"Bobby Jasoos" (Hindi) Movie Review

You are Vidya Balan, lovingly called Bobby. You live in Moghalpura, Hyderabad, a pincode that has a density of over 100 people per sq.meter. Narrow lanes, dingy corners, claustrophic separator roads and noisy people. You have a doting mother and two younger sisters but your dad has an eerie coldness to you and doesn't treat you like the eldest child in the family - that regrettable male fixation thing. Still you pick a reputation as a quick-fix spy - someone who noses in on neighbourhood girls with "excusable" traits to help out reluctant bridegrooms or help aunties with "reliable" information. One thing leads to another and you soon become a sleuth to reckon with your own "adda" and assistants. One of them, played by the charming Ali Fazal becomes your unwilling lover and eventual supporter of all risky undertakings. One such undertaking, the riskiest one, comes calling in metastazing instalments from one Anees Khan, played with uneasy grit and intensity by Kiran Kapoor who comes in limousines and oozes out royalty unlimited. What does Anees Khan want? He comes and goes in a jiffy everytime but leaves Bobby with two brown envelopes, one gives cryptic details of the girls he wants Bobby to track down and the other envelope gives a hefty advance sum. The pattern repeats, Bobby succeeds in getting to the "X" or "Y" and the stakes get bigger. Then, at interval time, Bobby gets a doubt. What is happening to the girls she is ferreting out for Anees Khan? What if there is a twist in the tail, for the girls? What follows is a different drama with hugely unintended consequences and a cool ending.

Made by a debutant director Samar Shaikh, "Bobby Jasoos" is not a regular spy-thriller fare. It is a quirky, raw attempt at blending the genres of thriller with emotional drama and desi humour from the street corners of the bustling old city of Hyderabad. If you want to savor the charms of Charminar with a candid camera  that peeks into what a half of Hyderabad are all about - stuck in simple ways, hard living and countless paradigms of male stereotypes and "chalta hai" attitudes while eking out a honest day's labor, "Bobby Jasoos" serves you right. Vidya Balan is one woman too many in the film as she straddles many roles and costumes to come up trumps on her assignments - using innovative and sometimes bizarre ways of ensnaring her "target". There are emotional angles - the father-daughter angle between Rajendra Gupta and Vidya Balan and the romantic angle between Ali Fazal and Vidya Balan which make the film evocative amidst the distractions of a boisterous i-spy game played by Vidya throughout. The film's weaknesses lie in its treatment by Samar Shaikh. Director takes a flippant route to the protagonist's job description and makes mockery of how many folks get fooled by the maverick methods of Bobby Jasoos in getting to her targets - even as she covers humongous ground in uncovering them. She covers her constituency of Moghalpura better than what the local MLA does - covering the range of her target universe with her own sampling techniques - doing a census of an audition for a serial her aunts watch for smoking out the girls of the desired age-group or making elbow room in Spoken English tutorial classrooms to figure out the right birth marks of the girl. All that gets sometimes trite and outrageously irritating - because not a voice is raised in the neighbourhood against such antics.

Be that as it may, the redemption of the film lies in its many strengths - its starcast that is too perfect from Supriya Pathak, Tanvie Azmi, Kiran Kapoor, Vinay Varma (what a cameo by Suthradhar Agency's Vinay!) and the lovely pairing of Ali Fazal with Vidya Balan. Music, especially the BGM and the two cute songs uplift the film's dull moments. One of the songs, composed like a ghazal duet with an unusual rhythm stands out. Dialogues liberally sprinkle the notorious "Hurdu" slang of Hyderabadis with killer effect - "Hau", "Nakkho" abound enough to tickle you. Undoubtedly, Vidya Balan is the greatest strength of "Bobby Jasoos" as she effortlessly delivers a range of emotions with her spontaneity and charm. Neither obesity, marriage nor recent flops deters her confidence as she exudes perfection in her roles of a focused spy or as a misunderstood daughter or as a paradoxical lover. This may be an imperfect spy thriller by Samar Shaikh but "Bobby Jasoos" wins your hearts with positivity and sincerity to the plot. At 121 minutes, "Bobby Jasoos" is a family entertainer that deserves cosmopolitan adulation.
My rating: 3.25/5

"Saahasam" (Telugu) Movie Review

"Saahasam" is a pure action adventure film in the traditions of Hollywood films which combine action and sci-fi directed by Chandrasekhar Yeleti - a Tollywood Pro who has his own raving-fan club for making slick, intelligent and gripping films. In an earlier film interview,  he said that anybody who misses the first frame in his film will not get the big picture. Films like "Aithe", "Anukodunda Oka Roju", "Prayaanam", "Okkadunnadu" established Chandu as a director who can handle diverse subjects. In "Saahasam", he repeats one of his heroes Gopichand in a maverick role of an ATM Security Guard who is out to unearth the treasures left by his grandfather Suman in a place  close to Peshawar in Pakistan. How does Gopichand stumble upon this treasure? What connects him to get onto the expedition to Pakistan with a gang of villains led by veteran Shakti Kapoor (yes, the Bollywood baddie)? How does he connect the dots and fill the missing pieces of the original magical key which fell off the rooftop of his ancestral home before the treasure unfolds?  The entire half grapples with these questions in a film that finishes in less than three hours. 

Chandrasekhar Yeleti, for sure, borrows the story-telling techniques from the action classics of treasure-hunt right from "Mackanna's Gold" to "Indiana Jones" but he is adept at blending the entertainment with plenty of nativity and local flavor and roots.  Dialogues are crisp and uproarious, narration pacy and hardly lags except when the hunt gets into a familiiar loop in the last half hour. For a director to master the medium of Cinema, two things are quintessential - imagery and story-telling. In both, Chandu excels as he unfolds an ordinary boyhood adventure into an adventurous pursuit filled with fun and emotions. Suman as the grand-father who leaves the legacy of a humungous treasure fits well in the only flashback of the movie. A handful of irregulars fill the comedy part convincingly. Tapsi, last seen in "Shadow", seems to relish the kind of cinema that can carve out a space for her - what she lacks in glamor she is trying to make up being  the brainy male escort, no offence meant.  Gopichand, the hero, capitalises on a good story with huge scope for action sequences, he is an unusual mixture of confidence that doesn't seem like arrogance, intensity that doesn't seem like an effort, and  heroism that doesn't sound incredulous.  Gopichand has the credentials that can sustain him in the genre of action plus entertainment and this film showcases him well in that direction.

An ATM Security Guard counting hundreds of crores in a month, later transferred to the Waste-Incinerating lands at Bibinagar near Hyderabad, stumbles upon a magical key and a letter from his grandfather urging whoever reads the letter to develop the clues to get to the bottom of the treasure - the storyline is quite perceptible in today's world and credit to Reliance Entertainment and BVSN Prasad for backing a story like this which sounds off-beat in a long time.  Chandrasekhar's direction is nuanced in all other aspects except emotions. It's a pity  directors like him don't get the call sheets from heroes who are more bankable. There are two surprise packets in this watchable film - one, Shakti Kapoor - he is striking and menacing in every frame. It's a good comeback film for him. The other guy who never blinked but got ignored for almost a decade is Music Director Sri, son of veteran Music Director Chakravarti. Last heard his music for "Ammoru", Sri has composed an elegant catalogue of songs and scored exquisite BGM for a film which spans a wide canvass of action, adventure, romance. I  liked Sri for his uncompromising style of music in "Little Soldiers", "Anukokunda Oka Roju", "Gaayam" "Aavade..Maa Aavidee". His music had promising streaks and he had the nonchalance of a modern-day composer with the casualness and innocence of his late father Chakravarti. That makes Sri's music unpretentious. Welcome back Sri. Hope to see  you more. Before "Saahasam" makes way for the heavy-duty Monsoon blockbusters, take a trip down a gripping adventure of sorts without the tedious masala. Rating: 3.5/5

"Lincoln" Film Review (English)

"Lincoln" is a moving film about one of the noblest American Presidents in history. Its a film strictly based on the life of Abraham Lincoln but director Steven Spielberg has based it on a riveting book called "The Team of Rivals" which talks about those crucial second-term Presidency years of Lincoln where he had to garner the support of 22-odd Senators to get the crucial "Bill of Emancipation" passed in the Congress. The entire film focuses on this play where the Republicans egged on by President Lincoln use all the tricks of trade to persuade, incentivise, mollycoddle and even coerce some of the rival Senators to accede to the Bill which seeks to abolish slavery.



Daniel Day-Lewis has played the title role of Lincoln remarkably well. He looks the part exceptionally good - his gait, unique beard, unkempt hair, nonchalant looks, brooding shoulders, unsmiling yet sincere facial expressions and disarmingly slow but assertive Chicago accent (which today's President cheaply imitates). Spielberg has got limited screenplay opportunities to telescope the many-faceted personality of Lincoln, so he uses few frames to highlight them and these are inter-mixed with the story from the book above. And so you see some brief but poignant picture frames of Lincoln as a good husband (with a wife who "drove" him till the end), Lincoln as a born-story-teller (he never tries to win an argument with logic; he brings a story with an embedded message that does the trick), Lincoln welcomed his son's distractions at office and doted on them, Lincoln felt for the poor, kept his promises and never lost an opportunity to bring humor. Spielberg shows all these glimpses within the tight script of the story - and those images haunt you even if you haven't read a word about this man. Music by John Williams is apt and under-stated. Steven Spielberg's films have become so inseparable from John Williams' music that you see the duo's output as one unit. Credit must go to John Williams - after Walt Disney, he has got the maximum Oscar nominations - 46 times! (Disney got 52).



The greatness of Spielberg continues in the way the film starts off with Lincoln in the silhouette facing the troops in a Civil War station and the way it finishes with news of his assassination. No flashbacks, no room for over-dramatisation, no bawdy display of Americana just a mesmerising straight narrative with an elegant under-statedness. Starcast has some American greats as rival senators who stood out on screen. Set Design and Costume Design must deserve an award; re-creating a period setting like that before motors and moving images came is tough. What made such a fine film which got 12 Oscar nominations fare poorly at the BO is understandable. It got timed with the US elections, and then there was a more imaginative "Vampire Hunter" movie on Abe which got the wind out of Spielberg's film. A few more shots of the gory Civil War and a few more popular anecodotes about Lincoln might have made the film more dramatic to watch. But Spielberg being Spielberg, he wouldn't compromise on his adherence to an authentic story within a taut script. Hurrah! Anil Ambani's company is the co-producer of this proud film. It deserves 4.5 out of 5 and should be a universal audience film.