Review: PADMAN

1st Half Is Painful As Periods

2nd Half Thankfully Is Absorbing

2.5 stars

Mini Review:

This is a dramatised biopic of India’s sanitary ‘Pad’ man,

who in his quest for making cheaper sanitary napkins

for his wife, suffered socially, was ostracised and then

ultimately acknowledged for his innovation. Akshay Kumar

does a fabulous job as small town inventor but the story

comes together only in the second half with the arrival of

Sonam Kapoor who guides him to greatness. If you can

endure the slow, unmoving first half, this film is socially

relevant.

Main Review:

Last year you watched ‘Phullu’ a film made rather shoddily on

the same subject, and one has learnt that there is another film

in the works about the same Pad man. How does this film fare?

Akshay Kumar plays Laxmikant Chauhan, who is a fabricator,

a small time inventor. His family has four women (two sisters, a

mother and a wife). His saucer-eyed wife is Radhika Apte, the

perfect small town woman, surprised and embarrassed at her

husband’s display of affection.  His distress at discovering that his

wife has to endure the unhygienic use of cloth during menstruation

is so great he wants her to use sanitary pads. But the cost is

prohibitive and the stigma attached to ‘women’s problems’ is great.

So he attempts something that inventors will. He attempts to make

a ‘pad’ at home. His logic is, it would be cheaper, and his wife

won’t have to endure the possibility of infection (and maybe

death) with the use of cloth.

It just ‘looks wrong’ according to his wife. And the audience, then

begins to endure a hopelessly weepy wife who is like, ‘Why are

you interested in what’s happening between a woman’s legs’. He

is unable to explain his fears, and he attempts to get his sister,

married out of town, to try his home-made sanitary pad, and a

neighborhood girl. Socially, in a small town, these actions are not

just odd, but a horrendous interference in ‘women’s matters’.

Thankfully as he explains later, every failure just made him

doggedly determined to succeed. The film’s second half actually

begins to tell the story, which is very interesting. His efforts at

trying to understand why a sanitary napkin costs so much are

really endearing. Then arrives Pari, Sonam Kapoor, who

inadvertently is his first customer after he is trying out his

fabricated machine. Pari figures out what is wrong with his sales

approach and his ‘low cost pad’ business takes off.

Sonam Kapoor just shines in the small role and is such a stark

contrast to his weepy wife, that you begin to notice Akshay Kumar

as a hero not just as an eccentric chap. Pari is played with charm

and grace you are forced to look at this young actor with fresh

eyes. You want to reach out and hug her after she tells Akshay

what she does on the flight. That is so real, it matches the

brilliant speech Akshay gives at the United Nations (a tad

overdone, I thought, but needed, for a socially relevant film).

The romance is unexpected and you wish characters had

broken tradition and the hero had chosen a beautiful, smart

woman instead of going back to his silly, weepy, wife who

abandons him.

The film is socially relevant so critics will be careful when offering

critique. And even though it has a stellar star cast, this film could

go straight to TV to actually reach rural women. But the second

half is worth the two and a half stars it has earned.

P.S. Two movies on sanitary pads are enough. How new or 
different is the third film going to be? Please, no more.


(This review, sans the post script, appears on 
www.nowrunning.com )

Review: AAPLA MANUS (Marathi)

A Story Of Many Homes
Great Start, Preachy Patriarchal Ending

2 stars

Mini Review:

Why are we still making movies where the central message is: Daughters-in-law must stay at home and cook? It alienates the new generation of cinema goers, and the 'old' people the film is trying to portray as 'selfless sacrificial people' come across as manipulative so it will put them off too! Plus, the manipulation by a policeman is so wrong, you come away hoping he will be sacked. So who is this film made for? 

Main Review:

Let's get this straight: Nana Patekar is still awesome. Whether he's being the crafty cop, or the manipulative dad, Nana uses his voice, his body language so well, you forget that it is a movie and begin to take sides.

Sumit Raghavan and Iravati Harshe are wonderful in their roles needlessly playing second fiddle to Nana Patekar. You wish they had been given equally powerful dialog to keep the balance. But that's not why the play was written (the film is based on Marathi play 'Katkon Trikon' where Mohan Agashe played the central character and 'Dear Father' in both Hindi and Gujarati where Paresh Rawal plays the role). The play does harp on the loneliness of the older generation as the sons and daughters-in-law, but the film serves this on a platter that is unpalatable. And you do not have an inch of sympathy for the lonely old man.

He calls everyone in his phone book to 'check' if his daughter-in-law is there 'instead of coming home' even though it is well after ten pm... It is such a nasty thing to do, you are happy he's jumped off the balcony and maybe dead.

But the cop, Inspector Maruti Nagargoje insists that the old man was pushed off the balcony. This could be an interesting whodunit, you think, and you begin to watch. The film cleverly via conversation converts the cop into the nasty old dad. 

It is very interesting to see in a Marathi scenario where the father - who is usually venerable and affable - is shown to be so manipulative, bordering on the nasty. 

So here's a cop, making the son and the daughter-in-law feel guilty for ignoring the old man and then feel like criminals when he accuses one and then the other for attempting to murder the old man. Each of these arguments is so convincing you watch with complete interest as Nana Patekar makes you believe that the son has plotted to kill his father. And not half an hour ago you believed him when he pointed an accusing finger at the daughter-in-law for killing the father-in-law out of sheer hate.

Deftly he makes us (and the son and bahu duo) that it could be a suicide too, and that the cops would charge them for negligence and for pushing the old man to the brink of suicide. 

The end is so botched, so preachy, you want to take a gigantic knife and stab the cop/dad as well as the writer. It is just there to make the audience feel guilty about their ageing parents. Fifty years ago, perhaps, a writer could get away by saying that children need to show more gratitude to parents who sacrifice everything. Today the economic realities are different and women are educated and are making difficult choices every day, this end where Nana admits to manipulating the son and the daughter-in-law is just not convincing. Had the old man manipulated the two, we would have appreciated his death. But the old man is alive, with the possibility of him being even more of a pain, and here is Nana, projecting his anger, despair and disappointments from his own son on to these unsuspecting duo.

The last speechifying and preaching at Sumit Ragahvan and Iravati Harshe is like a very bad reprise of Natsamrat. And in real life, a policeman would be out of his job for doing this to anyone. 

Ajay Devgn's foray into producing this film is great effort. Nana's acting is superb as always. But everything seems to be so stretched and then facepalmworthy, that you come away disappointed.   



P.S. The trailer is just fabulous.
     

Review: DEN OF THIEVES

Painting With Bullets: 
An Overblown Cops 'N' Robbers Tale 
With Fake Overgrown Macho Guys

ZERO stars

Mini Review:

PUHLEEZ! This is such an obviously bad film, you see an aerial shot of an armored truck traveling on a deserted road at 5.41 am and the voice-over begins, 'Most bank robberies are done here than anywhere else in the United States,' before you can sigh into your coffee, people are shot (unnecessary machine gun fire), cops arrive, they are shot at and the robbers get away with the truck. The cops now investigate and robbers get more daring. It is a never-ending bullet fest. Loud and bad.

Main Review:

Where is the Gerard Butler of 'P.S. I Love You' or 'The Ugly Truth' or even '300'? This Gerard Butler looks like what happened to Steven Seagal. Worse, because it's not enough that he's a 'badass cop' he's still being made to 'act'. He gets to cry, stalk his daughters at school and drink milk out of the carton even though he smells like a 'whore'. He gets to react when served with divorce papers, he gets to act the jealous ex-husband when he shows up at a small dinner party where his wife looks like she's with a 'guy'. Ugh! These are part that could be easily deleted and the film would still work. 

After all, this is a cops catching robbers movies, and no other character is given any family background. It's a muscle fest, dudes! There's no need to show family. Unless they're going to blow up and get the hero madder and badder. The cops have tattoos and guns and swagger (which I suspect comes because they wear such tight jeans!) and they have machine guns too, and they forget the audience has seen magazines and practically know how to load the magazines without ever having seen a gun irl. 

This film is that predictable. 

The bad guys want money so bad, they are willing to rob the Federal Reserve for something like 30 million dollars that no body will miss. Seriously, if you swallow that, you will also buy into security that is sometimes the toughest, and sometimes so stupid, a delivery guy goes up to the canteen to deliver food. Corporate houses in India don't let food delivery chaps enter 'sacred' office space. And we are to believe that the employees of the Federal Reserve let anyone walk in with food delivery?

This film is that dumb.

And watching a botoxed, beefed up to ugly hero slur through his role where only bad guys and a few good guys get killed in a shootout in a traffic jam, all civilians escape unhurt...And the shootout is with machine guns, nothing less.

Gerard Butler gets beefier by the minute and is made to do his stunts. If someone that large is made to do parkour, there are shots that look really, really awkward. And the plot is so thin it seems nonexistent (then you read how the filmmakers worked on it for more than ten years, you wish they had dumped this ridiculous bullet riddled plot into Direct To Home thang.

The only concession, the villain Pablo Shrieber looks good. 

Why is Hollywood still making such trash?

I think this and then see the ad in the Times Of India for a brand of sunglasses.

Facepalm.  

Review: KULDIP PATWAL: I DIDN’T DO IT

This Film: They Shouldn't Have Made It

1 star

Mini Review:

The concept is good: the common man always gets caught in the

crossfire between politicians and big money. The execution, plain

awful. Common man kills young politician, insists he didn’t do it,

the cops investigating think he might be telling the truth, and the

courtroom melodrama that follows is the film. But so flawed you

end up groaning and laughing helplessly.

Main Review:

No matter how good the story or the cast is (and Deepak Dobriyal

leads the ensemble cast), the direction is so flawed, you wonder

why a straightforward story was needlessly told in a non-linear

fashion going back and forth and back and forth for no practical

purpose (except to pretend to be sophisticated).

This pretension falls on its face because the timeline - ‘11 years ago’,

‘8 years ago’ followed by a sudden ‘15 years ago’ - is plain dumb,

because none of the characters age at all. And not one character in

the protagonist’s family gets younger when they go 15 years back

into the past.

So Kuldip is suspected of killing the Chief Minister of a state

called Bharatsar at a political rally. The production team makes

a lot of effort in recreating number plates of cars and autorickshaws

for the state, and the hard work is good. The cop is Anurag Arora

(fits perfectly into the role) who speaks Haryanvi. He’s typical, you

think, comes to work late, slaps people around, but has a heart of

gold because he actually makes inquiries into the murder suspect,

does not accept bribe from parents of the murder suspect. The

parents for some reason are the worst drawn characters. The dad

looks much older than his mom. His mom is housewife, nagging

auto-rickshaw driver dad to get masalas from the market,

complaining about having to wash clothes, but is shown to be

drinking local hooch from a bottle as she walks about the house.

Clearly the alcohol isn’t making her happy. And if she’s drinking

like that for 15 years, how come there is no change at all (not one

alcoholic cough!) and her clothes last for fifteen years (she wears

the same clothes at her son’s court hearing! Clearly the flashback

technique wasn’t really well-thought out. The murder suspect son

too has not aged at all, Deepak Dobriyal is himself. Ageless. And

flashback makes no sense because it takes us back by a decade

and a half.

On the other side of this failed Rashomon is the point of view of

the political party: if you forgive the ‘not ageing’ then the story is

told by the Chief Minister’s wife who is too posh to fit into the

Haryanvi setting. Her office as a prosecutor, is too posh. Her

English does not fit into this film and her lifestyle argument is

hollow: she leaves with her child and two empty bags (just two

sad suitcases when her husband says she spent ‘10 lakhs on

one dinner!’). The wife is played by Raima Sen, who is clearly

miscast in this Haryanvi milieu, is shown doing very ‘urban’ things

like ‘hugging the husband when she comes back from work in a

skirt and a shirt’. Clearly this is a small town, and if her husband

is the Chief Minister (and his reaction to the hug is ‘what are you

doing?!’, he pushes her away rather roughly saying that he was

‘thinking’) there would be protocols and their residence would be

‘government bungalow’. Sigh. If we ignore these details, the

weirdness of the politics - the young Chief Minister (played like a

zombie by a wooden Parveen Dabas) promoting the caste based

reservation - is really odd. And the eternal disgruntled politician

(Vikram Kochar) does not have any substance but to be disgruntled.

The inadvertently funny role of a business tycoon of ‘Reliable

Industries’ (the name brought on unkind guffaws) is given to

Jameel Khan who looks more like a small time fixer than a tycoon.

There is a defence advocate played by a man with a fake

moustache and an even faker Punjabi-Haryanvi accent. Turns out,

it is Gulshan Devaiah, a court appointed, bleeding-heart lawyer,

whose personal life is shown to make us admire him. But if anyone

were his wife, they would throw the spinach on his face when he does

not allow her to order what she wants at a restaurant. That said, the

court interactions between fake witnesses and his exposition is so

tiring, you wish they would have a mooch malfunction to save you.

There is a pointless twist in the end but you have left the building

with Elvis. And thank goodness.

(this review appears on nowrunning dot com)   

Review: Phantom Thread

As Exquisite As Belgian Lace
As Deadly As Omphalotus Olivascens 

4 stars

Mini Review: 

This film delights the senses in so many different ways. Mostly, it is a visual feast and I'm not talking about just watching Daniel Day Lewis. But this film is a challenge to everything you believed love is. If you are used to crash, boom, bang of popular cinema, stay away. But if you can linger and loiter in the richness of every frame, then you will come away wholly satisfied.

Main Review:

This is a Daniel Day Lewis visual feast. His last film as an actor. So it goes without saying you buy tickets quietly, and go see the film.

This is about London in the 50s. What's not to love? The clothes are beautiful, the setting is beautiful and the difference between upstairs and downstairs is delicately created. You will love the seamstresses march up the stairs, you will love the discipline of the design house of Reynolds Woodcock (that's Daniel Day Lewis). Breakfast is so quiet, they eat toast noiselessly. Cyril manages the house and the business beautifully. Reynolds gets to be creative, eccentric and abusive. 

Abusive? There's a third person at the breakfast table. Pretty girl who has 'become fat waiting for you to fall in love with her again'. Reynolds doesn't need that, so Cyril 'deals with the situation. She is no more than mannequin for Reynolds, who sits at the table sketching new designs...

To get over the podgy, creamy pastry the girl, Cyril suggests he drive over to the country house. You watch with envy as Reynolds drives through the most picturesque English countryside. The beauty is so overwhelming you have to close your eyes. But you cannot. Reynolds meets this tall, gorgeous waitress who brings him breakfast of Welsh rarebit, toast, cream, porridge, jam (not strawberries) and some sausages. Not to forget Lapsang Souchong tea. She calls him 'Hungry boy' and he smiles (lighting up the screen!). You know he's going to seduce this country lass, and this relationship hollows your stomach when he wipes off her lipstick and says, 'I want to see who I'm with'.

If that is not creepy, then when he orders her to take off her clothes at his home, you are about to scream but you don't because he's going to make her a dress. Cyril has shown up (as she promised) and without a word, she is imperiously ordered to write down the girl's measurements. Undressed as she is, the country girl shows spunk when she tells him that her name is Alma. Not just Cyril, we like her too. There is some steel in there.

She comes home to London and he begins to design clothes on her. She learns to eat her toast quietly but whenever she gets angry, she shows it by pouring his Lapsang from a height that makes it noisy. There are sighs from the women in the audience. If only they had expressed their boiling over like Alma...

The story moves forward at a sedate pace but there's nothing dull on the screen. Alma, played by Luxembourg actor Vicky Krieps is fabulous. She is so fragile and yet so powerful, she would be the single reason tourism to her country will increase this year. 

Alma's jealousies, her love, Cyril's care, Cyril's respect for Alma, balance out the 'I will have my way because I'm Woodcock' Daniel Day Lewis. The house of Woodcock seems silently efficient, but the undercurrents are so strong you would be swept halfway across the world before you could scream for help. 

The dresses are a dream, the flowers in the house seem to be responding to the mood of the occupants of the house, the country house is such a visual treasure, the mushrooms...

Alma turns Reynolds into putty in her arms, and we fear for him because the power equation in this relationship changes so brilliantly. Is it the mushrooms? Or the drunk customer who according to Alma, 'does not deserve to wear a Woodcock' and needs to be stripped off. 

Anyone who has ever imagined the price of a designer dress would agree at the horror of discovering, 'She slept in the Woodcock?'

What is so beautiful about Daniel Day Lewis is how completely mensch he is even when he is not shown to be at the physical prime of his life. He is gaunt and set in his ways, but how beautiful are his hands when he's sketching at the breakfast table? How completely Oscar worthy is his agitation when he discovers she has actually taken off to the Dance? How Oscar worthy is that moment when he watches her cook mushrooms and accepts this love? How Oscar worthy is that moment when he realises that the noisy pouring of the tea, and the buttering of the toast is something he would have to live with...

And I would kill to have written the dialog when he orders Alma to take the tea away from his design space, 'The tea you will take away, but the interruption remains'...

This film is like fine art. Has a certain je ne sais quoi which you might find on a field of pink musk roses in Iran or catching the magic hour in Tuscany or when you have been pushed into the coldest waters of the ocean with no hope of seeing the horizon again. 

The only reason it does not get five stars is they use the the phrase, 'Fuck Off'. When everything else is so posh, the common insult felt rather out of place and incongruous. Watch it. You'll want to buy a pack of Omphalotus Olivasens mushrooms for your loved ones. In your head.


  

Review: PADMAAVAT

BORIYAAT

(Pretty looking but boring as hell!)

2.5 stars

Mini Review:

The story of a beautiful, faithful queen and a lustful invader

who will stop at nothing is told in three very long hours. The

costume drama is beautiful and Rajasthan is a great setting

for this tale of Rajput valor. But the talk of pride and glory is

so endless, it makes you want to run into your sword out

of sheer boredom. But Ranveer Singh makes a brilliant

hammy villain, and Deepika is luminous.

And you say to Sanjay Leela Bhasali, 'Kuch naya batao!'

Main Review:

Sanjay Leela Bhansali has a penchant for controversy, whether

it was the ‘pinga’ song sung by the Peshwa queen in ‘Bajirao

Mastani’ or the ‘Ghoomar’ dance in this film. There was also the

question of did the king dance to a very colloquial modern

‘vaat lavli’ song. But the Marathi ‘manner’ remained a TV debate

and angry newspaper articles by ‘conscience keepers’.

This time, the Rajput Moral Police took to burning theatres and

tearing down posters thinking their Rajput pride would be hurt if a

Muslim king were shown romancing a Rajput princess. If only they

had seen the film! Their anger would have been turned into sheer

boredom of a costume drama that goes on and on and on.

Stiff Upper Lip And Everything Else!

That Sanjay Leela Bhansali can make things look good is not

in contest. Visually, the film is beautiful. But when you hear the

tiny (yes, he’s so thin, he could be counted as half a Rajput)

Shahid Kapoor play Maharawal Ratan Singh and talk about

Rajpur pride and glory and principles and code of war, he just

seems like he’s playacting. He talks so much about the ‘Rajput

Shaan’ (pride of Rajputs), you begin to pray for Shakaal from

‘Shaan’ the 1980 film to show up and save us from the lecturing.

Plus, he’s so stiff, you wonder if they used extra glue used for

his moustache twirl and used it on his neck.

The howlarious part is his terrible, terrible dialog: Tumahre

haathon mein meri talwar achhi lagti hai!' (My sword looks

very nice in your hands!). In this age of Internet memes and

hashtags, you burst outlaughing and say, '#TWHS!'

Deepika Is Luminous, But She Was Better 'Mastani'

Deepika Padukone mostly has tears in her saucer eyes, and it’s

funny to see how she bends down to hug her boring husband.

She carries her clothes beautifully, but you wish there was

something more to her than the adoring looks she has to give

to Shahid Kapoor (who looks comical when he’s impaled by her

arrow), and bores us to death with his endless dialog.

The Film Belongs To Khilji!

Ranveer Singh saves the film with a lot of hamming and we

love him for that. He looks like he had fun playing the demented,

wicked  Alauddin Khilji. And his dialog is so bad it is good. Plus,

kudos to Bhansali for showing a very interesting sexual angle

to this villain. Takes courage to do that. Ranveer’s wild dance

is just fab, and so are his deeds: his suspicious nature when

he changes the food plates, him strangling the nephew… And

the women in the audience sighed audibly, lustfully when he’s

sleeping topless in the tent or bathing or…

The other characters, like Jim Sarbh who is slave to Khilji, Gora

Singh the Rajput SenaPati, Rawal’s first wife Nagmati, Badal’s

mother are all great supporting cast, but Ranveer Singh simply

lights up the screen, even if he’s shown lovelorn, waiting for

morning to come…

He also makes the audience laugh out loud in complete empathy

when Shahid Kapoor shows up to say goodbye in one scene.

Ranveer throws down the lotus flower (‘Padma’ means lotus)

in disgust and says, ‘Why do you have to turn up every time I’m

hoping to see Padmaavati!’

That summed up this overly long, tedious, but beautiful film for me.

Take a bow Ranveer Singh, your hamming saves this film.

(A sanitised version of this review appears on www.nowrunning.com )