Movie Review – Earth

A movie which you can’t “part” ways with easily

Don’t go by the posters, with the face of Aamir Khan occupying three fourth of the frame, it looks like any normal revenge saga of a leading hero. But thankfully as I saw it as a part of Elements trilogy and knew that it was going to be a heavy movie, I wasn’t perturbed by the poster. The film which though starts on a dull note when compared to the first movie, ‘Fire’, quickly picks up and keeps you tense throughout. The movie matches its predecessor, if not, only gets better.

The film, more than anything, was brave. That’s the advantage of being a movie which was not being Bollywood, yet has the Bollywood sensibilities and mixes it well with Hollywood Persona. Thankfully so, because it was not made by an Indian resident. How ‘Fire’ not being in Hindi wasn’t affecting, ‘Earth’ not being in English too was not affecting. This shows how language is never a barrier no matter about what region you’re making the film. Or maybe the language was optimally used so that the difference didn’t matter at all.

The film takes some time to come to grips. Of course it has an effervescent Nandita Das, an actor whom you couldn’t take your eyes off, who keeps you glued to the screen, regardless of what’s happening on screen. Plus now she was in her home ground, going back to a poor rooted character whom one would instantly sympathize. I missed the charming Nandita Das of ‘Fire’ but doing what she does best, here too she was terrific.

The film is mostly seen through the eyes of Lenny Sethna aka Lenny baby (Maia Sethna) who is a young polio affected kid from a wealthy Parsi family. Her world revolves around her ayah, Shanta (Nandita Das), whose world revolves around Dil Navaz, the Ice-Candy Man (Aamir Khan), and Hassan, the Masseur (Rahul Khanna). Shanta being a naturally flirty attractive woman was naturally a cynosure of all eyes. Initially, may be because we knew Aamir as a big star, or may be due to narrative, it looked like Dil Navaz was actually the one loving Shanta and Hassan was actually lusting on her. The scene where her Pallu falls off, gave that notion but later we get to know that Shanta and Hassan were actually in love.

Religion and politics were talked upon much easily by the friends and for a major part looked like Dil Navaz being a hero. The situation becomes tense post the train scene where Navaz sees a train full of dead bodies. We get to see a lot of violence post that and most of it were quite affecting and effective. But the curious part was, Lenny baby being a rich kid, how was she allowed to go out just so easily with her Ayah when the world around them were tearing apart. That was the only part which felt farfetched.

There was one great scene where Lenny baby on her birthday goes to the terrace of her house and sees a next door kid whose mother was raped by a mob. The exchange of conversation between the Parsi kids and the poor kid looks so in genuine. The kid asks whether they’d like to play with marbles and Lenny asks whether he’d have cake. Sometime before Lenny asks her friend what does ‘rape’ mean, the kid asks Lenny and his friend, what does ‘cake’ mean? In a film which was so violent, this was the most hard hitting scene.

Deepa Mehta has got to be one of the best filmmakers to make sex scenes. It was so good in ‘Fire’ and now in ‘Earth’. May be Nandita Das and Deepa Mehta share a great chemistry which reflects on screen. But here the interesting part of the movie was not the sex scene but the conversation after that. Hassan proposes to Shanta for marriage, which she was initially hesitant but once he says that he’d go to Amritsar and convert to Hinduism, she accepts it. That was a curious scene as to what made her accept him. Whether the decision to move to India or to change his faith. Whatever it was, he looked more honest than her.

The film has an impactful climax which would stay in your head for a while. Wish it could have ended right there instead of a needless flash forward with a voice over. May be it’s just the directors style.

Movie Review – Everything Everywhere All at Once

For Everyone

Easily one of the greatest theater watches for an Oscar film. One of the good thing about the movie was, it was entertaining and didn’t feel like, it was made for Oscar.  Of course with great films gaining on popularity, this film would have its fair share of non-likers but it’s a relief to see an entertaining movie get an Oscar. For now, the focus shifting on Asian lifestyle seems to be good, more so because, it was made well no matter what the story was. Wish this doesn’t become a trend, like ‘War’ movies or ‘Black’ movies in the Oscar race and become redundant.

The beauty of ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’ is how it bundles a message movie into something fun for everyone to watch. If I had to say in a single line, Everything Everywhere is for everyone. There was an interesting thing I noticed in theatre. In the front row, there were a group of boys, guess one among them was a film buff or something and had brought a group of people to theatres. For all the jokes at the start, his friends were commenting whether they were supposed to laugh. But after a period of forty five minutes, they were so engrossed in the movie that they couldn’t chide their friend. The last I noticed such an incident was during ‘Avatar’ which is a legendary movie on its own. This shows how much command the director had in the movie.

Making a clumsy movie is not as easy as being clumsy. If there is one thing I would have given sure shot award for the movie is the Art Direction. Just look at the amount of props around Evelyn Quan Wang (Michelle Yeoh). You can’t just throw in random stuff around and make it clumsy. Everything must add value to the shot and it does. I’m sure so much effort would have gone through making those bills she presents to the IRS Inspector, Deirdre Beaubeirdre (Jamie Lee Curtis). There were other more glossy aspects like Joy Wang (Stephanie Hsu) changing costumes walking in the aisle, but it’s easier to appreciate it as its straight on the face. It’s the universe changes and the stuffs in the universe, mainly the Laundromat universe, is the one that should be given the highest credit.

The first twenty minutes or so of the movie was so tense, not thinking of what’s going to happen next but just thinking of Eveyln’s life. It was depressing and almost makes us sympathize with her in that short time. That’s when the verse jump happens and that’s where the film grips. Easily, the ‘Everything’ part was the best of the lot, one, because we were getting to see something new and two, because there was no morality associate to it, just pure randomness.

Waymond Wang (Ke Huy Quan) reminds us of Jackie Chan a lot and even his fight sequences were choreographed like that. While we wonder how lovely if it’d have had Jackie Chan, there is an interesting story doing rounds. Initially, the makers supposedly approached Jackie Chan to be the protagonist but he didn’t like the idea of a female doing kung fu. Not sure, how authentic the story is or its just plain gossip. On the downside, if Jackie had acted in the movie, the surprise factor would’ve been lost because right from scene one we’d have been waiting for him to explode at some point. And eventually it’d have become a Jackie film. In that way, it’s good that it didn’t happen.

For a movie this clumsy, it was brilliant how they kept the emotional part intact. This film would have easily failed if the emotional part had not been handled well. But towards the climax, the scene where Eveyln and Deirdre talk it out in the open would challenge even a full length emotional film. This scene has to be appreciated much more here because, there was a shift in the tonality of the movie, which, if not done right would have irritated most of the people. On another plate was a number of jumps and lot of action happening, to make people come out of it, and sit through dialogues was no mean task. The well played emotion also helps people to sit back from rather mind numbing frenzy on the other side of the universe.

When talking about this film, you can’t skip the intelligence part. Not only does it explore human depths and humor, it explores in a very short time. When we see Eveyln’s story of struggle because of her choice to marry Waymond, we get emotional within minutes but it’s overcome by Waymond in another universe where he tells how Eveyln is such a loser. Such a superb dig that.

For a movie which had so much happening, my favorite scene would easily be the rock scene. It’s like being at the tip of roller coaster and waiting for the fall. With subtitles being played, as wind was only sound in the scene, the audience were holding themselves from guffawing, thinking that they too shouldn’t make any noise to disturb that silence. A clever dig of ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ became an even better scene when the supposedly unmovable rock moves and hit each other. Did anyone get probably the biggest joke of the movie there – The Big Bang Theory?

Movie Review – Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

What.A.Woman!

What, a, woman! Probably that’s the only thought that constantly lingers in the mind while watching the movie. ‘Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri’ is a rare gem which gets the tone of the movie perfect while making it message oriented. It’s not a movie where you’d instantly like the protagonists and it’s not a movie which lures you with the shock value but a carefully constructed mood piece which makes you feel as if you’re inside an exploding chamber, which in the end doesn’t really explode but releases the vacuum in a subtle way.

The biggest advantage of this being a non-native movie was that, even though the title was direct, I didn’t know what was written in the three billboards and as I had not known, it was a great pleasure to decrypt it as the movie began. It doesn’t take much time for the movie to tell you about what the it was all about. But even in those first few minutes, the movie keeps you tensed. Thanks to the setting, lighting, sound, maybe everything but the most important of all was the lady, Mildred Hayes (Frances McDormand). What an actor Frances McDormand is, who can make any character special. Who can forget her performance in ‘Fargo’? It was one of the movies where anyone would be thinking that she can’t repeat a performance like that or she wouldn’t get such a character again but ‘Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri’ was equivalent to it.

The director, Martin McDonagh doesn’t look like a man who was into theaters more than films because the way the scenes were shot, it was near perfect. It was one of the excoriatingly beautiful eerie movie which I had seen recently. My last favorite shot movie was ‘Capote’. So you can see that it has lived up to a certain standards. I’ve watched only once and didn’t want to rewatch it just to decode a point. But is it just me or he doesn’t really show all the three billboards together in a single shot. If it was intentional, it was a great piece of work. Because the title was the entirety of the movie and that’s what runs in our mind throughout the movie. In spite of that we don’t see the complete sentence of something which was etched in the movie.

It was a straight forward message oriented movie alright, may be even propagandist but it’s the best possible way one can do a message movie. The characters were so special and end in a fate we least imagine. Be it the death of Bill Willoughby (Woody Harrelson) whom thanks to the title, would have made us think that he’d appear throughout the movie. And Jason Dixon (Sam Rockwell), true to his name of the character, refines or defines what a dick, a person can be. He and his character was brilliant till the point his face gets burnt.

Look how brilliantly the characters were written. Not a single character in the movie was straight. A lady who has lost her daughter, who casually swears in the household with his son, a husband who has a dumb blonde of a woman who is of their daughters age, a dying Chief, an alcoholic momma’s boy, Dixon etc. it can’t get more clumsy than that but still they all are a part of society and coexist with each other and they need each other to coexist, that’s the beauty. Wish Dixon was a dick throughout the movie because it was too great a movie to see a change in the characteristic of an individual but thankfully he doesn’t emerge out in a traditionally heroic way. Love the doubts that he and Mildred have in the climax and thankfully the movie wasn’t simple enough, where the case gets resolved, yet doesn’t leave us in the hooks like a ‘Memories of Murder’, rather somehow makes us feel the realistic nature of life and gets us attached to the thinking of Dixon and Mildred.

If there was one scene I wish hadn’t happened, it would be the scene where he gets juice from Red Welby (Caleb Landry Jones) because it comes after such a great scene. Even if the character has transformed to be a better person post that arson light up, it would have been nice if that juice scene had not happened, it would give a more edgy feel especially in the bar. I probably expected Red to through the juice in his face but would’ve not liked even that had happened. Best would have been to just cut without the audience knowing whether Red knew that it was Dixon or not. Probably he getting a new face is a symbolism to his character transforming? May be. But that was the only weak link of an otherwise glorious movie.

Movie Review – Lion

T(D)amed

If I had had a video blog I would have started by humming opening tune of Urvasi and said, “well… that’s the only good part of the movie”. If I had written this review in Tamil, I would have titled Asingam, assuming that the film would have been named as Singam. Even though it was quite injudiciously used for the latter case, still I would have gone ahead and used it.

I guess this film would add to the list of horrible films that I would watch this year. Somehow I have a gut feeling that this year is going to be a horrible year for my movie watching. And thanks to time constraint I’m watching more and more films in mobile. Lion was again a movie I watched in two uncomfortable sittings in mobile.

I don’t like the term ‘pathutu iruken’ (currently watching) when it comes to movies. It’s not a series where you currently watch. Movies ought to be watched in one sitting, no matter how boring it gets. So this movie I was ‘watching’. Generally when I watch a movie I would feel restless to complete watching the movie, at least to get done with. But here I wasn’t thinking about watching the movie at all. Such was the impact of the film.

I was warned about Dev Patel’s inefficiency to act. Not that he is a bad actor, he didn’t have much to do in Slumdog Millionaire, and it’s the same here too. But there are comparisons between the two films, which I find to be absurd, apart from being shot in India, I don’t see any reason to compare the film. Even if compared, Slumdog was a far more superior film which was stylishly made. It would have had a profound impact in countries apart from India, like how we praise City of God here. It would have worked here too to few people who could get detached from the environment and watch the film. Worked for me brilliantly. I felt most didn’t like the film just for fame and for pseudo intellect.

In a film which lacked absolutely anything, the only plus point of an otherwise insipid acting cast was Nicole Kidman. She shows us why she’s such a wonderful actor. She is the only one we could sympathize with, in the whole film. Rest all the story looks plain boring. This film, even though happens to be in a familiar turf, could have been shot in a million ways but the director fails to do so. All we get to see was Saroo (Dev Patel) trying to be a Michael Scofield and miserably so.

Everything looks fake in the movie right from childhood to the end. I found the sibling love to be too artificial, mother looked fake and his longing to get back to home too wasn’t shown well. How beautiful it’d have been in Swades where we would really want Shahrukh to get back home. I somehow felt that Ashutosh Gowariker would have done a great job directing the film.

Sad thing was, even bad films would have moments, and this film didn’t have any. If not for one scene, if not for that one scene which I mentioned in the beginning, I would have never forgiven myself for watching the movie. That was the only moment of genuine joy in the film for me. When the music comes and the heroine hides behind the post, does a crazy dance and both laugh at each other, well, that’s how to make a movie. It gave me a joy of reading those girly blogs which only English Literature girls could write.

And in the end when I was thinking, of all things, why the hell the film was named as Lion, we get a reason. If that’s any consolation.