The President is Coming

Rating : 8/10
Running Time : N/A (~100 minutes)
Release Date : 9th Jan 2009
Director : Kunaal Roy Kapur; Writer : Anuvab Pal; Music : Goldspot
Starring : Konkona Sen, Ira Dubey, Satchit Puranik, Anand Tiwari, Vivek Gomber, Namit Das, Shernaz Patel, Shivani Tanksale, Imran Rasheed

Why do women fake orgasms ? Because they think we care…

A message flashes on the screen, before the movie starts, stating that the film is a documentary and that the makers do not regret its lack of credibility. However, what this message doesn’t do is prepare us for the madness that is unleashed upon us. 6 young Indians vie in a reality TV style contest for the honour to be the young Indian to shake President Bush’s hand on his visit to India.



I think it’s the surprise element that is most amazing about the film – you’re caught unawares a lot of times, most of the jokes and situations being completely unpredictable. And the surprising thing is that the characters are also built up well, we actually start to care about them and feel for them.

Anand Tiwari plays Kapil Dev, a stockbroker who wants to become more famous than his namesake, who is so obsessed about stocks that “the capital of USA ?” for him is “Dow Jones”. When impressed with another contestant, his compliment is “If you were a stock, I would buy you”. And his display during the talent show was brilliant. Vivek Gomber, “you can call me Rohit or Tom or whatever”, has lived in the USA for a short while and now runs an accent training school. Ira Dubey, daddy’s girl, runs a lipstick “5 crore empire, which she started with a 3 crore capital”. Satchit Puranik is an MBA from IIM-A, a khadi wearing social activist who teaches kids in villages using buffaloes as a blackboard. Konkona is a Bengali authoress, the coldest, most sane of the lot, or at least that’s what we think. And finally, we have Namit Das as the programmer from Bangalore, who’s seduction techniques (I’m Ramesh S. S is private) border on the insane (“lets have some late night HBO type of fun ?”)…

We also have two PR persons who are running the contest – Shernaz Patel playing an ultra-aggressive, ball-busting person while Shivani Tanksale is the sensitive person who actually does all the work.

And once the contest begins, so many skeletons tumble out of the closet that you wonder whether it was a closet or a doorway to a graveyard…


Though like I said the best ones are the surprise / lateral ones. Dharmendra’s photo, for example, turns up in a completely unexpected place. There is a statue of Bush in a gaudy sherwani, at the entrance of the embassy. And a poster adorning the contest room saying ‘Don’t hassle the hof’.

All the jokes mentioned above are truly just a sample – there’s many many more, its almost non-stop craziness. In fact, during the interval, there was an ad for a program called “Indian Pagalpanti League” on some TV channel. And I thought how apt – we’ve just seen it already !

Madagascar2 : Escape to Africa

Rating : 7/10
Running Time : 89 Minutes
Release Date : 7th Nov 2008
Director : Eric Darnell, Tom McGrath; Writer : Etan Cohen
Starring : Ben Stiller, Alec Baldwin, David Schwimmer, Jada Pinkett Smith
The penguins provided some of the best moments in this one for me. Right from the start, beginning with their assault on the Dreamworks logo, their ‘Damn you, Darwin’, when they have to cajole monkeys to help them because of their opposable thumbs, the whole carjacking sequence and even the ‘We have some good news and bad news – the good news is that we’ll be landing soon. The bad news is we’ll be crash landing.’, they are simply hilarious.



Else, we have all the usual crazy characters in a plot which doesn’t really matter. Zuba’s son, Alex the lion, goes to New York and then returns with the zebra (Marty), giraffe (Melman) and hippo (Gloria) where, even though he re-unites with his parents, he finds it difficult to adjust to life in the non-concrete jungle, especially with Makunga, who wants to be the alpha lion in Zuba’s place, playing the villain. On top, we have the regulars, including the whacky King Julien, the monkeys, the penguins and some new ones, including the feisty Nana, the tough old lady from New York, who becomes the scourge of the lions.


Most memorable moments for me included the fight between Nana and Alex, the first time Moto Moto (a giant hippo) walks up to Gloria and delivers the classic ‘I’m Moto Moto, you like it so much, you say it twice’. King Julien, with his ‘first class travel’, the interaction between Gloria and Melman and finally the moment when Alex presents a handbag to the slightly effeminate Makunga, who’s reaction is ‘ooh, wow, a shoulder strap ! Does it adjust ?’

Its not that long, but it feels even shorter. Another proof of ‘Laughter is the Best Medicine’ philosophy…We can apparently expect a third in the series in 2011 and it can’t come soon enough…

Ghajini

Rating : 5/10
Running Time : 181 Minutes
Release Date : 26th Dec 2008
Director & Writer : A R Murugadoss ; Music : A R Rahman
Starring : Aamir Khan, Jiah Khan, Asin, Pradeep Rawat, Tinnu Anand

If I had to choose three words to describe this film they would be ‘gory, implausible, predictable’ with just a bit of ‘interesting-ness’ thrown in. Its a more pulpy copy of Memento (I was laughing when I read about the case between the original producer vs Murugadoss etc as both have essentially copied an English film anyways). I know Ghajini is a huge hit, but I was disappointed in the end-product – with a little more effort, it could’ve been much better…


Aamir plays a man who suffers from short term memory loss, where you cant remember anything for more than 15 minutes – so he has to rely on polaroids etc to remind himself of his house, his friends, his bus etc. And in Aamir’s case, he’s also got tattoo’s all over, which remind him that his fiancée, played by Asin, was killed by a man named Ghajini, whom he has to find and kill. While all this is made obvious in the first 15 minutes (the director fearing that the audience may also be suffering from short term memory loss perhaps), the rest of the movie then describes how the ultra rich Aamir and the poor-ish Asin fell in love, what led to the transformation of the smooth, rich tycoon to the muscle bound, tattoed, crew cut, near monster we see in the posters. And Jiah Khan plays the most underworked medical student I know, who has oodles of time to try her luck as a crime investigator and help put together what happened to Aamir.

I don’t like films where you kind of give it all away in the first few minutes and then explain how in flashbacks – it takes away the suspense for me and makes my viewing experience poorer. Here, they gave away too much – there was no need to do so and you then watch the entire film with a sense of grim foreboding, waiting for the bad stuff to happen. The songs were kind of weird – the mix of the South Indian grandeur and beats with Bollywood kitschiness. The fight sequences were a throwback to the good old days where the hero could single-handedly beat up 50 thugs, without a mark on himself, no matter that they were bigger, beefier etc. Also, in keeping with the theme of the ‘good, old days’, the thugs also shunned guns / knives but relied on wooden clubs, iron bars etc.


Aamir acts very well – even the implausible bits – but then you expect nothing else from him. Both Asin and Jiah were lukewarm for me, not entirely convincing in their roles, missing the spark a bit. The best part for me was the opening credits with the CG shots of the brain and its nerve endings provide a surreal background canvas. I also liked the way where in parts they used the fast forward technique of describing the story. However, the movie drags quite a bit, you feel most of the latter half of its three hour length go by.


I hope this wasn’t the case, but there did seem to be an element of Aamir saying to Shahrukh, whatever you can do, I can do better – the six-pack abs, the romancing chocolaty hero, the vengeance seeking fighter etc. Aamir, for me, is in a different league and stands for something different. I wish he had stuck to being himself or at least been more involved in the story - we would surely have seen a better film then.