Cowboys & Aliens : Movie Review

Movie Review of Cowboys & Aliens :     When you saw the trailer of Cowboys & Aliens, you must have thought that it is going to be one cracker of a movie… I thought the same! After all, the story rides on such a unique concept - cowboys fighting it out with the aliens! But unfortunately, the movie fails to deliver!

The movie revolves around a man (Daniel Craig…we will reveal his character’s name later; you will understand why so) who wakes up with an injury in the middle of a Mexican desert, without any memory and a strange bracelet around his wrist! While trying to figure out things, he reaches the nearest town called Absolution. Somehow, he gets involved in a fight with the local rich man’s son, Percy (played by Paul Dano). He (Daniel Craig) is then arrested by the local sheriff, because, although he has lost his memory, he is the most wanted criminal of the town by the name of Jake Lonegran! (Now you know why we didn’t reveal his name earlier!)

Then there is a mysterious girl Ella (played by Olivia Wilde), who helped the local sheriff in capturing Jake. The rich man’s son Percy is also arrested by the sheriff. Following which Percy’s father, the rich man, Colonel Dolarhyde (played by Harrison Ford) comes to the scene to teach the sheriff a lesson for arresting his son; and also take Jake’s case since Jake stole his (Dolarhyde’s) bullion. But the sudden arrival of space ships, followed by abduction of people from the town by the aliens, nullifies Dolarhyde’s plan.

What comes to their rescue is Jake’s bracelet, as he learns to use it as a weapon and destroys a spaceship (though the alien manages to flee). Slowly and steadily, Jake and Dolarhyde mend their differences and shake hands and decide to fight against the aliens and get back their abducted natives.

The problem here is not the concept of the movie, but the treatment given to the script. Jon Favreau’s direction fails to captivate the viewer’s attention for a long time span. Though the movie starts off well, with all the mystery surrounding Jake, the way the story unfolds doesn’t leave you much impressed. There are too many strange happenings in the film which somehow make the movie a tough one to grasp! Also, Jon Favreau takes too long to reveal the real identity of Jake. The reason for the aliens attacking the Mexican desert, also, does not leave you in a state of thrill (which it should have).

SPOILER ALERT… Ella turning out to be a non-human is perhaps the only element of the script that leaves an impact upon you.

Speaking about the performances by the actors, our very own James Bond, Daniel Craig (as Jake Lonegran), gives us a great performance as the quickgun but stoic protagonist. Daniel’s show is perhaps the only saviour of this lifeless film. Though Harrison Ford (as Colonel Woodrow Dolarhyde) is the second lead, he does total justice to his character. Olivia Wilde (as Ella) looks stunningly beautiful but has little to offer to the script. Adam Beach (as one of the native Indians who help Jake retain his lost memory) impressed us with his performance.

The background score by Harry Gregson-Williams is an exciting one. After watching the trailer itself one realises that whatever be the case, the background score will not be disappointing.

Over all Cowboys & Aliens is a below par movie and a waste of a unique concept. The movie will not catch anyone’s attention: neither the cowboys’ nor the aliens’!

Just for Daniel’s great performance, we give half-a-star extra and give Cowboys & Aliens 2 stars out of 5!

Rating: 2 stars out of 5

Gandhi To Hitler : Movie Review

Movie Review of Gandhi To Hitler

This Friday’s release Gandhi To Hitler demands an unconditional suspension of belief. So if a you see an actor whose every facial twitch reminds you of some dreamy Mungerilal now dressed up as the World War 2 monstrosity, Adolf Hitler, try not to wince. And if you spot a Russian or French soldier awfully tanned like some louts from apna Verar, try not to laugh. For all its claim to document the contrast of two ideologies and for all its attempt to tout itself as “A Masterpiece on World Peace” (the film’s tagline), Gandhi To Hitler is painfully farcical and downright ludicrous.

The intention of director Rakesh Ranjan Kumar is to underscore the futility of war by comparing and contrasting Mahatma Gandhi’s peaceful ways to the genocidal streak of the megalomaniacal Fuhrer. The plot is based on two letters written by Gandhi to Hitler, trying to impress upon the latter the importance of non-violence in a bid to prevent the war.

We are transported to the underground bunker in the bombed-out Germany where Hitler (Raghuvir Yadav), his well-coiffured ladylove Eva Braun (Neha Dhupia) and a bunch of loyal orderlies like Joseph Goebbels (Nalin Singh) and the Reich minister Albert Speer (Nasir Abdullah) are fuming, fretting and counting their last sparse blessings before giving up the ghost.

The action keeps shifting from inside the bunker to a few Indian soldiers in the warzone in Germany and to a relatively peaceful milieu in the British occupied India where Gandhi ji is heard preaching peace and non violence in congregations. Another contrasting angle is thrown in the form of a track involving the Azad Hind Fauj and its founder Subhash Chandra Bose advocating blood-for-ajadi among lanky foot soldiers. And spliced in between all this clutter is the actual footage of World War 2.

The script is a disaster, equally matched by shoddy performances by the actors, the otherwise tolerable Raghuvir Yadav included. But the most deplorable is the decision to cast Indian actors as the Germans, Russians and French. If this was Rakesh Ranjan Kumar’s idea of experimenting with truth, it falls flat on its face. To put mildly, it gives the film a farcical look and one wonders if the director should have gone the whole hog and rather cast a foreigner to play Gandhi.

In short, Gandhi To Hitler is best avoided.

Rating: 1 star out of 5

Khap : Movie Review

Movie Review of Khap The thing with issue-based films is that the director needs to learn the art of tightrope-walk through a potential minefield of obvious clichés and commercial trappings. A tilt too much to artistic adherence could earn the film a tag of docu drama and consequently scare away the movie buffs, and a kowtow to commercial formula may make the issue facile and trivial. That’s precisely the problem with director Ajai Sinha’s film Khap, made with good intentions but poor sensitivity.

The film, as you all must know by now, deals with the burning issue of honour killings in villages whenever young girls and boys marry within the same gotra. What’s murder for the modern world is, however, purgation for the Khaps of the villages still steeped in age-old customs and social mores.

Om Puri plays the one such authoritarian Khap of a village. His son (Mohnish Bahl) didn’t approve of his dad’s regressive mindset and separated years ago to pursue social activism.

At the start itself, director Ajai Sinha lays out the cards with a gruesome honour killing of a couple trying to elope. Then we are treated to an internet romance between a couple (Uvika Chaudhary and Sartaj) who fall in love, only to find out that they hail from the same clan. To make matters worse, the girl is the daughter of the same headstrong Khap (Om Puri) who is dead against same gotra marriage. How will this Khap react when chickens come home to roost?

The treatment given by director Ajai Sinha to the subject is facile at best. Weaving a threadbare plot from newspaper headlines and peppering it with the routine songs and a candyfloss love story robs the film of the gravity that it might have had if in the hands of an adept director like a Kashyap or Bhardwaj. On top of it, the director also tries to absolve the Khaps with a long monologue (courtesy Alok Nath) about keeping the gene pool clean by banning same gotra marriages.

The songs are absolutely unwanted and performance strictly tolerable.

Khap, in a nutshell, trivializes a serious issue with its formulaic treatment.

Rating: 2 stars out of 5

Singham : Movie Review

Starring Ajay Devgn, Prakash Raj, Kajal Aggarwal

Directed by Rohit Shetty

Rating: ** ½

This cop is a killer. He implements the laws applicable to the khaki-vardi with a passion that makes corruption seem like a mosquito that a human repellant can exterminate. His ways are unconventional. And he seethes and fumes when faced with diabolic corruption.

Last we saw, it was Rajeev Khandelwal playing the anti-establishment cop’s role in the brilliant Shaitaan. This time it’s a huge star getting into khakee. Meet Ajay Devgn as Bajirao Singham an honest-to-goodness cop who believes he has been given the law-enforcer’s job and he better take it seriously.

Hurling through a cavalcade of regionally-flush references Singham is the kind of rustic boorish kinetic action thriller where a cleaner social order is seen to be brought about by the power of the fist. Give or take a gun. Or a Devgn.

Devgn playing the one-man army invests the clichéd role with a kind of cultural specificity which allows him the leeway to get verbally regional without losing a pan-India flavour. That’s the magic of mass entertainment cinema that this film celebrates with panoramic verve.

We don’t need to comprehend Marathi to get the powerful subtexts of Devgan’s virulent attack on corruption. Fortunately Devgn isn’t the kind of actor who needs to scream to make himself heard. He effectually offsets Prakash Raj’s theatrical villainy bordering on bigtime hamming.

It is significant that the entire cast comprises Marathi actors, giving to the frenetic rustic proceedings a sense of arrogant chauvinism. Only the villain palayed by Prakash Raj is a South Indian actor of tremendous histrionic range. Give him anything to do. And he does with impassioned concentration.

A lot of the lines that the politician-villain is compelled to utter bordered on self-parody. Chunks of the action and drama are cannibalized from the Amitabh Bachchan’s ‘angry’ series , without the bridled indignance of the central character.

Yes, Singham is frustrated and embittered by the corruption that’s crept into the socio-political system. But he lacks the vitality to transmute the cop’s impotent rage into a potent cinematic language. e don’t feel for his concern for a clean social order. We just wonder whom he will thrash next, and how.

Partly, it is to do with the kind of shallowness that Singham’s love interest portrays. Jaya Bhaduri in Zanjeer and Smita Patil in Ardh Satya made a brief but telling impact on the way the enraged hero looked at the seedy world. Newcomer Kajal Aggarwal is a bundle of shallow take-away expressions, the cinematic equivalent of a home-delivered pizza, without the spicy toppings.

What sustains the narrative’s velocity is Devgn’s uncalculated moves as an action hero. He brings a kind of reckless inevitability into every blow that he delivers on the goons. There are some entertaining supporting performances, Sachin Khedeker as the heroin’e cellphone-fixated father is a hoot.

In all fairness the action sequences (Jai Singh Nijjar) are entertaining and humorous. The fights don’t take themselves seriously.

However the homilies on a need for integrity in the civil services seem like unwanted concessions to self-importance in a film that seems to revel in a kind of free-floating message on how to stay clean in a cesspool of corruption. Yup, Rohit Shetty packs in a punch.

You can’t but smile at the infinite pleasure which the director partakes from the age-old language of commercial Hindi cinema in all its flamboyant glory.

Singham is a cops film with balls.

Zindagi Na Milege Dobara | Movie Review

Actors: Hrithik Roshan, Farhan Akthar, Abhay Deol, Katrina Kaif

Director: Zoya Akhtar

Rating: ***1/2

First the good news. "Zindagi…" is one of the most nuanced, evenly paced and well executed films in commercial Indian cinema.

This cross between "Dil Chahta Hai" and "Sideways" is funny and honest, but it is marred by one fundamental flaw - it has nothing important to say.

Yes, to a select few, neo-rich one percent of its audience who find nirvana swimming under Spanish seas or for whom freedom is feeling the wind in your hand from a high speed car, the message is loud and clear - you only live once so live it full.

But one has to wonder, should a commercial film be made keeping just one percent of the audience in mind?

Yes, it is a message that everyone else needs as well, but should that message ride on a pleasure trip through Spanish landscape where there is beauty but no 'zindagi' or should it have been closer home, in the squalor and madness and 'life' of this nation.

Three old friends - Arjun (Hritik Roshan), Imran (Farhan Akthar) and Kabir (Abhay Deol) - go on a three-week bachelor's road trip through Spain before Kabir's marriage, only to come face to face with their own fears and insecurities.

Globally there are too many road-trip films for Zoya Akhtar to bring anything new to the cinematic table.

What she could have done was to have enough emotional pull for the viewer to empathise with the characters.

But would you empathise with the fatherly, marriage-related and heartbreak problems of three rich men who really have everything going for them? Besides its one percent audience, the rest would find the existential angst of these three men, a creation of their own vanity.

Yet, besides its many flaws, dishonesty is not one of them. It's an honest film about the type of people the filmmaker interacts with daily. Sadly, that is perhaps the only cross section of society that Zoya Akhtar has known in her urban living.

The problem with the film is thus the problem in the worldview of its maker, which is extremely limited in scope.

And that is a shame because Zoya is a nuanced and refined filmmaker. She could do wonders with a story that is real and about real men and women.

"Zindagi…" thus actually ends up being like a big-budget film with the heart and audience of a small-budget indie. And that mismatch will perhaps do the film in at the box office.

Cinematically though, Zoya does try desperately to transcend the obvious, to mean the message rather than say it, like say a "Sideways" or "Lost in Translation" does. And though she knocks on the door of this transcendence, she is unable to pass through.

Commercial filmmakers in the past, either came from the grassroots like a Mehboob or Guru Dutt, or were concerned about it like Raj Kapoor.

Their films hence reflected - sometimes directly - and often in the films written by Zoya's father Javed Akthar, allegorically, the angst, pain and the struggle for survival of the nation's teeming masses.

Sadly, as their world ended up becoming cocooned from life around, the connection their kids had with reality, became limited. The result are some really well made films, but ones with 'zindagi' only in their titles, not in their guts.

Murder 2 | Movie Review

Cast: Emraan Hashmi, Prashant Narayanan, Jacqueline Fernandez, Sulagna Panigrahi

Directors: Mohit Suri

Rating: ***

The sequel to "Murder" is nothing like the first part of the frenetic franchise. And Jacqueline Fernandez who has been built up in "Murder 2" as the next Mallika Sherawat is nothing like the overrated Mallika…. Thank God for that! Fernandez exudes an unbridled sunniness even when pouting in the bare minimum. Alas, she doesn't have much to do in "Murder 2" except swathe the dark drama in a spot of sunshine.

God knows this film about the devil-unleashed, surprisingly written by a woman (Shagufta Rafique) needs that little of sunshine. It is a desperately dark film. The characters are wretchedly unhappy. No matter which side of the moral line they are positioned they are standing screaming into the abyss that is suburban life. These people need serious help.

This then, is the world Mahesh Bhatt has bequeathed to us. Take it and bleed it.

Director Mohit Suri who earlier took us on a jolting trip through the world of prostitution, pimps and desperate cops in "Kalyug" takes the same route again. On this occasion the journey is far more ruthless and rigorously implemented to create horror repugnance and hatred for a word that we've created for coming generations.

In the typical Mahesh Bhatt style "Murder 2" doesn't waste time in back-projections and story build-up. He goes straight for the kill.

With trenchant immediacy director Mohit Suri (back in "Kalyug" form after the misfire that was his last film "Crook") tells us the story of a psychopathic killer who kills prostitutes with the pleasure that makes your stomach churn and look anxiously towards the future about your daughter who is just stepping into the big wide world.

Who knows if the man sitting next to her in the movie theatre is a closet-nutcase with a collection of hacksaws in his house, and not to carve up the Christmas turkey.

Prashant Narayanan as the psychopath plays the character at such an even pitch he makes your blood freeze in fear and revulsion. Here's a man who could be that ghoul who butchered all those kids in the Nethra killings and then ate them up without a burp.

The 'hero' in "Murder 2" is a burn-out suspended cop who makes money out of criminals, stays sullen and haunted throughout the film except when he goes for the kiss, and offers his girlfriend a wad of notes after making love. To buy the fridge, he says. Naturally the lady freezes.

Force of habit, we say. Hashmi has done this kind of a role repeatedly. The kissing and vigorous bedroom activities are quickly taken care of in the first 15 minutes. Wouldn't want the lovers of the serial kisser to feel they're being cheated in favour of the serial killer.

The wacked-out killer in "Murder 2" doesn't eat his victims. He just cuts them down to sighs…and groans and shrieks of pain and records their dying voices to get his rockers off….

The plot seems original. The narration is clenched and the characters driven by a desperate urge to assert themselves before death rings their doorbell.

The savagery with which the college-going call girl (Sulagna Panigrahi) is brought to her gruesome death becomes a metaphor for the loss of innocence and the triumph of diabolism that is often garbed in designer labels these days.

"Murder 2" is not a pleasant film to view. The psychopath's killings are done in graphic detail. The storytelling offers no respite from the brutality. Most of the time we are looking at happenings that we would rather not see. But see, we must.

"Murder 2" is a mirror of our amoral venomous times when no relationship is sacred anymore. Mohit Suri remains in command of the murky material and traumatized characters. While most episodes hold together in a riveting rhythm of life's most unsavoury truths, the sequences featuring Prashant Naraynan work better than the rest of the film. He lends the proceedings a credibility that is unsettling.

Chillar Party | Movie Review

Cast: Irrfan Khan, Sanath Menon, Rohan Grover, Naman Jain, Aarav Khanna, Vishesh Tiwari, Chinmai Chandranshuh, Vedant Desai and many more kids

 

Direction: Vikas Behl, Nitesh Tiwari

 

Genre: Drama

 

Duration: 2 hours 15 minutes

Story: A gang of school kids see themselves as the local dadas of their neighbourhood. Their biggest bugbear is that they always lose the cricket match while playing against the rival team. Things turn for the better when the new orphaned car wash boy gives them their first victory. But before they can savour their victory, another threat looms large. The local politician is determined to do away with all street dogs from Mumbai, which means the car wash boy will have to give up his pet dog. Can the gang save their best friend's pet?

Movie Review: What can you say about a film where the first half is spent with a bunch of kids trying to trouble a poor kid and his dog and the entire second half has them trying to save the dog from the infamous dog van.

Okay, the kids are occasionally cute and give you some moments here and there to smile. Specially when they begin to adopt the style and the language of the tapori kid and shock their parents completely. But after a point all their meanness and sweetness ceases to entertain. On the contrary, the total lack of a story line seriously tests your patience.

Wonder how restless kids will watch Chillar Party? Filmmakers need to realize Indian tweens are extremely smart and fed on a regular diet of Cartoon Network and roller-coaster Hollywood kiddie's flicks. You got to have a story, adventure drama and pace. Or else....

Transformers: Dark of the Moon | Movie Review

Cast: Shia LaBeouf, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Tyrese Gibson, Josh Duhamel, Patrick Dempsey Director: Michael Bay

Ever since the first part, the Transformer series has been abysmally stupid, cinematically crass and viscerally dumb. But then going by the new capitalistic mantra for cinema, anything that sells cannot be dumb. Thus you have another version of the same film you've seen twice before starring teenagers whose range of emotions are fewer than creases on a child's cheek and lots of machines shifting from cars to robots, bleeding oil.

The story has never been the strong point of Transformers and even here as well it is best described in one sentence - after learning of a crashed spaceship from their planet on the dark side of the moon, the benign Autobots race to find it before the Decepticons do.

It isn't the background score that has been its strength either - in the din of squealing robots, there's no space for any. As far as acting goes, the human actors are more robotic than the robots.

The strength of Transformers is its special effects. Indeed one look at any of the three films and it seems that the only purpose they exist is so as to excite our perverse senses, through teenage skin show, or through the loud, crass violence that goes on and on in the film. Thus violence and booty junkies, which the world is full of, would simply trip on this film.

There are desperate attempts at bringing some emotions though some bad teenage jealousies, or honour in Optimus Prime respecting human decision to exile them. But all these fall like a pack of cards at the altar of teenage titillation, pointless jingoism, and mindless violence.

Like the other two Transformer films, after a point you forget who's fighting who. All you see is big metal things transforming mid-air and slashing one another. And that's about all there is to the film indeed. Watching it is like children sitting in front of the TV, watching anything just because something is moving on the screen.

Megan Fox is replaced by supermodel Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, who like Ben Stiller's character in the satire Zoolander, seems to have only one pouted-lips expression in the entire film.

The only metaphor that this version of the successful franchise ends up drawing, just like the other two, is against a visually challenged and overwhelmed society that needs extremities of visual stimulations to like something. And that is something that is neither good for cinema, or for society.

Read more at: http://movies.ndtv.com/movie_review.aspx?id=633&albumname=Review:%20Transformers:%20Dark%20of%20the%20Moon&cp

'Larry Crowne' is the king of nice

Julia Roberts, left, and Tom Hanks turn the hard knocks of life into an upbeat fantasy in "Larry Crowne."

"Larry Crowne" is such a twinkly and likable movie, you wish it were a better one. Starring the twinkly and likable Tom Hanks (who also directed and co-wrote, with Nia Vardalos), it's the story of the nicest guy in the world.

Larry Crowne, who's in his 50s, spent time in the Navy before taking a sales job at a big-box electronics store. He works there for many years, making friends and helping customers — and then he's summarily fired, ostensibly for not having a college degree. Underwater on his mortgage and reeling from the financial free fall of a bad divorce, poor sweet Larry, blinking in the California sunshine, is facing a grim future.

That's the first few minutes of the movie, and they aren't promising; though Larry's troubles are certainly reflective of today's economic climate, they're presented so cutely that nothing seems real. Luckily, "Larry Crowne" the movie quickly remembers that it's a fantasy, and things immediately pick up for Larry Crowne the character: In short order, he acquires a scooter, finds a new job and signs up for community college. There, he meets a) a lovely and age-appropriate speech professor (Julia Roberts) with a bad marriage and a drinking problem, and b) a lovely and age-inappropriate fellow student (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) who adopts Larry as a sort of pet, giving him a makeover and recruiting him into her ever-smiling scooter gang. (If you're not sure which woman he ends up with, you haven't seen enough movies.)

In time (not much), things work out so nicely that "Larry Crowne" could well cause a flood of middle-age men to sign up for community college, in hopes of meeting dewy young women who'll put them in cuter shirts. Most of the characters lack nuance — particularly Roberts' no-good husband, played with a nearly mustache-twirling sneer by Bryan Cranston — and the plot jerks along awkwardly. We learn, pretty quickly, that nothing terrible's going to happen to Larry, so it all becomes a matter of waiting for Roberts' character to stop being pissed off.

But the movie has just enough funny lines and amusing casting choices (George Takei has a ball as a pompous economics professor) to make it all go down pleasantly, and Hanks' sweetly brash charisma could fill an entire multiplex of movies and then some. You find yourself rooting for Larry, though he doesn't need it — nice guys, in this movie, always finish first.