Rock The Kasbah: Review

I haven’t felt a stronger urge to walk out of a screening all year than I did during Rock The Kasbah. It wasn’t just the laziness of the writing or the gimmickiness of the set-up. It’s the astonishing condescension on display—the idea that Afghans need Americans to show them how to treat their women right. Rock The Kasbah wants to win hearts and minds, which makes it a lot more offensive than some blockheaded action movie in which wild-looking 'Arabs' chop off heads and say “infidel” a lot. It even climaxes with a teary performance of "Peace Train", perhaps forgetting that the author of the song had once demanded the very un-peaceful end of Salman Rushdie.

Rock The Kasbah takes a while to become truly offensive; initially, it looks set to be another fish-out-of-water Bill Murray comedy. Murray plays Richie Lanz, a washed-up rock tour manager in California. In desperation, he books his client, Ronnie (Zooey Deschanel), on a United Service Organizations tour to entertain the troops in Afghanistan. There is some comedy in the way Deschanel’s panic bounces off Murray’s fake cheer, but when she runs out on him—and out of the movie—things begin to spin out of control. The spiral intensifies when Richie is floored by a Pashtun girl’s singing and decides to book her on the American Idol-like TV show Afghan Star.

This film is dedicated to Setara Hussainzada, who angered traditionalists when she danced without a hijab on Afghan Star in 2007. Rock The Kasbah takes her story and turns it into a mess of stereotypes. Salima (Palestinian actor Leem Lubany) can’t just be any regular oppressed girl, she has to be the daughter of a warlord. And it has to be the American agent who emancipates her, who has the great wisdom to write off the studio audience’s cool reaction to her with: “They want to go with her. They just can’t go with her because they’re in a group.”

You just know that there’s a certain level of uncaring—and an assumption of audience ignorance—when an Afghanistan-set film is called Rock The Kasbah. Richie’s daughter actually points out that kasbahs are mainly associated with African countries, but that’s the film’s title anyway, not just because it’s a Clash number but because director Barry Levinson probably feels the viewer won’t know, or won’t care. The only thing more depressing than the horse-and-warlord clichés and the moralizing is Murray’s commitment to this rubbish, whether it’s warbling "Can’t Find My Way Home" in the shower or deadpanning, “Well, that’s wartime”, when an army man finds him tied to a bed wearing lipstick and a blond wig.

This review appeared in Mint.

Shaandaar: Review

There are so many regrettable decisions taken by the makers of Shaandaar that I’ll begin with what may seem like a minor one. Director Vikas Bahl and writer Anvita Dutt may think that it’s fine to fat-shame a character through an entire film as long as she’s given an emancipatory speech at the end. It obviously isn’t, but even the speech in question is problematic. Isha (Sanah Kapoor) explains that she likes herself the way she is, and then ends with, “I’m not even that fat”. But how fat is “that fat”? By drawing a line, Bahl and Dutt suggest that you shouldn’t be judged for your body type—up to a point.

Ineptly handled though they may be, weight issues at least offer a rare sour note in an unceasingly blithe production. This is a film of such consistent, determined frivolity that the high spirits soon become wearying. For me, the fun started dimming when Sushma Seth’s grandma casually addresses Alia (Alia Bhatt) as 'anaath' in front of the whole family. This exhibition of cartoon villainy is an early indication that Shaandaar is unlikely to be anything like Bahl’s last film, Queen, which had a pretty surface but emotions that felt like they were based in reality.

The stakes in Shaandaar are so low that the film keeps tripping over them. Alia, adopted daughter of businessman Vipin Arora (Pankaj Kapur), is detested by her stepmother and grandmother, both of whom are obsessed with the family name. So far, so Cinderella, except Alia is a perfectly happy child whose biggest irritant in life is her insomnia. Enter another insomniac, Jagjinder Joginder (Shahid Kapoor), who’s planning the wedding of Alia’s sister Isha—or the merger, as the grandmother keeps calling it—to Robin (Vikas Verma), the eight-and-a-half-pack-sporting scion of a Sindhi business family. Will Alia and Joginder pass sleepless nights in each other’s company? Will this bother her doting father? The suspense will kill you.

Queen may have had Bollywood gloss but it behaved like a scrappy outsider. Shaandaar, with its Karan Johar cameo and its in-jokes about Shahid and his father acting in the same film, feels depressingly establishment. Out with the feminism; in with fathers giving daughters away to unsuitable suitors and young women waiting for their princes. In, too, with excessively manicured settings—the wedding takes place in a massive English country house, complete with butlers and dancing waiters—suggesting an excess of money and a paucity of taste.

Kapoor Jr and Bhatt are lightly likeable, especially Bhatt, who uses her mobile face to suggest half-emotions, impulses, unspoken jokes—the stuff of real life. Her scenes with the beautifully underplaying Pankaj Kapur are the only ones in the film that come close to being moving. The rest of the cast ranges from passable to egregiously bad, but why single out the actors when everyone from director down to composer seems off their game? The writing, especially, is the stuff of sub-par Bollywood comedy: from the two airheads who coo acronyms like “FTB (father of the bride)” and “BTB (bride-to-be)” in unison, to Punjabi and Sindhi stereotypes so broad that Bahl could have fat-shamed them.

For two hours, Shaandaar strains to entertain, throwing everything from animation to skydiving at the audience. Then, with around 20 minutes to go, Bahl seems to let go of the reins and everything careens out of control. The film ends on such a vague and uninspiring note, it feels like the director himself gave up on it.

This review appeared in Mint.

Bridge of Spies: Review

There were moments in the first hour when Bridge of Spies reminded me of a Stanley Kramer film, with Tom Hanks as the Spencer Tracy figure, trying to save his country from its worst impulses. James Donovan (Hanks), an insurance lawyer in 1950s Brooklyn, is tasked by his firm to represent a captured Russian spy, Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance). Donovan takes to the job with more conscientiousness than everyone around him would have liked, and there are more than a couple of scenes with Hanks going on about the nature of freedom and democracy. He eventually loses the case, and his British-accented Russian client is sentenced to 30 years in prison. But when a US pilot is shot down over East Germany, an exchange of spies is proposed, with Donovan as the negotiator.

As soon as Donovan arrives in Berlin, Bridge of Spies, which is based on real-life events, becomes a smarter, more urgent film. Along with the pilot, Francis Powers (Austin Stowell), the East Germans are also holding an American student named Frederic Pryor (Will Rogers). The CIA knows about this, but they’d rather just have their pilot back before he divulges state secrets. But Donovan wants both prisoners, and finds himself negotiating with the KGB for Powers and with the East Germans for Pryor. The scenes in which he’s just trying to figure out who everyone is and where their allegiances lie are the best in the film, and a continuation of the messy, intricate and at times comedic political manoeuvring in Steven Spielberg’s last film, Lincoln.

Though the Coen brothers are screenwriters here, along with Matt Charman, this is an extremely Spielbergian film. He’s still the most fluent of directors—you could teach a class on scene transitions with the dozen or so examples this film provides. Nor has he lost his touch for the extended set-piece: the opening sequence, with the FBI stalking Abel, is marvellous, as is the scene which imagines the foundation of the Berlin Wall. There’s no John Williams on score duty this time (Thomas Newman replaces him) but Spielberg’s long-time cinematographer Janusz Kamiński is on hand, making the light look cold or forgiving or heavenly.

Bridge of Spies is also Spielbergian in other, less thrilling ways. Though US Cold War propaganda is subjected to a fair amount of scrutiny, the director remains, as he’s always been, an un-ironic believer in the American way of life. Notions of fair play and justice are sentimentalized, and linked with the US constitution and justice system. After a while, I found myself tuning out whenever the conversation turned to the greatness of American democracy and concentrating instead on Spielberg’s little filmic tricks and the satisfying, measured performances of Hanks (in full Jimmy Stewart mode) and Rylance, a British theatre veteran and occasional film and TV actor.

It will be interesting to see how audiences take to Bridge of Spies and its vision of a brief thaw in the Cold War. Recent TV shows that have explored this terrain (The Americans; Deutschland 83) have tended to be cynical about the existence of decency and honour in either side’s political dealings. Would this have been a better film if it wasn’t so damn hopeful? Perhaps. But it wouldn’t have been Spielberg then, and one wouldn’t want that either.

This review appeared in Mint.

Crimson Peak: Review

Crimson Peak is a strange mix of gothic romance, horror film and, in its frenetic last moments, giallo. It’s yet another advertisement for Guillermo Del Toro’s supreme visual imagination, something that’s informed all his films, whether big-budget Hollywood (Hellboy and its sequel; Pacific Rim) or more personal projects like Pan’s Labyrinth. Yet, too often, one gets the feeling of being haunted not by ghosts but by tropes. Everywhere you look, there’s an old standard waiting to be identified: the haunted house on the moors, the dour landowner with a shady past, the supremely creepy, piano-playing sister who keeps forcing people to have tea (okay, that one’s new).

The film’s opening is reminiscent of Pan’s Labyrinth: a brief glimpse of the mortally injured protagonist before we’re shown the rest of the film in flashback. “Ghosts are real. This much I know,” Edith Cushing (Mia Wasikowska) tells us straight off the bat. And she means it: The very next scene is Edith being visited as a young girl by her dead mother’s spirit, who isn’t very comforting. The film then jumps forward a few years. Edith, in the process of writing her own ghost novel, is an American Elizabeth Bennet of sorts: quick-witted and outspoken. It’s only right that a Darcy show up, and soon enough we get Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston), an English baronet who’s trying to get Edith’s father to fund his clay-extracting machine.

Thomas isn’t charming in the conventional sense but Edith finds his vampirish gloom and his obvious interest in her attractive. In due course—and with every possible warning thrown at the viewer—they marry and she travels with him to his crumbling residence on the Cumberland moors. The house itself is a creepy marvel, with dimly lit corridors, creaky doors, a hole in the roof, red clay oozing from the floors. Yet, the ghosts that Edith begins to encounter are—by Del Toro’s standards, at least—disappointingly one-note: shrieking, personality-less collections of blood and viscera. So are the horror-movie effects—the ball bounced back by an unknown presence in another room; silence followed by orchestral shrieking.

As Edith begins to understand the connection between the mysterious Thomas, his over-close sibling Lucille (Jessica Chastain) and the apparitions, the film whips itself up into a frenzy, until it passes out of the range of gothic horror and enters the domain of giallo. It’s a bold move—I quite enjoyed the Grand Guignol of the last 15 minutes—but viewers may be a little perplexed at the sudden shift of genre. They may also grow tired of seeing so many borrowed ideas, taken from films like Notorious, The Innocents and The Cement Garden, and from an assortment of gothic novels. Still, even if it doesn’t cohere or surprise much, there’s enough pure style in Crimson Peak to keep you hanging on.

This review appeared in Mint.

Jazbaa: Review

Jazbaa has the mother—or, more accurately, the mother-daughter—of pre-intermission scenes. Anuradha (Aishwarya Rai Bachchan) is a prominent defence lawyer whose school-going daughter has been kidnapped. She’s informed that the girl is having trouble breathing. When she arrives at a specified point with the medicines, the kidnapper tells her to place them in a pouch that’s on a very irate dog. The dog bounds over to a car. As the car pulls away, the daughter pops her head out of the window. “Sanaaayaaaa,” Anuradha shrieks, eyes bulging, running in super slo-mo towards her. “Mamaaaaa,” responds Sanaya. Anuradha falls to her knees. “Aaaaaaaaaaaaa,” she gurgles.

This isn’t the first time in the film that Rai Bachchan hits wince-inducing high notes, and it isn’t the last. We get it, really. She loves her daughter. She loves her so much that she will defend a possible rapist-murderer, Miyaaz (Chandan Roy Sanyal), on the condition that the kidnapper will let Sanaya go once she has won the case. Do we really need multiple “ek maa par kya guzarti hai” speeches? Does Rai Bachchan need to be red-eyed in every scene? Is director Sanjay Gupta so worried we won’t swallow emotional bait that he has to oversell it?

Helping her in her endeavours is Yohaan, an inspector known for his stellar policework and his terrible one-liners. As their investigation into the Miyaaz case progresses, we’re introduced to the victim’s mother (Shabana Azmi), a crooked politician (Jackie Shroff) and his drug addict son (Siddhanth Kapoor), and re-introduced to a mid-level thug (Abhimanyu Singh), whom Anuradha had defended in court at the start of the film. Yet, the more complicated this case becomes, the more slack the film feels, partly because Gupta forgets to keep the phone calls from the kidnapper to Anuradha going after a while (which allows the audience to forget that there’s a real threat there), and partly because the plot twists are so ridiculous that you stop taking them seriously.

Visually, Jazbaa is all Dutch angles and green filters and slo-mo, an excess of stylization that calls attention to the absence of any real style. The dialogue (by Kamlesh Pandey) is almost a parody of the hard-boiled Gupta style: “Aise khoobsoorat thopde case nahi jeet-te”; “Yeh case gutter banta jaa raha hai”. In her comeback vehicle, Rai Bachchan tries hard—so hard, in fact, that you can see the glycerine and the effort. (Khan, appearing as a cop onscreen for the second time in two weeks, is entertainingly hammy.)

The worst thing about Jazbaa, though, is when it ends with statistics about sexual assault convictions in India. This is a film in which the rape and murder of a young woman is re-enacted in lurid detail, thrice. It’s pulp material of the basest sort, but Gupta seems to think he’s making a social film.

Sicario: Review

Sicario is a great companion piece—and, to my mind, a superior film—to Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty. Both involve manhunts that see US forces hunting down their quarry on foreign soil, without involving the local authorities. This is murky ethical territory, the implications of which Zero Dark Thirty shrugs off, but Sicario, which deals with the drug trade along the US-Mexico border, doesn’t. The night-vision kill of Osama Bin Laden in Bigelow’s film is a tribute to the deadly efficiency of the US marines, a catharsis of sorts after a very tense film. Sicario is just as tense, but is less inclined to let audiences off the hook.

The film, by French-Canadian director Denis Villeneuve (Incendies, Prisoners), opens with dead bodies and ends with deadened hopes. On a kidnapping raid in Chandler, Arizona, FBI agent Kate Macer (Emily Blunt) and her team find dozens of corpses in the walls of a house. Then, as they’re sweeping the compound, an explosive device goes off, killing two agents. Later that evening, Kate’s superiors ask her if she’d like to join an inter-organization task force headed by the department of defence adviser Matt Graver (Josh Brolin) aimed at taking down the person responsible for her team-members’ deaths, cartel boss Manuel Diaz. She agrees, but right from the start it’s clear that this mission isn’t entirely what it seems.

After picking up Matt’s partner, Alejandro Gillick (Benicio Del Toro), and a team of ex-military men at El Paso, Texas, they head to Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. In a sequence that makes brilliant use of aerial camerawork, their convoy travels over the border, through the violence-strewn streets of Ciudad Juárez, where they abduct one of Diaz’s men, and then back over the border. At the checkpoint, there’s a skirmish and Alejandro, who till then had identified as a prosecutor, shows that he’s ice-cold in a gunfight. To Kate’s horror, no one seems to care in the least about civilian casualties.

Even before Diaz’s man looks at Alejandro and says, “Medellin”, Del Toro makes it clear his character is carrying a lot of baggage. What the exact nature of this baggage is, and how he fits into Matt’s plans, is something Sicario reveals slowly. Kate is the audience surrogate here: appalled at the violence and the sidestepping of international law, but unable to turn away. Eventually, she finds out why she—an agent with comparatively little experience and nothing approaching this level of combat training—is on the task force at all. By then, Matt’s larger strategy—which he helpfully boils down to “making some noise”—is well under way.

Villeneuve’s talent for building tension from scene to scene is already well known, and here he displays a rare command over the prolonged set piece. His partnership with Roger Deakins started on Prisoners, and the veteran cinematographer really gets to stretch out here and lend some of his magic to the Mexican landscape. Brolin, all forced blitheness, and Del Toro, mumbling and grimacing as only he can, are magnetic, but the film finds its emotional force in Blunt’s aghast features as she watches the mission become increasingly compromised, legally and morally. I could have done without the subplot involving a Mexican cop and his son, which feels like a token gesture, but that apart, Sicario is gut-wrenching and cynical in ways that Hollywood rarely is nowadays.



This review appeared in Mint.

The Martian: Review

If you’ve read that The Martian was shot in the same Jordanian desert as Lawrence Of Arabia and have conjured up images of gorgeous Red Planet landscapes, you might be slightly disappointed. Ridley Scott’s adaptation of Andy Weir’s 2011 novel is less concerned with the interplanetary scenery than it is with human ingenuity. Unlike Gravity, which was at its best a unique sensory experience, The Martian rarely tries to overwhelm us with scale or spectacle. Instead—and this might sound weird—Scott’s film is mainly a wry comedy, one which smoothly transfers the castaway narrative to outer space.

Mark Watney (Matt Damon), part of a NASA team exploring Mars, loses contact with the rest during a storm. Believing him to be dead, they leave the planet and continue with their mission. But Mark isn’t dead, and when he comes to the next day, he’s alone on Mars with no way of communicating this to NASA. This would normally result in a scene or two of hand-wringing and fate-cursing, but Scott’s protagonists have always been resourceful, and soon Mark is rationing his food and putting his training as a botanist to use by growing vegetables.

After NASA officials notice signs of activity, they manage to establish contact with Mark (through Pathfinder!) and a rescue mission suddenly becomes a possibility. From the chamber piece of the first half, The Martian becomes a more traditional bring-our-heroes-home kind of film. Nevertheless, it’s a very engaging one, full of good vibes and wisecracks and international co-operation. Not all the film’s decisions make sense—Donald Glover’s mad scientist is a bit of a comic relief in a film that doesn’t need it—but this is pretty fleet-footed stuff for big-budget Hollywood. It also steers clear of excessive emotionalism, which is a blessing for those who were left cold by Interstellar.

Besides Damon, the film has Jessica Chastain, Michael Peña and Kate Mara as the crew in space, and Chiwetel Ejiofor, Kristen Wiig and Jeff Daniels at NASA. This is an unnecessarily starry cast, but Scott and writer Drew Goddard wisely keep the focus on Mark and his resourcefulness, and expand the canvas only as far as the rescue efforts are concerned. If this is the middle ground between the bloat of Avengers: Age Of Ultron and the vision of Mad Max: Fury Road, we’ll take it.

This review appeared in Mint.