Review: JUDGEMENTALL HAI KYA

Faaltu Paise Hain Kya?

or

Chu**** Hai Kya?

1.5 stars

Mini Review:

Bobby is a dubbing artist, suffering from childhood trauma, is obsessed with murders and has a violent streak. But we're supposed to think it's cute because she is quirky and has a weird outlook on life. Keshav is her tenant with a new wife (lots of PDA), and is now the focus of Bobby's obsession. Their encounters are funny up to a point. Then comes murder, and idiotic interpretations of mental health issues, Ramayana... don't ask! Waste of time...

Main Review:

Quirky Ki Maa

The film opens to Bobby (played by Kangna Ranaut) dubbing for a film. It is delightful to see her literally get into the roles she is playing. She also plays hard to get with her agent cum boyfriend (played brilliantly by Hussain Dalal). Everything about her is quirky: from her funny sunglasses, to her clothes and decor in the house. She sees a man with a sign (which is fine a couple of times, but every single time? It’s an overkill). Even her cat is called ‘Panauti’ (bad luck)...

When she is dubbing for a policewomen, a producer gets fresh with her and she injures him with an exacto knife. We know what she will choose when the lawyer offers her a hefty fine or three months in a mental asylum. Of course in the asylum she plays pranks on the Super and throws away the medication. We know she is traumatised by her childhood, and she has a roach infested home. Before you can say ugh, you are told that she is imagining roaches. 

The dubbing part is delightful but goes on an on. Each time she gets a picture taken as if she were the heroine. Stops being fun and you want to say, ‘Get on with the story!’

Obsession, She Said

Thankfully she gets new tenants - a loving (read: lots of PDA) couple - Keshav (Rajkummar Rao) and Smita (Amyra Dastur).

Bobby is dubbing a murder mystery and she begins to obsess over Keshav imagining that he is going to kill his wife. Bobby stalks the two through the curtains and even enters their apartment through a connecting door when the two are not there.

He obsession grows so much that when the wife dies after a gas cylinder explosion, she tells the cops that he is responsible. She just comes across is crazy, and he is exonerated. 

By the way, the cops are quirky too.

Two years later she is on medication for imagining the roaches and obsessing over that man, and seems to be okay when she goes to London to be with her pregnant cousin (Amrita Puri) who finds her a job as an understudy in a play. Of course she comes face to face with Keshav again, except this time his name is Shravan. Her obsession becomes horrifically real and alarming. So much so that it could harm her cousin. 

If you’ve watched enough shows about serial killers and stalkers, you know what happens next. It’s just that a 121 minute film feels like it is longer simply because of a repetitive part when setting up her character, and his creepiness. Rajkummar Rao has to match her kookiness with menace but the constant, ‘Let’s see who’s crazy now!’ also becomes unbearable.

The editing is so choppy, you wonder why certain scenes just spring up as explanations (for example, her cousin’s broken engagement scene appears out of nowhere?). And no matter what the disclaimer says about treating mental health issues delicately, it is very obvious that the subject is treated flippantly (‘She’s crazy! She’s nuts!) and that she’s not really getting any real help. If someone is suffering from 'psychosis', I doubt the docs would let her consume medication on her own. But who cares, Bobby whacks the cockroach crawling on the doc and everyone in the audience laughs happily, 'She's such a cute paagal yaa!'

This ‘acting’ just gets annoying after a while. And don't get me started about Ramayana Redux. It is insulting to all professionals trying to help patients in real life when they treat the ‘mental’ part of the title as if they meant ‘demented’ instead. The result is that people laugh inappropriately at her ‘madness’, and your popcorn loses its pop because the film is tiresome..  

(a kinder version of this review appears on nowrunning dot com)

Review: SUPER 30

Gamchhe Ke Peeche Kya Hai...

Two stars

Mini Review:

A story about a free school for the poorest of the poor IIT aspirants run by a maverick mathematician should have been a hugely inspiring film. It starts out to be fabulous, introducing us to a bright mind and his yearning to become someone. The film crash lands and how! You hate everything about it, especially the brownface that Hrithik applies on his face to look like a small town lad. 

Main Review: 

Bihar Does NOT Mean Everyone And His Uncle Sports A Gamchha

I've lived in Patna, and what they showed in the film is not Mithapur (where the real Super30 school is located), neither is it Patna. It's an urban idea of poor small town and their 'sad' lives where mother is forever making rotis and dad has a rickety bicycle and spouts homilies. Fuck the facts. They even claim the original teacher Anand Kumar has helped with the script. Did he forget to tell the filmmakers that he is a civil servant? An IFS (Indian Forestry Service) officer? Obviously it was easier to show dire poverty to make it more filmi, more melodramatic.

Also because they're Bollywood's idea of poor, they will all be:

1. Brown and dirty all the time (gag!),

2. Won't have food but have big hearts (barf!) and

3. It will rain over their proverbial parade/adding to their woes all through the movie (puke!)

But Why Ruin Hrithik Roshan For Fans

I understand why everyone and their uncle wants to be politically correct and show 'desh ka vikaas' and all that, but why turn a gorgeous leading man who can out dance any hero that claims to know how to dance and give him a role that need him to downplay his assets? And NEVER break into a dance? Kya faaltugiri hai!

No one can deny that Hrithik Roshan is a good looking man. Then why does he have to tone it down by liberally applying the bronzer to look like he is a very poor, small town lad? Can someone tell filmmakers that ‘brownface’ might be insulting?

And what’s with the eternal hangover with the ‘Koi Mil Gaya’ mentally challenged act? That run, that confused look when he’s concentrating on the math is just wrong when repeated so many times…I did puke inside though when they made him look at his dad - awed by the homilies - like he was a ten year old instead of someone who had solved the most unsolvable math problem!

A Teacher To The Underdogs... Bollywood Ruins That Trope Too!

Hrithik still works in the first half of the film where plays the role of Anand Kumar, a math genius, doing the Good Will Hunting write on the blackboard thing. He hits sublime moments too, but the dirty gamchha gets in the way...

Alas he doesn't have Michelle Pfeiffer of Dangerous Minds or Vind Khanna of Imtihaan to support him or inspire him he is going to be that prof himself...

But if Hrithik insists on being Koi Mil Gaya, it falls on the character actors to who win your heart.

His dad Eeshwar, played by Virendra Saxena is rather sweet and inspiring postman.

His brother Pranav played by Nandish Sandhu (great casting, looks like Hrithik’s brother in real life) is a great support for his school.

Pankaj Tripathi is flawless as the local politician who has his paws deep in the dirt of the business of education.

Even Hrithik’s dialog coach for the film Manish Kumar Singh has a one minute scene as a policeman who is unable to help protect the brothers against the threat to their lives.

Vijay Verma whom you saw in Gully Boy shines in this film as well as the award winning student of the Super 30 program reminiscing about Anand Kumar, a genius who could not make it to Cambridge because of poverty. 

The best act of course is by the villain. Aditya Srivastava plays Lallan Singh who runs a successful coaching class which becomes even more successful when Anand Kumar begins to teach there. When Anand realises that the coaching classes are only for the very rich, and that he is contributing to the scam by teaching there, he gives it all up and decides that he will coach 30 poor but bright kids for free. 

So far so good. You even hope that you will see something like Stand And Deliver where students from the wrong side of the tracks learn high math by teacher Edward James Olmos… But no! The filmmaker chooses what he thinks is going to work commercially and you facepalm when you see the students turn the film into a hospital version of Home Alone with many stupid baddies out to assassinate the teacher as well as the students. That half an hour spent on using math to defeat men with guns is perhaps the worst one has seen. It squanders all the goodwill Hrithik and the kids earned in the first half of the film. Of course all 30 students make it to IIT. But you are so disappointed, you want to drown someone in a vat of bronzer... 

(Why haven't I mentioned the romance angle? Because it was dumb to show a heroine who only dances and then gets married off to an IAS officer. That made me chew the handle of my Gucci bag to bits. That Mrunal Thakur was sweet in the role fails to count)

P.S. Biharis will be grateful that they didn't show the chhath puja to make the film 'look and feel' authentic!

(a sanitised version of the review appears on nowrunning dot com)

Review: MALAAL

Dekhne Walon Ka Bura Haal!

1.5 stars

Mini Review

Meezaan and Sharmin Segal offer the same ole love story, a mish-mash of every love story since Bollywood began making romances. The film is executed so poorly, you wonder why it is under the Bhansali banner. It’s plain excruciating to watch predictable romance movie tropes go on and on for 136 minutes.

Main Review:

Who would've thunk, Bollywood would fail at romance?

A remake of Selvaraghavan’s Tamil film ‘7G Rainbow Colony’, Malaal attempts to make magic with two newcomers Meezaan (Javed Jafferi’s son) and Sharmin Segal (Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s niece, not related to Steven), but falls flat on its unoriginal nose. It’s sad because the two are quite promising, the girl more so than the boy who comes across as a poor man’s Ranbir Kapoor. The girl is rather attractive, but has limited acting chops.

And the story does not help. Not at all. He’s Shiva, the no good lad from a chawl (housing project like rooms connected with a common balcony, for common folk, unique to Mumbai), where his dad comes home to beat his mom who makes chaklis (Marathi savoury snack). Sharmin plays Aastha, who has just moved in next door with her parents - dad (two heart attacks, so you know he’s going to be villain) and mom (attempts to play martyr) - because her dad was once rich but has lost all the money at the stock market. By the way, this film is set in 1998 and tries hard to play the communal card (he’s Marathi, a local, and she is a North Indian, a Tripathi) but it peters out rather early in the film because lack of courage to make something courageous as love between different communities. 

And that’s just the beginning. Shiva has a temper, but he won’t turn into Sanjay Dutt of Vaastav. She’s all Simran of Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jaayenge but doesn’t have the sass that Kajol’s character had in the film. Neither are her parents Amrish Puri and Farida Jalal. There are some songs that happen and the dance moves (Javed Jafferi’s son has an additional burden of dancing as good or better than dad) are tired. Not the lad’s fault. You just wish his hair wasn’t so carefully casual.

IRL, Stay away from such gals!

Aastha is scary when she does the very tiresome girlfriend thing: If I take one puff of that cigarette you will stop smoking, And if I drink one peg of whatever you are drinking, then you will stop drinking... You groan! Is she his girl or his mom?! Lads should swipe her left if any girl should  say something this bizarre!

The weirdness does not stop there. ‘Walk behind me or ahead of me because no one should know we are together’, she says, and he obeys. She’s basically Taliban. He counts the number of steps she walks every day. So he’s Fitbit. She plays more paper messages from one balcony to another, and when he asks her if she loves him, she tears the paper and throws it down the balcony. And after a bit when she’s sitting on the rocks by the sea (couples go to canoodle there) she produces an account opening form for him to fill. Before you go whaaaa... She has got him a job at a stockbroking firm as an office boy who gives tea to the brokers and carries messages. She is still playing his mom. Especially because she knows he has 12 shirts and 3 tees and some ganjis (undershirts) and one of them ganjis has holes (she knows exact location of the holes). This is how much she loves him. He preens. The audience has hurt itself facepalming. She sounds more like his laundry lady than lover. 

Neverending groanfest...

A Sanjay Leela Bhansali production usually boasts of fabulous sets, This film went super low budget with location that look tacky. Even the birds in the cage look fake. There is not a single original thought in the script. Why bother to make a film that is careless? Why don't star kids study hard at school and become something else rather than star in these pointless movies?

Back to the groanfest. Aastha tells her mom that she wants to be with Shiva because she would soon be married to Aditya (please don’t ask who this sleazy Mercedes driving foreign returned creep is, but he’s the Parmeet Sethi from Dilwale Dulahniya without the charm). Mom is ineffective and let’s her go. They make out (thankfully they don’t show us sloppy kisses) but they wake up fully clothed. When walking home from friend’s apartment, she crosses the street without looking and yesssss! Relief! She dies, and he’s injured. She has been telling him that he needs to make something of his life... Alas the movie does not end there. While you have finished your neighbor’s popcorn out of sheer boredom because he has fallen asleep, Shiva has grayed and predictably heads Aastha Wealth Management, and is still talking to the dead Aastha... 

You discover that you have aged too. You reflect at the paucity of ideas in the film industry today and wonder why the once hugely popular romance genre is not even pulling 20 couples to the first day first show.

(this review sans rant about star kids, appears on nowrunning.com)

Review: ONE DAY JUSTICE DELIVERED

Akal Ke Saath Anyay!

1 star

Mini Review:

Justice Tyagi retires from Ranchi High Court and proceeds to take the law into his own hands to punish the men who went free because their crimes weren’t proven. This is no whodunit, not even why-he-dun-it. It’s a straightforward story laughably told. The usually reliable character actors are made to ham so much they seem to be competing for the Razzies. 

Main Review:

Anupam Kher (Tyagi) retires as a High Court judge who gets slapped or cursed by victims of the justice system. His daughter is about to get married and we see the whole family go shopping for her wedding saree. None of the actors are known and are treated like they don’t matter. Judge saab though walks out of the saree shop and walks next door to what looks like a hardware garage and casually orders five rolls of barbed wire. 

He is shown taking a morning walk and chatting with Inspector Satya Prakash Sharma (Kumud Mishra). Then at the daughter’s wedding a doctor couple vanish. Inspector Sharma comes to Tyagi’s home to ask if he knows anything. Tyagi denies it, but helps with the name of videographer at the wedding. While Sharma and the son (a product of the hysterical school of acting, hereafter referred to as HSA) watch the wedding videos for clues, Tyagi casually walks into what looks like a garage next to his house where the doctor couple are tied by barbed wire. Confess on camera that you admitted Abdul (HSA graduate) into the ICU to get more money. Confess that you killed him! 

Can't get the visual of the sweaty item girl in red outta me head! And the cringeworthy rhymes: Tu bada fancy hai, Groove bada dancy hai'! Ugh! But back to poverty...

Abdul’s mother (played by Zarina Wahab) looks too poor to afford anything, let alone hospital money. And before you groan at seeing another Muslim person on screen praying in hospital corridors, crying, ‘Allah, Rehem Kar!’ (God, save us!), you want to say, ‘Hey! You don’t puncture the saline bottle directly to inject something into a person!’  

We get to know that Abdul was blaming someone call Afzal for the bomb that injured him. Afzal was goon to a politician (Zakir Hussain) who sports a moustache first and then doesn’t… Afzal is also connected by crime to a hotelier (Rakesh Sharma) who has ordered an mms made of a honeymooning couple and the CD was distributed everywhere (wait, what?!). The shame kills the young woman Shagufta and ruins her newly married husband Shamim’s life. 

Of course Justice Tyagi who does nothing to hide himself from his kidnapped men and women gets confessions. But there’s a Haryanvi cop (Esha Gupta, who channeled her inner Salman Khan rather decently) Laxmi Rathi who reads files upon files and discovers the culprits behind kidnappings. It is Tyagi and Sharma! Wow! But we already knew that and we lived through two item songs too that were crammed in. But Esha realises that these criminals will eventually still be let off, so she kills them all. That’s what you feel like doing to the filmmakers when you come back home.

(this review appears on nowrunning dot com)