Baywatch: Review

Baywatch and McDonald’s both came to India in the early-to-mid ’90s. It’s fitting that we took to both around the same time because they were, essentially, operating along similar lines. Both were utterly predictable and completely reliable, and—though it’s tough to admit now—pretty thrilling at the time. Baywatch was almost an illicit thrill: all that flesh, running about so matter-of-factly. Even back then, I don’t think we mistook it for good TV, yet it was one of the post-liberalization Western pop culture imports that hit us early, and hard.

Seth Gordon’s big-screen Baywatch reboot is the daftest $70 million movie I’ve seen, and Hollywood makes one of these a month. No one goes into a Dwayne Johnson-starrer expecting a comedy of manners, but there’s some Grand Masti-level imbecility on display here. Early on, a new lifeguard tryout, Ronnie (Jon Bass) gets his appendage stuck in a wooden board because he’s aroused by the presence of CJ (Kelly Rohrbach). It’s a dumb joke but the movie keeps at it; a crowd gathers, other lifeguards join in, the scene stretches over five minutes. This is what you get when you give $70 million to the director of Horrible Bosses.

Rather than pretend that whatever existing lifeguards Mitch (Johnson), CJ, Stephanie (Ilfenesh Hadera) and new applicants Ronnie, Summer (Alexandra Daddrio) and Matt (Zac Efron) get up to in the movie is worth detailing, let me instead provide a taste of the subtle pleasures that await. There’s an entire exchange between Matt and Summer about him not being able keep from glancing at her breasts. There’s a scene with the two of them and Mitch in a hospital morgue, in which Matt has to lift the testicles of a corpse and check for evidence. There’s scene after scene of Ronnie humiliating himself and CJ inexplicably finding herself attracted to him as a result (Hollywood logic: the charmless horny geek always ends up with the hot bimbo). And my favourite: the woman on a burning boat who tells Mitch, mid-rescue: “If you want me you can have me.”

There was, apparently, a screenplay (by Damian Shannon and Mark Swift), the source of such witticisms as “Who taught you to drive, Stevie fucking Wonder?” and “Baywatch isn’t a job, it’s a way of life”. Mitch actually tells the applicants that they will have to learn to “sacrifice for something larger than themselves”—a statement at once blandly all-American and hilariously misplaced. Priyanka Chopra—the biggest star in the film after Johnson and Efron—plays antagonist Victoria Leeds. “I’m not a Bond villain… yet,” she purrs; her manicured but lifeless performance here suggests that even this may not be immediately forthcoming.

David Hasselhoff and Pamela Anderson have brief cameos—I can picture them getting together on set and laughing about how this movie makes the series look like King Lear. A blooper reel runs alongside the end credits. I think it’s cute that the film thinks there’s a noticeable difference between Johnson or Efron flubbing and nailing a scene.

This review appeared in Mint. 

Sachin: A Billion Dreams: Review

A couple of months after John Lennon was shot, his former Beatles bandmate George Harrison paid tribute to him. “You had control of our smiles and our tears,” Harrison sang on "All Those Years Ago". This line has always struck me as an apt description of the hold Sachin Tendulkar had over this country. He was the barometer of our moods, the determiner of our self-worth. Conventional narrative will tell you that Sachin freed India up, but the truth is, we shackled ourselves to him for 24 years.

James Erskine’s documentary is shackled to its subject as well. Sachin: A Billion Dreams is a tribute reel, a Very Special Episode on a sports channel blown up to 138 minutes. It creates the illusion of intimacy, then gives you the same old Sachin story you know so well. And it has exactly the level of insight about India and its people that you’d expect from a director who isn’t from here.

To call this hagiography is to mince words: the extent to which this film flatters and hero-worships its subject is plain embarrassing. Not that this is a surprise – from the moment it was announced that Sachin would participate in the telling of his own life story, this was the only kind of film that was going to emerge. No one realistically expects Sachin – as much a master of the diplomatic dodge as the straight drive – to say “It was Azhar all along” or “Kambli kind of got on my nerves”. But couldn’t we at least have a moment of irritation when Dravid declares with him not out on 194? The strongest statements in the film are those concerning his sacking as captain in 1997. “No one even phoned me,” he says. And, a little later: “You can take captaincy from me, but not cricket.”

Apart from a few sepia-tinted docu-drama recreations of his childhood, the film allows Sachin to narrate his own story, often directly to camera, reading Erskine and Sivakumar Ananth’s mawkish lines in that earnest voice of his. There’s a wealth of match footage, some intimate home movies of Sachin with family and friends, and every talking head you’d expect in a film like this (the absences – Sanjay Manjrekar, Kapil Dev, Rahul Dravid – are more notable). Erskine offers no analysis of his own, just a steady stream of No 10’s greatest hits, set to a syrupy score by AR Rahman. There are some intriguing details (apparently, Sachin was a bat-repair wiz), but for the most part, we’re offered a drearily virtuous narrative: Tendulkar as dutiful son, loving father, dedicated servant of the nation.

Here’s the really embarrassing bit. Sachin: A Billion Dreams is a singularly unimaginative, almost slavish piece of documentary film-making. Yet, I couldn’t help getting wrapped up in it. How could I not? This wasn’t Sachin’s story unfolding – it was my own. There I was, staring in shock as he took those suicidal steps out of the crease in the 1996 World Cup semi-final. Switching off the TV after “desert storm” with the knowledge that I’d seen something that would stay with me the rest of my life. Watching him charge Henry Olonga and Michael Kasprowicz, journeymen bowlers who’ll never be forgotten in India because of the innings Sachin played against them.

Though it’s an inherently compromised film, Sachin provided a powerful communal viewing experience. In the hall, I could hear my own complaints echoed in the dark (“They’re going to skip over fixing”; “That was Sehwag’s game”). Incantations were uttered – “aisles”, “Caddick six”, “shoulders” – pedestrian phrases made remarkable by the weight of collective and personal memory contained in them. It was a reminder of something that has gone out of our lives – not just Sachin himself, but the idea of a nation in unison, all of us chanting, praying, sitting in our lucky seats and not moving.

“We will never again agree on anything as we agreed on Elvis,” Lester Bangs wrote in a 1977 tribute. In 2011, I’d have extended this analogy to Sachin. Now, I’m not sure people still believe that we ever agreed on him. In these times of sub-tweeting and op-eds written in reaction to other op-eds, the idea of a universally held view on anything seems antiquated. I’ll end, therefore, on a personal note. Objectively speaking, Sachin: A Billion Dreams is safe, sentimental and saccharine. I was nevertheless thrilled by it. The heart wants what it wants.

This review appeared in Mint.

Half Girlfriend: Review

If this review of Half Girlfriend seems to fixate on matters of plot, it’s only because there isn’t much else to write about. Mohit Suri makes a particular type of film—full of rain, pain and emotional strain— but, from moment to moment, scene to scene, he isn’t the most imaginative of directors. Nor are Shraddha Kapoor or Arjun Kapoor captivating actors; the latter, in particular, has always struck me as one of the most reluctant performers in Hindi cinema. The only source of slight interest lies in seeing what happens to the characters in this film, and how they express themselves.

Expression—or the lack of it—is at the heart of this story. From the moment Madhav (Arjun Kapoor) steps onto the St. Stephen’s College campus, he’s on the back foot. The film wastes no time in making its central point—Hindi-speaking persons in the predominantly English world of higher education are often judged unfairly. This is, of course, true; you’d need a film at least a couple of degrees subtler and smarter to make a societal truth this evident un-didactic and dramatically satisfying. But in the world of Half Girlfriend, there are few half-measures. Both sides are caricatured: Madhav’s friends speak Bihari Hindi and are therefore crass; the English speakers are wealthy and insufferable.

However, if you speak both English and Hindi, you apparently have a shot at being a decent person. There’s a nice moment when Madhav, who’s besotted with Riya (Shraddha Kapoor) from when he first lays eyes on her, finds out she can speak Hindi; his relief is so pronounced I half-expected the soundtrack to break into a sitar taan of the sort used to indicate emotional release in 1950s films. In no time, the two of them become close; they kiss, and Madhav—not unreasonably—wonders if she’s become something more the label she’d given herself: a “half girlfriend”.

Even if you haven’t read the Chetan Bhagat novel that’s the source for Half Girlfriend, you may have heard about the contentious scene that arrives some 80 pages in. Madhav is sitting with his college friends, asking them how he should proceed with Riya. Their advice is to “make Bihar proud”; in short, call Riya to his room, make a move on her, and find out whether “half girlfriend” means “no sex”. This scene is reproduced almost identically in the film. The only dilution is what Madhav says when Riya rebuffs his advances: “Rehti hai toh reh, varna kat le (Either stay, or get lost).” In the book, it’s a cruder “Deti hai to de… (Either put out, or…)”.

The rest of the film seems to exist only to say: “But really, Madhav’s not a bad guy”. He wants to build toilets for female students in a school in his village—an endeavour that’s almost comically virtuous. By the time Riya enters his life again, she’s gotten over the incident in college, and the two of them seem set to walk off into the sunset, a half-Hindi, half-English song on the soundtrack. But this wouldn’t be a Suri film if the path of true love ran smooth. Cue tears, drinking, rain, self-destructive behaviour, more rain, and seven lovingly crooned songs that all sound the same.

Prominent as the Suri trademarks are, Half Girlfriend is very much a Chetan Bhagat film. All the markers of the man—the anti-intellectualism, the perfumed reek of good intentions, the ability to grind down complex issues into bite-size chunks of positivity—are present. “Madhav Jha is not a name. Madhav Jha is an attitude,” we’re told at one point. It’s surprising this line isn’t in the book: it has the sort of management-institute facileness that suits the author’s style perfectly.

This review appeared in Mint.

That show you like is coming back in style

In the summer of 1990, David Lynch, who had seduced and shocked America four years earlier with his film Blue Velvet, launched a TV series set in the fictional north-western town of Twin Peaks. The series, which he co-created with Mark Frost, and which centred on an investigation into the rape and murder of a local girl named Laura Palmer, was an eccentric mix of police procedural, soap-opera melodrama and a dozen other subgenres. Fans of Lynch’s movies had grown somewhat used to his kookiness and psychosexual predilections; TV audiences, though, had never seen anything quite like Twin Peaks before. There was a short (and brilliant) first season, and a long (and uneven) second one, before ABC decided to discontinue the series. What followed was a quarter-century of deep, profound influence.

Twin Peaks didn’t just pre-date Peak TV—the overwhelming glut of original TV content—it helped create it. Lynch was a TV auteur before Vince Gilligan or Matthew Weiner or David Milch, and the risks he took paved the way for their rise a decade later. The X-Files borrowed from Twin Peaks a showrunner (Frost), cast members (David Duchovny; memorable as a transgender DEA agent) and an elliptical approach to mystery-solving. In an interview with Vulture, writer-director David Chase spoke about the show’s influence on The Sopranos, and the arty aesthetic and strangely spiritual quality that set it apart from everything else on TV in the early 1990s. Damon Lindelof, too, has stated categorically that there would have been no The Leftovers or Lost (which he co-created with J.J. Abrams) without Twin Peaks.

Over the years, this show has been deconstructed, mined and assimilated. Breaking Bad borrowed its brand of surrealism, Fargo its combination of small-town charm and menace, Lost its supernatural tendencies. Even minute details from it have been appropriated: The show’s tag line, “Who killed Laura Palmer?”, was turned into “Who killed Rosie Larsen?” on The Killing. In fact, so many shows are accused of having it in their DNA that Vulture could run—with more or less a straight face—a piece titled “A Brief History Of TV Shows Being Compared To Twin Peaks”. Several shows actively boast of the influence of the series: It’s an easy way to signal to a discerning audience that your show is ambitious, or unsettling, or weird. Donald Glover has described his ambitious comedy Atlanta as “Twin Peaks with rappers”.

Season 2 of Twin Peaks had ended with a dream sequence in which Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) tells Agent Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) that she’ll see him in 25 years. This prophecy has, in proper Lynchian fashion, come true. This week, Twin Peaks is back as a Showtime series, with Frost and Lynch in charge. Lynch will direct all 18 episodes; MacLachlan will return, along with original cast members, including Sherilyn Fenn, Russ Tamblyn, Mädchen Amick and Harry Goaz, and several new recruits (Laura Dern, Tim Roth, Naomi Watts). Plot details have been closely guarded, though a teaser with the shot of Laura’s corpse from the original series and the words “It’s happening again” suggests that there might be another crime and investigation.

For fans of the series, the prospect of a continuing story is thrilling—and a little unnerving. Arrested Development came back after a gap of seven years; it wasn’t quite the same. The X-Files was revived after 14 years, and encountered a viewing public that had moved on. “The giddiness that accompanies news of a beloved show returning from the grave has an edge of desperation to it,” wrote Ian Crouch in the New Yorker when the news of Twin Peaks’ return was confirmed. “The thrill itself is death-haunted.”

Maybe it’s natural to feel conflicted. It’s worth noting that despite its now canonical status, critics weren’t uniformly enamoured by the show in 1990. After the first season, John Leonard wrote the New York magazine cover article which concluded that the show had “nothing at all in its pretty little head except the desire to please”. Yet, earlier in the piece, Leonard included a loving laundry list of Lynch attributes: “…the sinister fluidity, the absurd detail, the shocking relief, the elegant gesture, the deadpan jokes, the painterly pointillism, the bad puns, the erotic violence, the lingering close-up camera, the rampaging of non-sequiturs, the underlining and italicizing of emotions….” Come Sunday, we’ll begin to know if we get all, or some, or none of the above—whether, to use a line from the show, that gum we like has actually come back in style or not.

This piece appeared in Mint Lounge.

Meri Pyaari Bindu: Review

Meri Pyaari Bindu opens with an image out of Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita—a giant statue of Durga borne over the city by helicopter—and incorporates, towards the end, a version of the “Why is life worth living?” speech in Woody Allen’s Manhattan. What’s in between, though, is pure 2010s Bollywood romance: boy meets girl, they become fast friends, interfere in each other’s love lives and spend most of the film not getting together.

Akshay Roy’s film—his first full-length feature—is an amiable entry in the friendship vs love subgenre. If you’re looking for the kind of emotional scalding supplied by Karan Johar’s Ae Dil Hai Mushkil or Imtiaz Ali’s Tamasha, you won’t find it here. The characters in this film rebound from romantic disappointment within a few scenes, unlike, say, Ae Dil Hai Mushkil, where their disappointment becomes the entire film. Sure, there’s a Devdas in Roy’s film, but it’s a dog.

Abhimanyu (Ayushmann Khurrana) and Bindu (Parineeti Chopra) are childhood friends, inseparable ever since she moved in next door to his Kolkata home. They listen to old Hindi film songs, make mixtapes together, prank each other. He’s in love with her, but not to the point that he can’t function on his own; she’s unwilling to relinquish his presence in her life, but doesn’t seem to want to address the implications of this. Abhimanyu describes their relationship as the LOC between love and friendship, but, save for a few scenes, the film doesn’t bring out the emotional artillery, opting instead for a wry almost-there-but-not-quite love story.

Much like Band Baaja Baaraat (Bindu producer Maneesh Sharma’s first film) was a love letter to west Delhi, Roy’s film is elevated by its affection for Kolkata. Much of the film unfolds there, and screenwriter Suprotim Sengupta uses Bengali tropes—bookishness, mothers doting on sons—to wonderful comic effect. It’s also great to see, in an age when song choreography in Hindi cinema is fast becoming a forgotten art, tribute paid to two classic sequences: "Mere Sapno Ki Rani" from Aradhana, and "Meri Pyaari Bindu" from Padosan. Bindu comes on very manic pixie in the first hour, but Chopra finds a measure of pathos in her romantic indecision as the film progresses. Khurrana, who’s played prickly very well in the past, gets to be straightforwardly charming here; it’s a shame that someone with an onscreen manner this confident remains, five years after his debut, underutilized by Hindi cinema.

Meri Pyaari Bindu ends on an intriguing note, at once messy and fitting. But is this enough? I can imagine little details lingering on—Aparajita Adhya mining comic gold as a doting mother; Abhimanyu admitting that he remembers “every comma, every full stop” of a letter Bindu wrote him—but not the film itself. It’s the law of mixtapes: the whole is always less than the sum of the parts.

This review appeared in Mint.

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2: Review

There are many ways to grab a viewer’s attention at the start of a film. A song might do the trick, or a sudden burst of action. Myself, I’m always drawn in by a good one-take. When Orson Welles decided to shoot the first scene of Touch of Evil, with the car and the ticking bomb, without a cut, he gave us not just one of the great single-takes of all time, but arguably the best opening sequence ever. One-takes may have become easier to pull off with digital cameras and CGI, but it still takes a fair amount of skill and sheer love of cinema to execute what Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 does right at the start: a long, unbroken take of baby Groot dancing to ELO’s "Mr Blue Sky", while the other Guardians battle a gigantic space monster in the background.

Second films in Hollywood franchises often explore the idea of the central unit developing cracks. But the Guardians were cracked to begin with, and, having spent the first film exploring these fissures, writer-director James Gunn wisely avoids this approach. Instead, the Guardians—Peter Quill (Chris Pratt), Gamora (Zoe Saldana), Rocket (voiced by Bradley Cooper), Drax (Dave Bautista) and Groot (who’s growing again from a little sapling, but is nevertheless voiced by Vin Diesel)—find conflict brewing not within the group but within themselves. Quill has father issues, Gamora has sister issues (or, to be more accurate, Gamora’s sister, Nebula (Karen Gillan), has issues), Drax still misses his dead wife and daughter, and Rocket is running out of ways to camouflage the rage and despair within.

Cornered by drones belonging to the Sovereigns—a gold-skinned race led by Ayesha (Elizabeth Debicki), who looks like the evil bot from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis—the Guardians are rescued at the last second by Ego (Kurt Russell), a Celestial (how can you dislike a film that sounds like a battle of ’50s doo wop bands?). Ego then reveals himself as Peter’s long-lost father. He hosts Gamora, Drax and Peter on his idyllic home planet, and encourages his son to embrace his own Celestial powers. I won’t reveal any more, suffice to say that the film ambles contentedly past the halfway mark without a worthy antagonist in sight.

You could argue that Guardians 2 ignores narrative highways for byways and its A-plot for B-, C- and D-plots. This isn’t incorrect, but it’s also much easier to sit back and watch Drax and Rocket and Yondu (Michael Rooker) trash-talk each other than be subjected to the insufferable banter of the Avengers. In the often self-serious world of comic book movies, the Guardians are an easy hang. Perhaps this is why, when Gunn introduces unexpected beats—like filial abuse or child trafficking—the impact is that much keener.

Having emerged as a surprise MVP in part one, the compulsively literal Drax is the prime comic anchor here. Bautista does very well, even if the device wears thin. The most striking performances, though, come from Gillan and Rooker, who find surprising pathos in their one-dimensional villains from the first film. It might be overstuffed, it may meander and stall at times, but Guardians 2 should delight returning audiences, Michael Rooker fans, and anyone savvy enough to appreciate Cheap Trick, Sam Cooke and Jay and the Americans.

This review appeared in Mint. 

Netflix breaks into Cannes

On 13 April, the line-up for the Cannes Film Festival was announced. It was revealed that the Competition section would include Michael Haneke’s Happy End, Michel Hazanavicius’ Redoubtable, Hong Sang-soo’s Clair’s Camera, Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Killing Of A Sacred Deer and Sofia Coppola’s The Beguiled—titles which had featured in IndieWire’s “50 Films That Have A Serious Shot At The 2017 Line-up”. That list also included Okja, by Korean director Bong Joon-ho, of which IndieWire wrote: “Netflix is scheduled to unleash the film on June 28, which makes Cannes the ideal platform—if the festival can get over its alleged resistance to Netflix.”

The reasons for this alleged resistance are evident. Unlike Amazon (described by Cannes festival director Thierry Frémaux last year as “good for cinema”), which gives its films a proper theatrical run before releasing them online, Netflix’s policy is to release the film online the day it lands in theatres (which is seldom). This would pretty much destroy the idea of exclusivity that comes with a Cannes selection. Instead of waiting for the title to arrive months later via a festival or a repertory house, viewers around the world may be able to see it along with or, even more gallingly, before the audiences at Cannes. L’horreur!

Cannes’ misgivings about the streaming giant appear to have been overcome, or have at least been kept aside for the time being. Okja and Noah Baumbach’s The Meyerowitz Stories will be the first films distributed by Netflix to be in Competition at Cannes. Having bitten the bullet, Frémaux has been neatly sidestepping pointed questions about Netflix. “I chose Bong Joon-ho’s film because he’s a very good film-maker,” he told the ScreenDaily website. “I hardly spoke to Netflix.” And he told Variety: “The film world is like a big community and in this big community, everyone has a place to exist. We are happy that at Cannes, this discussion (about Netflix and digital versus theatrical distribution of films) can unfold.”

Netflix chief executive officer Ted Sarandos may well have heaved a sigh of relief after the Cannes line-up was announced. The year 2016 didn’t have any Netflix films in the line-up—Amazon had five—but that was still better than 2015, when Sarandos found himself in the midst of a chilly Q&A session after he delivered an address at the festival. Asked whether he would release Netflix subscriber figures, Sarandos said, “I’m sorry to disappoint you.” “I was expecting it,” the journalist responded. Things deteriorated swiftly from there. Someone asked, “Are you aware that in five, 10 years you will destroy the current ecosystem of film production in Europe?” This prompted Harvey Weinstein, co-founder of Miramax, a central figure in the last industry-altering movement before Netflix—the 1990s independent film boom—to jump in and defend Sarandos.

Exhibitors in Europe and the US have grown increasingly wary of Netflix, which has shown little interest in the idea of a traditional release “window” (a theatre release, then DVD, and then streaming). Days after the Cannes announcement, the National Federation of French Cinemas criticized the move, calling on Netflix to confirm that these films would get a theatrical release (recent reports suggest they might get a limited arthouse theatre release). Jean Labadie, president of French distributor Le Pacte, accused Netflix of promoting “the death of the theaters”—streaming services in France are supposed to wait for 36 months after the theatrical release; the window is 90 days in the US. Last year, the National Association of Theatre Owners in the US expressed concern over Netflix’s deal with luxury-theatre chain iPic Entertainment, which would allow simultaneous online and theatrical releases of its films.

For indie and arthouse directors who aren’t militant about their film being seen “the way it’s supposed to be”, there are obvious advantages to the Netflix model: upfront payment, and an exponentially larger (potential) audience. But for those with no financial or artistic stake in the film production business, the question is simple: How much do you value the big-screen experience? In India, which has just a handful of international film festivals and virtually no repertory houses, the debate is largely moot—we’ll take world cinema anywhere we can get it. But what about when the new Martin Scorsese film, The Irishman (which Netflix is distributing), comes around? Will it release in theatres at all? And even if it does, does it matter to you whether you watch it online or in a theatre?

This piece appeared in Mint Lounge.