An Actor Prepares – Naseeruddin Shah in Lahore

‘Standing Behind Dead Doctor’. That is the rather inauspicious-sounding credit listed as the first ever onscreen appearance of one of the world’s (yes, the world’s) greatest living actors – Naseeruddin Shah. The year was 1967 and the film was Rajendra Kumar-Saira Banu starrer, Aman.  “I had just finished school, I was 16 years old and I’d decided to come to Bombay to make my fortune, so I embarked on this adventure,” he recalls. “At first I stayed with some friends but they grew quite tired of me, so I moved here and there, had a pretty rough time, and ended up acting in two films as an extra. I used to hang around a lot at this place with other unemployed actors and one day this chap came along and said that I need twenty of you as extras, at 7 rupees per day. So that was my first appearance on screen, that probably also saved my life!”

Not that he is terribly fond of looking back at his salad days; on the contrary, Shah isn’t really prone to nostalgia of that fashion. “I don’t believe in holding on to the past, you have to let it go, so I don’t really treasure those years or anything, though I know that I was very fortunate to have got the kind of opportunities that I did. A lot of young people were starting out then and it just so happened that they needed an actor who looked real, that why I was lucky enough to get all those opportunities.” In the years since, of course, he has received all manner of acclaim, critical and popular, in the shape of awards and accolades, hailing and endowing him with a whole gamut of superlatives. One has to wonder if he ever gets jaded about all that.

The actor mulls it over and answers with care. “I can’t say that I don’t like it but one doesn’t really know how to respond when things like that are said. In fact it tends to create quite a gulf between other actors and myself, younger actors particularly. When I’m working with them they confess to getting an attack of the nerves and I hate that. I meet very few young actors who just take me in their stride. I think actors also like to make a fuss about the fact that they respect somebody, to make a big show of it. What does feel good though is that I’ve survived this long and three generations of people are familiar with my work, that’s what I have a sense of accomplishment about.”

Having visited Pakistan before, most notably with a splendid production of Ismat Chughtai’s short stories told through the age-old art of dastaan-goi, Shah was in town again recently, working on a film being made by the enterprising trio of Mazhar Zaidi, Meenu Gaur, and Farjad Nabi. Titled Zinda Bhaag, the project is the second one in Pakistan for the actor after Shoaib Mansoor’s Khuda Ke Liye. “They got in touch with me and asked me to act in it. I liked the script. It has three young men who’ve never acted before, they’re from Samanabad, from the kind of background that the characters themselves are, kind of disaffected, uneducated kids who dream of streets lined with gold, that sort of thing. So first I needed to come here and work with the kids, to prepare them for the experience of working in cinema, and also to work on my Punjabi, so it was as much for my own good as for them.”

If one looks back at Shah’s body of work, the kind of adventurous spirit that one imagines would compel him to work with this motley crew of young filmmakers, is very much in evidence in his choices as an actor, particularly in recent years, when he has worked with a number of directors in the nascent stages of their careers, very often first-time helmers. One would think an actor of his stature might be wary of the trappings that come with an inexperienced figure at the head of the table, but the actor has no such hang-ups. “I’ve never regretted working with a first-timer; I’ve regretted working with the masters many times. (Chuckles). I don’t go by whether someone is making a film for the first time, it’s a throw of the dice in any case. I go by whether I feel like doing the project, the script, the reasons for the film to be made, the circumstances it’s being made in, and the kind of people who’re making it. I’ve has as many good experiences as bad ones, working with first-time filmmakers. No, in fact, never a bad experience. Some films may not have turned out as I’d hoped, but there were never any regrets at having done them.”

I’m meeting Shah on a typical, sleepy Lahore afternoon. The weather has turned mildly hot and the electricity is playing its usual game of hide-and-seek. He has just risen from a siesta, and as we chat over tea and biscuits, he sounds groggy but in good spirits. His crinkly hair, usually salt n’ pepper (with the emphasis on salt, of late) is dyed a henna-orange for his role in the film, accompanied by a matching pencil moustache. He truly looks the part of the dubious ‘immigration agent’ he is playing, reminding me yet again of his uncanny ability to immerse himself into the myriad characters he has played over the years, also lacing them with certain physical details that leave such an indelible impression. Like the way his character Pirojshah blinks in Pestonjee, or, as I mention to him, his small but memorable part as Bhaisaab in Omkara, wherein he captures the gangster-politician’s idiosyncracies with a twiddle of his toes encased in white socks, and a cell-phone held to his ear in the oddest, most subtly hilarious of fashions. Where does this sort of inspiration come from? Is there an element of the divine in it?

“Aate hain ghaib se ye mazameen khayal mein…” he says with a playful smile. “I can’t explain, but you’ll get some idea by listening to this story: when I was playing Gandhi on stage, one of my mother’s old friends came to see it in Delhi. After the show, she came to see me and she was very happy, and she said, ‘tum bilkul apni Ammi ki tarha lag rahe the’. I was puzzled and said, ‘but I wasn’t playing her, I was playing Gandhi’. She said, ‘haan, woh to bohat achcha kaam kiya tum ne, per tum jab bhi utth-te the, baitth-te the, bilkul Apa Bi ki tarha lag rahe the’. (Laughs) So you don’t know where these influences come from. It’s osmosis. I’ve definitely seen people like that, the men who wear dhotis with dress shoes and socks. And somewhere it must’ve stayed with me, because when I went into that posture something told me that it was right. Also, gradually one’s understanding of body language increases over the years. Then when you’re confident enough to let your body make the decisions, that’s the stage one is looking for. Your body knows the answer, it’s our minds that get in the way.”

The mention of Gandhi brings to mind the hoary rumour that the national leader was one of the actor’s dream roles, but Shah dismisses it to an extent, as just something he thought would be interesting to do. He did play Gandhi on stage in theatre director Feroz Khan’s play Mahatma Vs. Gandhi in 1998, but recalls with some amusement his earlier tryst with the part when Richard Attenborough was casting for his celebrated film version of the leader’s life in the early 80s. “I just wanted to see if I could do it. When Mr. Attenborough came around, it occurred to me out of the blue that I would be a very good candidate for the part. I mean he wasn’t making Samson and Delilah or Hercules, he was making Gandhi! Where the hell was he going to get an English or American actor who could look like Gandhi? (Laughs) It came like a brainwave. So I got through to the man, and told him that I think I’m the guy you’re looking for!  So he took me to England and auditioned me. And in the meantime, for some reason, it began to matter hugely, not only to me but to the public in India, apparently. The press started printing stories about how I’d been selected already. But then I went to England and as soon as I set eyes on Ben Kingsley, I realized, hell, he’s the one. So I felt a sense of disappointment, but to tell you the truth, Attenborough was right. I don’t think I could’ve pulled off the role at that age. I didn’t have enough of a grasp over my craft either, and old Ben, I think, was pretty good.”

A part that he did play around the same time is now an iconic one, that of D.K. Malhotra, in Shekhar Kapur’s directorial debut, the hauntingly crafted Masoom. Based on a maudlin bestseller by Erich Segal, called ‘Man, Woman and Child’, the film defied its mediocre tear-jerker roots and became a wonderfully nuanced and well-loved classic about a man whose idyllic family life is fractured by the arrival of an illegitimate son. Shah professes this quiet little film to be one of his personal favourites. “It’s so simple; it deals with a subject which could seem slightly lightweight but the way that those characters were represented… it’s the same reason why Monsoon Wedding is so effective – the filmmaker knows that milieu. Shekar Kapur knows this milieu of upper-middle class Delhi really well. Mira Nair knows the farmhouse dwelling Punjabis of Delhi extremely well.  Like Shyam Benegal knows the Hyderabadis so well, which is why Nishaant and Ankur were such wonderful films. And Shekhar, in my opinion is one of the finest filmmakers in the world. But big budgets have been bad for his creativity. His two best films are to this day Masoom and Bandit Queen, both made on small budgets.”

Talking about big budget films, the actor doesn’t mince words as to how money and the clamour for it, in his view, have the potential for sounding the death knell for Bollywood, if they haven’t already, that is. “What are we making these days?” he posits with distaste evident in his tone. “The confectionery kind of quality of Bollywood, how can anyone take it seriously? Younger filmmakers, who should know better, and from whom one expected a modern sensibility, are also concentrating on making pure fluff, at the cost of everything else. The level of storytelling, writing, acting, music, is appalling. It’s just that we now have better trained cameramen so the frame looks great and the editing looks good. But that’s not all that a film is about.”

And if someone does want to do something ‘different’, it seems the industry won’t exactly bend over backwards for anyone, not even for one of its own most celebrated thespians. “When I wanted to make a film some years ago, and I knew that I didn’t want to cast any stars in it, there was no one willing to give any money to make it. The one and only question they’d ask is ‘hero kaun hai?’ If you give them a satisfactory answer, you get the money, no matter what the script might be. I had a ready script, a pretty decent story, a fantastic cast, but no stars, no hero. ‘Yeh kya baat hui?’ they’d say, ‘heroine koi bhi ho, hero to koi hona chahiye’. Which also shows you what a chauvinistic place it is. The business of it is preposterous, the figures have become mind-boggling, but like old Hollywood it is bound to implode, which would not be a good thing. It’s not the stars who’ll be badly affected but the poor guys who work in the film units.”

The film, titled Yun Hota To Kya Hota, did get made and was released in 2006 but the experience was not a pleasant one for Shah and he has all but sworn off directing for the cinema in the future, preferring to reserve his directorial energies for the theatre. “I was put off,” he says with the slightest hint of disgust, “I had a very bad time with everybody except my actors. I, as a filmmaker, made a terrible blunder by thinking that all I needed to do was to get the actors to behave well. I was unable to think visually and to make the right decisions quickly. And I realized I prefer to direct in the theatre where I can look at what I’ve done, ponder over it, chew on it, digest it, change it, shorten it, lengthen it. Which is why even plays we’ve been performing for twenty years, each performance is a new experience. I can’t do that in film. I’m not cut out for it. I cringe when I look at it (YHTKH). I was rushed into it, with no writer, no consultant, I wrote the script myself. I was given a deadline after which I’d have no money. I was eager to try my hand at it, that’s why I did it. Parts of it were good, but other parts just didn’t work.”

An earlier film he also had a nightmarish time making but with much happier results was Kundan Shah’s screamingly funny satire Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron (1983). His pairing with the late Ravi Baswani, as a couple of bumbling amateur investigators out to expose political and big-business corruption in Bombay, was just one of the highlights of this cult classic. When I mention it to him as the first Hindi film I ever saw in a cinema in India, his face immediately lights up and the memories come flooding. “Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron is another one of those films that has endured,” he says proudly, “Though none of us had the faintest notion it would be so memorable for people. We made it from our gut and our heart, in very difficult conditions. I didn’t find anything funny in it while we were shooting it. None of us were concerned with whether we ourselves were funny, rather we were concerned about pulling off all those zany scenes, which were conceived in such a way it seemed they could only be achieved in animation. That whole Draupadi theatre sequence was actually stolen from the Marx Bros’ A Night At The Opera! We were shooting on the streets of Bombay in summer in the scorching heat, trying to be funny. It was tough, sheer hell in fact. There were flare-ups and disagreements, I had many with Kundan, because I was at that time in my career when I was very interested in bringing logic and truth to my character, even if it was slapstick comedy. I think I nearly drove Kundan up the wall, poor fellow! He would put up with these rants of mine. One of the biggest quarrels we had was over that telephone scene; I was concerned about how I could possibly bring credibility to it, and he kept saying, ‘I don’t want credibility, I want the whole thing to be stupid!’ And of course it turned out to be one of the funniest scenes in the film. So it was pretty traumatic making it. But it all seems worth it. When people mention Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron, I feel a warm glow in my heart. All the hell we went through shooting it, is forgotten.”

Naseeruddin Shah may have denied having a sense of nostalgia about his work at the beginning of our conversation, but the wide smile I leave him with after his reminisces about Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron hint otherwise. Not that it matters really. As long as he keeps giving in to filmmakers with intriguing offers, despite his disgust with the business of movies, his legion of admirers will have plenty to look forward to in the times ahead, and the past can be another country.

Lights! Camera! Magic!

“People say movies should be more like life; I think life should be more like the movies” – Myrna Loy

 

In what is most certainly nothing but a happy and delightful coincidence, 2011 saw the release of two films that took a nostalgia-filled look at the early days of cinema: Michel Hazanavicius’s The Artist, and Martin Scorsese’s Hugo, a rose-tinted valentine to the art of moviemaking.

Asa Butterfield & Chloe Grace Moretz behold the magic of cinema, in Hugo

Let me say this right off the bat, so as to leave ambiguity wanting: if you were not utterly charmed by Hugo, you are devoid of a sense of and love for nostalgia, history and cinema itself, for movies like this are the reason movies were invented in the first place! For phase one of their history, films were not about telling gritty stories ruminating upon the inherent tragedy of the human condition, but about capturing moments of everyday life at their simplest, magnified manifold on to a screen, which, even when played in silence, magically transformed into fantastical, larger-than-life images. These images were almost unfathomable to enraptured audiences, who, when presented with the Lumiere Brothers’ ‘Arrival of a Train’, in 1895, shrank back in disbelief as the titular contraption chugged towards the camera, seemingly ready to leap off the screen into their midst. This particular moment is paid homage to in Hugo, a film that is as much an ode to cinema as it is a fond remembrance of that child’s sense of wonder and amazement at the world around us, that seems to gradually abandon each of us as we enter the world of adulthood – a world which practically requires us to be jaded and cynical, leaving childish things behind. If it weren’t, we would perhaps stop and notice the minute miracles that we are surrounded by everyday – from our ipads and ipods to the colour spectrum captured in the puddle of oil leaking from our car engines.

Scorsese makes an appearance as a photographer, in Hugo

Scorsese is by no means the only or even the first one to turn his camera onto the world of filmmaking itself; he is, however, one of the few whose perspective is unabashedly affectionate. More often then not, when filmmakers have reflected on themselves, the resulting portrait has been less than flattering. Vincente Minnelli’s The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), Martin Ritt’s The Front (1976), Robert Altman’s The Player (1992), and James L. Brooks’ I’ll Do Anything (1994), all depicted a cutthroat, dog-eat-dog business where friendships are routinely sacrificed at the altar of the bottom-line. Federico Fellini’s semi-autobiographical 8 ½ (1963) saw its auteur-protagonist retreat into a world of memories and fantasies, driven to near-madness by the demands of the business and the obstacles posed by his own artistic vision. In our part of the world, Guru Dutt’s lyrical Kaaghaz Ke Phool (1959) also presented an indictment of the vagaries of the film world which creates stars but destroys people. All in all, cinema may occasionally romance itself, but it’s hardly a healthy relationship, if the makers are to be believed.

 

So it’s certainly fitting that Scorsese is the one bringing the adaptation of Brian Selznick’s The Invention of Hugo Cabret to the screen. For a director who has been known primarily for his gritty dramas about men of violence, this gentle fable-esque story might at first seem like an odd choice, but for anyone familiar with Scorsese’s all-consuming love affair with cinema, it is in fact a no-brainer; you only wonder what took him so long to express his love so explicitly. In Hugo, he not only shows off his own mastery over the cinematic medium, but also simultaneously shares with the audience his passion for the art form as well as the tremendous affinity he has for one of its greatest heroes – movie pioneer Georges Méliès.

 

Until now practically unknown to modern film audiences, Méliès has been called, variously, the father of special effects, the first

Georges Melies, circa 1930

wizard of the cinema, and the first master of the technique of mise-en-scene. What he was, was a magician, first of the card-tricks variety, but later of the screen. Méliès wanted to communicate and transfer to the audiences the sense of joyous wonder he himself had felt at the Lumiere screenings, when he knew he was witnessing nothing less than a modern miracle. Of course he couldn’t have known at the time that he would go much further than even the two Frenchmen could’ve imagined. Accidentally discovering the endless possibilities of the technique of montage due to a faulty camera, Méliès realized that film could be used for much more than just showing workers leaving a factory (another Lumiere blockbuster): it could be used to weave tales of both enchantment and macabre mystery, to imagine and depict whole new worlds and sights unseen.  When he made A Trip To The Moon in 1902, it was the first real fantasy and science fiction film rolled into one, with the iconic image of a rocket hitting the man in the moon in the eye being just one of many examples of creative use of camera and painted backdrops to force perspective, unprecedented on film before Méliès explored the idea. He would go on to make 500 more films – one more mind-boggling than the other – before mounting expenses and then the First World War put him out of business. His years spent in obscurity selling toys out of Montparnasse Station in Paris are shown in Hugo, but also lovingly depicted is his heyday, his finest cinematic moments painstakingly recreated, which, astonishingly enough, are still rather awe-inspiring to behold.

 

Over the years there have been a plethora of nasty movies on movies, warts-and-all exposés and the like; what film fans want – nay, need – more of are the Hugo-esque paeans, which can help bring into the limelight once again the medium’s unsung and forgotten heroes. There are plenty more where Méliès came from.

No joy please, we’re Pakistani

It didn’t take long. Within moments of Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy bagging Pakistan’s first ever Oscar for her documentary short Saving Face, the internet trolls emerged in droves from under their bitter-pill bridges and started the inevitable gnashing of teeth and jiggling their whatsits in her general direction. ‘Bringing shame to the country!’ ‘Pandering to stereotypical Western notions of the East!’ ‘Western cultural imperialism!’ ‘Selling out!’ ‘Oscar ain’t all that!’ were some of the choice phrases being bandied about, but pretty much all of them had the same essential whiff about them: I’m unlikely to achieve something comparable in my sorry lifetime so I’ll just try and piss this into the ground. Well, sorry to rain on your urinary parade, trolls, but I think it’s safe to say that Ms Chinoy couldn’t give a fuck about you and neither does the universe – Twitter or otherwise – at large, so why don’t you crawl back to the sour milk teat that you suckle at when you’re not spewing its contents on the majority of us who don’t share your peculiar lactic predilections.

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Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara: A Review

Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara – Dir: Zoya Akhtar; *ing: Hrithik Roshan, Farhan Akhtar, Abhay Deol, Katrina Kaif, Kalki Koechlin, Naseeruddin Shah

If you grew up in Pakistan in the 80s, you must surely remember this ad for a lemon-flavoured clear carbonated drink in which a cowboy encrusted with dirt staggers into an Old West-style tavern on a blazing hot day, and in a tortured voice asks the proprietor to give him a pack of potato chips. Then, as the proprietor looks on in amazement and horror, the cowboy starts chomping on those razor-like chips, his face screwed up in torment as the voice-over man tells him to “go ahead… build up that thirst until you can’t stand it anymore…” Finally, the cowboy whips open his leather bag, filled to the brim with chunks of ice and two bottles of the beverage in question, and proceeds to blow his thirst away.

Now imagine that those chips are the current circumstances in Pakistan, as well as all the depressing films you might’ve been watching lately, and that refreshing beverage which blows it all away is Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara. It’s pretty simple really: if you want to exit the cinema wanting to plunge a dull knife into your skull, watch Bol or the like; if you want to come out humming ‘Take the world and paint it red’ and ready to book a flight to Spain (or Google Earth it, at least), go for ZNMD. For in these decidedly unpleasant times, the film is panacea, an unapologetically cheerful, optimistic, and, yes, uplifting diversion that, despite some well-spaced weighty moments, never takes itself seriously enough to become a bore.

The narrative structure is a familiar one, as is the story of three friends with unresolved issues in their lives taking a road trip together. As in Zoya Akhtar’s first directorial venture, the brilliant Luck By Chance, the characters are fairly broad ‘types’ – Arjun (Roshan) the ambitious workaholic, Imran (Akhtar) the jokester with hidden depth, and Kabir (Deol) the slightly geeky everyguy who also plays referee in any and all conflict – but somehow, yet again, she makes them work, as believable individuals to be identified with, instead of mere caricatures. And of course their journey (both the physical and the figurative one) offers up life-changing episodes. For Arjun it’s finding out that money isn’t everything when he meets diving instructor Laila (Kaif, finally relaxed and unselfconscious in a relatively brief but well-sketched role), while for Kabir it’s coming to the realization that in being the nice guy always trying to please everyone else but himself, he has perhaps painted himself into a corner with pixie-ish but compulsively jealous Natasha (Koechlin – superbly on-the-outer-edges-of-reason). And Imran has to decide whether he wants to risk putting his own sense of self into jeopardy by seeking out his long-absent father (Shah). Along the way, you can feast your eyes on some jaw-droppingly handsome Spanish landscapes.

But all the geographical eye-candy in the world would have come to naught if it had come accompanied by a trite script. Thankfully, that is far from the case here. The Akhtar siblings along with co-writer Reema Kagti keep it snappy with dialogue that is smart, fresh and engaging. It also helps that the three lead actors are so comfortable in their parts; Roshan mixes it up for himself by playing against type – Arjun is not an immediately likeable character. Deol and Akhtar are a delight, together and apart, whether going for laughs or tenderness.

Comparisons with Dil Chahta Hai are inevitable of course, and perhaps not unfairly so, both are essentially bromances, but ZNMD has actually added something to the narrative. If DCH was a coming of age story, then ZNMD takes a peek at what comes after, so don’t be surprised to see that becoming an adult doesn’t necessarily mean growing up.

Saat Khoon Maaf – A Review

Saat Khoon Maaf – Dir: Vishaal Bhardwaj; *ing: Priyanka Chopra, Vivaan Shah, John Abraham, Irrfan Khan, Neil Nitin Mukesh, Annu Kapoor, Aleksandr Dyachenko, & Naseeruddin Shah

Oh how the mighty have fallen! Actually, scratch that, it was a terrible way to begin. For that particular phrase carries in it more than a whiff of glee, a triumphal giggle-snort at witnessing a stumble from a heretofore infallible entity, like a pompous vicar passing wind during his fiery sermon on social etiquette. Let’s face it, we enjoy the air of embarrassment when a world renowned chef inexplicably serves up a turd frittata on live TV. But there is none of that vengeful mirth in one’s reception of Saat Khoon Maaf, the latest entry from Bollywoodwünderkind Vishaal Bhardwaj. After the director’s triple-whammy of Maqbool, Omkara, and Kaminey, we the audience probably got a bit too fat-headed for our own good and superimposed on Bhardwaj a mantle of invincibility – he is film’s über mensch and he can do no wrong! And being so invested in his awesomeness, the feeling one is left with at the end, and indeed through much of SKM, is one of disappointment and helplessness – our hero let us down? How can that be? Does he not love us anymore? But perhaps we should be thinking of our own culpability in the scenario, maybe the guy was under too much darn pressure to keep beating himself at his own game; just how long can we keep flogging that prized horse to indefinitely maintain its maximum speed? At some point it WILL either a) drop from exhaustion, or b) kick us in the mouth – in this case, both. After all, pretty much every great artist in history has at one point or more, laid an egg that no mother could love.

Based on Ruskin Bond’s short story ‘Susanna’s Seven Husbands’, the film lays out its central premise pretty plainly: Susanna (Chopra) marries, and marries often, for love, duty, convenience, pity, but she is let down every time by her grooms who turn out to be psycho (Mukesh), junkie (Abraham), sado-masochist (Khan), bigamist (Dyachenko), annoyance (Kapoor), and gold digger (Shah Senior). Through her endless and fruitless quest to find amour parfait, Susanna is loved from afar by Arun (Shah Junior), a servant’s much younger son (who also tells the story through flashbacks), and aided in her romantic and murderous endeavours by a trio of domestics who presumably constitute a kind of Greek chorus to the proceedings, except they keep rather quiet for a chorus.

It’s not difficult to spell out what some of the problems with SKM are. It’s too episodic and, surprisingly enough, despite the subject matter, lacks that seductive, dark intensity that marked Bhardwaj’s earlier films. It has neither the haunting quality or characters of Maqbool, nor the discomforting menace of Omkara, and certainly not the frenetic allure of Kaminey. Where Susanna’s story could have been used to explore a subtext not only on questions of prescribed feminine roles but also notions of family, marriage and honour within a patriarchal construct, the film merely meanders on the surface, seemingly content to relate anecdotes that, beyond the initial appeal of the macabre, have little substance, and become less and less interesting as the film progresses. The final nail in the coffin is Susanna herself, a character so sketchy and ill-defined as to be rendered utterly implausible. In traditional grand guignol and théâtre macabre, improbable characters are still plausible because of the heightened stylization of their entire milieu. In SKM, that is not the case, and as a result, Susanna and her predicaments and her actions come off forced and lacking in both logic and cohesion.

Still, this is our man Bhardwaj we’re talking about, so let’s consider this cinematic hiccough a momentary lapse in judgement – as batting averages go, his is still near impeccable. It’s alright man, we still love ya. If nothing else, we’ll always have ‘Beedi’.

Thor

Thor – Dir: Kenneth Branagh; *ing: Chris Hemsworth, Natalie Portman, Anthony Hopkins, Tom Hiddleston

It’s hammer time!

Have you ever noticed that a lot of comic book superheroes are associated in name with things often rather mundane? There are the creepy crawlies/stupid critters variety – spider, bat, panther, squirrel (yes, there is indeed a Squirrel Girl on Marvel’s ever burgeoning roster) – and there are also the household appliance variety – iron, lantern, torch, cable, and, umm, arrow. In other instances, the creators just seem to have named their heroes after the first words they encounter upon opening up their offspring’s second grade reader – doctor, fantastic, atom, THING. And then you have Thor, which puzzlingly sidesteps these easy categories, what with its Norse mumbo jumbo mythological pedigree and name that sounds like one of those text sound effects from the old Batman comics – Ka-pow! Zzzzwap! Thor! So the prospect of a movie version didn’t exactly feel like the greatest thing since sliced, toasted and buttered bread. At least not until I realized I was confusing the poor dear with Hagar the Horrible. That clarification helps somewhat, for Thor is just a teeny bit more super than the other superheroes, in that he isn’t, say, a laundromat mogul who likes to dress up as a rodent in order to fight street thugs; no, he’s a god, that’s right, a flipping god, who comes from a race of gods, and who has in his possession the super cool and crazy-powerful Mjollnir – the hammer of the gods. Of course with this sort of premise, there comes the inevitable faint whiff of cheese which you don’t necessarily want spread on your metaphorical cinematic cracker.

So fear not and rest assured, for Thor quite miraculously forgoes the allure of the fromage and instead delivers a rather sumptuous spread – of fast food, yes, but as prepared by a gourmet chef. The chef in question just happens to be celebrated Shakespearean actor/director Kenneth Branagh, who, not surprisingly, brings more than a touch of the Bard to this tale of battling brothers and banished would-be heroes. Half of the story takes place in the quasi-medieval parallel world of Asgard, where warrior-tastic King Odin (Hopkins) has defeated the race of creatures known as the Frost Giants (yes, they sound like something out of a Roald Dahl kiddie book, but scoff not, they’re fabulously conceived and rendered). Tapped to be his heir is brash, blond, hammer-happy babe fodder Thor (Hemsworth), while dark-haired son Loki (Hiddleston) broods on the sidelines. As it turns out though, Thor is just a tad too hung up on his own awesomeness and when his arrogance leads to a breach in Asgard’s defence against the sulking ice army, he is banished to Earth by Odin and stripped of the Mjollnir, having been told that only a suitably humble and truly heroic god is worthy of possessing it. Once stranded on the lonely planet, the anachronistic-sounding deity has to enlist the aid of breathless scientist Jane Foster (Portman) and friends, to find his way back, and that too before Loki-gone-loco ends up destroying his home world with his shenanigans.

Thor’s strength as a film lies in the fact that it is consistently entertaining and doesn’t flinch from deriving fun out of its main character’s Baywatch-ness; the stranger-in-a-strange-land flavour of Thor’s earthly exploits are bloody good fun and Hemsworth plays them terribly well – he is certainly a star in the making, if he isn’t one already that is. As director, Branagh wisely strikes a pleasing balance between the moments of levity and gravity, with Hiddleston’s Loki providing a wonderfully dark though strangely sympathetic counterpoint to the more broadly painted Thor. Visually, too, the film is a veritable feast. In today’s post-Avatar CGI/3D landscape, it can’t be easy to create something that still dazzles and intrigues, but Thor manages to do so, especially with Asgard’s wondrous Rainbow Bridge (okay, okay, so that too sounds more Sesame Street than God of War, but it’s still mightily impressive). Altogether, Thor does Marvel proud.

Squirrel Girl, your day is nigh.

Priest

Priest – Dir: Scott Stewart; *ing: Paul Bettany, Karl Urban, Maggie Q, Lily Collins, Cam Gigandet, Stephen Moyer

Blade bummer…
Paul Bettany, you are an incredibly hot man and a terrific actor to boot, so why on earth are you slumming it in Scott Stewart’s pseudo-Blade Runner/Man With No Name post-apocalyptic crap fests like Legion and Priest?!?!

Pardon, I wasn’t supposed to begin with this angsty primal scream moment but it is teeth-gnashingly frustrating when some actors seem hell-bent on squandering their talent in material that is best left scraped off on the edge of a pavement. Nicolas Cage is guilty of it, and De Niro has been pulling it for years now, to name only two, but it never gets easier on a filmgoer’s soul to see a beloved thespian ham it up, chew scenery, and generally just sign over his 21 grams to Lucifer, without so much as a ‘I’m doing it for the cash, okay?’ With an actor like Bettany it is all the more mortifying because, unlike Cage and De Niro, he is not yet a star and so can scarcely afford to louse up his chances. And yet he goes ahead and does it. Again.

Here, he plays the titular man of the cloth whose job description involves more than just taking confession and dishing out penance; namely, he’s a preternaturally gifted assassin, one among an elite army, hand-picked by the church to seek out and vanquish the world’s feral vampire population whom, in this alternate universe, humanity has been battling for centuries. When the film picks up the story, the pale toothy ones have already been permanently disposed of, and the band of clerical warriors has been, well, disbanded, and sent into forced retirement to live out the rest of their days in obscurity. Yeah, that’s what you get for saving the world’s ass from a righteous amount of neck chewing. But when Priest’s niece (Collins) is abducted and his family slaughtered (including True Blood’s main vamp Stephen Moyer in a bit of hokey stunt-casting) by what appears to be a bunch of re-emerged, rogue vamps, led by the supposedly mysterious Black Hat (Urban), the raspy voiced one defies church orders in order to a) rescue the girl, b) kick some serious vampire behind, and c) blatantly eke out a set-up that pretty much screams ‘sequel’.

You can be forgiven for imagining that the religious vein of the scenario must mean that themes of faith – or the lack thereof – and loyalty and church vs. man are explored herein; however, it seems, that the minds behind Priest aren’t as interested in subtexts exploring crises of faith and morality, as they are in exploring, well, vampire innards, varieties of blood spatter formations, and all the ways in which the vicious-looking villains can still be made to look like meowing kittens in the face of Priest’s magnificent proficiency with a flying fist and furrowed brow. I mean really, those vamps don’t stand a chance if Black Hat is the best, most badass one they’ve got; Priest can out-glower that wimp with one eye tied behind his back. And that’s just one of the myriad problems with the film: you never get the feeling that there is anything really big at stake (no pun intended), Priest will take care of it, man, no sweat – read: yawn. Couple that with some of the most god-awful dialogue committed to film in recent memory, and you have the makings of what is surely destined to be a future classic of the ‘so bad it’s good variety’. And it really does not help matters that in an age when we the audience are used to seeing vampires as pasty-faced, brooding hunks of sex on legs, Priest gives us vamps that look like the unholy spawn of the creature from Alien and an uncooked chicken drumstick.

Mr. Bettany, you need to screen calls from Mr. Stewart.

Mr. Stewart, you need to say a thousand and one Hail Mary’s to atone for this colossal mess of stupidity.

Source Code – A Review

Source Code – Dir: Duncan Jones; *ing: Jake Gyllenhaal, Michelle Monaghan, Vera Farmiga, Jeffrey Wright

Say ‘Sci-fi’ out loud. Go on, say it. What kind of images come to mind? Lumbering robots? Men in black kabukimono-style overcoats moving in bullet-time? A monumental spaceship cruising the final frontier, with perhaps the name ‘Enterprise’ emblazoned on its derriere? If so, then you’re very with it as far as sci-fi filmmaking in the last decade or so is concerned. (If, on the other hand, you pictured a black monolith and a red electronic eye singing ‘Daisy Bell’ in a distorted voice, then congratulations, you are a certifiable film geek stuck in a time warp, so welcome to my world). The genre has remained amazingly popular in the nearly-four decades since Star Wars, even though, it must be admitted, the ‘science’ aspect of it has become, for the most part, increasingly preposterous, while the ‘fiction’ part of it has more often than not sacrificed minor elements like character development and involving plot at the altar of ‘more mind-numbing explosions and cheesy punchlines, please’. So Source Code comes as a shockingly pleasant surprise, for it is an anomaly in these Michael Bay times – a sci-fi film with heart, brain, and, umm, those round things you play tennis with.

So okay, the science part of it is still fairly ludicrous, but by not dwelling on it interminably in order to justify its premise, Source Code acquits itself on that count pretty neatly. Army captain Colter Stevens (Gyllenhaal) awakens on a Chicago commuter train with no memory of how he got there and with no idea who the pretty woman sitting across from him (Monaghan) and talking to him in a familiar manner is. His confusion is cemented further when he stumbles into the loo and finds a stranger staring back at him in the mirror. There’s barely time to consider that, though, as in the very next moment, the train explodes into a fireball. Cut to Stevens strapped down inside a capsule, again completely disoriented until he is reminded on a closed circuit screen by Officer Goodwin (Farmiga) that he has been assigned the task of reliving the last eight minutes of the life of one of the victims on the train, through the nascent and top-secret technology of source code, in order to find the bomb that blew up the train and also to identify the bomber who has vowed to do worse very soon. Since Stevens was unable to complete the mission on the first go, he must go back again. And again. And again, over and over, as he adapts and changes strategy each time, all the while letting the mystery woman get further and further under his skin, and gradually realizing the enormity, as well as the inherent tragedy of his situation; source code is not time travel, as its creator (Wright) informs Stevens, it’s time re-assignment, which means that even if Stevens prevents the train bomb from going off in the source code timeline, in the ‘actual’ world, that would have no effect and the train would still have exploded, killing all on board, just as in the original event.

Director Jones, who earlier made the similarly mind bending Moon, creates that rarest of creatures here, the intelligent actioner which also takes admirable pains to not let the human angle of the story fall by the wayside; in fact, if anything, the film is more invested in its characters than its plot’s potential for bombast. So it helps that its three leads are played by such extraordinary and likeable actors. Monaghan’s is a guileless, unpretentious presence, while Farmiga is the goddess of the close-up, not only for her luminous beauty but, far more importantly, for her complete command over the instrument that is her delicately expressive face. And Gyllenhaal is the perfect fit as Stevens: manic, edgy, and tough, yet also the vulnerable everyman – it’s a complicated role to carry, but the G man does it with aplomb. Together, the three, along with their director, weave a smart, classy thriller with a soul that’ll leave with more than a few chills.

So the next time someone says sci-fi, think source code.

Ajab Prem Ki Gazab Kahani

Ajab Prem Ki Gazab Kahani – Dir: Rajkumar Santoshi. *ing: Ranbir Kapoor, Katrina Kaif

Remember the fable about that lazy sod who is stupidly entrusted with the task of purchasing a great big hunk of cheese, which he is expected to lug home upon his back? Said lazy sod finds soon enough that carrying that smelly block of fromage is way too much hard work, and instead decides to set the thing rolling down the hill, figuring that it’ll find its way to the village on its own.

Well, think of APKGK as the cinematic equivalent of that wad of cheese, left to roll down the hill to find its own way to its destination. Or, in other words, apparently director Santoshi and co. threw together a mish-mash of ingredients of dubious quality and lobbed it against the wall to see what would stick. Or, to put it yet another way, APKGK is that proverbial chicken with its head cut off, running around in frenzied, pointless circles until it finally keels over dead.

Which is to say that the film, to use a desi figure of speech, is a film without head or foot (sar paer). It has only the shakiest semblance of a plot, a script that ricochets wildly between nerve-testing comedy and cold-as-gazpacho ‘family drama’, and characters and situations so improbable they belong in a Barbara Cartland novel, had the poodle-loving lady in pink ever tried her hand at cranking out a piece of farce, as opposed to her usual piece of… well let’s not be rude about the deceased.

But if you must know, the story revolves around one Prem Chopra (Kapoor) a no-good wastrel who whiles away his days being ‘precedent’ of the local losers’ ‘Happy Club’, and the bane of his father’s existence. Enter love interest Jenny (Kaif, reprising her cutie-pie bimbo act for, oh, only the umpteenth time) and suddenly Prem is forced to attempt to grow up and face his responsibilities if he is to win her heart. Really, what is so gazab about this oft-told kahani?

However, there is one thing that keeps APKGK from being an irredeemable waste of time, and that is – drum roll, please – the absolutely colossal charisma of Mr. Ranbir Kapoor! If ever a film has been carried entirely on a single set of shoulders, this is it folks. On paper the titular character is an annoying little twerp, like a hypo-maniac left off his tranquilisers for too long. But in Kapoor’s hands he is lovable, ridiculously charming, and, dare we say it, very nearly comparable to some of the most memorable personae created by dad Rishi (who, to the devotees among us, is the true Kapoor khaandan deity). There really must be something in that household’s water.

Mention must be made too of our wonder boy Atif Aslam, who’s in fine form, making quick work of the film’s only real stand-out song, ‘Tera honay laga hoon’. And surprisingly enough, his slim pitch makes for a good ghost-voice for the rather more bear-toned Kapoor.

There is little else to recommend the film, unless mindless comedy is your need of the day, which, admittedly, is a perfectly valid need, but there too lies a pitfall since the jokes aren’t all that hot. When pretty much the funniest line in the film (spoken by a statue, no less) is “Wipe the crow shit off my back”, there isn’t much room left to maneuver, is there?