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  • About GNGM

    Reviews

    “A cerebral joyride”
    Karan Johar, filmmaker on REDIFF

    “Among the most charming and creative Indian independent films”
    J Hurtado, TWITCH

    ★★★★✩
    “You don’t really need a big star cast… you don’t even need a big budget to get the techniques of filmmaking bang on…”
    Allen O Brien, TIMES OF INDIA

    ★★★★✩
    “An outstanding experience that doesn’t come by too often out of Indian cinema!”
    Shakti Salgaokar, DNA

    ★★★
    “This film can reach out the young, urban, upwardly mobile, but lonely, disconnected souls living anywhere in the world, not just India.”
    Namrata Joshi, OUTLOOK

    “I was blown away!”
    Aseem Chhabra, MUMBAI MIRROR

    “Good Night Good Morning is brilliant!”
    Rohit Vats, IBN-LIVE

    ★★★✩✩
    “Watch it because it’s a smart film.”
    Shubha Shetty Saha, MIDDAY

    ★★★✩✩
    “A small gem of a movie.”
    Sonia Chopra, SIFY

    ★★★✩✩
    “A charming flirtation to watch.”
    Shalini Langer, INDIAN EXPRESS

    “Interesting, intelligent & innovative”
    Pragya Tiwari, TEHELKA

    “Beyond good. Original, engrossing and entertaining”
    Roshni Mulchandani, BOLLYSPICE

    * * * * *
    Synopsis

    ‘Good Night Good Morning’ is a black and white, split-screen, conversation film about two strangers sharing an all-night phone call on New Year's night.

    Writer-Director Sudhish Kamath attempts to discover good old-fashioned romance in a technology-driven mobile world as the boy Turiya, driving from New York to Philadelphia with buddies, calls the enigmatic girl staying alone in her hotel room, after a brief encounter at the bar earlier in the night.

    The boy has his baggage of an eight-year-old failed relationship and the girl has her own demons to fight. Scarred by unpleasant memories, she prefers to travel on New Year's Eve.

    Anonymity could be comforting and such a situation could lead to an almost romance as two strangers go through the eight stages of a relationship – The Icebreaker, The Honeymoon, The Reality Check, The Break-up, The Patch-up, The Confiding, The Great Friendship, The Killing Confusion - all over one phone conversation.

    As they get closer to each other over the phone, they find themselves miles apart geographically when the film ends and it is time for her to board her flight. Will they just let it be a night they would cherish for the rest of their lives or do they want more?

    Good Night | Good Morning, starring Manu Narayan (Bombay Dreams, The Love Guru, Quarter Life Crisis) and Seema Rahmani (Loins of Punjab, Sins and Missed Call) also features New York based theatre actor Vasanth Santosham (Bhopal: A Prayer for Rain), screenwriter and film critic Raja Sen and adman Abhishek D Shah.

    Shot in black and white as a tribute to the era of talkies of the fifties, the film set to a jazzy score by musicians from UK (Jazz composer Ray Guntrip and singer Tina May collaborated for the song ‘Out of the Blue), the US (Manu Narayan and his creative partner Radovan scored two songs for the film – All That’s Beautiful Must Die and Fire while Gregory Generet provided his versions of two popular jazz standards – Once You’ve Been In Love and Moon Dance) and India (Sudeep and Jerry came up with a new live version of Strangers in the Night) was met with rave reviews from leading film critics.

    The film was released under the PVR Director’s Rare banner on January 20, 2012.

    Festivals & Screenings

    Mumbai Film Festival (MAMI), Mumbai 2010 World Premiere
    South Asian Intl Film Festival, New York, 2010 Intl Premiere
    Goa Film Alliance-IFFI, Goa, 2010 Spl Screening
    Chennai Intl Film Festival, Chennai, 2010 Official Selection
    Habitat Film Festival, New Delhi, 2011 Official Selection
    Transilvania Intl Film Festival, Cluj, 2011 Official Selection, 3.97/5 Audience Barometer
    International Film Festival, Delhi, 2011 Official Selection
    Noordelijk Film Festival, Netherlands, 2011 Official Selection, 7.11/10 Audience Barometer
    Mumbai Film Mart, Mumbai 2011, Market Screening
    Film Bazaar, IFFI-Goa, 2011, Market Screening
    Saarang Film Festival, IIT-Madras, 2012, Official Selection, 7.7/10 Audience Barometer

    Theatrical Release, January 20, 2012 through PVR

    Mumbai
    Delhi
    Gurgaon
    Ahmedabad
    Bangalore
    Chennai
    Hyderabad (January 27)

    * * * * *

    More information: IMDB | Facebook | Youtube | Wikipedia | Website

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Browsing Category Reviews

David: Three for the price of one!

February 2, 2013 · by sudhishkamath

 

One’s a super stylish, black and white, moody gangster film that punctuates the narrative with sudden bursts of bullets in the tradition of the best noir films. And David (Neil Nitin Mukesh is really good) is the good guy-protecting-the-bad facing a moral crisis.

Another is a grungy, high-energy, coming-of-age tale of a young musician who sets out to avenge his father’s honour. David (an earnest Vinay Virmani) here, is the good guy wanting to embrace bad for revenge.

The third is a slow, lazy, breezy, drunk… almost stoner, unusual ‘romance’ between a happy go lucky drunk and a deaf and dumb girl. David (Vikram is endearing) here is a bad guy (drunk, juvenile, vandal who goes around punching women) wanting to be good and romantic.

Yes, the fact that these three stories/genres are set across different decades –  in 1975, 1999 and 2010 – is a bit of a stretch and even more when the filmmaker insists that the climax of all three stories happened on March 3rd!

To be honest, I was dreading the fact of watching a film connected only by a name that might end up having a contrived climax that tries to tie up everything. But luckily for me, David was all about the journey and not the destination.

David is an exploration of morality – between right and wrong – and it does so with so much more restraint and style than the blatant in-your-face good versus evil face-off in Mani Ratnam’s Kadal. While I knew from the promos that the film was going to pack a lot of style, what I didn’t anticipate was the surprising amount of soul and substance and a filmmaker in supreme control, so damn confident of his craft.

Here, you are not just rushing through the motions for the sake of pace but exploring it slowly, letting your audience soak in the rich textures of character, their environments and inner turmoil. David is the journey into that part of the mind that is at a two-way fork on the road and how their demons, their Daddy issues, their meeting with their Goddesses shape their destiny.

There is so much glorious detail in David that sets it apart from most Bollywood films. Every frame is so exquisitely composed and choreographed to capture character and mood, a perfect marriage of form and content. The first is dead serious, the second bitter-sweet realistic and the third completely zany and creative. While each character study is faithful to the genre the story is set in, the journeys of the three Davids have one thing in common – they all want answers. David is about the unravelling of those answers while cashing in on its artistic licence and constantly reminding you of its fictional nature through its storytelling devices – music video-like montage sequences, stylised action (the shootout sequence is simply fantastic), surreal supernatural twists, larger than life atmospherics and lavish shot compositions that will put Sanjay Leela Bhansali to shame.

Remember that classy, slo-mo shootout picturisation of the jazzy version of Khoya Khoya Chand in Shaitan that the filmmaker indulged in simply because it looked so cool? There’s a similar boxing sequence here set to Damadam Mast Kalander. Only that this time, Bejoy connects it to what’s going on in the film and uses it to underline the David-Golaith theme running through the film. This is not style for the sake of it. This is style that underlines the film’s central conflict. As a physical manifestation of the battle with the demons.

The relationships are so tenderly etched out in all three stories – be it the classic love story in the first, the unusual bond between an elderly widow and a musician or the beautiful friendship between a drunk and the lady running a massage parlour. It’s these touches that give David its heart and their meditation on the choices they need to make, gives the film its soul. The all encompassing style with which the narrative unfolds is just a huge bonus.

David has to be among the best looking films to have ever come out of India. I’m happy to report that it’s also among the bravest. It’s never afraid to be politically incorrect, whether the Davids are doing right or wrong. Bejoy gets it right.

It’s easy to make a fast film. To make a slow one requires balls.

It’s easy to make a film as a moral science lesson. But to make an amoral film requires guts.

David packs in the spirit of the indie in the big bad world of Bollywood Golaiths.

Mr. Orange approves, Mr. Nambiar.

(I saw a bit of the Tamil version as well, Jiiva is fantastic in it. Will surely now go watch the semi-dubbed Tamil version just for him!)

Kadal: Mani Ratnam at sea as gospel meets masala

February 1, 2013 · by sudhishkamath

Kadal

Kadal is a difficult film to write about especially because a lot of why it doesn’t work lies in spoiler territory.

So do come back to read this only once you’ve seen the film. And yes, that means you must watch it. Even knowing that it is bad. Simply because even a bad Mani Ratnam film is better than most films made.

To begin with, the faulty Prologue should have been done away with at the editing table. It gives away too much information that makes a significant plot twist before interval predictable. We were better off not knowing how exactly Arvind Swamy and Arjun know each other. Because once we know their equation, it’s easy to see a twist coming the minute Arjun returns to the scene. This weakens quite a bit of the first half of Kadal.

The prologue is a weak first scene because Arvind Swamy’s priest comes across as a little too uptight for us to see him as good. He’s like that pest in class who gets you caught for copying. Which is a pity because the character actually blooms into a real person a little later when he enters the village the film is set in. He smiles a lot, he likes people and as tolerant as he is with mischievous urchins, he doesn’t hesitate to slap the kid when needed. And just like that, an uptight stereotype became a real person. Wish we saw more of this human side with his nemesis, who takes character exposition to new heights by taking the name of the Devil in almost every scene he appears. Saataan this, saataan that! Yes, we get it. You don’t have to come in black-and-black to talk about Saataan post interval, we understood who you represent from the very first scene.

It’s not just the simple black and white, good and bad stereotyping that fails Kadal, it’s also the lack of character motivation… What are the these people doing in the film?

An orphan boy who wants his “father” and the whole village at his feet, signs up with the Devil halfway into the film… So far, good. But ten minutes after interval, his “father” is dead and there’s nothing left for the boy to do but wait for the climax to redeem himself. So he bides his time romancing the heroine.  A couple of songs with almost similar visuals – and at least one same reused shot of the couple in a bicycle on the shore in both songs – put the film into a time warp.

Nothing happens. One principal character is away and the other free to do what he wants to.

The priest who has to prove his innocence and win back the trust of the villagers… does it instantly on return! And the Devil of the villain has absolutely nothing challenging him till the climax.

To re-emphasise, as the film does again and again all through the second half, the villain’s graph coasts along gloriously smooth, the boy’s is stuck in a time warp and the other is in exile finds himself suspended from the film and the story.

We have the boy turn all out killer without the slightest hesitation and turn soft again almost instantly every time a romantic song sets in. This is as uni-dimensional as any Tamil masala film, not what you would expect from Mani Ratnam. But it also wants us to learn lessons of forgiveness from the church! Only Mani Ratnam would have thought of making masala meet gospel!

There are some great moments where you can see the class of the master – like the scene during the opening credits when we see the child for the first time, as he discovers that his mother is dead. It’s such a powerful sequence all the way to the burial and you wonder why he didn’t just open the film with this compared to the weak opening at the seminary.

The first half has many such moments – especially the first half hour when the village warms up to the priest who employs a tape recorder to break the ice, the priest’s relationship with the orphan, his attempts to tame the runt all the way to the arrival of his wounded friend from the past! The subplot involving Lakshmi Manchu is quickly forgotten in the second half and the boy’s transformation from bad to good happens with the weakest of Mani Ratnam’s heroines… a girl who behaves like a child (like Priyanka in Barfi, not as over the top). Mani Sir, this is not a new type. Almost, all Tamil film heroines behave like they are 14 year olds with a crush on the hero!

Rahman’s songs are picturised great and the film looks fantastic no doubt but the overdose of the simplistic Biblical good versus evil discourse turns the film predictable. But for the unbelievable unprecedented technical excellence in the picturisation of the climax (Rajiv Menon’s cinematography brings the storm alive), there’s very little the second half offers in terms of good cinema.

The actors are mostly good. Gautham Karthik reminds us of his father and gets a dream debut, the girl is bad but that’s probably because of the ill-etched character she’s been assigned while Arvind Swami gets to make a superb comeback and Arjun gets to be all out bad, even if uni-dimensional. But they have all worked hard on getting the diction right. The technical team gets the milieu somewhat right. Rahman has given us a rather eclectic unusual soundtrack and if the film is let down, it’s only by the weakest material Mani Ratnam has ever been associated with (the screenplay and dialogues are credited to Mani Ratnam and writer Jeyamohan).

For a more superior and authentic film set in this milieu, go watch Neer Paravai (incidentally Jeyamohan wrotes dialogues for this too) which had a lot more to do with the sea than Kadal, where the sea, barring the spectacular climax, is just pretty wallpaper for the rest of the moral science lesson set inside a church!

Barfi! Let there be light

September 15, 2012 · by sudhishkamath

Genre: Dramedy
Director: Anurag Basu
Cast: Ranbir Kapoor, Priyanka Chopra, Ileana D’Cruz, Saurabh Shukla
Storyline: A carefree, spirited young man with a hearing and speech disability has to kidnap his childhood friend, an autistic girl, for an emergency.
Bottomline: The sunny, summery anti-thesis to the wintry, bleak ‘Black’

It’s tough not to draw parallels between Black and Barfi! with so many striking resemblances, overlapping of themes and equally emotional popular response.

Yet, they are at the opposite ends of the spectrum, despite their distinctively different European treatment.

If Bhansali and Ravi K Chandran chose to paint their canvas in shades of gothic black, Basu and Ravivarman bathe their film with beatific light.

If Black tried to make you cry, this one tries to make you laugh.

If Black chose to focus on characters trying to overcome their disability, Barfi! chooses to focus on the characters ability to see the world differently.

If Black was about a character battling old-age and schizophrenia and another coming of age, Barfi! is about the return to innocence as the lead characters celebrate their ‘disabilities’.

While Barfi (Ranbir) has the ability to put a smile on your face though he can’t talk or hear himself, autistic Jhilmil (Priyanka Chopra) sees the world through the wide-eyed innocence of a child.

They are not trying to compete in this world or trying hard to prove a point like characters in Black. They are happy living a life together, far away from the madness of materialism of today. Remember the seventies when songs about life used to be about how life was a song? Barfi! totally milks music for old-world charm.

It’s the Ranbir Kapoor show all the way as Barfi makes you smile and applaud with his antics without needing a single line of dialogue. It’s a fitting tribute to Charlie Chaplin and his own grandfather Raj Kapoor, the original Indian tramp and he proves once again that he’s the best actor of his generation.

Priyanka too is just wonderfully restrained for most parts. However, the best portions of the film do not belong to their story. Their scenes together look blatantly cutesy and manufactured.

Almost like Basu wants to say: “Look how much spirit these two happily disabled characters have. Please smile for them, they don’t need your tears.”

Though a far cry away from Bhansali’s “Look how much spirit these two characters have to fight their disability. Shed a tear for their struggle and triumph,” Barfi! gets problematic by reminding us of their disability all the time – even if it’s for laughs.

Why do filmmakers need to treat disability like a show-pony irrespective of whether they want to make you laugh or cry? Barfi is the other side of Black. Equally manipulative. Which is why Iqbal despite its budgetary constraints seems like a more honest film – it makes you completely forget that Iqbal cannot talk or hear.

Even if you are to overlook the plot contrivances here (don’t you just hate it when characters are bumped off conveniently to get the story moving forward?) and the desperate efforts to manufacture conflict of an epic scale, there’s that leisurely pace that might discourage repeat viewings.

The first hour of the film is picture perfect, especially, the scenes with Ranbir charming Ileana and their relationship. This is Anurag Basu’s finest hour with the visual medium. He shines with his craft, using non-verbal communication, flawless physical comedy, superbly employed metaphors and leitmotifs to a fetchingly French background score by Pritam that is really the soul of the film.

And then, one of the biggest cliches of Indian cinema (the hero needs money for the kidney operation of a loved one) kicks in a convoluted plot of kidnapping and needless suspense to make up for conflict.

Still, there’s a lot to love in this “Adventures of the Happily Disabled” once you buy into the platonic Barfi-Jhilmil relationship. It just doesn’t seem right when it turns into a love triangle because clearly one of them is still a kid at heart.

Which brings us to the film’s biggest strength at the box office – it’s family friendly. Pretty much every member of your family is probably going to love this film and many will swear it’s the best film of the year.

Strange that many looked down upon Basu’s last film ‘Kites’ though it was just an adult version of the same story: Love knows no language and it happens when two people are on the run. If Barfi channels Chaplin and French cinema, Kites paid homage to Tarantino and Rodriguez.

Barfi is a safe bet. Populist, instantly likeable, charming and unfortunately, a tad too light.

Bol Bachchan: Bad stunt

July 8, 2012 · by sudhishkamath

Genre: Comedy

Director: Rohit Shetty

Cast: Abhishek Bachchan, Ajay Devgn, Asin, Prachi Desai

Storyline: A man lies through his teeth to save his job

Bottomline: The worst remake of a film since Ram Gopal Varma Ki Aag

Sitting through Bol Bachchan is like sitting through multiple car wrecks. No, seriously. There is enough car on car action all through this unwarranted Rohit Shetty remake of Golmaal.

Well, it’s made by stuntmen, you see. Something they don’t want you to miss.

Think 12 Angry Men performed entirely by blondes WHILE they are watching the Sidney Lumet classic on stage BECAUSE they keep forgetting their lines. Or Star Wars staged by the cast of World Wrestling Federation just because they speak English like Yoda. “Talk like him, we can. So fight with tubelights, let us.”

There’s enough bad English in this film under the pretext of humour to make even Rowdy Rathore go: Don’t Angry Me.

If you liked Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Golmaal, which you sure did, you would want to protest this assault on one of the effortlessly funny films of all time.

Here, the effort shows in every scene.

Every actor opens his mouth knowing well that he has to deliver a funny line that’s mostly dead on arrival. While the iconic Ramprasad Dashrathprasad Sharma (Amol Palekar) was a natural born scum who premeditated his lies and Bhavani Shankar (Utpal Dutt) was a hypocritical culture Nazi, Rohit Shetty and his writers paint their characters in monochrome.

Here the hero lies because he is noble and his nemesis buys it because he’s kind at heart. Abbas (Abhishek Bachchan) wants to save a child from drowning in the temple. So to prevent bloodshed, he lies that he’s Abhishek Bachchan.

Whoa! So that’s how communal India of today has become.

What’s worse is the fact that the makers resort to gay jokes by making Abbas play an effeminate dance teacher who turns on an army of wrestlers. Stay classy, guys.

We can’t really fault the actors here when the lines were cursed from the start. Abhishek Bachchan gives it all and the effort shows sometimes while Ajay Devgn walks around hamming it like he’s in on the joke.

And thus, the classic comedy about generation gap becomes approximated to… well, people blowing up cars while making off-colour jokes about race and homosexuality because there are puns waiting to be milked.

Yes, you will laugh a couple of times mostly because the actors manage to salvage a bad joke here and there.

But most of it does not even make sense. Sample Ajay Devgn translating “You make my heart swell in pride to” to “My chest has become blouse.”

That’s pretty much how funny Rohit Shetty’s translation of Golmaal is.

(This review originally appeared here)

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