FILM: Paddington
Cast: Hugh Bonneville, Sally Hawkins, Samuel Joslin…
Voiceovers by: Ben Whishaw, Michael Gambon …
DIRECTOR: Paul King
Paddington is a light-hearted adventure film for children with engaging twists and turns. The gentle moments intersped wigh the cute action scenes have a universal appeal.
Director Paul King’s Paddington is based on the long-running children’s book series from renowned author Michael Bond, which was first published in 1958. With a cleverly embellished back story which in fact is an acknowledged, immigration allegory, the director has skillfully updated the tale while remaining faithful to the original book.
Paddington is the story of a young orphan, stowaway, bear on a boat from ‘Darkest Peru’ who lands up in London seeking to be adopted by a home, carrying a suitcase and a label round his neck.
While at the railway station, he discovers that London and its people are not what he had imagined to be. He is initially taken aback with their indifference. He soon finds the Brown family who is willing to take him in and look after him, albeit for just a little while. The kind-hearted Mrs. Brown (Sally Hawkins), a children’s book illustrator who has a soft corner for the bear, names him after the station. She coaxes Mr. Brown (Hugh Bonneville), her concerned insurance-assessor husband and kids; the sulky teen Judy (Madeleine Harris) and tween geek Jonathan (Samuel Joslin), to let Paddington move in with them and their elderly relative Mrs. Bird (Julie Walters) until he finds an alternate accomadation. This is when everyone’s adventure begins.
Outgoing and adorable, Paddington has an innocent way about him when he inadvertently gets into trouble. He reminds you of a child learning new things. And this is evident from his first adventure itself when he accidentally catches a pickpocket and ends up as a celebrity on his first outing in London.
The film caters to children and would be enjoyed by adults alike. It is a family film with several messages and one of the messages is that families are not just made up by the people who are related to us, but friends and even animals can be a part of our family. This is beautifully correlated with, “In London everyone is different and they all fit in” and “Family stick together.”
With the right intonation, Ben Whishaw’s voice suits Paddington to perfection. Equally convincing are Imelda Staunton and Michael Gambon as Paddington’s Aunt Lucy and Uncle Pastuzo. On the performance front, the actors slip into their roles with apt precision except for Nicole Kidman. She portrays the antagonist, taxidermist Millicent, who is determined to add Paddington to her collection of stuffed animals.
With garish outfits and a bit over the top performance, she is a laugh. (IANS)
The gags, visual puns and imaginative framing devices along with scene transitions that are especially used for flashbacks, are so reminiscent of the 1990s style, that the film offers a preserving sense of easygoing sweetness.
Visually, there is perfect combination of computer generated images and live-action which results in a very real and life-like drama that is pleasing to all. (IANS)
FILM: Alone
Cast: Bipasha Basu and Karan Singh Grover DIRECTOR: Bhushan Patel
They fooled us, didn’t they? The two semi-clothed bodies writhing and moaning in the scenic water of Kerala made us believe this is an erotic thriller.
“Alone” is actually a very funny film. A kind of inside joke where the characters pretend to be trembling with terror and apprehension. But here’s the secret — they are actually shaking with laughter.
First off, “Alone” is a remake of a Thai film. That perhaps explains why there is much of Bipasha’s ‘thighs’, plus other body parts, in the film. And for all of Bipasha’s fans, there is good news. There are two of her to savour. Tragically, one of the twins is a ghost (a dead giveaway, if ever there was one), who doesn’t quite care for her sister’s lust interest.
Mr. Lust Interest is played by the film’s in-house beefcake Karan Singh Grover. Mr. Grover, god bless his pumped up muscles, is so stiff in all the wrong places that he makes the furniture in a dentist’s waiting room look like designer furniture in a five-star lounge. A lot of the playing time of this atrocious scare-farce goes into Mr. Grover entwining his limbs into his leading lady’s ‘thigh-land’. We thought such muscular miracles only happened in the circus. How wrong we were! Come to think of it, we thought this was an erotic thriller. It turns out to an idiotic thriller, the thrill element provided more by the gosht (meat) than the ghost factor.
“Alone” moves at its own weird volition. The narrative slackens to a slumber and then suddenly wakes up with a start. The plot is a gravity-defying triangle about a woman, man and a ghost, who is no ‘dost’. The frights could have flowed fast and furious. Instead, what flows is a fatuous plot about two girls who get caught in a squabble over a wooden toyboy. Bipasha tries hard to infuse life into the inert plot. She fails, though we can’t blame her. Even the stunning Kerala locales look listless when weighed against the cartoonish terror and lust of a pair which knows they are getting into the wrong train.
Forget horror. This is a comedy. (IANS)
FILM: I
Cast: Vikram and Amy Fernandes
DIRECTOR: Shankar
Let me tell you about an actor called Vikram. In I, which is actually the most exceptional film of high maintenance director Shankar’s extravagant oeuvre, this exceptional actor, known to transform into whatever he plays, stands in a room filled with multi-reflective mirrors, looking at his horribly deformed body and disfigured face.
It is a heart-shattering, glass-shattering moment.
It is a moment that would be quoted as an example of what magic a capable actor can create out of melodrama.
Melodrama is certainly Shankar’s forte. His films are not only many sizes larger than life, they are also suffused in excessive exuberance and free-flowing rhetoric that do not render themselves to a proper Hindi translation.
In I, one doesn’t mind the blizzard of bombast and drama. This is Shankar’s most dramatic film to date. Drama has never been a rationed component in his cinema. Here the director, known for his visual flair and vital connect with the masses, pulls out all stops as he takes us on a colloquial and spectacular visual discourse on the subject of physical beauty and its impact on love.
Do we stop loving a person if he or she becomes physically undesirable? Films like Rajnish Behl’s “Soorat Aur Seerat” and Raj Kapoor’s “Satyam Shivam Sundaram” dealt with the theme of love and physical beauty with varying degrees of effectuality.
In “I”, Shankar, with his extraordinary command over the grammar and the narrative’s rapid run, goes for the jugular. There is nothing subtle about the way the film’s hero, a state-level wrestler filled with a boorish pride about his looks and physique, loses it all and becomes hunchbacked and grotesque.
There is a lot of embarrassing humbug in the lengthy narration. With that penchant for over-elaborate plotting whereby every component in the characterisations must be hammered in repeatedly, the film’s moral map gets tediously fine-printed in the narrative.
The caucus of villains, which oddly includes a cross-dresser who lusts after the hero and then wants him destroyed, gets its comeuppance with infuriating mathematical precision.
But here is the thing — “I” is nonetheless an exceptional film. The main love story between the disfigured hero and the stunning model (Amy ably cast) gets its core compulsion from “The Beauty and The Beast” fable. The manner in which the relationship grows and then takes a twisted turn, is skillfully manoeuvred by the director.
There is no doubt that Shankar is a remarkable raconteur. His cinema is almost always blessed with a leading man who takes the director’s vision beyond the script. Here, Shankar has an arresting ally in Vikram, whose interpretation of the protagonist’s horrific physical change is so palpable as to make every other recent attempt at prosthetic-induced realism look strained.
The film’s most majestic chunks are those where Vikram, playing the deformed avenger stalks dark corridors in search of his tormentors. Here is where P.C. Sreeram’s magic from behind the camera opens its arms and hugs excellence. What we see on screen are visually interpreted themes on the destruction of human faith.
The film neatly balances the beauty of nature against the cruelty of mankind. The scenes shot in China against the backdrop of thousands of blooming flowers are enchanting in their summoned splendour. Watching the beauty of nature in all its glory we know what they mean when they say time stands still.
Vikram’s courtship of the beautiful Ms. Fernandes is taken through various stages of awkward self-assertion, each stage brilliantly covered and crossed by Vikram.
The songs by A.R. Rahman and choreography are breathtaking in their grandeur and eloquence. (IANS)
Specially outstanding is the fantasy opera where the Beauty is faced with the agonised helplessness of the Beast.
There are many sequences in “I” which linger in the mind long after the show. I only wish the narrative had avoided banal characters and long drawn episodes of crass mass wooing where the film’s innate excellence is mocked.
Shankar irons out the rough edges with his mesmerising power to hold the character’s bizarre fate in place. Indeed, the film takes us beyond the imaginable and the conceivable, fusing with fabulous flamboyance the fantasy element with a level of heightened reality that’s commercial cinema’s forte.
More brilliant than the film is Vikram’s multi-personality performance which holds the film together, loopholes and all. Vikram embraces the grotesque as possessively as the glorious. It doesn’t matter which language you speak or think in. Just go for “I”. It speaks the language of cinema.