Review: 127 Hours

Director: Danny Boyle
Cast: James Franco
Rating: ****

Perhaps the only thing more astonishing than Danny Boyle’s telling of this story is the fact that it’s true. Aron Ralston (James Franco) is an engineer who sets off alone on a hiking trip to Blue John Canyon without informing anyone. But things don’t go as planned when, after an accident, he finds one arm bizarrely trapped under a boulder.

The story is well-known, told in several TV interviews and an autobiography, Between a Rock and a Hard Place. It makes the director’s job harder. There’s no climactic suspense to work towards. No shock to evoke at the moment Ralston decides to hack off his arm to save himself after a five-day ordeal. If anything, there’s an uneasy anticipation throughout of that very moment. Yet, 127 Hours doesn’t just document the pain, the sense of impending death and the desperation of a truly brave man. It also manages to entertain.

Most of the film is shot in one cramped location. Boyle breaks it up with occasional flashbacks and expansive shots of the canyon. For the most part though, it’s just Ralston looking into the camera and talking. It doesn’t sound exciting, but Franco brings to the role an amazing ability to emote using just facial expressions.

Ralston, we learn, is a practical man. After chipping at the rock for a while, he realises it’s causing it to settle even more, so he abandons it. His understanding of inevitable death isn’t dramatic either. He simply records his struggle on a handycam, leaving his parents a memoir. His calculated effort to document things borders on the obsessive. So after five days, when he does manage to sever his arm, after breaking the bone deliberately, and sawing it off using a ‘made in China’ multi-tool, he has the presence of mind to take a picture. If we had been witnessing fiction, we would have blamed the director for going overboard here. But Aron Ralston exists. And he still treks.

It’s the incredible story of an incredible man. And it’s told skilfully. Boyle is far from the mad, crowded world ofSlumdog. Yet he is in his zone, capturing pain, suffering and the fundamental human instinct of survival. You feel Ralston’s loneliness, his desperation, you laugh with him as he displays a sense of humour under ironic circumstances, comparing his urine (that he will have to consume after water runs out) to Sauvignon Blanc. What you don’t possibly feel is his pain; but yet you grimace with him.

And when you walk out, you feel happy to be alive; for once, you don’t mind the crowded streets of Mumbai, even if the people around are strangers. Rarely does a film manage to do that.

- Sarit Ray

This review was originally written for gqindia.com (Click here to see...)

Review: The Green Hornet (2011)

Director: Michel Gondry
Cast: Seth Rogen, Jay Chou, Christopher Waltz, Cameron Diaz
Rating: *

The shortest review of The Green Hornet would simply have to read: rather random. The comic superhero genre in Hollywood is becoming a bit like the ‘90s Bollywood formula film (with better costumes and no Govinda, of course). It sells, so everyone wants to make one. Alas, Michel Gondry (the man who directed the sublime Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and the hilarious Be Kind Rewind), we discover, is no Christopher Nolan. And I’d be really surprised to see The Green Hornet get a sequel.

You’ve come to expect any movie with Seth Rogen to be funny. What you don’t expect it to be is tedious. The Green Hornet lines up all the set pieces of a classic superhero movie and tries to run them down with a bowling ball. You have a self-serious-superhero-meets-frat-boy in Britt Reid (Rogen); a role reversal between the bumbling front man and the punching-kicking-weapons-building Man Friday/side-kick (Jay Chou as Kato); even a mockery of the homoerotic bromance between the two (“He is my platonic friend,” says Reid). It works till a point. Before it degenerates into CGI sequences and randomly picked fights where a lot of glass is broken and entire labs and archaic press offices (Who has a printing press at the office anymore?) are trashed.

The source material is from a 1930s radio show that was adapted into a TV show that ran for a single season in the ’50s. The highlight of that show was Bruce Lee’s introduction to Western audiences as Kato. He became so popular that it was marketed as The Kato Show in Hong Kong. Gondry’s version gives Kato no such scope. Sure, he dominates every fight sequence, beats the hell out of Reid in a scene and rides a custom V-Rod Harley. But he is short-changed by Reid’s histrionics, long dialogues and general buffoonery. Cameron Diaz as the on-off secretary Lenore Case is nothing more than a cameo. The funniest act is by Christopher Waltz as the villain with a funny Russian name (of course), a bad sense of style and a worse sense of humour. He totes a double-barrel pistol and delivers corny lines with a straight face.

Some things in the film are cool, but are as insignificant as the leaf Kato manages to shape on the cappuccino foam, or the door-mounted gun on the classic superhero car.

Overall, it’s half-baked-slapstick-meets-masked-vigilante-exploits. And while the 3D doesn’t give you a headache, it doesn’t add value either. In the end, you’re left wishing you actually were Rogen in The Green Hornet (with his garage full of cool cars and gadgets). That way, you’d at least have had some fun.

- Sarit Ray

This review was originally written for gqindia.com (Click here to see...)