Movie Review: Hawaizaada

Hawaizaada claims to be the story of Shivkar Talpade, a Maharasthrian scientist in the 1890’s who supposedly built the world’s first unmanned aircraft, almost a decade before the Wright brothers. 

Hawaizaada should have been called ‘Hawe me zyada’, because it takes a ton of creative liberties to dole out a completely fictional story using a real person. That is still permissible, because most historical movies seldom follow facts. What isn’t acceptable is that Hawaizaada is the most excruciatingly boring movie in recent times.

Directed by Vibhu Puri and starring Ayushman Khurana as Talpade, Hawaizaada is well intentioned for sure – it’s just a simple crowd pleasing love story set to the backdrop of a historical invention. Boy meets girl, girl loves and leaves guy, guy invents the airplane – no foreseeable harm, except for one thing: the treatment. Sample these:

A clerk with the intention to help build the plane musters up all his dramatic range and bellows ‘Ye Britishers hamare pair baandh ke rakhenge, humein rokenge nahi udne se’.

Khurana’s Talpade madly bellows ‘Mi khooni ahe’ (I’m a killer) over and over again in a bout of guilt.

A plane, that looks like a prop from early 90’s Indian TV takes off to the roaring (and by that I mean eardrum shatteringly loud) rendition of Vande Mataram as onlookers wipe tears in awe.

The plane itself is constructed on a gigantic ship on a Mumbai shoreline. And there are British officers yelling ‘Bloody Indians’ every few minutes.

Hawaizaada is so over the top and operatic it makes Sanjay Leela Bhansali seem like Kiarostami. Everyone, literally everyone, overacts. Khurana, generally a likable actor, flails his arms, wildly mouthing hammy dialogue that is too serious for his own good. He also makes strange comical faces for the ‘lighthearted’ scenes. Pallavi Sharda does a cartoonish rendition of Meena Kumari, spectacularly stumbling at every attempt of a serious dialogue. Mithun Chakraborty wears a wig that is only less hilariously terrible than his mugging performance as a ‘quirky’ scientist. The cop in the film speaks in a weird anglo Indian accent. The rest talk and behave in an exaggerated manner, as if they’re in a bad children’s film. Even the horses in the film make extra grunts.

And yet, despite having a tone so loud and overwrought the film doesn’t move a single muscle in your body. No matter how hard director Puri tries to make the film scream at you, he somehow only manages to bore you to near death.

Apart from the tonal and performance issues, the film also suffers from one other tiny little problem – it doesn’t make any freaking sense.

a) The protagonist’s mentor builds a plane on a ship instead of on the ground. No explanation why. Then when the plane is fully built on the ship, it automatically finds itself on the ground, far away from the ship to be tested for takeoff.

b) Khurana’s Talpade is supposed to be an adult sized manly man who’s flunked so many times he’s still in 6^th standard. Yet he somehow gains the smarts in a matter of a month to build the world’s first airplane.

c) Then when the plane is finally being built over a period of two years, the kid (Naman Jain) who helps out Talpade stays the same height and build.

d) Plus we get a Muslim extremist/freedom fighter saluting Talpade with a Vande Mataram.  

e) Talpade’s mentor (played by Chakraborty) designs a Batsuit. No really – the suit that Batman wears in The Dark Knight. In 1895. And we see Khurana flying around the ocean wearing the Batsuit in eye-rollingly tacky CGI.

f) Not to mention the blatant attempts at emotional manipulation, and the asinine attempts of legitimizing Hindu mythology with a fictional story, in megadicebel loud jingoistic tones, complete with patriotic songs as BGM. This is a fictionalized story of a man who attempted to make the first plane, why is it shoving nationalist pride down our throats? How can you feel proud as Indians, if the film in question is centered on a fictional Indian man? Are we supposed to believe that a Marathi mulga flew around in a Batsuit in Mumbai and no one filed for patent? Doesn’t matter, the filmmakers say, just drop your intelligence, pick up your tutaris and wave the national flag around. 

The cherry on top, however, is the fact that despite the painful two and a half hours runtime of a film about the world’s first plane, we’re never shown the plane actually being built. It’s bad enough that everyone in the film is either singing or dancing or romancing or hamming instead of making the damned plane, but it’s infuriating that they don’t even show the plane being made. One moment Khurana is sharpening his pencil passionately, or taking a gander at his ruler, the next moment hey presto – the plane is ready. This happens over and over again – no mention of how the plane was built, because clearly the filmmakers didn’t know either. And that’s only because 99% of the story is fictionalized.

The awkward tone of the movie makes you wonder whom it was made for. There’s too much romance, too little adventure for children, and it’s too foolish for adults. Puri attempts to make the film with a sense of wonder - childlike, regrettably he manages to render a film that is childish.

(First published in Firstpost)

Movie Review: Birdman

Growl.

It’s me. Birdman.

How did you end up here.

This place is horrible. Smells like malls.

The cheap, pseudo sanitized, plasticky nature of the thrills. The crummy, emotionless texture of the narrative. The dead eyed one-note characters. The over the top acting and visuals.

This is not entertainment. This is robbery. And snuff. And you pay for it every single week, week after week. You champion commercial blockbuster cinema. You’re the problem.

Fuelling a kind of cinema that caters to the lowest common denominator. You should be ashamed of yourself.

Lying on your sofa-facing TV, with a tub of poisonous snacks, feeding your ugly shapeless potbellied body more calories than the budget of these films. Feeding your vacant mind with flashy images of robots fighting each other or Adam Sandler cracking dick jokes with his friends.

You’re pathetic.

Every two months a great indie or an arthouse movie shows up, and you get a chance to redeem yourself. But you never do. You don’t even know what indie means. You wouldn’t know arthouse if it squeezed you by the unmentionables and screamed its name to your face.

You don’t watch a movie unless it’s got a big star or a popular auto tuned item song with a skimpily clothed actress gyrating lasciviously for you. You don’t watch a movie unless it harks back to the 80’s, where women are treated like objects and the men dance like unwashed coked up monkeys. You don’t watch a movie unless it’s got a superhero in a drag costume blowing up buildings in a suburb after spending two hours whining about his daddy issues. The louder the explosion, the bigger the girth of your crotch. The younger the heroine, the bigger the Michael Bay box office.

You’re an embarrassment to humanity. You’re a scourge to cinema. 

Face it. You don’t watch challenging films because you’re afraid. You’re scared to death that your tiny little brain, already fried by the years of blockbuster meals, won’t process anything that’s not made for toddlers. You’re as stupid as the movies you watch. The movies are as stupid as you. You and movies are the couple from Gone Girl. You deserve each other. Even bums know the difference between caviar and a happy meal, but you wouldn’t. Your taste buds reject anything that isn’t made of cheese.

You know I’m right.

You only love blood. Or action. Not talky, depressing, philosophical bullshit.

And your sheer lack of effort to challenge yourself as a person kills the real talent.

Listen to me. You were once not stupid.

You did watch that Kieslowski movie on TV during that afternoon and you kind of liked it. You dug the offbeat style of the narrative. You relished the character in that film. When was the last time you saw a movie for the characters. You only watch movies because they’re just extended versions of trailers on YouTube. The three minute trailers that give away every damn thing in the movie except for the end credits. 

You’ve got a chance to do something right. You’ve got to take it. You can go back one more time and show me what you’re capable of.

Birdman is in theaters this Friday. It’s got Michael Keaton in one of the most memorable cinematic performances of all time. It’s got Edward Norton playing himself. It’s got Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s signature balance of powerhouse performances and tremendous narrative. It’s got Emmanuel Lubezki’s mind-boggling visuals. It’s got a drummer signifying the world between reel and real. It’s got a pretentious newspaper critic who gets his posterior slammed. And the whole film looks like one spectacular long take.

It’s a movie about you and me. It’s a movie about how you’ve disappointed me, and about how you’ve failed cinema and cinema failed you. It’s also about choosing the easy allure of expensive comfort and settling for mediocrity, versus having the balls to step away from your comfort zone and gaining some self respect. And it’s all rendered as a brutally black comedy.

So get your lazy buttocks off your couch. Shave off that pathetic goatee. Get some vitamins. Drive to the cinema. If you find a movie better than this I’ll clip off my wings, bathe in batter and offer myself on the platter at the nearest KFC. You can then eat me.

But if you choose to not take the effort, I will fucking eat you. And then defecate you on the poster of the next Rohit Shetty movie.

(First published in Firstpost)

Movie Review: Baby

Neeraj Pandey’s films are a mixture of old school Bollywood formula, slickly modern execution and occasionally intense suspense that doesn't skimp on social commentary and bombastic tones. His films don’t have clueless idiots with walkie talkies pretending to be commandoes. They have reasonably realistic depiction of police work and ludicrous ‘holy cow that was awesome’ thrills.

His latest venture Baby is another perfectly outlandish and white knuckled action thriller - a seemingly intelligent but cleverly mindless piece of well-oiled escapism that delivers several crowd-pleasing moments of action mayhem. And Pandey does it in such style and a breakneck pace that one can't help but enjoy the ride. Sure, most of the plot points in Baby come dangerously close to the utter stupidity found in films like Holiday, and various action beats will get your eyeballs rolling, but it’s very entertaining. It’s also a rare piece of event cinema - because how many Akshay Kumar movies turn out to be anything besides awful?

Baby is supposedly based on real life missions and characters, but the disclaimer before the movie mentions that all characters and events in the film are fictitious. It’s probably Pandey pulling the prank that the Coens did in Fargo, but more on that later.

We’re introduced to the grave and grim voiceover of Danny as Feroze Khan, the chief of a super-secret-undercover-counter intelligence-rapid action-surveillance savvy-first encounter-assault recon-I spy-antiterrorist unit named Baby. Feroze tells us that Baby has been the most successful force against Pakistan based terrorism, and since 2008 it has dismantled several terrorist attacks in the country. The film chronicles Baby’s final mission, starring Akshay Kumar as Ajay chasing Kay Kay’s Kasab-like escaped terrorist Bilal Khan. Ajay’s hunt for Bilal takes him (and us) through seedy streets in Bombay, the bylanes of Turkey, the mountains of Nepal, and the desert sand of the Saudi Arabia. Also in the mix is a nutty, India bashing, hate spewing Mullah Maulana Mohammad (played by Pakistani actor Rasheed Naz), a not so subtle derivation of LeT’s Zaki ur Rehman Lakhwi.

If you thought Special 26 seemed threadbare, Baby ups the body count and delivers the goods when it comes to gritty action, non-stop thrills, mood and style. What mainly works here is the sense of urgency and Pandey’s ballsy choice of weeding out the unnecessary bullshit. Our hero sticks to the mission instead of veering out for a few item numbers, and even though he’s larger than life he remains in a fairly realistic mode, doing fairly believable (for Bollywood standards) things. This is a mainstream film but there is no slo mo bullet time rubbish. There’s some interesting hand-to-hand combat, and Pandey somehow manages to still make all the grittiness and realism work on the commercial level. It’s quite refreshing to see a film that caters to its target audience and at least tries to not insult it.

There’s not a dull moment here, save for one hopelessly horrible song in an equally awful love track (Pandey did the same in Special 26 as well). The love track is thankfully short and we’re thrown right back into a cocktail of bombastic chase scenes and espionage stuff. To fill the rather large 140 minute runtime there are enough catchy sequences, and also the unintentional hilarity of head-scratchingly stupid moments that stretch the material beyond the realm of plausibility:

Bilal makes a daring escape from the police van in broad daylight, in the middle of a completely deserted Marine Drive, after leisurely shooting three cops and walking away. Anyone who’s been to Bombay knows that the only time you’d find a deserted main road is during the Rapture.

There’s also a scene where Feroze explains to the CM how Pakistani terror organisations are breeding home grown terrorists in India, much to the CM’s shock. One would imagine the CM would be well aware of the most basic security threat to the country. I presume Pandey actually uses that scene to render the message to the Akshay’s usual audience.

Speaking of which, Akshay deserves credit for choosing such a project and making it work. He’s got his usual cocksure swagger, his impressive athletic prowess and he manages to restrain himself pretty well during the dramatic beats. He even hurls a few one-liners in hilariously passive ways. If only he’d stopped himself from giving into his desire to display his jumping abilities.

Adding some much-welcome layer to a very standard character, Taapsee Pannu is rather fun as Ajay’s team member who kicks a lot of ass during her mission. Her violent encounter with Sushant Singh’s shady businessman makes, very crowd pleasingly, the first case of women empowerment of 2015. Kudos also to Pandey for delivering action scenes that are visually slick, cohesive and also narratively consistent. Most desi films lazily do quick cuts to cheat their way through so it’s nice to sit back and watch the onscreen tension unfold.

A rewatchable thriller can spark conversations about how unexpected some scenes were, but most of the conversations following Baby will consist of how true the film actually was. On one hand we’re expected to simply take everything at face value, assume the anti terrorist unit and the mission in the film are real, and on the other hand we're also made to digest the vast amount of very obvious creative liberty. It’s the self-contradictory narrative that also plagued D Day and Madras Café. So no matter whether you like the film or not, it’s hard to deem Pandey a thought provoking filmmaker because Baby seems a lot sillier a few hours after you see it. It’s right to deem Pandey as a smart commercial filmmaker then, because Baby is a film that exists for the singular purpose of rendering two and a half hours of slickly crafted and frequently outlandish thrills. And just like Ajay Singh himself, the movie doesn't stop until its mission is complete. Just plug some cotton in your ears though, the music is loud enough to wake up the dead.

(First published in Firstpost)

Movie Review: Dolly Ki Doli

Some will call Dolly ki Doli the best Sonam Kapoor movie as of now. But what those people are saying is that Dolly ki Doli is better than I Hate Luv Stories, Mausam, Players and Bewakoofiyan. It doesn’t add up to much of a compliment, even if Kapoor is such a beautiful person.

In Abhishek Dogra’s debut film Dolly (as played by Kapoor) is part of a con gang that finds suitably stupid eligible bachelors, gets them married to Dolly, who mixes sleep medicine in the suhaag raat doodh and makes off after robbing them dry. One of her gang members (Mohd Zeeshan Ayyub) who generally plays the brother is miffed because he digs her. One of her victims (Rajkummar Rao) is miffed because he still wants her. One of the police officers on the case (Pulkit Samrat) is miffed because he wants revenge against her.

If this all sounds a bit vague and meandering, that's because Dolly Ki Doli is precisely that. The thing is, wherever the meandering narrative turns towards, there’s something interesting to look at. Rao is this hardcore Jatt softened into a weepie after nursing his broken heart. Rao is such a natural he can make you like anything he appears in, even if the material is way below his talent level. One of the victims’ mother is Archana Puran Singh, who brings the house down as the hilariously witchy, crass and self centered Punjabun mother. Singh’s boisterous bitching makes it really hard to suppress your giggles. Also bringing on the guffaws is Varun Sharma as the quintessential Delhi buffoon desperate to please a pretty girl. The funniest moment in the film is when he’s getting beaten with a shoe by a fellow Dolly victim.

Plus there’s the always likable Manoj Joshi, Rajesh Sharma and Brijendra Kala in tiny supporting roles, lending their bits of assured niceness that they generally do.

The problem is all the disparate goodies rise and eventually crumble because of the weak foundation of their root - the central character of Dolly who is not only terribly written but also severely underperformed by Sonam Kapoor. Whether Dolly is happy, or sad, or scared, or upset, or frustrated, or angry, or tipsy, there is literally no change in Sonam’s personality. It’s only the volume of her voice that changes. Her presence is simply too insubstantial to support an entire story.

It doesn’t help that her character has no backstory whatsoever – we never get to know why she’s into the con game, where she’s originally from or why she has no interest in a real relationship. One presumes that such things have to be excised to keep the runtime short, but it takes away a large slice of the film’s quality. Moreover, when the best thing you can say about a movie is that its runtime is just 110 minutes, you're not exactly talking about a great piece of filmmaking.

There are also a ton of truly astronomical plotholes in the movie. Dolly’s gang manages to dupe more than a dozen grooms and their respective families in the film, yet there is not a single picture of the gang in the wedding photos to show to the police. The film often tries to make us forget such logical leaps of faith by asking us to simply go with the flow of the series of the small, light hearted comedic moments. But then it also renders three completely out of place songs, one truly nonsensical celebrity cameo, and a couple of seriously ham handed attempts at ‘emancipation’. A few characters bicker, and they suddenly forgive each other. The cons are so contrived and the ending so predictable you’ll wonder why the characters didn’t go ahead with their actions an hour earlier.  Come to think to it, none of it makes any sense whatsoever. Including the thakela nature of Malaika Arora’s item number. 

Though Dolly Ki Doli doesn't qualify as an awful movie – it’s not tacky looking, and the lingo is fairly funny - it does, regrettably, end up as forgettable fluff and a hugely wasted opportunity.

(First published in Firstpost)