RRR [dir. S Rajamouli]

It is, I suppose, a curse of the pan-India movie paradigm that even the titles must be generic for the sake of universality. So they either use proper nouns, words that mean the same across multiple Indian languages, or, as in the case of Eega wunderkid Rajamouli's latest project RRR, reduce the title to an acronym that expands differently in different tongues. That said, with RRR I wonder if the bulk of the audience is even bothered to be acquainted with the expanded forms in the different releases. It might as well be just an echo of the manly growls that permeate this picture.

And there are manly growls galore. Each of the film's two male leads - Ram Charan and NTR Jr - gets a massive introduction sequence in which they are established as forces of nature. Rajamouli distinguishes his heroes with fire and water motifs respectively, even announcing these in on-screen titles, just in case anyone in the audience missed the metaphor. The film drips with so much machismo, it was a missed marketing opportunity that they didn't have promotional 'mandles'.

While RRR is making waves both in India and outside for its exaggerated action set-pieces and equally exaggerated bromance between the lead stars, it is by no means a novel concept. Bollywood masala mogul Manmohan Desai's Mard in 1985 showcased Amitabh Bachchan and Dara Singh knocking the stuffing out of British colonials with fisticuffs and the aid of a trained horse and dog. RRR's bad people, Governor Buxton (Ray Stevenson) and his wife (Alison Doody, the only woman in the film who makes an impact), would certainly be at home with the caricature British villains from Mard. Stevenson admonishes his troops for wasting expensive British-made bullets on lowly brown natives, while Doody complains about the lack of blood spurts in a public lashing. I imagine the spirit of Bob Christo would heartily approve of these doings. For some reason they're not mindful of a niece (Olivia Morris) that hangs about with said lowly brown natives and brings them for tea and dance dates to the gubernatorial palace.

Continuing with the Mard comparisons, RRR does not match up to that film's cheerful ludicrousness. Mard had cheesy S&M leather outfits, Mission Impossible type latex mask disguises, a baddie literally bleeding out starved Indian laborers while wearing a Hammer Dracula style hooded cape. But one really can't hope for that level of reckless imagination now.

As some measure of recompense, RRR boasts of a level of polish in the execution of its set-pieces that the technologically-slipshod-even-for-the-80's Mard could not claim. An applause-worthy level of detail is given to each of the film's action sequences, which are meticulously designed and painstakingly executed - Ram Charan fighting his way back and forth through a whole mob of protesters, him and NTR Jr forming a Goro-like fighting combo, the wild animal assault on the Governor's mansion. Right up to the ridiculously explosive climax, the film speaks purely in hyperbole. There are even some epic emotional moments like when NTR's character is getting whipped by Ram and breaks out into a patriotic song - say what you will, these guys put in their all.

But anytime the film moves away from them or the baddies, it stumbles massively. Alia Bhat barely registers as Ram's love interest, and Ajay Devgan as his father sucks the life out of every scene he is in, purely by being his Ajay Devgan self. Taking them out of the picture would have cut a fourth of the massive runtime and kept it fresher.

I certainly enjoyed individual portions of RRR, but Eega / Naan Ee / Eecha / Makkhi is still the one Rajamouli film I consider worth revisiting.

Malayan Kunju [dir. Sajimon]

There is little to give by way of plot synopsis for the Mahesh Narayanan produced Malayan Kunju (Child of the Malayan tribe). In the story set in the verdant idyll of Idukki, protagonist Anil Kumar aka Anikuttan (Fahadh Faasil) is the local go-to for any electronics / gizmo repair (in an early scene he uses window hinges to repair a broken laptop hinge). Anikuttan is also a casteist curmudgeon with a (what else?) painful past event that defines his current outlook. It takes another crisis to break down his reserve and unearth his suppressed humanity.

When reduced to bare outline, Malayan Kunju (MK) is a simple story of redemption through trial. Of course, a simple story is by no means a bad thing. Some of the most entertaining films have two-line (or less) plots. Take Neil Marshall's survival thriller The Descent - A gaggle of spunky spelunkers brave a hitherto unmapped cave and must survive both perilous natural obstacles and an unexpected predator. The trick lies in being sincere to that premise and yet add sufficient layers to render it interesting for the running time.This reference to Marshall's film is not an idle one, since the thrills in MK bring to mind the claustrophobic sternum-squeezing atmosphere of the former. 

The entire pre-interval portion of MK is used to define Anikuttan and his surroundings, and in a series of non-linear sequences, sketch out the tragedy that haunts his world-view. It is a large amount of build-up,  even incorporating a couple of song numbers (AR Rahman), but the characterization is not rich enough to justify the time spent, and the significance of scenes like the boar hunt escaped me. A fair portion of the first half therefore comes across as the disjointed padding out of a leaner, more taut adventure, and the emotional angle is, like Rahman’s overbearing background score, on the nose without being memorable.

The best parts of the film occur once Faasil's character literally lands in the calamity that he must overcome to survive. Without spoiling too much, it is a gripping and visceral journey, masterfully captured by the production crew and performed by the actor with complete involvement. In comparison to the diffuse prologue, this part of the film held my attention so completely, it seemed to end too soon. How I wish more of MK could have been this one-man survival drama.

Raudra [dir. Ravindra Shivaji]

Raudra (roughly translating as scary or horrible), which I stumbled upon on Amazon Prime, seems to have been birthed by the success of the Marathi culture inspired Tumbbad. While that film was a near masterpiece of modern Indian mystery-horror, presenting a fantastic fable of human greed with incredible visual and textural detail, Raudra sadly does not match up.

It is not made explicit, but the story seems to be set sometime in post-independence India (possible the 60's or 70's) in a remote Maharashtrian village. Trambak (Rahul Patil) enters the village as a census taker and arrangements are made for his accommodation at the crumbling vada (mansion) owned by the acerbic Nanasaheb (Deepak Damle). Nanasaheb is a dominating figure both at home to his wife and daughter, and for the villagers. Daughter Mrunmayee (Urmila Jagtap) is young and pretty, and sick of her father's oppression. She seems to find in Trambak a sympathetic ear for her complaints, perhaps even an escape route from her current existence.

Apart from going about his census task in the most halfhearted manner accompanied by buffoonish local aide Bando (Anil Padvankar), Trambak seems quite interested in the regional legends, and it becomes apparent early on that this is not mere idle curiosity. He is in quest of an old temple he claims to be of a family deity. Mrunmayee posits that the information he seeks may be available in an ancient book of records carefully guarded by her father, and volunteers to steal the book for him. Even after stealing the book, they have to contend with solving the riddles contained in it to decode the location of the temple, which is said to house an ancient treasure.

While promising in outline, Raudra disappoints hugely in execution. Writer-Director Ravindra Shivaji's screenplay is lackluster and contains glaring exposition lapses. The MacGuffin of Nanasaheb's book is a clumsy one - given his innate craftiness, it seems unlikely that for so many years before Trambak's arrival he would not have made similar deductions. Worse, the film is unable to set and sustain a pace. Instead of a carefully constructed ebb and flow as Trambak follows up various clues, we get a jerky stop-start narrative.  Characters are drawn with far too few shades to render them interesting. Mrunmayee could have been an layered personality, but as portrayed here (both by the writing and Jagtap's unskilled performance) is rather shallow.

Technically also, Raudra is a mixed bag. The decaying vada is an apt setting  and there are some atmospheric shots (Swapnil Kedare). But several other parts of the film appear prosaic and the music - both songs and BGM - overbearing. Apart from a nicely intimidating Deepak Damle, the cast is not particularly impressive. The film is just not able to sustain a specific mood, essential for this kind of story. The worst is saved for the climax. I really don't know what they were thinking here. Perhaps they wanted to make an impact with its abruptness, but it feels as though they stopped there on account of a total deficiency of ideas on how to finish off the story.

Looking up the entry for this film on IMDB, I find a very favorable rating and almost uniformly gushy user reviews (LINK), but my own experience left me quite cold.

Zombies of Mora Tau [dir. Edward L. Cahn]

Of B-movie maven Sam Katzman, Charles Schneer said that he "Knew everything there was to know about making a movie. He was a very enterprising fellow, and was enormously intuitive. But, he was a very tough taskmaster and a real skinflint... all his input was negative. He never contributed anything positive. I would suggest an idea, and he would knock it down. I would argue with him, but I never got very far. He wouldn't say: 'Do this instead of that.' He would only say: 'Don't do this'." 

Katzman was a power player in the low-budget movie business that produced movies for a number of studios  constantly feeding product to small theaters across the United States. Sometime in the mid-50's he targeted the teenage and adolescent crowd with science fiction tinged horror fodder like Creature with the Atom Brain (1955) and The Werewolf (1956). While not exceptional cinema, they were quite decent as low-budget entertainment, capturing a certain zeitgeist of the atomic era. 1957's Zombies of Mora Tau is another interesting yet not entirely successful entry from Katzman's stable. It differs in some important aspects from previous zombie movies like White Zombie and I Walked with a Zombie, and in some ways presages George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead as well as the Italian Zombo-calypse movies.

Zombies of Mora Tau begins with a bang when the automobile the leading damsel is being chauffeured in runs over a figure standing on the road. The scene is supposedly set in Africa where the lady is going to stay with her grandmother, but there are almost no cultural landmarks and not a single native African to give credence to that claim. Anyhoo, despite her protests the otherwise kindly driver refuses to stop after the "accident", remarking that he did not hit a man but "One of THEM!". When she finally reaches her grandmother's home, she finds that gramma (Marjorie Eaton) has similar notions, and that the stories she'd heard as a kid about the "dead but not dead" are actually serious beliefs among her folk.

In parallel, a ship expedition with a drunk captain (Joel Ashley), his saucy wife (Allison Hayes) and a hunky diver (Gregg Palmer) plans to explore the wreck of a 19th century sunken ship to recover a casket of uncut diamonds. But when they near the site of the wreck, they get some uninvited boarders who don't seem too troubled about getting shot or drowning. The survivors jump ship and take shelter at Grandma Eaton's place where she tells them about the undead sailors cursed to forever guard the booty of diamonds against anyone that came to take them. Of course, they think gran's off her head even if what they have seen can't be explained away.

Moonlight shenanigans ensue - damsels are carried off, zombies rise from their coffins, and our leading cast must fight for their lives. While the zombies are created by a curse, they are not under the direct control of any witch-doctor or mad scientist unlike previous movies, and more importantly, they have the ability to convert other humans to zombies to add to their number (how is not clarified - it seems to involve some ritual in their crypt, not just a chomp of flesh). This brings them closer to the zombies in NotLD than White Zombie. We also see sequences of them attacking the divers underwater (done with a gauzy filter and projected bubbles) prefiguring the memorable Zombie vs Shark scene from Lucio Fulci's Zombie Flesh Eaters.

While there are fascinating elements in the script, Edward L. Cahn's direction is pedestrian. Marjorie Eaton's performance plays to the rafters, more Old Dark House than the subtlety called for. Visually too, there are not many striking moments - a Val Lewton protege or a Mario Bava could have worked wonders with the material. That said the film is only around 70 min long and doesn't allow much time for one's interest to flag.

A few words on the blu-ray from Arrow Video's set of Sam Katzman movies:

Video-wise, this is a very decent HD transfer for a vintage low-budget movie with good contrast for the numerous nighttime scenes. The mono audio is clear if limited in immersion. Supplements include a Kat Ellinger commentary on the film (which was pretty decent, although she is a lot kinder to the film than I felt) and a Josh Hurtado video piece on genre transformation in Katzman's films.

KGF: Chapter 2 [dir. Prashanth Neel]

For my views on the first chapter of KGF, please click HERE.

KGF-2 is a continuation of the old-school swagger from the first installment, but taken a few notches higher. Rocky (Yash) is still the uber-badass, dealing out sneering one-liners and sledgehammer fists in equal measure. He now controls the titular gold fields, but in his "More gold! MORE GOLD!" attitude seems to opt for a far less smart plan than the original owners had - I would imagine that part of the perceived value of gold is the fact that it's hard to mine and is made available to the market in limited quantities. Rocky's business sense resembles the guy that slit the belly of the goose laying the (ha!) golden eggs.

But this is not a movie one criticizes for its lack of business sense, or for that matter any other sense. This is a movie where our gangsta hero can:

• Barge in unannounced into the Prime Minister's working chambers and swag at her, while she hisses ineffectively like Lalita Pawar in Ek Din Bahu Ka.
• Have a blooming helicopter hovering above his lawn for a spot of breeze on a warm day.
• Single-handedly assault a police station - no wait, that's a branch office of the CBI - with a tripod-mounted belt-fed large caliber machine gun to recover a single gold biscuit because dammit, that's HIS property.

The large supporting cast is (dur!) cast in that same mold of exaggerated sentiment. Someone actually says with a straight face that the character Sanjay Dutt plays was inspired by Viking culture, and he turns up in the soul-sapping heat draped in chain-mail and leather, and a braid that must take some serious grooming. And beards, beards still rule. Raveena Tandon's PM character would have probably posed a bigger challenge if she sported one. Everyone speaks their lines like theater actors anxious to ensure that their voices carried to the last row.

This is again not a criticism, it is inherent to the film's design. The canvas feels genuinely big, and while the brush strokes are broad, they are also unabashedly virile, with some epic visual moments. You can see that writer-director Prashant Neel wants to pay a Tarantino-like homage to the glory days of Macho Indian Cinema, and when it works, it works really well. On the whole I liked this a good deal more than the sum total of Bahubali.

What I would criticize is the déjà vu occurring over the course of this two-part narrative (with the imminent warning of a third installment). The danger of painting in broad strokes is always that there's not sufficient layer or detailing for the characters. While individual scenes are calculated to raise whoops and whistles (I'm sure this would have been a riot in the cinema hall), there is choppy flow and a lack of connective tissue between scenes - A lengthy symphony cannot be composed solely of overtures, you need to also think of the quieter moments.

Mundane History [dir. Anocha Suwichakornpong]

The work of Apichatpong Weerasethakul casts a long shadow on Thai arthouse cinema, and Anocha Suwichakornpong's 2009 debut feature Mundane History certainly owes some debt of inspiration to him.

 

The film is centered around Ake (Phakpoom Surapongsanuruk), a youth paralyzed from waist down, and Pun (Arkaney Cherkam), the male nurse employed to take care of him at home. The other significant characters are Ake's father, who is considerate yet distant from his son, and the family members / domestic staff.

 

Ake has the simmering frustration of a youth whose entire way of life has been snatched away, reducing him to someone that needs help with his most basic needs. He also feels emasculated by his inability to sense any sexual pleasure, as demonstrated in the scene where he masturbates in the bath to no effect (a scene which was probably instrumental in earning the film the Thai censor board's strictest age rating 20+). This makes him taciturn and indifferent / rude to the people around.

 

Pun at the beginning of his employment feels lost. He is a friendly, open-hearted person and the hushed sombre atmosphere of the house wears him down - he confides to an acquaintance on the phone that he finds it "soulless". But as he diligently works with Ake and shares his own thoughts with his patient, a bond develops between the two young men - they are of the same generation and find common ground in their interests. Pun provides Ake a companionship and affection his own father seems afraid to show.

 

Mundane History is presented in subtle non-linear fashion where at different points back and forth in time we see the outlook of Ake and Pun, and their interaction with each other. This non-linearity is not an essential device for telling the story, but does prevent it from following a cliched path, and more importantly, allows for time lapses where more can be left to the viewers' imagination.

 

It is not clarified what mishap led to Ake's paralysis, or at what point the estrangement between father and son occurred - was it caused by Ake's accident and subsequent disability, or whether it predated that? Beyond a point, the film is less interested in the emotional drama (the tone is tamped down throughout, neither anger nor joy are given showcases), and becomes more of an overarching poetic reflection on the rhythm of life (even incorporating the depiction of a caesarean section birth). I didn't find this meshing as organic and magical as in my favorite Apichatpong film Uncle Boonmee Recalls His Past Lives, but it is done well enough and does not overstay its welcome.

 

 

A few words on the Second Run DVD:

The DVD came out in 2012 and gives a decent though not particularly stunning presentation. Most of the film is shot in a naturalistic manner with lots of static camera settings, that are not necessarily the most picturesque. There is noise, especially in darker scenes, but I would assume that to be endemic to the source material. Audio comes in Dolby 2.0 and 5.1 options, the latter slightly expanding the ambient sound field for the world around Ake, and giving more body to the occasional music score. Extras include a conversation with the director discussing the film's genesis, making and its reception, and a previous short film by her called Graceland, which is visually more striking but with a sketchier narrative. As customary with Second Run, the release includes a booklet with an essay.

Kaun Pravin Tambe? [dir. Jayprad Desai]

So I saw Iqbal Part 2. Oh wait, it's called something else, but Shreyas Talpade is playing another underdog trying to make it in cricket. This is the story of a real life guy called Pravin Tambe, a club cricketer in Mumbai who persevered in honing his game in all his spare time even though he was not selected for any national level tournament up to his 40's, which in most sports is when people start to talk about retirement. He finally got to play in the Indian Players' League, where he made enough of a splash to garner notice and have a movie made about his life.

Kaun Pravin Tambe? (KPT?) does not have the production value of an '83 (reviewed HERE) or the M.S. Dhoni biopic, and the scope is a lot smaller. There are some nice Sai Paranjpe style touches in depicting the Tambe family's lower middle class life in a chawl type society - when Pravin and his brother get married together, they have to draw lots to see who gets the 'bridal suite'. The film also looks at Pravin's struggle to keep up various jobs while he still tries to sneak in some play time - In one instance he is strung along with promises of making a company cricket team to work for cheap by an employer who has no actual intention of actually doing so.

The film also highlights how the sport outside of the more glamorous tournaments often offers meager incentive for the players. Talpade has some fine scenes in which he expresses his character's despondence, and the talented Anjali Patil (Newton) does the best she can as the spouse who loves her husband but is also frustrated with what she feels is his lack of prioritization towards his family.

But even when KPT? eschews the usual patriotic jingo of Indian sports movies (likely because Tambe never played for the country as a whole), the script is still formulaic and most of the characters are etched in very broad strokes. Parambrata Chatterjee as the sneering sports journalist Sanyal is handed a one-note part that does not do the actor sufficient justice - I know that Sanyal's scorn towards Tambe is driven by his envy, but there should have been a more nuanced portrayal instead of making him a stock villain till short of the end. Also, the background score (credited to a Sai-Piyush) is near-constant and unsubtle.

But if you like cricket in general or the idea of a Readers' Digest type slightly saccharine inspiring story, I thought KPT? was better than those bigger-budget cricket movies.