Court (2015)

Director: Chaitanya Tamhane
Writer:    Chaitanya Tamhane
Cast:       Vivek Gomber, Geetanjali Kulkarni, Pradeep Joshi
Language: Marathi

The apparent 'suicide' of a sewage cleaner leads to the arrest of a Dalit activist/folk singer. The 65-year-old is held on grounds of abetting the suicide through his lyrics, which asked Dalits to commit suicide since that will give them more dignity than living through India's regressive social system under which their status haven't improved much since independence. The film follows the personal lives of the Judge, the public prosecutor and the activist's lawyer as the case meanders its way through India's notoriously slow legal system courtesy of numerous excuses and delays.  

Film got almost universal praise for its accurate portrayal of court system in India and the makers also marketed it as a realistic court-room drama. While it is true in that sense, this kind of marketing disguises the political nature of the film and that is a stroke of genius as it didn't generate the level of controversies it could have if they had marketed it as a political film. It has been selected as India's nomination for Academy Awards in the foreign film category for next year and it is mind-boggling that such a choice could have happened under the watch of a right wing conservative BJP government. I do remember reading news about some no-mark getting appointed recently related to this selection process and maybe the guy was so bad that he didn't even understand the true nature of this film. It is done in such a non-judgmental fashion that maybe the right-wingers thought that film was actually justifying their position on issues like 'Freedom of Speech', Dalit rights etc.

I was reminded of works of Ruben Ostlund and Michael Haneke while watching this film. The former for its extremely dark humor and the latter for its potential to plunge you into a state of depression. The male advocate, who is appearing for the activist, is a progressive guy with 'so-called' westernized lifestyle. He is not comfortable with Marathi, which suggests that he is an immigrant in Mumbai, a controversial thing in right wing politics of Maharashtra. The public prosecutor is a woman whose background is extremely conservative and the director chooses to show her family attending a theater performance containing xenophobic material. The judge is your traditional old patriarch guy with a penchant for moral policing and dishing out advises for no good reason. The film culminates with him slapping a kid angrily for disturbing in his sleep. It is essentially the right wing slapping the progressive nuisance in a society where 'collective' rights are given much more importance than 'individual' rights and things like 'Freedom of Speech and Expression' don't have much of a place in it and most people don't understand what it entails. Both the public prosecutor and the judge are put in the collective context of their family and relatives while the defendant's advocate is being shown in isolation with him exhibiting some exasperation when dealing with his parents. I am not in a position to judge whether any of this was done with subtlety since my politics will naturally prompt me to perceive it according to my own biases and maybe a non-political person is in a better position to comment on that.

It is a must watch film and should be a landmark one for Indian cinema. It went to many international film festivals that actually matters (Venice, Vienna etc) and won numerous awards. Since it doesn't really explain the caste issues that it is dealing with, I don't know if a foreign viewer would be able to appreciate in its entirety. I don't really care much about the Oscars but a shortlisting in the Foreign Film Category will surely help the film get a wider exposure, not only in foreign countries but also in India. It did get released here in Kochi with subtitles and I really regret not being able to catch it at the cinemas.

Rating: 5/5     

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl (2015)

Director: Alfonso Gomez-Rejon
Writer:   Jesse Andrews
Cast:      Thomas Mann, RJ Cyler, Olivia Cooke

High schooler Greg, who spends most of his time making parodies of classic movies with his co-worker Earl, finds his outlook forever altered after befriending a classmate who has just been diagnosed with cancer.

It is an adaptation of Jesse Andrews' novel with the same name and his screenplay for the film featured in 2012 Black List of Hollywood's unproduced screenplays. The director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon got interested in the project after reading a leaked copy of the script and decided to make this as he was looking to make a personal film after the death of his father. He had previously assisted the likes of Martin Scorsese and Alejandro Gonzalez Inaritu. Brian Eno scored the film using a combination of unreleased recordings and a few original compositions. The film got screened at Sundance Film Festival, where it got a standing ovation, and was picked up by Fox Searchlight Pictures. 

It must have been really a difficult film to market since by the sounds of it, it looks like a really cliched story-line. The spoof films that they have done had the potential to wreck the movie if it was included in a self-indulgent manner. But the director manages to pull it off with great restraint as we are shown only glimpses of it and I had to really pause the film to catch up with the frame on the left. It does help that the films that they are spoofing are world film classics and its always nice when you do a spoof voice-over of Werner Herzog. Some of the tropes in the film, like managing the audience's expectation by being upfront about its intentions and cliche-breaking, is not really novel but is done in a neat manner. Despite its veneer of apparent cliche-breaking it is quite replete with nerdy indie film cliches like the nature of parents characters, teachers etc. But you do get surprised by how well it worked for you in a matter of fact fashion.

Overall, it is a very good watch with good performances from all concerned. Film is really about the 'Me' in the title and Thomas Mann carries the role well. There is a clever misdirection involved wrt the fate of 'Dying Girl' that is there to get us invested in the story. By the end, it might feel a bit disingenuous for some but I didn't mind it. 50-50 is a cancer film done well in a comedic fashion and this is another one that could be added to that list.

Rating: 3.5/5 

                                                                           

Rubicon (TV series) (2010)

Creators: Jason Horwitch, Henry Bromell
Cast:       James Bridge Dale, Jessica Collins, Lauren Hodges, Dallas Roberts, Christopher Evan Welch, Arliss Howard, Michael Cristofer

Will Travers is an analyst at a New-York based federal intelligence agency who is thrown into a story where nothing is as appears to be. He discovers that he maybe working with members of a secret society that manipulates world events on a grand scale. The series is probably inspired by how intelligence was massaged to get a consensus for War on Iraq in the aftermath of 9-11 attacks. 

I stumbled on to this series after reading a review of Mr. Robot in LA Review of Books. This was cited as a very underrated one with similar conspiracy sensibilities as well as for respecting audience's intelligence. It was broadcast in AMC and was cancelled after the first season, comprising of thirteen episodes. It also had other problems like the creator leaving due to creative differences after the pilot and show was later taken care by Henry Bromell, the executive producer. You could see over the course of the season how that affects the series as there is a conflict between whether it is primarily about the conspiracy or is it about Office politics and team dynamics. That is especially apparent in the season finale which seems a bit directionless and understated in a bad way. 

Overall, it is still a very good watch and a breath of fresh air when compared to traditional TV staple. It does have the cheap look of a TV series, which is not true for Mr. Robot. The fact that it didn't get renewed for a second season doesn't really matter since it reached its logical conclusion and anything after that is better if not done. Same is true for Mr. Robot, which has been renewed for second season, and I can only see it going downhill from here after the excellent first season. In Rubicon, performances from all concerned are very good but I found James Bridghe Dale's acting in the very last sequence of the series a bit underwhelming. Michael Cristofer is deliciously hammy and he will play a bigger role in Mr. Robot's next season, which is great news. Arliss Howard's 'Kale Ingram' is the Doug Stamper (House of Cards) equivalent for this show and like Doug for HoC, he is my favorite from this show. Just found out that he played John Henry (LFC and Boston Red Sox Owner and figurehead of FSG) in Moneyball. 

Rating: 3.5/5

                                                                           

Tom à la ferme (Tom at the Farm) (2013)

Director: Xavier Dolan
Writers:  Xavier Dolan, Michel Marc Bouchard
Cast:       Xavier Dolan, Pierre-Yves Cardinal, Lisa Roy, Evelyne Brochu
Language: French

A young man (Xavier Dolan) travels to an isolated farm for his lover's funeral where he's quickly drawn into a twisted, sexually charged game by his lover's aggressive farmer brother (Pierre-Yves Cardinal). He learns that his lover's homosexuality is not known to the mother and the brother forces him to behave like a normal friend of her son in front of her. He also learns that the brother had also invented a girl-friend for his brother to please his mother and he is trying his level best to keep the facade going. As we progress in the film, we are not sure who is really the aggressor in this equation and more and more things are revealed about the household and the pariah status it enjoys within the community.

The film is adapted from a play by Michel Marc Bouchard, who also helped in writing the screenplay, and this is a sort of departure for Xavier Dolan who had made films out of his own original output up till this one. It is a film that you can get easily disappointed with if you try to pin it down to a particular genre. I had read some review headline which described it as a horror flick and the director also do some bits in it to class it as such. But I found it to be more of a mystery film with a heavy dose of black humor to it. I enjoyed it thoroughly and you will also do the same as long as you don't insist on it adhering to some genre conventions. It doesn't try to overly explain itself and you are free to interpret it any which way you want. The brother character turns out to be really endearing from my POV and his life must have been a really difficult one with his aggressive nature being a bi-product of his own ambiguous sexuality. 

Prior to this, I had only seen 'Mommy' from Dolan's filmography. It id difficult to believe that he is just 26 years old now. It seems some of the mixed reactions that his films get from critics is to do with them being conscious about his age. 'Tom At The Farm' was screened in the main competition section at the Venice Film Festival where it won the 'FIPRESCI' prize (Enterprising film-making). It is in French, like 'Mommy', as it is set in French speaking Quebec region of Canada. Dolan had cited Haneke's 'Funny Games' and 'Piano Teacher' as his favorites and you can see shades of those films in this one. I guess the best way to describe the film would be to something like that as well.

Rating: 5/5

                                                                                  

എന്നു നിന്റെ മൊയ്തീൻ (Ennu Ninte Moideen) (2015)

Director: RS Vimal
Writer:    RS Vimal
Cast:       Prithviraj, Parvathy Menon, Sai Kumar, Bala, Lena, Tovino Thomas
Language: Malayalam

Ennu Ninte Moideen (Yours, Modieen) is a romantic thriller based on the real life love story of Moideen (Prithviraj) and Kanchanamala (Parvathy Menon), which happened in 1960s in and around Calicut. The director had previously portrayed this story in documentary form and with this film, he is making his feature length format debut, adapting the same story. 

I was not familiar with the story even though the director, in some interviews he gave this week, made it sound like it was a very commonly known story in these parts of the world. He made it sound like it is our own version of 'Romeo and Juliet' with the added bonus that it actually happened. Like in that one as well, it is tale of forbidden love. The villain in the story is their respective religions and the things that it imposes on people as societal norms. Both the characters hail from rich families and even their fathers are very thick friends. The first forty minutes of the film is quite excruciating to watch as they show how they fall in love. The two titular characters are portrayed predictably in a binary manner, as is the norm in Indian cinema, and I don't know if the director went for portraying that part of the film the way Malayalam films from those era would have portrayed it. I found it totally cringe-inducing and was really feeling miserable since the film was supposed to be three hours long. But things did change after that when they declare their love in front of their family members and it starts to get interesting.

It is interesting basically because what follows is not at all what we expect. Instead of the usual fleeing together (ഒളിച്ചോട്ടം), they just basically stay put and start wearing their family down. This is not done with the aim of getting consent but out of concern for Kanchana's siblings whose future could be affected by her decision. What follows is a wait lasting considerably more than what you would think it would be and it kind of reaches a point where the opposition to their marriage is purely out of inertia rather than anything. Good thing about the film is that most of the family members are not portrayed in the same binary manner and you do get the impression that they are just the prisoners of  societal conventions. 

Overall, it is a good watch, but they could have made it better by doing away with all the initial foreplay and get straight down to business. Prithviraj was cast in the film based on suggestion by the real life Kanchana and I read that she fell out with the director because of some deviations he made. It is difficult to believe the climax happened in real life the way it is shown. That scene and the the earlier court scene are something that you can see from a mile off. It is now a cliche in Malayalam period films set in this kind of period to have the protagonist as a rebel communist/socialist and this film is no different, but I guess it at least they have the excuse of it being biographical. Performances from all the supporting characters are really good and from the leads as well after the initial parts of the film. 1960s aspects of the film is done with some authenticity. Songs are well used to move the story forward and BGM also worked well I think, having paid not much attention to it. I read somewhere that its budget is a whopping Rs 13 Crores and I do think it will struggle to break even on that. They could maybe market it as a 1960s 'Love Jihad' saga and thereby generate some controversy to bring audience in. 

PS: I can suggest an alternate title for the film: 'Once upon a time in Monsoon soaked Calicut'. Coz its always fucking raining. 

Rating: 3/5

                                                                             

ആട് ഒരു ഭീകരജീവിയാണ് (Aadu) (2015)

Director: Midhun Manuel Thomas
Writer:    Midhun Manuel Thomas
Cast:       Jayasurya, Vijay Babu, Vinayakan, Saiju Kurup
Language: Malayalam

Shaji Pappan (Jayasurya) and his friends get a goat as the prize for winning a tug of war competition. They don't know what to do with it and try their best to barbecue it, after failing which, they try to dispose it but they just can't get themselves away from it. Meanwhile, Shaji Pappan's friends begin to take a liking towards the cute goat while Pappan himself remains steadfast in his hatred towards it, which is explained through his backstory. More and more characters get introduced into the story-line and it works as a hilarious road-trip film set in Idukki, Kerala's high-range district.

It is common in Malayalam films these days to target the kids here since it is a sure-shot way of getting more asses on seats since the parents will also accompany them. I hadn't seen a trailer of the film but did watch some interview with Jayasurya in which he was talking about the importance of the Aadu (Goat) in the film and I thought it was gonna be another one of those shitty kids' movie. I missed it at the cinemas and the negative reviews it got ensured that it didn't get much of a theatrical run. I don't know if they had a deliberate strategy to project it as a children's film or whether it was a cheeky misdirection as it continues even during the opening credits, which is animated. But within five minutes into the film, we realize that it is not in fact a film for kids but solely intended for an adult audience.

I decided to watch the film after it became an internet hit after the release of its DVD. The fact that some students dressed as Shaji Pappan during their Onam celebrations was a proof for that. Negative reviews from normal Malayalee audience is no guarantee that a film would be shit, based on recent experiences, and the inverse of it is also true with many that got near universal acceptance turned out to be utter cliched shite. So I took the plunge with Aadu and it was an enjoyable watch. It continues to surprise you with character introductions and cameo roles from the likes of Sunny Wayne, Renji Panicker and Aju Varghese. Best way to describe the film is that it is a lower budget 'Double Barrel', with characters that are complete opposite 'Thani Nadan' (village) versions. Shame that both of them proved to be disasters at box office but will continue to garner a cult following. First half of the film chugs along at a good pace with a very good interval point. It does get a little muddled during the second half with pacing issues and too many sidetracks which doesn't always work well. With a running length of two hours, it is around twenty minutes longer than it should be but on the whole it is a very enjoyable watch. Indrans plays a character which is a caricature of CPI(M)'s Idukki secretary, MM Mani, and it took me some time to realize that. Vijay Babu is delightfully hammy in his role as Police Inspector, Sarbath Shameer, and his production company partner, Sandra Thomas, also makes an appearance in the film.

The directorial and editing flourishes are quite good and it does take audience's intelligence for granted with regards to keeping up with the story and that is always a good thing. Midhun Manuel made his writing debut with Om Shanthi Oshana, which did very well commercially but I was disappointed by it. I did enjoy some really campy scenes in it, like that Chinese characters sequence, and hated the whole cliched formula of it- which is a mix of nostalgia, village farmer goodness and coming of age drama. In Aadu, he doesn't do the cliches and goes full retard with a mix of spoofy mass scenes, peppy BGM, great character introductions and unpredictable plot. Film takes place in Idukki disctrict and its exquisite beauty is captured fully well on camera. Performances are great but I found Dharmajan Bolgatty to be quite irritating throughout the film. It is highly recommended for everyone as long as you watch it in the right mood.

Rating: 4/5

                                                                               

കൂതറ (Koothara) (2014)

Director: Srinath Rajendran
Writer:    Vini Vishwa Lal
Cast:       Sunny Wayne, Bharath Srinivasan, Tovino Thomas, Mohanlal
Language: Malayalam

Koobrin, Tharun and Ram are three students from Kerala who end up as roommates while studying a course (Electronics & Communication Engineering like many of us) in which they don't have much interest in. They end up getting dismissed from college and the start-up IT firm that they launch only helps in increasing their debt. Not knowing where to go and what to do, they meet a mysterious man in a Bar who starts influencing them. 

It is very common in Malayalam cinema these days to lecture us about moral and social lessons relating to motivation and responsibilities and the film is kind of a genre-bender by doing it in a very different way by adding some magical surrealism to it. Predictably, it bombed at the box office because the audience just can't accept films that surprise them in a good way. It is the same phenomena that happened to 'Double Barrel', whose box office returns is a sad indictment on the so-called intelligence of Malayalee film audience. Koothara has not yet been broadcast on TV channels and when it finally does, I expect people to wonder, in an ironic fashion, why it didn't do well during its theatrical run.

The common feedback that I got from people who had seen it was that the first half of the film was good but second half is terrible starting from the introduction of Mohanlal as the 'Mer-man'. I thought the first half was rather average with some good laughs to go with some terrible acting from Bharath. Bad dubbing can always spoil an otherwise good film and I don't know why they couldn't do it well or cast someone who is comfortable in Malayalam. College and hostel life is portrayed with quite good authenticity but overall it is inferior in every way compared to what was done in 'Premam'. I like the second half of the film and especially Mohanlal's cameo as the mysterious 'mer-man'. I am quite sick of Mohanlal and Mammootty giving us life lessons through their larger than life roles and this is how they can do it in an enjoyable way. Another annoying feature from recent films is the way they refer to older Malayalam classics and most of the time I find it obnoxious. This one does it in a subtle enough manner in sync with the story to make it enjoyable. There is even a throwaway reference to director's debut film, Second Show, which he did with Sunny Wayne. 

Overall it is a good watch and the makers should be applauded for their bravery to do an experimental film. Performances on the whole is quite good and I enjoyed Mohanlal's deliberately hammy performance. Cinematography is gorgeous, especially in the second half with boat scenes. The CGI, when it is used, was also quite good considering the industry it is in.  It is a good second film from the writer-director duo. I'll certainly check out their next feature when it happens.

Rating: 3/5