Tag Archives: Akshay Roy

Movie Review: Vijay 69 (2024)

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2.5 Stars (out of 4)

Watch Vijay 69 on Netflix

Vijay 69 is a compact slice-of-life flick that’s funny and touching. The new Netflix Original movie created by Yash Raj Entertainment — the OTT arm of Yash Raj Films — fits perfectly on a streaming service.

Anupam Kher stars as the titular 69-year-old Vijay. A neighbor sees him jump into the ocean for a late night swim and assumes it’s a suicide attempt. Curmudgeonly Vijay turns up at church the next morning in the middle of his own funeral.

Even more upsetting to Vijay than being declared dead after only a few hours of fruitless searching is the eulogy his best friend Fali (Chunky Panday) wrote for him. The speech mentions that Vijay was good at rummy and once won a garba dance contest, but that’s about it.

Vijay is incensed that the eulogy didn’t mention the bronze medal he won in a national swimming competition, but that happened decades ago. When he sits down to write his own list of achievements, he can’t think of anything else. Though he has good friends, a caring daughter and grandson, and memories of his beloved wife Anna, he realizes he’s been running out the clock since she died from cancer fifteen years ago.

Inspiration for how to beef up his eulogy comes when an 18-year-old boy in his apartment colony starts training to become the youngest Indian to complete a triathlon. A quick internet search reveals that Vijay would beat the current record holder for oldest Indian triathlete by two years if he competed. Even though no one believes he can do it, Vijay vows to finish the triathlon.

The conflict in Vijay 69 is absurd in a good way. Vijay becomes rivals with the teenage athlete Aditya (Mihir Ahuja, who played Jughead in The Archies). Vijay trains under the eccentric Coach Kumar (Vrajesh Hirjee), who has local kids pelt Vijay with water balloons to make him run faster. As the old man swims laps, Coach shouts, “You’re a sea snake! You’re a sea otter! You’re an underwater mountain goat!”

Writer-director Akshay Roy (Meri Pyaari Bindu) clearly had fun with the dialogue in Vijay 69, making Vijay’s foul mouth a continual source of laughs. One can only imagine the challenge subtitler Neena Kiss faced trying to come up with English equivalents for Vijay’s colorful language.

Kher does a nice job humanizing Vijay, making him more than just a grumpy Gus. He’s vulnerable and openly shows gratitude for his friends. The unexpected alliance he eventually forms with Aditya is quite sweet.

Panday stops just short of making Fali into a caricature, allowing the affection his character feels for Vijay to shine through. Hirjee is delightful in a role I wished was bigger.

Vijay 69 suffers most when it tries to be a more conventional sports movie. Filmmaker Roy doesn’t trust the drama inherent in sport to carry the story, and instead relies on too many shots of characters struggling to increase dramatic tension. After the umpteenth closeup of Vijay looking like he’s going to have a heart attack while riding a bike, the emotional effectiveness wanes.

That said, the film’s sub-two-hour runtime keeps it from overstaying its welcome, even if it does become heavy-handed at the end. Vijay 69 is a nice story that’s small enough in scale to suit at-home viewing but worthy of one’s undivided attention.

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Movie Review: Meri Pyaari Bindu (2017)

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3.5 Stars (out of 4)

Buy the movie at Amazon or iTunes
Buy the soundtrack at iTunes

Meri Pyaari Bindu (“My Sweet Bindu“) puts a clever spin on a familiar story in a way that allows its talented lead couple to shine. Debutant screenwriter Suprotim Sengupta is one to watch.

Bollywood is awash in stories about a man who falls for a woman — often based on the woman’s appearance alone — who then makes it his mission to win the woman’s affections in return. These one-sided romances are often portrayed as a matter of destiny: the woman simply doesn’t realize that she’s meant to be with the man, so he must convince her. Meri Pyaari Bindu also tells a love story from a man’s perspective, but he is not some hero of destiny. He’s just a guy.

Abhi (Ayushmann Khurrana) is a successful — if slightly embarrassed — writer of pulp horror-romance novels living in Mumbai. He’s spent three years struggling to write a love story of literary merit. His concerned parents dupe him into returning to Kolkata in order to shake his writer’s block and force him to interact with the outside world once again.

The problem is Abhi’s obsession with “the one that got away”: Bindu (Parineeti Chopra), his childhood sweetheart. The mementos he finds in his parents’ home — most significantly a mix tape of old movie songs — prompt Abhi to write about his past with Bindu.

This version of the past is deliberately told from Abhi’s point of view, and it can’t be taken as a completely objective, even in his characterization of Bindu. In his recollection, the first thing she did upon meeting him was to hand him a pair of headphones, instructing him: “Listen to this. It will change your life.” The scene is a direct reference to Natalie Portman’s character in Garden State, one of the most commonly cited examples of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope — a free-spirited female character written as a romantic interest for a stuffy or depressed male character. The fact that Bindu and Abhi are six-years-old when this happens highlights the absurdity of Abhi’s perception of Bindu as his own personal wake-up-call.

As Abhi’s recollections progress forward in time, it becomes apparent to both him and the audience that there’s more to Bindu than her carefree persona suggests. She has plans of her own that may not include Abhi. Both of them learn as they get older that holding on too tightly to dreams that cannot be will only hurt the dreamer.

It’s a risky move to establish Bindu as a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, since it requires the audience to invest enough in her to enjoy the payoff as she is revealed to be a nuanced character in her own right. Sengupta successfully pulls it off, and in doing so tells an unconventional but totally relateable love story. Debutant director Akshay Roy shows a knack for commercial cinema in the way he interprets Sengupta’s tale.

Few actors do “exasperated” better than Khurrana, and he gets to deploy his best hangdog expression liberally in Meri Pyaari Bindu. He’s a fine match for Chopra, who gets a wider range of emotions to work with in the film, from spunky to defeated to resolute. Her performance during a scene in which Bindu faces harsh reality is particularly moving.

It’s refreshing to see a Hindi romantic-comedy that knows how to bend the rules of the genre to make something that feels new. Meri Pyaari Bindu trusts in the intelligence of its audience, and the audience is rewarded for watching it.

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