The 'Cowboys & Aliens' Review

 Cowboys and Aliens is a convoluted visual spectacle, marvelous to look at but woefully devoid of entertainment. In throwing out wit, humour and intelligence for meandering action, director Jon Favreau ends up with a noisy, overlong, over-serious mess. There's nothing in this film you haven't seen before, especially if you own an Xbox. 

There are cowboys, aliens, James Bond, Indiana Jones and buck naked Olivia Wilde, so what possibly could the superstar writers Damon Lindelof, Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci do wrong? A lot as it turns out - Daniel Craig’s one-note dullard, the oppressive production design and the underwhelming special effects crush this film like a trash compactor. Favreau is gifted with a much bigger budget than he was for the first ‘Iron Man’ film, but here he makes the all-too-common mistake of believing money can substitute for imagination. The uninspired alien design, the cooky spaceship, the corny Old West dialogue, the hilariously pathetic characters, the obligatory naked woman - it feels as though we are immersed in a low budget video game. A game that never seems to end. The biggest frustration is being unable to care about the plot, unless you are content to root for dozens of people whom you can’t give a tinker’s cuss about. The best we get is a spectacularly hamming Harrison Ford, who always seems to have dialogue scribbled on his palm.

For a film that combines two big genres, there isn’t much of a story. We have a man (Daniel Craig) who awakens in an 1873 Arizona desert with a metal bracelet fixed to his wrist. Like Jason Bourne, he has no recollection of who he is or how he got there. He stumbles into a sleepy town where he learns of his identity, and witnesses strange lights attacking the place with devastating death rays and crafts that snatch people with mechanical lassos. Unfortunately, the whole alien abduction sequence is an eye-glazing fiasco which leaves us totally uncaring whether anyone survives the massacre. This is perhaps because the aliens and their ships look hideously unoriginal. The villainous invaders physically appear as, for all intents and purposes, mutant humanoids with stronger than usual strength and just the one emotion. This was the wrong way to go with these creatures, who never seem to pose much threat and, therefore, are giant bores. It doesn't help that their motives, like that of the rest of the characters, are highly sketchy. Even the big finale is a moldy cliché of a science-fiction film without the vital feeling of release from danger.  

Cowboys and Aliens is the kind of project that is a dream-come-true for composers, but Harry Gregson-Williams' score neither brings Sci Fi nor Westerns to life.  Daniel Craig is supposed to be the classic lone ranger, the stranger, the man with no name, the anti hero we have to have in post modern cinema. But the man has neither wit nor emotion.  Equally distracting is his British accent which he frequently drops in.

The silly third-person-shooter style action scene is mildly interesting, but Favreau miscalculates the outcome of his overriding vision by making every action sequence edited into jump cut frenzy. The supporting cast, an excellent lineup of Sam Rockwell, Harrison Ford, Paul Dano, Raoul Trujillo (the villain from ‘Apocalypto’) is absolutely wasted. Favreau clearly wanted to make something more than your average explosion-laced popcorn film, but we expect an explanation to why the aliens invade the Old West when people like Lindelof, Orci and Kurtzman bring us the story.    

Cowboys and Aliens is just an inane film that is mostly laughable due to it’s atmosphere of dead-serious reverence. You’re better off watching Tree of Life this weekend. 

First published in DNA

The 'Tree Of Life' Review

The Tree of Life is not a film. It is the product of an artist's imagination on the loose. You cannot just watch it, you experience it’s masterful, maddening power. You can’t dismiss it by calling it pretentious. But you can compliment it by calling it indulgent because it literalises the theory of surrealism as an everlasting dream state. Nobody creates cinematic hypnosis like Terrence Malick, and Tree of Life is his most intense and ambitious film to date.

The film's innovativeness lies in its visual design and complex, shifting tone. Malick’s cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki invents a whole new technique – a sort of ‘Godcam’ - and renders haunting, floating imagery. The camerawork is unlike anything you’ve ever seen on the big screen. The narrative here follows the logic of a bad dream dealing with repressed memories.  And Malick preaches to his clan - hardcore fans will hail it as an evocative, difficult masterpiece, and others need not apply.  Everyone who dismissed ‘The Thin Red Line’ as tedious will throw up their hands once again. But the rest like me will rise to the challenge of piercing Malick’s layered surrealities.  Each frame here is otherworldly, absorbing and transporting in the way only a Malick film can be. You may walk out with a big question mark over your head, you may walk out frustrated and angry, but you will not walk out unaffected.

The Tree Of Life opens with a verse from the Hebrew Bible in which God prompts Job of his creation of the earth and his power over all life on the planet. Cut to a suburban Texas home where the O’Brien couple (Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain) are informed of the death of one of their sons. We then flit to a future where the eldest O’Brien son Jack (Sean Penn), now a successful architect, wakes up on the anniversary of his brother Steve’s death. Jack is clearly disturbed, and we hear whispered voiceovers and illusory scenes as clues to unlock the mystery of the O’Briens’ past. What follows is a brooding, meditative examination of the infirmity of life on earth. The narrative seamlessly shifts from the subconscious to the conscious, and from one universe to another, stressing the need for ordinary life and love. The final segment leaves you with a few questions, but also a whole lot to discuss, dissect and debate long after the melancholy journey reaches an end. What it all means is up to the viewer to decide, and if you can handle unconventional nourishment for your senses and mind, you'll have a profound time piecing everything together.

I am sure that the most attention will be paid to the film’s hallucinatory stretches, but far more important than the surface trickery is The Tree Of Life’s greatest accomplishment – it redirects the focus from the dreamlike imagery to it’s emotional core and it’s characters. Malick scatters the beautiful CGI & special effects with seeming randomness, but makes it clear that what matters are the emotions boiling within the characters. Hunter McCracken, in particular, who plays the younger Jack is impressive – his subtle disintegration is a wonder on par with the events’ transformation. Pitt and Chastain are excellent as well. Sean Penn doesn’t get to do much more than wander helplessly in his own fractured mind. Malick throws in plenty of visual clues and symbolism, even the ideological distinction between Jack and Steve is visual (the dark-haired versus the blond look).

About 20 minutes in, Malick strikes a sharp knife into the profitable heart of Hollywood that has supported him over these years with a sequence involving the creation of the universe. A sense of astonishment gnaws behind your eyeballs as you witness the modern day pinnacle of filmmaking where cosmos shift, volcanoes erupt and dinosaurs walk the earth - all of it juxtaposed to a gut-wrenching operatic score by Alexandre Desplat. It does indeed remind you of Kubrick’s ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’. No matter what you think of this movie, this sequence will get you to stare in awe and reach out for an oxygen mask.

The Tree of Life has an intoxicating narrative groundwork. It is unique, visually lush, and Terrence Malick’s conviction for his self-indulgences, coupled with his extraordinary filmmaking skills make this the best film of the year, and one of the greatest ever made. The question isn’t ‘if’ you want to see it, it is ‘how many times’ you want to see it.

The 'Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara' Review

 According to scientists, black holes can slow down the progress of time. A similar effect can be felt by viewers of Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara, a staggeringly inept coming-of-middle-age story as it drones on from one lame overly lit set-up to the next.

So what’s wrong? The plot itself is hackneyed, the tone is inconsistent, and what aspires to be funny leaves us just embarrassed. What’s more, Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara does feel like a stale rehash of Dil Chahta Hai - take away the ‘Dil’ and you get this dismal, lumbering mess. The trio of Arjun (Hrithik), Imraan (Farhan) and Kabir (Abhay) are almost apologetic-looking, as they tread gingerly through the wreckage of the script.  While trying so hard to have such a good time, they simply forget to be funny, and begin to grate before the body even cools.  The plotting is far from watertight, and the curiously unlikable characters fail entirely to cover up this film's flimsy underpinnings.   

The stench of desperation wafts from the screen, as writers Zoya Akhtar and Reema Kagti randomly grasp at one clichéd device after another. Yes, the Spanish locales are gorgeous to behold, and we have seldom seen imagery as pretty as this in Indian films. But watching it feels like walking into a fancy restaurant and being served a dead mouse. Abhay’s stilted dialogue delivery is itself sufficient to discolor the entire experience.  

Zoya Akhtar goes for Hollywood-style physicality, marching her players around a country in which a scantily clad diving instructor (Katrina Kaif) and ‘fear’ plays a big part. As interesting as self-obsession can be when handled properly, it's unbearable when the writers and actors can't nail that tenuous tone between empathy and absurdity. There are splendid shots of parajumping, underwater exploration, tomato-bathing, bull-running – these are the moments when Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara spins, whirls, sputters and wheezes, but never at exactly the right moments. It seems almost as if the Akhtar clan thought it was stimulating enough for the film that they create these jerks. As opposed to better road trip films like The Motorcycle Diaries where the location, the experience and the characters' insecurities feed the story, Hrithik’s Arjun sheds a tear as Imraan delivers dull poetry throughout.

The story often goes in circles when it could be advancing things. For instance, we see Arjun’s back-story involving his ex girlfriend, but nothing ever comes of it. There's also a big to-do about the fact that Kabir doesn’t really want to marry his fiancé (Kalki) but is too afraid to say it, obviously setting us up for a moment where he finds his voice. But by the time we get there (nearly three hours), the plot vehicle winds up being rather tedious and the whole point is lost.  Meanwhile, the subplot about Imraan’s estranged father kills the levity even further injecting a completely superfluous detour that much like everything else seems more dull than intriguing.   

If anyone behind the scenes of ZNMD deserves praise without reservation, it is cinematographer Carlos Catalan. Besides Hrithik (whose plainness here will make him unrecognizable to those who swooned over his ‘Kites’ persona), ZNMD wastes the always-likable Farhan  whose frequent outbursts of juvenile antics and wisecracks are made to pose as comic gems.

If you thought the supply of the Akhtar factory’s talent was unlimited, Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara is surprisingly convincing evidence to the contrary.

(First published in MumbaiBoss)

The 'Delhi Belly' Review

 Make way for over-the-top profanity and delightfully absurdist humour. Delhi Belly is a raunchy, witty and irreverent film that is bound to please all but the most strait-laced audiences. I haven't had this much fun at the movies in a long, long time.

Newbie Akshat Varma’s script is hilarious and bitingly perceptive. Delhi Belly is perhaps the first Hindi film to not just understand potty humour as a pop cultural form, but to play it like a master pianist. You can’t help but grab your stomach and guffaw as the bumbling trio of Tashi (Khan), Arun (Das) and Nitin (Roy Kapoor) stumble through a landscape defined by stolen diamonds, botched shootings, dumb sexism and gleeful disrespect of the commode. What works here is that these characters are very real — they bicker and blunder like idiots but not like movie characters, and they toss snappy one-liners the way you and I slough off dead skin-cells.

For most of its short 90-minute runtime, Delhi Belly is sly and darkly humorous, and the post-modern satire playfully deconstructs most Bollywood genres and cliches. I'm aware that Bollywood is an easy target in today’s movies, but the intentionally crude dialogue and the plot move quickly and humorously enough to make me believe that the film is smarter than it is lazy. Rather than A-list stars, sophomore Deo directs relatively unpopular actors and gives them a new chance to shine. Moreover, he has taken Shehnaz Treasurywala, an actress who killed our brain cells in films like Radio, and actually made her likeable in her brief cameo.

Here we have three youngsters — an unseasoned reporter Tashi, a meek cartoonist Arun and an unkempt photographer Nitin — slumming it at a rundown Delhi apartment. A particularly nasty day begins as Tashi’s fiancé (Treasurywala) decides to hitch him, Arun’s girlfriend dumps him, and Nitin’s appetite begins to overpower him. Enter new colleague Menaka (Poorna), followed by an unhygienic piece of tandoori chicken, and all hell breaks loose. The excrement finally hits the ceiling when Nitin’s stool sample gets mixed up with a Russian doll containing diamonds, much to the annoyance of smuggler Somayajulu (Raaz).

But never mind the story. It doesn’t have layer upon layer of intrigue, and except for the blackmail subplot involving Nitin and a prostitute, Delhi Belly could have been a short story published in an adult version of Tinkle. It's fun, but that's not the point. The point is how screwy it all is, with Deo playing with the rules of Hindi movies. As for the dialogue, I won't repeat any of the uproarious lines that pass between the characters, in part because they often feature ferocious swear words, but also because they'll be funnier if you discover them yourself. Rest assured, the jokes are about as lowbrow and raunchy as any filmmaker in India will ever get with an ‘A’ rating.

It's not high art, nor is Delhi Belly even close to the pinnacle of originality, but it is a jolly good time nonetheless. The running gag of Nitin’s protesting stomach reigns smack down in the middle of the plot, and miraculously it never comes across as tawdry. Vijay Raaz seems have a whole lot of fun as a gangster — it’s clearly the best thing he has ever done. Kunaal Roy Kapoor does well as the typical ‘fat guy with flatulence issues’; Vir Das is quite likeable as well. Imran Khan sans the irritating chocolate boy look is surprisingly good here. The trio’s English delivery is mostly convincing.

What works best in the film is the subtle, smooth nature of the comedy — the actors don’t try too hard, nor do they make stupid faces to extort laughs from you. Another big positive is the restrained use of music — unlike in Rohit Shetty and Sajid Khan products, there are no loud, annoying musical cues that accompany every joke.

Deo directs with a zippy pace and clarity. The only problem is that Delhi Belly is overtly calculated, and the songs, though gorgeously relegated to the background, are mercilessly sliced and diced. Hat tip to producer Aamir Khan for shepherding a zany, truly cheeky jet black comedy for adults in an industry that generally delivers stuff like Ready and Tees Maar Khan. Mr Khan even makes sure you stay during the end credits where he makes a hilarious cameo.

Delhi Belly is lethally funny and cynical. It is so gaudy and profane that you can't say it isn't fun in its own exuberant way. Do watch.

First published in DNA

The '180' Review

180 is two and a half hours of emotional torture that is so brutally assaultive in its determination to extort sympathy from viewers that it practically leaps off the screen and into their laps in order to get to it. The film is completely contrived and uneven - by the end we are screaming to yank our engines away from the forecourt as fuel spills - all that piano music, that gilded lighting, those glycerine tears - threatening a pyre of sense, sensibility and supersensitive subject choice. Siddharth’s heartfelt performance and the exquisite cinematography can't redeem the dramatic fallacies surrounding this mess.

Mind you, 180 has a rather intriguing first act, but by the end it just left me mourning the movie that might have been.  The idea of a young character facing death can’t help but be compelling in a way, but director Jayendra and his writing collaborator Umarji Anuradha aren’t satisfied with telling the story cleanly and straightforwardly. They instead adopt a structure that tells the story from the shifting memories of the central character, (though on close inspection it’s a technique they ignore as often as they follow it).

A stranger who calls himself Ajay (Siddharth) arrives in Kasi on a spiritual journey. After a super duper ultra slow motion bath in the river, he moves to Hyderabad and stays as a paying guest in the house of an elderly couple (Mouli and Geetha). Ajay indulges in weird things like selling moong falli on the streets, helping the slum kids deliver newspapers and standing up for the common man. Photo journalist Vidya (Nithya Menen) is smitten by Ajay’s Patch Adams attitude, and she wastes no time in (telling him how she feels about him). Ajay, who hides a traumatic past rejects her and leaves the city – it’s when Jayendra pulls the rug from under our feet by involving one of the characters in a terrible accident.

The frightening escalation of Ajay’s past is glimpsed in vivid flashbacks, but the result is a laughable jumble. Moreover, Jayendra and Anuradha ratchet up the mawkish quotient mercilessly. It’s not simply that they go for the jugular in scenes like the inevitable one where a character wants to make one last visit to his beloved.  It’s that they ladle on the plot holes with grotesque profusion. A character who suffers from a broken spine is shifted from Hyderabad to San Francisco for an emergency surgery. Another sees death – which is portrayed as a sidey black man wearing trench coats and carrying ropes. And while a patient battles life and death, we’re transported to the romantic flashback between Ajay and Renu (Priya Anand), which includes a picturesque joyous song sequence, then an obligatory sad cameo from Ajay’s mother who dies, which is almost immediately followed by a wedding and another romantic number.

Tonal inconsistencies be damned, 180 suffers from sheer sloppiness of script that results in scenes of comedic frivolity.  The dramatic turns in the second half are so conceptually off-kilter that they really succeed as unintentional hilarity. A prime example of the latter would be a scene where ‘Death’ (the black dude) stands on a flowing river, and points and laughs. Not to mention the big reveal – the scene is hysterically overlaid with a dramatic song so as to dampen its persuasive power. It's as if Siddharth has to convince even the filmmakers of his plight.

Priya Anand’s performance - talk about people going overboard in an effort to make an impression. I can understand why she would want to take this role, but her work here is so shrill and overbearing (even beyond the demands of the character) that it just becomes embarrassing. Nithya Menen comes off as painfully forced for most part of the film. The best performance is given by Balasubramaniam’s high speed camera that captures some truly amazing, detailed slow-mo nuggets (although why those sequences existed in the movie remains a mystery).

180 feels like there was an explosion at the sob story factory and little pieces from dozens of different films were jammed together into one ungainly mutant. The whole terminal illness melodrama attacks your heartstrings so relentlessly that by the time it's over you’d beg for a defibrillator.

First published in DNA

The 'Transformers: Dark of the Moon' Review

Transformers: Dark of the Moon is an unabashed work of pure entertainment made without the slightest agenda beyond replicating the look and feel of a Power Zone cartoon. It’s very nearly everything that's wrong with Hollywood, but darn if it won't give an action-hungry audience its money's worth. The story isn’t the least bit cohesive – it’s ridiculous and unintelligent, but the mayhem gets so over the top that it's hard not to have a big grin on your face.  

Like the Autobots themselves, director Michael Bay’s latest succeeds by simply crashing headfirst through every obstacle in sight. There's no way to take this movie seriously, and that's exactly what makes it so much fun. But when the action begins there’s nothing one can do but sit back and witness the carnage in awe – there’s huge robots mercilessly gutting each other, as they transform from military jets, tanks, trucks, concept cars into heavy artillery wielding biomechainsed warriors. The parajump/skydiving scenes are spectacular. And some scenes are just gorgeous massacre – like Shockwave's huge driller strangling an office tower, as the mirrored glass sprays everywhere.  Bay’s long, evolving shots are mouth-agape stuff, and their intricacy is remarkable. The 3D is glorious – it is the best usage of the format I've seen since ‘Avatar’, it even tops the latter in some places. There’s none of that gimmicky in-your-face drivel, (aside from a scene where a character points two gun barrels in our eyes). The depth of field in each shot is eye popping stuff.  Most impressively, the action is shot wide enough for one to make sense of it. Bay pulls the camera back, and it becomes sheer guilty pleasure to witness Optimus ripping mechanical spines and Decepticons blasting humans into ash and skull-dust.

In fact the only real drawback of Dark of the Moon is that the Transformers themselves aren’t the central characters. The fearsome Soundwave, who makes a return from the previous movie makes a blink-and-you-miss-it appearance. Starscream, one of the best damn villains of pop culture is reduced to a puny minion. But thankfully, most of the hogwash from the previous installments has been fixed. The attempts at comedy are far more respectable – there are no robots making racist comments or anal raping cement mixers in front of pyramids. No one pees on people’s heads, the dog doesn’t hump the cat, Sam’s parents don’t show up as often.

The plot doesn’t make much sense – we’re treated with a full blown CGI prologue that explains the presence of the Autobots and the Decepticons on earth. Writer Ehren Kruger goes the whole hog by connecting the incident with NASA’s first moon mission, and Bay responds by throwing in cameos by Edwin Aldrin and Bill O'Reilly. We learn that Sam (Shia LeBoeuf) has just graduated from college and is living with a different, hotter girlfriend (Rosie Huntingon). It isn't long before Megatron makes an impressive entry, wandering in a desert, preparing to implement his master plan to wipe out mankind. The Decepticons pop up in Chernobyl to steal a mysterious piece of a spacecraft that landed on the moon fifty years ago. And the Autobots bring Sentinel Prime, who was marooned on the moon back to life. 

The human characters are introduced, including newcomers played by John Malkovich, Patrick Dempsey, Alan Tudyk , Ken Jeong, and Frances McDormand. Add to them the returning actors Josh Duhamel, John Turturro, Tyrese Gibson. Thankfully, the humans are nowhere as annoying was the case with the previous two films.  From here, the film zips from point A to point B, and Bay merely edits for convenience. He even brings us a series of quick cuts separated by blackness in order to reduce major plot points into a sort of trailer reel. Steve Jablonsky’s score blares in the background, reminding you of the Inception gong, as the final hour of mayhem takes over all your senses.        

Transformers: Dark of the Moon doesn’t just offer a veritable feast of special effects chaos - Industrial Light and Magic has crafted some of the best CGI I’ve ever seen in a movie, and I challenge you to find faults in the action. The film dwells so far away from the realms of reality, that it would be foolish to condemn its cartoonish violence. You could step in after the first hour, but you can’t afford to miss the rest. Do watch. 

The 'Paul' Review

Paul features an alien who drinks beer, smokes pot, makes dick jokes, drops his pants to moon in public and hurls expletives like his life depends on it. He is like a quirky combination of Jay and Silent Bob, only from outer space, and he is hilarious.

But regardless of its R-rated edge, Paul is a goofy, good-hearted spoof that works well as a fluffy genre parody. Director Greg Mottola (Advenureland, Superbad) and writer-stars Simon Pegg and Nick Frost economically fulfill the mandate of their limited goals without veering off toward the grating self-indulgence of anal probing jokes. Oh wait, they do. But what they also do is cater to geekdom and Comic Con nuts the way Kevin Smith’s films do. 

Here we have two UK science fiction nuts – an artist (Simon Pegg) and an aspiring novelist (Nick Frost) who are on a road trip to visit the famous San Diego Comic Con, and the numerous UFO-related sites around the area. Things take a turn when they stumble across an actual alien (voiced by Seth Rogen). Paul is the stereotypical gray alien, but the big twist is that he is a more tranquil version of Jeff Lebowski, complete with a laidback fratboy hipster attitude. Paul has escaped from a top secret government facility and plans to go back to his planet. Hot on his trail are two bumbling federal agents (Bill Hader, Jo Lo Truglio) and a Man in Black (Jason Bateman) who wants to deliver Paul to the Govt head honcho ‘Big Guy’ (name withheld to preserve the awesome cameo).

There are so many humorous references to Spielberg’s ET films, Star Wars and Back to the Future that Paul should really have been named ‘Close encounters of the laidback kind’. Pegg and Frost are in their element with their ginger-soda dialogue and the subtle pop-culture digs. The duo have come a long way from their cult hit ‘Spaced’ days to ‘Shaun of the Dead’ and ‘Hot Fuzz’ glory, and even in Paul they dole out US pop-culture jokes by transposing them to the ET settings for amusing effect. 

What works best here is the understated nature of the comedy. Paul is not just a parody of alien films and their legendarily geeky fans. There is some of that kind of humor, but Mottola wisely realizes that making fun of the fans is not particularly funny anymore, since it's been done so much. There is a scene where the alien makes fun of the grown-man geek fandom of its two leads (neither has ever had sex nor has dressed as a Klingon) – it makes way for three dozen in-joke references for sci-fi geeks.  And there is some marvelous hilarity in presenting irreverent characters like Kristen Wiig, who plays an awkward one-eyed love interest to Pegg. Seth Rogen does well, his verbal bombast and egotism are amusing. The film gets a little too serious in the third act when Paul tries to correct a mistake he made years ago, but it picks up again after the hilarious reveal of the ‘Big Guy’. 

Paul is a fun, keenly satiric film that manages to simultaneously spoof popular ET movies and replicates the very elements that have made them so prevalent. Do watch it.