REVIEW 558: MY BIRTHDAY SONG

Release date:	January 19, 2018
Director:	Samir Soni
Cast: Language:	Sanjay Suri, Nora Fatehi, Zenia Starr, Ayaz Khan, Aryan Veir Suri, Pitobash, Purab Kohli  Hindi

Most people worry about the end of their youth. What may be just another birth anniversary in the eyes of some, could turn into a nightmare for those who view the start of a new decade in particular with dread. In Rajiv Kaul’s case, you can take that literally. A tragic death – murder or accident? – mars his 40^th birthday, but he wakes up the next morning to find that all seems to be well and that the bloody episode of the previous night appears not to have happened at all.

Tidbits from that day, however, keep repeating themselves, in different ways and different settings. At first, the premise is interesting enough. Has Rajiv slipped through a crack in the universe and got caught in a time loop in a Groundhog Day Redux? Is someone playing a cruel joke on him? Is he the victim of a crime? Is the film capturing the goings-on in the imagination of a mentally unwell individual? Or is this just a metaphorical depiction of gerascophobia, the fear of ageing?

When My Birthday Song initially throws up these questions, it evokes curiosity. After a while though, it reveals that it has little to offer beyond its clever concept. The repetition of events in Rajiv’s life then becomes increasingly dull rather than fascinating as it should be, so that by the time the answer is unveiled, it does not have the desired jolting effect. Ho hum. Yeah yeah, very smart, but…yawn.

Model-cum-TV-star-turned-debutant-film-director Samir Soni’s My Birthday Song lacks punch in its narrative style, depth in its writing and imagination in its camerawork. Among other things, it sorely needs some layering in its examination of Rajiv’s crisis of conscience that is a crucial part of this tale.

Soni has co-produced this film with his lead star, Sanjay Suri. The screenplay too is Soni’s, with inputs by Vrushali Telang.  

In Onir’s My Brother Nikhil (2005) and Nandita Das’ Firaaq (2008), Suri has shown us that he is capable of complexity given the right project and director. He is earnest playing Rajiv Kaul in My Birthday Song, but the screenplay gives him little to sink his teeth into. His co-star Zenia Starr, playing Rajiv’s wife Ritu, shows some spark that may be tapped in a better film.

This birthday song goes flat too soon to sustain interest.

Rating (out of five stars): *

CBFC Rating (India):	A
Running time:	95 minutes 40 seconds

This review was also published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/my-birthday-song-movie-review-sanjay-suri-is-trapped-in-a-clever-concept-gone-dull-4309869.html

Poster courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Birthday_Song

REVIEW 261: MILLION DOLLAR ARM

Release date:	May 9, 2014
Director:	Craig Gillespie
Cast: Language:	Jon Hamm, Suraj Sharma, Madhur Mittal, Pitobash, Lake Bell, Aasif Mandvi, Bill Paxton, Alan Arkin, Darshan Jariwala, Tzi Ma English with some Hindi

Million Dollar Arm is such a quiet film that it would be easy to under-rate it. Anyone can guess how it will end for the protagonists, yet – unlike most sports films where we already know the central character won that World Cup or breasted that tape at the nth second – this one doesn’t build up an artificial frenzied suspense around the baseball field. What it does is introduce us to this wonderfully gray real-life American sports agent called J.B. Bernstein who plucks two poor boys out of India and takes them to the US to make them Major League Baseball players.

This is a biopic-of-sorts of JB (Jon Hamm) who has been struggling to survive since he started his own business. To save his career, he decides to find baseball’s next big sensation in India, to convert one of the cricket-crazy nation’s bowlers into a baseball pitcher. JB flies off to hold the Million Dollar Arm contest in India. With the help of the crotchety old sports scout Ray (Alan Arkin) and local baseball enthusiast Amit (Pitobash), he finally finds young Rinku Singh (Suraj Sharma) and Dinesh Patel (Madhur Mittal). From there the film takes us through the boys’ discovery of the US, JB’s opportunistic view of them as “investments”, and his gradual conversion from being a “Class A jerk” as his girlfriend calls him.

A story like this is fertile ground for condescension. This could have been a patronising white-man-saves-little-brown-people saga told in the kind of tone we’ve heard from too many Western journalists in the past year while covering India’s anti-rape protests, Moon Mission and other news developments. With masterful deftness though, director Craig Gillespie and writer Tom McCarthy pull back and hold a mirror to JB each time they’re entering tricky territory, giving us a surprisingly sensitive take on alien cultures, disparities and commonalities, underdogs, unwitting racism and white-man-who-is-saved-from-himself.

JB’s early impression of India is a quick composite of crowded roads, traffic jams, chaos and animals on city streets, but at the hands of DoP Gyula Pados nothing is over-emphasised to exoticise. Slumdog Millionaire’s critics may possibly have objections here too, but to be fair, it is but natural for a foreigner to be struck by these overwhelming aspects of India before they notice glitzy hotels, malls, factories and prosperity. It is to Gillespie’s credit that he presents to us these elements of the Indian reality without caricaturing the country.

We get a brief glimpse of Ray sneering at a goat’s kid on a two-wheeler riding beside his car in Mumbai, and an equally fleeting look at JB’s plush hotel in the city. There’s this and there’s that – fair enough then. A.R. Rahman’s music suffers one jarring moment when he includes some bars from Slumdog’s Ringa ringa in the background score, but for the most part it too is engaging and shorn of clichés.

Where the film falls short is in the depiction of the people at large, which could have been more well-rounded without turning Million Dollar Arm into a documentary on India. For instance, the scene depicting the boys’ wide-eyed wonderment when they enter an elevator for the first time is matter-of-fact without being patronising. Of course poor Indian village boys who’ve never been inside a modern building would be fascinated by lifts. In a world where too many Westerners think those are the only kind of Indians in existence though, it is a glaring flaw not to at least briefly introduce viewers to the other kind of Indians, the ‘people like us’ characters, the ones for whom a lift is not a discovery, the ones who are as exasperated by goats and cows on streets as a foreigner might be shocked, amused and bemused.

Million Dollar Arm scores though with its immaculate casting. Few men can play a slimeball in a suit with as many layers as Hamm, well-known in India for his role in TV’s Mad Men. The actor makes JB a character who is hard to hate even when he’s despicable, the sort of chap about whom you feel you know there’s a good guy lurking around somewhere inside him.

Suraj Sharma from Life of Pi is growing into a handsome young fellow, as is the potentially hunky Madhur Mittal who played the wayward elder brother in Slumdog. Both are spot on in their depiction of youthful confidence that occasionally hits a slump. They are so natural before the camera and so charming, that it becomes easy to imagine why JB’s neighbour Brenda would feel a certain tenderness towards them. Brenda is played by Lake Bell who is familiar to Indian viewers from Boston Legal. Her searingly astute observations about JB make for some of the film’s most well-written moments.

Pitobash as Amit is the one who could have ended up being Million Dollar Arm’s only cliched desi. Instead, this gifted actor holds back some of his innate rusticity and exuberance to give us a winning character. The screenplay wisely allows Amit, Rinku and Dinesh to have most of their conversations in Hindi. This gives the dialogues a natural tone, with the Indians speaking not in the stereotypically sing-song, accented English of The Simpsons’ Apu, but in the kind of English and Hindi that real Indians from their particular background would use.

The remaining roles are all played by talented actors who make their few minutes on screen count, including poor Aasif Mandvi who is saddled with the only badly written part. It seems as though someone forgot that business partners are actually supposed to do something in the business. Mandvi’s Ashu Vasudevan seems to contribute little to JB’s firm.

It needs to be pointed out that the film creates the impression that the Million Dollar Arm contest got a lot more coverage in the Indian national media than it did in reality. It should have also been clarified that baseball is many light years away from getting the “billion new viewers” that JB thought his contest would earn for the game in India. This country is still obsessed with cricket, and baseball is still largely a distant sport.

That being said, it goes without saying that the contest changed the lives of the real Rinku and Dinesh. This film though is the heart-warming story of how they changed the real JB’s life. No doubt JB was on an exploitative, self-serving mission, but the boys were too innocent to get that. No doubt the story is focused on JB and not the boys, which some may even see as its failing. However, by the end of its 122 minutes we get to know Rinku and Dinesh just that little bit more and are left with a cloud of warmth floating around the heart. This is a film that’s small in scale, with no pretensions whatsoever to grandeur. Million Dollar Arm is a pleasant and deliberately under-stated ‘melodrama’, as dramatic and real as real life usually is.

Rating (out of five): ***1/2

CBFC Rating (India):	U
Running time: MPAA Rating (US):	122 minutes PG (for mild language and some suggestive content)
Release date in the US:	May 16, 2014

Poster courtesy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Million_Dollar_Arm 

REVIEW 216: ONCE UPON AY TIME IN MUMBAI DOBAARA

Release date:	August 15, 2013
Director:	Milan Luthria
Cast: Language:	Akshay Kumar, Imran Khan, Sonakshi Sinha, Pitobash, Sonali Bendre Behl, Chetan Hansraj Hindi

Those who’ve watched Once Upon A Time in Mumbaai will recall that it ended with Shoaib Khan (Emraan Hashmi) assassinating his mentor Sultan Mirza (Ajay Devgn). The two were said to have been inspired by real-life gangsters Dawood Ibrahim and Haji Mastan. Once Upon Ay Time in Mumbai Dobaara (OUATIMD) takes off where that film left off, with Akshay Kumar playing an older Shoaib and Sonali Bendre Behl making an appearance as his long-time lover Mumtaz whose younger version was played by Prachi Desai in the first film. In terms of story, what you see in the trailers is what you get with OUATIMD: Shoaib, now a senior don, falls out with his young protégé Aslam (Imran Khan) when they both fall in love with the same woman (Sonakshi Sinha). Simplicity can be a good thing, but not when it translates into lack of depth. And sadly, while there is much to toast, there is just too much to lament in OUATIMD.

The first film was far from brilliant but it did have memorable music, production design and costumes complementing a screenplay filled with 1970s/’80s style Bollywood dialoguebaazi that was enjoyable coming from actors who could carry off those flourishes. In Dobaara, the bad news is that Akshay’s heavy-voiced dialogue delivery makes too many of his lines sound tedious and contrived especially in serious scenes. The occasional glimpses of his trademark comic timing are not enough. The good news is that Imran Khan rises beyond expectations. The junior Khan is likeable but has so far come across as an actor whose performances have reflected his own urbane real-life personality. Here in OUATIMD, a long soliloquy in a hospital room shows that he still has a long way to go, but where he’s indulging in deliberately over-dramatised talk, he is far more convincing than his older co-star.

Sonakshi Sinha as Jasmine, the love of both their lives, is a mixed bag in this film. Coming as Dobaara does after her excellent performance in Lootera, it’s nice to see that here again she’s not just a pretty adjunct to the hero as she’s been in too many films with Salman Khan and Akshay himself. OUATIMD’s screenplay belongs as much to her as it does to her male co-stars which is a pleasant change in the male-dominated universe inhabited by Akshay and Salman. Sonakshi still needs to get past her extreme self-consciousness about her large eyes, pretty lashes (false or real, I can’t tell) and distinctive profile, which seems to have afflicted most of her directors too so far, but she is undoubtedly a natural actor who owes it to herself and good cinema to do more Looteras and less (god, it hurts to name the film) Jokers.

There are some significant asides worth noting in the casting. Gender norms have been turned on their head with the contrast between Imran’s slimness and Sonakshi’s largeness. It’s not that she’s overweight (absolutely not!) but this is a big-boned, broad-shouldered woman who does not conform to prevailing social diktats on female beauty. Aslam and Jasmine reminded me, in terms of physicality alone, of Huma Qureshi with a puny Nawazuddin Siddiqui in GoW 1&2. Little steps like these are what evolution and revolutions are made of. Interesting too that right after SRK’s character announced he’s 40 years old in Chennai Express, 30-year-old Imran gets to be the beau of 20-something Sonakshi while 45-year-old Akshay is the senior lusting after her. Perhaps Bollywood is finally seeing the light about age-appropriate roles for gentlemen.

Rajat Aroraa’s writing for OUATIMD is inconsistent. Some of the dialoguebaazi is amusing, it does have several effective thriller elements and does touch some emotional chords, especially in the climax; but Jasmine’s emotional graph is poorly explained and there’s only so much you can take of lines like “Naam bataa diya to pehchaan bura maan jayegi” and “Peene ki capacity, jeene ka strength, account ka balance aur naam ka khauf kabhi bhi kam nahin hona chahiye”. Director Milan Luthria (Once Upon A Time In Mumbaai, The Dirty Picture) seems too acutely aware of having a major male star as his hero, or at least that’s the impression created by Akshay’s introduction scenes in which excessive time is taken to reveal his face. On the other hand, Shoaib’s initial interactions with Jasmine are filled with humour, though there’s nothing quite as funny in the film as the scene in which Aslam teaches her English and elsewhere when she must suffer the consequences of those lessons. Considering that this is a Bollywood gangster film, it’s surprisingly un-bloody. Some of the action is top-notch, most especially the long chase sequence within and atop a train involving a sprightly Aslam.

While care has been taken to maintain the film’s period look, the lack of attention to detail in other aspects is irritating (a woman lies in hospital after being shot in the back, with bandages underneath her unchanged – and almost unscathed – clothes). Most of the supporting cast are either unimpressive (Chetan Hansraj playing Shoaib’s sidekick Jimmy even sounds confusingly like Akshay) or they’re given short shrift which is so unfair when you’ve roped in talents like Mahesh Manjrekar and Pitobash. Vidya Balan is wasted in an inexplicable guest appearance. Sonali Bendre Behl though looks lovely (gosh, she’s ageing so gracefully!) and pitches in a neat performance which makes you wonder why Hindi filmdom doesn’t have bigger roles for her. Sandip Shirodkar’s background score is effective in building up the suspense, but Pritam’s songs – except for Yeh tune kya kiya – are nothing to write home about. Tyyeb Ali is more energetic in the film than it appeared to be in the trailer, but it’s hard to understand why this classic song has been reprised from Amar Akbar Antony when the music director, choreographer and director couldn’t give it half the zest and verve of the original and when, well let’s face it, Imran Khan ain’t no Rishi Kapoor!

OUATIMD is not an absolute washout though. Far from it. Despite its flaws, Luthria and editor Akiv Ali have given it a certain pace especially as it hurtles towards its rather unexpected climax. The lasting impression though is of a sliver of a project, not a fully fleshed out film.

Rating (out of five): **1/2

CBFC Rating (India):	U/A
Running time:	2 hours 40 minutes

Photograph: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Once_Upon_ay_Time_in_Mumbai_Dobaara!