Tag: Alia Bhatt

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cinema FRS

FRS: Sadak 2

It’s good to be back!

So you all know what an FRS is right? Right? 

-20: Movie begins with “ millennial represent “ Alia Bhatt’s character Aarya sneaking into an Ashram of a Baba and (what else) drawing graffiti on one of his giant cut-out with the word Badla. 

Nothing innately wrong with this, millennials are often shown to be using graffiti as their preferred mode of expression, but seconds later the same millennial burns down the whole cut-out, which doesn’t make sense. 

Why vandalise if you are going to burn the whole thing down?  

I guess we will never understand millennial-represents, maybe the negative points are for us. Ok, it is for us. 

+12: Aarya uses the split second available before she is chased by the authorities to capture this flaming act of protest in an insta live. Opportunistic characters are opportunistic. 

+2: Director goes into a flash montage of the happenings of Sadak 1 , good for those who missed the first film, which includes most of the FRS writers room. The important takeaway is that Pooja (character played by Pooja Bhatt is dead) 

FRS Trivia Thagaval 

Vasanth’s tamil film Appu starring Top Star Prashant is a remake of Mahesh Bhatt’s Sadak 1 which itself was based on the Martin Scoresese movie Taxi Driver, which some critics opine as being inspired by John Ford’s The Searchers

FRS Trivial Thagaval brought to you by Wikipedia 

+20: Ravi seems to have done well by himself in the last 20 years, from being a taxi driver to the co-owner of Pooja Travels which has many Audis in its fleet. They also seem to have in possession of prime real estate in Mumbai, but the movie of course doesn’t want to focus on the positive aspect of the story but more on the still depressed taxi driver Ravi. 

Does Ravi fear the rise of cab operators like Ola and Uber,which could potentially eat into his business, we will never know. Movie is not interested in such things. 

+35: Millennial Aarya instead of booking Bla Bla Car or some such ride sharing service goes back to good old Pooja travels for her trip to Kailash to be completed before she turns 21.This could be seen as a hipster thing, like people picking up board games to reduce time spent on apps.  

-35: It so happens that Driver Ravi also meets Millennial Aarya at the hospital, the day before, expected movie co-incidence is expected. 

-101: Hero will deny the journey to be taken but will somehow be convinced to go on the journey, because “screenplay”. Also the audience knows this will always happen because they know the runtime of the movie.

+56: During the course of the journey we learn that millennial Aarya is also the founder of an activist group called India Against Fake Babas, it is an awareness group that meets sometimes in cafes and tells people that they do not need interpreters and can directly speak to God. Down with blind faith boys.

-22: Unfortunately, India Against Fake Babas is not against all Fake Babas but only one, namely Gyaan Prakash, whose cut-out we wrote about earlier. 

That begs us the question, how does one know who the fake babas are? Never mind, movie is not interested in such stuff anyway, if movie tells baba is fake then we must accept it, blindly. 

+101: Millennial Meet Cute- movie is very innovative in ways to make its lead characters meet. In the age of the online trolling (of which Sadak 2 is also a victim, wait for our FRS Trivia Thagaval again) Aarya seeks out Vishal (Aditya Roy Kapoor) who is the constant web irritant to her cause, India Against Fake Babas and demands a public apology. 

This being a movie, both fall in love at first sight. 

We although fear that this would encourage twitter trolls to think that if they do keep hounding celebrities that they might actually fall in love with them. 

-25: Movie makes an attempt at equipoised storytelling that champagne liberals behind causes don’t add much to the cause other than themselves, movie then abandons this line of storytelling because hero falls in love with heroine.

-57: India Against Fake Baba’s other outreach strategy is to distribute handbills to people on the street and see if they call them back, movie itself makes fun of this strategy. LOL

-101: For a movie called Sadak, almost 90 pc of the movie takes place inside rooms, maybe they should have called it Sadak 2: Now in Kamra 

That now reminds us of Chennaiyil Oru Naal 2’s unbelievable tagline. 

-122: Movie wants us to think Ooty is some Himalayan hill station, boss

-60: Movie also wants us to believe in its blatant “screenplaying”, one girl gets a father, a father who lost a daughter gains one, a man who lost interest to live found a cause etc, yeah yeah but why do you also say it in dialogue too? 

-33: Aditya Roy Kapoor always carries a guitar on his back, this made us fear that when he will break into a song and our fears came true 

That was really the most fearful moment in the movie for us, because every obstacle introduced in the movie is resolved easily in the next scene itself. 

-24.6: usual something something twist happens and everything comes to an end and millennial Aarya makes an appeal to the government saying that bringing light to all corners of the country will not do much good, but dispelling darkness by chasing away fake Babas is the true path to greatness. 

We wondered if she would dedicate her entire fortune to fighting fake babas and mythbusting, but no such announcement was seen in the movie, which made us think about Aditya Roy Kapoors abandoned comment about Champagne Liberals. 

All the best for India Against Fake Babas

FRS Trivia Thagaval 

At the time of going to press (lool we think of ourselves as one publication), Sadak 2 was the second most disliked trailer on youtube, which is why we mentioned that it was a victim of concerted web abuse, the first most disliked video is the YouTube Rewind 2018 

FRS Trivia Thagaval brought to you by Wikipedia

A short interview with our editor about the new section FRS Trivia Thagaval 

Journalist: Why did you introduce this new section to your old review format FRS?

Editor: We believe that people should learn something when they go to the movies

Journalist: We are hearing rumors that this is because of falling traffic to your blog site

Editor: It’s not a rumor, it is the truth, but we don’t add sections for such things like web traffic

Journalist: That’s big breaking news

Editor: Lool, never blogged eh? 

End of interview 

All numbers are incidental and arbitrary , except the facts provided by our data analytics team

Subam

Team FRS

PS Mahesh Bhatt’s Sadak 2 is now streaming on Disney+Hotstar

PPS Venkatesh Bhatt’s Idhayam Thotta Samayal is now streaming on his youtube channel, just saying.

Categories
cinema

Kalank (2019)

As the Swivel Chair Spins #11

If you were to ask any resident of Husnabad as it appears in this film, the route to Hira Mandi, the notorious locality where courtesans and blacksmiths co-inhabit, the resident would probably come up with something like this 

“ No eagle requires direction to fly, it knows they way from its heart” 

The Streets of Husnabad from Kalank
all day song, dance and poetry

Very difficult to deal with such daily poetry, so it is always better to carry modern tools such as Google maps when visiting Hira Mandi. The visitor will likely be awed by the erected sets of Husnabad, which seems to be the combination of Istanbul and Venice, but is labelled as pre-Partition Pakistan. For example you would need a gondola to reach the mahal of courtesan Baahar Begum, to whose voice the whole city goes to sleep; much like Vaidehi Kaathirundhal. But unlike the older Tamil film, here the songs are not about loss but about longing. 

Madhuri Dixit as Baahar Begum, once courtesan now music teacher
once courtesan now music teacher

Naturally our heroine Roop, who is new to Husnabad and who has been forced into a contract marriage with nice guy template Dev Chaudhary because his first wife Satya is in her last stretch of her life, death quickened by cancer; but normally we wouldn’t notice because even cancer here is beautiful or atleast made to look beautiful. 

Making everything beautiful, does not make this a Bhansali film, nor does the classical number or the rose tinted look of Pakistan of the time; but hey they tried a lot. As another Husnabad resident would immediately come up with lines like 

“Only the blind would look for story, in a film about love” 

Alia Bhatt and Varun Dhawan from Kalank
love boating

Maybe that Husnabad resident is right, I should indeed focus on the gondola ride at the end of the street and the mega burning Raavan before whose embers that our lovers Roop and Zafar meet. Obviously it is love at first sight, the complication in this love story ( as in most love stories) comes from the fact that Roop is a recently married woman. But as the movie which upends the Partition says “love has no borders” who am I to question. 

While even with a healthy level of cynicism I do accept this love, but Kalank tries to push another theme called ‘respect’, all the characters here are looking for one of the two or both. 

Roop says to Dev that she will not be able to love him, but she will respect him and she has given up on her lover Zafar,  because she no longer respects him. 

Right, so that was a streaming pause moment for me. Maybe you should go back and read that again. Maybe movie love is different from all this, better to leave abstract things to the poets in the streets of Hira Mandi and focus on characters. 

Alia Bhatt plays Roop, a free spirited like a kite without restraint-stubborn Rajputana girl whose dreams are cut short until they are rekindled when they meet Varun Dhawan’s Zafar, a brooding blacksmith whose eyes light up like a furnace when he hears the word “Inteqam”.

Their love story is a given, obviously since they are the leads of the movie and their story would be championed over the others, every side glance cements it, but director Abhishek Varman tends towards maximising this supposed poetry in the hope to make another Bhansali. 

But as the Husnabad street poet would quote beautifully

“Chandeliers and Courtesans alone don’t make a Bhansali

Like how a melting clock doesn’t make a Dali” 

My biggest issue with the film is not the confusion between love, sex and respect, it’s not even the over insistence n beauty, decor and makeup, it’s not even the off-mood Baahubali type bull fight that Zafar gets into, it’s not even the dullness of the senior actors (Madhuri and Sanjay) who have seen far better times but are unable to recreate it now, heck it’s not even the overblow Dusshera celebrations that I touched upon earlier. 

Nice Guys Get Nothing 
Aditya Roy Kapur as Nice Guy Dev Chowdary

It’s about the nice guy, Dev Choudhary; it is not good to be a good guy in Bollywood. As in, if we crystallize all of Bollywood films into the single line as “who gets the girl”, the good guy would never get it. 

Everyone in Bollywood hates nice guys, the character is always given to the ‘other’ hero, not the lead. His character undergoes no change that even if he has the means and need to express his feelings (for the heroine, what else), he won’t do it, his character won’t do it. 

He is the well educated, understanding, silent and “aapko books pasand hai” type guy who loses or in most cases willing to ‘sacrifice’ the girl to the street corner romeo who says sweet things to your wife like “ let the willingness of your eyes not be marred by the obstacle that is your eyelids”. Our man can never say such things, he is probably editing a cabinet report committee on steel factories in his library somewhere. Nice guys are not exciting (for the heroine, hence audience), nice guys are nice, but that’s just it. 

It’s even verbally said in Kalank, for those who might not appreciate this reading of the film, when Baahar Begum tells Roop that Dev (Aditya Roy Kapoor) is an ‘achcha ladka”, Roop responds by saying, is being “achcha” enough to spend a lifetime with? 

Umm, his plight continues, he loses his wife to cancer, who is another ‘achcha ladki’ Sonakshi Sinha who sacrifices her position  of bahu in the family, so that her husband can have a happy future. Has a wandering father (Sanjay Dutt) who from reports seems to be the Zafar of the previous generations, naturally the Begum fell for him! 

All of Dev’s credentials of being a London educated, progressive news editor and sensitive husband all fall to zero before the first class rascal nature of the romeos, because that is where Mohabbat is. 

Love is strange, but Bollywood is stranger. Maybe the end is a bit of a surprise, going against tradition, he does ‘get’ the girl, but her heart? Oh it is floating somewhere in the clouds or in the Gondolas of Husnabad. Nice guys, even when they win, they lose. 

Nice guys get nothing and that’s my biggest issue with Kalank. 

PS

Oh yeah I forgot to mention about the good old zero sum bollywood socialism sub plot, where Zafar instigates rebels against the coming of a steel plant which can only mean local industries will go bankrupt. Naturally this leads to a riot. 

Kalank is streaming on Amazon Prime and pardon my Hindi, I am learning through subtitles. 

Categories
Books cinema cinema: hindi

WALLS PEOPLE BUILD

Image

Even in the most formulaic of products cinema can surprise you to lengths that you could have ever imagined.

2 states is no new story, two people from diverse background fall in love and naturally their parents oppose, how the couple convince their parents form the rest of the tale. Yes, how many times have we seen this story? Yet 2 states gets most things right where others slip.

This writer walked in expecting a clash of cultures, a comedy of manners and other such gags, but that was not the case to be. Usually not one to expect authentic portrayal of south Indians in Hindi films, there was really anything for me to complain about.

Most of the films in the same fashion, in fact even with the same story reduce characters to prickly caricatures, taking ample advantage of existing stereotypes, the troubled couple usually have to tread carefully amidst the culture bushes while not rustling them, but trying to win their approval as well.

It is not to say that 2 states does not take the help of the stereotypes, just that they are not gags, like first you think Mr. Swaminathan is the grumpy  simple south Indian dad, then we come to realize that he is not grumpy  because he is south Indian, but he is tired of doing others’ work, likewise  the “middle-class” minded fast talking groom’s mother also begins as a staple, not unlike many Bollywood Mas; but she too just wants some respect after being mistreated for most of her life. Her issue is really not having a ‘Madrasi’ daughter-in-law, but her fear of losing her son’s love and respect, something her husband could never provide. 2 states aptly bring out the motivations behind the stereotypes rather than just painting them in stock expected colors.

When characters are written with respect, it shows on screen! Even if respect did not allow much time for research, the previous clash of the culture films only seek to bring the differences to one common ground for the benefit of the lovers, so much so that we do not really care in the end if the protagonists get married or not.

In the end it is not the diversity of the cultures that is the hindrance; it is the minds of the people who preferred to be safely walled up in the name of society and culture.

Marriage is about individuals, not about culture. Yes it does involve culture, but it is not to be seen as a solid unmovable entity that shuts out people and selectively allows some in. Culture is a result of individuals, accumulated over the years to make things easier, if it makes life a chore; then a lot of rethinking needs to be done.

Well written characters are essayed by finest supporting actors (Ronit Roy, Amrita Singh and Revathy deserve more than special mentions), while the biggest hurrah must go to the likeable lead, Alia ‘light-in-her-eyes’ Bhatt and the surprisingly effectual Arjun Kapoor.

While the film does stop and get into the usual Bollywood song and dance occasionally, all that is forgiven. Also nobody gets married at the Shore Temple, it is a UNESCO world heritage site for God’s sake.

2 States is immensely pleasant even at its length, a film that rightly captures the scenario while not being either youth-rebellious or teacher-preacher in its handling of marriage, that is an achievement.

Yes it also ends well.

PS: Two paragraphs on how good this Alia Bhatt is, as Ananya Swaminathan was written, it was deleted keeping in mind that Arjun Kapoor(Krish Malhotra) too is amazing. Further problems were averted by using simpler adjectives in the piece.

PS 2: Remind yourself that this film is not an ad for YES Bank and Sunsilk, repeat this again please for your benefit.

PS 3: This writer did not read the Chetan Bhagat novel from which the film was adapted from and thus cannot speak about loyalty to text issues.

X Box: Kya Yaar, we also see Hindi films.