Iron Man 3 traverses some of the same territory. The events of The Avengers where Tony Stark had to face Gods and supernatural entities have left him with, well, something like PTSD. If you’re a superhero, the last thing you want is a tendency to get anxiety attacks when someone mentions New York. Friends and loved ones — few though they may be — try to help, but in the end, you have to carry your armour and whatever else comes with it.

Tony has other kinds of baggage as well. His pre-Iron Man persona didn’t endear him to too many people (not that the current version is Mister Congeniality either), and some of those chickens have now come home to roost. And these birds are more than just angry — they’re seriously deranged, with the firepower to match.

So yeah, he has his hands full with demons both within and without. As good as the action is (and the 3D experience isn’t half-bad either), there’s only so far you can go with this material at this point in the franchise’s history.  What makes it work as a serviceable summer entertainer is the strength of two performances.

The first is not surprising: Robert Downey Jr. has always had a nice line in sass, but his ability to switch gears in the more dramatic moments is especially noteworthy. The sass is the more important characteristic, though: here it’s more than just a lovable character trait, it’s practically a survival skill. And since the Iron Man franchise has always been about him, the film relies on him to carry us through the portions where the action gets a bit tiresome.

The second is a man whose acting skills have never been in doubt, even if his choice of roles has been considerably dubious at times. But suffice it to say that Ben Kingsley steals the film from right under everyone’s nose. Forget wisecracking armour-clad superheroes, AI-systems that give as good as they get, fiery supervillains and gorgeous women — the real reason to watch this film is an aging British character actor who gets ten minutes of screen time, five of which are worth the price of admission. If that isn’t a superpower, I don’t know what is.

Ramsu, there’s a simple three-step algorithm for happiness. The first step is to identify your metric — what makes you happy? The second step is to optimize your chosen metric — it takes effort and a bit of luck, but it can be done. The third step is a tricky one: It involves understanding that steps 1 & 2 have nothing whatsoever to do with your happiness.

Six years ago, he lost his life to an aggressive form of cancer. He was barely thirty at the time. Since then, I have hardly ever hated anything quite as much as I hate cancer. He was not the first loved one I lost this way, but his loss was probably the hardest to take.

I mention this because he has been on my mind a lot this past week — his birthday fell on April 1.

And today, I found yet another reason to hate cancer a bit more. Roger Ebert, my favourite film critic, went to the Big Multiplex in the Sky. I discovered him in grad school, a few years after I had gotten into the habit of writing film reviews. It was through his essays, especially those on all-time classics, that I began to see film as more than a medium of entertainment, and film reviews as more than a prosaic chronicle of what unfolded in front of us. His reviewing career has spanned decades, and I must have read hundreds of them, but his essay on Ikiru remains my favourite, thanks to this closing paragraph:

I saw Ikiru first in 1960 or 1961. I went to the movie because it was playing in a campus film series and only cost a quarter. I sat enveloped in the story of Watanabe for 2 1/2 hours, and wrote about it in a class where the essay topic was Socrates’ statement, “the unexamined life is not worth living.”‘ Over the years I have seen Ikiru every five years or so, and each time it has moved me, and made me think. And the older I get, the less Watanabe seems like a pathetic old man, and the more he seems like every one of us.

Here was a man speaking not as a film critic but as a lover of cinema who took something back with him from a three hour stint in a darkened movie theater, and felt compelled to share his joy with the world. And by making it personal, he spoke to all of us.

I close with two quotes. The first is a translation of a song from Ikiru that I wrote about earlier:

Life is brief, fall in love, maidens
Before the crimson bloom fades from your lips
Before the tides of passion cools within you
For those of you who know no tomorrow

Life is brief, fall in love, maidens
Before our raven tresses begin to fade
Before the flames in your hearts flicker and die
For those to whom today will never return

The second is something Ebert quoted in an article he wrote on Salon.com a couple of years ago, and was written by Vincent Van Gogh:

Looking at the stars always makes me dream, as simply as I dream over the black dots representing towns and villages on a map.

Why, I ask myself, shouldn’t the shining dots of the sky be as accessible as the black dots on the map of France?

Just as we take a train to get to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to reach a star. We cannot get to a star while we are alive any more than we can take the train when we are dead. So to me it seems possible that cholera, tuberculosis and cancer are the celestial means of locomotion. Just as steamboats, buses and railways are the terrestrial means.

To die quietly of old age would be to go there on foot.

Bon voyage, Mr. Ebert. And if you happen to see a quiet young man with a brilliant smile out there, tell him I said hi.

I make my case through the contrast between two exchanges. In Kill Bill Vol 2, there is a scene where Bill tells Beatrix the story of Pei Mei’s Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique. He pauses in between (long, beautifully constructed) sentences to play on his flute, speaks slowly and really stretches out a small incident into something approximating an epic. Consider now the story of Broomhilda as related by Dr. King Schultz to Django. This is an actual epic, and you sense that Schultz can really relate the heck out of it, but Django is impatient and asks too many questions. The beauty of QT’s cinema is that his characters relish their dialogue to the point where the Universe — the audience, the camera, even the other characters in the scene — pauses and lets them speak, and cares not for such trivialities as plot and loaded guns and Mexican standoffs. Not here. As blood-soaked as his frames get sometimes, the principal reason why I love Tarantino’s films is the dialogue that precedes the bloodbath.

Now, this may seem like a minor quibble. One could even argue that Django’s approach is true to his character, even if the tale is diminished in its telling because of it. But the trouble is not with this scene per se. It is symptomatic of the film itself, which focuses more on what happens rather than on how it happens. There is the occasional moment to relish, such as an argument between some KKK members about the masks they’re wearing. But scenes like these are scant consolation in a long, bloody film. Too much gore is not a problem per se — too much gore without the prospect of anything entertaining in between is.

Why, you might ask, am I expecting humour and whimsy in a film about the abominable cruelty of slaveowners in the Deep South and the bloody revenge meted out by Django and Schultz? I submit that Tarantino’s subjects have never been all about sweetness and light anyway — his last film was set in Nazi-occupied France, for heaven’s sake! What makes his films so interesting to me is his ability to mine that thin vein of sublime ridiculousness even in subjects that nearly every other filmmaker would treat with grim fascination — half the time, your enjoyment comes from watching him get away with it. Without that critical ingredient, what remains is a lot of stylized violence, and the style wears thin after a point.

Understand that my problem is not with this movie being different from what he has made before. I would’ve been perfectly content, had he made a good movie that was unlike any of his previous ventures. In my opinion, this one simply isn’t all that good.

One cannot fault the actors here — given the material they have to work with, they do a damn fine job. Kerry Washington has precious little to do as the MacGuffin in this particular plot, but you can see why a man would walk through fire and fight a dragon for her. Jamie Foxx gives a surprisingly restrained performance, given the description of his character in the title. Christoph Waltz does wonderfully in a role that, post Inglourious Basterds, can now be described as the Christoph Waltz role. Samuel L Jackson is in fine form as usual, but this is not a big stretch for him as an actor.

The standout, for me, is Leonardo DiCaprio as the plantation owner Calvin Candie. Here is a performance that suggests that he could’ve perhaps taken a shot at playing Bill “The Butcher” Cutting in Gangs of New York  — it is unlike anything DiCaprio has done so far, and he digs into it with palpable relish. His Calvin Candie directs the violence rather than personally indulge in it, and yet manages to convey the sense that he could explode any moment. A critical confrontation at the dinner table with Django and Schultz is handled with such fearsome intensity that it makes one wince. Django unchained can be fearsome, but Calvin unchained is a truly chilling prospect. He deserves better than this film.

Regular readers of this blog, such as there are, know that one of the genres I have a soft corner for is the one where a bunch of unlikely musicians get together to form a band. Bandslam approaches this from the point of view of a boy who wants to manage a band, not play in one — not a commonly taken PoV. Now, when I watched this movie a long time ago, I wasn’t all that taken by it. But somehow, one of its scenes kept popping up in memory often, and I have no idea why. So I went to Youtube and looked it up, and here it is.

The song being performed is by Steve Wynn, and is called Amphetamine. The original, frankly, is nothing to write home about. This one, on the other hand… the term pattaiya kalapparadhu (loosely translated to “bringing down the house”) barely does it justice.

The real pleasure for me, though, comes from watching Galean Connell (the one who seems to be coordinating the whole thing) — how often do you see someone enjoy his music like that?

The next time Mr. Daniel Day-Lewis does the lead role in a motion picture, I request you to simply disqualify all other potential Best Actor nominees for reason of not being Mr. Day-Lewis and present him with the statuette forthwith. To support my humble request, I present four and a half reasons:

0.5: If his performance in his Oscar winning turns (as well as some others like my personal favourite – The Age of Innocence) is anything to go by, you are unlikely to find a better performance in that year. Ordinarily, this would count as a full reason, but I give it only half points because on the odd occasion, some actors do manage to do better. (Although even if they did, you manage to ignore brilliant performances often enough that this wouldn’t really be noticed.)

1.5: Cutting down the time taken for to go through the nominees for even one award would cut the time taken for the Oscar telecast by a precious few minutes. Some of us have to get to work after the show’s over, ya know?

2.5: Consider his first Oscar win for My Left Foot. Look at how Morgan Freeman (nominated that year for Driving Miss Daisy) was cheering when the winner was announced. My guess is, he knew what was coming: a witty, wonderful, yet short speech that stayed in the memory.

3.5: Now, despite the fine example he set back then, so many of his contemporaries insisted on blubbering up there with the statuette in their hands, reading out prosaic laundry lists of thank-yous and making us admire, instead of their acting abilities, the writing abilities of the screenwriters that made them so watchable in the movies they won for. So he obliged by winning again and There Will Be Blood and giving us this object lesson:

4.5: One would imagine that a lesson twice-taught would be heeded, but no. We still got laundry lists. We still do, come to that. So he has won — yet again — this year, just so he could teach his dim-witted colleagues once more how it ought to be done.

However, dear Academy members, I doubt that he will be successful in his endeavour despite his repeated attempts. Therefore, I humbly request you to put both him and us out of our misery and do the needful.

Regards etc.

Ramsu

Then again, the story is crowded with people who are dysfunctional in some form or shape. Pat Solitano Sr (Robert De Niro), whose problems are relatively minor in the scheme of things, is a gambler and sports nut who has been permanently banned from the Eagles stadium for fighting. His son Jr (Bradley Cooper) has just gotten out of a mental institution (against medical advice), where he was committed for extreme bipolar disorder resulting in a meltdown where he beat his wife’s lover half to death. Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence), the girl he meets at a friend’s place, is still dealing with her husband’s death — she used to deal with it through extreme promiscuity, but has calmed down a bit since then. The extended cast of characters bring their own baggage. Perhaps the only one without her own baggage is Pat Jr’s mom Dolores (Jackie Weaver), but living in this environment can’t be easy.  That she manages to look cheerful for the most part is another miracle in itself. Pat’s mantra after getting out of the mental institution has been to look for the silver lining (get in shape, get his wife back etc.) — he ought to be taking notes from his mom, who has the Hunt Brothers beat in cornering the market for silver.

So you realize that when you put these people together, you’re unlikely to get scene after scene of sunny laughter. The strange thing is, they are so intensely, uncompromisingly themselves that they make for fairly compelling viewing.  To observe these people trying to get on with their lives would be an interesting experience in and as of itself, but to tell an actual story cannot be easy, what with all of them getting in their own and each other’s way all the time.

What makes the story move, really, is the sheer force of nature that is Tiffany. It’s amazing how well Jennifer Lawrence does here, given how many notes she has to hit over the course of the film — grief, anger, need, ferocity, tenderness and the occasional scintilla of joy, all wrapped up inside this weird package. And despite all that complexity, she makes us empathize with her anyway. We search for a happy ending in this fruitcake factory of a situation simply because we want her to have one. Well, her and Pat Sr, in whose awkward, obsessive-compulsive character, De Niro mines a vein of sweetness that is as unexpected as it is gratifying.

When that ending does come (and to be honest, this is one place where the creaking of the plot machinery can be heard above the voices of the characters), we cheer for these two more than we cheer for anyone else. As far as this story is concerned, these guys are the silver lining. Pat Jr gets it in the end. Dolores knew all along. Maybe that’s what sanity is all about.

If Maya’s career in the CIA has boiled down to one thing, Jessica Chastain boils down her performance of Maya down to one note: dogged determination. Taken as a whole, Jessica Chastain’s short career so far has provided ample proof of her versatility. This film, however, is not about her range but her accuracy. I have no doubt that Chastain will win an Oscar in the fullness of time, but this film will most likely not put her on the podium.

While the broad historical contours of this story are well-known, Kathryn Bigelow casts this specific plot in a familiar Hollywood mould: The Woman With A Theory No One Believes. Maya pursues the theory that the best way to get to Osama is to find his trusted courier, a will-o-the-wisp named Abu Ahmed. Nearly everyone else is shown to focus on the more immediate problems plaguing the Western intelligence organisations at the time: find and avert further terrorist attacks. Screenwriting classes teach us that plots need conflict — this is the central one in this film.

So she pleads, cajoles, hectors and persuades her colleagues and superiors to help her on this mission of hers that nobody else seems to fully believe in. That she is right is what makes it work, but the interesting part is that her colleagues have excellent reasons to be sceptical of her conclusions for the most part. A lesser film would have portrayed her detractors as petty-minded bureaucrats with equal parts malice and ignorance, but Bigelow adopts a more even-handed approach here.

There is, however, a deeper conflict brewing, one that Maya is not even aware of. What happens once she achieves her objective? Given the methods used to extract information from captured terrorists and their contacts, methods that Maya is very much aware of and tacitly participates in, what bill will her soul present to her when all is said and done? Barring a few moments, Maya’s intensity never flags; you never get the sense that she even wants to think about this. For now, there is just the chase.

A couple of weeks later, I watched Gentlemen Prefer Blondes – let’s just say that my reaction was somewhere between active distaste and near-indifference. I remember discussing with a friend once, that there was as much guano to be found in the old movies as in the new ones — we just manage to pick the good ones in hindsight. Except in case of GPB, our hindsight was a little impaired.

While Monroe played versions of roughly the same character in both films (ditzy blond on the lookout for a rich guy), in SLIH, she seemed to project a certain innocence that was incredibly appealing, whereas in GPB, the cynicism and self-awareness was a lot more apparent. She has her moments in the latter, but is never spectacular. And I remember thinking, she was a lot more fun to watch when she didn’t know how good she really was.

And then of course I found out that Some Like It Hot came out in 1959, a full six years after Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. She had been through twenty-five films, thirty-three years and three marriages by then; three years and three films later, she’d be dead of a barbiturate overdose. How on earth did she manage to deliver a performance of such freshness?

Ordinarily, a good deed such as a well-made, well-received first movie does not go unpunished. The result is usually a bigger budget, bigger stars (with bigger egos) and — sadly enough, more often than not — a bigger but not necessarily better film.

Neeraj Pandey has indeed gotten himself a bigger budget. It has most probably gone towards paying a bigger star (Akshay Kumar) and mounting a more lavish production (the film is set in mid-eighties India, and the period detailing is wonderful). But here’s the thing: it seems like he has spent a good bit of the time since his first film doing something extraordinarily strange: writing a good script. The result is a film that has only a few (mostly forgivable) flaws, works for nearly its entire running length, and is practically crowded with good performances.

Caper movies, like this one about a bunch of con-men who pretend to be CBI officers conducting a raid and make off with the ill-gotten gains of the rich and powerful, are as much about character as about plot. In fact, the more entertaining the characters and their interactions, the less you worry about whether the plot holds together. And since crime capers usually hinge on so many things going precisely right at precisely the right time, it is very easy to poke holes in the plot afterwards. This one is no different. What makes it work is the sheer joy of the ride. 

And this joy is to be found in abundance in Special Chabbis. Let me start with the lesser players and work my way upwards. There is the henpecked husband (Kishor Kadam) whose day job seems to be washing his wife’s clothes and generally trying not to incur her wrath. And a lady constable (Divya Dutta) who essentially has one line of dialogue, repeated at various junctures, and yet manages to make you want to see more of her.

The bigger players have even more fun, maybe because they rarely get to have this much of it. Jimmy Shergill, who exuded toughness in A Wednesday, plays an earnest cop whose palpable chagrin at having been duped provides the punchline to nearly everything he says or does. Manoj Bajpayee, who is enjoying a welcome return to form these days, brings a fearsome intensity to his role as the cop on the trail of these con-men, but leavens it with a dash of wry humour (his specifically worded request for water at the end brings the house down). Akshay Kumar, who seems to be enjoying a renaissance of sorts playing second fiddle to seasoned character actors, brings every ounce of his star power to the Danny Ocean role, but doesn’t upstage the movie by it.

It is Anupam Kher, though, who is the star here. There are moments when his character’s nervousness reminds you of the one he played in Khosla Ka Ghosla, while at other times he displays the ferocity of his character in A Wednesday. The funny thing is, although the various shades of his character here find echoes in other characters he has played before, rarely has he had an opportunity to do so much in one film. Or, for that matter, in one single take. Watch how his body language changes in the course of a walk through a corridor. This is an actor at the peak of his powers, having an absolute ball in front of the camera.

Watching these people act is a pleasure in and as of itself, but watching them interact is the key here. Notice Akshay Kumar’s actions and facial expressions during his phone conversation with Anupam Kher on the eve of the latter’s daughter’s wedding. Listen to Manoj Bajpayee’s conversation with his boss about his promotion. There is no greater pleasure in cinema than spending a couple of hours in the presence of interesting characters who enjoy each other’s company enough to talk like that.

Okay, so what exactly is all the hoopla about? Or is it just me who is unable to see the offensive material packed into a story about an Al Qaeda plot set in New York City, with significant portions set in Afghanistan? What am I missing here? Never mind, let me focus instead on the film itself.

The story, which shuttles back and forth between two timelines and locations, involves a diabolical terrorist plot and a bunch of intelligence officers who work to foil it. The frenetic pace, slick production values and nonlinear storytelling makes it seem a lot more sensible that it does now in hindsight. Which makes it no better or worse than a number of entertaining action thrillers we’ve seen come out of Hollywood in the past.

Here’s the thing: You want to tell a story where complicated machinations lurk beneath a placid surface. So you start by showing the surface, and then rip that veneer apart in a series of dramatic action sequences. It’s a fair storytelling strategy and has worked well in a number of movies in the past. Trouble is, it isn’t a good story-building strategy. Why is that? You see, the story didn’t unfold backwards from the facade. The facade had to be the result of a logical sequence of events.

So, when an effeminate TamBram kathak teacher (played amusingly well, I might add) suddenly turns out to be someone else entirely, you are appropriately surprised, but when you try to reconstruct the story later, you realize that there is no earthly reason why he had to masquerade as said effeminate TamBram kathak teacher in the first place. The answer, of course, is simple: it gives Kamal an opportunity to play that character.

Having said that, there is much to like about this film. It is, as I said, pretty slick. The portions shot in Afghanistan are riveting. I don’t know how true to life it is, but it feels mostly plausible and works on screen. Sometimes the plotting is not just complex, but also left to be complex — I like a film that trusts its audience to fill in the gaps and doesn’t spell everything out. In the midst of all this, there is room for a little humor as well, including a cute inside joke about Dasavatharam.

That Viswaroopam isn’t the film it could’ve been is cause for disappointment, but this isn’t a bad film by any means. I’ll say this, though: Had they made this film in Hollywood with, say, Matt Damon, you would most likely not have seen him play a possibly-gay salsa dancer who enters into a marriage of convenience with a nuclear oncologist.