Kick-Ass: DVD Review

Kick-Ass was an important step in the evolution of the geek wish fulfillment fantasy industry. What this film said to comic book fans, the driving force behind the superhero movie industry, was: “You own us anyway, so why don’t we give you a starring role.” Thus, you get nerdy, nondescript Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson) putting on a silly green costume and heading out to fight crime as self-titled superhero Kick-Ass. After a video of him barely fending off some thugs goes viral, he becomes famous. Soon, for reasons that barely register, the mob is gunning for him.


When this movie, directed by Matthew Vaughn and based on Mark Millar’s comic of the same name, released in 2010, it caused a stir because of its un-PG-13 tendencies. Until then, even darker comic book movies had kept a lid on cussing and violence. Kick-Ass ripped that convention apart by giving its youngest character, a more capable superhero called Hit Girl (Chloë Grace Moretz), a foul mouth and a capacity for creative bloodshed last seen in Uma Thurman’s Bride from Kill Bill. The scene where Hit Girl takes out a mini army in a hallway, Joan Jett and the Blackhearts’ “Bad Reputation” playing in the background, was as guilty a pleasure as Hollywood provided that year.


Kick-Ass is best digested as a nasty-minded, kinetic piece of entertainment (Vaughn’s past work has been in the same vein; he directed the gangster flick Layer Cake, and was producer on Snatch). Yet, there’s something not quite right about a film which celebrates average school-going geeks as superheroes and yet excludes a majority of them from its audience (the film was released with an R-rating). Vaughn’s next directing job was X-Men: First Class, an entertaining summer flick, sure, but as conventional as they come. So much for rattling the cage. 


This review appeared in Time Out Delhi.

The Shins - Port of Morrow

For a while, The Shins were the indiest of the indie. Pitchforked, quite literally, into the limelight, they released three albums that melded the nervy lyrics of frontman James Mercer to sublime lo-fi pop. However, when Mercer fired keyboardist Marty Crandall and drummer Jesse Sandoval in 2008, it left him the only original member of the band, and forced fans to come to terms with the fact that the Shins was now effectively The James Mercer Project. Port of Morrow is therefore likely to be judged not only on its own merits, but also in terms of its adherence to or departure from the Shins sound.

For this album, Mercer’s called upon some of his old bandmates, members of his current touring outfit and a few hired killers. One of the guests is former Sleater-Kinney drummer Janet Weiss, whose backbeat lends “The Rifle’s Spiral” and “Simple Song” a solidity that wasn’t there on the band’s previous albums. Shins followers might point to this and other evidences of a tightened pop structure (especially on the ballady “It’s Only Life”) and moan that Mercer’s been listening to too much American Idol. It’s true that Port of Morrow mirrors indie’s steady drift towards the mainstream. But there’s enough of the old Mercer in here as well. His falsetto on the Portishead-like title track makes for a refreshingly weird closer. And in the shimmering “Bait and Switch”, he sings “High from my psychic derailer/ Drive this car to the sea/ Spend the night as high as a cannon, a towering hemlock.” Can’t see Michael Bublé covering that. 


This review was brought to you by Time Out Delhi, home to the worst coffee in the capital. 

Mirch Masala: Not so hot

Mirch Masala has been called an ‘important film’ and a ‘classic’, but I doubt its supporters would be able to explain why without throwing an anthropology textbook at the reader. I can just visualise a review of the film that talks about subaltern tradition and the reformist movement and the idea of woman as avenging goddess. The truth, however, is that there’s less here than meets the eye.

The film is a strange blend of two disparate genres – the social reformist drama and the Western. The first is in plain sight from the start, as unsubtle attempts are made to tackle several ‘big’ themes: women’s empowerment, rural education, caste and class consciousness. The second emerges gradually; you can see it in the film’s borrowing of that stock Western situation – the posse holed up awaiting the enemy’s attack – as well as in the way a lot of the action is staged. There’s also a definite Morricone twang to the music in the second half, which actually goes quite well with the traditional Rajasthani music on the rest of the soundtrack.

It all starts when a subedar (tax collector) played by Naseeruddin Shah lays eyes on village girl Sonbai (Smita Patil) and decides, twirling his moustache, that he must have her. She resists his advances, even as  the villagers try and convince to sacrifice herself for the greater good. After a slap and an impressively constructed chase sequence through a sea of drying red chillies, she takes shelter in a warehouse presided over by an old man with impossibly bushy eyebrows, who on closer inspection turns out to be Om Puri. Most of the other women in the village are also in there, and Mirch Masala neatly turns from class oppression to a battle of the sexes.

You could say that the male population of the village asking Sonbai to give herself up is a metaphor for the abandonment of the motherland in the face of foreign oppression. Even if it is, does it really matter? Metaphors that heavy-handed are best left to idealogues. I doubt it’s a coincidence that the headmaster’s spectacles are shattered in the same fashion that the old woman’s in Battleship Potemkin are. Potemkin’s director Sergei Eisenstein used his visuals to drive home a simplistic worldview, albeit with great power. Mirch Masala is just as simplistic, but what is its point? That women in rural India are denied their rights? It’s hard to believe that this came as a surprise to viewers in 1987. Yet, instead of approaching the topic from a new angle, this film uses stock characters to espouse themes that other directors had already tackled in the decade past with more subtlety and insight.

For all its misfires and manipulations, Mirch Masala isn’t devoid of appeal. The camerawork is insidiously good at times; note the masterful swivel and pan around a group of villagers sitting with the subedar. There’s the blanched colour palette highlighting the fiery red of the chillies. Smita Patil and Deepti Naval battle patriarchy, tradition and the limitations of the screenplay to come up with defiant performances. Om Puri is fine as the grizzled gunslinger; his relative composure makes Naseer’s over-the-top subedar seem all the more ridiculous. No one, though, embarrasses themselves as much as Raj Babbar in a bizarre freakout scene that had me wondering why he’d want to exert himself so if he was just putting in a guest appearance.  

Mirch Masala is proof that alternative cinema in this country is by no means immune to a good cliché. Hindi cinema has gotten by for so long without subtlety that very few filmmakers seem to think it necessary, or even desirable. This will not change until we start to re-evaluate our ‘classics’, and decide which ones actually deserve to carry that label.

Notes on Party

I recently saw a superbly restored version of Govind Nihalani’s 1983 film Party on DVD. I scribbled down some notes afterwards, which I’ve reproduced here. While they may not make much sense to anyone uninitiated with the unique pleasures of this film, I’m hoping those who’ve seen it will recognise my eagerness to say something – anything – about it quickly, before those precious first impressions evaporate.

- The cast is like an honour roll of parallel cinema actors. Wouldn’t it have been great if the movie had no opening credits? Imagine not knowing who was going to walk through the door next, and it turning out to be Amrish Puri, Deepa Sahi, KK Raina, Om Puri, Rohini Hattangadi, Manohar Pandey, Shafi Inamdar…

- Robert Altman appears to be the dominant influence on the way the movie is structured, but I wouldn’t bet my life on it. For one, I haven’t really heard of any Indian director citing the Hollywood maverick as an influence. Also, none of Nihalani’s other work that I’ve seen points to him. Maybe it’s just that the film is ‘Altmanesque’, in that it has a large ensemble cast, uses stylistic tropes like overlapping dialogue, and satirises without discrimination.

- Some of the observations are as true today as they (presumably) were then. The two unidentified men at the start of the party – the ones who say “Kitna culture hai…aur culture ke saath contacts bhi badhta hai” – are a hilarious send-up of the kind of hangers-on still seen at film screenings and art exhibitions. It’s fun to see how the same situation can still serve as a send-up today, but with the roles reversed: when Tusshar Kapoor and his buddies crash a high-society book launch in 2011’s Shor in the City, they are the social critics, and the joke is on the attendees.

- “Subhash once played the Elephant Man, don’t let that bother you”, says Pearl Padamsee’s Ruth at one point. It’s a gem of a non-sequitur, but is it also a reference to David Lynch’s film, which caused such a splash in the art film world when it released in 1980, three years before Party? The only other thing that’s Lynchian about this film is Naseeruddin Shah’s brief but horrifying cameo at the end.

- This is the Hindi film as far as onscreen drinking is concerned. As in real life, you have the abstainers (Deepa Sahi’s Sona), the self-appointed saakis (Amrish Puri’s eponymous doctor), the ones who can hold their drink (Monohar Singh’s Divkar), and ones who can’t (Rohini Hattangadi’s Mohini). Some are drinking to lose their inhibitions, some to forget their problems, some just because that’s what people do at parties. A large amount of the dialogue revolves around alcohol and its effects: “Please give me a small brandy, I feel so tired”; “Drinking won’t solve anything”; “I’m drunk” (in response to “You’re looking more and more radiant”).

- The structure is unlike that of any other Hindi film. Like Altman’s films, Party is composed of fragments of conversations, interactions, incidents. (You could argue that Monsoon Wedding was similarly structured. Could it be that Mira Nair’s inspiration was Party and not Altman’s A Wedding, as most Western critics assumed?) The film keeps shifting its focus from one conversation to another, a high-risk stratagem that could have ended up disorienting viewers (that it didn’t is a testament to Nihalani’s clarity of vision and the presence of the great Renu Saluja at the editing table).

- “All art…is a weapon,” Avinash (Om Puri) says. And its true that art is lethally deployed in this film. Nihalani’s camera (he shot the film himself) literally stalks the participants, creeping up on them around pillars, doors and bushes, hoping to catch them during an unguarded moment. And the script is a polished knife. Divkar’s response to Mrs Rane’s suggestion that they, the mannered intellectual elite, had been in search of the truth – “Hoax!” – is as breathtaking and self-critical a moment as any in Nihalani’s oeuvre.

- The ending is a head-scratcher. In what looks like a scene from a zombie movie, a battered, tongue-less Amrit (Naseeruddin Shah) is shown staggering towards the camera. This ghastly vision is seen by Divkar and Bharat. You can see why Nihalani chose these two. Amrit’s moral authority already haunts Divkar – this gruesome image could almost be an extreme manifestation of the poet’s guilt. For Bharat, on the other hand, this walking corpse is like a premonition. Till now, he’s been keen to follow in Amrit’s footsteps. In the same way Hazaron Khwaishein Aisi would do two decades later, Nihalani shows him – and the audience – the stakes involved.

- The least developed plot strand is that of Soni Razdan’s character semi-cheating on her husband with Pearl Padamsee’s escort. But even their scenes have a point of interest – Nihalani’s use of uber-pop numbers from the ‘80s. That the angry young auteur of Indian cinema chose to include such cheesy synthpop classics as “Maniac” and “What a Feeling” is intriguing; the rest of the film has a restrained Indian classical score. Did Nihalani use these numbers (both from Adrian Lyne’s Flashdance, released that same year) to ground his film in a particular place and time? Was he being ironic? Or did he just need some diegetic sound, and reach for the nearest mixtape?

- Party is full of little seductions. Malvika dances into sin. Bharat is seduced, not by an increasingly enamoured Vrinda, but by the very idea of Amrit. And there’s a delightful mutual seduction scene between playwright (Divkar) and actor (Shafi Inamdar's Ravi), each telling the other just what they want to hear.

Lagaan: 11 and counting

I wrote this appreciation of Lagaan for the  Time Out website.

In early 2001, long before it travelled to the Oscars and inspired MBA case studies, Lagaan was just another Bollywood release in search of a strong opening. Not many pundits were confident that would happen; Ashutosh Gowariker’s film had risk written all over it. Hindi film directors had all but given up shooting outside of studios; Lagaan was set in a fictional village and shot on location in Kutch, Gujarat. The only big name in the cast was that of Aamir Khan – and his last three films had been failures at the box office (Gowariker, who started his directorial career with two flops, had fallen off the grid). The dialogue was in Awadhi, a dialect from Uttar Pradesh that was tricky, though not impossible, to understand. The shoot, as a making-of documentary attests, was long and often in danger of being scuttled. But Lagaan had a secret weapon, one that was cannily hidden until the film’s release. It was about cricket.

Lagaan wasn’t the first film to combine cinema and cricket, India’s two great obsessions. There was a 1984 film called All Rounder, in which Kumar Gaurav played an up-and-coming cricketer. Six years after that, there was Awwal Number, directed by Dev Anand and starring, in one of his early outings as lead actor, Aaamir Khan. As a film, it was just bad; as a cricket film, it was an embarrassment (the nadir being the soul-scarring Bappi Lahiri ditty “Yeh hai cricket”). Though he’d never admit it, Lagaan might have been Aamir’s attempt of atoning for that terrible wrong done to the Indian cricket fan. At any rate, Lagaan, his first film as producer, was a watershed as far as cricket on the big screen was concerned.

Set in 1893, the film’s about a group of villagers who accept a British Captain’s challenge to a cricket match. They’ll be exempt from paying tax for three years if they win; if they lose, they’ll pay three times the regular tax. The first half shows how Aamir Khan’s Bhuvan and the other villagers go about learning the game, which at that time was only played by the ruling British. The rest of the film is taken up by the match itself. That the on-screen cricket looked authentic (and true to the period – no paddle sweeps were used in the making of this film) was vital to the film’s success. After 20 years of increasingly detailed cricket broadcasts, the Indian public would have rejected anything with a false ring to it.

Another source of delight was the many sly references to the modern game. The match features live commentary, runners for injured players, non-strikers leaving their creases and being run out. The screenplay was peppered with tactics the modern-day fan would recognise – the field closing in to cut off the single, a new arrival to the crease being subjected to sledging. Match-fixing was very much in the news in 2001, and it makes an appearance here in the form of an Indian team-member who under-performs as part of a deal made with the British. Other details, like the pitch taking spin only after a day’s cricket’s been played on it, are used as dramatic plot devices.

More than anything else in the movie, it’s the character of Kachra, a lower-caste spin bowler with a withered arm, which makes evident just how well the makers of this film knew their cricket. Kachra is a composite of two real-life Indian spinners: Palwankar Baloo and Bhagwat Chandrashekhar. Baloo overcame massive odds to become one of the first Dalits to play for India; his 118 wickets on the 1911 tour of England remain one of Indian cricket’s great unsung feats. Chandra, who was part of the great trinity of Indian spinners in the 1970s, had polio as a child, which resulted in a withered arm much like that of Kachra. To this composite, the film adds a dash of Shane Warne, as seen in the cheeky recreation of the Australian’s “ball of the century” (Kachra bowls a befuddled Brit round his legs, the same way Warne did in his first Ashes series).

It might be another decade before we can assess Lagaan’s true place in the pantheon of Hindi cinema (it was definitely the beginning of brand Aamir, that canny mix of populism and smarts). As far as Indian sports films go though, it stands unequalled. Lagaan can be seen as a precursor to Chak De India and Iqbal (maybe even Paan Singh Tomar), films that put sports front and centre, and got the mechanics right. Also, in introducing Bollywood to cricket, Lagaan predated that very peculiar soap opera series, the IPL. Lalit Modi might claim that it was he who brought cricketers and movie stars on the same pitch, but history will show that Lagaan did it first, and arguably better.

Gone with the Wind: DVD box set review

It’s three and a half hours long. It has an interval. It’s wildly melodramatic. It has masters and servants, evil landowners and sacrificing wives. Gone with the Wind is the most Bollywood of Hollywood movies. That might explain why so many Indians are fans of the movie, and why this staggeringly expansive (and fairly expensive) five-disc box set has been placed on shelves here.

If you’re a Windie (fans of the movie call themselves that), this pack might actually look like value for money. The first two discs are devoted to the movie, after which begins a deluge of extras. There are portraits of Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh (leads Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’Hara), and recollections by Olivia de Havilland, who plays Melanie. There’s a feature called 1939: Hollywood’s Greatest Year and a made-for-TV movie on producer David O Selznick’s search for the perfect leading lady (a process which lasted two years and included rejects of the stature of Katherine Hepburn and Bette Davis). The pick of the extras, though, is a documentary on the making of the film. Written by the irreverent David Thomson (The Biographical Dictionary of Film), it’s an engaging look back at a production that threatened to fall apart at every step.

As for the film, what’s left to say? It is over the top. It’s very condescending towards the African-American characters. Those who aren’t sold on the novel will have to come to terms with Scarlett’s selfishness and frequent tantrums. Yet, somehow, it just about holds together. Gable was the obvious person to play Butler – or maybe the way he played him made it seem obvious. Olivia De Havilland and Leslie Howard provide some welcome moments of quiet, while Hattie McDaniel as the maid is such a charged presence one wishes she had her own film. There was key work from Max Steiner (score), Ernest Haller and Ray Rennahan (cinematography) and William Cameron Menzies (production design). Victor Fleming was the main director (George Cuckor was fired early on), but the captain of the ship was undoubtedly Selznick, who did everything from rewriting the script to sending memos about the actors’ eyebrows.

Normally, the biggest grouse we’d have with this pack is the missing audio commentary. But that oversight pales in comparison to what’s been done to the movie on behalf of our delicate moral sensibilities. All major kissing scenes in the film have been censored. We appreciate the concern of whoever felt that the sight of Gable and Leigh locking lips might send us into a frenzy of moral turpitude. Even so, we wish they’d taken a gamble and left the kisses – the payoff in any romance movie – in. Selznick, who fought long and hard with the censors so that “Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn” didn’t become “Frankly my dear, I just don’t care”, would not have been impressed.

A version of this review was published in Time Out Delhi.

Sound and Fury: Ishaqzaade

This is Ishaqzaade's storyline till half-time. Parma and Zoya are a small-town UP Romeo and Juliet. They meet cute when he barges into her house and holds her at gunpoint. That’s as personal a gesture as anyone makes in this movie, and soon they’re falling for each other despite belonging to different religions and rival political families. They marry, and just when you begin to wonder why things are going so smoothly, he tells her he wasn’t actually marrying her, just playing with her and destroying her reputation. She responds by shooting him. Only, he’s taken the bullets out. And so on.

That Habib Faisal's Ishaqzaade is entertaining is undeniable. It achieves this not by subtle suggestion, or by building a mood and maintaining it, but by keeping the viewer constantly occupied. The hits keep coming at you: chase sequences, love scenes, item numbers. There isn't a moment of stillness – not for the characters, or the story, or the roving camera. But if piling set piece upon set piece were all that mattered, Shaitaan would have been the best film of 2011. Ishaqzaade is an attractive collection of arrows whizzing towards a target that doesn’t exist.

Maybe it was intended to be so. Perhaps the very act of mulling over things – of characters forming an opinion that has some basis in reality – is antithetical to this film’s existence. Maybe Parma doesn’t change his worldview because his mother is killed, but rather, because she tells him to do so. That's a key difference. Changing his mind towards Zoya, a ‘musalla’, on his own would require him to pause and do some thinking. The film doesn’t encourage either of these activities. But a dying mother’s instructions – now that’s a whole lot easier to follow blindly. This refusal to examine the self extends to this film’s attitude towards its audience, especially the expectation that we’ll swallow the “social message” at the end without questioning whether a film like this has any right appropriating it in the first place.

As Parma, Arjun Kapoor seems bent on projecting a sort of animal magnetism, and ends up dangerously close to self-parody. He settles down after the break, but by then film’s been taken over by Parineeti Chopra. As she did in her debut, Ladies Vs Ricky Bahl (also written by Faisal), Chopra emerges as the best reason to watch this film. Whether Zoya’s gifting herself a gun or attacking Kapoor with a stick, a pistol or a shard of glass, Chopra comes across as believable and good-humouredly independent. Priyanka Chopra, Parineeti’s sister, essayed a similar take-no-prisoners role in Kaminey to widespread acclaim. Parineeti improves on that by seeming utterly at ease in the male-dominated small-town milieu of Ishaqzaade. If Zoya undermines patriarchic assumptions, it’s not because she’s out to provoke or be rebellious. This is just who she is.

It might be short on insight, but Faisal's film looks and sounds great. Chaturvedi’s camerawork recalls his work on both Vishal Bharadwaj’s Maqbool and (particularly in the chase sequences down narrow lanes) Ram Gopal Varma’s Company. Amit Trivedi’s music is dependable as always, and it’s supported by a fine background score by Ranjit Barot. Faisal’s debut film was Do Dooni Chaar, which was as becalmed as Ishaqzaade is jumpy. It’ll be interesting to see where he goes from here. He has a knack for creating feisty female characters (Shruti in Band Baaja Baraat, the daughter in Do Dooni Chaar), and he’s gained visual style since his last outing. He’s lost substance, though. If his scripts for Ladies Vs Ricky Bahl and this film are any indication, he might be a writer-director in search of something worthwhile to say.