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feminist_gal
Reviews
Sex and the City 2 (2010)
Too Shitty
This story is about 4 women who probably have grand daughters stuffed inside their closet and try to pass off as being as old as them. This is achieved by borrowing their clothes and an airbrushing budget that could have supported several world economies.
They are reeling under the pressures (other than that of the liposuction pump) of raising kids, being satisfied in a Manhattan penthouse with a millionaire architect husband and menopause hampering the ability to romp with one washboard cardboard after another. In the process they will also end up endorsing Wonderbra as the fundamental law of existence to women across the world.
And so they fly off to Dubai (Actually Morocco but its all the same really). You know, one of those little crumbs they cant spot on the world (Read, Manhattan) map. Where they'll make bold feminist statements by sporting costumes that make you at least grateful that these hags have gotten their regular bikini waxes.
Parker's character (assassinate please) coos "I was more Coco Chanel than Coq Au Vin". More like coq-a-bull than coquettish in my opinion. And then there is Kim 'I'll screw a flag pole scented with testosterone" Catrall. A 'Yo mama so botoxed, they use a bulldog as her 'BEFORE' picture' joke.
The layers belonging to the script have been usurped by the make up that'll need hose jobs to come off. Liza Minelli channels Michael Jackson (cosmetologically, not vocally) in a guest role at a gay wedding sequence that is about as pretty as Adam Sandler in a tutu.
I'll watch Sex and the City 3. Provided a certain Jason Vorhees makes an appearance.
Raavan (2010)
A visual smokescreen is all it has to flaunt
So what do you do when you've got on your hands, one of those most interesting and misunderstood characters of all time? A context that has such layered underlying themes – Political, psychological and social? Possibly the chance to turn the reality that every Ramanand Sagar extravaganza has drilled into us, on its head? MR does dare venture this territory. Sadly, it remains Terra incognito even as the end credits roll. Ironically, the jaw dropping beautiful locales and cinematography do the movie in. They set the stage for something spectacular, operatic and epic- something the movie doesn't achieve in its entire running time of 2 hours and 15 minutes.
Most of the fault lies with the flimsy writing and one dimensional characterization.
The name of the movie for Cryin' out loud- Is Ravaan. The learned and spiritual uber villain of the epic. This Beera is reduced to a boor that mumbles incoherencies and borrows expressions from the Exorcist (and daddy dearest in RGV ki Aag) and evidently suffers from a bad case of head lice. Forget Ramayana, I am thinking he tottered out of the pages of twinkle comics. He speaks Hindi in a rustic dialect which miraculously disappears in the songs. The biggest flaw lies in the fact that the 'good' in Beera is achieved by 'demonising' Ram (ACP Dev). On his own, he has no stand to take.
Abhishek Bacchan , well, there is really NO erudite way of saying this. He sucks! Twitchy head movements and deranged smiles et al. He possibly might be the product of one of his mountaineering attempts gone wrong and him landing on his head.
Aishwarya screeches so much in the first half that you want Beera to set her free for his own good. But once she puts a lid on the ham, she emerges as one of the stronger performers. Eclipsing Abhishek and Vikram in every frame, she effortlessly looks ethereal - wide eyed and drenched locks set against the primal and mystic forest. A more ballsy ending would have done 'Sita' more justice. For once she isn't the Domex drenched doormat most Indian women are expected to be on celluloid. She is, in spite of herself attracted to the Beera, questions the 'Mariyaada Purushottam' and makes her way back to Beera in the climatic sequences. I'd have readily forgiven most follies of the movie had She stayed with Beera. However, on some level I don't blame the makers. This is after all the land where anything can be turned saffron and demolished for taking a different stand.
And yes, there is a Ram thrown in for good measure. Why waste the national award winner Vikram in this role? His exists on the canvas only to be blackened enough to make Beera look like the victim of a witch hunt. Again, Beera in himself is never layered enough – merely canonized indirectly. Ravi Kishan as Beera's brother turns in a good performance. Govinda has man boobs. Enough said. AR Rehman's score exists. But that's about it. I don't know if it was inherently lackadaisical, irrelevant or if I was too jaded to react to it. When will we ever learn to use soundtrack to propel the story forward?
And now for the ugly.
A terrible background score. A forest should sound as good as it looks – Here, absolutely NO use of the natural sounds to heighten the atmosphere. Instead we have jarring George of the Jungle beats. Unless they wanted to make a point about the extinction of species, not one non-human organism is spotted.
One of the cheesiest dialogue I have ever come across on the screen.An embarrassment when pitched against the slick,witty and tight writing of MR's preceding works, Guru and Yuva.
Baffling logical inconsistencies – Aishwarya is led into the big, bad forest blindfolded. But in the climatic sequences she effortlessly makes her way back to Beera. With no clue that over 50 men are minutes behind on her trail. A special mention for how spotless her white clothing remains throughout this entire journey.
The only saving grace is Santosh Sivan's cinematography. Which makes this the cinematic equivalent of a dumb blonde. My apologies if my review reads too tepid. Usually I am unforgiving and caustic to the movies I hate. This one has left me too jaded to even abuse it properly.
Phoonk 2 (2010)
What a blowout
When I got out of a theater with an excruciating headache thanks to the movie that finds its place in the IMDb bottom 100, 'RGV ki AAG', I realized with a sinking feeling that the man who made movies like Satya and Company had undoubtedly suffered a severe concussion.
But to come to this, RGV? Funding equally clueless film makers who have no doubt tottered up to your foot steps, jarring camera angles and irrelevant close ups et al.
Who scripted this thing? Not the 5 year old child actor of this movie for sure. He looked far too sensible for it. For it is nothing but Bhoot, Vastu Shastra and Phoonk 1 sliced up and edited together. The tragedy is, this one might pass off as a parody of all of them
I will tell you what is scary about this movie. The fact that film makers still think they can botch together a movie out of things that have stopped scaring people 25 years ago. During the entire course of this sham (I really can't dignify it by calling it a movie) I felt more emotionless than one of those frozen hibernating frogs. You see, I've been rendered so incredibly numb that I can't even elucidate just how vile a mockery of the craft of film making this is.
However, I am eternally grateful to the makers for keeping it shorter than 2 hours. Had I been one of them, I'd have taken my name off the credits.
The tagline reads 'The first one was a warning'. I'll tell you something, this review is one as well.
Alice in Wonderland (2010)
Drowsier and drowsier...
..Is precisely what I felt after half an hour into this movie. One inevitably goes to watch the Burton-Depp pair expecting some cinematic magic. Instead what reigns on screen is sheer tedium. Oh yeah the plot.No one seemed to have been curious about that unimportant detail called the script.
Uhh..hmm..you know Alice is now 19 and by virtue of it she seems to have a perennially confused, wooden look on her face. And of course she will become the unwilling warrior destined to save Wonderland from the Red Queen and the monster she unleashes. And in the process she will make up her mind about marrying a moronic lord and rebel against..yawn..conservative society. Oh, are you even interested any more? And yes there's Johhny Depp too. I mean, the Mad Hatter. Doesn't make a difference. The bloke doesn't seem to be too important anyway.
Mr.Burton where is the magic? The wide eyed child's splendor that comes from the Lewis Carroll's characters? Here, as flimsy as 2D cardboard cutouts. Your wonderland looks drop dead gorgeous of course. But nothing that one cant experience from a modern day video game. Mia Wasikowska seems utterly lost and too inexperienced to fit into Alice's miniature shoes. Anne Hathway's White Queen comes across looking slightly cuckoo and dumb. The Red Queen is nothing you haven't seen Helena Bonham Carter do before. Johhny Depp's character is so poorly written that I expected him to evaporate off the screen midway instead of the Cheshire cat. The set design and imagery gets all the detail right. But trippy? Not by a mile. Picturesque? Yes. Magical? No.
A shoddily written fantasy soup, lukewarm and bread crumbs gone soggy. Given the novel it is based on, the movie lacks the most important ingredient. Soul. And all the 3D in the world can't save it.