to lift off above the ground. Going to the movies is about feeling alive, and you’d imagine a film about an illicit affair would at least keep you interested in how things pan out at the end. No such luck here. You’ll be craving the comfort of your home. I’m going with a generous two out of five.

(This review first aired on CNN News18)