Movie review- Madras Cafe

John Abraham may not have had a very noticeable career as a Bollywood actor but he is going great guns as a producer. Madras café is his second production venture, and he has chosen his theme and his team well (The first one being Vicky donor’, that did very well for itself).
The movie is about the separatist rebel ethnic Tamils in northern Sri-Lanka and their militant
outfit- the LTTE. Although all the key names have been changed in the movie- LTTE is referred
to as LTF and its chief Prabhakaran as Bhaskaran, the decoy is all too evident. The LTTE as of
now is practically non-existent after the death of Prabhakaran, but the sensitivities involved in
he issue can be gauged from the fact that the TN theatre owners have refused to screen this
movie. Not that the film shows any deviation from the truth, and not that LTTE has been shown
in poor light either. In fact, the movie begins with the portrayal of the sorry state of affairs of the
ethnic Tamils in Sri-Lanka. John Abraham plays an Indian military officer, who is chosen by
RAW to carry out covert operations in Sri-Lanka in an attempt to contain the LTTE by hook or
crook. He works independent of the overt Indian attempt in form of ‘Indian peace keeping
force’- the IPKF- a brain-child of the then prime-minister- Rajiv Gandhi (referred in the movie
only as the prime-minister or the ex-prime-minister). While the IPKF fails in its mission and has
to beat a retreat, John Abraham unearths a plot to assassinate the now ex-prime-minister Rajiv
Gandhi (the movie shows the PM to have had resigned his post following IPKF’s failure,
whereas the truth is that he had lost his post to VP Singh following Congress’s defeat in 1989)
The rest of the story is RAW and John Abraham’s attempts to ambush the LTTE’s plan to
assassinate Rajiv Gandhi, and how they fail to prevent the killing in Sriperambadur.

The most attractive part of the movie is the way in which John has been portrayed as a real
RAW agent. Most of the audience would want to believe that military agents and spies are like
James Bond or agent Vinod- completely infallible, heroic, brave-heart, lady charmers and have
the strength of a hulk who can fight thirty villains at one go. John’s character Vikram is a brave
man, but that is all. He has his weaknesses- he is shown to fail; he is shown to be unable to
protect his wife from being murdered, and finally he is shown to fail to prevent his Prime-mini
ster’s assassination. But despite being all this, he comes across as someone who wins the
heart of the audience. In short, he is the real hero, a real human hero.

The female lead is played by Nargis Fakhri who plays a war correspondent for an international
periodical. She helps John in getting leads into the LTTE cadre. Second female lead is Raashi
Khanna, who plays John’s wife, but frankly there’s not much to her role. All she has to do in the
movie is to lament her husband’s constant absence from home to dangerous assignments.

The other important characters are those of the Bala- the LTTE mole in the Indian agency in Sri-L
anka; Anna Bhaskaran, the LTTE chief, and Siddharth Basu, the RAW chief. The character of
Bala is played by a Prakash Belawadi, and he has done his part very well.

Shoojit Sarcar has been brilliant with his direction, so has been Kamaljeet Negi with his
cinematography.

A wonderful movie and a must watch.
My rating- 3.5 on 5

Movie review- Bhaag Milkha Bhaag

It is said that a book should never be judged by its movie. Likewise, I think a movie should never be judged by its theme. Milkha Singh has always come across to me as the ‘flying sikh’ who won medals for India in Asian games and Commonwealth games, and how he missed by a whisker a medal in 1960 Rome Olympics. Therefore I expected the movie to highlight his triumphs; to tell us about his chief rivals at the games, and how he managed to overcome them to bag the medals. Quite frankly, I was looking for a ‘Chak De India’ kind of flavor in Bhaag Milkha Bhaag. Therefore, I was quite disappointed by the movie. A set of generous media reviews and a decent crowd at the multiplex on a rainy July Monday evening reinforced further my hopes from the film. But not only was the film excruciatingly long, it was boring in most parts, and I found myself looking at the watch waiting for the interval much before it actually happened. I had expected the movie to portray Milkha the ATHLETE and his quest for excellence in the track and field. But alas, the movie is about Milkha the MAN who suffered the pains of the partition (So what, millions others did too, and we have scores of movies on the subject), his struggle for existence post-partition including his knife-wielding days, his days in the army, his love life, his one-night stands, AND also his achievements as a star Indian athlete. The parts that depict his real winnings on the tracks at the international level are run through as a brief documentary somewhere in the dying stages of the three hour long movie, added with a final little-known hurray in which he is shown to defeat an arch-rival Pakistani athlete in Pakistan- a time-tested method of whipping up a patriotic fervor among the audience. But alas, that too somehow failed to leave a mark. The movie, therefore, should be seen as a biography of Milkha the man who happened to be an athlete. The narrative is confusing with the story jumping from Milkha the victim of partition, Milkha the lover, Milkha the army man and Milkha the athlete.

The movie could have been excellent had Milkha’s past as refugee from Pre-partition Multan been kept brief, for example there was no need to show his sister being made furious and noisy love to by her scoundrel husband in a refugee camp tent shared by Milkha and two other unknown boys who wear knowing smirk on their faces as they hear the couple copulate. There was no need to show the gory killing of his family as a fall-out of Partition. There was no need to show a prolonged quest by Milkha for his lady love Sonam Kapoor. In short, many lengthy portions of the movie could have been either done away with completely or could have been shortened.

Most people have been very impressed by the six-pack body that Farhan Akhtar built for his role including his bulging biceps marked with engorged veins and a bulky set of pectorals across his chest. However, there is a technical flaw that all of us seem to overlook. A sprinter does not need a strong upper body. On the contrary, a heavy upper body would impede his run on the tracks and that is why most runners strive to keep themselves skinny and make their leg muscles strong. But we can accept that for the sake of the movie it was essential to show the hero with a six-pack.

Performances have been good. Farhan looks perfect for the job but I would have preferred Ajay Devgan for the role. Sonam Kapoor and other actors did not have much to do though Sonam looked good for a change. However, one is surprised to see Sonam playing a role of a 1950s girl wearing gaudy lipstick and an eye-shadow. Other roles are character roles and the best one is played by Divya Dutta, playing Milkha’s elder sister.

Music by the trio Shankar Ehasaan Loy is good, and the number ‘havan karenge’ is catchy, and has been choreographed beautifully.  Another song that I liked is ‘mera yaar’..

Go and watch the movie only if you are a die-hard fan of Farhan Akhtar.

My rating: 2.5 on 5 

Movie review- TALAASH

Movies are generally divided into genres based on the basic theme of the story- A romantic; a comedy; a thriller; story based on the supernatural and paranormal behavior; action; horror, and so on. Most often, when we go to watch a movie, we know beforehand what genre the film belongs to. Talaash is a film that ideally must be watched without the knowledge of its genre. But because we live in a society where people are so well-connected through the electronic media and social networking sites, that it is impossible to be oblivious of the genre of the film, if not the actual mystery, unless one maroons himself from the world keeping his eyes and ears shut till he watches the movie. I, owing to a few of my good friends on FB, could get an idea about the genre of Talaash, and hence I could not enjoy the movie as much as I would have otherwise enjoyed it. But in the theatre too there were some very extremely helpful gentlemen in our vicinity who kept mumbling future course of the movie and I felt during the interval to bring some action into the whole affair by smacking a few on those gentlemen’s faces. But I refrained eventually considering my frail frame.

Now writing a review of a film without discussing even the genre, let alone the mystery, is a huge ask. I obviously will not be able to say much about the story itself, but Talaash is THE ‘long-awaited-once-in-a-blue-moon-good-movie’ kind of a flick. The story is extremely gripping, and it keeps you on the edge of your seat for most of the time. This is a movie where you hate that the interval happened, and you actually don’t feel like going out for popcorn and coke lest you should miss a few frames of the second half. Aamir Khan is a police officer who is investigating a mysterious and seemingly accidental death of a film star. He is also burdened by the guilt of his only son’s accidental death that he thinks he could have prevented if he were a bit more careful. During the course of the investigations, Aamir meets Kareena Kapoor, a prostitute, who helps him to crack the case because the meager clues leading to the death of the film star go through the city’s brothels. Needless to say, the ‘accidental’ death of the film star is actually not an accident in totality, and the ‘mystery’ in the film is the reason of this ‘accident’. I can say no more about the story itself without spilling the beans.  

The performances are all power-packed. Aamir, as usual, has done full justice to his role as a police officer dedicated towards his duty, and grief-stricken from his son’s death. He looks handsome in his curved-down moustache and cropped hair, but his hair dye is as blatant as it could get. Every time I see an actor trying to look younger by coloring his hair, I remember Naseeruddin Shah, who looks stunning in his silver hair these days. But I guess the story demanded that Aamir had jet-black hair. Even then, the make-up artists could have done a much better job. I have never liked Kareena before, except in Jab we met, but last night I was stunned by the way she looked, and the way she performed her role.  Simply superb. She looked very beautiful; a bit gaudy, but that is understood coz after all she plays a prostitute. An important character in the film is Timur, named after the famous lame king, a shady character who is afflicted by polio, and carries out odd jobs for the touts in the red-light area. Timur has been played by Nawaazuddin Siddiqui, of the ‘Gangs of Wasseypur’ fame. He is a promising actor and I’m sure he will mark a solid mark in the Hindi film industry. Rani Mukerji plays Aamir’s wife, also grief-stricken for the same reason as Aamir himself, and is sans make-up for most of the film, looking plain and simple making you forget how beautiful she looks with the make-up on. She has done full justice to her role too.

Kudos to Reema Kagti for crisp direction. The story, written by Reema and Zoya deserves accolades. It is truly a ‘different’ story, a term that the Bollywood wallahs so much love to use.

Of the tracks, I liked ‘muskaanein jhooti hain’, and ‘jee le zara’. And the music is really good.

  My rating: 4 on 5

Movie review- Raaz-3

Though the censor board does not clarify as to why a particular movie has been awarded an ‘A’ certificate, the reason is most often obvious. It is either too much of violence or sex, or both; or is utterly horrifying.  Raaz-3 must be the first horror movie to have got an ‘A’ certificate for too much sleaze, because horror is entirely missing from this third sequel of the original Raaz that did very well for itself about ten years ago. I have had the chance to watch all three in the Raaz series, and as has always been the case with the sequels in the film industry, Raaz-3 is easily the worst among them all, the first one being the best.  The Bhatt duo has run out of ideas and I really hope there is never a Raaz-4. And as if they knew the amount of real substance that they have managed to put into this one, they unabashedly exploited their nephew Emraan Hashmi’s ‘serial kisser’ image. The only plus point that I saw in the movie was Bipasha Basu. Kudos to her for having managed to look as beautiful as she did in Raaz-1. The less said about the other girl, Isha Gupta, the better. She has neither the looks; the oomph, nor the acting skills. I am still racking my brains as to how she could make her way into this severely competitive world of movies. The Bhatt family has never been reputed to be in the casting couch business. I won’t write the outline of the story here as I have been doing in my past reviews as some of the readers have complained that I end up telling too much. I’ll only say that there is a lot of stupid Mumbo-Jumbo (The worst part is a medical doctor being shown to believe in all this crap); the horror factor is practically non-existent (You’ll perhaps find better horror in one of the weekly horror serials on TV); the numbers are ok, I liked ‘Marhaba’, choreographed very well on Bips. The performances are ok. Bipasha has been the most impressive of all; Emraan has done best in what he is notorious of doing. Isha Gupta has been ‘ugh’. Watch this one only if you are a die-hard fan of either the Bhatts, or Emraan, or Bips.

My rating: 1.5 on 5

Movie review- Shirin Farhad ki toh..

‘Shirin Farhad ki toh…’ is a sweet, soft movie that can only be enjoyed by those seeking some light-hearted comedy, and a bit of a drama. There are no high-flung action scenes, nor there hot romantic scenes (You cannot expect hot romantic scenes in any case with Farha and Boman playing the romantic pair!). There is an appropriate dose of comedy, and with Boman you can expect the comedy to be convincing. But there is a lot of toilet humor as well..you know, farts and all..some even worse stuff so all those who find it ‘ugh’ should be prepared for the ugh..what with Boman running around with the hospital bed-pan full of Farha’s S**T (No, not the reels of Tees maar Khan).

The story is set-up in a Parsi back-ground with every character being Parsi, except a few policemen who were heard speaking Marathi. Boman (Farhad) is a 45 year old single, never married Parsi ‘chhokra’ who is a salesman in ‘Tem Tem’ Bra and panty store (Now how can a full-fledged store sell only bras and panties? A road-side shack is understandable but a store? But indeed the whole store is shown to be stacked with rows and rows of the stuff). Boman isn’t getting a bride for marriage, as is the problem with the community because of the dwindling Parsi population. His mom (played very convincingly by Daisy Irani) is after him to find a girl. All attempts to get him a Parsi girl through arranged matrimony fails because Boman is very honest and every time he blurts out his profession as a bra-panty salesman and other family things that people would otherwise keep to themselves. This turns off all prospective brides. He is very dejected when he accidentally meets Farha (Shirin) in his store who has come to buy a bra. They soon come to like each other but the twist is in the fact that Farha is the secretary in the Parsi trust office, and she has demolished an illegal water tank in Boman’s house built by his late father and so dear to his mom (How can a water tank be so dear. A complete house is understandable, but a water tank?) Anyway, when Boman’s mom discovers that Farha is the one who demolished her tank, she turns dead against Boman’s and Farha’s marriage. Add to that the fact that Farha has a father who has been in coma for many years and she since she has to take care of him, she cannot leave her home after the marriage and hence Boman must become a ‘ghar Jamai’.  The story is about what happens to this pair finally and how.

Boman is a seasoned actor and one of my favorites (His best for me is easily Khurana’s character in Khosla ka Ghosla), and he has done his part extremely well in this movie. And since he is a Parsi himself, he didn’t really need to ‘play’ the part- it came naturally to him. Farha has hopped from being a choreographer to being a producer, director and now acting. She has done her part well too, but her inexperience in acting skills show clearly during the movie.

My rating: 2.5 on 5

Movie review- Ek Tha Tiger

If you are planning to watch ‘Ek Tha Tiger’ because you think of it as a ‘spy-thriller’, you better drop the idea. If you are planning to watch it just because it is a Salman Khan movie,  then  go ahead- it is a typical Sallu film. The promos had made the film look like a Bond-like spy-thriller with lot of action and a bit of romance.  There is a lot of action, a lot of romance but it is far from being anywhere close to a Bond movie.  Salman Khan is a RAW (Research and Analysis Wing) agent who is shown be always on ‘missions’, most often against the ISI of Pakistan, but the story is never about those missions. One would think that with a RAW agent pitted against the whole of the ISI would make an extremely interesting cross-border spy story, but it is not.  

Salman Khan aka Tiger is an unmarried RAW agent working directly under RAW boss Girish Karnad (Mr. Shenoy). The movie begins with Tiger tracking down a traitor in the RAW who had started working for the ISI for money. The scene is somewhere in the crowded streets of Iraq, and after a lot of action through these streets, breaking and damaging local people’s homes and businesses in the process (reminiscent of Bond movies), Salman Khan kills the errant RAW agent and is back in India reporting about it to Mr Shenoy.  Here his conversation with Shenoy reveals that Tiger has never been married and is a dedicated RAW agent, always preferring field operations to desk jobs despite the dangers that come with it. Also, he has not taken a day’s leave from work in the last 12 years. Needless to say, he has never even had a girl-friend either for the above mentioned reasons.

Next, Sallu Miyan is sent to Dublin to ‘keep an eye’ on a Dr. Kidwai, a scientist supposedly developing war-related technology that could help Pakistan. Kidwaii is played by Roshan Sheth (Remember him? he played Nehru in Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi). Now with a seasoned player like Sheth in it, this plot seemed as if it would thicken. But it does not- the Kidwa- being-a-scientist-secretly-helping-the-Pakistani-nuclear-cause fizzles out and never concludes. Sheth appears in a few frames later but that is only frivolous. The real reason for Sallu being in Dublin is to make him meet Katrina Kaif (Zoya, addressed as zee by friends), who is an apparent ‘house-keeper’ to Kidwai (I felt so envious of the old fart Kidwai for having a house-keeper like Katy baby). But Katrina is actually an ISI agent (Don’t say ‘awww’ for me revealing this ‘suspense’ because it is hardly one) but by the time both Sallu and Katy baby discover that they are what they are, they are already in love with each other. Needless to say, Katy’s ISI colleagues discover the real identity of Sallu and they get after him. There is a lot of action here as he fights them and finally returns to return to India, both of them deciding that duty is far more important than love and they cannot betray their nations and love their enemy. But Sallu accidentally meets Katy again on another assignment in Istanbul where they both discover that they still have the fire in them for each other. They decide to chuck their respective agencies and elope to some remote place to start a new life. They successfully escape to Havana, Cuba, where they are soon discovered and once again both ISI and RAW are after them to chase them and kill them/arrest them for their blasphemy. The rest of the movie is about this chase, and they are shown finally to escape to a secret location where they ‘live happily ever after’.  

Regarding actors and performances, Saalu you know how he is…he is the same except the fact that he has shown signs of aging on his face in this movie..his hair is so blatantly dyed jet black that it appears out of the place. I remember Sallu looking at his best in Baghbaan, but he has lost most of the charm since. Katrina is a big disappointment. God knows what she has done to her lips; she looks all puffed up. At places her face appears to have been stung by hundreds of bees. Gone is the charm that she oozed in ‘Singh is King’. As a couple, Katy and Sallu look un-fresh. Girsh Karnard has played his part well, as has Ranvir Shenoy (Of Khosla ka Ghosla fame, Konkana’s real-life husband), who plays yet another RAW agent shown to be Sallu’s shadow/associate. The rest of the actors don’t have long enough roles to make an impact. Roshan Sheth should have refused this role unless he was running short of money. Kabir Khan’s direction is good, as is the photography. One good thing about such films is that they take you on a world tour, traveling thru several countries and by putting in songs, they take you sight-seeing. I waited and waited for the number ‘Mashallah’ but it never came..I guess they were to play it with the credits in the end but we never sit thru the credits. I liked one another number ‘Jaaniya’. 

My Rating: 2.5 on 5

Movie review- Gangs of Wasseypur

Cutting short my Sunday afternoon siesta, when I dragged myself to the multiplex to watch ‘Gangs of Wasseypur’, I had not expected the hall to be full. It was not only full, it comprised almost exclusively of men, most of them in large groups. I could sense my wife getting uncomfortable as the movie progressed, because it was replete with all conceivable content that it takes to qualify a movie for an ‘A’ certificate- Violence, sex, and gaalis. And these days watching a movie in expensive multiplexes does not guarantee decent audience, and the theatre continuously rang with vulgar laughter, cat-calls and whistles.  Thankfully we had left our daughter at home owing to the ‘A’ certificate.

I had high hopes of Anurag Kashyap, and this was the first of his directorial ventures that I saw. I have been meaning to see Dev D for long, but haven’t been able to do so.

Even if the best of the cooks sets out to bake a cake with all the right ingredients, the cake can still get spoilt by over-baking. This is exactly what happened with Gangs of Wasseypur (GOW). Anurag had the perfect story-line, a set of brilliant actors, and he himself is a good director, but he simply overdid everything, including the length of the film. While watching a film if I find myself waiting for the interval in the first half, or waiting for the movie to end in the second half, I declare the movie as boring. And this happened with GOW in both halves. So, I was rather surprised to find the movie boring when everything about it was good- The rawness of rural Bihar; the ruthlessness of the gangs; the violence; the sleaze and the works. Then what went wrong?  It was simply a case of too much of everything. The story spanned over three generations, and I don’t think there was a particular need to do so, since the truth about the scenario in mafia-ridden rural Bihar could have been driven home in a single-generation story as well, with interspersed short flashes into the past. There was nothing drastically new happening in any of the generations, and on the contrary, there was added unnecessary confusion with a plethora of characters getting added with each generation. The violence was simply too much, nauseating, in fact. Murders were committed through the movie practically every ten minutes, and the lead actor (Manoj Bajayee) was shown murdering at least a dozen people with his own hands, ruthlessly cutting down people at times, choking bathroom drains with their blood and body-parts. There was no need for such garish display of violence, and certainly not in this quantity. The sleaze was in form of an explicit adulterous sex scene involving Manoj Bajpayee and Reema Sen, who plays his mistress, and also in the form of overt dialogues about sex between Bajpayee and his wife. As expected, GOW was full of cuss-words, the worst sounding ones heard regularly in the bad-lands of north India. In order to show the crude reality of the gang-ridden towns of Bihar, Anurag left no holds barred, and I dare say he even exaggerated a bit.

The actual story can be summarized in just a few lines: Though the tale spans through three generations, it is all about rivalry between two major groups of Wasseypur. The fight is for power, control over the local coal mafia, and all other illegal activities like kidnapping, murder, protection for money etc etc. Manoj Bajpayee is the middle generation of the Khan family, which is in constant fight with the local political family of the Singhs- mainly Ramdhari Singh, who uses another local Muslim group of Qureshis (butchers) against the Khans. One major flaw in the film is that though the rivalry between the families starts in 1941, in the generation of Bajpayee’s dad Shahid Khan and Ramdhari singh, Ramdhari Singh does not age much even when Shahid Khan’s grandsons become goons themselves in 2004. Meanwhile, Ramdhari Singh’s family is shown to be still stuck in the second generation. Another shortcoming is that police and administration is practically non-existent in the whole movie. Except for a few scenes where the lower-rung policemen are shown behaving timidly before the gangsters, it appears that law is practically non-existent in rural Bihar. It is agreed that there is utter lawlessness in the Wasseypurs of India, but it is not that the law-keepers don't exist. In fact, they have their own sinister role to play in the police-politician-gangster nexus. Therefore, while no one expected the good cops to be around, the rogue policemen are badly missed in this story. 

There is no flaw in the performances, and all actors have done their parts extremely well. The direction is bang on and the cinematography is beautiful. Still, the movie would have been more watchable if everything were a bit toned down, including the length. All in all, watching this one wasn’t a very good experience for me. I wouldn’t recommend this one at all, and is a strict no-no for the weak-hearted. The numbers with folk touch are good and I plan to include some of them on my playlist.    

My rating: 2 on 5