Review: Raaz 3

Direction: Vikram Bhatt
Cast: Emraan Hashmi, Bipasha Basu, Esha Gupta
Rating: **

What do film stars with waning mojos do when they fail to win awards? Swig whisky on the rocks and wallow in self pity? Raaz 3’s megalomaniac, mantra-reciting, tacky-costume-wearing heroine – Shanaya (Bipasha Basu) – plays out those clichés, in front of a giant photograph of herself no less, before she seeks out the devil. But instead of the sell-your-soul-for-wishes route, she walks the twisted path – spook out the new girl (Esha Gupta as Sanjana) who’s taking your place. Totally foolproof plan, if there were just two actresses left in the world. Then again, logic and character motivation aren’t really the cornerstones of a Vikram Bhatt directorial. So, the “aatma” called Tara Dutt (a too-much-kohl-wearing Manish Choudhary) agrees to help her for no apparent reason. Maybe he runs a dial-an-aatma service, who knows? After reciting some gibberish that sounds vaguely Arabic, he hands her a jar of evil water that will be Sanjana’s nemesis.

But the water must be given by a “bharose-wala aadmi”. Enter Bhatt boy Emraan Hashmi, who’s made a career out of kissing and effortlessly seducing on-screen babes. This time he is film director Aditya who seems to aid Shanaya in her evil plan in exchange for sex. In one of the most unintentionally funny moments in the film, Shanaya takes her shirt off, stands over him, and with the camera focused on her assets, asks him to look into her eyes. Right.

With the evil water administered, the horror finally begins: Sanjana has nightmares where voices and choking hands come out of the TV (The Ring, anyone?); she is chased by a clown in an empty studio; and a domestic help drives giant shards of glass into her own body. The theory of the water causing hallucinations would be perfectly credible. But logic is killed and hanged from a fan when Aditya also sees the paranormal forces.  

It all goes downhill from there, with love, revenge and blackmail mixed up with aatma-rescuing priests, phone-using zombies (yes, here they speak) and a Matrix-like world of spirits you can go in and out of. At one point, it feels like someone put the script for another Murder sequel in the blender with horror set pieces.

But you might forgive all of this in a horror film with impressive visual effects and scary make-up. Unfortunately, the grunting ghost covered in maggots belongs in a Ramsay Brothers franchise (they had less technical help in the ’80s) and the CGI appear dated. The 3D is up to the mark (it’s not the dark, upconverted variety), but just ends up taking the tackiness to another level, literally.

As usual, Bipasha gets to show more skin than acting prowess, but is startlingly better than Esha, who competes with cleavage but forgets to emote altogether. Add to that every available cliché in the book – Ganpati to the rescue, ganga jal as a weapon – and it’s more likely to scares you away than scare you.

-Sarit Ray

September 08, 2012 

Review originally published in hindustantimes.com (Click here to see)

Review: Gangs of Wasseypur II

Direction: Anurag Kashyap
Cast: Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Tigmanshu Dhulia, Huma Quereshi, Zeishan Quadri
Rating: *** 1/2

Gangs of Wasseypur II is less like a movie sequel, more like the season finale of an ongoing (and admittedly, engaging) TV series. Part I had no real ending. The death of Sardar Khan (Manoj Bajpayee) was the sort of crucial juncture you expect the next episode to pick up from. In Part II, there’s no need for a long-drawn establishment of premise, with characters whose stories play out in fast forward. This one isn’t slow. There’s just less motion blur.

But if Wasseypur I was about Sardar Khan, Wasseypur II is more distinctly about his son and successor Faizal Khan (Nawazuddin Siddiqui). Kashyap’s version of a Michael Corleone is the pot-smoking, Amitabh Bachchan-channelling boy with no aspirations of becoming a gang leader. He looks on bemused, and presumably doped out of his head, as his brother Danish (Vineet Singh) shoots one of his father’s murderers.

His transition to a feared gangster is not fully explained, yet the film kicks into gear as he comes into his own, with new allies and largely old enemies. Nawazuddin revels as the detached don who goes from endearingly funny (as he woos the woman he loves) to scarily aloof (he shoots a man over a slight and coolly walks away).  

In Kashyap’s pulp-fiction version of the Jharkhand mafia wars, violence is fundamental. It’s graphic, easy and often without deliberation. The gravity of death is replaced by an ironical matter-of-factness: the cries of mourning are drowned out by the cheap noise of a brass band. Cinematic realism pervades, not only in the film, but in the minds of its characters: “Everyone has a movie playing inside his head,” says Ramadhir Singh (Tigmanshu Dhulia). The fantasies are of filmi romances and filmi murders.

The significant new character is Faizal’s stepbrother, Definite (Zeishan Quadri). The boy with a bizarre name and a Tere Naam hairstyle is born with a gun in hand, and goes on to aid Faizal on his meandering path to revenge.    

The women have less significant roles than in Part I. They inhabit the fringes – as mothers and wives who in turns egg and console their husbands and sons. But that’s probably as true of the setting as it is of the film.

The movie plays out amid political and financial machinations – illegal scrap metal trading, election rigging – not unheard of in Jharkhand. Yet, it would be a mistake to judge Wasseypur for factual correctness. Kashyap shows familiarity with this world in his attention to detail – the typical Hindi accents, the Ray Ban shades, the pager. But they enhance the flavour rather than the facts. Wasseypur is as much a celebration of small-town India as it is a sinister revenge tragedy. If the subject wasn’t so gory, you’d call it charming.

It ends with a climax fitting for its dramatic characters and storyline – in its guns-blazing, blood-spilling glory, it’s reminiscent of Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction or Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. And with a maniacal smile, Faizal could be Jharkhand’s very own Travis Bickle.

-Sarit Ray 

August 09, 2012

Review originally published in hindustantimes.com (Click here to see)

Ferrari ki Sawaari (2011)

Direction: Rajesh Mapuskar

Cast: Sharman Joshi, Boman Irani, Ritwik Sahore
Rating: ***

Rustam Deboo (Sharman Joshi) is a man you might meet on the streets of Mumbai. He’s the modest Parsi with neatly side-parted hair and round glasses, who wears the Sudreh-Kusti, rides a scooter to work and lives in an old house with an ageing father (Boman Irani as Deboo). He barely manages to make ends meet on the salary of a head clerk at the RTO, yet is honest to a fault – when he runs a red light without getting caught, he finds a cop and insists on paying a fine. It’s the sort of thing only a Parsi would do!

The one extraordinary thing in their otherwise ho-hum life is Rustam’s son Kayo’s (Ritwik Sahore) talent for cricket. Of course, there are a million parents in this country who believe their boy is the next Sachin Tendulkar. The difference is that, within the premise of Ferrari Ki Sawaari, Kayo is the next Sachin Tendulkar who can send a ball scurrying off to the boundary at will.

But Ferrari isn’t really another cricket movie (thank god for that). At the heart of it, it’s an underdog story, with an everyman up against huge odds, that we have come to expect from a Rajkumar Hirani-Vidhu Vinod Chopra script. In both the Munnabhai films, a common, illiterate gangster overreaches himself, first by questioning a rigid medical system, and then by fighting corruption and injustice with Gandhigiri; Rancho in 3 Idiots is an unlikely engineering student up against an education system based on rote-learning.    

In first-time director Rajesh Mapuskar’s Ferrari (Mapuskar was associate director to Hirani in Lage Raho Munnabhai and 3 Idiots), Rustam fights against financial constraints and the politics of cricket selections to fulfil his son’s dream of playing at the Lord’s Cricket Ground.

And that’s where the Ferrari comes in. The pressing need for money leads Rustam to take a reckless step and ‘borrow’ Sachin Tendulkar’s big red machine. A comedy of errors ensues involving the wedding of a politician’s son, a hunt for the missing car, and Grandfather Deboo, who has a back-story of his own (let’s just say, that too concerns cricket).

The second half of the movie largely devotes itself to resolving this plot, and does so entertainingly, with wit, humour and pathos thrown in for good measure. There is even a symbolic deus ex machina with a god that comes riding on a bullock cart. Some stock characters exist purely for comic effect (the politician’s idiot son, the Tendulkars’ domestic help and security guard out hunting for the car), though the central characters are neatly fleshed out. Sharman, one of the most underrated actors in Bollywood, is extremely convincing as the scrupulous Rustam (it’s astounding that in his 13 years in the industry, this is his first ‘lead’ role). Boman Irani excels as the cynical grandfather (of course, he has a natural advantage in playing a Parsi) and has some of the best lines in the movie (at one point, he calls the whole Lord’s affair a “recession scheme” by the West to make money).   

The Hirani-Chopra influence, however, pervades throughout the film – a morally-upright, large-hearted, protagonist; an old, brooding father (not entirely unlike the carom-playing Parsi dad from Munnabhai), even a magic-realism song sequence.

Review originally published in hindustantimes.com (Click here to see)

That Girl in Yellow Boots (2011)

Director: Anurag Kashyap
Cast: Kalki Koechlin, Naseeruddin Shah, Gulshan Devaiya
Rating: ***

In a ‘massage’ parlour, a British expat offers clients a ‘handshake’ for a thousand rupees. The premise is only too real. You’ve seen the advertisement for ‘full satisfaction’ massages in the classifieds section of the paper and pasted all over the local train compartment. You’ve always wondered what goes on there. I know someone who’s even been to one of those places. Unwittingly, he claims. I take his word. The handshake is a code. For the shady businesses that are means of survival in dystopian Mumbai. Euphemisms like ‘handshake’ for a hand job are codes everyone understands. And lives by.
Kashyap’s Mumbai in Yellow Boots is one he is very familiar with—the crowded streets of suburban Lokhandwala, always busy, always manic, hiding dirty secrets inside rooms reached through rickety elevators, and guarded by gaudy receptionists even as they flirt on the phone. The film deserves credit for portraying this world. And for the brilliance with which it is shot—entirely on a Canon 7D, it seems. What it lacks is a script that can shock, or make you think afterwards. This is a pity, given that the premise had the scope.

Ruth (Kalki Koechlin, who also co-wrote the script) comes to India against her mother’s protests to find her Indian dad. Through this, she believes she will find the one person who loves her, and in a way, find herself. Her situation is a reversal of the romanticised idea of coming to India to find roots. The hand jobs are a way of sustaining herself. It satisfies her clients, but lets her stay aloof, physically and emotionally. She hooks up with a cokehead who is the most undefined character in the film. He stands for little more than the person whose life sucks more than her. Ruth’s relationship with an old man (Naseeruddin Shah) is the only respectable relationship she develops, unsullied by expectations and favours. He is the father figure she seeks, and yet blindly rejects. The gangster Ch**tiappa (Gulshan Devaiya), badass, funny and yet pitiable, with father issues and oddly shy, makes for a dark sort of humour. As does the brilliant phone-flirt secretary. Mumbai’s potholes also lend themselves easily to jokes.

Kashyap’s films are often reminiscent of European cinema. Ruth’s quest might remind one of Angelopoulos’ Landscape in the Mist, also dealing with the search for a father and the loss of innocence. But where Kashyap differs is that the story has a resolution, which is maturely handled. Overall, too, the film is a good work of direction, and for that it’s worth seeing. In spite of the limitations of a rather tepid script. 

- Sarit Ray

02 Sep, 2011

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

Cowboys & Aliens (2011)

Director: John Favreau
Cast: Daniel Craig, Harrison Ford, Olivia Wilde
Rating: *

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s a bunch of aliens come to fish for humans in the Wild West. And yes, gold. “They plan on buying something?” asks Woodrow Dollarhyde (Harrison Ford). It’s a valid question (one that is never convincingly answered), and one of the rare moments of logic in the film.Cowboys & Aliens is the sort of stuff that makes you appreciate good cinema. By pure contrast, that is.

Director Jon Favreau takes two really popular Hollywood genres—the Western and the sci-fi horror—and mashes them together in a random experiment. You half expect, hope rather, that this will be a satirical pastiche, one that will go after the clichés that both genres afford. I mean, come on, it’s called Cowboys & Aliensand set in a desert town called Salvation. Instead, it plays out in all seriousness as a gun-toting preacher, a rough-cut wealthy man and an outlaw, among other Western stock characters, find themselves attacked by slimy aliens in tacky spaceships.   

Jake Lonergan (Daniel Craig) is the outlaw with the tough-guy look, an alien bracelet and no memory. He shoots and punches more than he talks, swigs whisky and tells the sheriff he wants no trouble, only to beat up his posse right after, frankly because he can. I could imagine Robert Downey Jr (who was initially supposed to play Lonergan) as a better fit for a kooky character in a kooky script. Craig brings to it what he brings to the James Bond franchise—brawn, and a standard menacing expression. Harrison Ford, with a gun and a hat, looks like an older Indiana Jones, while Olivia Wilde is the woman from another planet who can walk out naked from a flame after being killed but has no superpower otherwise.

The slimy, ugly aliens that open up to reveal uglier tentacles look borrowed from James Cameron’s 1986 hit Aliens. Surely, with modern CGI and some imagination, they could have come up with something more original. The spaceships look like toys and the mother ship like something the Uruk-hai would have inhabited in Tolkien’s Middle Earth. Overall, the CGI, which is often the only high point of many a big-budget absurd extravaganzas, looks cheap. It might have worked a decade ago, but it takes more to impress us now.

With the visual spectacle found wanting, there is little that makes this worth watching. Of course, you can go just for the promise of a brighter 2D film. For once, things on screen look dorkier than you with those stupid glasses.

- Sarit Ray

31 Jul, 2011

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

Transformers 3: The Dark of the Moon (2011)

Director: Michael Bay
Cast: Shia LaBeouf, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley
Rating: **

Give a boy some action figures, some toy planes and a Lego set and he can spend the whole afternoon in his room. In his imagination, his heroes fly, kick ass and a lot of things blow up—if you put your ear to the door, you are likely to hear him making flying and shooting noises. Eventually, when he is bored and has exhausted his energy, he goes to sleep.

It’s easy to imagine Michael Bay as that boy. And while he had imagination on his side, beside the novelty of cars becoming robots inTransformers (2007), he now only has more toys to play with, more fireworks to unleash and a lot more Lego cities to demolish. So, if you’re going to watch Transformers 3 for the pyrotechnics show, for the state-of-the-art CGI or just Rosie Huntington-Whiteley’s legs, go ahead. If you’re looking for cinema, try the next screen.

Even after a disastrous second instalment, the trailer for Transformers 3 looked promising. The idea that America landed Apollo 11 on the moon to investigate alien activity seemed like the sort of story concept that could resurrect the franchise. Alas, that’s just the first 10 minutes of the film, before it degenerates into the metal bashing that has come to define the toy fantasy.

Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) is a man without a job, yet with a hot new girlfriend, Carly (Huntington-Whiteley), who looks out of his league. Of course, she is more Bay’s fantasy than Sam’s, present in every second frame because the film needs her perfect derriere and legs. She must have had one instruction from the director: “Keep pouting, look sexy.” Meanwhile, the autobots, led by the monster truck Optimus Prime retrieve another Prime autobot from the moon, fire it up, only to have it betray them. The bad bots want to teleport their entire planet to earth and make slaves of humans. The good bots want to save earth. Thereafter, it’s a high-graphics videogame.

The graphics, however, are worth a mention. One particular scene, where Sam’s car transforms mid-air with him inside and then transforms back before it lands, pulling him back in, is visually stunning. The Imax 3D, inspite of the slightly darker pictures, work well overall.

The film is marred mostly by clichés and inane dialogues. It keeps you wincing with phrases like “weapons of mass destruction from outer space” and “class dismissed”. The pointless fighting and destruction goes on forever and a CGI post-apocalyptic wasteland with an alien spaceship hovering above looks suspiciously inspired by HG Wells’The War of the Worlds. By the end of the ridiculously long final battle, you feel as bored as the kid with the toys. Now if only my car could transform and get me out of here quickly.

- Sarit Ray

01 Jul, 2011

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

Why Fast Five and Avatar Fill Cinemas In India

The orders have been placed for gluttonous tubs of cheese popcorn and watered-down Coke. Muscle-or mostly, flab-bound men abound in T-shirts that seem two sizes too small. Going around, there are also plenty of mohawked and spiked hairstyles,tattooed arms and low-rise jeans that seem two sizes too large. Add to that the gadget paraphernalia, namely theBlackBerrys and the iPhones, a couple of which will unfailingly ring during the movie.

We’re here to watch Salman Khan’s long-lost brother in Hollywood, the formidably named Vin Diesel, kick ass, talk tough and do some mean-ass driving through Rio on rides we can’t afford (or, even if we could, can't buy in India… yet). When Fast Five was released last week, Mumbai flocked to the biggest screen in town (the iMax at Wadala) to watch some ‘English cinema’. If you haven’t had the time, or are too much of an I-watch-world-cinema snob to see such commercial fare, you've missed out on a small phenomenon of sorts. Fast Five was the second most popular film of the week, ahead of a few Bollywood offerings, preceded only by a certain indigenous horror film called Haunted. Trade figures will tell you that Fast Five and its Hindi-dubbed version raked in a combined Rs. 9 crores in its opening week.

The late night show I attended at iMax last week had a capacity crowd. I haven’t seen a Hollywood film attract that level of following since James Cameron’s Avatar. That, too, did so well that they’re still running eight-minutes-of-head-hurting-3D-added ‘special’ shows. Who knows, Cameron might just go down as the man who gave some competition to Shah Rukh Khan’s DDLJ run at Maratha Mandir.

So between the masses that flock to the box office when a Salman Khan film like Wanted releases (there’s another one coming, Ready, and you can bet on that one being a hit too), and the handful of intellectual filmgoers who drop names like Wong-Kar Wai and Lars von Trier, who is the audience for mainstream Hollywood films in India?

The 500-strong crowd I watched (and thoroughly enjoyed) Fast Five with mostly consisted of school- and college-going boys. There was also the young IT and corporate crowd, with IDs still clipped to their formal-trouser pockets and heavy laptop bags parked in front of their seats. Understandably, it's a mostly male audience. The few girls there look like they’d rather be BBMing their girlfriends (if they weren't already), making shopping plans for the weekend ahead. The guys they're accompanying know that they'll have to pay for the favour by watching Sex and the City 3 andTwilight.

But as with the slapstick-y Golmaal series and 

Sunny Deol movies, it's it’s formula that draw the masses - and that's just as true for Hollywood. Give us something that moves fast, puts up a good fight, occasionally blows up or makes us laugh out loud and we’re as good as kids at a candy store. Fast Five won’t win an Oscar anytime soon, but we will keep watching more ‘English cinema’ and whistling every time Diesel breaks the law.

- Sarit Ray

20 May, 2011

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

Fast Five (2011)

Director: Justin Lin
Cast: Vin Diesel, Paul Walker, Dwayne Johnson
Rating: ***

Formula films work. Again and again. Part five of the Fast and the Furious franchise proves that and manages once again to be absurdly entertaining. Slick chase sequences, stunts, bullets, babes and the sexiest rides—that’s what you come expecting, and that’s what you get. What’s that? A good film should make you think? Yes, this does too. About who’s that babe in the bikini and what car that was.

For the uninitiated, Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) is the star, the Salman Khan figure who kicks ass and talks tough. Thefts are ‘gigs’ in this world, and this time, the action is in Rio. A simple job (burn a hole through a speeding train, drive out with the cars. Piece of cake) becomes complicated when Toretto and company find out that Rio’s super villain Reyes (Joaquim de Almeida) was actually after a microchip. Why that needed entire cars stolen is anybody’s guess. Soon, Toretto is going after Reyes, and he’s flown in a team from halfway around the world, including smooth-talking Roman (Tyrese Gibson) and Tej (Ludacris) from 2 Fast 2 Furious. They show up sans luggage but with snazzy rides, and yes, leather jackets in tropical Brazil. Whoever said looking sexy comes easy.

They are up against a man with bigger biceps and lesser facial expression than Diesel, Federal Agent Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson, or the Rock). He is all adrenaline, shooting, swearing, sweating and sporting a ridiculous beard. The mano-a-mano between Toretto and Hobbs is muscles, bald heads and brawn. If you didn’t know better, their relationship would seem oddly testosterone charged.

Of course, the film wouldn’t be complete without a fast and furious climax. So they drive out of the police station with a vault the size of a Mumbai studio apartment tied to the back of their cars, and trash half of Rio in the process. Plausibility? That’s not in script. It does not have the finesse of an Ocean’s Eleven heist, rather feels like 15 minutes of Demolition Racer. But what’s disappointing is the longest car chase sequence takes place in two black sprayed-painted cars. What were they going for? Subtlety?  

Yet, it doesn’t matter. You won’t regret spending money for an hour and a half’s worth of entertainment. Just don’t think about it. At all. By the way, the girl in the bikini is former Miss Israel Gal Gadot. As for the cars, call the GQ auto editor. He can tell you all about them, and why this is the best movie ever. 

- Sarit Ray

08 May, 2011

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

Rango (2011)

Director: Gore Verbinski

Cast: Johnny Depp, Isla Fisher, Ned Beatty
Rating: ***

Irrespective of whether you love or don’t care for Westerns, you must see Rango. It takes all the clichés—the stock characters, plot and action—of a classic cowboy film and turns them into a parody that’s as hilarious as it is intelligent. So take your kids, mum, dad (especially if he’s a Clint Eastwood fan. You’ll see why), cousin, uncle, aunt...whoever...for this one’s a family entertainer if there ever was one.

It’s back to good old 2D animation without the pathetic excuse of dim 3D images and silly glasses for an extra Rs. 100. One of the first things that strikes you is the clarity and brilliance of the animation. On the iMax screen, I was genuinely startled as Rango the chameleon’s colourful, scaly face filled the entire screen.

In his first shot at animation, director Gore Verbinski (of the Pirates fame) delivers a visual masterpiece, bringing to the film his signature exaggerated characters and imagery. The bombastic and animated protagonist Rango inhabits the same mock-epical space as Jack Sparrow. Little wonder then that Johnny Depp should lend him his voice.

By an extraordinary turn of fortunes, a pet chameleon finds himself in the arid desert town called Dirt. With some comical histrionics and a catchy made-up name—Rango—he’s soon made the sheriff and the hero who must find water for the thirsty inhabitants. He goes up against gun-toting outlaws and evil politicians, falls for an oddball female lizard called Beans (Isla Fisher), rides dramatically across the canyon and in the end plays out the incidental hero’s role to comic perfection.

Rango is not as much a satire on the Western as it is a tribute. Yet, you will not feel stupid or bored if you don’t know all the references. It doesn’t matter if you have seen Chinatown or The Man with No Name. Rango is funny and goofy on its own. The oddest characters—snakes, lizards, armadillos, a hawk, a rattlesnake—play out the age-old tale of good, evil, love, heroism. A quartet of mariachi owls are the chorus to the picaresque plot.

It ends as all Westerns do. With a whole lot of shouting and shooting. And some heroic saving-of-the-day stuff. Certain serious issues, such as the politics over resources and real estate, aren’t resolved or explained. Then again, this is a kid’s film adults will enjoy, and not the other way around. 

- Sarit Ray

17 Apr, 2011

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