The Descendants (2011)

Matt King played by George Clooney in The Descendants has many things:

1. A comatose wife

2. Hell-raising daughters schooled in the tradition of the anti-Dakota Fanning daughter-prototype

3. 2,500 acres of land

4. A clan of cousins who will become millionaires if that land is sold.

What he doesn’t have, is a clue.

This movie has ”Oscar Bait’  written all over it and I was already preparing myself to watch the uglification of Clooney but here he is completely believable as  a middle-aged guy disoriented by life. All traces of Ocean’s Eleven and Italian suits will fall by the wayside very fast.

His portrayal of Matt King is so well-rounded that even the way he  runs deserves an award of its own. There is ultimately no George Clooney in Matt King and that is a wonderful thing.  (He’s already directed ‘Ides of March’ this year, I mean what does a man need to do to get an Oscar around here, for god’s sake. Be Gary Oldman?)

Middle-aged, clueless and well-off guys are something of a specialty with director Alexander Payne who also directed ‘About Schmidt’ and ‘Sideways’. Mr Payne seems to be of the opinion that the mid-life crisis is not an event, but the start of  a long process that continues till you die. It’s a depressing thought at the surface of it, but Payne has a knack of revealing the humor that lies at the bottom of despair. I  now eagerly look forward to being devastatingly sardonic when (and if)  I hit 50.

Alexander Payne’s universe is somewhere between the eccentricity of Wes Anderson and the hyper-articulated one of  Diablo Cody. If you liked ‘Rushmore’ and ‘Juno’, chances are you will like this too. It’s just a hunch. Check it out.

Footnote: at some point in the middle you will see a man who looks a lot like Jeff Bridges. Don’t be freaked out like I was. It’s his brother Beau Bridges.

Rockstar (2011)

I finally watched Imtiaz Ali’s  Rockstar last night, more than two months after it released. What a blessing that turned out to be. The din of many voices praising and dissing the film finally died down and I watched it fairly unhindered by the immediacy of reviews and opinions.

Rockstar begins with a translation of Rumi’s lines : “Yahaan se bahut door, ghalat aur sahi ke paar, ek maidan hai. Main wahaan milunga tujhe.”

I am going to shamelessly borrow from that great poet and argue that when it comes to movies, it matters not whether you like or dislike a film. Beyond like and dislike,all that matters is if you found it interesting. And I found Rockstar hugely interesting.

You sit through biopic after biopic of great artists and it is hard to look away from one thing- that if you met one of them at a party and did not know who they were- you would say they were assholes. It is as true for Jim Morrison as it is for Bob Dylan. You can admire an artist’s body of work, but to love an artist is much harder. Ask Eric Clapton’s wife or Mick Jagger’s many wives. It’s a rocky road and I don’t think it’s just because they are promiscuous.

And I imagine (not being one), it is because you can’t create art at the switch of a button. It requires talent but more than that it requires the unfettering of your inhibitions. When Jordan breaks into a monologue between a song, and starts referring to old jungles that have made way for new, clean cities, he is not really mourning the past. He is mourning the restrictions of modernity. It’s not traffic. It’s not expensive houses. It’s not pollution. It is the curbing of his spirit. ( Cue rockstar primal scream) It’s also why Janardhan called  Heer, ‘neat and clean’ as if it’s a bad thing.

There is that line in the film which gets that very well:  ‘Tu toh golgappe khaa khe kehti hogi, oh by god, kitna crazy kar liya aaj!’  So funny I had to pause the movie and laugh.

Many themes  are touched upon in the film, but never said outright. That love has the potential to unlock something within you and then it needs the strength to deal with what it unlocks. Or that a successful artist needs to be ‘crazy enough’. Crazy enough to be cool. Sane enough to turn that into money.

Of course, one does need some ear/eye candy in the middle of all this pondering.  The shehnai jugalbandi between Shammi and Ranbir is just inspired. I couldn’t take my eyes of Kapoor Sr. and the sound of a shehnai is like Goosepimple Central for me

As you can see, I am a glass is half full kind of person and easily amused. But even my optimism cannot ignore the fact that Nargis Fakhri’s eyes are deader than Sanjay Dutt. And I did not know that was even possible.

Margin Call (2011)

Before watching Margin Call, I was thrilled about watching an ensemble cast featuring Kevin Kaiser Soze Spacey, Zachary Spock Quinto, Jeremy Kafka Irons, Stanley Mr Child Tucci and Penn Pretty Badgely, because that’s what an ensemble cast does to a movie. It hypes everything up and you are mostly reduced to yelping  mentally at points when each actor displays his or her brand of scenery chewing and then often left with great moments and a mediocre movie.

It happened with Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, so surely a debutante director couldn’t possibly helm all this talent, I thought. Wrong.

Margin Call is set in a fictional financial firm that in 2008  realized a little ahead of others that the markets were about to collapse. They have a little less than 24 hours to clear the pile of Mortgage Based Securities that form a huge chunk of their assets. In order to do so they have to sell it to buyers, knowing fully well that they are junk. It will ruin their reputation and put many of their clients out of business, but it’s the only way out. The other option is to sink with everyone else. As CEO John Tuld (Jeremy Irons) says, ‘It’s not called panicking if you are the first one out of the door’.

Sounds a lot like Lehman Brothers no?

But Chandor miraculously, does not go Gordon Gekko on Jeremy Irons’ ass  and with great restraint he presents the dilemma faced by the group of people who knew of an impending global crisis but also had to rescue their own firm. No one comes off looking good. At best they have job and at worst they don’t. But everyone is burdened by the knowledge of what they have done and they deal with it in their own ways.

If you don’t care two hoots of the financial crisis and don’t understand what Mortgage Based Securities are, watch it for its layered understanding of a financial crisis that is usually represented as a Bad Greedy Wolf ate Poor Honest Man’s money. And if even that doesn’t interest you then for the sheer pleasure of watching the ensemble cast throw punchy lines around. See we have come a full circle. It’s all about the ensemble.

 

Mission:Impossible-Ghost Protocol (2011)

So an ageing superstar who is more in the news for his (frankly ridiculous) religion than his movies. A sagging franchise based on a TV show that ended in 1973.  A global political scenario where there are no clear villains. Yet Mission Impossible -Ghost Protocol is a blisteringly effective action films that reinvents two franchises. One of course, is the series itself and the other is the two billion dollar franchise that is Tom Cruise.

It’s directed by  Brad Bird who shows us that not only can he make a movie about a  rat cooking gourmet food (Ratatouille), he can also make Tom Cruise appealing.  A  greater feat if you ask me. Bird takes the Cruise’s grating, smug cockiness and turns it into pure adrenalin fun. Remember that the only other director to have done that in recent times is Ben Stiller in Tropic Thunder who hid the star under so much prosthesis that most people watching the film didn’t realize who it was and laughed their guts out. By the time the credits rolled it was too late.

Mission: Impossible -Ghost Protocol is immersive as an all out action film even if you don’t watch it at an IMAX.  It’s even more thrilling because it doesn’t resort to the dance choreography style action sequences that seems to characterize any action scene shot after the Matrix released. Sometime the audience (I mean me) just wants to see some bones broken and this the film understands.

It also boasts of a supporting cast that features two Oscar nominees( Jeremy Renner and Tom Wilkinson) but you won’t be giving them a second thought when the movie ends.

What you will be thinking of is: Did a 49 yr old man just bungee jump, run on and do pirouettes in the air while swinging from the Burj Khalifa. Apparently he did. (eye popping video of him waving from a mile up on the building while doing these stunts here)

What is it? Is it Scientology? Or the numbing power of millions of dollars in salary? Whatever it is, it’s jaw dropping on the big screen.

Less jaw dropping is the villain who is woefully cookie cutter and conveniently apolitical. He wants to launch a nuclear war to end the entire world. This sidesteps many messy parallels to the real world and widens the box office markets for the film without alienating a single country with a negative portayal. It’s both very savvy and very dull.

But I would watch it again. Preferably at an IMAX.