WHERES THE SCISSOR??

MOVIE: Transformers- Revenge of the Fallen

DIRECTOR: Michael Bay

CAST: Shia LeBeouf, Megan Fox

Lets be clear about something before you read further; This movie is just a display of how good the special effects in Hollywood is and how good Megan Fox looks. If you are looking for something logical or something with some substance, then this is not the movie to watch. Its a sequel to the first part as most might know.

The first part saw the death of the Megatron; but in this part Megatron is revived by Skorpinox's spark after the latter steals his dead body from the safest US Military naval base. But before this and after this is a mad race of unreal machines fighting, firing, cracking jokes, some with toilet humor and along with their story runs the story of a special guy, Sam(LeBeouf) and his girlfriend Mikaela(Fox) who run around purposelessly(dare I say this to the screenplay writer)

The worst part of the movie is its editing(even with four editors, probably because of that). Zero stars to the editor. Its too long. Then further zero stars to the screenplay as the person has strived very hard to keep the viewers engaged. So in the end, rather being engaged, you just realise that someones making efforts to keep you engaged.

The only appreciable thing in the movie is the SFX, undoubtedly. Bringing such an unreal world into reality is the credit of the SFX team. Also some of the funny scenes in the first half were good, but you feel bad later on as they have little relevance then.

The movie surely costs a lot. Hats off to the producer who in the demand of this third grade script was ready to fund for the most impossible locations, from creating artificial US Military Bases to roaming around in Egypt to breaking several cars and also a pyramid, lot of million USDs have gone into this no brainer , pseudo-entertainer.... If people have so much money to throw(including those who are watching this movie, including me!), then why doesnt the condition of people in Sudan improve!

UNBELIEVABLY STRIKING!

MOVIE: Bolt

DIRECTORS: Byron Howard & Chris Williams

VOICES: John Travolta, Miley Cyrus

Now this one has got elements from various previously acclaimed animation flicks. Its got a 102 Dalmations in some part and its got Stuart Little in some, but in the end it comes out being a totally new and fresh roller coaster ride. And like most animation movies it comes with a message. And the one here is pretty beautiful too.

Basically, BOLT is a super dog with some serious super powers and takes on some seriously con enemies in a world of high gadgets and cybots all around. But all this is a part of a popular TV show and unfortunately BOLT feels its all real. The unit of the show makes sure that the dog doesnt realise that all this is unreal and hence they keep him aloof from the real world.

The movie is a 3D movie and the experience is just awesome as the grade of animation is above excellence and the voice overs of Travolta, Cyrus and others are nothing but excellent. My favourite voice over though was of the Hampster, Rhino done by Mark Walton.

The movie then deals with the event that BOLT goes missing and faces the "real" world and with the company of a Cat (Mittens) and a Hampster (Rhino) realises his true powers. The story line and direction and the dialogues are so strong that it actually goes on to convincingly explain that even though super powers exist only in comic books, the determination we have to solve problems with our capabilities and presence of mind is the real super power. This forms the high point of the movie.

So Bolt is a fun ride really with lots of special effects and special thoughts. A must watch for children, but I guess parents accompany them so that they are made to understand the crucial noble messages of the movie. Watch this, it will make your day for sure...

SALVATION!

MOVIE: Terminator Salvation

DIRECTOR: McG

CAST: Christian Bale, Sam Worthington

From a long time you might not have seen a review on this blog. I was actually keeping myself inactive during the time movies were not releasing and even though I caught up with some disasters like Kal Kissne Dekha and X Men Origins: Wolverine , I did not write their reviews because I had vowed that the comeback review I would write would be of a really dashing movie. Well that says it all, Terminator Salvation is a thumbs up!

Coming straight to the plot, Its 2003 when Dr. Serena Kogan convinces Marcus Wright(Worthington) to donate his body for a "noble cause" of medical research. Trust me, you do not want me to reveal what that cause exactly is. The plot moves on to 2018 where John Connor(Bale) is the leader of the Resistance attack and fights the Machines. He gets off an island assuming he is the lone survivor but the remains reveal that Marcus has released himself from the Skynet base. What follows is his adventure when he meets two more humans in the form of Kyle and Star.

The strongest point in Terminator Salvation is surely the impeccable special effects and the humane touch to the Sci Fi script. The experience of Bale and the amazing promise of Worthington heightens the level of cinema completely. Though Christian Bale is the hero of the movie on paper it is Worthington's role which has maximum meat and it leaves an ever lasting impression on the memory of the viewer.

As in the Terminator 3: Rise of Machines, this too follows, infact elevates the unthinkable level of special effects in the form of cool robots and their fight scenes. So, the movie is basically about the clash between Machines and the Resistance(handful humans post the Judgement Day). One of the most catchy dialogues is when Connor motivates the remnant humans via radio as he says, "If you are listening to this, You are the Resistance." Similarly I can assume , If you are reading this, you are going to watch TS this Sunday....Go ahead, its worth it..

NOT REVOLUTIONARY, BUT AMAZING ANYWAY

MOVIE: Revolutionary Road (2008)
CAST: Leonardo Di Caprio, Kate Winslet
DIRECTION: Sam Mendes




The institution of marriage is the strangest of all. While it is the purest form of union, its side effects can never be ignored. The amount of bliss a happy marriage can bring into life and the amount of positive energy it can give you is unbelievable. Similarly abundant is the amount of stress, retardation and suffocation an unhappy marriage can give you. Mr and Mrs. Wheeler have an unhappy marriage(Di caprio and Winslet) in Revolutionary Road. Mrs. April Wheeler aspired to be an actress. Her aspiration remained unfulfilled and her ambition got dug somewhere and her only consolation was a husband who supported her pretty decently. Her husband, Mr. Frank Wheeler, is on the other hand, unhappy with his job and believes the pressure of earning the basics has cut his wings and changed his freestyle mentality and forced him to work at a place where he does not belong.

This seed of unhappiness in this couple grows slowly into a monstrous forest and the after effects of this spoilt love marriage are better if not mentioned. They have two children and April deep inside considers their elder one as a "mistake" rather than a boon. Under all this unhappiness of their life, April one fine day decides that they should move to Paris to start of a fresh life. The decision is apparently childish as Frank does not have any guarantee of finding a job there. The dynamics of these human complexities, the human expressions of love, lust, dissatisfaction, unhappiness, infidelity, ambition, faith, courage and fear make this lovely treat called Revolutionary Road.

The Winslet- DiCaprio pairing is without a doubt one of the most complementing pairs in the world. Kate Winslet yet again features in a complex marriage flick, an earlier better flick she worked in was Little Children. Kate might have been nominated with a BAFTA for the best actress here, but I feel DiCaprio's portrayal of Frank was much superior and deserved more attention. The movie is nothing "revolutionary" in that sense, but just another sensitive tale and consequence of an unhappy marriage. This movie would be remembered for its elegant direction and brilliant performances. Michael Shannon's portrayal of the retard neighbour, forms a pivotal role in the film and is a brilliant performance too(nominated for an Oscar). As I have always said, "If marriages are made in heaven, heaven consists of a bunch of incompetent and wicked devils"

A SWEET LITTLE EXPERIENCE

FILM: Little Zizou
DIRECTOR: Sooni Taraporewala
CAST: Jahan Bativala, Imaad Shah, Boman Irani




I cannot forget my days in the Dadar Parsee Youths Assembly High School. Apart from the great school that it was, the beauty of its locality, the Five Gardens is something beyond expression. Five gardens are not the world's most beautiful garden, nor are they peaceful with the plenty traffic, pollution and kissing couples all around. Obviously the chaat walas, the horse carts and the toy wala, everyone coexist in harmony and not so harmony at Five Gardens; a place which bears testimony to the history of one of the great communities in India; the Parsees. The Five Gardens is one of the few places in Mumbai where you will find a dominant Zorastrain population. The Parsees are few in number and mostly the other communities often fail to relate themselves with the Parsees. A major reason to that also is a closed policy of the Parsees. They do not endorse mixed marriages and the rights to the entry to their worship place(Agyari) is chopped down even if you are a Parsee and have married a non parsee. All this makes the community shrink in size and conditions have reached such a horrible extent that in some cases just for the sake of protecting the community to community relation, often closely related cousins marry each other which has led to many biological problems amongst the community.

Coming to the movie, we are talking about Xerxes, played with outstanding maturity by Jahan Bativala, the new child artiste on the block. His elder bro Artaxerxes(Imaad Shah) is into his own weird world of making sketches and is working on a "Flight Simulator" along with two more engineers. Apart from that he runs a very interesting blog. They do not have a mother. Their father is a religious fanatic ;who in the name of "blessing does boob pressing" amongst the many other inhuman things he does. Artaxerxes compares him to Idi Amin(the cannibal Uganda president) and Atilla the Hun (leader of the barbaric Hun tribe). Boman Irani is a neighbour who knows this person's shady ways and wants to expose him through a modest newspaper he runs. With few more characters and a lot of depth to each of them, Little Zizou pulls out a very sensitive tale which makes you laugh, cry and most importantly learn.

More publicised as an All-Parsee film, Little Zizou surely does deal with the life of only this community but the way it has captured the slightest of dynamics of all age groups and lifestyles of the community makes it so human that any other community can relate to it and think of society and its problems in general. Bickram Ghosh, one of my favourite musicians, did not really work hard on the background score. He just pulled of few scores from his superhit Rythym Scape and used them here. More interesting were the ethnic oldies sung in normal voice by Boman Irani with his impeccable dancing. Few know that Boman is a brilliant dancer and has been training Imaad post Little Zizou.

Little Zizou mostly deals with the shady ways of the people in power exploiting religious sentiments. Power and religion often form the perfect cocktail for the con dividers and hence have been heavily mixed from centuries. This small little movie, with a very fresh approach tells you a lot about this cocktail. Go for this one, this could well make your dull day shining!

THE CURIOUS CASE OF THE OSCAR NOMINATION

FILM: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button(2008)
DIRECTOR: David Fincher
CAST: Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett




Time is a confusing thing yet it is so simple. It is probably the simplest thing when we perceive it as the ticking of the clock. The ticking of the clock is monotonous with a repeating tick sound but what events occur during this ticking are so random, so confusing, so interlinked and so many. This concept was beautifully dealt with in one of the scenes of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, where Daisy(Blanchett) meets with a road accident. The concept of change is the central theme though. The thought that Nothing is constant except change is the essence of this curious story. Our protagonist Benjamin Button is a peculiar case. He is born as an old man and is ageing reversely. The events that have followed as the after effects of this reverse ageing are very nice and deep but the flaw of this movie is that it never substantiated a reason for the reverse aging. When Clarke Kent can lift cars with his thumb, we have been shown that it is so because of the gravity adjustments of that of Krypton and Earth are dissimilar in Superman. It is so because the gravity at Krypton is stronger and to lift objects there one has to put more effort than that on earth. As the earths gravity is weaker, Kent can easily lift even heavy objects here and so he is Superman. No such explanation of reverse aging was provided, though several attempts were made, but nothing was dealt with conviction.

Performances are unquestionable. Brad Pitt has added yet another brilliant performance in his lustrous filmography. Cate Blanchett too does full justice to her role. Though The Curious Case of Benjamin Button has its moments, it fails due to certain flaws. Firstly, as I said earlier, no explanation of the reverse aging was given. Secondly, the editing was extrememly poor and it becomes an extremely long screen watch which becomes boring at some in between parts also because of a not so brilliant background score. Thirdly, there were some technincal flaws regarding the camera work. Whenever the camera focuses on a light source, some sort of dispersion takes place and one often sees a rainbow on the screen. That should not happen. The director should make sure that one is seeing the movie from his eyes and the cameraman's eyes. Surprisingly, it occurs six to seven times in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

Even though the story line is pretty curious the slow screenplay often takes off the curiosity and intrigue at certain points, much unlike any other Fincher flick. Apart from these things, the movie is a pretty decent watch and may put you into some sort of thinking. The fact that even though Benjamin had a boon of growing backwards and it made him so different from others yet he was so similar to them and had to face the same consequences as others do, but in a different way, was well captured. But still if one speaks honestly then this flick does not deserve an Academy award Best Film nomination. It deserved that make up oscar, but certainly not a nomination in the Best Film category. Especially, when all time greats like The Dark Knight, were left out. When Heath Ledger would come to know that Nolan's great has not been even nominated for the Best Film, he would simply open his eyes and with his joker grin would ask, "Why so Curious?"

Rest In Peace, Ledger.

MILK FLOWS "STRAIGHT" INTO YOUR HEART

MOVIE: Milk (2008)
CAST: Sean Penn, Emile Hirsch,
DIRECTOR: Gus Van Sant




Homosexuality has got different interpretations and is viewed with different eyes in different parts of the globe. While its a human right to chose who you want to be with, homosexuality is also perceived as a threat to the family lifestyle and the natural phenomenon of having kids. Some sections say that all that homosexuals have given to the world is AIDS. Well its true that AIDS was spread from a gay couple in the United States in the year 1981, but that's not all that the homosexuals have given us. They have set examples of true freedom and have displayed courage to do what their heart wanted. Many call homosexuals sick and that homosexuality is rather a disease than a conscious choice. It was and it still is a highly controversial and debatable topic this, but one thing is for sure which no one can deny, homosexuals are humans and ought to be treated as humans!

Harvey Milk (Sean Penn) believes in his homosexuality and wants gay men to unite and be a force so that they are treated as equals and they get their rights as much as any other citizen. Based in the span of 1970-1978, Milk deals with how Harvey rises in popularity and from owning a camera shop which was more of a gay hangout spot, goes on to become the voice of homosexuals for USA and set a global example. Milk beautifully captures the moments of evolution of Harvey with amazing cinematography and real video clips from the 70s. This year's Academy for the best film may have been unfortunately Slumdog Millionaire, but no force could deny Sean Penn his best actor award. One of the best performances ever in the history of cinema, It was as if Penn lived in the character and not for a moment would you feel that you saw Sean Penn, it was Harvey Milk all along. Another brilliant aspect of this movie was its casting plus the make up, which you would realise in the last scene when you get to see the real life characters as well.

Homosexuality has been the hottest topic of controversy even during US Presidential election campaigns. Evolution of the homosexuals as a united force has changed the script of a lot of presidential speeches and has altered the content of interviews and TV shows all over the world. If someone says that homosexuality is a threat to the institution of straight marriages then I say that the nuns and virgins and the big respected saints too are a threat to marriage and the notion of having kids! If you say that gays are the reason for the biological menace called AIDS, I say its the immorality and irresponsibility of the so called straights which is fuelling it and today its spreading faster than forest fire. Films like Dostana make fun of such sentiments, whereas films like Milk, are a food for thought, deep thought and with the stream of your thoughts they flow right into the hearts of not only all homosexuals, but all humans!

BAD RGV FILMS ARE MUCH BETTER

MOVIE: Street Kings(2009)
CAST: Keanu Reeves. Forest Whittacker
DIRECTOR: David Ayer




I had a great impression of Forest Whittacker after watching his Academy Award Winning performance in The Last King of Scotland where he played the eccentric Uganda dictator. Here for no reason he makes those similar eccentric expressions and does not deliver anything special. Reeves plays a cop, Detective Tom Ludlow whose job is to get angry, push people when angry and drink lots of vodka while driving. Street Kings has that same old story of a cop falling in trouble and getting caught in charges of murdering another cop and all evidences are against him. It is his pursuit of coming out clean which forms the story.

The movie has nothing new to it and looks very silly most of the time. Martha Higareda's looks might be of some solace to the viewer but the remaining minutes of repititiveness brings no good to a viewer. Like I have mentioned in the headline, Ram Gopal Verma's films like Satya. Company, Sarkar and also the bad ones like Shiva, James, D and Contract are much more entertaining action movies than this.

With predictable and repitive screenplay, okay cinematography, nothing great direction and nothing great performances, Street Kings is far from striking any impression.

CANNOT DEPART FROM OUR HEARTS

MOVIE: The Departed (2006)
CAST: Leonardo Di Caprio, Matt Damon, Mark Wahlberg, Jack Nicholson
DIRECTOR: Martin Scorsese




Leonardo Di Caprio became the household heartthrob with his cute looks and romanticism in Titanic (1997). Since then he hasn't looked back and has delivered master stroke performances in brilliant movies like Gangs of New York, Catch Me If You Can, Blood Diamond, The Departed and the most recent The Revolutionary Road. This article is dedicated to his brilliant portrayal of Billy Costigan in The Departed which is surely one of the all time best movies, no wonder IMDB has kept it at #50 in its prestigious top 250 list.

The Departed is the story of two undercover agents, commonly called "rats". One poses to be a mafia serving a cop and the other is a cop and serves the same mafia. The mafia, Costello is amazingly played by Jack Nicholson. The Massachusetts State Police has launched a special investigation to gather evidence against Costello for which they have planted a rat, Billy in Costello's den. Mark Wahlberg plays an over abusive cop, Dignam who plays a pivotal role in the movie, beautifully blossoms the character he played. Martin Sheen plays another cop called Queenan. Queenan and Dignam had recruited Billy to keep an eye on Costello's whereabouts. Whereas Costello had a rat in Colin(Matt Damon) inside the cops. With twists and turns and thoughtful screenplay, the fate of Colin and Billy collide more than once.

The Departed beautifully captures the idea of good souls residing in bad lanes. And bad dogs ruling with a mask of good. The dynamics of relationships amongst people which has so much to do with the work they do is also an aspect in the story. Scorsese's power direction and the amazing performances as a whole takes The Departed to a very high level altogether. One memorable dialogue which I can recollect is, ": Marriage is an important part of getting ahead: lets people know you're not a homo; married guy seems more stable; people see the ring, they think at least somebody can stand the son of a bitch; ladies see the ring, they know immediately you must have some cash or your cock must work."