Movie Review(s): Ouija, Boyhood, Interstellar, Nightcrawler & PK (English/Hindi)
Director Christopher Nolan, who has acquired a cultish fan following over the last few years, is back. His latest film Interstellar is his most ambitious, his biggest and grandest film to date. And that's saying something for a director like Nolan for whom making such films has been child's play. Touted as a cerebral science-fiction adventure, Interstellar is epic in scale, but the film's big ideas on transcendent love gets lost in its sloppy, disappointing execution, and a weak story that's riddled with logical inaccuracies, while never failing to project an air of pretentious intricacy. Yet for all its flaws and sporadic forays into the absurd, it's a stirring and thought-provoking journey about loss, separation and hope.
Reams and reams of exposition and explanations have already been written about the story and the supposedly abstruse timeline of Interstellar. There is no doubt a lot of science behind it - wormholes, time-dilation, quantum mechanics, black holes, gravity and whatnot. But underneath all of this mind-bending hokey-pokey, there lies a simple, generic story about saving mankind and finding a replacement for our dying Earth. It's a narrative sleight of hand that's virtually omnipresent in most of Nolan's films, right from Memento to the Batman trilogy to Inception, for Nolan goes to extraordinary lengths to make something so commonplace and mundane look staggeringly complex and difficult to get grips with.
There in also lies the movie's glaring problem. The story is crammed, overstuffed with too many subplots, needlessly complicating the narrative for no reason. It's as if Nolan wanted to cover a lot of territory in one biblical epic of a movie - the depiction of a father-daughter bond, the makings of a monumental cosmic adventure, a stylish disaster thriller with dazzling visual effects, and also a story about humans' inherent selfish mentality and transcendent love. But the end result is a test of endurance, entertaining and profound only in parts. What I really took away from the movie at the end of its 169-minute long runtime is its emotional core, that love knows no barriers, and for that brilliant idea alone, this movie is worth a watch. Forget the physics and the scientific accuracy and just go with it!
Boyhood likewise is an epic. An epic drama and possibly the most realistic and natural coming-of-age film that you'll ever see in your life. Shot intermittently over a eleven-year period from May 2002 to October 2013 with the same principal cast, the movie follows the life journey of Mason (Ellar Coltrane) from a sweet six-year-old boy to a young teenager entering college. There's isn't any story per se, but director Richard Linklater strings together a handful of wonderfully precious moments as Mason comes of age. It's like watching a time-lapse video of Mason, while the world around him goes by. We witness the familiar tropes that one might encounter in any family - parental discord, sibling rivalry, first love and breakbreak, but they are all presented so naturally that you might for a second mistake them for happening in real life.
We forget the very fact that we're watching a movie. There's one particular scene which is still fresh in my mind. As Mason packs up his stuff and prepares to leave home for his freshman year in college mid-2013, his mom (played superbly by Patricia Arquette) breaks down saying "My life has been all about milestones... I thought it would be so much more." Boyhood drives home this bitter truth about life like no other movie. And for Linklater I have nothing else to say but thanks for coming up with such a cinematic gem.
There's is very little doubt that traditional media houses today show scant regard for factual reporting. That they thrive mostly on propaganda and lurid sensationalism, routinely circulating misleading stories and outright falsehoods in the name of news, should come as no surprise. It's also a reason why more and more people are turning to Facebook, Twitter and other Internet sources for their daily dose of news. However what's surprising is we now have a Hollywood film to expose their true colours and show them for what they are. Directed by debutant Dan Gilroy, Nightcrawler is a gripping crime drama that takes a sharp cynical look at the present American TV news business even as it switches unpredictably from a satire to a psychological thriller with a morally debauched sociopath as its protagonist.
Jake Gyllenhaal plays Lou, an utterly despicable slimeball who rises up in the ranks from being a jobless petty thief to a ruthlessly driven man making money by selling crime and accident footage to local TV stations. And he does it with such intensity that it creeps you out! The movie in addition to raising several important questions about professional ethics, media sensationalism and moral depravity also works as a tense, nail-biting thriller, especially in those riveting chase sequences. Nightcrawler is dark, unsettling and a stinging media critique, but is also a must watch for Jake Gyllenhaal's career defining performance.
Ouija is a supernatural horror film based on, you guessed it, the Ouija board. The makers of the movie tell it's not just a game, but I find the prospect of playing with an actual Ouija board more exciting than watching this predictable, unimaginative spookfest. Not to be entirely dismissive, the film does deliver some decent jump scares here and there, yet when every member of the supporting cast begins to get bumped off one after the other in quick succession, you cannot help but think if it was inspired by a Final Destination movie. Unfortunately the deaths aren't as gory as in those movies, which makes the entire effort of sitting through Ouija altogether a waste of time. The female lead played by Olivia Cooke tries as much to inject some life (and fear) to the proceedings, but the too conveniently knotted story fails to elicit any real tension.
Rajkumar Hirani's films are often narrated from an outsider's point of view. In 3 Idiots, the outsider (read: non-conformer) questioned the flaws in our present education system, while in PK (read peekay as in tipsy) Hirani takes the "outsider" literally out of Earth and makes him an extraterrestrial (Aamir Khan) who gets stranded on the planet after a guy steals from him the remote that's used to summon his spaceship. His search bears no fruits and eventually when he's told that only God can help him, he sets out on a mission to find Him in hopes that his prayers will be answered and that he will be able to make it back home.
PK's first half is clever and funny (the dancing car bit is bloody brilliant!), and Hirani mines his outsider concept for what it's worth by questioning our blind faith in God and those self-proclaimed godmen, but then the curse of the second half strikes. It meanders into painfully groan-inducing melodrama and an unnecessary romantic track between PK and Jaggu (Anushka Sharma, whose scenes with Sushant are equally bland for that matter) which paves the way for an ending that's contrived and totally incredulous. Even if these flaws can be bracketed as cinematic liberties, the movie's bigger problem is that it reeks of the usual Rajkumar Hirani formula, offering little by way of new.
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| Boyhood, Interstellar, Nightcrawler, Ouija and PK |
Reams and reams of exposition and explanations have already been written about the story and the supposedly abstruse timeline of Interstellar. There is no doubt a lot of science behind it - wormholes, time-dilation, quantum mechanics, black holes, gravity and whatnot. But underneath all of this mind-bending hokey-pokey, there lies a simple, generic story about saving mankind and finding a replacement for our dying Earth. It's a narrative sleight of hand that's virtually omnipresent in most of Nolan's films, right from Memento to the Batman trilogy to Inception, for Nolan goes to extraordinary lengths to make something so commonplace and mundane look staggeringly complex and difficult to get grips with.
There in also lies the movie's glaring problem. The story is crammed, overstuffed with too many subplots, needlessly complicating the narrative for no reason. It's as if Nolan wanted to cover a lot of territory in one biblical epic of a movie - the depiction of a father-daughter bond, the makings of a monumental cosmic adventure, a stylish disaster thriller with dazzling visual effects, and also a story about humans' inherent selfish mentality and transcendent love. But the end result is a test of endurance, entertaining and profound only in parts. What I really took away from the movie at the end of its 169-minute long runtime is its emotional core, that love knows no barriers, and for that brilliant idea alone, this movie is worth a watch. Forget the physics and the scientific accuracy and just go with it!
*****
Boyhood likewise is an epic. An epic drama and possibly the most realistic and natural coming-of-age film that you'll ever see in your life. Shot intermittently over a eleven-year period from May 2002 to October 2013 with the same principal cast, the movie follows the life journey of Mason (Ellar Coltrane) from a sweet six-year-old boy to a young teenager entering college. There's isn't any story per se, but director Richard Linklater strings together a handful of wonderfully precious moments as Mason comes of age. It's like watching a time-lapse video of Mason, while the world around him goes by. We witness the familiar tropes that one might encounter in any family - parental discord, sibling rivalry, first love and breakbreak, but they are all presented so naturally that you might for a second mistake them for happening in real life.
We forget the very fact that we're watching a movie. There's one particular scene which is still fresh in my mind. As Mason packs up his stuff and prepares to leave home for his freshman year in college mid-2013, his mom (played superbly by Patricia Arquette) breaks down saying "My life has been all about milestones... I thought it would be so much more." Boyhood drives home this bitter truth about life like no other movie. And for Linklater I have nothing else to say but thanks for coming up with such a cinematic gem.
*****
There's is very little doubt that traditional media houses today show scant regard for factual reporting. That they thrive mostly on propaganda and lurid sensationalism, routinely circulating misleading stories and outright falsehoods in the name of news, should come as no surprise. It's also a reason why more and more people are turning to Facebook, Twitter and other Internet sources for their daily dose of news. However what's surprising is we now have a Hollywood film to expose their true colours and show them for what they are. Directed by debutant Dan Gilroy, Nightcrawler is a gripping crime drama that takes a sharp cynical look at the present American TV news business even as it switches unpredictably from a satire to a psychological thriller with a morally debauched sociopath as its protagonist.
Jake Gyllenhaal plays Lou, an utterly despicable slimeball who rises up in the ranks from being a jobless petty thief to a ruthlessly driven man making money by selling crime and accident footage to local TV stations. And he does it with such intensity that it creeps you out! The movie in addition to raising several important questions about professional ethics, media sensationalism and moral depravity also works as a tense, nail-biting thriller, especially in those riveting chase sequences. Nightcrawler is dark, unsettling and a stinging media critique, but is also a must watch for Jake Gyllenhaal's career defining performance.
*****
Ouija is a supernatural horror film based on, you guessed it, the Ouija board. The makers of the movie tell it's not just a game, but I find the prospect of playing with an actual Ouija board more exciting than watching this predictable, unimaginative spookfest. Not to be entirely dismissive, the film does deliver some decent jump scares here and there, yet when every member of the supporting cast begins to get bumped off one after the other in quick succession, you cannot help but think if it was inspired by a Final Destination movie. Unfortunately the deaths aren't as gory as in those movies, which makes the entire effort of sitting through Ouija altogether a waste of time. The female lead played by Olivia Cooke tries as much to inject some life (and fear) to the proceedings, but the too conveniently knotted story fails to elicit any real tension.
*****
Rajkumar Hirani's films are often narrated from an outsider's point of view. In 3 Idiots, the outsider (read: non-conformer) questioned the flaws in our present education system, while in PK (read peekay as in tipsy) Hirani takes the "outsider" literally out of Earth and makes him an extraterrestrial (Aamir Khan) who gets stranded on the planet after a guy steals from him the remote that's used to summon his spaceship. His search bears no fruits and eventually when he's told that only God can help him, he sets out on a mission to find Him in hopes that his prayers will be answered and that he will be able to make it back home.
PK's first half is clever and funny (the dancing car bit is bloody brilliant!), and Hirani mines his outsider concept for what it's worth by questioning our blind faith in God and those self-proclaimed godmen, but then the curse of the second half strikes. It meanders into painfully groan-inducing melodrama and an unnecessary romantic track between PK and Jaggu (Anushka Sharma, whose scenes with Sushant are equally bland for that matter) which paves the way for an ending that's contrived and totally incredulous. Even if these flaws can be bracketed as cinematic liberties, the movie's bigger problem is that it reeks of the usual Rajkumar Hirani formula, offering little by way of new.
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