Drinking Buddies: DVD Reviews

Drinking Buddies is like a homemade quilt – colourful, patchy and warm. It’s sews together disparate genres: spiky Hollywood romantic comedy, new-age sitcom, relationship drama. Its director Joe Swanberg, one of the spearheads of the mumblecore movement, a sub-genre of American indie cinema that puts its faith in low budgets and natural-sounding dialogue, is known for intense character dramas like Kissing on the Mouth and Alexander the Last. By contrast, Drinking Buddies is relaxed, low-key and, even when it’s raising the emotional stakes, winsome.

The first surprising thing about Drinking Buddies is that Olivia Wilde (“13” from House M.D.) is playing the sort of role that usually goes to a male actor. Kate spends her days working at a hip Chicago brewery and generally being one of the boys. She’s schlumpy and messy, and doesn’t seem to have (or feel the need for) a life plan. Her relationship with a slightly older man, Chris (Ron Livingston), isn’t quite working out, and it’s obvious that she feels more of a connection with her co-worker Jake (Luke Johnson; Nick from New Girl).

When Chris invites Jake and his girlfriend Jill (Anna Kendrick) to join them at his forest retreat, things begin to unravel. Chris and Jill share a romantic moment, the awkwardness of which is underlined by the relaxed, bantering chemistry between Jake and Kate. This leads to friction in both the relationships, and forces Jake and Kate to confront their attraction to each other. Swanberg asked his actors to improvise all their scenes, an approach that can often end up mired in pretension. In Drinking Buddies, however, this fly-by-the-seat approach ends up producing moments that are both hilarious and uncomfortably real. Small actions are accorded their due emotional significance – two very different scenes, for instance, are capped by a kiss on the forehead.

This DVD comes with a host of special features. The cast and crew interviews can probably be skipped, but the deleted scenes are interesting for the simple reason that, in a film as casually mounted as this one, there’s very little difference between an outtake and whatever’s left in the final cut (this gap is where Swanberg operates). There’s also a look at Revolutionary Brewing, the Chicago establishment where the film was shot, and a breezy audio commentary with the director and producers that sheds welcome light on the limitations and freedoms of indie filmmaking in the States.

This review appeared in Time Out Delhi.

Ek Villain: Review

Who’s the real villain here? Is it Milap Zaveri, a writer whose ear for dialogue suggests not so much tin as tin foil? Tushar Hiranandani, whose screenplay is in equal measure morbid, masochistic and patently ridiculous? The ear-splitting, logic-defying Bhatt production house style? Or the man at the helm, Mohit Suri, who specialises in films about messed-up lovers?

Go into Ek Villain expecting a date movie and you’re in for a rude shock. The film is an endless series of chokings, guttings, shootings, beatings and burnings. Faces are smashed against glass, bodies slashed by screwdrivers. The opening few minutes set the tone, with Aisha (Shraddha Kapoor) thrown from the window of her apartment by a man in a hoodie. From here, we go back in time to see hired killer Guru (Sidharth Malhotra) set a man on fire in front of his family. Apprehended for the same, he’s spotted by Aisha for the first time as he’s being tortured (love is pain in Suri-land). He’s set free – the victim’s mother won’t testify because she’s a plot device – and finds himself being pursued by Aisha, who is very talkative for someone who’s terminally ill. As they begin to fall in love, we’re yanked out of the flashback, and things start to get even weirder.

When Aisha’s hoodie-obscured killer was revealed to be Riteish Deshmukh, I was half-amused, half-impressed: it’s a nasty bit of stunt casting, making this amiable, even-voiced actor play a psychotic murderer. Guru finds out about him, and instead of killing him and ending the film around the one hour mark, he decides to let him live so that he can beat him within an inch of his life time and time again. (This, apparently, is entertainment.) Aisha largely disappears from the story, as the hero-villain and actual villain play hunter and quarry, and the props department runs out of glass to shatter.

If there’s a way to seem intelligent while playing a woman who allows a cold-blooded killer to follow her to Goa and help her cross out her bucket list, Kapoor doesn’t find it here. Her endless cheer is a lot less interesting than Malhotra’s incessant brooding, and even that wears thin eventually. Deshmukh stares blankly to suggest the voices inside his head, an approach that’s oddly effective. Suri has refuted charges that his film was inspired by the 2010 Korean film I Saw the Devil, but even if it’s not, the scene with syringe to the heart is stolen from Pulp Fiction, the fight scene on the docks from Oldboy. There are also visual details and background music lifted from the TV series Dexter. But really, if the product is full of holes anyway, does it matter if it’s original or second-hand?

This review appeared in Time Out.

Enough Said: DVD Review

Enough Said may not have been James Gandolfini’s last film, but it’s a poignant reminder that the late Sopranos star, nearly always cast as a heavy or a gangster, could be surprisingly tender when he got the chance. There’s evidence of this scattered across his career: his supporting role in The Mexican, the
“shadow life” sequences in the final season of The Sopranos, his gentle voice work in the animated film Where the Wild Things Are. But everyone saw him as the archetypal tough Jersey tough, which is why it’s an enlightened bit of casting that placed him at the centre of a romantic comedy at the very end of his career, and cannier still to have Julia-Louis Dreyfus play opposite him.

Eva (Dreyfus) and Albert (Gandolfini) are both divorced and in their 50s. He’s rich enough to not have to work anymore, while Eva, a personal masseuse, lugs her table from one client’s house to another. They meet at a party and though the svelte, finicky Eva isn’t particularly attracted at first by this shy bear of a man, she agrees to do go to dinner with him. They hit it off and tentatively ease into a relationship.

Unfortunately, instead of exploring the ins and outs of a romantic relationship between two over-the-hill single parents, Enough Said chooses this moment to turn into a more formulaic rom-com. Eva has struck up a friendship with one of her clients, a flighty poet, and it soon becomes clear that the ex-husband Marianne (Catherine Keener) keeps complaining about is Albert. It also becomes dispiritingly evident that the film will contrive to have Eva find out about this in an unnecessarily dramatic fashion and then begin to find fault with Albert herself. Yet, the two of them are such decent characters that they don’t really have the heart to attack each other. So the film squirms its way towards a reconciliation which comes way too late and leaves Dreyfus playing a version of her commitment-phobic character from Seinfeld. Still, when Gandolfini and Dreyfus are on screen, Enough Said is funny and entirely winning. The special features include short interviews with the cast and director Julia Holofcener. 

This review appeared in Time Out Delhi.

CityLights: Review

Hansal Mehta’s CityLights shares its title with the classic Chaplin feature from 1931. The film also shares Chaplin’s conception of protagonist-as-outlier. Deepak (Rajkummar Rao) and Rakhi (Patralekha) are homeless and broke in the big city. Unlike the vagabond but unfailingly enterprising Tramp, they’re martyrs from the start, symbols of small-town purity, there simply to be used or brushed aside. Mehta, whose 2013 film Shahid won him the Best Director prize at last month’s National Awards, piles on the misery until the only feeling the viewer is left with is one of foreboding. CityLights aims for powerful, but ends up uncomfortably numb.

When the cloth shop he runs is shut down, Deepak, a former Army driver, moves from a small Rajasthani town to Bombay with wife Rakhi and young daughter. An early indication of the film’s willingness to dump on its protagonists is when they meet a kindly man who helps them rent a reasonably priced flat. Only, he’s a conman who disappears with the deposit, and Deepak and his family are suddenly homeless, eating peanuts for dinner on Marine Drive. And that’s only the start of their problems. Deepak takes a job with an impossibly shady private security firm. Rakhi becomes – you guessed it – a bar dancer. They find temporary shelter in an under-construction high-rise. At halftime, I was amazed that the child was still alive and well.

If you think the film sounds depressing, wait till you see how it looks. CityLights was shot on digital, and boy, does it look it. Each frame is colder, danker and gloomier than the next – the David Fincher look minus the sleekness. This could well have been an intentional choice by Mehta and cinematographer Dev Agarwal, who deserve a measure of credit for not trying to aestheticise their characters’ sufferings. But even the grimiest, grittiest street sagas filmed in this city – Salaam Bombay!, Satya – have had small, saving moments of beauty. The determinedly ugly visuals add another layer of gloom to a film that’s forever sinking into the quagmire of its unhappiness.

CityLights is a remake of the 2013 Filipino film Metro Manila, which had a similar plot about an immigrant to a city who drives an armoured car and finds a lone friend in his superior at work. Here, the role of the friend, Vishnu, falls to theatre actor and director Manav Kaul, who invests it a scene-stealing energy. We believe in Vishnu’s affection for the naïve Deepak, even when he reveals his hidden reasons for befriending him. Kaul is the most arresting thing about the film, though Rao – who won a Best Actor National Award for Shahid – shows that he can be just as impressive playing timid and uncharismatic as he can chewing scenery. Patralekha, making her feature debut, gives a steely performance, though her big scene is ruined by the sound mix – shrieking at a drunken Rao, she’s comically indecipherable. (It’s also strange that a film like this should buy into the myth of the working class not being able to hold their liquor.)

At one point in the third act, when Vishnu is putting his schemes in motion, CityLights looks like it might segue into a tense action thriller. But every time the pulse quickens, we’re returned to the miserablist human drama at the centre. That big cities are intimidating to people from small towns and villages isn’t even an argument. But surely there are better ways of evoking the immigrant experience than guilting the audience into empathy? In suggesting that outsiders will remain outsiders, Mehta has taken a pessimistic – he might say realistic – stand. Meanwhile, the millions of people who travel to big cities and get by on their ingenuity, enterprise and sheer grit will look for another film to tell their story.

This review appeared in Time Out Delhi.

20 on 20: Pulp Fiction

On May 12, 1994, Pulp Fiction premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. This was the second film by Quentin Tarantino, who’d barnstormed his way into the public consciousness with Reservoir Dogs two years earlier. By the end of the fortnight, Pulp Fiction had garnered the first of several breathless reviews and the festival’s grand prize, the Palme d’Or. It’s gone on to become one of the classics of modern cinema – an ambitious patchwork of interconnected stories that messes with time and cinematic conventions. On its 20th anniversary, here are 20 reasons why Pulp Fiction is the greatest film since Pulp Fiction.

1. It reaffirmed the promise of Reservoir Dogs
Despite budgetary limitations, Reservoir Dogs was a swaggering, confident debut. Its success meant that Tarantino had a sizeable budget and the chance to cast major actors in his next project. The result was a film that aimed higher and wider, and hit nearly all its targets.

2. It was going to be Paul the Bartender and anyone but Travolta
Tarantino’s uncanny casting instincts played a big part in the film’s success. Paul Calderon, who ended up with a bit part as a bartender, was earmarked for the role of Jules Winnfield until Samuel L Jackson turned up and gave a scarily intense audition. Also, John Travolta was cast as Jules’ partner only after Tarantino overcame the strong objections of producer Harvey Weinstein.



3. Ezekiel 25:17
Hitman Jules has a habit of quoting from a Bible passage before he kills people. When we hear him read from Ezekiel 25:17 for the first time, the emphasis is on phrases like “furious anger” and “lay my vengeance upon you”. Yet, when he recites it in the closing scene, the delivery is rueful, and we notice “his brother’s keeper” and “shepherds the weak”. It sets up Jules’ ultimate decision to let Honeybunny and Pumpkin live – which is also the grace note on which the film ends.



4. It’s a mutated Cassevettes homage
Those riffs on pop culture and philosophy that go nowhere? Tarantino told Elvis Mitchell on his radio show The Treatment that the scene with the hitmen and the terrified kids they’ve come to collect from was him “trying to write one of [Cassevettes’] big improv-y set pieces”.

5. It’s got a crackling soundtrack
Like Scorsese, Tarantino mostly takes a jukebox approach to scoring his films. Pulp Fiction brought back old hits like Dusty Springfield’s “Son of a Preacher Man”, and immortalised Dick Dale’s “Misirlou”, the song that hurtles past in the opening credits.

6. It’s movie-mad
Before he became a writer-director, Tarantino worked a video store. And it’s a video store clerk’s sensibility that flows through all his films, the idea that that Antonioni and Argento may well be found on the same shelf. Pulp Fiction has a wealth of movie references, from French New Wave films like Alphaville and Jules and Jim to blaxploitation classics like Coffy and forgotten gems like The Warriors. My personal favourite is the scene where Butch is in the taxi and the rear projection is very obviously from an old black-and-white movie. It’s Murder, My Sweet, a 1944 adaptation of a novel by Raymond Chandler, the original king of pulp fiction.

7. It made twisted time games acceptable
After Pulp Fiction, it became okay for filmmakers to structure their films in tiny loops (Memento), giant loops (Irreversible), and generally mess with time and viewers’ heads. David Denby wrote as much in a March 2007 New Yorker piece, in which he argued that the modern trend of ‘disordered narratives’ – from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind to Babel – followed in the wake of Tarantino’s film.

8. Everyone’s welcome
Critic, regular moviegoer, snob, genre enthusiast, exploitation buff, film theorist: you could belong to any of these camps – or none of them – and still love Pulp Fiction.

9. Minutiae 
Unlike other ‘important’ movies, Pulp Fiction isn’t really bothered with weighty ideas like honour and freedom. What makes the movie special is its focus on the smaller stuff: TV pilots, foot massages, the metric system, potbellies, wristwatches, gourmet coffee...



10. It’s endlessly quotable
All Tarantino films are quotable, but Pulp Fiction is in a league of its own. You can tell how big a Pulp Fiction fan someone is by the relative obscurity of the quotes he or she favours. “You mind if I have some of your tasty beverage to wash this down?”: Run-of-the-mill fan. “That’s thirty minutes away. I’ll be there in ten”: Proper fan. “My name’s Paul and this shit’s between y’all”: Devotee.

11. It made Samuel L Jackson a star
Jackson had been an actor since the early ‘70s, but Pulp Fiction made him a star, setting him on the road to Shaft and his recurring roles in the Avengers and Star Wars movies.

12. It created a template for the new gangster film
Pulp Fiction casts such a long shadow over the modern gangster film that it’s difficult to separate the films that were simply inspired by it from those that wouldn’t exist without it. Still, without Tarantino’s film, we probably wouldn’t have Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Snatch, In Bruges, The Sopranos...

13. Gregory Peck may not have approved of the delivery method…
…but it’s customary for the boy to have his father’s watch.



14. It still makes people mad
Though there’s nothing as gratuitous as the ear-cutting scene from Reservoir Dogs, there’s still enough violence to get people jumpy about recommending Pulp Fiction. I also have a friend who can’t see past Jimmie’s “dead nigger storage” line – though I’d argue that this scene is an illustration of how badly Jules needs the obnoxious Jimmie’s help at that moment. (It’s also worth noting that Jimmie’s wife is African-American, and that the film’s cast is a Benetton ad of white, black, British, Portuguese and Hispanic actors).

15. The MacGuffin
The initial idea was to have a briefcase with diamonds, but Tarantino and his co-writer Roger Avary realised that it would be more interesting to leave the contents up to the viewer’s imagination. So we never actually find out what’s in the briefcase that Jules and Vincent are to deliver to Marsellus, only that it glows and renders anyone who looks at it momentarily speechless.



16. The twist
Uma Thurman and John Travolta’s dance at Jack Rabbit Slim’s is a goldmine of movie allusions. First, there’s the obvious reference to the white-bread teen movies of the ‘50s. Tarantino asked Thurman to imitate the famous ‘Madison’ sequence from Jean-Luc Godard’s Bande à Part, as well as Duchess’ moves from the Disney movie The Aristocats. There’s also Travolta’s history as a dancing star from Grease and Saturday Night Fever.





17. Shot through the heart
If you’re Tarantino’s muse, you’re going to suffer. This has long been the fate of Tarantino heroines: from Alabama in True Romance to The Bride in Kill Bill. But the height of twisted romance is Mia Wallace overdosing in Pulp Fiction and being brought to life with an adrenaline shot to the heart.

18. The little studio that could
Miramax had scored with its 1992 release of Steven Soderbergh’s Sex, Lies and Videotape – made for $1.2 million, it grossed $24 million. Five years later, Pulp Fiction blew those numbers out of the water, netting a cool $100 million. Harvey Weinstein later referred to his company as “the house that Quentin built”.

19. Le Big Mac
It’s almost certainly the liveliest, least obviously arty film to win the Palme d’Or in the past 20 years.

20. Because Tarantino has never been as good since
Jackie Brown, Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained all have their moments, but I’d trade them just for the “Vincent Vega and Marsellus Wallace’s Wife” segment from Pulp Fiction.

This piece appeared in The Sunday Guardian.

Dial L for Latin

Wrote this for GQ's March issue.

The late 1990s and early aughts were an exciting time for Latin American cinema. In Brazil, Walter Salles directed Central Station (1998) and The Motorcycle Diaries (2004), while Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund made City of God (2002). And in Mexico, the trio of Guillermo del Toro, Alejandro Iñárritu and Alfonso Cuarón – ‘the three amigos of cinema’ – found their distinctive voices. Today, nearly all these directors have shifted to Hollywood, working on projects ranging from Gravity to Hellboy 2: The Golden Army. Their departure notwithstanding, the fertile Latin American market continues to yield new directorial talent. Here are three South American filmmakers likely to be on Hollywood wishlists soon.

Pablo Larraín

Pablo Larraín had already made two films about the Pinochet years (Tony Manero, 2008; Post Mortem, 2010) before he teamed up with actor Gael Garcia Bernal for No. Fittingly, for a film that completes a loose trilogy, No focuses on the 1988 plebiscite that marked the end of the Pinochet regime and the unlikely role that advertising men played in this success. Bernal is René Saavedra, an adman who gives members of the opposition party the same pitch he sells to a Cola company at the start of the film. Improbable as it may seem, the cheery, cheesy ‘No’ campaign helped the opposition win the plebiscite.

Since Larraín knew he’d be using the actual campaign ads, he took a crucial stylistic gamble. Instead of shooting on digital or even 16mm, he used a dodgy, ancient format called U-matic to make the rest of the film look as tacky and dated as the ads. This paid off in droves: No had the look and feel of a documentary shot in 1988. Larraín later explained to Sight & Sound: “If you can see the difference, it destroys the illusion.”

Sebastian Lelio

When Gloria played at Berlin Film Festival last year, it was warmly received; its lead, Paulina García, eventually won best actress. It also charmed the pants off the audience I saw it with at the 2013 Mumbai Film Festival. The film – the fourth by Chile’s Sebastian Lelio – is about a 58-year-old divorcee called Gloria aggressively pursuing the singles scene in Santiago. She’s worked out a routine: she dresses up, goes to the club, drinks, locks eyes, dances and, if there’s a spark, takes the party to a hotel room. This is how she meets Rodolfo, another divorcee, but one who’s more strongly tethered to his family than Gloria is to hers.

Lelio’s direction is at once wry, sympathetic and unsentimental. An English-language remake would probably tone down all the (gasp!) senior citizen sex, but García’s physical exposure is certainly in tune with her exposed emotional state – open to scrutiny by Rodolfo and the audience. Lelio balances out the drama with some outlandish moments, such as one character’s deadpan explanation for how cats ended up on Noah’s Ark, and a climactic bout of you-go-girl paint gun glory.

Carlos Reygadas

It’s difficult to imagine any Hollywood studio – indie-friendly or not – green-lighting Post Tenebras Lux (2012). Before its release, its director, Mexcio’s Carlos Reygadas, was bracketed with ‘slow cinema’ proponents like Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Nuri Bilge Ceylan. But Post Tenebras Lux deserves another label: weird cinema. It’s not just that bizarre things happen in this film – and they do, from a swingers club with rooms labeled Hegel and Duchamp to appearances by a suitcase-carrying, neon red devil – it’s how little these events seem to connect with each other. Yet, the film is often mesmerising, especially the opening scene, with Reygadas’ own toddler running in a sodden field with dogs, cows and horses.

Reygadas’ earlier films – Japon (2002), Battle in Heaven (2005) and the interminably slow Silent Light (2007) – all courted controversy, but have proved popular on the arthouse circuit. Of the three directors mentioned here, he seems the least likely to be tempted by a Hollywood project. Then again, maybe some far-thinking exec will hit upon the idea of getting Reygadas to reinvent the slasher film (you have to watch the last few minutes of Post Tenebras Lux to see why).  

Children of War: Review

Google “Bangladesh War” and one of the first results you’ll get is a Wikipedia entry for “Rape during the Bangladesh Liberation War”. This is testament to the centrality of systemised sexual assault by Pakistani forces in the nine months of conflict before Bangladesh became independent. Some 400,000 Bangladeshi women were estimated to have been raped during this time. Many subsequently had abortions, fearing that the children they were bearing would be ostracised – as several were. It’s worth noting that Children of War was earlier called “The Bastard Child”.

Almost from the start, the screenplay is split into three parallel stories, each of which echoes a key strand of the actual conflict. The first involves Fida (Raima Sen), who is raped in front of her husband, journalist Aamir (Indraneil Sengupta), and then taken away and interned in a camp run by the sadistic Malik (Pavan Malhotra). The second is about two young siblings attempting to cross the border into India. We also see how Aamir ends up joining the Mukti Bahini, the blanket term for armed Bangladeshi rebels.

Children of War is a very difficult film to watch. The director, Mrityunjay Devvrat, making his feature debut after a couple of documentaries, evidently feels strongly enough about the events of ’71 not to dilute them. You’re dragged, wincing, through rape and torture and slaughter. There’s no let up, and for most of the running time, no catharsis. During the first half in particular, the film’s relentless onslaught feels more numbing than powerful.

The film nearly messes up things for itself trying to find aesthetic solutions to all the sadness. The camerawork by Fasahat Khan is best when it’s kept simple: there’s a very jarring POV sequence, and slo-mo is used too often for it to be effective after a while. And there’s one unmitigated disaster, a scored montage just before the interval which begins as a sort of torch song and then unexpectedly changes into a rock number. As if this wasn’t bad enough, the accompanying visuals – shots of crying babies, flowing blood, a boy running with a Bangladesh flag – look impossibly staged and arty, like someone trying to trick you into feeling bad.

Despite this passage – and two similar ones later – the film manages to pull itself together. After a key cameo by Tillotama Shome as a rebel fighter, there’s a rapidly accelerating build-up to a climax that’s as concerned with everyone’s survival as it is with whether Aamir will accept Fida now that she’s pregnant with a “war baby”. The film also links to the controversial war tribunals initiated in 2008, which tried and sentenced several “razakars” (the term used for Bangladeshi informants).

The actors commit admirably to the material – despite the incendiary potential in most of the scenes, there isn’t as much playing to the gallery as one would expect. Pavan Malhotra’s Malik is as odious and mesmerising a figure as Ralph Fiennes’ Amon Goeth in Schindler’s List. Less showy, and equally effective, are Riddhi Sen and Rucha Inamdar as the siblings; Sen’s hardening into a young guerrilla is one of the more subtly tragic things in the film. Like Madras Cafe last year, Children of War is a welcome indication that some Hindi filmmakers are starting to look outside India for stories. That Devvrat tackles his subject head-on is something else to feel encouraged about.

This review appeared in Time Out.