FILM FATALE: BOLLYWOOD’S PRO-MODI VS NO-MODI DEBATE & THE END OF INDIFFERENCE / COLUMN PUBLISHED IN THE HINDU BUSINESSLINE

(This column by Anna MM Vetticad was first published in The Hindu Businessline on May 10, 2014)

Headline: APOLITICAL NO MORE

Introline: Bollywood seems to have finally shed its political apathy and its infamous reticence

We were all set for the shoot. Lights: check. Camera: check. Makeup: check. My star guest — one of the hottest women in Bollywood — was just entering the room when her publicist whispered in my ear, “Ma’am is requesting you not to ask political questions.” Meaning? No questions about Shah Rukh Khan, right?

In my experience, Hindi movie stars tend to avoid comment on political issues, but they rarely try to pre-censor an interview. This particular actress, however, is known for getting her agent to convey this request to journalists before every long-format Q&A. On earlier occasions, I had laughed it off because I wasn’t interested in her reactions to political affairs then. This was different. This was a month when her industry was engulfed in politics; when Shiv Sena had threatened to block the release of SRK’s My Name is Khan (MNIK) unless he apologised for his remarks about Pakistani players in the IPL. It goes without saying, I refused to agree to her condition and did the interview my way.

This memory from 2010 has flashed through my mind repeatedly this month as a battle rages in Mumbai’s film circles between pro-Modi and no-Modi groups. These people openly sparring over ideology… could they possibly be from the same industry that was once notoriously non-committal about politics or terrified of it?

Unless you’re living in a vacuum, you know where this is coming from. This April, a group of eminent citizens, mostly from Bollywood, issued an appeal to the electorate in the ongoing general election “to vote for the secular party, which is most likely to win in your constituency”. The letter was signed by a cross-section of film personalities including, surprisingly, makers of money-spinning hardcore commercial cinema.

They did not name any politician or party. However, in what must surely rank as a self-goal, BJP supporters in Bollywood have exploded in protest, translating the call to vote for secularism as a call not to vote for Narendra Modi. This is a “conspiracy” to “divide” our industry, they say.

A film journalist cannot but rub her eyes in disbelief as this storm refuses to subside. In the past, political apathy has been a hallmark of Bollywood, unlike some of the other Indian language industries, and in sharp contrast to Hollywood. Even stars who join political parties have rarely publicised their stance on combustive issues. Equally bizarre are some who have canvassed for politicians during polls. In the 2009 election, Salman Khan took the cake, the bakery and the wheat field with it, when he campaigned for candidates from both the BJP and the Congress! I am not supporting parties, I am supporting friends, he explained.

Over the years, even as Bollywood’s right to free speech has continuously been attacked, most victims have bowed to bigots. It’s only fair to point out that protests against art in India usually include physical violence, with the state doing little to protect its people. For political, religious and social groups, targeting artists, especially commercial film folk, is an easy route to publicity. With money and personal safety at stake, Bollywood often asks how they can be blamed when they opt for self-censorship and apologies.

Well, the point is, artists from other fields have shown far greater courage in confronting political goons. So have Mumbai’s documentary makers and some parallel cinema luminaries. Mainstream players in Bollywood though (with a few exceptions such as Mahesh Bhatt and Shabana Azmi) have consistently played it safe.

What then has prompted the change in 2014? A widespread sense of urgency regarding the election this year is one factor. The Aam Aadmi Party’s emergence has also fired the imagination of many who see among the party’s recruits ‘respectable’ folk who don’t fit the stereotypical image of netas. It must be pointed out though that the winds of change have gradually been blowing away the industry’s infamous indifference since 2010.

If time in the Gregorian calendar is divided into BC and AD, then this Bollywood calendar of political evolution can be divided into BM (before MNIK) and AM (after MNIK). When Shiv Sena challenged Shah Rukh four years ago, Bollywood insiders and viewers witnessed the unprecedented phenomenon of a megastar refusing to be cowed down. Spurred on by public and media support, one by one most film personalities — though not all — spoke up for him. Ultimately, despite delays within Maharashtra which hurt the bottomline, MNIK got an all-India release and became a massive hit.

Sometimes, it takes just one courageous individual to discover that a bully is a coward. SRK tugged at the Shiv Sena’s beard and Uddhav Thackeray lost face. The price has been that AM, religious right-wingers have consistently singled out SRK for propaganda and abuse. History must credit him though for forever changing Bollywood.

The ongoing row over Modi is another turning point AM. As more film personalities express political views publicly, there will be strength in numbers and the risk of violence will hopefully decline. Don’t lament an imagined end of unity, dear Bollywood-gazers. Celebrate instead that Bollywood’s political apathy has finally ended. Silence cannot be an option for India’s most high-profile entertainers.

(Anna MM Vetticad is the author of The Adventures of an Intrepid Film Critic. Twitter: @annavetticad)

Photograph courtesy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Name_Is_Khan

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 260: THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN 2 (3D)

Release date:	May 1, 2014
Director:	Marc Webb
Cast: Language:	Andrew Garfield, Emma Stone, Jamie Foxx, Sally Field, Dane DeHaan, Paul Giamatti, Dennis Leary English

There’s a point in last year’s Man of Steel, when Clark Kent in his pre-Superman childhood days uses his superpowers to save another kid from an accident. Much to his confusion, instead of gratitude he evokes fear in that child. “People are scared of what they don’t understand,” his foster father played by Kevin Costner explains to him.

Sometimes, undeterred by that reaction, the object of fear goes on to become Superman, Spiderman or some other enemy of evil; sometimes that reaction combined with self-doubt brings out negativity, as it did with Lizard, the bad guy from the first instalment of this film series, and Electro from The Amazing Spider-man 2.

In a nation where a debate on Section 377 is raging; where politicians in election season are trying hard to net votes by invoking fear of the “other”; where efforts are on to demonise Muslims, secular Hindus, homosexuals, hijras, feminists and anyone whose ideology, personal choices or intrinsic characteristics can be used to paint them as aliens; in such a nation at this point in our history, Electro from The Amazing Spiderman 2 is a telling and poignant villain.

He doesn’t choose to become what he becomes. He is just a brilliant scientist going unnoticed by his colleagues until one day he is bitten by a tank-full of gigantic electric eels and mutates into a human generator of electricity. He didn’t seek out the power that came to him accidentally, nor is it his fault that he doesn’t at first know how to control it. “I just wanted people to see me,” he cries out helplessly when by-standers on the streets of New York react in horror as he himself first becomes aware of his own might as a mutant. But people’s fear compels him to protect himself, and that’s when all hell breaks loose.   

This happens part-way through the film. The Amazing Spider-man 2 starts with a flashback to Peter Parker’s childhood and his parents’ murder. That being dealt with, we are back with Peter (Andrew Garfield) where we’d left him in The Amazing Spider-man: a youngster living with his Aunt May (Sally Field). Peter graduates with his girlfriend Gwen Stacey (Emma Stone) and becomes a photographer whose calling card is that he has provided pictures of Spiderman to The Daily Bugle. Gwen becomes an intern at Oscorp, the company for which Peter’s dad had worked before his death. Remember Oscorp is where Lizard was born when the scientist Curt Connors injected himself with a serum containing genetically modified lizard DNA.

As Spidey continues to fight crime in New York, he’s also battling the worry that his work could some day put Gwen in danger. Meanwhile, his childhood friend Harry Osborne (Dane DeHaan), son of Oscorp founder Norman Osborne, returns to New York and urgently needs to find Spiderman for his own personal reasons. He turns to Peter for help, not knowing the truth about Spidey. It’s also around this time that Electro (Jamie Foxx) is born.

Director Marc Webb efficiently negotiates the multiple strands in the screenplay without allowing it to appear convoluted at any point. American superhero films seem fixated on a powers-being-handed-from-father-to-son narrative, but Aunt May here is no silent spectator. For that matter, Gwen is no sidekick to Spidey either. She’s a feisty equal partner who fires him for daring to take a decision on her behalf in a bid to “protect” her. It is her scientific mind that provides Peter with a solution to combat Electro’s powers. And it is she who is the centre of many of the film’s most touching scenes. Through her we even discover that our Spidey is a feminist, that he’s not one of those guys who expects his girlfriend or wife to follow him across the world wherever his career may take him while she puts her dreams on hold.

Garfield and Stone are both lovely to look at and excellent actors. Their beauty, charm, charisma and undeniable chemistry might have sustained a much thinner screenplay. Here, with the backing of strong writing, they effectively convey to us the romance, companionship, sexual sparks, heartache and heartbreak involved in their relationship. 

The two leads are backed by a supporting cast of wonderful actors though it has to be said that Oscar winner Jamie Foxx is given short shrift. We see little of him in his pre-Electro avatar, and as Electro we can barely decipher his face. Still, that’s not as bad as the embarrassingly insignificant role played by Irrfan Khan in the last film. On another front, it’s sad that superhero films rarely get the attention of awards-givers. If it weren’t for past trends, I’d have put my money on Field getting a bunch of Best Supporting Actress noms by year-end. 

The screenplay of The Amazing Spiderman 2 has considerable depth, but it’s not without its flaws. First, it skims over the reason for Electro’s animosity towards Spiderman. Since we are not drawn into their enmity, that takes away much of the edge from their confrontations. Second, some of the satellite scenes needed to have been better written and directed, such as that awkwardly handled one in Aunt May’s hospital room when the lights come back on and she acts like a boss which in fact she is not, as is evident from an earlier conversation she had with Peter. Third, Garfield and Stone are so much more interesting than Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst who played Spidey and his girlfriend in Sam Raimi’s film series, yet this film like the first Amazing Spider-man, sorely lacks that one defining moment of burning romance akin to that electrifying upside-down kiss in the rain that has immortalised Maguire and Dunst.

TAS2’s special effects and action are top-notch though the music fails to stir. Overall, it is a high-adrenaline experience, zipping from one crest to the next to the next, leaving the viewer with little time to think or complain. In short, The Amazing Spiderman 2 is great fun.

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

CBFC Rating (India):	U/A
Running time: MPAA Rating (US):	142 minutes PG-13 (for sequences of sci-fi action/violence)
Release date in the US:	May 2, 2014

Poster and videos courtesy: Sony Pictures Entertainment

“Rise of Electro” video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8qESpVVTfI

Final trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNp7N1eRt7k

Hindi trailer featuring Vivek Oberoi: http://youtu.be/bmrOwxOaV3M 

Hindi music video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVT93bhOntk