Fan – A Review

Maneesh Sharma directs Shah Rukh Khan in and as Fan. The story of Bollywood superstar Aryan Khanna and his doppelganger and obsessive fan Gaurav Chandna. What starts as a story of a middle class boy from Delhi’s Indra Nagar who devotes every living minute of his day to his idol Aryan Khanna quickly devolves into a cat and mouse chase through Mumbai, Dubrovnik, London and eventually Delhi. After a series of critical flops which made an absurd amount of money at the box office does SRK redeem himself? After all he is no stranger to playing double roles and he had carved out a niche for himself playing characters with grey shades in Baazigar, Darr and Anjam.

 

There is little to cheer about in this movie so let me get that out of the way first. The make-up and prosthetics on SRK when he plays Gaurav Chandna is exceptional. The use of visual effects to show the younger of the two characters works seamlessly, Gaurav Chandna is skinnier, with a smoother looking face and thinner nose and more pronounced teeth. The older, Aryan Khanna is SRK himself, beefier and with a face that has weathered over time.  In terms of acting this isn’t his best performance but it also isn’t his worst. So that is something to cheer about. When he is playing Gaurav Chandna he is at his best as he manages to strike a fine balance between the innocent obsession and a psychotic madness with the lines often blurring. When he is Aryan Khanna he phones it in, there is no nuance to his portrayal and as an audience I couldn’t connect with him. There is no vulnerability, no human frailty just the idea of him being a super hero instead of a movie star which takes away the believability element.

That is where the positives end. With a plot like this there is so much that could have been achieved but precious screen time is wasted in three elongated and entirely pointless chase sequences which yield nothing meaningful other than capturing the crumbling south Mumbai building, the picturesque Dubrovnik and the claustrophobic New Delhi.  Maneesh Sharma whose first film was the brilliant Band Baaja Barat and the second the underrated Ladies Vs Ricky Bahl has an organic way of directing and storytelling.  He was either too overwhelmed to be working with arguably the biggest superstar of Bollywood and he surrendered to the over indulgent nature of showcasing the superstar rather than the story or it was actually someone like Rohit Shetty who directed this one instead. The groundwork that was carefully laid in the first half is wrecked in the second half where two incidents destroy the public image of Aryan Khanna.  Clearly the superstar himself isn’t aware of just how much someone like him can get away with. Just cast a glance at the recent tabloid headlines and you have a wide variety of scandals to pick from, leaked pictures (either in the buff or doing lines of the wrong stuff), casting couch, or making controversial statements. It is a literal minefield out there and it would have lent more gravitas to the story and made you feel sorry as you witnessed a slow descent of Aryan Khanna.

The chase in Dubrovnik is un-believable and not in a good way. It is a straight lift from the opening sequence of Skyfall and even the music echoes those familiar Bond-esque notes. The Lawyer who accompanies Aryan Khanna to deal with immigration issues becomes a special services agent doing surveillance. In Mumbai no less than 8 police officers risk limb and life to try and capture a perp who isn’t a terrorist or murderer or even on a most wanted list. In London Gaurav takes a train for Dubrovnik from St Pancras and then St Pancras is shown to be Dubrovnik airport. It is gaping plot holes like this which question the sanity of the people behind this movie.  The climax is a long SRK monologue and a rehash of one of his more iconic movies’ final scene.

A plot with immense potential is rendered impotent by an overindulgent second half, average acting, uninspired dialogue and an overall terrible execution fails to make me a Fan. Shameless product placement for a car giant and even more absurd placement for an international remittance company who get their tag line mentioned not once, not twice but three times make this movie unbearable.  A movie that wants to be a study of the psychology of obsession but gets in its own way by trying to be a thriller is a movie best left alone.  Rewatch Swades or Chak De instead and reminisce what SRK was capable of.

 

 

The Intern – A Review

Nancy Meyers directs Anne Hathaway and Robert De Niro in The Intern. De Niro plays a 70-year old widower who applies for an senior intern outreach program at a tech company and is hired when he sends in a heartfelt cover-video. Assigned to difficult-to-work-with founder of the company Jules Ostein we see how an old dog can teach the new dogs some new tricks.

De Niro’s career graph has been ridiculed with the choices he has been making off late and how he is scurrying away one of the most impressive resumes in the industry by signing up for trash movies. And from the sounds of it The Intern should have joined the long line of disappointing De Niro outings but it doesn’t, instead what we are treated to is a feel-good movie that I frankly haven’t seen the likes of since Meyer’s The Holiday and David Frankell’s  The Devil Wears Prada which incidentally Hathaway starred in as well. And if you know me a TDWP comparison is about as high a praise as one gets from me in terms of rewatchability

What lifts the movie up from the generic banalities that litter the rom-com landscape is Meyer’s nuanced writing and an almost intuitive direction. There are no big moments of epiphany or any similar histrionics. The story pushes a feminist agenda but without bashing your head in with a meat cleaver.  Anne Hathaway (contrary to bitchy bloggers) is immensely likable as the runaway success story of a founder of a e-commerce business who is struggling to keep the successful enterprise and her blissfully happy domestic life chugging along while she continues to take on everything on herself. She is both believable and relatable.

De Niro is the gentlemanly grandfather types who doesn’t act gross or all wise and condescending but rather is trying to fit into a cool Brooklyn startup without giving up his old habits. There are many wonderful moments in the movie and so many come to mind but my favourite has got to be the late night working when Jules comes over and offers Ben a slice of pizza and shows him how to get on Facebook and he in turn shares his story of his days of working for a telephone book company.

Meyers touches on Sexism & Ageism with a delicate flourish that actually make you sit up and take notice rather than those movies where the agenda is front and center and the story is merely a vehicle to push the said agenda forward. I cannot help but compare this to a recent Bollywood movie Ki and Ka where the gender norms are turned on its head and the Man is a stay at home husband and the wife a hotshot executive. that movie was so badly executed that it actually did more of disservice to the message it was trying to convey than do it any justice.  This is how it could have been handled. The only complaint I have with Meyer is her choice in the actor who plays Hathaway’s husband while Andrew Holms is wonderful when he is playing dad to little Paige ( cute as a button) he really lacks the acting chops when it comes to the more dramatic scenes. Also somehow he looks like an understudy next to Anne Hathaway who is akin to a Thespian .

Andrew Rannells who was over the top in The New Normal plays it cool this time around, Adam Devine (Andy from Modern Family ) is brilliant with his comedic timing but it is Rene Russo who gets the the meatier of the supporting roles as Ben’s love interest. She is having a fantastic renaissance of a career after her brilliant turn as a soulless TV reporter in Nightcrawler and now as the wonderful in house masseuse.

Watch this as De Niro delivers a wonderful performance that complements the charming turn by Anne Hathaway. I cannot wait for what Meyers does next. This was a refreshing break of a movie and something I am sure to come back to again, maybe not as much as TDWP.

Ki and Ka – A Review

R Balki directs Kareena Kapoor Khan and Arjun Kapoor in a gender-bender movie Ki & Ka aimed at breaking the stereotypes the society assigns to the male and female sexes especially when seen under the microscope of a martial setup.

 

We are introduced to Kabir played by Arjun Kapoor and Kia played by Kareena Kapoor Khan. After the meet-cute they start to get to know one another over cheap whiskey. Kia is ambitious and doesn’t want relationships and marriage to slow her career down. Kabir is chilled out and wants to be like his mother, a homemaker. He has no career aspirations.  Kia is a focused, ambitious career oriented girl who thinks that marriages are the death knell for women and their careers. They decide to get married out of convenience the story explores the strain of matrimony and daily life on their gender-swapped relationship. The premise couldn’t get more exciting, especially in today’s context where women are slowly chipping away at the glass ceilings and men are evolving from being cave dwellers.

But nearly every aspect of this movie is a nice idea taken to such an extreme that it becomes insufferable. Take Kabir’s fascination with trains for instance, Balki takes what is a wonderfully whimsical idiosyncrasy and dials it up to an 11. A tastefully kitschy apartment is turned into a train museum where food and drinks are served via toy trains, the wallpaper is a diagram of a steam engine and on and on and on. The idea that Kabir doesn’t want to be a part of the corporate rat race and is content to being a house husband is taken to the extreme where is hanging out with the other housewives from the building and hosting kitty parties and turning into a personal trainer to the kitty club to earn some money. Kia is no better. When she is not pointing at PowerPoint slides like one of those stock photos she is freaking out over a pregnancy scare by being horrible to Kabir, being insufferable when Kabir (unconvincingly and without preamble) feels jealous and neglected when Kia takes him along to a marketing conference in Dubai. What promised to be a refreshing look at modern day matrimony is essentially reverse-regressive where “the man” wears pretty blouses and “the woman” has a beard. From being progressively feminist where “Streeling Puling Same Thing” the movie veers into Femi-Nazi territory.

 

The dialogues are possibly some of the worst written and equally badly delivered from recent memory. The screenplay is choppy and the tête-à-tête between Kabir and Kia is so disjointed you as an audience cannot feel for either of the characters. Kareena looks radiant and is styled to perfection but her overreactions which were charming in Jab We Met are just plain clumsy here. She is unconvincing as the career obsessed Kia and comes off as someone going through the motions. She is good in parts where her interactions with Arjun Kapoor aren’t forced into the reverse stereotype. Arjun Kapoor is totally lacking in charm and wit and is forced into poorly conceptualised role that is at odds with his masculinity. He lacks a certain sense of self-assurity which is required to carry off a role which would be subjected to snide comments as it challenges the social norms. Instead all we get is pan-faced expression. His outburst at an off-hand comment Kareena makes about stay-at-home wives is as unconvincing as Kareena’s outburst at his allegations of her wanting to sleep with an executive from New York to further her career. The supporting characters are also poorly written. Swaroop Sampat and Rajit Kapoor from the golden age of Indian television series like Yeh Jo Hai Zindagi and Byomkesh Bakshi respectively are given the most cringe inducing scenes. The first time we need Swaroop Sampat she hams it up and then advises her daughter Kia to consider pre-marital sex. Rajit Kapoor does one better when he tells his son if he should look down his boxers in case he has forgotten he is a man when his son Kabir tells him of his plans to get married to Kia and live as a house husband. I hate it when movies do product placement and Ki and Ka is a essentially a long and pointless vehicle to push as many products as they possibly can and when it all finishes they still manage to push Virgin trains through. This is just in poor taste.

 

This could have been a milestone movie for furthering the cause of gender equality had it been dealt with in a more nuanced fashion. Simply swapping stereotypes doesn’t break them. The same basic premise without the forced strife at one another’s growth, a little more compassion from both characters and the movie would have greatly benefited. The man content at not being a corporate rat finds success as a domestic-god, the woman a cut-throat corporate ladder climber who doesn’t taunt her husband for his lack of ambition. At the end two people in a marriage who thrive in the choices they made for themselves and who basked in each other’s company. Wouldn’t that be a story you’d want to watch? Well in the immortal words of John Lennon:

You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will live as one