Review : Babel

Babel is a movie where four vignettes are linked together: An American tourist and his wife who gets accidentally shot while on vacation in Morocco, the children's nanny who is an illegal Mexican immigrant, the Moroccan family whose kids accidentally shoot the American tourist and a Japanese teenager in Tokyo.

While three are directly connected (The Americans, the nanny and the Moroccan shooter), the Japanese connection is a bit tenuous, which is a bit ironical since that is the most appealing part of the movie.

The vignette of the Japanese teenager dealing with the trauma of her mother's death and her own emerging identity while coping with being disabled, is brilliant. The urban loneliness in Tokyo, portrayed throught the experiments of the teenagers and more brilliantly throught the bleak, concrete skyline view from her balcony, is the best part of the movie.

The nanny's story of how she takes the children to Mexico for her son's marriage and on the way back gets into trouble with the police and finally gets deported is also an interesting as well as touching story about the situation of immigrants to theUS - especially the illegal ones.

The other two are fairly straight stories - while the insight into Moroccos's rural settlements, confused political situation is good, it doesn't leave an imprint because it is so connected to the story of the Americans, which is the least appealing bit of the movie.

The format, the coherence and the handling are really superb and so is the camera which brings out the sense of desolation and loneliness so very eloquently. If this movie has been nominated for Best Cameraman, it just deserves to win. The movie is also rather intense and leaves you with a feeling of isolation and depression which is characteristic of today's existence. I just can't understand the significance of the title or the Hollywoodified American family. For the most part definitely good. Must watch.

Review : The Queen

We normal mortals are always fascinated by royalty. This is a movie which questions that fascinating institution in the backdrop of the death of Princess Diana.

To put the storyline simply, the movie details out the reaction of the British royal family to Diana's death in a car crash in 2000 and how they are forced to accept public reaction. In the course of this stream of events, a series of issues are highlighted -

• the hypocrisy of the royals : it is OK for Charles to have an affair, but not OK for his wife to be upset about it. The stiff royal upper lip and silences need to be preserved. The Queen's husband takes the children out stag hunting to stop them from learning of Diana's death.
  
• the relevance of royalty : when Cherie Blair questions the role of the monarchy versus the privileges they have. The government is elected by the people but reports to the queen.
• The pressures of privilege : the queen is forced to react when she is severely criticised by her people for not sharing their grief!!
• What defines a royal : When Charles time and again asserts that he is a `modern' man while his parents are from the `old school'.

There are also the interesting sidelights when a Labour Prime Minister (Tony Blair) has to report to the entity he sees no value in - The Monarchy - and how he changes his opinion about the Queen. The interesting play between the royals and the elected government - who is the custodian of the people and their interests, the `Queen bends knees to the Prime Minister' headlines when he forces her to react to the public outpouring of grief for Diana.

But as I said, all these are just highlighted/touched upon in the movie. There is no attempt to explore any of these ideas or focus upon them. While from one point of view it is commendable that there is no attempt to judge and the judgement is left to the viewer, from another point of view the movies comes through as lacking depth.

I would believe it is definitely worth a watch but wouldn't rate it brilliant, because finally this movie is about an interesting side issue in the UK but has no relevance to the greater part of the world. I am also not sure that Elizabeth Mirren's portrayal of the Queen deserves an Oscar.

Movie Review : 28 Days

Returning from a mind numbing number of meetings, the idea of being a couch potato for the rest of the evening (er...... this was 9.50 p.m) seemed extremely attractive, so I plonked myself in front of the T.V and by accident watched this very funny movie called 28 Days. I probably am the only idiot in the world who is writing a review of an ancient movie, but I really loved it.

Sandra Bullock is a writer-who has never written a word in her life-alcoholic-drug user. She and her boyfriend turn up completely high at her sister's wedding, whe she proposes this wonderful toast ``Everyone has to make some compromise in life. My sister made an intelligent one. She looked at Andrew and said is this a guy I want to spend the rest of my life with and came up with the answer Oh,why not! He is making pots of money. She is smart.'' (This is line which got me interested in the movie.) And then she wrecks the wedding cake, trips out of her bridesmaid's clothes, drives around in her underclothes in a drunken, hallucinative stupor and crashes into someone's house. And gets sent to a rehab centre. And gets rehabilitated.

The movie makes fun of all the stereotypes. Sandra Bullock's co-inmates at the rehab centre are a baseball star addicted to sleeping around with every woman he sees - including his best friend's ( since fourth grade) wife, a teenager hooked to drugs and a sleazy soap opera aka Santa Barbara, a stressed out alcoholic executive, a ageing beauty queen whose husband walked out on her, a black mother, a gay alcoholic who keeps crying all the time and losing his partners. The place is run by an ex-drunk. They poke fun at everything that happens there - the handholding, chanting sessions, group therapy, the focus on `expression' and what not. And under this is the pathos - all the others have been thru several rehabs and keep coming back . As the teenager puts it - faster and faster each time. And so she kills herself. The reality of life is there. But still it is a funny movie.

The movie has some great dialogues : like the sister's wedding toast and my personal favourite which is written below.
Scene : Sandra's boyfriend is proposing to her while she is at rehab.
``But Jasper, I am in rehab''
``Thatz because you got a nasty judge.''
``You know Jasper, I've been going downhill all my life.''
``Of course not. You are damn funny,especially when you get high. You are great.''
``Stop it,Jasper. I can see I have been on this path to kill myself and I didn't even know it.''
``Are you talking about the accident? it wasn't that serious''.
``There are so many normal people out there who don't drink, who don't wreck their sister's wedding, who don't land up in rehab and do chanting.''
``You are normal.''
``No, I'm not and it is dawning on me relentlessly''.
``Listen. When you become an adult, you stop being normal and this is true of all people. You wake up one day and have to figure out what to do with your life. Some get married and make babies, some get a job and make money and then there are some like us who have fun. All of us are adult and all of us are normal.'' I just loved that!

So even though Rotten Tomatoes rates it at 29%, I enjoyed that bit of dialogue too much and have to say, I loved it.

Movie REview : Guru

As usual Mani Ratnam has taken up a controversial and interesting theme and as usual, he stops short on the depth. The sad thing though is that as Mani Ratnam's presentation gets slicker, his miniscule content tends to get rather lost.

The movie is about Gurukant Desai, failed student turned petrol worker for Shell in Istanbul turned mega industrialist. Combine this with the cotton trading on floor, spat with a Parsi blue-blood industrialist, friendship with a socialist newspaperman which later turns into a long running feud, the questionable ethics versus shareholder friendliness - the connection to Dhirubhai Ambani is rather pronounced but vehemently denied. Again signature Mani Ratnam - Iruvar, Nayagan style.

The story can be summed up in one line - it is a rags to riches story of a petrol attendant who becomes India's largest industrialist. Obviously Mani Ratnam went into the story attracted by the shades of grey of the character of the protagonist - a visionary, a person who fights all odds, who allows nothing to stall him - not relationships (like his brother-in-law Jignesh) nor setbacks nor criticism,who corrupts on the same mega scale as he creates. But as usual, Mani Ratnam does not delve the depths of this character. Abhishek ends up looking like a hero, despite all the greys and he is not the one to portray the different shades of the personality he plays.

The shades are brought out by several points in the movie -

1)Guru marries Sujatha for the dowry but is not bothered by the fact that she is older by a year, has tried to elope with someone else. They have a great relationship -Is it the dowry alone ? Then how does he manage a good relationship with her?

2) Jignesh, his brother-in-law, is an equal partner in his business but Guru is unquestionably the able one, the one who makes the decisions. When Jignesh questions it, Guru as well as his cronies are taken aback.

3) As Madhavan remarks - Guru has grown by 400% but the corruption he spreads has grown at twice the rate.

4) As Vidya Balan puts it - Whatever the route he is chosen he is successful and he has made a lot of ordinary people successful through the stockmarket.

But sadly the shades are only hinted at, the filmaker does not explore them at all. And hence while Guru becomes a watchable movie due to its lucid storytelling, good perfomances, good music and great locales, it can never be called a brilliant movie.

Abhishek has put in a good performance, but his is a one dimensional character - more the hero than a man, that sadly was the lack of vision on the part of the director.

Aishwarya is as usual the glamour element, but thankfully is less coy, cloying and irritating in this movie.

Madhavan and Mithun Chakraborty, the two newspapermen, idealistic but intensely human walk away with the best characters, followed by Vidya Balan who represents the balance in this all. These three characters prove to be so much more interesting than the main characters.In real life, Dhirubhai always maintained centre-stage but somehow, in the movie version that is not what Gurubhai does.

Review : The Devil Wears Prada

Hah! This must be the first time that a review is being written after the movie has long vanished from the cinema halls of Chennai. What to do? When the movie was playing I wasn't exactly in blooming health and the thought of going all the way to Satyam Cinemas was quite daunting, even though I really wanted to see the movie.So finally I did watch it on DVD and to put it simply - it was very disappointing.

To give a brief outline of the story - Meryl Streep is the powerful and ruthless(???) editor of a leading fashion magazine and Anne Hathway, who comes to New York with dreams of becoming a journalist, lands up as her assistant. Everyone around her keeps telling her how a million girls would love to be where she is, but initially she is not convinced. Well, how can she be, considering she is nothing better than a valet - having to get coffee for her boss, hang up her coat, get stuff organised for her boss' children etc and being in the middle of a shallow world focussing purely on making a dress!! Well, the shallow world is worth billions and employs thousands of people, she is told (and this is true and why is fashion the only target, while there are cosmetics and cosmetic surgery as well as health clubs etc., doing pretty much the same?) and somewhere down the script she flips - for no plausible reason, except for a severe lecture from a colleague - and towards the end of the movies flips back again. There are a lot of characters who float in and out to help her make this point, but since none of them are memorable, I am not going to make the effort.

I had expected a witty, razor sharp movie on the ruthless fashion world but Devil .... is sentimental!! What more can you say?? Everybody, including Meryl Streep looked nice, dressed nice but were terribly unfleshed out characters. I still can't make out Anne Hathway's character - she initially loathes the world, then actually believes in it and then filmy style gets out of it!! I believe the book is much better. I should've just stuck with it! Sigh!

Sillunnu Oru Kaadhal

Missing the woods for the trees

A Surya-Jyothika starrer, a few days before they tied the knot in real life. The build-up to the movie release was immense and the title song `Jillunnu oru kaadhal...' ably aided the efforts. But the movie....?

It is actually an interesting plot which begins with a young Jyothika (Jo from now on) who has dreams of a love marriage, getting into an arranged marriage with Surya. Six years later, they are deliriously happy and have a precocious kid too. And in the middle of this smooth life, Jo discovers Surya's old diary which tells her that Surya loved and actually tied the knot with another girl Ishu (The same name as his daughter's) during his college days. But the girl's MP father bashes up the newly married Surya and whisks his daughter away to an unknown place. A series of events and Surya weds Jo. Jo now goes off in search of Ishu, the lover girl and brings her back into her husband's life for one day! And then the movie ends somehow.

An interesting plot, which could've explored how the knowledge of bigamy affects the family- Does Jo feel threatened even if Ishu has never surfaced in Surya's life after the ill-fated wedding? Does she feel differently about her husband? Or alternately, the movie could have explored how Surya and Bhoomika (who plays Ishu) feel when they meet years later and their personalities are very different.

Instead we have a wife talking about how she wants her husband to `enjoy one day of his life with the girl he loved' because she understands what love is!!! And then turns the entire plot into some sentimental mish-mash, which is even more difficult to understand. I really cannot understand how a scriptwriter can so completely miss the point of the story and talk such unadulterated rot!!

Vadivelu's comedy is cheap, dirty and vulgar, not to mention unlaughable. Surya has managed to portray the two different personalities (carefree and irresponsible college rowdy to happy, responsible and caring family man) quite well, but with a pointless story the effort also becomes pointless. Jo looks really nice, her costumes are great and does a decent job as the wife but ditto as above. Bhoomika is puzzling and I can't even figure out if she acted well or not.

Music- loved the title song and Kummi Adi. Machhakari is Ok. The rest exist.

I went to the movie with less than zero expectations, but still came away irritated by the entire pointlessness of it all. Come on Tamil Cinema, make intelligent movies!

Lage Raho Munnabhai - Review

Good comedy, great packaging of Gandhi, a coherent narrative, a cast which obviously enjoyed itself tremendously and works well together as a team - all the ingredients of a good movie and that is what Lage Raho... is. And the best thing is that this is a movie which does not attempt to take off where the earlier Munnabhai left off. This is a separate story, with just the same set of main characters.

Ok, now to the story. Sanjay Dutt is Munna the dada and Arshad Warsi his sidekick Circuit (pronounced SirKit) who work for real estate `shady' dealer Boman Irani. Munna is in love with Janvi (Vidya Balan), a radio DJ and in a bid to meet and impress her, impersonates a history professor (Murli Shankar Sharma) and by his usual dubious means wins a quiz on Gandhi. Impressed by Murli-Munna's native gyan on Gandhi, Janvi invites him to her home-cum-old-age-home-for-homeless-elderly-people to give a talk on Gandhi. Munna spends long sleepless hours mugging up on the life and works of Gandhi and the result is that he starts hallucinating about Bapu. However, he believes that the hallucination is all for the best in facing Janvi and her troops and then of course romance blooms. Meanwhile, Boman Irani needs Janvi's bungalow as a gift for his daughter's wedding and tricks Circuit into helping him get the bungalow while Munna and Janvi are away in Goa. Munna comes back and enlists Gandhi's help in getting back his lady love's home and heart.

Sanjay Dutt and Arshad Warsi do a great job as usual, though I thought that Boman Irani did not have too much scope here. He does do the role of the flashy Sard pretty well, but hey, Boman is a great actor. Vidya Balan does a good job too, though I did find the Goood Mornnnnnnnnnnnnnnning Mumbai a bit irritating. All the oldies are super cute. And Gandhi,of course, was very very chweet.

But I found it a tad bit sentimental in places (eg:Munna says sorry to Circuit).For instance, a movie like `Love Actually' deals with a cheesy subject like love and doesn't dip into sentimentalism. But Munna has liberal doses of it which makes it that much more predictable and very-Bollywoodish.

To sum up, it is a good fun movie, definitely worth a watch, but keep your expectations low.