Madari



Review

Cast:
Irrfan Khan, Jimmy Sheirgill, Tushar Dalvi, Vishesh Bansal • Director:
Nishikant Kamat SPOILERS ALERT The protagonist of Madaari is driven by anger and anguish to kidnap a powerful politician's eight-year-old son. With that daring act, the man hopes to force the world to sit up and take notice of his plight, precipitated by a bridge collapse in the heart of suburban Mumbai. Two hours and a bit later, he achieves his goal: the minister and his cohorts are on their knees.  
 But the bitter battle of attrition that he wages against a battery of opponents remains strangely unengaging despite a superlative performance from the redoubtable Irrfan. Madaari, directed by Nishikant Kamat, makes the right noises about the state of the nation and its people owing to the machinations of avaricious and insensitive politicians and crony contractors.  
 However, the methods that the film uses in order to do so are rather fanciful, if not outright harebrained. Irrfan, at the top of his game as an actor, goes all out to inject some energy into the narrative. If only the games that the aggrieved character plays with the handpicked CBI sleuth Nachiket Verma (Jimmy Sheirgill) had greater frisson, Madaari might have been an infinitely more riveting piece of cinema.  
 It is, at best, a tepid, occasionally intriguing thriller. It fails to create the required tension, suspense or anticipation as the intrepid crusader leads the cops and their feckless bosses on a wild goose chase across northern India. At the outset, the film alludes to scams, bridge collapses, rail mishaps and farmer suicides before plunging into the story a distraught, dishevelled Nirmal Kumar, a common man blessed with uncommon courage. He is hit by a tragedy caused by corruption, so he zeroes in on the Union home minister's son, a Dehradun school student who has no special security cover. Lest he be mistaken for a common criminal seeking petty personal gains, he puts his actions in a larger context. When a falcon, he says, swoops upon a hatchling, the story sounds credible but it isn't rousing enough.  
 But when the hapless quarry hits back at the falcon, the story may not ring true but it is far more exciting, he asserts. Madaari is obviously all about rustling up the latter scenario, but it does not deliver the expected thrills consistently enough to count as a humdinger. The film leaves several questions unanswered. For one, it is difficult to fathom why on earth a Mumbai resident who has lost a dear one picks on Union home minister Prashant Goswami (Tushar Dalvi), an affable gentleman who forgoes the trappings of his high office. Another central government minister in the revenge-seeking vigilante's line of fire, Pratap Nimbalkar (Uday Tikekar), whose portfolio is never mentioned but it might be safe to surmise that it is urban development, is dragged into the pit without much explanation until it is time to ring the curtain down on the action. Inevitably, there is a shrill television news anchor in here - Swatantra TV's Sanjay Jagtap (Nitesh Pandey) - who raises questions on a nightly basis on the ineptitude of the government. Despite Irrfan's controlled star turn - he moves from sorrow to sarcasm, and from shock to scorn, with effortless ease - the film makes rather heavy weather of its progress towards a bizarre climax in a Mumbai chawl that brings the audience back to the falcon and chick scenario.  
 Madaari isn't the first Hindi film to advocate a brand of vigilantism that borders on the fascist. Nor is it likely to be the last. But its point about the deadly distortions of democracy is terribly laboured and sketchily articulated. Terms like instant justice, kangaroo court, media trial, rule of law and ideal voter are bandied about. They do not eventually add up to much because the tale of loss and retribution that Madaari sets out to narrate is lost in a heap of cliches. Besides its distractingly loud background score, the film's biggest drawback is the superficially defined character of the abducted boy (Vishesh Bansal). He is projected as a bright kid who knows his onions better than most lads his age. That would have been perfectly fine had he not been as precocious as he turns out to be. An eight-year-old holding forth on the Stockholm syndrome is a bit much. I hate you, the boy says to his captor at one point in the film when the former is laid low by a stomach bug. The latter retorts: "Your hate doesn't matter. My hate... it matters. I could be much worse." In another scene, Nirmal Kumar declares: "I will not wrap up my story. I will leave it incomplete." He carries out neither of the two threats. He never directs his coiled-up rage at the boy and he also takes his tale to its logical end. Unfortunately, by the time Madaari gets there, the hero's life and death gambit turns into a disappointingly tame, mechanical rigmarole.

Bajrangi Bhaijaan

Review

Bajrangi Bhaijaan Movie Review Watch Bajrangi Bhaijaan even if you aren Saibal Chatterjee  | February 05, 2016 15:42 IST Rating:  • Genre:
Drama • Cast:
Salman Khan, Kareena Kapoor and Nawazuddin Siddiqui • Director:
Kabir Khan SPOILERS AHEAD Bajrangi Bhaijaan is a supercharged cross-border drama that goes all out ? and then some ? in delivering its message of subcontinental peace. Director Kabir Khan pulls out an old chestnut ? the theme of humanity trumping a history of bitterness. Into this perennially bubbling cauldron, he throws a devout, upright Hindu do-gooder and an achingly beatific but speechless six-year-old Pakistani girl stranded on the Indian side of the border. Bridging many divides ? religion, national identity, food habits ? the two develop an unlikely bond that wipes out all prejudices. The man puts everything at stake, driven by his faith in Bajrangbali, to ensure that the lost girl makes it back home in one piece. Bajrangi Bhaijaan runs with this wafer-thin premise with such unbridled enthusiasm and vigour that you might be forgiven for wondering if the future of the universe hinged on it. But even then, strictly from the perspective of Salman Khan?s core constituency, Bajrangi Bhaijaan might seem a touch tame. The blustery superstar goes missing in Bajrangi Bhaijaan, as do his signature punchlines. It is, clearly, a calculated risk, a bid to reinvent a successful screen persona that might have outlived its utility in the light of the ageing actor?s off-screen troubles. Salman plays a Hanuman-fearing, truth-loving straight-arrow bloke from Pratapgarh, Uttar Pradesh who breaks neither the law nor bones. Main Bajrangbali ka bhakt hoon, koi kaam chori chheepe nahin karta, he says. So, he does not get into any street fights, spouts no explosive lines and does not take off his shirt. What a bore! But, then, he is no longer a mere mortal in policeman?s clothing cleansing a neighbourhood. He is now a crusader for truth and love and knows no boundaries. Like the monkey-god he swears by, he can leap over any gulf of mind and land. Bajrangi loses his cool only on two occasions ? once when he has to rescue the girl in his charge from the clutches of a human trafficker in Delhi and then in a Pakistani police outpost. Of course, what Bajrangi Bhaijaan seeks to communicate is laudable in the current climate of distrust. Wish it hadn?t made such heavy weather of the well-meaning exercise. The India-Pakistan border obviously plays a pivotal role in Bajrangi Bhaijaan. The screenplay traverses the entire distance from Wagah-Attari to Rajasthan, and from there to Kashmir, where the drama culminates on an implausibly preachy and screechy note. Forbidding fences and imposing iron gates loom into view every now and then. At one point of the film, the audience is told that the wires along the border have 440 volt running through them. So, that is the measure of the protagonist?s heroic act of escorting a mute Pakistani girl back to her village up in the mountains on the other side of the line of control. Bajrangi Bhaijaan opens in a Pakistani village. A pregnant woman, wife of an ex-army man, is among a group watching an India-Pak one-dayer on a community television set. Shahid Afridi hits the winning stroke. The crowd erupts in joy. The daughter that is born is christened Shahida. The girl cannot speak. The film makes no attempt to explain the exact nature of her congenital condition. We figure out along the way that while she is unable to speak, her ears are in perfect condition. Shahida?s mom decides to take her daughter to Hazrat Nizamuddin dargah in Delhi in the hope that divine intervention would restore her speech. On the return journey, the mother dozes off. Shahida gets off to play with a baby goat. The train leaves without her. The girl ends up in Kurukshetra and chances upon her would-be saviour, who makes his grand entry singing and dancing to the tune of Selfie lele re, with a giant Hanuman statue watching over him. The hero, Pawan Kumar Chaturvedi alias Bajrangi, son of an RSS man and a stickler for form, flunks his school leaving examination ten times and is averse to wrestling because he is tickled all too easily. When Pawan eventually passes the exam on the eleventh attempt, his shocked father drops dead. But wrestling still remains anathema to our man. In old Delhi, Bajrangi fights his own prejudices and those of the family of Dayanand (Sharat Saxena). His only ally in this battle is the patriarch?s daughter, Rasika (Kareena Kapoor in a largely decorative role). When he tunnels his way into Pakistan, Bajrangi runs into a battery of security agents and cops determined to bring the ?Indian spy? to book. He does not lie, does not eat meat, and is under oath to Bajrangbali to find Shahida?s parents. In his uphill task, he is aided by ordinary folk in Pakistan ? a journo (Nawazuddin Siddiqui), a maulana (Om Puri) and even a bus conductor who is so impressed with Bajrangi?s selfless mission that he saves him when the cops comes calling. Salman Khan may the principal driving force of Bajrangi Bhaijaan, but the real star of the film is the super-cute child actor Harshaali Malhotra. Her winning smile, her large, playful eyes and a face can melt the toughest heart, even that of a dyed in the wool film critic. Watch Bajrangi Bhaijaan even if you aren?t an inveterate Salman Khan fan. Harshaali will steal your heart.

Rang De Basanti

Director: Rakeysh

 Omprakash Mehra

Cast

  Aamir Khan

  Siddharth

  Kunal Kapoor 

 Sharman Joshi

  Alice Patten

  Soha Ali Khan

  Madhavan

  Kirron Kher

  Om Puri

  Waheeda Rehman

  Anupam Kh

Review

"Rang De Basanti" is a Bollywood film that attacks modern Indian youth and the government, all sugarcoated in light comedy and music, until it gets really heavy. But the simple-minded presentation ultimately makes it ring hollow.Oddly, writer-director Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra tells his story from the point of view of a British character -- she is Sue (Alice Patten), a filmmaker who has been preparing a movie chronicling the execution of Indian revolutionaries in the 1940s, just as Britain is about to relinquish sovereignty. Sue is basing this true account on the diary of her grandfather, who was a sympathetic prison warden and witnessed the last days of the revolutionaries.

When a British film company pulls her funding, Sue quits and goes to India anyway, armed with her video camera. Her friend Sonia (Soha Ali Khan) introduces Sue to her friends, led by the James Dean-ish DJ (Aamir Khan), ostensibly so they can act in the project -- but the genial, lazy, privileged college students can't relate to the actions and words of the ancestral generation that gained India's independence.

Gradually, though, as they spend time together, they become game -- even as the star of the film turns out to be played by a man from a lower caste who does odd jobs around the college and hates the rich students as much as they hate him.

Sue is evidently filming this movie, but we never see the cast get into makeup, never see a crew. .Another problem is -- and read no further if you don't want the ending revealed -- the idiotic way they go about their political activism once they find a cause worth fighting for in today's India.