Black Mass: Review

The Boston crime film constitutes a small but colourful subgenre within the larger universe of the gangster film, arguably Hollywood’s greatest contribution to cinema. Most of these mob films, which range from The Departed to The Boondock Saints, are populated by tough-talking men of Irish extraction. And a good many of them are founded on themes of loyalty and friendship—honour among thieves, as it were.

Loyalty is a word tossed around a lot in Black Mass, Scott Cooper’s film on notorious gang boss James “Whitey” Bulger and his relationship with FBI agent John Connolly. Bulger rose from a low-level hood in the mid-1950s to the top of the Boston gang hierarchy in the 1980s. This rise was abetted by the fact that, unbeknownst to most of his gang members, he had turned informant for the FBI in 1975—encouraged by Connolly, whom he knew since the latter was a boy growing up in the same neighbourhood. The film shows Connolly passing on information about Bulger’s rivals in exchange for tips. By the time Bulger was arrested in 2011, Connolly had already been charged and sent to prison.

If all this sounds vaguely familiar, it’s because The Departed used several details of the Bulger case to ground its tale of twin moles. Black Mass is less frenetic than Martin Scorsese’s film. Cooper, director of Crazy Heart and Out Of The Furnace, favours the slow burn over the sudden conflagration. Besides Whitey (Johnny Depp) and Connolly (Joel Edgerton), there are a number of recurring characters, among them Whitey’s brother, Senator William Bulger (Benedict Cumberbatch); Connolly’s morally conflicted partner, John Morris (David Harbour); Whitey’s right-hand man, Stephen Flemmi (Rory Cochrane); and Connolly’s wife, Marianne (Julianne Nicholson). There are also several brief appearances by key players in the Bulger story, including a haunting one by Peter Sarsgaard as Brian Halloran, an ill-fated business partner of Whitey’s.

For a gangster film, Black Mass isn’t terribly exciting: It lacks the cheerful invective of The Departed or the masterful set pieces of The Town. Cooper directs with few flourishes, but he has a talent for atmosphere and for letting the tension in a room build. He never allows us to lose sight of how dangerous and unromantic a figure Bulger is, and how in awe of him Connolly remained. By putting words like “loyalty” and “tradition” in their mouths, he exposes the hollowness behind this self-serving rhetoric. Friendship is a sham and everyone’s out to make life easier for themselves, whether it’s Bulger’s lieutenants giving the federal agents evidence against him, or Whitey brutally disposing of Flemmi’s moll because he suspects that the police knows she’s involved with them.

Seeing Depp in a strange wig, buried under a few thousand dollars of make-up, has become a trial in recent years, but once you get used to his receding hairline and piercing grey eyes, it becomes easier to appreciate his performance. Depp’s Whitey is violent, wary and unpredictable, a far cry from the glamorous mobster he played in Public Enemies. Edgerton, all fake charm and bluster, is a good foil—the Australian actor is a far more convincing Bostoner than Cumberbatch, whose accent keeps slipping. Harbour, Cochrane and Nicholson are terrific, but I would urge you to look out for the charged scenes involving Dakota Johnson (as Lindsey Cyr, Whitey’s girlfriend) and Juno Temple (as Deborah Hussey, Flemmi’s moll). In a very male-dominated film, these are the scenes that haunted me later on.

Meeruthiya Gangsters: Review

Recently, news emerged that Zeishan Quadri, who co-wrote and played that singular sociopath, Definite, in Anurag Kashyap’s Gangs Of Wasseypur, has been tapped to direct a sequel to the 2012 film. Meeruthiya Gangsters gives us an idea what that might look like. Quadri’s first outing as director is like a low-rent Wasseypur. The setting’s been changed from small-town Jharkhand to small-town Uttar Pradesh, but the blending of humour and violence and everyday life in north India is much the same. Other factors contribute to the Wasseypur hangover—the presence of Jaideep Ahlawat (he played Shahid Khan in Kashyap’s film), the sweeping camera movements, even the background music, which at times apes Sneha Khanwalkar’s score.

The film begins with a scene so transparently ambitious and completely wrong that it’s a wonder no one counselled the young director against it. The camera approaches the table at which the protagonists are sitting, and starts to whirl around it. This is a shot used fairly often by young film-makers, most of whom have learnt it from Quentin Tarantino movies. It’s a nice little trick if you can do it right, but Quadri misjudges the speed. It’s too fast, and instead of inducing the desired effect, all the movement does is call attention to itself. And it just doesn’t stop—we’re whirled around the table for what seems like 3 minutes.

Things calm down a little after that, and we are slowly able to tell one gangster from another. Quadri’s writing is still sharper than many of his Bollywood peers, and he gives Amit (Aakash Dahiya), Nikhil (Ahlawat), Sunny (Shadab Kamal), Sanjay Foreigner (Jatin Sarna), Gagan (Vansh Bhardwaj) and Rahul (Chandrachoor Rai) quirks, small identifying details, hints of personalities. We see the six of them go from minor extortion and strong-arming to robbery and kidnapping in Meerut and its surrounding areas. Yet, even as the ante is upped, the stakes remain low—there’s no urgency to the crimes, which are committed almost offhandedly. Nor is there much urgency on the part of police inspector R.K. Singh (Mukul Dev), the closest the film comes to giving our boys a serious rival.

There’s some fun to be had just watching the hoodlums sit around, cuss and talk about guns, their romantic entanglements or the relative merits of waving a shirt or underclothing as a white flag. The largely unknown cast is believably ornery, with funny turns from the drawling, long-haired Dev and the blond Sarna, and Ahlawat proving yet again that he has the charisma necessary for bigger, better roles. But the plot goes nowhere and the camera goes everywhere—there’s a tracking shot or an unusual angle in almost every scene, giving the impression that Quadri is straining for effect. There’s also little of the sociological and historical context that underpinned the equally violent and jocular Wasseypur. Still, there’s just enough here to suggest that Quadri has a future as a screenwriter. Direction, though, may require a little work.

This review appeared in Mint.

Hero: Review

Subhash Ghai’s Hero released in 1983 and launched the careers of Jackie Shroff and Meenakshi Seshadri. It was a huge hit then, though by today’s standards it’s nearly impossible to watch. It’s easy to make fun of a film which ends with a scene that has Shroff fighting in a pink motorcycle helmet after saving Seshadri’s honour. But have things improved for our commercial film-making in 32 years? Nikhil Advani’s Hero—a remake produced by Ghai and Salman Khan—suggests that we still can’t string together a half-decent action sequence. We’re still stuck with fathers slapping their daughters, and the recipients of those slaps forgiving the perpetrators too easily. And we still have young lovers in the heat of passion kissing each other on the eyelids (I counted four of those).

Apart from a few tweaks, the story of Advani’s Hero is much the same as the earlier film. Sooraj (Sooraj Pancholi) is a hoodlum with a heart—he beats up people for a living but is generous with the money he’s paid for doing that. He meets Radha (Athiya Shetty) at a club, and does what male leads in Bollywood are supposed to: dance with her, teach her a small lesson in manners and beat up her ex. They part ways, but are thrown together when he’s sent to kidnap the inspector general’s daughter, who turns out to be Radha.

Though Sooraj initially convinces Radha that he’s a policeman who has spirited her away because there’s a threat to her life, she eventually finds out what he does. But they’re in love, so she decides to stick with him. However, her father (Tigmanshu Dhulia) is understandably opposed to their union. So Sooraj decides to turn himself in, just as his criminal mentor and father figure Pasha (played by Sooraj’s real-life father, Aditya Pancholi) escapes the police’s clutches. Things get really weird thereafter. Sooraj goes to prison, Radha to Paris. She invents a fiancé at random to appease her father; that man turns out to be another gangster. Pasha employs Radha’s fiancé to kill Sooraj, who has been released from jail and has opened a gym, and so on.

It’s unlikely anyone in this day and age could have made a totally convincing film with material like this, but Hero is dragged down further by pedestrian writing, unremarkable music and patchy direction. Its two leads are second-generation Bollywood—Athiya is Suniel Shetty’s daughter—and neither make much of a case for star kids being awarded debut vehicles. Sooraj Pancholi is earnest but hardly commanding. He’s a good dancer, is soulful and has a fairly handy way with dialogue, but you still wouldn’t pick him out in a crowd. Athiya Shetty rarely seems at ease on screen; Advani should have noticed that she gets squeaky and that she has evident trouble with many of her lines (to be fair, she has to say rubbish like “dork face muppet”).

Ghai may no longer be relevant to today’s film-making scene, but there was one thing he was undeniably good at—spotting talent in young actors and taking a chance on them. It’s what made the original Hero and so many of his other films exciting for audiences at the time. Modern-day Bollywood, packed to the gills with star sons and daughters, may have to adopt some of his pioneer spirit if it wants a fresh set of idols to replace the Khans.

This review appeared in Mint. 

Welcome Back: Review

At some point during Welcome Back, my spirit left my body and soared over the heads of the stricken audience in the theatre. I looked down at them as they checked their phones, clutched their hair, wondered how Anees Bazmee could have been allowed to make films for 20 years now. I could see myself crumpled in a corner, glaring at someone behind me who had the gall to find what was happening on screen funny. Then John Abraham said, “Aaj kisses, kal missus”, and I was transported back to the desert of the real.

I’ve never attended journalism school, but I gather one of the things they tell you is not to open a film review with an out-of-body experience. I apologize, but then again, who says this is a film? I’ve seen CCTV footage of elevators that is more cinematic. Slugs inching their way across asphalt have more narrative drive than this. Daylight robberies would be funnier.

Bazmee is, of course, no stranger to daylight robberies, having masterminded ones like Ready and Singh Is Kinng. He’s also responsible for 2007’s Welcome, in which Anil Kapoor and Nana Patekar play gangsters called Majnu and Uday, who pretend to go straight so that they can get their sister married to a “respectable boy”, the nephew of one Dr Ghungroo (Paresh Rawal). In Welcome Back, the joke’s on them (though all jokes are really on the viewer)—another sister, Ranjhana (Shruti Haasan), has to be married off, but the man she’s in love with, Ajju Bhai (John Abraham), is as big a criminal as they used to be (he’s also Ghungroo’s stepson).

Over its cruelly prolonged 150-minute running time, Welcome Back treats human intellect with the sort of disdain that’s remarkable even for Bollywood. It’s not just that these are old gags; they’ve been repurposed so lazily that you can see the actors tiring of a scene even as they perform it. The screen is dense with characters—in addition to the ones mentioned above, there’s Wanted Bhai (Naseeruddin Shah) and his son Honey (Shiney Ahuja), and the mother-daughter grifter team of Dimple Kapadia and Sakshi Maggo—but the plotting is convoluted and increasingly ridiculous. Abraham, his I’m-so-gorgeous grin an awkward match with his bhai accent, Kapoor and Haasan are locked in a deadly three-way struggle for the crown of the film’s biggest ham, but then Shah enters the picture as the blind Wanted Bhai and walks away with top honours (or dis-honours).

If Welcome Back’s crimes against the ear are unforgivable, almost as grave are its sins against the eye. If there’s a tackier-looking film than this made in the country in the last five years, I’m yet to see it. The film’s supposed to be set in Dubai, but it really seems to take place on the sets of a bad jewellery ad from the 1980s. I’m not one to dwell on crimes of fashion but Ahuja’s pink jacket and Maggo’s gold-lamé dress should have come with a little advisory, like those no-smoking warnings. The tackiness extends to the special effects: the climactic sequence, which takes place in the desert, has exploding remote-controlled mini-helicopters, two camel stampedes and a dust storm. It also has a blind man regaining his sight, which is ironic, considering Welcome Back is likely to make you want to claw your eyes out.

This review appeared in Mint.

Perfecting Pyaasa

Over the past eight months, some rather lovely work has been going on in the decidedly un-lovely environs of Thakkar Industrial Estate in Lower Parel, Mumbai. It’s in this decrepit compound that you’ll find the headquarters of film production and distribution company Ultra. And it’s in their labs that Guru Dutt’s Pyaasa has been restored to what Ultra Media & Entertainment chairman and managing director Sushilkumar Agrawal claims is its original screening condition. The restored version will screen in the Classics section at the Venice Film Festival this fortnight, alongside Sergei Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky, Akira Kurosawa’s Red Beard, Ernst Lubitsch’s Heaven Can Wait and other landmark films.

This isn’t, as Agrawal claims, the first time a film restored in India has made it to the line-up of a major film festival. Mrinal Sen’s Khandahar, restored by Reliance MediaWorks in Mumbai, was shown at Cannes in 2010; and in 2013, Satyajit Ray’s Charulata, restored in Mumbai’s Pixion Studios, was also screened there. Still, this restoration (and the nod from Venice) is welcome news. Few Indian films are as beloved as Pyaasa. Countless viewers here regard it as the fullest expression of poetry and film craft in Hindi cinema. And it’s also a popular means of initiation for foreign critics and cinephiles looking to acquaint themselves with the mysteries of Bollywood.

Ultra was founded by Agrawal in 1982. It began as a home video company, producing VHSes, and later, DVDs and Blu-Rays, while also diversifying into production and theatrical distribution. In the latter half of the 2000s, Agrawal realized that a Blu-Ray-watching public would no longer accept the awful, shaky, scratchy versions of old Hindi films it had been shown for decades. TV channels had also started asking for restored versions of classic films. So he started putting together an in-house restoration lab. By 2009, it was operational. As of today, Ultra has restored some 300 titles from its library. These have all been standard or high-definition restorations, fine for TV viewing but not for bigger screens. Pyaasa is their first 2K restoration—the kind that can play in a movie theatre.

This restoration was undertaken with the aim of sending it to a major film festival, Agrawal says. “We wanted to promote Indian classic films. And we wanted to promote our restoration lab, because there is a lot of restoration work available in foreign countries. Especially in Europe, the people are very, very into the classic films.” Agrawal actually had the Classics section at Cannes in mind, but they couldn’t complete the restoration in time. Venice, the world’s oldest film festival, was the next logical choice.

Ultra had already acquired the rights for all Guru Dutt films from the director’s son, Arun Dutt. Agrawal procured the original camera negative of Pyaasa from the National Film Archive of India, where it is stored. He also arranged for 35mm prints of the film “from here and there”, to substitute the portions where the original (which had “deteriorated from the VHS quality we got 25 years ago, but in good condition”) was too damaged. Restoration proper began in the early days of 2015. A digital transfer was made from the camera negative. More than 200,000 frames were then cleared of scratches, pinholes, flickering, green patches, thick lines. Sound posed less of a problem, with stray clicks, hisses and thumps being removed. The entire process took around four months.

One recurring (and difficult to pinpoint) problem with film restoration projects is the tendency to overcompensate, to buff up images to levels the original wouldn’t have had. To try and counter this, Agrawal sought the opinion of lower-rung technicians who had worked on Pyaasa and of experts who had seen the film when it released in 1957. One of the people approached was director Govind Nihalani, a former assistant of Pyaasa cinematographer V.K. Murthy, who advised them about the kind of lighting that would have existed in the 1950s. “Our intention was to get it close to the original,” Agrawal says, “not add something to make it better than that.”

Agrawal wouldn’t reveal how much this project cost them, though he says a 2K restoration usually involves a budget of Rs 30-50 lakh. Had the project been undertaken abroad, it would have been a lot more expensive —not just because of the higher calibre of technicians but also because major restoration projects abroad involve extensive research and consultation (a case in point is Janus Films’ painstaking restoration of the Apu trilogy). Ultra has been able to offer restoration services at a comparatively lower cost to companies like Rajshri and Mukta Arts; they’ve even handled a couple of foreign projects. “We aren’t sure whether the techniques used in our restoration process are also used abroad,” Agrawal said in a 2014 interview to Variety. “However, we are definitely competitive in terms of our quality and the prices we offer.”

Ultra could not show us any scenes from the restored Pyaasa, so there’s very little to go by as far as judging the quality of the transfer is concerned. There are stills like the ones reproduced on this page, a trailer of sorts for the restored film, and a before-and-after clip from the song "Jaane Kya Tune Kahi". The images certainly seem to have been cleaned up; beyond that, it’s extremely difficult for anyone who isn’t an expert to say whether they’re in the spirit of the original or have been spruced up too much. It’s unlikely that questions of fidelity to Dutt’s vision will bother, or even occur to, most people. But Agrawal knows that it’s his restoration that’s on display now, as much as the film itself. And it’s important to look closely at process and outcome, just as it’s important to recognize and laud Ultra’s promotion of our cinematic past.

This piece appeared in Mint Lounge. 

Phantom: Review

Whether you find yourself in a patriotic frenzy by the time Phantom ends will depend on where you stand on the idea of revenge—or, to be more specific, the idea of nations avenging themselves on each other. Whether you believe it was justified for the US government to send forces to Pakistan to kill Osama Bin Laden. Whether you think their doing so gives India the licence to do the same. If scenarios such as these sit well with you, you’ll find a lot to like in Kabir Khan’s latest film, an adaptation of S. Hussain Zaidi’s Mumbai Avengers.

Zaidi’s novel, published earlier this year, is about a team of five Indian agents assigned to hunt down and kill the perpetrators of the 26/11 attacks. The film boils that team down to one person—a shadowy ex-armyman named Daniyal Khan (Saif Ali Khan). Khan is tapped for this mission by Research and Analysis Wing, who have been expressly forbidden by the government to mount any covert operations, but go ahead with one anyway. Wary, but also eager for redemption—he was dismissed from the army on charges of desertion—Khan takes it on. Thus begin the assassinations, first in London, then Chicago, Syria and Pakistan. Along the way, Daniyal acquires a helper in Nawaz Mistry (Katrina Kaif), an ex-RAW agent who’s with a private security firm, but only until her latent patriotism kicks in.

The first murder—by way of a lighted stove—has a setup that’s reminiscent of Munich, which led me to wonder whether Phantom might also turn out to be a meditation on the double-edged sword that is state-sponsored vengeance, as Steven Spielberg’s film was. This was not to be: Daniyal doesn’t seem in the least affected by all the killing at close quarters that he’s doing, and the film does no introspecting either. This is Baby by way of Zero Dark Thirty, pushing in favour of vigilante solutions, presenting acts of revenge as both just and justified.

Still, when Phantom is on song, things fall into place very satisfyingly. Kabir Khan and his co-writers Kausar Munir and Parveez Sheikh build the assassinations carefully, from the ground up. The frequent cross-cutting between events is handled very well by editor Aarif Sheikh. The unhurried build-up to the parallel murders in Lahore is especially impressive for the number of the moving parts it brings into play and then deploys. But Khan can’t quite pull off the big action set-pieces: the tension built up in Lahore is squandered with a Rambo-like finish, while the gunfight in Syria is confusingly staged and, despite the best efforts of cinematographer Aseem Mishra, a dusty mess.

As Daniyal, Saif Ali Khan is lethal and dour—impressive as a killing machine but impossible to feel anything for. Kaif tries really, really hard, and it seems fair to leave it at that. (Why anyone thought she’d do justice to a scene in which she has to pretend to be pregnant is mystifying.) There are talented actors on the sidelines— Mohammed Zeeshan Ayubb as the RAW employee who comes up with the plan, Ashwath Bhatt and Denzil Smith as ISI agents—with little to do, though there’s an affecting cameo by the person playing the Pakistani café owner who helps Daniyal and Nawaz.

In an unusual turn of events, two Kabir Khan films have released in theatres in the last month and a half, each with contrasting visions of Pakistan and cross-border relations. Phantom would seem to be the one that hews closer to real life—after all, it has David Coleman Headley and Hafiz Saeed (changed to Harris Saeed) and dozens of references to actual events. But it’s important to recognise that they’re both fantasies: of good vibes and cooperation in Bajrangi Bhaijaan’s case, and of bad vibes and old-fashioned vengeance in Phantom’s. And it’s quite possible that a lot of the people who cheered for Indo-Pak goodwill in Bajrangi will end up applauding the chest-beating, flag-waving Phantom.

This review appeared in Mint.

Ricki and the Flash: Review

Jonathan Demme has had a long and, at times, fascinating career. He began as an exploitation director in the Roger Corman stable. For a decade after that, he made wry, idiosyncratic films including Melvin and Howard, Swing Shift and Something Wild. He hit the big time in 1991 with the Oscar-winning The Silence of the Lambs, and two years later, Philadelphia. There was nothing of note for a while after that, but he returned in 2008 with the well-received Rachel Getting Married. In between, he’s also managed to direct more concert films (including the Talking Heads classic Stop Making Sense) than any other major Hollywood director.

Demme’s latest isn’t a concert film, but it is a musical of sorts. At its centre is Ricki (Meryl Streep), an ageing singer who works days at a department store and sings at night in a five-piece band called Ricki and the Flash. They’re a small-time outfit, playing classic rock and the occasional Gaga or Pink cover in bars. After one performance, Ricki gets a call from her ex-husband, Pete (Kevin Kline), who informs her that their daughter, Julie, is being divorced and is in bad shape. Would she come and visit?

It transpires that Ricki walked out on her husband, daughter and two sons to pursue her dream of being a rock star years ago, and has been virtually absent from their lives ever since. After some dithering, she does go and visit them, and the film tries to wring comedy from the sight of the 66-year-old Streep, in leather, with eye make-up and half her hair braided, negotiating with some wonder a nouveau riche home. Streep is very broad in the film—you might be reminded of her Julia Child in Julie & Julia, though this kind of showboating is more in the vein of screwball turns like Carol Lombard’s in Twentieth Century.

Ricki and the Flash might have worked if it were a little more tough-minded, if it really explored what it was like to be a woman who gave up her family for work but found little success, but Demme and screenplay writer Diablo Cody are clearly in love with Ricki, and keep finding ways to make her loveable and sympathetic. Of all the characters introduced—in addition to Pete, Ricki and their children, there’s Pete’s second wife and Ricki’s guitarist boyfriend—the only one I felt for was Julie, played by Streep’s own daughter, Mamie Gummer, whose black humour stays intact even as she unravels. Her scenes with Streep are the best thing in the film, which, for the most part, seems to be searching for a solid reason to exist (apart from ‘Hey, that Meryl Streep can really sing’). So you’ll have to be content with little pleasures, like seeing Kline with his co-star from Sophie’s Choice; cameos and look-ins for old Demme favourites like Sister Carol and The Feelies; Streep’s Chrissie Hynde voice as she sings "Cold One".

This uninspired review appeared in Mint.