Music and Lyrics

Music and Lyrics is what I'd call an easy rom-com. The humor is low key, the laughs aren't forced, the movie's amiable and friendly, and you walk out feeling content. The only part where I laughed out loud was during the music video that played over the opening credits. But I did have a good time all the way through.

Much of its charm has to do with Hugh Grant, who has become one of the most dependable rom-com stars of our time. He still plays a mostly content underachiever, but the affected stutter that served him so well in Four Weddings and a Funeral (and not so well afterwards) has been replaced by a combination of easy confidence and wry, self-deprecating humor. Here he does pretty much all the heavy lifting while his co-star (Drew Barrymore) simply plays her part. The two of them look cute together (yeah, cute - can't find a better word for it) and manage to get the funny parts perfectly right.

The plot, if you will: Alex Fletcher (Hugh Grant) is a musician who used to be part of an 80s group called Pop that enjoyed a brief run of success. His former bandmate has gone on to have a successful solo career while he has been reduced to playing the music man at amusement parks and fairs. His fanbase is mostly middle-aged women who used to love him back in the eighties. He now has a chance to revive his career by writing a song for Cora, a Britney-Christina-type singer. Trouble is, he has zero writing ability. Enter Sally Fisher (Drew Barrymore), a lit student who comes in to water his plants. You can make up the rest. You might be wrong on a few counts, but this is a rom-com - how does it matter?

The music is okay. Hugh Grant and Drew Barrymore perform their own vocals, and are passable enough singers to make their roles credible.

The highlight, as I mentioned earlier, is the music video that plays over the opening and closing credits - typical 80s pop song, with a hip move that guarantees the necessity of replacement surgery. Grant is amazing in this video - it makes everything he does in the movie funnier, simply because your mind keeps replaying that scene whenever you see him. Barrymore is pretty much overshadowed in this movie; however, I have a soft spot for her so I'll just blame it on the writing. The girl who plays Cora is spot-on in her imitation of Britney and the like.

On the whole, this isnt like an amazing song that you'll list among your all-time favourites. But you'll enjoy listening to it while it's on.

The Prestige

At one point, the narrator Cutter says of the audience that has just witnessed a magic trick being performed: "Now you're looking for the secret, but you won't find it. Because you don't really want to know."

The Prestige tells the story of two magicians obsessed with each other's downfall. But at a deeper level, it tells the story of two magicians who don't really want to know. They are so involved in the sleight of hand they are performing behind their back that they almost willfully refuse to see what lies before them.

They are also both obsessed with magic tricks. One is more concerned with the beauty of a trick, while the other is more concerned with the beauty of the performance. However, the business defines, in many ways, their world view. They both believe that there is a human hand behind the stage that knows what it's doing, even in life. Even in death, for that matter.

The central trick (or tricks) - the MacGuffin, as it were - is one that involves a magician disappearing from one part of the stage and appearing elsewhere almost instantaneously. Does the magician use a double? Or is there really a way of doing it? More importantly, does it matter?

The story is narrated in nonlinear fashion with three separate timelines (not as confusing as it sounds, though). Not to mention a labyrinthine third act that you wonder how much was planned and how much was improvisation. There is even some science fiction, in the person of Nikola Tesla.

The movie has an intriguing start and a riveting second act that has less to do with the tricks and more to do with these people. But where it could have finished beautifully and powerfully, it chose to place plot over character. In The Pretige, instead of seeing the man appear again, you saw the machine. Pity, that.

Naqaab

What is it with Hindi movies and infidelity? For a while now, this has been the focus of a number of movies beginning with the execrable Murder. Abbas-Mustan's latest thriller Naqaab is yet another in this series.

Much bile has been vented about the tagline - The most shocking thriller of the year - in various reviews. It's Wednesday evening and I don't feel like kicking a man when he's down on a Wednesday, so I'll say no more on the subject.

The story begins with a girl dancing with a handsome stranger on the night of her engagement and finding herself attracted to him. She meets him a few more times after that and begins to fall for him. But it isn't that simple: the stranger seems to have been hired by a mysterious man, whose voice you only hear on the phone, to make her fall for him. Meanwhile, there's a mysterious man who captures much of this with a handycam. Cameras are all over the place in this movie, and they play a fairly important part as well. To say anything more would probably reveal the suspense. Let me just say that, while I didn't feel exhilarated by what happens, I was surprised and mostly entertained.

The movie uses an interesting device to hold a mirror to the characters' own morality; however, instead of exploring what the characters think or feel, it opts for the thriller route and concentrates just on what they do. It was a choice I was disappointed with, because the other route, I felt, had infinitely more potential.

That said, however, it's not an unwatchable movie, and has its share of entertaining moments. All three leads give solid, unremarkable performances, one of them the debutante Urvashi Sharma (who bears a striking resemblance to Udita Goswami). The only sore point for me was Raj Zutshi, who looked like his dad ought to be asking his mom about that peackock she met while on vacation.

On the whole, I don't think there's much to complain about this movie, or much to write home about either. You can safely avoid it, you can safely watch it, and you won't care either way. The only thing that stands out is the tagline.

Partner

Yet another movie waiting to be made, and for a variety of reasons. Firstly, Hitch is one of the most obvious targets for a Hindi movie remake, and it was even more obvious to me, even while watching the original, that Govinda would do well in the Kevin James role. Secondly, if Govinda was making a comeback, David Dhawan had to be somewhere in the picture sooner or later. Thirdly, given their similar comic sensibilities, a Govinda-Salman starrer was almost inevitable.

None of this, of course, guarantees a movie's success. If you need more persuasion, watch Bhagam Bhag - a movie where the makers pencilled in the lead cast, had a good laugh about the potential, and then just left it at that. Thankfully, David Dhawan doesn't make the same mistake here. This isn't the veteran director at the apex of his abilities, but it has its moments.

The one thing they got absolutely right is the Govinda-Salman pairing. Strangely enough, Govinda's strength has always been his chemistry with his male co-stars - Kader Khan, Sanjay Dutt, and now Salman Khan. It's so obvious that the two of them are having fun sharing screen space, and the good cheer is infectious. It also helps that their dialogue is rich in wordplay, consistently chuckle-worthy and occasionally brilliant.

Sadly, though, when it comes to the other easy target - making a good remake of Hitch - the movie is way off the mark. Sure, the cast looks appropriate - Katrina Kaif and Lara Dutta both seem like obvious choices in hindsight - but the screenplay is so awful, it sometimes feels like a school play written and rehearsed over half an hour at lunchtime.

Performances: Katrina Kaif was never a great actress, but this movie mostly just requires her to look gorgeous, so it's not a problem, really. Lara Dutta fares much better. I didn't like her much in Jhoom Barabar Jhoom (although I'll admit she was marginally better than the other three leads), but this one hasn't given me any reason to complain. David Dhawan's movies require a certain brand of acting, and she seems to understand quite well how to do that. Salman and Govinda are quite good together, but have their share of missteps in the remaining scene. There's a kid who plays Lara's son and got on my nerves - bad dialogue, worse acting, total dead-weight. Rajpal Yadav has a cameo where he spoofs SRK in Don, and mostly fails miserably.

On the whole, I'd say the movie is worth a dekko. It makes its share of mistakes, but its one big positive is enough for me to recommend it.

Honeymoon Travels Pvt. Ltd.

The problem with Honeymoon Travels Pvt. Ltd. is simply this: it never really takes flight. It is well conceived and occasionally well written. There's much warmth and sexiness on display. And it's far more interesting than the other honeymoon movie that came out around the same time - Just Married. But somehow, it just doesn't add up.

The movie tells the story of a honeymoon trip taken on a shockingly pink bus by a bunch of disparate couples. As is the case with stories like this, each couple has something brewing under the surface, which comes through somewhere or the other. Some people act as catalysts for some others to reach a turning point. In the end, some go back happy, some don't. A movie of this nature depends largely on the chemistry between the characters. They don't all have to be lovey-dovey, but there has to be something there that makes the viewer invest in each relationship and care for how it turns out. This is essentially the fatal flaw in Honeymoon Travels.

In some cases, the stories aren't interesting. In some others, the acting is a let-down. Sometimes it's both. The only couples who emerge unscathed from this movie are Boman Irani and Shabana Azmi, who play an elderly couple for whom this is the second marriage, and Kay Kay and Raima Sen, a Bengali couple trying to rekindle the spark in their marriage. Of the four, Kay Kay and Shabana give solid, unsurprising performances.

The other two are phenomenal. Boman plays Oscar, an elderly man on his honeymoon with Nahid (Shabana). It is the second marriage for both, and their families react predictably to their pronouncement. Theirs is the warmest relationship of the lot, and Boman in particular invests Oscar with such an interesting combination of crankiness, humor, despair and love that he steals every scene he is in.

The real standout, for me, is Raima Sen who is simply luminous in the role of a Bengali housewife with a streak of individuality that scares her husband at times. There is a moment on a beach in Goa just after an ill-advised parasailing episode, when she just walks into the waves, free of all inhibitions. It is a well written scene, carefully set up in the preceding minutes, but it’s not a surprising one. However, there’s something about how she does it that makes it work far better than we think it might. At times docile, at other times impish, and at yet other times breathtakingly sexy, this is a performance that deserves an award she will almost certainly not get.

The movie has a few revelations in store along the way. Most of them are revealed through a voice-over by a Radio Mirchi jockey and accompanied by snatches from appropriate film songs. These revelations, alas, don’t always work as well as the device does. A couple of them are quite surprising and garner the odd laugh. The rest are considerably more pedestrian. There is also a big non-radio revelation that works so badly it almost completely derails the movie. Thankfully, the characters involved are developed so shabbily that we don’t really care at that point.

The music is mostly okay. The dancing, however, is noteworthy. There’s Pyaar Ki Yeh Kahaani a lovely tango with Abhay Deol and Minisha Lamba, and Kay Kay’s wild gyrations in Sajna Ri. Outside of that, nothing to really write home about.

On the whole, this is a lot less interesting than it could’ve been. I’s not an utter waste of two hours of your life, but if Seinfeld is playing on TV at the same time, you know what to do.

Thank you for smoking

It looks like a penchant for humor runs in the family. Jason, son of Ivan Ghostbusters Reitman, makes his feature debut with Thank you for smoking, a satire aimed at lobbyists in general and tobacco lobbyists in particular. I haven't chuckled this often during a movie in a while.

What's interesting is how he trusts the audience to see the point. The movie is satire, but it doesn't push too hard. Aaron Eckhart makes tobacco lobbyist Nick Naylor into such a smart guy that you find yourself laughing along with him and admiring the way he spins himself out of trouble. A fair bit of the material plays almost as it would if it wasn't actually lampooning the subject.

The movie also has a key moment where it plays it straight. This comes right at the end and concerns Nick's son. You could see this coming a mile off, given how much warmth and chemistry Eckhart and Cameron Bright (who plays his son) bring to their parts. What's nice, however, is that even then, Reitman is content with just pausing long enough for us to get it, and doesn't actually descend into much preachy dialogue.

Aap Kaa Surroor: The Moviee: The Real Luv Story

Yess. I actually watched itt.

Sometimes you go in expecting the worrst. Through loong, bittter experience, I've learnt that thiss might be a good strategy to adopt.

Howeverr, instead of being an atrocious, abominable mess of a moviee, Aap Kaa Surroor: The Moviee: The Real Luv Story turns out to be merely forgettablle. Praise the Lord!

I could continue with the awful spelling, but I'm sure you get the point. So I'm gonna spell like a decent, civilized human being from now on.

I'm assuming the odd repeated letter in the title has to do with some numerological advice. Basically, some guy told him that the movie had a better stab at commercial success if the spelling was worse than the film. I think he did follow the advice: the spelling is indeed much worse. But I don't think it has helped, judging by the number of people I saw in the movie hall. Most of them, I suppose, came there for the reason as I did: for a laugh. Sadly enough, we didn't get much of that either. Like I said, the movie is just plain insipid.

The plot involves Himesh "HR" Reshammiya, a rock star, being arrested for a murder of a journalist while on tour in Germany. Half the movie is flashback, mainly dealing with his romance with Riaa (as spelt in the credits). The rest is about how he proves his innocence.

As murder mysteries go, this one has about as much complexity as a story told in a music video. Which, I suppose might be because the makers wanted to keep the focus solely on Himesh. Everyone else - the heroine, the vamp (Mallika Sherawat in yet another jaw-droppingly awful performance) - is just garnish. There's a guy who plays a friend of Himesh and has one good line early on. After that, he too has little to do.

Our hero obliges with a predictably bad performance. His dialogue delivery is at about the same level as his singing, which is saying plenty. The worst acting comes right at the end: an ill-advised cover of Mehbooba, with Himesh giving Mallika Sherawat what is presumably his most lustful stare. Given the lady's performance, the term "good riddance to bad rubbish" springs to mind.

The singing of course is typical Himesh. Either you like it or you hate it. I hate it. Someday in the future, the Museum of Modern (and Incomprehensibly Popular) Art will put Himesh's nose on display. Along with Kumar Sanu's. And Altaf Raja's. And... God in heaven! What have we let our music come to?

I must admit, however, that the theme tune is quite decent. The background score in the scene where he tries to break into a guy's safe shows a touch of innovation. The movie is well shot too: nowadays a standard feature in the Hindi cinema.

On the whole, this isn't the worst moviee (sorry, couldn't resist) you'll ever see. But don't let that stop you from giving it a wide berth. Sometimes, in order to make something look good, you put it next to something that is even worse. After this movie, people are likely to ask him to stick to singing. Which might have been the object of the exercise.

Sivaji: Citizen Kenai

In some ways, this was a movie just waiting to be made. Shankar is a director with a proven ability to create box office magic with movies involving middle-class supermen fighting corruption. Rajni is a star who has made a career out of playing such roles. The only question that remains is: do we get to see Rajni in a Shankar movie, or Shankar directing a Rajni movie? A little bit of both, thankfully.

Shankar is a director with an ability to think really big. His plots usually involve the sort of skulduggery you'd dream up after your third straight tequila, and believe to be plausible after the fifth. His technique is simple and time-worn: First, set up situations where the man on the street is victimized by greed and corruption at various levels - deserving students having to pay high capitation fees, doctors refusing to treat poor patients, politicos and government officials demanding bribes for everything and so on. Now, once you've gotten the audience baying for blood, have the hero blow up the logjam through some decidedly unconventional and swift methods. Usually, these methods involve some illegality - murder, robbery, blackmail and the like - but they are always directed at the established bad guys. What makes it work is the way he ratchets up the tone of the proceedings from the get-go. For Rajni, this sort of filmmaking is the perfect vehicle.

Aside: For those of you who are unfamiliar with Tamil cinema, Shankar is the man who made (either the original, or the remake as well) Nayak, Hindustani, The Gentleman and Aparichit. If you've seen any or all of these, you'll know what I mean in the above paragraph.

However, such an endeavour is not without its risks. Shankar's biggest weakness is a tendency to overdo things on occasion. Usually, this happens in the hero's tragic flashback - someone close to him gets badly burned or electrocuted, and the apathy of the people around him is what lights his fire. Rajni's weakness is a tendency to have his movies revolve entirely around him. Even while making something like Chandramukhi, he took the low-key Mohanlal role in the Malayalam original and added mucho baggage to it. Baggage of the sort his adoring fans have come to expect from every one of his outings. Maybe it's his fault, maybe it's the makers'. It doesn't matter.

Both these aspects - the synergies and the double-flaws - are on full display in Sivaji. Clocking in at around three hours, the movie takes its time to tell a story of a rich man who becomes poor trying to do good, then rich again by beating the crooks at their game, then arrested, then out, then... you know the drill, I'm sure.

Much of it could have been told in less than two and a half hours, and some of it needn't have been told at all. Large portions of the first half, especially the scenes dealing with Rajni wooing Shreya and her family, could have been done away with. It's unfunny, loud, occasionally crude and mostly cringe-worthy. The most shocking part of it all is that one of Rajni's best attributes - excellent comic timing - has deserted him here. What salvages it somewhat is a triumphant return to form by Vivek. He manages to lampoon just about everybody, including the man who has taken his place on the popularity charts in the last few years - Vadivelu.

The song sequences are about as hopeless as the music (A. R. Rehman having an off-day of mammoth proportions), and watching Rajni flap the odd limb at high speed in an effort to approximate dancing is painful at best. And don't even get me started on the costume design.

The only scenes that work in the first half are the serious ones involving his fight to realize is dream of providing free education and medical care to the poor. In this he comes across a dangerous adversary, a corrupt kingmaker named Adiseshan. The biggest problem with Rajni movies in recent times has been finding a worthy foe with sufficient screen presence. What Shankar and Suman have accomplished here is fantastic: aided in large part by a low-key Rajni performance in the first half, Suman creates an Adiseshan who is as soft-spoken as he is menacing. By the time we reach the halfway point, he's made us want to figure out how Rajni would destroy him.

The second half is where it all comes together. Rajni and Shankar both stop fooling around and get down to business, and the effect is electric. Pure masala, peppered with inside jokes that would have seasoned Tamil film goers in splits. And the coup de grace: a Rajni in the final scenes looking and acting like the old Rajni from Thai Veedu, Thanga Magan and Moondru Mugam. Fantastic stuff! There's a dodgy little sequence involving an amalgam of medical science and biblical resurrection, but I'm inclined to forgive that in light of what follows.

On the whole, this is far less of a movie than it could have been, thanks to some disastrous choices in the first half, but delivers its share of vintage Rajni entertainment in the second half. Worth a dekko? Hell yeah! The Rajni you see in the last fifteen minutes alone is worth the price of admission.

ps: The title was inspired by a comment by my friend Gora. For the uninitiated, Kenai is a Tamil word that broadly translates to "imbecile".

Jhoom Barabar Jhoom

When I was driving back home after watching Jhoom Barabar Jhoom, I asked myself how I would describe the experience to my friends. My top three candidates were:

3. A lengthy rant involving the occasional throwing of cosmic questions into the void, such as "What were they smoking when they wrote this?" or "What moron heard this pitch and decided to put money into this?"

2. The horror, the horror... (Ideally in my best Marlon Brando voice, which unfortunately doesn't sound much like Brando.)

1. An expression of muted shock and misery, held for about 30 seconds.

If you're an avid moviegoer like I am, with tastes spanning multiple genres, languages and levels of absurdity, you tend to walk into a movie with appropriate expectations. Watching a Yash Raj film and complaining about the lack of realism is akin to watching a West End production of Hamlet and complaining about the lack of car chases.

So, when you walk into a theatre to watch a movie that involves Amitabh Bachchan dressed like a cross between Bappi Lahiri and Bjork, you prepare yourself for more such outlandish excursions. The extraordinary thing about JBJ is that it defies all expectations. Unfortunately not in a good way.

The plot involves two people waiting at a London railway station and falling into conversation. They both claim to be waiting for their respective lovers, and talk of how they fell in love. And somewhere along the way, they fall in love with each other. As it happens, there are no lovers in the background: they just made it up. So now they have to do all the crazy stuff people do in romantic comedies before they finally kiss. None of this is particularly novel, but if done well, it could've been a serviceable rom-com. Ah, well...

I guess what brings it down is, lemme see... the wafer-thin characterization, zero chemistry between the leads, a screenplay with no sense of flow, an average score and bad acting. Short list, don'tcha think? Priety Zinta and Bobby Deol lead the pack with truly atrocious performances. Lara Dutta can be forgiven for not being capable of anything better. To give her some credit, she doesn't do too badly in the second half. And Abhishek Bachchan... considering how many comedies he's been doing in recent times, it's amazing how little his comic timing has improved. The man is often half a second late in his dialogue delivery, which essentially means that half the comic potential of his lines are lost while he's getting there. I've already spoken of his facial hair in an earlier post, but I must admit that his look and mannerisms in this movie aren't half-bad. To do him justice, he delivers the occasional zinger quite well. However, these do little to salvage what is yet another bad performance in a movie chock-full of them. The only one who manages to come out relatively unscathed is Piyush Mishra, who plays Abhishek's friend Hanif.

And now for costume design and art direction. It's so atrocious, it deserves its own paragraph instead of being part of the laundry list above. It even deserves its own blog, but I don't think I have the energy for it. Suffice it to say that some of it makes Baz Luhrmann's work look like German expressionism in comparison. The rest of it is just plain bad.

The music has gotten much airtime in recent weeks, particularly the title number with Amitabh stepping out of a Salvador Dali painting to do a song-and-dance routine. Which is just as well, since the rest of the album is pure noise, while this one has the glimmer of a tune. However, it appears so often in the movie that it begins to get on one's nerves. The argument, I suppose, is that the music would grow on you. Well, so would fungus, except you don't let it.

Traditionally, reviews like this are supposed to end with some sort of savage punchline. But then I ask myself, why bother putting in more effort into the review than the makers put into the movie? Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn.

Ah, there you go.

Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End

Does he plan it all out, or just make it up as he goes along?

So wonders an admiring British officer after yet another of those insane Jack Sparrow escapades that leave him, improbably, out of harm's way (for the moment) and at an advantage over his rivals. With Sparrow, one really couldn't be sure.

On the other hand, with the screenwriter(s) of the three Pirates movies, you could be 100% sure: they made it up as they went along. My guess is, they sat down each day and wrote three scenes or so, and didn't really worry about whether or not they could remember what they wrote the previous day. After it was all done, they might've spent, oh, about half an hour or so tying up a few loose ends. The entire process being lubricated with vast quantities of rum (yo-ho-ho and all that jazz), of course.

Not that this amounts to a criticism of the movie, really. If you've seen Gore Verbinski's The Mexican or the first Pirates movie, you already know that to expect narrative discipline is an exercise in futility: just enjoy each moment and don't worry about how it adds up, or how long it takes. To his credit, the guy knows how to make a movie look visually appealing, and he knows how to make each scene play well enough to keep you interested. Which is essentially what saves this gloriously shot and acted mess called POTC:AWE.

Johnny Depp is as good as ever: who else can carry off a line like "Can we just ignore that she is a woman scorned, the fury the likes of which hell hath no?" And then there's the little pleasure of having watched Jack Sparrow's spiritual father (Keith Richards) play his real one. Kiera Knightley and Orlando Bloom do their shtick - they do it well, but it's not high wattage, and I suppose they know that they're not what makes the movie tick. Geoffrey Rush brings a marginally kinder, gentler version of Barbossa to the screen in this installment - not surprising, given how many other Part 3s this year have resorted to Karan Johar-esque screenplays.

On balance, I'm not entirely sure if I'd recommend this movie. It's an overlong, unedited, and mostly senseless. But if you can look past that flaw, it does entertain. Hey, if you've watched David Dhawan, I don't see why you should thumb your nose up at this one.

Ocean's Thirteen

I think the first thing that strikes you when you see this movie is the level of emotion on display. The earlier movies had a certain cool reserve that masked whatever emotion the main characters were feeling. This one dared to be sentimental. Not that I think this is a bad thing, mind you.

However, the movie does have its share of problems. First of which is Al Pacino. In the first movie, Andy Garcia conveyed a sense of menace - you felt that he could, and readily would, hurt these guys. In the second one, Vincent Cassel conveyed the sense that he was competent enough to beat these guys. Although with the trick ending right at the end, it was difficult to tell whether he really was. In this one, however, Al Pacino seems to be filling in for the villain that the makers thought Al Pacino could play. He displays less than a tenth of the energy the character needs to have, and less than a hundredth of what he could. However, not all the blame for this performance can be laid at his door. His character is written as someone who is supposed to be quite smart, but the script never really bothers to demonstrate it.

The thing is, intelligence doesn't work the same way as evil in the movies. You could merely hint at the evil a character is capable of and not really show it except in the occasional instance, and people would fill in the blanks for themselves. But with intelligence, you need to demonstrate that the guy is smarter than the people around him - if you don't do that, you can't make people invest in the hero's success. If there was no-one of Lex Luthor's calibre, would you feel happy when Superman won?

The second problem is the payoff. The movie has a sort of kind, gentle tone throughout the elaborate process of setting up the con, which would've been okay if it really managed to deliver a zinger of an ending. But the movie prefers to play it straight, and just brings up a few small surprises, none of which are really surprising to anyone who has watched the two earlier movies closely enough. Maybe it's a problem of expectations, but that's a burden that any third installment in a series would doubtless carry.

The third problem is the humor. The material is so obvious, it's almost juvenile. The Ellen Barkin character, for instance, is written and played too broadly. As is the entire segment in the Mexican factory. You get humor when you're looking for wit. The movie does have the occasional laugh-out-loud moment that really hits the spot. But these are too few and far between.

Let it not be said that this review is one-sided. The movie does have some good things going for it. For one, it's not boring - there's the pleasure of seeing an elaborate con being set up. Then there's the pleasure of watching a bunch of talented actors who have grown comfortable with each other over three outings. And then there's the pleasure of watching George Clooney and Brad Pitt interact with each other. Danny and Rusty have so much history together that their communication has by now become some kind of code. They speak in half sentences and faint gestures, and yet it manages to work.

Clooney is a master at conveying volumes while not moving a single facial muscle, and Pitt has always been a great comedian (I thought he was dynamite in The Mexican, although James Gandolfini hogged all the glory). Watching them react to Linus' (Matt Damon) earnest statements is a master class in how to evoke laughter with the barest minimum of effort.

However, on the whole, this is yet another in a series of disappointing third acts that we've been subjected to this year. Especially so because so many of these series had fantastic second outings. I remember telling my wife that it seemed like the Sophomore Jinx was now a thing of the past. To paraphrase the promos of Ocean's Twelve, it looks like three is the new two.

Mozhi

Prakash Raj's Duet Films has been making some fairly interesting films. There was Azhagiya Theeye, which I regard as one of the best romantic comedies ever made in Tamil. Then there was Kanda Naal Mudhal which was nearly as good. And now Mozhi, a movie about a man's love for a woman who is deaf and dumb. The premise has so much scope for melodrama that you stay on tenterhooks most of the time, waiting for the movie to make a mistake. Surprisingly, Mozhi hardly ever missteps.

The humor in this movie is of an everyday kind - the jokes are the sort you or I might come up with. Which means that, while it's not always laugh out loud funny, it is very often chuckleworthy. Prakash Raj, in a comic role after a while, is fantastic.

But outside of that, what really worked for me were some deft little touches. The scenes where the friendship between Karthik (Prithviraj) and Archana (Jyothika), and their friends Viji (Prakash Raj) and Sheela (Swarnamalya) develops is interlaced with music, and the interesting thing is how the deaf-mute Archana responds to music. Like a language she's hearing for the first time, she seeks patterns. She notices the rhythm, and begins to vibe with it. The way this is done is obvious, yet not overdone. You don't see her move her head too much, or start dancing suddenly. You just see her nod, almost to herself, hardly noticeable to an unknowing outsider. Nice touch, that.

The other moment that worked was towards the end, when she takes a cold, hard look at herself after Karthik has just read her the riot act. Her instinctive reaction is to clench her fists in anger - the reaction she has had all these years, and which we have seen so often before. But she kinda realizes that this refuge won't work anymore, unclenches her fists and just screams out in grief. And her grandmom, sitting outside, looks concerned for a moment, and then smiles.

Monsters up close

Today seems to have been Monstrous Dictator Day for me. I watched a couple of movies - Den Untergang (aka Downfall) and The Last King of Scotland. The former tells the story of the last days of Adolf Hitler, seen through the eyes of his secretary. The latter tells the story of the reign of Idi Amin, seen through the eyes of his physician.

I wish I could say more, but I am too drained to continue. Both films feature scenes of gut wrenching cruelty. The one that I expect will haunt me for a while is the scene where Magda Goebbels sedates her children and then poisons them one by one, so that they will not have to live in a world without Nazism. You hear the soft crunch as she inserts a vial of cyanide into their mouths and forces their jaws shut so the vial would break. You see them shudder for a moment, then become still. You see her cover their faces with their blanket. Not once. Six times.

Nishabd

Nishabd is, as the title indicates, a movie constructed almost entirely out of silences.

As anyone who has seen the trailers or caught a bit of the endless coverage of Jiah Khan on television will know, it is about the relationship between a married 60 year old man Vijay (AB) and an 18 year old girl Jiah (Jiah) who is his daughter's friend. Some love stories are not meant to be understood, the tagline says.

However, in many ways, the movie is not about this story, about this relationship. It is about who these people are, and the stories in their past that has brought them to this point in their lives. These stories are not told in the movie, but they are what give this movie its meaning and impetus.

It is not that he is trapped in a bad marriage. It just has become one where he finds that he has nothing to say anymore. Nothing that matters to him, anyway. And it is not that Jiah understands everything, either. Just that she listens. She, on the other hand, is the product of a broken marriage. Her dad has left, and her mom has found someone else. There is much residual hurt there, much anger, much longing. She doesn't speak of it too often, but it underlines so much of what she does. He has learnt to retreat within himself over the years, to find solace in his passion - photography. She hasn't had that much practice.

These are not stories that are elaborated upon or articulated by the characters. They let us guess at them through the things they say, and don't say. Silences, like I said.

The movie has just three supporting characters - Vijay's wife Amrita, his daughter Ritu and Sridhar (Nasser), his friend and brother-in-law, in that order. None of them has a single weak moment in the entire movie. Revathy plays Amrita as a woman who has, in many ways, lost the same things that Vijay has, but finds solace in her household routine. Neither of them sees the other's loss - they just see what the other did or did not do. In a sense, that is the movie's tragedy. Nasser plays the understanding friend who nonetheless advises him to do the right thing. Shraddha Arya has the least heavy lifting to do as Ritu, and is adequate.

Jiah is electric in her debut role. There isn't a single moment when her inexperience shows - this is as close to a pitch-perfect performance as one can expect. Sadly, though, it's mostly downhill from here. Unless she's really careful with her choices, she's gonna be playing some random hero's arm candy or Emraan Hashmi's latest femme fatale.

Amitabh was never a bad actor, but somewhere in the last few years, something has clicked into place. His roles have gotten more interesting, and his ability to play them so well has inspired people to make interesting movies with him. He has taken a nearly-dead market for people in his age group and breathed life into it. Say's Law, as they say in economics: Supply creates its own demand.

Here, he creates a character that he could not have assembled from spare parts of other roles he has done. It's not like he's created an unrecognizable character from thin air, like Johnny Depp did with Capt. Jack Sparrow. This is still an Amitabh you can recognize. But the thing is, he embodies the character to such an extent that you are not reminded of anything he has done before when you see him in this movie. His

Which brings us to the director, Ramgopal Verma. Like with his other intensely personal venture Naach, he slows things down considerably and lets the characters take their time. A lot of directors seem to do this when they make something they really love - it's like they want to savour the moment a bit more. Watch Vidhu Vinod Chopra's Ekalavya, or Sanjay Leela Bhansali's Black - same principle in action.

The other commonality seems to be the visuals - Amit Roy's work here is definitely on par with what Ravi K. Chandran did in Black and Nataraja Subramanian did in Ekalavya. Less showy, but no less gorgeous. Clearly, a lot of thought has gone into the shot compositions. Watch the scene just before the interval, and how the camera pans in a certain direction and draws your eyes to something, yet doesn't press the point by zooming in. Interesting choice, there.

The curious thing I noticed was how RGV seemed to have brought a horror movie sensibility to the way this movie was shot, chopped or scored (to borrow a Robert Rodriguez phrase). The way the background score keeps sounding premonitions at key moments, the way the camera moves relative to the action... It's a strange strategy to adopt, but effective nonetheless.

Watching this movie, I wondered who put up the money to make it. There is no way on earth that this could become a commercial success in this market. It is concerned with these characters, content to let them be who they are. It doesn't care that there might be an audience. Which, I suppose, is one of the reasons why it is so good.

Rocky Balboa

Rocky Balboa is a curious movie. As the latest movie in a series that went steadily downhill after the first installment, the expectations were as low as they could ever get. But, like Rocky himself, it is a surprising triumph. Not a universal one, though - it is about an old boxer coming back to the ring for one last fight, but the only thing about it that doesn't work is the fight itself.

For more than three-fourths of its running time, the movie is just a quiet, well-observed portrait of a man we cheered for three decades ago, when he landed an unexpected title bout with the reigning champion and won his self-respect, and the love of his life, by going the distance. Now he runs a restaurant named after his beloved Adrian (who passed away a few years ago), does a few pull-ups from the bar outside his house every morning, and lives a quiet life surrounded by the relics of a life long past. "If you live in a place long enough, you become that place," he says at one point. This segment is slow, patient and has an emotional power that defies all explanation.

A lot of screen time in this segment concerns Marie, the girl he once walked home and gave some advice to in the first Rocky movie, who has now become a bartender with sad eyes and a beaten-down attitude. When he becomes reacquainted with her, he does what little he can to improve her life. In a lesser movie, she would've become a love interest; Stallone, however, understands Rocky better. He still sees her as "Little Marie", the girl who he tried to straighten out when she was a kid. She needed help then, and she needs it now; they've both grown older, but relative to each other, they're still the same. There's even a quiet little moment when she wonders about this, but recognizes his feelings for what they are. The gentle, unforced nature of this relationship is one of the best aspects of the movie.

And then there's the fight. Rocky decides to get back into the ring, mostly just because he wants to return to the one thing he loved the most other than Adrian. He plans to fight a few small-time bouts. But fate has other plans. A computer program that simulates how he would've performed against the reigning heavyweight champion (had he been in his prime) throws him up as the winner, and the money-makers are suddenly interested. They convince him to fight an exhibition match against the champ, the obviously nicknamed Mason "The Line" Dixon. He agrees.

What follows is the customary montage of him jogging through the cold weather and doing push-ups and weights and what not, ending with him pumping his fists on top of the steps at the Philadelphia art museum - I suppose Stallone realized that, if he didn't do that, longtime Rocky fans would be offended beyond all belief. Following which there's the fight, where Rocky turns up, as usual, to be more than a handful for his celebrated opponent. This part not only stretches credibility, but also feels strangely obligatory. You root for Rocky, sure, but only because you've grown up rooting for him.

However, that glitch apart, this is a solid motion picture with more to offer than the standard sports movie. If this is, as Stallone says, the last in the series, it is indeed heartening to see it going out on a high.

Pokkiri

The problem with Pokkiri, the new Vijay starrer, is simply this: it does too much. There's the story of how a young, ruthless killer named Thamizh rises up the ranks of the Chennai underworld. There's the love story between him and Asin, which gets interrupted, both literally and metaphorically, by bouts of violence. Then there's the story of the corrupt police officer who has his eyes on Asin. Plus, there's a comedy track with Vadivelu.

I realize that having these many threads is par for the course in many movies, but there are moments when the begins to feel a bit crowded. Plus, there are so many gangsters, most of whom look and talk the same way, that it's difficult to keep track.

These cribs apart, Pokkiri is an entertaining ride with all the masala ingredients one expects of a Vijay potboiler. The man does his shtick, Asin looks cute, the action scenes are well shot... basic paisa vasool, no complaints.

Vijay's performance here owes as much to Mahesh Babu as to his recent movies, in all of which he plays pretty much the same character. Mahesh Babu's performance in the Telugu original came across as a lot colder and ruthless (having seen one other of the man's movies, I am now given to understand that this is his default mode) - Vijay has brought that aspect to his performance here. However, the dialogue delivery - his strongest point - is not as good here. It's different from his usual, but in his attempt to convey more steel, he ends up sounding disinterested in some of the key scenes.

The thing that struck me most obviously while watching the movie was how risque some of the material was. There's a vamp who's got a crush on him, and her dialogues, actions and facial expressions are pretty blatant. And then there's a song at a club that has lyrics just this side of Penthouse Letters. Not that I'm complaining, mind you!

Nasser has one key scene towards the end, where his performance, though well-meaning, struck the wrong note for me. There was a quiet dignity to his character that was suppressed in gavour of rhetoric. Prakash Raj has moments of comedy mixed in with violence and general evil - effective at times. Livingston makes for an impressive cop, and has a scene where he takes the press to task that he does quite well. Vadivelu, who has in recent years made slapstick fashionable again, finds new ways of getting beaten up. His signature style seems to be an active sort of masochism, and it works for him.

For Prabhudeva, this looks like a safe bet to announce himself as a director to the Tamil film industry. The movie is a remake of a Telugu superhit, has a plot and character tailormade for Vijay, and doesn't disappoint on any major counts. Start counting the money - there's a good bit of it bound to flow in.

The best movie review I have ever read

Roger Ebert's essay on Akira Kurosawa's Ikiru - it's so well written, so passionate in its description of the movie, that it ranks among my favourite pieces of writing in general. A lot of what Ebert has written about the movies is brilliant, but his essay on Ikiru is, I think, his best work to date.

Dhoom 2

Okay, here's my problem with Sanjay Gadhvi, the man behind the two Dhoom movies. He's got a nice visual style, a reasonably talented cast and a knack for making women look gorgeous, but he's forgotten a very basic ingredient. He's making movies about a cop on the trail of some great thieves. But not once does he invest enough in the scenes showing the actual crime. You've got the setup, you've got the scenes where the cop (Abhishek Bachchan) talks admiringly of the criminal and his methods... But the robberies themselves are handled so perfunctorily that all this seems for naught. And the chase/fight sequences afterwards have no zing. The movie makes it a point to advertise its high speed chases, but spends so much time in slo-mo that one never really gets a sense of the wind blowing through the actors' hair. Both the robbery and the chase afterwards feel as sterile as the demo section of a video game.

At least Dhoom was fresh and had a few things going for it. For starters, Esha Deol looked phenomenal. Her intro, where the camera slowly pans up her legs and you realize that it's taken a couple of seconds longer than you thought it would before it reaches the hemline of her skirt, was an event in itself. Abhishek Bachchan finally found a role that could showcase his particular brand of brooding screen presence. And I've always had a bit of a soft spot for Uday Chopra - he reminds me of what Saif Ali Khan used to be back in the days of Yeh Dillagi, although I'm leery of predicting that he'd go as far as Saif has in the years since.

This one, on the other hand, is a disaster. They got Abhishek and Uday back to doo their shtick, but neither actor really takes off. Uday sounds like he's trying too hard, and Abhishek replaces acting with general glowering. They've added Bipasha to the mix, just to up the glamour quotient (I thought Rimi Sen did just fine in the first one, but I guess it wasn't enough), and given her a few bikinis to wear on Copacabana beach in Rio. Her contribution to the movie is essentially that: wearing a bikini in Rio.

On the other hand, the man got imaginative when it came to the villains. The Dhoom movies have to have a supervillain, so they got Hrithik Roshan this time around. And for good measure, they added Aishwarya Rai as his sidekick. The first part works brilliantly - Hrithik is in top form here, and is far and away the most watchable thing about the movie. Ash starts off well - she looks gorgeous when you see her for te first time. And then she opens her mouth.

Someday, many years from now, Ash will probably occupy the same pedestal as Hema Malini - a gorgeous woman whose fatal flaw was that she wasn't mute. Ash's dialogue delivery and acting in this movie is so atrocious, it could singlehandedly sink the movie, even if the others didn't do such a splendid job of sinking it anyway.

One of the best scenes in Dhoom, I felt, was the conversation between Abhishek and John in the end - both actors were at their best in that scene. I guess Sanjay thought the same thing, and figured that the key was to give us a great villain, and work on the scenes with the cop and the criminal. The strategy works: Abhishek's only good scenes in the entire movie are those with Hrithik. Those are the only moments when he seems to be anything other than a cardboard cut-out. But these are small consolations in a big movie: the rest of what happens on screen is so phenomenally insipid, it makes the whole product hopeless.

Apparently, there's a Dhoom 3 in the works, with SRK as the villain this time. Not surprising, really: even when I heard about the second movie, my prediction was that, if this one's successful, there'll be one more, and my only question was, which of SRK or Big B would be the villain this time.

I can only hope that Sanjay Gadhvi gets it right the third time around. But I'm not holding my breath.

Bhagam Bhag

This seems to be a bad time for me to consider watching a Hindi movie. Consider the last few movies I've watched:

1. Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna: I was on a bus from Hyderabad to Bangalore and they played it during the journey. I've never really considered jumping off a moving bus before, but I came close that night. I mean, heck, isn't there something in the Geneva Convention that bans this sort of punishment?

2. Vivaah: Nothing happens in this movie. I mean nothing. The best thing I can say about it is that the term "comfortably numb" applies well to it. It doesn't make you cringe as often as Main Prem Ki Deewani Hoon, if that's any consolation.

3. Baabul: Same as above, but with more melodrama, although maybe I should spell it "mellow-drama". What the heck is happening here? Did the National Association of Insomniacs go petition the big Bollywood studios or something?

4. Dhoom 2: I remember reading somewhere that the most popular reason for making a sequel is that the first film made money. Unfortunately, in most cases, that's where reason bails out and the suits take over. Dhoom 2 is one such debacle, a perfect example of form replacing content.

And now Bhagam Bhag, a comic caper I had pinned much of my hopes on. Paresh Rawal, Akshay Kumar, Priyadarshan at the helm, Govinda making a comeback... it all sounded good on paper. I should've read the signs more carefully: when the makers decide to include a "rap number" featuring the heroes at the last moment, it is usually because they saw the rushes and realized that the rest of the movie was crap.

The movie basically involves a troupe of performers in London to do a show. The heroine bails out at the last moment, so they search for a replacement. The replacement turns out to have suicidal tendencies, and immolates herself one night. But then it turns out that she's not dead. And then... do you really want to hear the rest of this?

Now, I have no problems per se with the idea of a screwball plot that piles one contrivance on top of another. What I do have a problem with is this: the movie is simply not funny. I don't remember laughing even once. I chuckled a couple of times, but that's about it. Govinda appears desperate, trying to replace comic timing with perpetual annoyance. Paresh Rawal has precious little to do, and he does even less: as performances go, this one compares with Satish Shah playing a dead man in Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron, but with none of the comic potential. Only Akshay Kumar looks moderately alive - he's the pick of a bad lot.

I guess the basic problem is this: the makers probably decided on the star cast first, and were so enamoured by the comic possibilities inherent in such a cast that they forgot to actually make the movie. Somebody's got to remind these idiots that they have to do something in order to be funny, they can't just exist and expect people to laugh.

Baabul

Watched Baabul yesterday night. Ravi Chopra seems to have made his choice of genre clear - the family melodramas of the eighties, the type that Visu used to be well-known for. (For a brilliant rant on the subject, check out this piece by dingchak).

Now, while this may not be obvious from my earlier posts, or my general preferences for movies, I don't have anything against the genre per se. If it's done well, I'll watch it, and even enjoy it. While I wasn't completely sold on his previous venture Baghban, I thought it had a few good moments. The final speech by Amitabh was, I thought, quite well-delivered.

This one, on the other hand, is dead in the water. And I use the word dead in every imaginable sense. Nobody, and I mean nobody, displays even the tiniest hint of a spark throughout its running time. This is a story about how a widow's father-in-law is willing to forgo every relationship he has to get her remarried. Not a bad plot for this kind of movie. And many scenes are set up in a way that gives the actors ample room to go ballistic. And yet, nobody seems to take that chance. I like understated acting (see my earlier post on the subject), but there's a world of difference between understating and being a lawn ornament.

Rani Mukherjee basically has to look pretty, look happy, and then weep for the rest of the movie's running time. She's the one getting remarried, but she never seems totally sold on the idea. She comes across simply as a device to demonstrate the protagonist's nobility of character. While it is true that the plot revolves around the father-in-law, his entire struggle makes no sense if the person he seeks to help doesn't seem to want it.

This is a quieter, more dialed-down Amitabh than we're used to seeing. This itself is not a problem, had he managed to convey a certain degree of intensity. This is a man who has lost his only son, and now is possessed by a fierce desire to see his daughter-in-law happy again. The plot tells us that. But his eyes tell us nothing.

Salman basically just has to appear as a random romantic hero in the first half and die at the end of it. The only good thing I can say about his performance is that the cringeworthiness per unit screen time has gone down marginally from Baghban. Which isn't saying much, considering that he has more screen time in this movie.

Hema Malini, John Abraham and Om Puri basically just occupy space and do little or nothing of note. I can forgive John for not being capable of much more than that; I'll even forgive Hema for the same reason, sacriligeous as it might sound to some (she never impressed me as an actress). But what Om Puri is doing (or not doing) in this dreck is beyond my comprehension.

On the whole, this is one of the most sorry-ass excuses for a movie to come out in recent times. That it boasts such a star cast only makes it even more of a tragedy.