Movie Review: Oldboy

Before I talk about the quality of the movie, I need to tell you something hilarious about the Oldboy remake.

If you’ve seen the Korean original (if you’re reading this, I’m sure you have) you’ll know that the entire film hinges towards that one sex scene. The shock value that the scene exudes during the final reveal was one of the primary things that made Park Chan Wook’s 2003 movie so famous. The film releases in India without the sex scene because it was axed by the censor board. There are no blurs, no edits, just a big old chop – it’s completely removed and the sex is not even implied. It’s amusing, and sad. And it’s not surprising, given the regressive attitude of our censor board. And it’s a shame that the distributors didn’t submit the film to the revision committee, because if they had the scene would’ve most probably remained intact.

That said, Spike Lee’s Oldboy is yet another gratingly unnecessary, clumsily realized Hollywood remake of a foreign classic. The film pretty much takes a giant dump on everything that we loved about the original film. There was a lot of fuss made about how this version was going to be closer to the Manga than the Korean film, but sadly that was all a big fib. The writing is credited to Mark Protosevich but the film doesn’t even try to do anything new with the material. Even some of the shots are exactly the same and you’re left wondering why Spike Lee is channeling his inner Sanjay Gupta. The film is in fact much closer to Zinda than it is to Oldboy. The former had excised the big twist to suit the faint hearted desi audiences, the latter trims down a couple of plot points to dumb it down extensively. As a result the remake is a hot mess that is neither for those who loved Park Chan Wook’s movie, nor for those unfamiliar with it.

Everything about the film is half-assed, from the writing to the direction to the acting by Josh Brolin. The one take hammer fight is reduced to a cringe inducing terribly choreographed schlokfest that makes the one in Zinda look better in comparison. Before being imprisoned Brolin’s character is supposed to be pudgy, but Brolin is clearly very muscular and he makes a hilariously bad attempt to hide his abs by jutting out his stomach to make it look like a paunch. Elizabeth Olsen’s character in the original hung out with the hero because someone else was controlling her actions. In the remake, the girl simply hangs out with a random stranger because she feels compelled to. The villain in the original was a classy badass with a terrifying motive to torture the hero, in the remake he’s given a scar on his torso to compensate for his cheesy standard issue back story. The whole thing really feels like an Asylum remake of Oldboy with an aftertaste of the live octopus that Oh Dae Su swallows in the original.

(First published in MiD Day)

Movie Review: R.. Rajkumar

In one excruciatingly long scene of R Rajkumar, Sonu Sood sits with a bunch of his gunda cronies and jovially sings ‘I am your Bull. You are my shit. Together we are Bullshit’.

Never before in the history of Hindi cinema has a film so astutely relayed its intentions from the makers of the film to the viewers. Which is why I need to emulate a song from R Rajkumar to elucidate its overall quality: Gandi film, Gandi gandi gandi gandi gandi film.

Directed by Prabhudheva, R Rajkumar secures the honor of justifying the fact that Bollywood can be full of surprises – just when you think you’ve seen the most annoying film of the year, up pops an even more mind shreddingly irritating one. This movie also earns the prestigious honor of being the only mainstream film of the year that I’ve walked out of (and I’ve sat through Grown Ups 2).

Every limitation of any movie can be forgiven if it makes you laugh. R Rajkumar has only one such moment, when you realize that Bollywood is attempting to make money by trying to make 90’s Telugu movies. At all other times the film is a thoroughly laugh-free, idiotic, juvenile, maddening, moronic, outdated gulag of guano that galls and irritates with every passing second of its interminable stream of pig swill pretending to be humor. The movie was originally called Rambo Rajkumar, and I believe Stallone enforced a ban on the name not because of copyright infringement but because he didn't want Rambo to be associated with something so knowingly wretched.

Here's what happened - a couple of years ago when Rowdy Rathore hit 100 crores a producer realized 'Holy crap! What a magician Prabhudheva is! Someone get him to make another Simbly South style film, hire a fledgling actor and get it done asap! We have a December weekend to exploit!' This theory explains why the plot of the R Rajkumar is reminiscent of 80's Bollywood and 90's Telugu cinema, and that's a huge slap in the face to film buffs. Here's all you need to know about the story - hero joins villain's gang as henchman, both hero and villain like the same girl, hero will do anything to save the girl. That's it. And that was the plot of Once Upon a Time in Mumbai Dobara as well, and the girl in that movie was also Sonakshi Sinha.

The trio of actors involved are: Shahid Kapoor, who we know has better cinema sensibility than this (hint: Kaminey), Sonakshi Sinha who looks like she is extremely grateful for any acting gig that she can get, and Sonu Sood who is both completely devoid of comedic talent and utterly uninterested in anything happening on the set. The love-lust triangle between the three is crass and asinine and utterly unbecoming of a film releasing in 2013. You can't even credit Prabhudheva for trying to evoke ancient mysoginist desi B-cinema because instead of parodying the genre he actually takes it seriously. After two hours of this junk you feel like leaping into the screen and do to the filmmaker what Lisbeth Salander did to her lawyer.

The saddest part of all this is Asrani, who at his age and experience, is handed cringe inducing pathetic lines, and made to tear his clothes and stand in his undies for 'comedy'. His performance here is the absolute zenith of career humiliation, and is used to complement the donkey carnival show of shameless, unfunny and obsolete skits on 'massy hero vs villain'.  You also get choice lines like 'mere mooh mat lagna, mai sehed ke liye haanikaarak hoon', along with a barrage of 'comedic' sound cues. If this is what you want to see in a movie, call me. I have a couch at home. We'll talk about your life, your priorities, your cerebral harmony and what is best for you as a modern civilized human being. I can help. I promise.

(First published in Firstpost)

Movie Review: Bullet Raja

It sounded like a cool pairing – the darkly fun Tigmanshu Dhulia, coming off Paan Singh Tomar and Saheb Biwi and Gangster Returns, in collaboration with Saif Ali Khan as a pulpy goonda. It pains me to say that despite a few isolated fun moments, Bullet Raja is a stale and forgettable movie.

I love Tigmanshu Dhulia. I love that he'll go to any extent to craft a funny line, and he really knows how to construct Virat Hindu Villains. Having said that, his latest movie has a crossroad. On one hand you could call Bullet Raja better than most Simbly South remake style movies because it avoids the grating visual tackiness of that genre. On the other hand you could call this film the worst Dhulia flick because it takes a clever concept and does nothing with it.

Here the hero Raja is an Uttar Pradesh ka goonda, a bearded, henna dyed, Bullet-riding, chick magnet macho man. Raja sucks at love, plots revenge, and well, let's just say Bullet Raja doesn't exactly work as a throwback or as a dark comedy thriller. And as pulpy entertainment it fares even worse. The movie is called Bullet Raja and the hero never does anything awesome with his Royal Enfield or his revolver’s bullets. Saif plays the cocksure swaggerer, with Jimmy Shergil as his bestie, together they are a UP goonda gang and they wander from place to place, perpetually doing gangstergiri. On paper this should work, but it doesn’t. Saif and Shergill are forever mumbling and snoring their way through the movie, and it doesn’t help in making us care for this unexciting duo. There’s Ravi Kishan who dresses up as a woman while having sex with another woman in a saree - and stuff like this fails to both funny and pulpy. Every UP-wale-daakoo character waddles onto the screen and snoozes through the set pieces.

At times we'll be offered doses of Dhulia’s clever one liners, but they’re offset by the wearisome look of the film. Lensed in bland shots (in which some characters speak directly into the camera with grim faces), Bullet Raja is one hell of a dry looking movie. Combine the dreary visual style with a deafening tone that pretty much reeks of Prabhudeva’s masterpieces, this movie is the textbook definition of a stillborn action comedy. It has no rhythm or panache or any trace of the naughtiness found in Dhulia’s earlier films. There's a superficial backbone about Raja trying to find a job and being forced into goondagardi but it exists only as a coat hanger on which to hang a random and disjointed series of skits. Toss in an excessively horrendous score by Sajid-Wajid and you're looking at one hot mess of a movie.

Did I laugh a few times? Absolutely. There’s a scene where Saif escapes his chaser by jumping through a glass window and people around him stand and clap. Give Dhulia a word document and put Saif on the camera for two and a half hours and you're bound to find a few giggles from the footage. But the laughs delivered in this film are painfully few and far in between. For the amount of entertainment that Bullet Raja has to offer I'd say it's more worthy of a lazy TV watch. Once all the boring ‘backstory’ bits are dealt with in the first half you'll be treated to a short series of dialogue baazi that doubles as action sequences – Saif vs Chunky Pandey, Saif vs Raj Babbar, Saif vs Vipin Sharma. And after Sonakshi Sinha’s Bong actress moves in with Saif and Shergill after having met them once, the film gets all deep and serious as if it expects you to find and extract one sincere drop of emotion from these terribly written characters.

Saif struts through the movie under the impression that acting is optional in this movie. We’ve seen what he is capable of in Omkara, and he was pretty darn good in Ek Haseena Thi – he is miscast in this role because he just can’t pull off a showy gun trotting slightly OTT gangsta without going into the farcical zone. As for Sonakshi, after seeing her nuanced performance in Lootera it looked like she was moving beyond the cash grabby roles but Bullet Raja marks her worst performance to date. The very pretty Vidyut Jamwal wanders through the film doing Kung Fu Karate kicks, careful to never take the spotlight away from the camera-hogging superstar hero. And if there's one universal rule of filmmaking it is this - when you get Gulshan Grover in your movie, you better give the guy some good material to work with. Bullet Raja manages to make even Gulshan Grover seem tedious, and for that I dislike the film even more. But it'll take more than one disaster before I wash my hands of Dhulia. Let's just call this one a small mistake and wait for his next great film. 

(First published in Firstpost)

Frances Ha

Imagine if Jim Jarmusch and Woody Allen got together and made a movie. That progeny would be a lot like what Frances Ha is. The film has Jarmusch’s trademark coffee and cigarettes approach to the postmodern psycho-social youth subculture, with Allen’s wonderfully buoyant and neurotic air, along with director Noah Baumbach’s own unmistakable sensitive touch.

Starring Greta Gerwig in her breakthrough role, Frances Ha is for everyone and anyone who would like to gain some perspective on their own life through a film. On that front Baumbach has pretty much made a movie for every twenty-something in Bombay. Gerwig’s character Frances is in her late twenties, and is struggling to get her life in order. Like so many young folks in Versova she chose to take the 'artistic' route rather than the corporate one, and is naturally scuffling to find any firm ground and draft a career. 

Baumbach does a cool job of developing the perceptual problems of Frances’ stagnant life and her inability to achieve any focus or independence. People in their late twenties are supposed to be settled but Frances is unable pay her rent. She struggles to grow up as a person and is so attached to her best friend and roomie Sophie that she is unable to process anything when the latter decides to move out. She has to face the realization of suddenly being too old to date someone in their early twenties. She has to deal with the fact that her close friends are moving on with their lives and leaving her behind. She has to digest the bitter irony of being single while facing the eventuality of her roomie getting married.

The best part is all these seemingly depressing themes are established with humor and Gerwig’s lovable persona and her terrific comic timing. There are plenty of laugh out loud moments to complement the icky sweet and the tear jerking ones. Not to mention the lovely black and white NY landscapes to gawp at.

Gerwig and Baumbach are in a relationship in real life and it’s fun to wonder how much of the film was based on her own life’s experiences. So many of Gerwig's previous movies have been meta, including the mumblecore long distance relationship dramedy Nights and Weekends and the highly underrated Lola Versus. There are very few movies of this genre that have a protagonist which exudes sympathy without exacting kitsch, and Baumbach and Gerwig deserve brownie points for that. It's also a rare movie that ends on a hopeful note that doesn’t feel like a contrived life lesson. The film may be set in New York but the Bombay parallels are simply too obvious, and Frances Ha is really a piece of art for Bombayites who can project their own experiences onto it. It’s their own personal little film.

(First published in DNA)