Star Wars: The Force Awakens: Review

What must today’s youngsters make of Star Wars? The original 1977 film helped create the concept of the tent-pole release, an entity extending from theatres to toy stores. Now, there’s a tent-pole every fortnight. Will they come out of The Force Awakens ready to go back in again, like their parents did all those years ago? Or will they go home and set a date with the next X-Men movie? Is Star Wars just one franchise among many, or is there something that sets it apart?

Director J.J. Abrams seems anxious to impress upon movie-goers that Star Wars (the original trilogy, at least) was no ordinary series. Rarely have we been sold as hard on a myth as in the first act of The Force Awakens. Some 30 years have passed since the events of Return Of The Jedi. Our heroes have scattered: Han Solo (Harrison Ford) is off doing disreputable business deals; Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher), now General Organa, is leading the Resistance; and Luke… well, no one knows where Luke is. For Rey (Daisy Ridley), a suspiciously gifted scavenger, and Finn (John Boyega), a Stormtrooper who has a change of heart, the Force and the Jedi are urban legends. Abrams makes them audience surrogates: they must be given a reason to believe.

The build-up is probably the most pleasurable part of the film. With every familiar sighting—the Millennium Falcon! Luke’s lightsaber!—the heart jumps, and, with it, John Williams’ score. Some things never change: The plot still turns on a little beeping droid (this one’s called BB-8) delivering a galaxy-saving message; sons are still avenging, or taking revenge on, their fathers; and best of all, they still insist on making ever more powerful Death Stars which can be destroyed with one well-aimed missile.

Abrams achieved something rare with his 2009 Star Trek reboot, which managed to satisfy picky older fans while bringing a new audience into the fold. I suspect the same will happen here; Abrams has a Spielbergian knack of making the narrative zip along, Oscar Isaac is surprisingly convincing as a square-jawed Resistance pilot, and Finn and Rey are extremely root-able characters. I was also a little moved to see Ford's normal grouchy heroics underlined with traces of hard-won wisdom and regret. What The Force Awakens could have done with, though, was a worthy villain. The antagonist here is Kylo Ren, a Jedi knight who’s gone over to the dark side and is now a Commander in the First Order, a spin-off of the evil Galactic Empire. He has in his possession the twisted, mangled mask that Darth Vader wore and wears a Vader-like mask himself, but his motives are unclear; his backstory is obviously being kept in reserve for the sequels. And when the mask is removed and Adam Driver’s petulant face is revealed, something is lost.

The Force Awakens is snappily written on a scene-to-scene basis, though it’s also true that Abrams, Michael Arndt and Lawrence Kasdan don’t manage anything near as clever as Kirk meeting the older Spock in the Star Trek reboot. By the time the third act comes around, I found myself wishing for a couple of new tricks instead of refashioned old ones. Abrams works well with actors and is, to my mind, a more naturally gifted film-maker than George Lucas, whose limitations were severely exposed when he decided to direct the dreadful prequels himself. But it’s one thing to riff smartly on past successes (which Abrams has done on Mission: Impossible 3, two Star Trek films and Super 8, which used every trick in the Spielberg playbook), quite another to suggest a daring new direction. The Force Awakens is fun while it lasts and a welcome opportunity to meet old friends, but the series might need something more radical if it doesn’t want to be lost in a sea of franchise films.

This review appeared in Mint.

Dilwale: Review

There are stupid films, and there are films that flaunt their stupidity. Rohit Shetty is a frequent purveyor of the latter sort. Such films nearly always have dialogue attributed to Farhad-Sajid. And, of late, they sometimes feature Shah Rukh Khan. Dilwale brings all of them together. It must have taken some doing, but they’ve managed to ensure that the sum is worse than the parts.

Khan plays Raj (not that Raj), owner of a garage in Goa, loving older brother to Veer (Varun Dhawan), and a seemingly well-adjusted guy, give or take memories of being shot in the chest at close range. Yet, when he dresses up like ET, closes the door behind him and doles out a beating to some local thugs like Amitabh Bachchan in Deewar, we realize that this is no ordinary mechanic. In the extended flashback that follows soon after, we learn that he used to be a mafia strongman named Kali, and that he was once in love with a sketch artist called Meera (Kajol)—though why a film this unsubtle would refrain from naming her Simran is beyond me.

This flashback is probably the most watchable part of the film. The sight of Khan and Kajol walking around in a European town—and the sheer history that crackles when they’re on screen together—neutralizes the banal lines and stock situations they’re given. The one scenario that’s novel has been lifted from How I Met Your Mother: Raj taking Meera on a 5-minute date. Still, it at least feels like Shetty and screenwriter Yunus Sajawal have expended some effort in conceptualizing this and executing it as a one-take. Which is way more than you can say for the rest of the film.

(Spoilers ahead.) The big twist—which you can see looming at least 15 minutes before it arrives—is that the crime syndicate Kali’s family is battling is headed by Malik (Kabir Bedi), whose daughter is… Meera. It turns out that she’s a criminal as well, and that it was she who shot Raj 15 years ago. Why does that matter now? Well, Veer is in love with Ishita (Kriti Sanon), who may or may not be related to you know who. Imagine finding yourself living in the same town as an old lover who shot you and discovering your brother is in love with her sister. Of all the exceedingly specific gin joints…

Shetty is the Michael Bay of Indian cinema, attracted to fast cars, gleaming surfaces and crude humour. Does he ever have moments of doubt that aren’t related to box-office collections? Does he sometimes feel that his action sequences lack coherence—that they’re just a collection of fast cuts and flying bodies that leave the viewer bewildered as to the spatial geometry of the scene? Does he worry that his comedy tracks seem like they should be accompanied by a sign that says “comedy track, please laugh”? If he does, these doubts must be fleeting. When five of your films have grossed over Rs 100 crore, there’s no real reason to fret about craft.

And yet, and yet. I watched the film this morning, an 8.15 show on a workday. The hall was packed. Everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves. They laughed when Sanjay Mishra said things like “Bahut kaam hai, total Haldiram hai”. They cheered each time Khan did a slow walk towards the camera. They really seemed to like it when Varun Sharma, playing Veer’s friend, blamed his girlfriend for his financial troubles. Perhaps we get the kind of cinema we deserve.

This review appeared in Mint.

Bajirao Mastani: Review

It’s surprising how Sanjay Leela Bhansali only just got around to making a historical epic. His is a cinema of grand gestures and raised voices, weeping string sections and poetic destruction. When he applies this aesthetic to modern-day stories, the results can seem a bit overwrought, as they did in his last film, Goliyon Ki Raasleela Ram-Leela. But when you’re telling tales of warriors and princesses (and warrior princesses), the setting encourages, even demands, high drama. And no one does drama like Bhansali.

Bhansali had wanted to make a film about the 18th century Maratha peshwa, Bajirao I, and his second wife Mastani, as early as 2003, with Salman Khan in the lead. Over the years, the project kept resurfacing, only to be sent back into the purgatory of development. Finally, the Ram-Leela pair of Ranveer Singh and Deepika Padukone was cast, and production started. In July, a trailer appeared, suggesting similarities to the recently released, already very popular Baahubali.

It turns out Bajirao Mastani is quite different from the Telugu megahit. But you wouldn’t know that from the first 30 minutes, which build up to an extended battle that will be compared—unfavourably—to Baahubali’s crunching action sequences. After the soldier princess Mastani (Padukone) tracks him down and requests his help, Bajirao (Singh) and his army come to the defence of Bundelkhand, which is under siege from the Mughals. The pre-war scenes are beautiful, with one establishing shot that’s a version of the Monument Valley shot in John Ford films, and the stirring visual of an army charging downhill at dusk carrying lit torches (which turns out to be a decoy). But the battle itself is disappointing, and no match for the superior VFX and epic sweep of Baahubali.

Once Bundelkhand has been defended successfully, Bajirao and Mastani waste no time falling dramatically, violently in love (he cauterizes the wound she sustained in battle with his sword, which is a very Bhansali way of telling us they’re made for each other). When he departs soon after on a military campaign, he leaves behind his dagger. In 18th century Bundelkhand, such an action is tantamount to marriage. It’s all the encouragement Mastani needs to leave home and land up at the peshwa’s palace.

This is a problem, because we already know that the peshwa has a wife, Kashibai (Priyanka Chopra). To add insult to injury, Mastani, the illegitimate daughter of the ruler of Bundelkhand and a Persian woman, is Muslim. The film soon becomes a royal triangle, with Bajirao unwilling to listen to his advisers—and his formidable mother, Radhabai (Tanvi Azmi)—who are telling him to keep his new love under wraps as his mistress, and Kashibai and Mastani out-sacrificing each other for his well-being.

Bhansali obviously hasn’t had his fill of star-crossed lovers: Having the leader of a state looking to establish Hindu rule across India fall in love with a Muslim warrior was probably the only way he could have upped the ante on the Romeo and Juliet hijinks of Ram-Leela. While the palace intrigue storyline may not be particularly novel, his flair for colour, movement and visual opulence remains intact, and the writing (story by Bhansali; screenplay by Prakash Kapadia) is significantly better than in his last couple of films. There are moments when the dialogue could be from a less Urdu-heavy Mughal-e-Azam, particularly the charged banter between Radhabai and Mastani—this film’s equivalent of Akbar talking to Anarkali.

Though Bajirao Mastani is more heart than head, there’s one moment when both are equally balanced. Early in the film, we’re shown how the image of Bajirao standing in a glass palace is transmitted via a complex system of mirrors on to a screen in Kashibai’s room. In other words, she can see a film of her husband, an idea perfectly attuned to the historical reality of Maharashtrians being the originators of cinema in India. In a later scene, Kashibai hears her husband in the palace and rushes to look at his image, only to see him embracing Mastani. Though Chopra’s face registers little, it’s a heartbreaking scene, more so for the intricate way in which it’s set up.

Bhansali might be one of the last exponents of the grand old Bollywood style. Melodrama is not only something he’s comfortable with, it’s the air his characters breathe. His songs don’t move the story forward, as the modern style dictates; instead, they are invitations to stop, sit back and gawk at costumes, jewellery, glittery sets and gorgeous people moving in unison. He’s unafraid of placing a tiger in a scene for no reason at all—though the effect is spoilt somewhat by a ridiculous Censor Board-mandated disclaimer that states “Tiger scene shot abroad”.

Singh’s sensual, almost cruel swagger, though familiar by now, is perfectly matched to the brazen character he’s playing. Padukone adds another wilful rebel to her burgeoning roster; though she ends up in chains (cue Anarkali references), it’s her single-minded pursuit of her love that propels the plot. Chopra is a little blank early on, but warms up once her character decides to acknowledge the other woman in her husband’s life. Azmi plays the scary matriarch with as much verve as Supriya Pathak Kapur did in Ram-Leela. Yet, even at their most compelling, there’s one person who’s writ larger than any of them on screen, and that’s Bhansali.

This review appeared in Mint.

Listen To Me Marlon: Review

Listen To Me Marlon has one of the most surreal openings of any film this year. Against a black backdrop, a bright blue digital capture of Marlon Brando’s face flickers into view. The edges of the face are fraying, wispy, like it’s only just being held together by the force of his personality. “Actors are not going to be real, they’re going to be inside a computer,” that unmistakable voice intones. “So maybe this is the swansong for all of us.”

It may well be. For although the voice and face are Brando’s, you’re not watching him—not exactly, anyway. Special effects man Scott Billups made digital captures of Brando’s face in the 1980s for a movie that never materialized. Listen To Me Marlon’s director Stevan Riley had these captures fixed on the face of an actor lip-syncing Brando’s lines, and then worked with animators to render this so that it would seem like Brando was speaking. It’s disturbing, impossibly daring and a little bit deceitful, all at the same time—much like the subject of this documentary.

Listen To Me Marlon took shape when Riley, whose previous work includes the very entertaining West Indian cricket documentary Fire In Babylon, was approached by producer John Battsek to make a film on Brando. Because the film had the blessings of Brando’s estate, Riley was given access to around 300 hours of unreleased audio recordings, ranging from the audio diaries the actor kept to “self-hypnosis” tapes. It allowed him to envision his documentary as an autobiography: a sort of Brando on Brando.

After a brief reference to the shooting his son was involved in in 1990, the film goes back in time to tell the story of Brando in a more or less chronological order. His mumbled commentary (at times difficult to decipher, as it was in his later films) is overlaid with still photographs, scenes from his films, appearances on talk shows and the news, and home movies. Like some extended therapy session—or an out-take from Last Tango In Paris—he talks about his alcoholic mother (he loved the way liquor smelt on her breath) and abusive father. We learn about his conquest of Hollywood and his rapid disenchantment with it, see him marching for civil rights and joining an armed Native American protest.

The quasi-first-person documentary has been a major fixture on the non-fiction film-making landscape in 2015. Amy, about the late singer Amy Winehouse, was constructed out of video and audio fragments culled from hundreds of sources. Cobain: Montage Of Heck had a similar genesis to Riley’s film, built as it was around the unreleased tapes and drawings provided by Kurt Cobain’s estate. Like these two narrator-less films, the only talking head in Listen To Me Marlon is the blue digital one at the start—though viewers would be advised not to take anything the famously unreliable actor says as holy writ.



One of the great pleasures of this film is the glimpses it affords of a young, enthusiastic Brando who just wants to be “as good an actor as (he) can”. The rare moments when he discusses his craft are revelatory: like when he says that you knew what you were going to get with the actors of the 1940s, and that he tried to be like boxer Jersey Joe Walcott, whose punches would come out of nowhere. He pays tribute to his coach Stella Adler, stating that all modern acting stemmed from her. It might not be inaccurate to say that it all stemmed from him; that young actors took to memory-based acting not because Adler taught it but because Brando made it look so vital.

My favourite moment in the film comes some 20 minutes in. Brando is being tested for a Warner Bros. film. He’s asked to stand in profile, turn around. He looks more than a little amused. The camera moves in, as if it can’t resist a closer look at features this radiant. We hear Brando’s voice on the soundtrack. “When the camera is close on you, your face becomes the stage... And it sees all the little movements of the face and the eye and the mouth.” As these words are being spoken, Brando’s expression goes through half a dozen changes. It’s just a screen test, but he can’t stop performing.

Listen To Me Marlon makes for fascinating viewing, even as it struggles to try and make sense of its contradictory and conflicted subject. But the moments when Brando the legend dissolves, and we’re simply watching Marlon the actor, are pure gold.

This review appeared in Mint. 

The Peanuts Movie: Review

It saddens me to say this, for I love Peanuts and would like anything associated to it to succeed, but The Peanuts Movie doesn’t understand what it was that made Charles M. Schulz’s comic strip special. I was wary of seeing characters I had always pictured in 2D rendered in three-dimensional space, but the film does a good job of finding the right physicality and facial qualities for Schulz’s creations. No, the problem lies in the film’s attitude. It’s too well-adjusted. It’s too damn happy.

Peanuts is the most melancholy comic strip that a six-year-old might be allowed to read. It’s built around Charlie Brown—one of the greatest sad sacks of the 20th century—and his inability to do anything right: fly a kite, kick a football without Lucy pulling it away. Nothing else is more integral to Peanuts—not Snoopy’s ceaselessly fertile imagination or Lucy’s crabbiness or Linus’ wisdom—than Charlie Brown’s essential loser-dom. The Peanuts Movie seems to recognize this initially. But then, to my growing horror, director Steve Martino allows things to become warm and fuzzy until it’s just another bland commercial animation up there on screen.

Charles Schulz knew well enough not to mess with tradition. “Charlie Brown can never be a winner,” he once wrote. “He can never win a baseball game because it would destroy the foundation of the strip.” But The Peanuts Movie has him successfully flying a kite (the kite-eating tree actually helps!) and conducting a conversation with the Little Red-Haired Girl. These may seem like small things to a lay viewer, but to a Peanuts fan, it’s the equivalent of letting the Coyote catch the Road Runner.

The makers are clearly in love with the strip, however. The big hits are all there—Snoopy and the Red Baron, the exclamations of “Good grief” and “Aaugh!”, Lucy’s five-cent psychiatric help service—as are the more specific references, like Peppermint Patty mistaking Snoopy for a “funny-looking kid with a big nose”. The animation, though unremarkable, has a bright fluency to it. I will grant that it’s admirable to try and adapt a creation as singular as Peanuts—in 3D—for the screen. Perhaps the early TV specials were greeted with the same scepticism I’m displaying now. Still, when I heard the sad strains of "Christmas Time Is Here", it made me want to get up, go home and watch A Charlie Brown Christmas, which packed more feeling into 25 minutes than this film can muster in an hour and a half.

This review appeared in Mint.

Legend: Review

In the 1950s and 1960s, the London crime scene was ruled by the Kray twins. As Eastenders who ended up rubbing shoulders with Judy Garland and Joe Louis but were also convicted of murder, Ronnie and Reggie Kray have held their own fascination for film-makers over the years. James Fox met Ronnie Kray while preparing to play a gangster in Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg’s 1970 classic Performance. In 1990, there was The Krays, starring two members of the band Spandau Ballet, a film that must have inspired its own unique terror. Now comes the studio version, directed by Brian Helgeland and starring Tom Hardy as both the bespectacled, awkward Ronnie and the smoother Reggie.

Helgeland has written one of the best cops-and-wise-guys movies of the past 20 years in LA Confidential. He also adapted Mystic River, a more sobering look at the effects of gang violence. Legend—his fifth film as director—operates largely in Goodfellas mode: a glamorous gang tale with a voice-over and a period pop soundtrack. Ronnie, with his neurosis and hair-trigger temper, is Joe Pesci, while the suave Reggie is De Niro. There’s even a variation on the Copacabana one-take when Reggie takes his girlfriend, Frances (Emily Browning), to a club, gets interrupted, doles out a beating and returns to his table.

The film follows the twins as they finesse (mostly Reggie) and bludgeon (both) their way across London’s crime scene and into society’s upper echelons just as the cultural explosion of the 1960s is starting to take off. While it does tempt us to think of Reggie as “good” and Ronnie as “bad”, the film never really stops reminding us that both brothers are ruthless; Reggie is simply able to hide his brutality better. Though Helgeland’s writing is frequently funny and the period detail immersive, the film suffers for lack of someone to root for. The only sympathetic character is Frances, who—in an uncharacteristic move—is entrusted the voice-over.

The foregrounding of Frances and Reggie’s relationship is the closest that Helgeland comes to putting his own spin on the gangster movie. But we never get any real perspective from Frances, just the sad realization that her faith in Reggie’s essential good nature was misplaced. Hardy, to his credit, doesn’t try to elicit more sympathy from the audience than his characters deserve. His openly homosexual Reggie—ugly of speech and countenance—is a more interesting creation than Ronnie, though I more enjoyed the work done on the sidelines by David Thewlis (as the Krays’ accountant) and Christopher Eccleston (as the cop chasing them). In the end, Legend is violent, polished, darkly funny—and empty.

This review appeared in Mint.

Angry Indian Goddesses: Review

Angry Indian Goddesses has no intention of letting the audience ease into the film. Ten minutes in, Pammy (Pavleen Gujral) has dropped her gym weights on an eve teaser’s foot; photographer Frieda (Sarah-Jane Dias) has quit a fairness cream shoot; singer Mad (Anushka Manchanda) has attacked hecklers at a show; company head Su (Sandhya Mridul) has chewed out her employees at a meeting; Jo (Amrit Maghera) has spectacularly failed at being a damsel in distress; and Lakshmi (Rajshri Deshpande) has a man, quite literally, by the balls—all this while "In the Hall of the Mountain King" builds to a crescendo in the background. Then, accompanied by the supremely aggressive strains of Bhanvari Devi hollering "Kattey", we crash into the opening credits.

When the film resumes, we’re in Goa. All the women are friends of Frieda’s, who’s invited them over to her house so she can make an announcement. After some prodding, she reveals that she’s getting married, though she’d oddly reluctant to reveal the identity of the groom.

After an opening that operatic, one might have expected things to calm down. But this isn’t that kind of film. Part of Angry Indian Goddesses’ charm (and perhaps its undoing) is its almost unceasing energy. Director Pan Nalin (Samsara, Faith Connections) keeps the screen buzzing with overlapping dialogue and loudly voiced opinions, jumpy camerawork and even jumpier editing. Secrets keep spilling out: Mad has attempted suicide; Pammy is in an unhappy marriage. My favourite might be Su’s unfortunate reaction to the arrival of another of Frieda’s friends, Nargis (Tannishtha Chatterjee). It turns out she’s an activist protesting Su’s company’s land acquisition plans.

At times, it’s all a bit much. Forcing Nargis and her ideological opposite to live under the same roof is contrived enough, but having Su’s child bring them together is just too sentimental. The scenes with Jo daydreaming about the shirtless car-washer next door seem like a cross between a condom ad and a bad Terrence Malick imitation. The hugs-per-scene ratio is dangerously high. There’s an unfortunate tendency to lecture the audience on everything from land-grabbing to Section 377. And though it’s perfectly fine to want to keep the film free of men, it makes little sense to have Mad’s boyfriend travel 600 km to see if she’s all right and shunt him out of the story immediately after.

It’s difficult to predict what the audience will make of the events of the last 20 minutes. One can argue that something of this nature has been simmering through the whole film. While this is true, I feel the film would have been just as hard-hitting – and a bit more convincing—if it had kept its characters’ problems life-size. Then again, it’s tough to imagine a film like this not going out with an especially loud bang.

Had the ensemble been flat or awkward or unconvincing with each other, Angry Indian Goddesses would have fallen flat. But the performers, many of them only a film or two old, are all visibly comfortable in their skin and with one another. Dias is beautifully poised as the quiet Frieda; Gujral, playing the Punjabi ditz, is very funny; and Deshpande shoots off sparks as the house help Lakshmi. The film juggles the characters around, pairs them up in different scenes, and though not all the combinations work, we do get a sense of what they’re like as individuals.

Angry Indian Goddesses has been promoted as India’s first female buddy film, and its best moments are the ones with the six women sitting around, cussing (there’s a lot of that – muted at random by the censors), getting drunk, and talking about everything that comes into their minds, with Lakshmi hovering somewhere in the background. When’s the last time you saw a female character in a Hindi film have a wet dream, or come out to her friends? If the answer is ‘never’, Angry Indian Goddesses might make for instructive viewing.

This review appeared in Mint.