New Releases
Rama Rama, Kya Hai Dramaa
If you take all those tired jokes featuring meek husbands and nagging wives your inbox is infested with, and place them end-to-end, you will get this week’s new Hindi film, Rama Rama, Kya Hai Dramaa.
Three couples, played by Rajpal Yadav and Neha Dhupia, Ashish Chowdhary and Amrita Arora, Anupam Kher and Rati Agnihotri, go through the director’s idea of a comic look at the institution of marriage. Good wives cook and make tiffin. Bad wives are possessive and suspicious. Good men—and all men in this sad flick are good—go off every day to earn a living and put food on the table. And what do their wives do? Berate them at every turn.
Ye shaadi nahi, barbaadi hai, the old tenet which could have been a passable comedy, given that there are enough crowd-pleasing lines. Sample this: “Arrey bhai, bloody fool nahin, beautiful”. This to a peon in a bank—who loves murdering the English language—from a harried cashier Yadav, who, when he is not fielding calls from his wife, is busy accepting morsels of food from his pretty colleague in the canteen. Chowdhary is to be seen constantly clutching his brow, Arora slinking around in the bedroom, and Kher and Agnihotri-the much-married, older, wiser couple—falling all over each other.
The only one trying to infuse some life into the proceedings is the talented Yadav, who seems to have got a permanent fixture in stories to do with oddball couples. He’s been the simpleton spouse who supports ambitious wife Antara Mali when she wanted to be Madhuri Dixit. He’s been the short guy with tall dharam-patni Rituparno Sengupta. And here he is with Dhupia, who has three looks: a Rajasthani ghaghra-choli-clad creature, a salwaar-kameez- wearing housewife, and a virago in a deep red gown with a deeper cleavage.
This is low budget, low- brow tripe.
Bloody Smell of Success
American Gangster
There can be no doubts regarding the appeal of Frank Lucas’s story: a Black gangster who rises from nothing to outsmart the Italian mafia lords at the peak of the American civil rights movement, who uses the American presence in Vietnam to smuggle huge quantities of pure heroin into US soil on US military helicopters, who is tracked down and caught by an upright White officer, and who with his evidence helps put behind bars half of New York City’s corrupt Narcotics Department officials.
However, Ridley Scott could have easily tripped at half a dozen places. How to convey what Lucas’s rise portrays to the Black community, to Harlem, his family and to the Italians? How to get across the utter waste of America’s Vietnam War? How to measure the palpable corruption that runs through police ranks? And mark out the danger of being on the streets at such a time?
Scott and screenwriter Steven Zaillian, working initially on a New York magazine article on Lucas, bring all the worlds together seamlessly. American Gangster is one of the few films to give us a complete idea of the life of two of its main protagonists: Lucas (Denzel Washington) and Detective Richie Roberts (Russell Crowe). That the original Lucas and Roberts were associated with the project must have helped.
Similar in their clear ideas about right and wrong, Lucas and Roberts couldn’t be more different in their personalities.
One is nattily dressed, proper and systematic. While that should come easily to the always-dashing Washington, Crowe is marvellous as a police officer who hovers on the brink of degeneration.
His clothes, his hair, his house, his eating, his drinking, his affairs, his paunch —just so, telling all about his life in that slight bulge, standing out from the rest of his well-exercised body — mark him out as a man who is ready to go under, but for a mission. That he finds with Lucas.
American Gangster has been nominated for two Oscars, for art direction and for acting. It’s reflective of the strength of the film’s performances that the nod for acting has gone to another character, Lucas’s mother, played by Ruby Dee. She has few speaking moments in the film, but she brings everything that Lucas represents onto the screen every time she appears.
And everything that she has gone through —in the hovels of North Carolina —in one reflexive slap on Lucas’s cheek.
Brothers grim
We Own the Night
In We Own The Night, James Gray’s operatic new film, the police and drug dealers are imagined as warring tribes in a fight to the death. The Russian gangsters on one side appear ready to take out the entire NYPD. And some of the cops are just as eager to forgo the legal niceties and do some righteous killing of their own.
The film is a bloody, passionate melodrama, self-consciously Shakespearean—or Biblical, or Greek—in its intentions. At the center are two brothers: Joseph Grusinsky (Mark Wahlberg), a clean-cut, ambitious family man rising quickly through the ranks of the department, and Bobby Green (Joaquin Phoenix), who has forsaken the family surname and who manages a raucous nightclub in Brooklyn.
Cain and Abel; the ant and the grasshopper. Bobby and Joseph present, at least at first, wildly contrasting temperaments as well as divergent career choices. Joseph takes after their father (Robert Duvall), a high-ranking officer. But Bobby, while he may be as irresponsible as his father and brother think he is, also has a sweet, impulsive, hedonistic side.
But he is also, within the film’s fatalistic universe, a traitor, or at least a prodigal who must be brought back into the fold. Much as he may revel in the company of his surrogate family—the Buzhayev clan is warm and welcoming—the claims of blood are always stronger.
As this happens, the life begins to leak out of We Own the Night, and especially out of Phoenix’s performance. In the actor’s case, this seems deliberate, as if he had chosen to interpret grief as a form of petrifaction.
There is certainly nothing fancy or gimmicky about this movie. But there is nothing especially interesting or new either. The problem with We Own the Night is that it mistakes sentiment for profundity, and takes its ideas about character and fate more seriously than it takes its characters and their particular fates. “I feel light as a feather,” Bobby says in a crucial scene, at which point the movie starts to sink like a stone.
Rama Rama, Kya Hai Dramaa
If you take all those tired jokes featuring meek husbands and nagging wives your inbox is infested with, and place them end-to-end, you will get this week’s new Hindi film, Rama Rama, Kya Hai Dramaa.
Three couples, played by Rajpal Yadav and Neha Dhupia, Ashish Chowdhary and Amrita Arora, Anupam Kher and Rati Agnihotri, go through the director’s idea of a comic look at the institution of marriage. Good wives cook and make tiffin. Bad wives are possessive and suspicious. Good men—and all men in this sad flick are good—go off every day to earn a living and put food on the table. And what do their wives do? Berate them at every turn.
Ye shaadi nahi, barbaadi hai, the old tenet which could have been a passable comedy, given that there are enough crowd-pleasing lines. Sample this: “Arrey bhai, bloody fool nahin, beautiful”. This to a peon in a bank—who loves murdering the English language—from a harried cashier Yadav, who, when he is not fielding calls from his wife, is busy accepting morsels of food from his pretty colleague in the canteen. Chowdhary is to be seen constantly clutching his brow, Arora slinking around in the bedroom, and Kher and Agnihotri-the much-married, older, wiser couple—falling all over each other.
The only one trying to infuse some life into the proceedings is the talented Yadav, who seems to have got a permanent fixture in stories to do with oddball couples. He’s been the simpleton spouse who supports ambitious wife Antara Mali when she wanted to be Madhuri Dixit. He’s been the short guy with tall dharam-patni Rituparno Sengupta. And here he is with Dhupia, who has three looks: a Rajasthani ghaghra-choli-clad creature, a salwaar-kameez- wearing housewife, and a virago in a deep red gown with a deeper cleavage.
This is low budget, low- brow tripe.
Bloody Smell of Success
American Gangster
There can be no doubts regarding the appeal of Frank Lucas’s story: a Black gangster who rises from nothing to outsmart the Italian mafia lords at the peak of the American civil rights movement, who uses the American presence in Vietnam to smuggle huge quantities of pure heroin into US soil on US military helicopters, who is tracked down and caught by an upright White officer, and who with his evidence helps put behind bars half of New York City’s corrupt Narcotics Department officials.
However, Ridley Scott could have easily tripped at half a dozen places. How to convey what Lucas’s rise portrays to the Black community, to Harlem, his family and to the Italians? How to get across the utter waste of America’s Vietnam War? How to measure the palpable corruption that runs through police ranks? And mark out the danger of being on the streets at such a time?
Scott and screenwriter Steven Zaillian, working initially on a New York magazine article on Lucas, bring all the worlds together seamlessly. American Gangster is one of the few films to give us a complete idea of the life of two of its main protagonists: Lucas (Denzel Washington) and Detective Richie Roberts (Russell Crowe). That the original Lucas and Roberts were associated with the project must have helped.
Similar in their clear ideas about right and wrong, Lucas and Roberts couldn’t be more different in their personalities.
One is nattily dressed, proper and systematic. While that should come easily to the always-dashing Washington, Crowe is marvellous as a police officer who hovers on the brink of degeneration.
His clothes, his hair, his house, his eating, his drinking, his affairs, his paunch —just so, telling all about his life in that slight bulge, standing out from the rest of his well-exercised body — mark him out as a man who is ready to go under, but for a mission. That he finds with Lucas.
American Gangster has been nominated for two Oscars, for art direction and for acting. It’s reflective of the strength of the film’s performances that the nod for acting has gone to another character, Lucas’s mother, played by Ruby Dee. She has few speaking moments in the film, but she brings everything that Lucas represents onto the screen every time she appears.
And everything that she has gone through —in the hovels of North Carolina —in one reflexive slap on Lucas’s cheek.
Brothers grim
We Own the Night
In We Own The Night, James Gray’s operatic new film, the police and drug dealers are imagined as warring tribes in a fight to the death. The Russian gangsters on one side appear ready to take out the entire NYPD. And some of the cops are just as eager to forgo the legal niceties and do some righteous killing of their own.
The film is a bloody, passionate melodrama, self-consciously Shakespearean—or Biblical, or Greek—in its intentions. At the center are two brothers: Joseph Grusinsky (Mark Wahlberg), a clean-cut, ambitious family man rising quickly through the ranks of the department, and Bobby Green (Joaquin Phoenix), who has forsaken the family surname and who manages a raucous nightclub in Brooklyn.
Cain and Abel; the ant and the grasshopper. Bobby and Joseph present, at least at first, wildly contrasting temperaments as well as divergent career choices. Joseph takes after their father (Robert Duvall), a high-ranking officer. But Bobby, while he may be as irresponsible as his father and brother think he is, also has a sweet, impulsive, hedonistic side.
But he is also, within the film’s fatalistic universe, a traitor, or at least a prodigal who must be brought back into the fold. Much as he may revel in the company of his surrogate family—the Buzhayev clan is warm and welcoming—the claims of blood are always stronger.
As this happens, the life begins to leak out of We Own the Night, and especially out of Phoenix’s performance. In the actor’s case, this seems deliberate, as if he had chosen to interpret grief as a form of petrifaction.
There is certainly nothing fancy or gimmicky about this movie. But there is nothing especially interesting or new either. The problem with We Own the Night is that it mistakes sentiment for profundity, and takes its ideas about character and fate more seriously than it takes its characters and their particular fates. “I feel light as a feather,” Bobby says in a crucial scene, at which point the movie starts to sink like a stone.
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