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

November 22, 2019

Cast: John Abraham, Anil Kapoor, Arshad Warsi, Pulkit Samrat, Ileana D’cruz, Kriti Kharbanda, Urvashi Rautela

Director: Anees Bazmee

When a film’s title so brazenly announces its sensibility (or the lack of it), any criticism about its nonsensical nature feels pointless. So Pagalpanti, directed by Anees Bazmee is just that – nearly two-and-a-half hours of brainlessness. But that’s not the problem. The problem is that Bazmee, who has also co-written the film, doesn’t try anything fresh or original. If you are going to make a mad film, pull out all the stops for heaven’s sake. Pagalpanti never does. Don’t get me wrong – it’s way too long and there’s a lot going on. But it feels like a lazier, cheaper, recycled version of Bazmee’s earlier films.

John Abraham stars as Rajkishore, who is the walking-talking embodiment of bad luck. Misfortune follows him everywhere. He can’t hold down a job for this reason, and any business he touches inevitably burns to the ground. One such failed enterprise in partnership with his friends Jaggu (Arshad Warsi) and Chandu (Pulkit Samrat) ends up with the trio deep in debt and left with no choice but to work for gangster brothers-in-law Raja (Saurabh Shukla) and WiFi (Anil Kapoor).

I couldn’t explain the rest of the plot even if I tried, because there isn’t one. Set for no good reason in London, this is a busy film, and every few scenes we’re introduced to new characters. There are rival gangsters (Zakir Hussain and Mukesh Tiwari) plotting to take down Raja and WiFi, there is an uncle and a niece (Brijendra Kala and Ileana D’cruz) in pursuit of Rajkishore for the money he owes them, there is Raja’s pampered daughter (Kriti Kharbanda) who falls for Chandu, there’s also Urvashi Rautela playing a woman whose job is to pretend to be a ghost in order to scare away trespassers from her boss’ property, and – believe it or not – there’s even a character played by Inaamulhaq that’s modelled on fugitive diamond merchant Nirav Modi.

For the most part the script finds the flimsiest of reasons to cram as many characters in a scene as possible. The jokes are pedestrian, and the gags have no novelty whatsoever. A chandelier falls on a character’s head, cars fly in the air, ram into each other, or simply explode, straight out of a Rohit Shetty film, and at one point, inspired no doubt from Total Dhamaal, that other brainless comedy from earlier this year, a bunch of lions wander into a scene. It’s clear that Bazmee will try anything. He even throws in a patriotic angle for what it’s worth. The stink of desperation can be smelt from a distance.

Of the cast, expectedly Saurabh Shukla, Anil Kapoor, and Arshad Warsi – all actors with solid comic timing – make the most they can of the mediocre material. A word also for John Abraham who sportingly plays along with the ‘lunkhead’ stereotype. In one bit, he rattles off a long dialogue without a hitch, even as others in the scene are visibly surprised and break into cheers. It’s a small moment that works because the actor owns the joke.

These are small mercies in an overlong, derivative film that fails to exploit the potential of what its own title promises. The madness feels laboured, where’s the inspired lunacy? I’m going with one-and-a-half of five for Pagalpanti.

(This review first aired on CNN News18)

November 22, 2019

Cast: Lima Das, Arghadeep Barua, Neetali Das

Director: Bhaskar Hazarika

For anyone that’s harbouring a taste for the unusual, the excellent Assamese film Aamis may be the best thing on the menu. Directed by Bhaskar Hazarika, the film explores appetites, cravings, desires and morals, until it all blends into a dangerous, thrilling cocktail. Watching the two people at the centre of this film exchanging meals that they’ve lovingly cooked for each other, I was reminded fleetingly of The Lunchbox. But in a clever twist, Aamis moves far away from that tender romance.

Hazarika, who has written the film too, presents us with daring ideas, frequently venturing into dark, even twisted territory. The result is a film that shakes you to the core, even while taking you on a tantalising visual journey.

Nirmali and Sumon are strangers drawn to each other over their shared love for eating unusual meats. Nirmali is a pediatrician in Guwahati; married, with a young son, and whose husband is often away for weeks in remote villages, researching diseases. When he is home, he’s a self-righteous bore, rarely listening to his wife, consumed by his “important” work in the villages. Nirmali is lonely and ripe for companionship when she meets Sumon, a PhD student younger than her, who’s researching meat-eating traditions in the North East.

The two set off on a shared culinary adventure. Over delicious meat dishes and conversations, they are drawn to each other. They quickly fall in love, but are mindful of how society may frown on their relationship. They can more freely explore their feelings in the food that they eat; in the meals that Sumon prepares. But their love for the forbidden takes them down a dark path. To reveal any more would be to spoil the suspense in this wildly unpredictable film.

What one must acknowledge is that Hazarika crafts a narrative that starts off like a sweet romance. Lima Das and Arghadeep Barua are first-time actors, and they bring a shy, fresh energy to their characters Nirmali and Sumon. But as Aamis freefalls into the bizarre, the music and the visuals take on more sinister tones. There is a lot of meat eating; the food shots are lovingly composed. The film suggests that just like we all have different tastes and appetites when it comes to food, we also have varied moral palates and desires. Nirmali, for example, is judgmental of her married friend’s casual affair, repeatedly stressing that she is yet to even touch Sumon. Aamis also looks at love under a microscope, revealing its tiny details, its beauty and its ugliness.

Both written and directed with extraordinary skill and insight, the film seizes your attention as it unfolds, and then leaves you pondering its themes long after the lights come back on. Be warned, it’s not for the squeamish; you’ll need a strong stomach to take it in. Still, I recommend that you make the time for it.

I’m going with an easy four out of five for Aamis. Bhaskar Hazarika reveals a solid filmmaking voice with this staggeringly original film that leaves you with many questions and yet delivers an incomparably satiating experience.

(This review first aired on CNN News18)

November 22, 2019

Cast: Mu Ramasamy, Nagavishal

Director: Madhumita

In the charming new Tamil film KD, Karuppu Durai is an 80-year-old man, weighed down by sorrow. Just as he wakes from a coma, he hears his children planning to kill him through a form of euthanasia practiced in his village. It makes the old man leave his home behind and run away. But the day that Karuppu Durai becomes KD, he starts shedding his insecurities and his sadness and sets out to embrace life. It all has to do with meeting a street-smart, 8-year-old orphan Kutty, who nicknames him KD, and teaches him to be ‘jolly’ like him.

To watch KD is to be reminded of a whole bunch of such bittersweet films – Pixar’s animated gem Up, Takeshi Kitano’s Kikujiro, even the Jack Nicholson-Morgan Freeman starrer The Bucket List. The film’s premise is straightforward: an old man regains his zest for life when he takes a journey with a child who helps him tick off entries on his bucket list. But director Madhumita infuses a refreshing touch of originality to that familiar set up…like KD’s sheer gluttony for mutton biryani or his boisterous enthusiasm for Tamil superstar MGR. There’s a lively comic thread, especially through Kutty’s acerbic one-liners. This is a child who talks as if he’s far older than his years, and this is the rare instance where that isn’t irritating; it’s cute.

You’re also transported to scenic, rural Tamil Nadu and its village life, making you want to set off on a road trip yourself, not unlike the odd couple in the film. Madhumita lucks upon a terrific cast, with the excellent Mu Ramasamy playing KD, and Nagavishal playing the little tyke Kutty. The script does subsequently veer down a predictable path, but the tone remains upbeat. It’s one of those sweet, life-affirming, feel-good films that leaves you with a big smile on your face.

Sometimes that’s exactly what you need at the movies. I’m going with three-and-a-half out of five for KD.

(This review first aired on CNN News18)

November 15, 2019

Cast: Sidharth Malhotra, Tara Sutaria, Ritesh Deshmukh, Rakul Preet Singh, Nasser

Director: Milap Zaveri

In interviews leading up to the release of Marjaavaan, Milap Zaveri has said it was born out of an angry place inside him. Having watched it I can tell you the anger is contagious. Marjaavaan is a lazy, cynical, cash-grab exercise disguised to look like a movie. It feels like it was made not from a script but from a checklist of Hindi film clichés and tropes from the 80s and 90s. Milap is credited as the writer and director of the film, but there’s little evidence of whatever writing or directing that’s supposedly gone into it.

Sidharth Malhotra stars as Raghu, the trusted right-hand man of a water-mafia don named Anna (Nasser) who took him in when he was abandoned as a child and raised him as his own son. This has led to a lifetime of resentment from Anna’s birth son Vishnu (Ritesh Deshmukh), a three-foot ball of hair and fury. Vishnu, who resembles a shrunken version of Chewbacca, has it in for Raghu; he’s constantly plotting to humiliate him or to eliminate him completely.

All of this unfolds in a basti in Mumbai, a sort of Wasseypur-like badlands where gang wars routinely break out in the street, innocent people are killed in broad daylight, and the police always shows up late. The characters in Milap’s films are ‘types’ and they have all the depth of a potted plant. So Raghu kills people on Anna’s orders but we’re never allowed to forget that he’s basically an empathetic and ‘progressive’ gangster who helps old women and stands for communal harmony. Rakul Preet Singh is Arzoo, your standard hooker with a heart of gold, which means she must stand on the sidelines and watch the man she loves, lose his heart to the ‘virtuous’ girl. Which brings us to Zoya (Tara Sutaria), a mute girl from Kashmir who wanders into Raghu’s orbit; the sort of angelic heroine who exists in a script only as a catalyst to trigger a change in the hero.

I could tell you what happens next, or you could just watch the trailer – they’ve given it away themselves. The second half spirals into a revenge saga with the sort of twists that your six-year-old could easily predict. Watching Marjaavaan, the stench of creative bankruptcy is hard to miss. There’s nothing fresh by way of story or treatment, only one good song stands out in an album crammed with lazy remixes, and throwback tropes like clap-trap dialoguebaazi get very tiring very quickly.

The weight of this mess is too much to carry even for Sidharth Malhotra’s pumped up shoulders. He’s earnest as Raghu, especially in the emotional bits, but action scenes in which he vanquishes ten bad guys at once look unconvincing. Salman Khan he is not.

I came away from Marjaavaan bored and exhausted. It’s literally a film with no perceivable merit, and one that begs two key questions: How did this film get made? And why are we being taken for a ride?

I’m going with one out of five.

(This review first aired on CNN News18)

November 08, 2019

Cast: Ayushmann Khurrana, Bhumi Pednekar, Yami Gautam, Saurabh Shukla, Seema Pahwa, Javed Jaffrey, Abhishek Banerjee

Director: Amar Kaushik

Ayushmann Khurrana, who’s cornered the market when it comes to playing flawed, insecure men with confidence issues, continues his winning streak with Bala. This time he’s playing a young man dealing with premature balding, and the film uses that premise to make a case against judging people on the basis of physical appearance.

Ayushmann is Kanpur resident Balmukund Shukla aka Bala, thus named for his thick, lustrous hair at birth. In school his wavy tresses ensured his popularity with the girls; he even mocked his bald teacher in class. But karma appears to have caught up with Bala who, at 25, is losing hair every day, and growing more and more desperate. There’s no potential remedy he won’t try; no ‘nuska’ he won’t give a shot…including oils and eggs, and a mixture of cow dung and bull semen. When everything else fails, he reluctantly goes with a wig. Director Amar Kaushik mines these moments for big laughs, but Ayushmann conveys Bala’s vulnerability with heartbreaking precision. Even as you laugh, you can’t help feeling for him.

This is, in fact, the biggest strength of Niren Bhatt’s winning screenplay, which gives us scenarios and moments that are both entertaining and authentic.

Amar Kaushik, who last directed Stree, perfectly captures the sights and sounds, and rhythms and feels of Tier II towns: the accents, the family banter, the casual moments between friends, the obsession with Bollywood. In one of the funniest bits in the film, the three of them just hanging out casually, Javed Jaffrey and Abhishek Banerjee playing Bala’s two best friends, break into Amitabh Bachchan imitations. Terrific stuff.

The other masterstroke is Yami Gautam’s character Pari, a Tik Tok star and sometime model from Lucknow who briefly enters Bala’s romantic orbit. Yami plays her as a ditzy but always likeable figure, and gets two of the best moments in the film – one in which she learns Bala’s truth and responds with understandable shock and horror, and another in which she explains candidly why looks matter so much to her and why she can’t resign herself to Bala’s ‘shortcoming’.

But the problem is that the filmmakers aren’t content giving us merely one case study to make the larger point about our prejudice towards people based on their physical appearance. So they bung in the character of Bala’s dark-skinned childhood friend Latika (Bhumi Pednekar), who’s grown up mocked and bullied because of her complexion, which is hampering her marriage prospects now. You can’t tell if it’s a case of sheer ignorance or convenience that the makers equate the agony of balding for men with the experience of being a dark-skinned woman in India – however well meaning the parallel may be, it’s just not the same.

The decision to cast a lighter-skinned Bhumi over an actress with the required complexion reeks of hypocrisy, and discredits the film’s very message. And the decision to practically lather Bhumi in dark face and body make up is misguided and completely distracting. It’s a shame because she’s a very talented actress, and she turns Latika into a confident, spirited character. In fact, I wish there was more of Latika woven organically into the plot, simply because Bhumi plays her with such vim. Latika’s scenes with Bala benefit from the comfort and the ease that Ayushmann and Bhumi clearly share, possibly from having made two films together before. Unfortunately Latika exists only to drive home the message.

That, for me, is the film’s only black spot (pun unintended). For the most part Bala crackles with sharp dialogues, Ayushmann’s winning mimicry of Bollywood stars, especially Shah Rukh Khan, and of course the charming ensemble that includes Saurabh Shukla, a moustache-sporting Seema Pahwa, Dheerendra Kumar Gautam as Bala’s younger brother, and again, Abhishek Banerjee and Javed Jaffrey as his best friends.

Supported very ably by his two leading ladies, Ayushmann Khurrana cuts a sympathetic figure as another not-instantly-likeable loser. Watch how he tears into his father for passing down the baldness gene. Never understating the troubling blackface of Bhumi’s character, the truth is that the film is consistently enjoyable. I’m going with three-and-a-half out of five for Bala.

(This review first aired on CNN News18)