Movie Review: Blackfish

A trip to the zoo is a delightful experience. We love looking at those animals and taking photos. They seem so happy in their little cages. They seem to like all the attention we give them. We never stop to think that we’re paying to have these animals imprisoned in solitary confinement for the rest of their lives. As humans it is in our disposition to destroy the harmony of nature and profit through the endless torture of other species.

Your guilt of visiting and liking zoos will increase a thousand fold when you watch Blackfish, a disturbing, revelatory film on the dangers of nabbing animals from their natural habitat and keeping them in captivity for our recreational purposes. Although a documentary, the film directed by Gabriela Cowperthwaite plays out like a razor sharp thriller on large smarmy entertainment corporations who abuse ethical boundaries and shoot animal rights to hell.

Blackfish chronicles Tilikum, an Orca who was captured in Iceland and brought to Seaworld, a popular American marine park to entertain audiences by performing tricks. To say that the film makes you loathe Seaworld is an understatement – it will make you cringe in your seat and sick to your stomach with its series of shocking exposes. Tilikum was treated like a milking commodity by the owners of the water park, and he ended up killing a few of his trainers in response. And appallingly, the Seaworld management not only refused to make changes to the way they do their business, but also blamed the victims for their own deaths.

All of that is just the tip of the iceberg and director Cowperthwaite puts together a bunch of searing interviews with former trainers and workers of marine parks who are now disillusioned and recount ghastly details of the underbelly of their industry. The filmmaker also interviews whale hunters who are absolutely disgusted with their own selves for being in a profession that slaughters other species. The details become more and more grim and disturbing as the film goes on, and you keep wondering why anyone would believe that putting killer whales in a tiny tank and making humans interact with them is a great business idea.

Seaworld refused to be interviewed for this film and the reasons are only too obvious. There is some horrific footage, least of which is when Tilikum grabs and drags his trainer to the bottom of the pool out of sheer frustration. If that doesn’t turn your stomach, the footage of hunters throwing a net and separating screaming baby whales from their mothers certainly will. It’s heartbreaking enough to crack open your home’s aquarium and set your pet fish free. 

But this is not a sensationalist manipulative propaganda film. Apart from its substantial research work, Blackfish really rises to greatness for the way it makes a case against keeping killer whales in captivity by establishing the evidence that they are highly intelligent and emotional creatures. To date there are zero reported incidents of killer whales attacking humans in their habitat, and Tilikum was plucked from his family and home and placed in a tank that is the human equivalent of a bathtub to train. Three years ago the brilliant and unsettling The Cove exposed the annual mass torture and murder of dolphins in Japan, and Blackfish is a powerful companion piece to that film.

(First published in DNA)

Movie Review: Prague

Prague has an interesting premise, I’ll give it that. Debutant filmmaker Ashish Shukla and (relatively) newbie screenwriter Sumit Saxena have lots of cool ideas and they don’t want to take the commercial route – and on that front this is a neat little experiment. The film could have been equally fascinating had it not supplanted cool ideas with tacky execution.

Starring the underrated Chandan Roy Sanyal (Mikhail from Kaminey), Prague is a psychological thriller but it merely goes through the motions of a thriller without actually delivering the thrills. It starts off on an intriguing note, and promises some sort of a cerebral exercise about a man who is so caught up in insecurity that his only way to have a relationship with someone is by feeling guilt. No doubt, this is high concept for a desi film, and that an indie film released in theaters, despite having an unsellable story and no big stars is probably triumph enough.

Sadly Prague is not the indie film to lead a revolution, because it’s just not a good movie. One would expect a movie about a man on the verge of a breakdown to be zany and gripping. Unfortunately the film winds up being as exciting as a brochure of Prague. In every scene it feels like the filmmakers used a ‘Moviemaking for Dummies’ guidebook found at a library and missed an opportunity to make a truly great movie with style and atmosphere worthy of its premise.

The problem is that Prague neither caters to the mainstream crowd nor the indie enthusiasts. The former would rue the lack of item numbers and Sallu bhai while the latter would always be 30 minutes ahead of the characters. Any moviegoer who has watched half a dozen psychological thrillers would crack the mystery 15 minutes into the film, and to hang around for two whole hours knowing what’s going to happen next becomes an extremely tedious jaunt. Even formulaic and predictable thrillers can be enjoyable if they manage to invest you into the characters, but Prague fails to do so.  

Sanyal is talented but not particularly interesting here, and he tries too hard, unlike his co-star Elena Kazan (from John Day) who is comparatively effortless. The characters are very poorly written and they turn out to be just as one-dimensional, ludicrous and unconvincing as the events that they are participating in. The dialogues range from wannabe to cringe inducing. In one scene an idealist stoner dude lends some great advice to his friend - 'If you fuck a girl, she may or may not end up with you. But if you mindfuck a girl, she will definitely end up with you'. These gems would probably work in films like Pyaar Ka Punchnama (which Saxena co-wrote).

The only element of the film that offers a welcome break from the dreary, amateurish and clichéd story grafted onto a two-hour ad for Prague is the music (Atif Afzal, Varun Grover). Director Shukla gets all the music montage scenes just right, but every single one of those scenes are so tonally detached that they seem like they belong in another movie. Pity.

(First published in Firstpost)

Movie Review: Elysium

At the end of District 9 the ‘fookin prawns’ promised that they’d come back in four years. That sort of worked as a meta for director Neil Blomkamp because he’s back after the exact amount of time with a new, even more bombastic film.

Don’t get your hopes too high up, because Elysium is not as smart, lean and gritty as District 9, but it is WAY more action packed. It’s the masala entertainer version of sci fi, but done with the insane dedication, passion and artistry that you expect from Blomkamp. If you love science fiction, action films, video games and Matt Damon, Elysium is paisa vasool entertainment. You dig Halo? There’s two dozen references to the game, including the ‘Elysium’ being Halo. You love Third Person Shooters? Yeah Blomkamp has you covered - there’s awesome gunplay, with electrobolt rail guns shredding humans into tiny pieces.

Do you also love a good story? That’s where the film sort of fumbles around clumsily. It’s not that the story is bad, but Blomkamp includes some cringe inducing cheesy flashbacks and Bollywood style manipulative melodramatic scenes. It’s very jarring especially because you walk in expecting a no nonsense taut film like District 9. All of the themes of racial discrimination, social divide and elitist snobbery from D9 are redone in Elysium, but on a much grander scale, and sadly in a ham handed manner.

If you can ignore the three-four instances of inelegant preaching, Elysium is a blast from start to finish. There’s not a dull moment here thanks to the gravelly editing. The production design is incredible, from all the gleaming futuristic hardware of the first world to the rusty crapware of the third world. The robots are so impossibly realistic and fluid you'd think there’s a guy wearing a robot suit. In fact the film looks like a sprawling gigantic $250 million film when its budget is less than half of that. More importantly the film is more rousing, epic and exciting than most big budget films out there. More money doesn’t necessarily mean better action, and Blomkamp demonstrates that beautifully here. When you see two guys mauling each other in exo-suits you realize that this would’ve been the action movie of the year had Pacific Rim not existed.

Sharlto Copley, the protagonist from D9 is a delightfully badass baddie here – armed to the teeth with ammo and even a sword, with no semblance of pity or compassion. It’ll be interesting to see what he does as the villain in the Oldboy remake. Damon is excellent for a variety of reasons. We’ve seen him play the unstoppable assassin fighter in the Bourne films, and he makes an effort to distance himself from that character – he plays an everyman who is forced into firing weapons, and he gets his ass beaten. He wears a strength enhancing exoskeleton later on, but doesn’t become an invincible action hero – he becomes more like Isaac Clarke from Dead Space – a nice touch to make his character more believable.

If you’re wondering why there are so many video game references, it’s because that is exactly what this film is, a video game adaptation, and a damn good one at that. The film is set in 2154, the same year that Commander Shepherd from Mass Effect was born. Young modern filmmakers like Blomkamp grew up playing video games, and they understand what it takes to turn games into great cinema, a feat that Hollywood has failed at over and over again. This makes me hopeful for the upcoming Assassin’s Creed and Duncan Jones’ Warcraft. 

(First published in MiD Day)

Movie Review: Prisoners

Over the past decade Canadian filmmaker Denis Villeneuve has emerged as one of the most fascinating and consistently solid filmmakers of our generation. From the mesmerizing psychological thriller Maelstrom to the gripping shootout drama Polytechnique to 2010’s disturbing Incendies, Villeneuve has steadily become more adept at delving into the theme of a traumatic incident and twisting the knife into its implications. With Prisoners he’s finally found a way to make a commercial film on the subject with big stars.

With a dash of Zodiac, Mystic River and German thriller The Silence, Villeneuve’s Prisoners stands apart from most Hollywood thrillers. It doesn’t follow serial killer tropes and avoids the tactic of morbid imagery for shock value. And yet, the film manages to cause a few knots in your stomach thanks to Villeneuve’s stark, uncomplicated direction.

Hugh Jackman, in the best performance of his career plays a distraught man whose kid disappears from home after a mysterious RV pulls up alongside his driveway. Jackman is bearded, puffy eyed and constantly stringy and you wonder why this man is doing commercial stuff like Wolverine when there is a monster of a dramatic actor hidden in there. The only element in the film that manages to rival his brilliance is Jake Gyllenhaal as the cop investigating the case. The kid from Donnie Darko has come a long, long way and he’s great at hinting towards the demons in his character’s closet.  

Prisoners does something different early on to bring a new twist to the serial killer genre. What would you do if your kid suddenly disappeared and the only suspect is let go by the cops for lack of evidence? Would you just watch helplessly or let nihilism take over you? That’s the path that writer Aaron Guzikowski takes to question the basics of morality, guilt, law and justice, and he does it with stomach turning realism. As Gyllenhaal’s cop sifts through the murky layers of strange basements, creepy clergy and sex offenders, Jackman’s goes through a Dostoyevsky-eqsue breakdown to uncover the truth. There’s plenty of religious symbolism but Villeneuve establishes a chilling moral subtext to it all and lets you make judgments – little details like these is what makes Prisoners so good. And when you veer from feeling hate to pity for the suspect, you know you’re watching great cinema.

Like in Incendies Villeneuve connects various strings together with a neat little bow – even the final scene cuts to black in the most precise possible manner. Cinematographer Roger Deakins absolutely nails the cold, isolated atmosphere here and it goes well with the nearly nonexistent music. Villeneuve’s minimalist, fluff-free approach to filmmaking is refreshing, as is his decision to cast the young Paul Dano as the suspect, whose real life felony is being criminally underrated.

(First published in Mid Day)