Not that there is nothing to like. There are a few quiet scenes, especially between Mee and his zookeeper Kelly (Scarlett), that work quite well. Mee’s struggles in dealing with an ailing tiger are reasonably well done, but one moment where he looks at it and asks, “Is it time?” is heartbreaking.

There is however one scene where Crowe absolutely brings his A game. It comes right at the end, when Mee takes his children to the restaurant where he first met their mother. In an early scene, he refuses to go to that restaurant because of that very reason, so you know right then that he would eventually return here. The little exchange that concludes the scene (and the film) is cute if not exceptional, but has the added bonus of explaining an earlier conversation between him and Kelly and ensures that we walk out with a little smile and a chuckle.

But really, it is the manner in which this scene is played that makes it worthwhile.  As Mee relives that scene before them, you see an energy that the rest of the film lacks. While this is somewhat credible given that the plot involves him getting over her loss, it is in this scene that you feel like you’re watching something made by the man responsible for “You had me at hello.“

• Wanted (the English version involving curving bullets and a curvier Angelina Jolie): Given how often the lead character gets beaten up, he could easily have been played by Vadivelu and given the moniker of Bullet Bhupati.
• 7 aam Arivu: Surely Body Soda (Pokkiri) was Bodhidharma’s descendant?
• The Harry Potter series: Snake Babu (Arya), the true heir of Slytherin. Think about it: when a dark wizard of Voldemort’s stature faces off against a teenager he is unable to kill, wouldn’t his first thought naturally be: Enna chinna pulla-thanama irukku?
• Mission Impossible 4: The fate of the Anil Kapoor character is the epitome of vada pochche.
• The Star Wars series: Body Soda (Pokkiri) for Yoda or Kanduvetti “Terror Face” Karuppu (Kathavarayan) for Jabba the Hutt. Your choice.
• The Fantastic Four: Admit it, Theeppori Thirumugam (Englishkkaran) would’ve kicked Johnny Storm’s butt.
• King Kong: Bannerjee (Aadhavan). In his own words.
• The Seven Samurai: Oh, come on, had it not been Toshiro Mifune playing Kikuchiyo, wouldn’t it have occurred to you as well?

I am yet to figure out how Citizen Kane can be improved. Given our man’s physical proportions, rosebud comes to mind. But beyond that, nothing. Ideas are welcome.

ps: Yes, I need therapy. Thank you for noticing.

It is an early indicator of the method Selvaraghavan employs to tell this story — what you need to know is often told either in shorthand, or not at all. Indeed, Mayakkam Enna is eloquent when it tells a story through its silences. But when it descends to talking, or when it makes use of silence as a plot device, it loses much of its momentum.

The first half concentrates on two subjects — Karthik’s struggle to become a professional phtographer, and the love triangle between him, his best friend and the girl the friend is dating. The former plot line is elevated by the moments of wordless communion between the photographer and his subject. There’s a scene in the jungle where he is overwhelmed by the beauty of what he is seeing. The scenes involving the reputed photographer whom Karthik wants to work with feature dialogue that is a lot harsher than it needs to be. But the story is really told through the desperation you see in Karthik’s eyes during those exchanges. The love triangle is almost entirely narrated through the way the girl looks at him (and how he tries not to respond, in deference to his friend).

The second half concentrates on the fall and rise of Karthik as a photographer, and the price that is paid in the process. This is where the film goes pear-shaped, really. Think about it — if you’re so pissed off at your husband that you literally stop talking to him, would you still boink him anyway and get yourself knocked up? I highly doubt it. Come to think of it, her character makes weird choices throughout the story. I can see the point of creating an intriguing character, but I don’t think it’s the same as creating one who needs her head examined. The sheer implausibility of it all is a big distraction.

Having said that, there are some isolated moments that keep you involved. My favourite is the one where he begins to turn his life around and does the usual dramatic thing — dumping a bottle of booze. Ah, but first, he pours himself a drink. (Why does he do that? Is it because he feels he cannot quit cold turkey?)

You might notice that nearly every scene I speak of involves Dhanush. This is no coincidence. Karthik’s story is told through a series of uncomfortable moments with the odd interlude of inner peace, and Dhanush responds to the challenge with a magnificient performance. This is an actor at the peak of his abilities, pushed to the brink by a director who knows what he is working with.

Now, if only we could convince him not to intersperse these efforts with turkeys like Mappillai… movies for which the most apt description is a paraphrasing of a term from this movie itself: aai padam.

ps: Also read a couple of lovely articles on this movie, by Gradwolf and Baradwaj Rangan.

In this case, that man is Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland Athletics. Beane was a gifted athlete whose pro-baseball career fizzled out, but who found a lot more success after his move to the management side of things. He was given the task of building and managing a team that had far fewer dollars to play with than its competitors (less than a third of what the New York Yankees had to work with), and responded by trying to find undervalued players who could help the team win.

How did they do this? The simple, yet superficial answer would be statistics. A lot of rigorous statistical analysis replaced the conventional wisdom used by the scouts working for baseball teams. Instead of letting the scouts influence the decisions on who a team picked and for how much, Beane based his decisions on the work of his analysis team, led by a Harvard economics graduate named Paul DePodesta.

But as anyone who has a lot of data on his hands knows, you can coax a large enough database into giving you any conclusion you want. What really matters when you delve into the world of baseball statistics is an ability to figure out what you should be looking for. Lewis uses a number of examples about both batters and pitchers to convey this point, and this is where the jargon gets in the way of the narrative.  If you don’t know baseball, you might find it difficult reading.

The film has the same problem — there were scenes where my response was driven primarily by the expressions on the characters’ faces and not by what they were saying. It was like watching a foreign movie without subtitles. These scenes are rescued by the acting, and by the fact that we understand the emotional context of the scene, if not the specific topic being discussed. As a result, we stay involved enough in the narrative to cheer when Beane’s unorthodox methods produce spectacular results.

In 2002, the Oakland As put together the longest winning streak in the history major league baseball. As Paul himself might say, that’s a bit of a statistical freak with not a large enough sample size to back it up. But the truth is, the 2002 season was not the first time that the As did so well with so little money, or the first time Beane went looking for undervalued draft picks. It was just the season where his methods were most evident and came under the most stress (three of his best players had just been bought by other, richer teams).

While the movie is principally about Beane, and how he championed the use of new techniques to be “the card counter at the blackjack table”, the book uses it as a jump-off point to profile a bunch of people whose work influenced him and his team. This idea of focusing on a little band of idiosyncratic outsiders is something Lewis uses again in The Big Short, his chronicle of the subprime mortgage crisis.

Chief among the outsiders here is Bill James (who was later hired by the Boston Red Sox), who is among the best known pioneers in this area. When one says, “James wrote the book on meaningful baseball stats”, it’s not a figure of speech — he literally wrote a series of books with all kinds of baseball stats. But more than the numbers he crunched, it was the kind of analysis he provided that really had an impact on the game.

As someone employed in the field of data mining, I can understand why this character strikes a chord with me. I can imagine being engrossed by a biography/biopic of James himself. But I can also see why the focus of the book and the movie is not James but Beane — he was the man who staked his career on these ideas. Given how much it went against the conventional wisdom prevalent in major league baseball, he’d have been flipping burgers if it hadn’t panned out. The fact that Beane had, in the past, shown himself incapable of dealing with failure, meant that flipping burgers was not the worst of the consequences one would worry about when it came to him.

As interesting as Beane is on the printed page, what makes him tough to base a movie around is that a team manager’s involvement with the game does not seem as immediate as that of a player or even that of a coach. So the filmmaker is stuck with the challenge of making a sports movie where the sport is as much of an abstraction as a stock ticker in a movie set in Wall Street. Even a movie like Jerry Maguire, which was about a sports agent and only peripherally about the sport, had one of those big last-minute-play moments. This one has no major scenes on the field, no inspirational speeches… none of the traditional dramatic flourishes that we’ve come to expect, really. But it works, and we are involved, because in its own understated way. Brad Pitt’s performance helps immeasurably — here is an actor who is more often admired for looking good, and therefore underrated as an actor. By the time he gets an offer to manage the Red Sox at what was then an unheard-of salary, the film has quietly built up such a dramatic head of steam that we cheer, even though the scene is quiet as they come.

You don’t always need great dramatic flourishes to draw people in. Quiet observation of interesting people will do just as well. What is significant doesn’t always have to be the thing that draws our attention at first glance. Which, I suppose, is what the story is about.

ps: It occurs to me that I have not said anything about the extent to which the movie is faithful to the events and characters depicted in the book. It also occurs to me that this is not a significant variable in the equation.

But where the Joker was more interested in chaos for its own sake, Professor James Moriarty is interested in profiting from it. The plot involves Holmes and Watson racing across Europe trying to prevent catastrophe, and finding Moriarty almost always a step ahead. The challenge is something both Holmes and his arch-enemy relish, but Watson? As Mary Morstan-Watson observes at one point, Holmes is likely to want to join them on their honeymoon. Watson himself regards his dear friend with a mixture of admiration, amusement, exasperation and the occasional kolaveri.

The film is populated with a fine cast of character actors. Stephen Fry has a scene-stealing turn as Holmes’ brother Mycroft. “You mean there are two of you?” asks Mary at one point, and you can see why she feels that way. Jared Harris exudes a quiet menace as Moriarty. His exchanges with Holmes are beautifully written and acted. Noomi Rapace plays a gypsy fortune-teller — she does as good a job as the role lets her, but you cannot escape the feeling that this is scant reward for playing Lisbeth Salander in the Swedish film series. (Not that the man playing Kalle Blomkvist fared any better.)

The highlight, though, is the Robert Downey Jr. — Jude Law pairing. While the books centered around Holmes and made Watson more of an observer, the films edge closer to buddy-action-movie territory (think Lethal Weapon with period costumes and more deductive reasoning) and their chemistry is absolutely electric. Downey Jr. is an inspired choice to play Holmes — he is capable of playing the role straight, I’m sure, but who better to bring out the detective’s innate kookiness? Law plays the straight man, but delivers his zingers at Holmes with such relish that he makes you wonder why Conan Doyle made Watson look like such a wuss in the first place.

It helps, I think, that the cast and crew don’t treat this like a film adaptation of Sherlock Holmes, but rather like a film series involving a character who might remind you, at times, of a fictional detective you once read about. While there is a lot more action than you might find in your average Holmes story, Ritchie uses some clever editing and economical dialogue to illustrate his hero’s powers of deduction. The result is a kinetic, witty and entertaining motion picture.

What makes this film stand out in my opinion is how taut Bruce Lee seems throughout the movie. Every moment that he is on screen, he looks poised to explode. My favourite moment, however, comes after one such explosion has just occurred.

In his first match in the tournament, he faces off against the man responsible for his sister’s death. To call it an one-sided contest is to do it a disservice. The closest equivalent in the movies is the scene where a black mamba strikes Budd in Kill Bill Vol 2. At one point, in desperation, the man tries to attack Lee with a broken bottle. It turns out to be the tipping point — Lee not only disarms him, he goes a step further and kills him. The camera focuses, however, on Lee’s face, and how his muscles slowly relax into something resembling normalcy.

The sequence is somewhat foreshadowed by earlier exchange between him and his master:

Shaolin Abbott: What is the highest technique you hope to achieve ?
Lee: To have no technique.
Shaolin Abbott: Very good. What are your thoughts when facing an opponent ?
Lee: There is no opponent.
Shaolin Abbott: And why is that ?
Lee: Because the word “I” does not exist.
Shaolin Abbott: So, continue…
Lee: A good fight should be like a small play, but played seriously. A good martial artist does not become tense, but ready. Not thinking, yet not dreaming. Ready for whatever may come. When the opponent expands, I contract. When he contracts, I expand. And when there is an opportunity, I do not hit. It hits all by itself.

As wonderfully phrased as that is, one does wonder if the “I” did not exist during that fight. I am not entirely convinced that it did not — his last words to the villain are, after all: “You have offended my family and you have offended the Shaolin Temple. “

But when his face slowly relaxes after that fight, you get a palpable sense of seeing him enter his own body after it has hit all by itself.

A megalomaniac has obtained control of a nuclear device and is likely to detonate it in x hours. The world teeters on the brink of destruction. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to stop said megalomaniac and save the world. If you are stupid or unlucky enough to get caught while doing this, we strongly recommend suicide, ’cause we’ll disavow you and you really don’t wanna drop the soap in the showers of those foreign prisons. This message will self-destruct in five seconds.

It’s that highlighted phrase that always gets to me. Ask yourself how likely it is that you’ll say: “Nah, I’m having too good a time here. You carry on without me. I’m sure there are other  agents chomping at the bit and hoping I’ll turn this one down so that they can get a nice bullet point on their resume.”

Maybe it does happen sometimes. Maybe, like Terry Pratchett says, in some other universes this would be a very short movie. But he does choose to accept it, and it isn’t such a short movie after all, but it does manage not to outstay its welcome.

As thrill-a-minute rides go, though, this one is more entertaining than most. For one thing, the action set pieces are as spectacular as one would hope. For another, the movie plays like the other MI/Bond movies would play if all those cool gadgets worked like they really do in the universe we inhabit. The device conveying the mission brief doesn’t always self-destruct on schedule, for instance.

And yet our intrepid heroes keep plugging away and finding ways around all those little glitches, even if they’re hanging from a glass wall on the Burj Khalifa. And while they do this, they find time for the odd wisecrack or two. The actors inhabiting these roles (Tom Cruise, Paula Patton, Jeremy Renner and Simon Pegg) do a wonderful job of making it all work. The villain (Michael Nykvist, who plays Mikael Blomkvist in the Swedish film versions of the Steig Larsson novels) doesn’t have much to do, primarily because his opponents are more busy debugging than saving the world from him. But what little screen time he has, he uses effectively. Anil Kapoor is present primarily for comic relief (although I am not entirely convinced that this was intentional).

Here’s the thing, really: I watched the entire movie questioning every little thing that went wrong, asking myself how it would all get explained in the end by some grand plot twist. With that came the realization that, had it not been for the labyrinthine deceptions that characterized the first movie in the series, I would probably have just leaned back and let things go bang all around me.

Baradwaj Rangan, in his review of the movie, says:

They could design a game from these films. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to recount the plot in detail.

Personally, I liked it better when that mission was impossible.

Conviction

A man is wrongfully convicted of murder and spends the better part of his adult life in prison before his sister proves his innocence and has him released. The story is not about him, though — it is about how a high school dropout and housewife and mother of two decides to get her high school diploma and then put herself through college and law school so that she could fight her brother’s case herself. If it weren’t a true story, I’d probably have dismissed it as one more instance of Hollywood putting dramatic impact above plausibility.

That the man is played by Sam Rockwell might not come as a surprise, but it is easy to imagine a number of other talented character actors in the role. But can you think of anybody else except Hillary Swank in his sister’s role?

There is a moment when she visits her brother in prison after he has just tried to kill himself. Watch the way she reacts to this and gently extracts from him, a promise never to do that again. I was reminded for a moment of Laura Linney’s performance in Love Actually, where she reacts to her brother losing control and trying to hit her. It is not a note readily suggested by the plot, but it is what lets Swank differentiate this character from the other strong women she has played before.

Made in Dagenham

As late as the second half of the last century, most companies in the industrialized world still paid women less than men for doing the same work. Then a bunch of women who used to stitch the upholstery on Ford cars at one of their plants in the UK decided to go on strike in protest. It snowballed into a nationwide movement, embarrassed the Labour Government which was in power at that time and led to the creation of new legislation mandating equal pay for women and men. Other nations followed suit.

The movement is spearheaded by a woman named Rita O’Grady (a composite character based on a number of real ones), played by Sally Hawkins. This is the first movie I have seen her in and, if this performance is any indication, I will eagerly look forward to watching anything else starring her, even if it turns out to be a commercial for some brand of fabric softener.

The crucial exchange, for me, is one she has with her husband late in the movie when he claims to have been a good husband because he doesn’t get drunk or abusive. Her response to that is: That is as it should be.

Another gem of an exchange comes when reporters ask her how they would cope if the Government refused to support their demands, she responds with: Cope? We’re women. Don’t ask stupid questions.

Queen to Play

This one’s quite different from the other two, in that it is a little story about a Corsican maid who learns to play chess under the mentorship of one of her employers and finds, within the logical labyrinth of this fascinating game, the keys to her own life. The relationship between the maid and her mentor seems poised on the edge of sexuality sometimes — there is a scene involving them playing a sort of blindfold chess that puts the Steve McQueen-Faye Dunaway scene from The Thomas Crown Affair to shame. But what really drives it is the respect they have for each other’s minds and talent. A bit like Girl with a Pearl Earring and Once.

The leads are perfectly cast. Kevin Kline shows himself capable of investing a line like “Knight to d4″ with more emotion than I would’ve thought possible. Sandrine Bonnaire looks like a woman you might cross on the street without noticing, but when she smiles, well… But for much of the film’s running time, you just see her thinking. I didn’t think it would be so absorbing to watch someone do that, but she makes it so. It takes a special talent to be able to do without dialogue like “Knight to d4″.

1. Get yourself to Bangalore. If you live here, it’s a relatively short commute in non-peak hours.
2. Look up Jagriti Theatre in Whitefield and get tickets to Lysistrata.
3. Try not to laugh too loudly.
4. Be warned, though: The original play was pretty damn raunchy to begin with, and these folks haven’t watered it down in their update.

2500 years ago, a man named Aristophanes wrote a comedy about the women of Athens and Sparta going on a sex strike so that their men would stop fighting. The Jagriti version keeps the general plot and the names intact and updates the dialogue to include references to Bangalore landmarks and the odd current event. The result is a curiously anachronistic mishmash that nevertheless manages to tickle the funny bone throughout its running time.

Jagriti is a pretty small theatre — you sit so close to the stage that you feel almost part of the performance. On top of which, the dialogue breaks the fourth wall so often, it almost feels like a conversation with you rather than between the cast members. This can, in theory, be pretty distracting, but it works because the performances are so strong. Especially the ones by Deepika Arwind (Lysistrata) and Sukhita Aiyar (Calonice).

Aside: If I do have a complaint, it is that they don’t introduce the cast members at the end of the play, so I had to spend some time on the net to figure out who played who.

As anti-war works centered around women go, Terry Pratchett’s Monstrous Regiment still ranks number one on my list. But thanks to my experience on Saturday evening, Lysistrata comes a close second.

Kapur narrates an indicent following the release of his film debut, a film named Ishq Ishq Ishq that his uncle Dev had produced and directed. He speaks of how, just after the release, the man was taking calls from well-wishers and distributors. Over the course of the evening, it became clear that the film was a disaster at the box office.

Then the calls stopped. No one called and the loneliness of failure hung in the room. Dev Anand has just lost everything. All his money and everything he sold to make his most ambitious project ever. There are few more intimate moments you could share with a courageous man than his coming to terms with complete defeat. He was sad. Reflective.

For all of five minutes. He then looked at me and smiled.

” I just be back ‘Shekharonios’ (thats what he called me) and went into the bedroom of the suite. I should have felt sorry for my first foray out as a (minor) actor flopping, but was too caught up in the incredible drama unfolding in front of me.

Ten minutes Dev Anand emerged. His his eyes were vibrant. His face excited. He was unable to sit down for his excitement. Looked me in the eyes.

” Shekharonios, I just thought of a great plot for my next film !!”

He picked up his register. Took out a pen and started to write. How does a man who just lost of everything come to terms with it so easily? I was left gaping. But knew it was time for me to leave him alone. To write and plan his next film. He never talked about Ishq Ishq again.

Thats the Dev Uncle I knew.

But the Dev Uncle I did not know. The Dev Sahib, the Dev Anand that the world did not know, was the man coming to terms with himself in 10 minutes in that room.

If there is a more moving tribute to Dev Anand than that last sentence, I have not read it.