Movie Review: Island City (2015)

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IslandCity2.5 Stars (out of 4)

Island City was a part of the 2016 Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles.

Writer-director Ruchika Oberoi’s debut film Island City explores the pressures of life in modern Mumbai through three connected narratives, with varying degrees of success.

The movie opens with “Fun Committee,” a story about a middle-aged salaryman, Mr. Chaturvedi (Vinay Pathak). He files into his cubicle at Systematic Statistics along with the other drones, an interchangeable cog in a giant machine.

To remedy persistent employee dissatisfaction, the company installs a “Fun Committee” to randomly award workers with a day away from the office. For a guy like Chaturvedi, whose job is his life, such a reward feels like a punishment.

According to an anonymous committee member heard only over the phone (voiced by Rajat Kapoor), the day away is scientifically planned to maximize “mandatory” fun. Chaturvedi is dropped off at a shopping mall, under orders to utilize a stack of coupons for free stuff like balloons and lollipops.

The film’s limited budget becomes a problem as the narrative shifts into a surreal examination of consumer culture. Retail employees sing when Chaturvedi redeems his coupons as shoppers mill about nearby. Are the shoppers also a part of the alternative universe inhabited by Chaturvedi and the store workers? Are they even aware of it? A bigger budget would’ve allowed Oberoi to build a more immersive world, avoiding the questions of who’s involved and who’s just a regular person who happened to be shopping on the day of a movie shoot.

Sympathy for Chaturvedi’s plight is undermined when he extends his frustration with his soul-sucking job beyond the callous management to his fellow employees. They’re just as much victims of the system as he is. “Fun Committee” ends on a grim note.

The second story — “The Ghost in the Machine” — is the best of the three. Housewife Sarita (Amruta Subhash) learns that her husband, Mr. Joshi, is in a coma. Sarita, her two young sons, and her mother endure neighbors dropping by to offer condolences in exchange for tea and cookies, but the family knows the truth: Joshi was an overbearing jerk, and their life is more enjoyable without him.

All four family members get hooked on a TV serial about an ideal man. The TV hero (Samir Kochhar) is handsome, affectionate, kind, generous, and polite: all the things Joshi is not. The serial allows the family to envision a better life, while comatose Joshi hovers over their dreams like a not-quite-dead ghost. The story is delightfully clever, especially in the way the TV serial’s narrative evolves to depict the family’s desires.

“Contact” is the last of Island City‘s short stories. Unlike the middle-class protagonists of the other narratives, “Contact” features a poor heroine. Aarti (Tannishtha Chatterjee) endures a hopeless existence, commuting for hours to a manual labor job at a newspaper print shop. Her father has arranged her marriage to a foul-mouthed boor, Jignesh (Chandan Roy Sanyal), who insists that dour Aarti smile without giving her a reason to.

An anonymous love letter professes to see the passionate fire hidden within Aarti’s sad eyes. The mystery awakens not just Aarti’s sense of curiosity but a belief that perhaps she deserves a more fulfilling life than the one she has. Chatterjee’s touching performance lives up her consistently high standards.

Island City is pessimistic about life for the average Mumbaikar. Hope is either a lie, or it comes at an astronomical cost. “The Ghost in the Machine” is the only one of the three tales that is fun to watch.

It’s hard to reconcile how the salaryman’s story fits with the other two. The image of the zombie-like office worker is well established, but Chaturvedi is there by choice. There’s no sense that he quashed some vibrant part of himself to take this job. He has no family to support. He’s there because there’s nothing more to him.

Contrast that with both Sarita and Aarti, whose opportunities are dictated by the men in their lives. Joshi forced Sarita to stop working in a career she loved. Aarti works in a dead-end job, and she’s forced to marry someone she finds repulsive. Not only are Chaturvedi’s self-imposed troubles deemed equivalent with those of the two women, they’re given prominence by being placed first in the story order.

It feels like there’s a piece missing from Island City that might have better connected the three stories. Maybe it was just a matter of weaving the narratives together rather than presenting them separately. As constructed, Island City only hits its stride after a third of the movie is already over.

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Opening May 6: 1920 London

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A new Hindi horror movie hits Chicago area theaters on May 6, 2016. Sharman Joshi stars in 1920 London, the third installment in the 1920 franchise. I won’t be reviewing this one in the theater, since I am a total chicken when it comes to scary movies. I’ll catch up with it when it becomes available digitally or on DVD.

1920 London opens Friday at MovieMax Cinemas in Niles and the AMC South Barrington 30 in South Barrington. It has a listed runtime of 2 hours.

Baaghi carries over at both of the above theaters, plus the Regal Cantera Stadium 17 in Warrenville. Fan gets a fourth week at MovieMax, South Barrington 30, and Regal Gardens Stadium 1-6 in Skokie.

Other Indian movies showing in the Chicago area this weekend include:

Bollywood Box Office: April 29-May 1

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The Tiger Shroff-Shraddha Kapoor action flick Baaghi hit all its marks in its first weekend in North America. From April 29-May 1, 2016, it earned $233,793 from 96 theaters ($2,435 average). It opened in the seventh highest number of theaters this year, posting the seventh best opening weekend average and eighth best opening weekend total. Not bad at all. Further, Baaghi‘s performance was leaps and bounds better than Shroff’s 2014 debut, Heropanti, which earned just $31,556 from 20 theaters ($1,578 average) in its opening weekend here.

Last weekend’s new release, Laal Rang, has the dubious distinction of being the first Hindi film of 2016 to exit theaters after just one week. A $5,874 opening weekend will do that to ya.

In its third weekend, Fan earned $91,376 from 87 theaters ($1,050 average), bringing its total to $2,246,220. That ends any chance of Fan wresting the top spot from Kapoor & Sons, which added another $5,560 from five theaters ($1,112 average) to bring its seven-week total to $2,656,169.

Ki and Ka took in $1,954 from five theaters ($391 average), bringing its total to $919,815.

Source: Rentrak, via Bollywood Hungama

Streaming Video News: May 2, 2016

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I updated my list of Bollywood movies on Netflix with four new additions to the catalog. Well, four re-additions, actually. After a prolonged absence from the service, Besharam, Bodyguard, I, Me, aur Main, and Singham are back. Their return (sort of) offsets the recent expiration of Kill Dil, Shahid, and Shuddh Desi Romance.

Movie Review: Baaghi (2016)

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BaaghiEntertainment Factor: 3.5 Stars (out of 4)
Quality Factor: 1 Star

Buy the DVD at Amazon
Buy the soundtrack at iTunes

Baaghi‘s sheer ineptitude is its greatest asset. It assembles a hodgepodge of movie cliches into something inadvertently hilarious.

Right off the bat, the movie hints at the stupidity to come. A henchman, Biju, enters the lair of the villain, Raghav (Sudheer Babu). “We found her,” Biju declares, handing his boss…a magazine with a woman on the cover?! Either Biju is the world’s worst detective, or this woman is the world’s worst at hiding.

Probably the latter. The woman is Siya (Shraddha Kapoor), who has some sort of disorder the film chalks up to spiritedness. Siya giggles whenever it rains, and she yells at the clouds when it stops. This is her entire character.

Despite being a mental lightweight, Siya’s beauty charms two men for whom nothing must matter but looks: Raghav and Ronny (Tiger Shroff), a standard issue Bollywood man-child brat whose overwhelming character flaws are forgiven because he’s cute.

In a flashback, we see Ronny fall in love with Siya on a train journey south to Kerala. She’s visiting her grandmother, and he’s joining a martial arts academy. He arrives at the academy bearing a note from his dad, who’s basically Chappy from Iron Eagle: “By the time you read this, I’ll be dead.” The head of the school is Chappy’s former comrade, and the note begs the headmaster to turn butthole Ronny into a decent human being.

There is no indication that Ronny knows or cares that his father is dead.

Raghav falls for Siya on the same train trip, despite never actually talking to her (which explains everything). She has no clue who he is. In addition to being the head of an international crime syndicate based in Bangkok, he’s also the headmaster’s best student… and son!

While Ronny romances Siya and gets Miyagi’d into shape by the headmaster, Raghav bribes Siya’s piece of crap dad (Sunil Grover) for her hand in marriage. A bunch of stuff happens that drives all the characters apart and out of Kerala, leading us back to the start of the film, with Raghav “finding” Siya and kidnapping her.

Siya’s piece of crap dad pays Ronny to rescue Siya, a job Ronny only agrees to because he needs the money to — I shit you not — pay for surgery to help a mute little boy speak again. The mute boy can only say, “Ya ya,” which he does all the freaking time. The surgery is only mentioned once, with zero followup.

During a fight scene, the boy gets thrown about in the best cinematic instance of child-tossing since Gunda‘s Shankar tossed his adopted daughter to a monkey. There’s also a shootout at a quarry, again evoking Gunda imagery (as does all of the terrible acting and plot construction).

Speaking of evoking other movies, director Sabbir Khan and writer Sanjeev Datta boiled down the entire plot of The Raid: Redemption into one 14-minute-long action sequence. They did it so ham-handedly that the producers of The Raid took the producers of Baaghi to court. Make no mistake, the sequence is a total ripoff.

But that’s all Baaghi really is: a collection of elements of other movies awkwardly stapled together into an amateurish scrapbook. At times, the formula yields unintentionally hilarious results. Siya and Ronny make it onto a descending elevator seconds before Raghav, so what does Raghav do? He grabs a firehose and John McClanes it out the window to beat them to the ground floor!

There are many other golden moments that need to be seen to be believed, and the climax is a thing of botched beauty. Watching Shroff struggle to emote is likewise entertaining. Kapoor — who has it in her to be better than this — does nothing to help him.

Baaghi‘s worst moment is an alleged comedy sequence in which a blind cabdriver played by Sanjay Mishra molests a woman because she is Thai and wearing a miniskirt. It highlights a nasty strain of ethnocentrism in the film, which repeatedly belittles East Asian cultures. Another example is the atrocious wig the filmmakers force upon Kazu Patrick Tang, Bollywood’s all-purpose “East Asian bad guy.”

Still, it’s hard to take anything too seriously in a movie this dumb. If you’re delighted by misguided failures, Baaghi is for you. If you want to see an actual good movie, watch The Raid: Redemption.

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Opening April 29: Baaghi

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Tiger Shroff’s sophomore effort, Baaghi, hits Chicago area theaters on April 29, 2016. The action flick co-stars Shraddha Kapoor.

Baaghi opens on Friday at MovieMax Cinemas in Niles, AMC South Barrington 30 in South Barrington, and Regal Cantera Stadium 17 in Warrenville. It has a listed runtime of 2 hrs. 15 min.

Fan carries over for a third weekend at all of the above theaters, plus the Regal Gardens Stadium 1-6 in Skokie and AMC Loews Woodridge 18 in Woodridge. The South Barrington 30 also holds over Ki and Ka and Kapoor & Sons.

Other Indian movies playing in the Chicago area this weekend include:

Movie Review: Waiting (2015)

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Waiting3.5 Stars (out of 4)

Buy the DVD at Amazon

Waiting was the closing night film at the 2016 Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles.

Writer-director Anu Menon presents an unvarnished look at the lives of those with seriously ill loved ones in the smart drama Waiting.

A young wife, Tara (Kalki Koechlin), finds herself in the southern city of Cochin after her husband is injured on a work trip. The husband, Rajat (Arjun Mathur), suffered serious head injuries and lingers in a coma while doctors wait for swelling in his brain to subside.

Alone in a strange city at night, Tara turns to the only other person in the hospital cafeteria for comfort. Retiree Shiv (Naseeruddin Shah) can sympathize with Tara’s situation. His own wife, Pankaja (Suhasini Maniratnam), has been in a coma for eight months following a stroke.

Shiv patiently talks Tara through the torrent of emotions she’s experiencing: disbelief, anger, depression. He’s been through them all himself. Looking past Tara’s short temper and foul mouth, Shiv sees in her the daughter he and his wife never had.

Being together gives Shiv and Tara something they both need: a way to relieve their boredom. Having spent my fair share of time in hospitals in recent years, I can attest that the predominant feeling is not panic or sadness, but tedium. Everything happens slowly. Answers are vague and in short supply. The chairs are uncomfortable. The walk to the cafeteria isn’t nearly as long as you wish it would be to kill all the time you have on your hands.

Palling around gives the two spouses something to do. Shiv explains to Tara that her duty is to take care of herself while the nurses take care of Rajat. But time spent together allows them to put off answering the terrible question of what their own lives will be like if their spouses never wake up.

Dr. Nirupam (Rajat Kapoor) is the surgeon responsible for the well-being of both patients. His instincts are often correct, but he finds it expedient to project an air of confidence regardless of his level of certainty. He’s not exactly compassionate.

It falls to Dr. Nirupam to have a frank conversation with Shiv about Pankaja’s quality of life. The doctor says, “You have to ask yourself, what would she want?” Shiv replies, “She would want to get better.”

Sometimes people can’t get better, and the film addresses the challenge of accepting that fact. Menon doesn’t try provoke a reaction from her audience, instead presenting her characters in a natural way that sparks the audiences’ empathy. It’s sad without being melancholy.

Both lead actors are so strong in very different ways. Shah’s character is easier to sympathize with, but Koechlin makes Tara likeable and relatable, despite her brash exterior. Kapoor is solid as the film’s equivalent of a villain: a man who’s trying to do what he thinks is right, albeit in an off-putting way.

The straight-forward tone of Menon’s story makes it feel familiar to those who’ve spent time in hospital waiting rooms while also serving as a useful guide for those who haven’t. Waiting is a real achievement, and an enjoyable one at that.

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Bollywood Box Office: April 22-24

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If you’re curious as to why movies featuring Randeep Hooda as the headlining star don’t release internationally, look no further than Laal Rang. From April 22-24, 2016, it earned just $5,874 from 31 North American theaters, a per-screen average of $189. Yuck. That’s the second worst opening weekend of the year after Loveshhuda ($1,399 from eight theaters), and that movie starred a couple of no-names. Randeep is my favorite actor, but apparently I’m one of the few people on the continent who will buy a ticket to watch him as the solo lead in a film. I was not surprised to have the entire theater to myself Friday morning.

The weekend was notable for another disappointing box office performance. In its second weekend, Fan earned $353,949 from 249 North American theaters ($1,421 average). That’s a drop of 74% from its opening weekend. Compare that to how this year’s other high-earners fared in their second weekends: Kapoor & Sons (-40%); Airlift (-41%); Neerja (-27%). Perhaps Fan‘s most comparable film among wide releases is Fitoor, which saw its second weekend biz drop by 87%.

Yash Raj Films should be worried, because among Hindi films that failed to retain at least 30% of their opening weekend gross in their second weekends, none have been able to double their opening weekend gross over the course of their theatrical run. (For Fan, that double figure would be $2,677,506.) That raises the distinct possibility that Fan may not be able to unseat Kapoor & Sons from atop this year’s North American leaderboard.

Of course, Fan has plenty going for it, including Shah Rukh Khan’s star power, a huge theatrical presence, and a favorable Bollywood calendar that won’t see another wide release until Housefull 3 on June 3. On the downside, waning interest tends to have a snowball effect. Fitoor earned $2,171 in its third weekend. With per-screen average earnings currently on par with Hollywood movies that have been out for a few weeks, there isn’t much incentive for theaters to keep Fan around, especially those theaters that rarely carry Hindi films. Even regular Bollywood theaters will be under pressure to free up screen space when Captain America: Civil War opens on May 6. Fan needs a really good second week and solid third weekend if it has any chance of beating Kapoor & Sons.

Other Hindi movies still in North American theaters:

  • Kapoor & Sons: Week 6; $13,352 from 12 theaters; $1,113 average; $2,647,874 total
  • Ki and Ka: Week 4; $8,074 from 12 theaters; $673 average; $914,993 total

Source: Rentrak, via Bollywood Hungama

Movie Review: Laal Rang (2016)

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LaalRang2 Stars (out of 4)

Buy the DVD at Amazon
Buy the soundtrack at iTunes

Laal Rang (“The Color Red“) is a treat for Randeep Hooda fans, but it’s not an especially good movie.

Although Hooda is the biggest star in the cast, he doesn’t play the protagonist. That gives him the freedom to chew through scenery like a wood chipper, but at the expense of screentime given to another character who frankly sucks.

That character is Rajesh (Akshay Oberoi), a young guy from a modest background who’s studying to be a laboratory technician. In his lab tech program, he meets Poonam (cute Piaa Bajpai), a fellow student with whom he falls in love. It’s also where he meets Shankar (Hooda), an alluring criminal who sells blood.

International moviegoers may find the setup for Laal Rang confusing. Sophomore writer-director Syed Ahmad Afzal’s story assumes that the audience has a certain degree of familiarity with the Indian hospital system. (This knowledge prerequisite was also a problem in Afzal’s first movie, the political drama Youngistaan.) Without such background information, the very notion of an illegal blood trade sounds bizarre.

Based on what I’ve learned from other Hindi films, Indian public hospitals require the families of patients to source their own medications and supplies needed during the course of the patient’s hospital stay. This is opposed to the American system in which the hospital provides everything during the patient’s stay and bills the patient later.

The premise in Laal Rang is that men like Shankar exploit Indian’s chronically short supply of blood — another problem that is sadly not explained — by selling blood bags at exorbitant prices. Shankar’s blood is either stolen from other hospitals or donated by junkies looking to earn a few extra rupees. A lab tech degree would make Shankar’s black market enterprise even easier, hence his enrollment in a program with students at least a decade his junior.

Shankar is cut from the same cloth as Matthew McConaughey’s character Wooderson in Dazed and Confused. Not only are both characters much older than the people they hang around with, but they have the same sleazy charisma. Shankar is kind of gross, but his throaty laugh and magnificent hair make one overlook his less savory qualities. Watching Hooda ooze his way through his scenes is a lot of fun.

Rajesh takes one look at Shankar’s spinning belt buckle and cool motorcycle and decides he wants in on whatever action this dude is running. Soon enough, Rajesh is delivering blood bags on Shankar’s behalf and raking in the dough. Rajesh romances Poonam on the side in a boring subplot that forces Hooda offscreen.

Rajesh justifies his illegal activities by saying that he needs the cash so that he can marry Poonam, but he’s really just greedy and impatient. There’s no reason why he and Poonam can’t wait to marry until they graduate and find jobs. Then Rajesh spends his first big windfall on his own motorcycle and a wardrobe modeled after Shankar’s signature look: boots, jeans, and a flashy shirt.

A couple of characters tell Rajesh that he’s a good person, but there’s nothing to substantiate that. He turns to crime because he wants easy money. As soon as he’s out from under Shankar’s wing, Rajesh does something so heinous as to be unforgivable.

Yet Rajesh never pays for his crimes. His otherwise upstanding parents don’t want to know where his money comes from, and Poonam doesn’t care. Rajesh doesn’t really learn anything or develop a conscience, so what’s the point? Why is he the main character?

Perhaps making Hooda’s character the protagonist and giving him a growth arc would have cut down on his swagger. Who knows? Still, when the only reason to watch Laal Rang is for Hooda, why not just cut out the rest of the fluff and let us enjoy him?

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Opening April 22: Laal Rang

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One new Hindi movie opens in the Chicago area on April 22, 2016. Laal Rang (“The Color Red“) stars my boy Randeep Hooda as the operator of an illegal blood bank.

Laal Rang opens on Friday at the AMC River East 21 in Chicago and AMC South Barrington 30 in South Barrington. It has a listed runtime of 2 hrs. 30 min.

After posting the best opening weekend of 2016, Shah Rukh Khan’s Fan carries over for a second week at both of the above theaters, plus the Regal Gardens Stadium 1-6 in Skokie, MovieMax Cinemas in Niles, Muvico Rosemont 18 in Rosemont, Marcus Addison Cinema in Addison, Regal Cantera Stadium 17 in Warrenville, and AMC Loews Woodridge 18 in Woodridge.

The South Barrington 30 also holds over Ki and Ka and Kapoor & Sons.

Other Indian movies showing in the Chicago area this weekend: