The Phantom [dir. Simon Wincer]

Comic book movies more than any other genre are enjoyable or not predominantly on how much you're attached to the original source. The Phantom movie adaptation is a striking example of this. During my childhood I was a huge fan of the Phantom comics as released on Indrajal, and I still try to get the stories that I consider distinctive enough when I see them, so my opinion of this movie is definitely colored by my enjoyment of its relation to the source comic.

The storyline is quite hokey. In 1938 the 21st Phantom must battle a lawless magnate called Xander Drax who wishes to acquire 3 magical skulls whose combination will release an energy more powerful than anything else and enable him to control the world. Yada.

Quite a few things have been done right here. The production design is very handsome, be it the depiction of the Phantom's jungle realm - the Skull Cave, treasure room, ancestral crypt, the phantom chronicles etc. - or late 1930's art deco New York. The narrative moves at a zippy pace and the writers have rightly analyzed that the Phantom is a macho wise-cracking ass-kicking action hero who doesn't spend time moping over his dead ancestors or over his love Diana. Some of the action set-pieces, like the one where the Phantom and Diana are escaping from the villains in a small plane and do a leap onto the back of the Phantom's horse Hero are terrific. Billy Zane carries the Phantom mantle with charm, effacing to a great extent the essential goofiness of the purple costume. Unlike the alter-ego of many other costumed heroes he's also equally interesting as Kit Walker.

So what are the disappointments?

The plot. The Phantom's world in its limited scope has been distinctive. His villains are pirates, poachers, despotic rulers of tiny neighboring nations. Bringing him to New York just a third into the film and having him combat a generic world domination scheme takes away from the uniqueness of the franchise

One of the quibbles that those wanting the most faithful sort of adaptation of the Phantom franchise will have is that the film does not feature any BLACKS. The tribes surrounding the Phantom seem like they're from Hawaii or south America, as does his retainer Guran (dressed here in a Nehru jacket and turban). 1938 New York too seems totally free of blacks, even as serfs. Probably the makers chickened out from depicting blacks as they were portrayed in the Phantom strips.

The perceived need to have emancipated women also hurts the movie's legend. Sure, Diana has always been a tough cookie but if she can also wipe out guys with single punches, what is special about the Phantom and all his hardcore physical conditioning?

The villain Xander Drax is a huge disappointment. Sure he has a great name but he's played by an actor with a reedy voice who inspires no chill even when he's doing questionable things like having librarians eye-stabbed by spring-loaded knives or lobbing javelins into the backs of disagreeable colleagues.

The film seems to have had a curious budgeting. The sets and props are handsome and some of the action is painstakingly choreographed but the post-production budget seems to have been nothing because all the visual effects have a very low-quality to them, frequently worse than even some of the more recent Indian movies incorporating SFX. The climactic showdown in the lair of the Singh brotherhood also has an underwhelming feel to it. I imagine the original vision was to have a huge pirate warren but the budget constraints reduce the Singh stronghold to little more than a single mid-sized room set and a clash with around a dozen pirates at most.

All this nit-picking may seem that the movie has more bad points than good. But if you keep an open mind and fill in the gaps that the lack of budget creates you have still a fairly enjoyable outing and possibly the best Phantom adaptation given that there is no scope for one in the future.

Go Goa Gaand [dir. Raj Nidimoru & Krishna DK]

I never expected Go Goa Gone (GGG) to be any match for the Return of The Living Dead's and Zombieland's of this world. But this trailer suggested what could be a passable attempt at an indigenous zombie movie mixed with the trademark humor of the guys that made the smashingly funny 99 and the more ambitious if flawed Shor in The City:

That however turned out to be not the case. If one were to ask, as the movie itself, taking inspiration from a Steve Jobs poster, likes to ask several times over, "What do we know? What have we learned?" these are the points one can put together:

1. Too many borrowed elements - Slackers? Call of Duty references? Foreigners as zombies? Not that many Indian movies in cult genres are known for their originality but the problem is that even the borrowing is done in a very lazy manner, with not a smidgen of freshness or creativity. GGG may be an Indian production with Indian lead actors, but the script and direction is utterly generic with respect to the setting.

2. Not enough local flavor - 99 and Shor... were remarkable for their attention to detail towards local cultural stereotypes, and much of the canny humor was generated therein. GGG has zero local flavor, not even Goan, which makes it numbingly bland for most of its running time.

3. Huge lacuna of decent jokes - Remember the bit about the "dumb charades in the jungle" from the trailer? I was hoping there would be a fair amount of like humor in the film, but it turns out that the trailer has most of the good bits in the film...which is bad considering that the trailer runs less than 3 min and the film stretches to a zombie-fying 110 min. People around me at the cinema seemed to be enjoying themselves a fair bit, but then they were the sort whose funny bone was tickled every time someone cussed. Kunal Khemu has very good comic timing but he can't transcend the absolute lack of even half-decent material to work with. Saif Ali Khan has a small number of one-liners in the film, all of which are equally un-funny.

4. Shallow and Inconsistent - Again not uncommon in movies, but here it's inconsistent without being entertaining. The supposedly expert video-gamers and cable TV nerds have trouble recalling what zombies are, really now. The scene from the trailer where Saif's character Boris reveals his Delhi origins comes very early on in the film, but then he reverts back to his faux Russian accent for the most of the remaining time - some more Punjabi humor would have been a shot in the arm for the proceedings. The paper thin characters have you not giving a fuck as to what happens to them. The zombie shots are very disjointed and almost never raise any tension. Most of the gore elements come from digital blood splatters, and some of them appear to have been cleaned up from what was shown in the trailer. While this appears a childish thing to complain about given the lack of personality in the main characters, even the zombies are totally non-descript and devoid of any memorable moments.

So if your horror-n00b aunts and uncles come talking about how they too have dipped their beaks into the zombie genre with GGG, just remember to aim for their heads.

Приключения Шерлока Холмса и доктора Ватсона

Ah yes, that's Russian for Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson, the early to mid-80's Russian tele-film series that was apparently one of the cornerstones of entertainment in erstwhile Mother Russia. I had heard of this series some time ago, especially the high praise given to Vasily Livanov's portrayal of Holmes and the faithfulness to the original stories. In Moscow they have a statue of Holmes and Watson (Vitaly Solomin) cast in the likeness of the actors from this series, and Vasily was given an honorary OBE.

At long last I have an opportunity to actually try this out. I just saw the first episode (An Acquaintance), which takes the meeting of Holmes and Watson from A Study in Scarlet, then nicely segues into the plot of The Speckled Band. I can understand the logic behind that since the plot of A Study... is too lengthy to be respectably contained in an hour-long episode, and this provides a nice complete-in-itself introduction to our Baker Street companions. If the quality of the first episode is any indication, the production values are quite nice with a modest but pleasing representation of Victorian London (actually shot in Russia).

Of course, what would interest many of you is the portrayal of the lead characters. Sherlock Holmes fans have read the original stories several times over and each has a crystallized image of the gaunt detective and his loyal "friend and colleague". Many actors have portrayed Holmes in various adaptations, and Vasily Livanov's name can stand proud with them. Unlike most actors in the pre-Jeremy Brett era, including the respected Basil Rathbone and Peter Cushing, who portrayed Holmes as a brisk rather chummy avuncular chap, Vasily brings languor, moodiness and a hint of arrogance to his performance. It's not the full-blown baroque theatrics with which Jeremy Brett would astound and endear himself to Sherlock Holmes fans and redefine their image of the character, but it is interesting. Dr. Watson is also in good form at least in this first episode. His initial reaction to Holmes is one of suspicion and antipathy, and at one point, don't ask me how, they have an indoor boxing bout. While they get around rather soon after that, I am hoping this is an indication the Watson of this series will not be a mute spectator or a bumbling clown. I will get back when I have sampled more of the series but this is an auspicious beginning.

Silent Indian Cinema

No, this is not going to be some illuminating overview of the early days of Indian cinema. I can claim no appreciable knowledge of the same. These are my impressions of a DVD that contains surviving material of three silent films taken from the National Film Archive of India (NFAI). Of the three films, two are from India's pioneer of film Dhundiraj Govind Phalke aka Dadasaheb: Raja Harischandra (1913), regarded as India's first feature film, is available only as a fragment containing the opening and closing reels, while Kaliya Mardan (1919) is present almost entirely. The last film in this set is a feature from Bengal, Jamai Babu (1931) by one Kalipada Das. Along with my impressions I have also given screenshots, click on the screenshots for the full resolution.

Both the Phalke films are based on famous incidents from Hindu mythology, obviously with an aim to differentiate them from foreign product and have immediate attention value amongst the Indian public. I suspect the decisions about which stories to adapt for film would have resembled the sequence in R.K. Narayan's Mr. Sampath (The Printer of Malgudi), where a film-making team brainstorms about their maiden production, trying to zero in on suitable stories from the mythos to adapt for the screen. If Phalke's two films set six years apart can be taken as an indication, there was not much evolution to his style. Of course, he was making films in the period when the mechanics of the trade were still primitive in most parts of the world and the added challenges of working in Indian conditions with the aim of producing material that would appeal to a film-illiterate Indian audience cannot be underestimated. However it stands that in these films, his style is generally that of filmed theater than an erudite visual language. Most shots are mid-range upfront, capturing naïve actors repeatedly performing a set of uncoordinated arm-waving gestures without any clear idea of the length and rhythm of the shot.

Another source of unintended humor is a practice Phalke, as depicted in the bio-pic Harishchandrachi Factory, unfortunately could not avoid - the use of cross-dressing men for female roles. The image in Kaliya Mardan of a flock of hirsute gopis grinning lasciviously at the child Krishna (incidentally played by Phalke's daughter Mandakini) is more disturbing than anything. Technically, panning of the camera is quite rare, and apart from the odd overhead shot in the last reel, I cannot recall the use of any striking camera angles or tracking movements. Occasionally he juxtaposes shots where characters in a room are looking out of a window at another scene. Apart from the use of some rudimentary visual effects for the climactic battle between young Krishna and the snake (an obvious rubber inflatable with the plug right on top of its head), this is about the extent of its difference from amateur theater.

What a world of difference in the 12 years between KM and JB. While no match at all for the genius of FW Murnau or Fritz Lang, the visual style in Kalipada Das' film is, of course due to the greater experience and exposure to better quality western cinema, more sophisticated and professional than the previous films. The story of a country bumpkin that lands at his in-laws' place in Calcutta and has a series of misadventures on account of his bumpkin-ness is quite modest and not particularly noteworthy, but the film's execution has a pleasing polish. The location shoots give a lovely view of the old city and have a quasi-documentary feel. The framing and the editing of these sequences (both credited to one D.R. Barodkar) are elegant. Camera pans are more frequent (not as an empty exercise in style), close-ups, juxtapositions, lighting schemes and non-theatrical angles are judiciously used, and there is, heavens, even the odd tracking shot. Considering that I have not even heard of this film, it was a lovely surprise and it would have been nice to have some access to Kalipada Das' other work (sadly, nothing else is known to survive at this point).

The NFAI DVD (authored by one Kriti Media Services and manufactured by Sony DADC) gives us an acceptable presentation of these films. Given the age and likely condition of the source material, we cannot expect miracles. That said, the bulk of Kaliya Mardan and Jamai Babu look quite acceptable (although Jamai Babu, despite being newer is more scratched and washed out). NFAI have specially commissioned scores for these films by composer Rahul Ranade and he obliges with material that sits comfortably with the style of the films. There are no extras apart from a dull slideshow of pictures of the NFAI screening facilities. A small interview or featurette on the restoration and presentation of the films on the DVD, or even a sitting with Rahul Ranade regarding his contribution would have been much appreciated. The package includes liner notes, carelessly printed on a very non-standard size leaflet. Oh well, just appreciate the good stuff while they still bother to put it out.

Gafla [dir. Sameer Hanchate]

The cover of the Gafla DVD says “India's first film on a stock market scam”, and I suppose that's true. Originally released in 2006 (and included in the London Film Festival that year), Gafla is a loose adaptation of the events leading up to and encompassing the Harshad Mehta scam of the 90's. Here we have Subodh Mehta (Vinod Sharawat) getting into the stock market world first as a wide-eyed apprentice with a brokerage firm, then climbing up the professional ladder. He eventually becomes his own boss and engineers resources at hand to manipulate stock prices that lead to a rigged bull-run. The expose of his attempt to fund his venture by illegally harnessing the resources of banks eventually lead to the end of his success story. Gafla portrays the Harshad Mehta character in a curiously whitewashed manner, as an entrepreneur who does what he does with the intention of expanding the stock market and increasing the investor base, thereby bringing democracy to the market and prosperity to the small investors. He is shown as a maverick crusading against a coterie of suited tycoons that for reasons of their own periodically crash the market. The Mehta of the film says that his investments are always in firms he has thoroughly researched for their potential and that by following his lead “the market will never crash”, something of a large swallow. His downfall is shown entirely as the work of his rivals in collusion with corrupt journalists.

To Gafla's credit it is a sincere and focused film that doesn't stuff in any needless commercial elements like songs, cheap sexuality or ornate romance sequences, and more importantly no significant detours from its plot line. Mehta is shown as someone willing to do anything to achieve his ends, including marrying for political advantage (without the usual associated melodrama for such moments). Vinod Sharawat in the lead role acquits himself in a decent manner. The problem however is that the treatment is linear and lacks any emotional strength. In a 2 hour film that charts a significant period of its protagonist's life, there are hardly any memorable moments; contrast this with Oliver Stone's Wall Street or David Fincher's The Social Network, which made sure to have a strong dramatic element in the progression of the story, and interesting characters.

Neither do Hanchate and his team have the creative chops to make the film interesting on a technical level. I don't know how much research was done for the project, but the portrayal of the workings of the stock market seem empirical and simplistic, little above the “Market mein saare shares khareed lo (buy up all the stock in the market)” depiction of business rivalry in several archaic Bollywood films and TV serials. Combined with production values and flat visuals normally associated with the more recent Dev Anand films, it feels more like a movie composed of footage excerpted from an 80's era Indian television serial. The presence of tele-serial actors of that period like Shakti Singh and Somesh Agarwal only adds to this feel.

The DVD of the film by one Junglee Home Video, claims to have an anamorphic transfer (and even instructs you about adjusting your TV settings for the same). But it is an amazing botch up job in which they have somehow managed to generate an anamorphic signal for a stretched out 4:3 image. To illustrate, I have here modified one of the film's images to a 4:3 ratio and you can see that this looks less distorted than the original so-called anamorphic image (yep, Vikram Gokhale isn't THAT fat :D).

Original "Anamorphic"

Resized to 4:3

The film also has an official website HERE.

Dracula [dir. Terence Fisher]

This is going to be rather embarrassing, but I will first paste in an old review I had done for Hammer Studio's version of Dracula aka Horror of Dracula. The review was written in 2004 for an informal online film discussion group, and going through this you would not think I liked the film as much as I do now. Here goes:

My only earlier experience of the Hammer horrors being the slow-paced and unrewarding Countess Dracula, I thought I would, before dismissing them entirely, give a try to their much praised (among the genre fans) first Dracula film. Well, it's a lot better than Countess Dracula, better paced with the thrills coming along fairly frequently but it remains in most part a clunky, garish effort that doesn't very well stand the test of time.

Jimmy Sangster's script is a very `free adaptation' of [Bram] Stoker's book, cheerfully fooling about with the characters and relationships (Lucy, engaged to Jonathan Harker, is the sister of Arthur Holmwood, who is married to Mina???) and doing away with major chunks of the original plot to fit Hammer's limited means. The film bears a lot of B-movie trademarks – stagey sets, cacophonous music, horrible dialog, and with few exceptions, prosaic visuals. Christopher Lee's Dracula is decent if not too effective in the scares department, and way ahead of his predecessor [Bela] Lugosi's stodgy turn.

The best parts of the movie though are the solid performances of Michael Gough as Arthur Holmwood and Peter Cushing as Van Helsing. A word about Cushing: He plays Van Helsing more as a vampire hunting Sherlock Holmes and quite rightly since he has such a startling resemblance in his looks and gestures to the beloved sleuth - only the lack of a proper baritone puts him a couple paces behind Jeremy Brett. He and Gough gamely manage to imbue their roles with some dignity in the face of all the ridiculous lines they have to mouth. So in total, this movie won't having tearing your hair out over it but is also nowhere near the must-sees for the current-day horror fan.

Even then I had begun to have second thoughts, since just a few hours after the initial writeup I added a post-scriptum:

I feel that I may have come cross as being a bit too harsh on the film. To be sure, it would have had some powerful shock moments in it's time, when the only Dracula film to reference was the turgid 1931 Lugosi version. It's mainly that the shock value doesn't translate too well today, since it's not accompanied by a strong aesthetic. The sets are not bad in themselves but, unlike Mario Bava's Black Sunday, unimaginative lighting reveals their prop-like quality all too obviously. The performances in general would have made a much better impression if the actors hadn't had to grapple with mostly inept dialog. 

Well, given that nearly a decade later I still enjoy watching the film, enough to drop 18 quid on a blu-ray release, I guess I can shove the "doesn't very well stand the test of time" remark where it came from. Dracula is still not a frightening film unless you're extremely young or extremely simple-minded, but it is a rousing adventure with generous lashings of the sensational. My remarks about the turns by Lee and Michael Gough are also reversed in this span of time. Lee does the best he can with the material at hand (although his absolute lack of dialog after the initial scenes does dampen the impact of the character as anything more than ravening animal), and Gough seems to have a hard time finding a steady tone for his performance, some of his delivery almost amateur drama level.

But one of the big things this new home video release of Dracula based on a 2007 BFI restoration of the film (with some additional work to incorporate previously censored footage found only on a Japanese print) does is, make me reconsider my views on the technical merits and visual aesthetic of the film. Now I was not even born when the film was released in 1958 and have no grounds to speculate on how faithful the new look of the film is to the intentions of its makers. But to mine eye, the film now looks amazing, in a way that it can finally be taken seriously as a product of fine craft. The previous reference for me was the Warner DVD, where the brightness seemed uniform throughout the film and the level was so high it flattened the image, stripping it of visual drama and exposed the budgetary limitations. One of the major changes here is that the brightness and colors are carefully graded to correctly represent the time of day in the scenes. Just this simple act of cohering the script and the visuals instantly boosts the dramatic strength of the scenes. The new restoration is also not afraid of darkening the screen as necessary, even if it means obscuration of previously visible detail. Thus scenes like when Jonathan Harker invades the crypt in Dracula's castle near twilight in the hope of destroying the master look atmospheric instead of stagey. With the readjusted color timing, several scenes have an almost painterly quality to them. If true to the original look of the film, it reveals Terence Fisher to be a far more skilled and careful craftsman than I previously gave him credit for. While I will not say James Bernard's score is equally revelatory this time around,  the several Hammer films I have seen in the interim have made me more comfortable with his style and appreciative of the unique identifying stamp it brought to the studio's output.

So yes, I will gladly eat my erstwhile words regarding  this wonderfully entertaining film. A few additional words for those interested in the blu-ray (which also comes with DVD versions of the new restoration and sundry bonus features, so it's well worth your money even if you aren't yet on the high-def wagon):

Like I have described above, visually the presentation is quite lovely and beyond anything previously seen on home video. It is however soft in appearance, detail is decent but not eye-popping and print damage is still apparent in some scenes. There are however no digital anomalies, and it is unlikely that there will be any better presentation of the film in the near future. The dual-mono lossless audio track faithfully presents the original sound mix, which again means that it's a little on the hollow side, especially when the brass booms in background, but works as intended.

There's a good smattering of extras: A making of featuring interviews with several people including Jimmy Sangster, a documentary on the restoration process and the incorporation of the Japanese footage, and another on the censorship of the film in the UK. This is all good stuff. There is also a commentary track I have not yet sampled, which thankfully doesn't include Christopher Lee. What annoys me is that this premium priced package does not have even a liner note insert but a PDF booklet (which is located in the DVD containing bonus features, but not the blu-ray). It's a minor quibble, but considering that companies like Eureka offer significantly better packaging for their Masters of Cinema releases which incidentally are cheaper than this, it is annoying.

Sona Spa [dir. Makarand Deshpande]

Sometimes even a rough build of a fresh concept is better than the nth polished and honed iteration of a done-to-death theme. Writer-Director Makarand Deshpande's Dänav (reviewed on this site here), although rather unwieldy, half-finished and even tacky on occasion, was interesting to me because it told a fresh story with strong dramatic quotient. Hence my attraction to see his new offering Sona Spa, although I suspected that it would suffer from many of the same shortcomings that plagued Dänav. You could say I saw the film under rather personalized conditions: a very decent screening in a desolate cinema hall. It speaks for the amount of interest the lay public has in this star-bereft enterprise (unless you count Naseeruddin Shah, and we'll talk about that soon), but from a selfish point of view it makes for near-ideal conditions for appreciating a film of this sort.

So how does Sona Spa compare to its predecessor? For one it is technically a lot more polished, with even some stylish cinematography and editing touches thrown in. There are still rough edges: the writing and acting can be rather gauche, there is some cheap language and sexual references thrown in possibly to add market value to the film (that obviously didn't work) and the use of computer graphics generated imagery is miles behind what most other commercial film industries of the world use. But compared to Dänav which had absolutely no style, this is progress. Alas, technical progress seems to have come at the cost of conceptual freshness and dramatic intensity.

The basic idea behind the titular Sona Spa is that it is a place where you can pay to have your sleeping hours transplanted into someone else. Confused? In essence what this means is the person sleeping on your behalf will for that period receive your state of mind with all its cares and tensions and in return transfer their state of uninterrupted blissful rest to you. Do not bother to ask for even basal level rationality behind this concept as the film is not interested in doling out any explanations in that regard. Even the spa as such is a hugely incongruous establishment, with a complete lah-di-dah approach to running background checks on its customers, inexplicable financial circumstances and the sort of liberal employee policies for its “sleep-workers” that the rest of us can only (heh) dream of. Rucha (Shruti Vyas) and Ritu (Aahana Kumra) are two girls from filthy-rich and middle-class backgrounds respectively that take up employment as sleep-workers. Each comes with their own emotional baggage. Emotionally fractured spoiled brat Rucha is looking for a cure for her insomniac father, while humble affable Ritu wants to earn money for her (wait, is this another point of contrast?) comatose father's hospital expenses and help a sister struggling with a recurring nightmare. In turn they are set up with “clients” for whom they must sleep. The catch is that in the sleep-state they receive the dreams of their clients and these can take a turn into perverse sexual or violent territory.

This is an excellent concept in outline and I would have loved to see some daring strides taken. But there are problems with the manner in which the concept is dealt with here: Here, dreams have no randomness, no disorientation factor, they are presented in a manner as mundane as memories or flashbacks. It is as though the writer is afraid of confusing the audience, not a good sign. The second aspect is that after teasing with the perverse elements of the dreams, the story makes no effort to explore the acute and chronic effects that it can have on the minds of the sleep-workers. Instead, it rather quickly wraps the dream-cycle with trite moral lessons and happy endings. This is very unfortunate pussy-footing. A film like this was never going to garner a significant audience, it would have made more sense to just cast aside any notions of garnering popularity and make the best of the idea instead of watering it down. And yeah, somewhere in between is that all too abused symbol of unspoiled innocence, the retard.

I am perhaps being unreasoning if I say that you might still give this watch. I liked it more than the much slicker Inception, although that's possibly because that one had too much fan-hype surrounding it. I also feel good about a Hindi movie that's at least a novel idea and not just an ego massage for the Great Bollywood Incestuous Mafia. There are, if you can ignore the disappointments and the gauchery, moments where the film strikes a chord. Aahana Kumra as Ritu gives a very solid, empathetic performance, and like I earlier said, it is visually more polished. As for Naseer, while he features heavily in the posters and marketing, he is not even playing a role in the conventional sense. He portrays the Baba who has established the spa and within the film is only seen in televised ads proclaiming its benefits.