Dev OD'ed

Well Not Really! I have always held Anurag Kashyap in very high regard for his visual flair, choice of subject and conceptualization. Somehow between the abstract one could see the man's intelligence, his clarity. His problem, as is with such individuals is ‘hubris’. Somewhere he loses it; over indulging where subtle would have been the best. Yet there is something about him, which tells me he'd be remembered for his cinema.

I have a habit of watching a movie for the merit of its director, so a Tarantino film always merits a watch, a Nikhil Advani film is always a convenient avoid. This rule though changes with Abhay Deol; he is the only current actor who has an amazing knack of picking up different scripts. Scripts that might not please the pundits, but almost always find a cult following. So I set out to watch Dev D for two reasons, Abhay Deol and Anurag Kashyap, two minutes into the movie I found a third. Ladies and gentleman let's put our hands together for the most killer soundtrack in ages. Amit Trivedi has used exceptional creativity in composing music that merges seamlessly with the narrative. There were times when the characters were quite and one could still decipher what was going in their heads. That’s the power of music. Full marks to Anurag Kashyap for cleverly using the 18 tracks very intelligently for character and the story development.

Anyway back to the story, Dev D is a modern interpretation of the novel Devdas, but in a lot of ways it is completely its antithesis. In Dev D the characters are not black or white, the situations are not melodramatic and the tragedy is not tear-inducing. Here life’s a bitch and characters are ‘sluts’. You can see Dev making out with a chick before getting worked up on Paro’s supposed affair with another man. Here Paro is an all abusing female, not ready to take shit from anyone. She is not crying but gyrating on her wedding. Here ‘Chanda’ can speak English in an accent and can turn on a man with her voice. Here Dev uses sex to get over Paro and most interestingly one never gets to know whether Dev truly loves Paro or was he pushed into depression because he thought someone else would ‘do her’ and not him.

Dev D takes Devdas and turns it head on. Especially interesting is the fact that assuming that Dev and Paro would have wanted to get married, there would have been no family opposition. In fact Dev’s father wanted Paro to get married to Dev. Anurag Kashyap cleverly changes the story line to make it a tragedy of the situation rather than the characters. It’s here that he develops pathos. When Paro questions Dev’s manliness, you cringe, cos you understand how it would hit a man’s ego. When Dev enters the brothel you see ‘Maar Daala’ playing on the television. Dev D is about such in-jokes.

Performance wise Abhay Deol has enacted the role quite well, save for certain scenes where he tries too hard. Mahi Gill is exceptional as Paro, while Kalki Koechlin looks very much the character she is portraying.

The only portion which disappointed me was the ending, which looked too rushed and too forced. It kind of killed the built-up to the climax. Even though I liked the positive ending, it did not look too convincing. Leave that aside and Dev D rocks. It is an extremely visceral experience, filled with humor and characters true to life. When one of the side-kicks asks Dev ‘iski abhi tak nahi li aapne sir’, a friend quietly chuckled, probably reminiscing the last time he asked someone a similar question!

Leave Memento alone: Hai Guzarish!

The worst mistake you can do while watching Gajini is to compare it to Memento. It would be as asinine as comparing Sholay to The Seven Samurai. Yes the movie is inspired but it has its own soul to make comparison mindless and a futile exercise in general.

Gajini is a revenge drama with dollops of violence thrown in and some light moments intercepting the non-linear narrative. For a revenge drama to appeal, it is important that the lead character can make the audience feel empathetic to his/her crisis. This can be achieved through a mix of great acting, a ghastly villain, some truly spine-chilling moments and a touch of irony. This is where Kill-Bill made its mark. Gajini does falter on a few parameters, but has enough meat to keep it going for three hours.

Sanjay Singhania is a businessman with dreams in his eyes and heart in his head. A twist in the tale introduces him to the lovely Kalpana. Alas it was not meant to be and she is savagely murdered, while Sanjay is brutally hit on his head trying to save her. Though he survives the blow, he contracts a typical condition called anterograde amnesia short-term memory loss, where he cannot remember anything for more than 15 minutes. How Sanjay gets his revenge with the handicap forms the crux of the movie.

There have been a lot of negative reviews about the movie being over-the-top and masala in its approach. How I see it is, that Aamir Khan was due for a movie which was over-the-top and mad-cap like Andaz Apna Apna. The fine actor in him refused to play a character which he has done before, so he chose to do something which he has never done before. Play a Sunny Deol and more convincingly at that. You can see the actor in him genuinely having a ball. He punches, he gyrates, then he punches some more and then he gyrates some more. The point I am trying to make is that there are certain movies, which are beyond reviews because simply they are expected to be blockbusters. Where you are expected to whistle every time the hero makes an entry, where you enjoy his punches without questioning the logic. And before we talk of expectations which we have from Aamir Khan, the actor, let me tell you that every actor deserves this kind of fun. Amitabh Bachchan did it in Amar Akbar Anthony, Agnipath, Shaan and numerous movies. And we loved it. He fought crocodiles, killed tigers and we looked in awe. The challenge here is not whether a human can do it but it is whether Mr. Bachchan can make us believe that he could do it. And this is where I feel Aamir Khan did really well. So when he punches a guy and his face turned 3600 , I believed in it, reveled in the action and looked in awe. Call me stupid, moron, but there where atleast 150 odd people in the audience who felt the same. I heard no laughter, no chuckles.

Anyway I had a lot of fun watching the movie simply because I didn’t carry the baggage, that some of us might have.

And yes, as I said initially as well, the movie has its flaws, there are a lot of inconsistencies in the movie. I choose to ignore them simply because I see no point in nitpicking when I got my hour’s worth.

So my final verdict is, if you can just sit back and not question every scene, you’ll have fun, because Aamir Khan has carried the movie very well on his shoulder. But if you would want to analyze every scene, question every character and actions, it would be in your best interest to steer clear of Gajini and pick up a DVD of Memento. This is NOT an intelligent movie. This is Aamir Khan genuinely having fun. And this is what he wants us to do as well!

A critique of critcs

The other day I was having a discussion with one of my friends about why we watch movies. Whether they serve any purpose other than entertainment? The animated discussion reached its crescendo when she suggested that OSO (Om Shanti Om for the uninitiated) was stupid and over-the-top, to which my reply was that, it was the first movie in a long time that was blatant on your face entertainment. So what really is the purpose of cinema? We hear so much banter about movies being realistic, reflecting life in all its purity. If realism is what we are looking for then why were the doordarshan documentaries boring?
If we look at movies from the eyes of critics, then we will see them using all sorts of superlatives for movies which imitate life, but are very critical in heaping praise on movies which offer nothing more than pure unadulterated entertainment.
The blog being a critique of critics, I would now like to introduce two very able (??) but very different critics. So ladies and gentlemen, please put your hands together for Raja Sen (Rediff) and Taran Adarsh(IndiaFM)

Raja Sen: Raja Sen writes regularly for rediff, but is very selective in choosing the films he would review. Often made to eat his own words as the movies he shredded to bits become blockbuster. Over-analytical, over-critical, he has a reputation of being quite anti-bollywood. His reviews are a must read for CAT aspirants as he carefully chooses his words and logically tries to analyze every scene, every camera angle. But his predictions are woefully short. He is the second most hated critic, just falling short of a gentleman to be introduced shortly. Still I would say he knows cinema. I end up envying his knowledge, though I fail to understand that why as a critic he fails to understand his audience. Why would he mix and match a bollywood movie and a Hollywood taste. He came closest with his reviews of Jaane-tu and Singh is King, where rather than analyzing the follies, he rightly pointed that the movies do strike a chord, which is kind of the whole point. But I have to admit his reviews are a lot of fun to read, they are a bible in absolutist reviews.

A Raja Sen sample:

Movie: Jaane Tu
Rating: 4/5

Taran Adarsh: The most hated critic of this generation and beyond, his reviews are very helpful, you just have to replace all his adjectives with their antonyms to get the perfect review for the movie. So while Musafir is a 4 star movie, Swades is 1.5, DCH is 2 stars. I have yet to see a person so condescending that he feels that the audience are almost always dumb, looking for cheap titillations. To use a modified Godfather quote “he insults our collective intelligence”. Has a very very limited vocabulary, and freely uses the words/phrases hoi-polloi, old wine in a new bottle, leave your brains at home etal. His reviews, cease to be reviews but turn into futile exercise to predict a movies’ performance based on star-power, director, glitz and gloss. He is notoriously known to apologize for his negative reviews for movies which eventually turn out to be hits (case in point Chak De). Needless to mention his reviews are almost always off-track. And yes, every stars’ latest performance turns out to be the best in his career, whether it is Anil Kapoor in Musafir (now really?) or Amitabh Bachchan in Bhootnath (what can I say?). They say he is the most famous critic, this in itself is an insult to the ‘aam janta’. Let’s hope some better sense prevails and we are relieved of his stupid, inane, wannabe analysis. But I must point out I love reading his reviews, they almost always make me laugh, and as for the rating just subtract his rating from 5 to get the actual rating for the movie. It’s all about the math you see; the most useless piece becomes useful. Oh ya I almost forgot, some of his most memorable lines are “cut the gyan, cut the crap!!” Amazing way to start a review!

Taran Adarsh samples:

Movie: Dhoom 2
Rating: 4.5/5

Movie: DCH
Rating:2/5

I now finally get back to the same basic question. What purpose does cinema serve? My view is simple, if a movie is able to make even one person forget his/her worries and make him/her laugh, cry or dance then it has achieved its purpose. So personally I may hate a movie but if makes my grandmother laugh for even half an hour it is praise-worthy cinema, because it is not about you or me, it is about whoever can appreciate it.
So let us all laugh, cry and dance and enjoy the wonderful medium of cinema to enter into the make-belief world, where we can dance under traffic lights, where good always wins over evil, where the movie never ends till everyone is happy. Let us all decide for our own-selves what suits us the best. A review after all is just a personal opinion and no more.

Taare Zameen Par!

As a critic I find it extremely difficult to write about movies which touch me, cause it is impossible to be detached. You tend to forget the follies and focus on how you loved the movie rather than providing a critique.In the same vein reviewing TZP is not easy, the topic is sensitive, the script quite powerful and the performances quite flawless. But after watching the movie I feel compelled to write about it. TZP is essentially about an 8 year old dreamer who is branded a looser by the big bad world obsessed with results. The story focuses on his plight and how hope in form of a teacher resurrects the kid. Essentially a very simple story, where Mr. Khan excels is the way he has treated the subject, the way everything looks so natural that we begin to laugh and cry with the characters.To lend such credibility to a story is indeed a herculean task. It helps that the songs are spot on and are almost poetic flowing seamlessly through the narrative. Performance wise Aamir Khan as Ram Shankar Nikhumb acts with full honesty and becomes the character with effortless ease. The scene where he looks moist eyed at the disabled is worth his weight in gold. The angst and the helplessness he shows through his eyes makes one feel claustrophobic and bound. Every time you feel SRK is improving Aamir Khan reinvents himself. With Shahrukh Khan you see Shahrukh Khan, with Aamir you see DJ, Ram Shankar Nikhumb or the numerous character he portrays.The show stealer is of course Darsheel Safary as Ishaan Nandkishore Awasthi. With Ishaan, he does a remarkable job in performing a very complex character so effortlessly, that one can't help but marvel. He speaks through his actions, he speaks through his eyes, he is always conveying something. Pain, anger, disgust. His ability to show twisted emotion of feeling the pain yet not wanting sympathy is something very rare to see in someone so raw. His presence is so overwhelming that other characters just serve as fillers. One can just hope that he doesn't randomly pick up movies. Darsheel has immortalized himself as Ishan Nandkishore Awasthi with this one performance.It will be a benchmark performance for years to come. Other characters are well etched and perform ably. The scripts has a few cliches like the painting competition and the final predictable victory but they don't put you off. You are addicted. You don't notice. You are blinded. Even after the movie ended I saw nobody moving, everyone was watching the end credits rolling silently. Almost everyone wiped a tear or two and silently walked out. They must have promised themselves to be a better person,better parents,to be more understanding, to be more human! Do yourself a favour watch Taare Zameen Par. Not tomorrow, but today, not later but NOW! Highly recommended!