Post by odadune on Oct 4, 2015 0:06:03 GMT
The More Casual Fan dropped me off at this one and went to go see Jurassic World Imax. The road construction nonsense near the Big Theater Far Away keeps getting worse, so I don't know when my next chance to get to see an Indian movie on the big screen will happen. I want to see both Bajirao Mastani and Airlift at the theater, but am not sure it will happen.
SIB was produced by PEN, which distributed and promoted Akshay's film Entertainment last year. SIB, like Entertainment before it, had an incredibly awful trailer and pretty charming song promos, so I was expecting something at about the level of Entertainment: good-natured, bland, mostly harmless, sort of midway between the two extremes that the promos represented. I was pleasantly surprised to get a movie that was consistently cute, likable, funny, cool to look at, and where the supporting cast actually held up their end well. The humor is silly and comes with its share of wacky sound effects but feels much more mellow and comfortable than the standard Stupid Shouty Bollywood Comedy.
Akki plays Raftaar Singh, a mild-mannered and not overly bright Punjabi who's pretty physically adept but just can't finish what he starts. His father ships him off to work for a friend who owns a fairly legit casino boat in Goa, who in turn assigns Raftaar and his minions/buddies (played by Anil Mange and Arfi Lamba) as bodyguards/factotums to Sara (Amy Jackson), the heavily westernized daughter of an NRI friend of the casino owner. Sara's lying low in Goa to get away from an unwanted gangster admirer (Kay Kay Menon, who is having a blast) and to search for her estranged mother. Since Sara speaks no Hindi and the "three morons" as she terms them, speak no English, they hire Emily (Lara Dutta) to translate for them with complicated results. Raftaar, after being mildly annoyed by Sara at first meeting, quickly falls for her, but has no way to communicate with her, especially since Emily decides it is her job to shield poor sweet innocent Sara (who's already in trouble for kicking one bad guy's rear end, and will kick numerous other bad guys' rear ends over the course of the film) from Raftaar, whom Emily believes to be a dangerous gangster.
Lara Dutta is someone I don't normally feel strongly about, but she is really funny and likable here, and the running gag about her sleep-walking around the bungalow and the minions thinking she's trying to seduce them is handled with a light, PG-rated touch while making the case, that yes, at 37, she's still a looker, it's just Emily's dubious fashion sense that keeps people from noticing. What I like about the Emily character is that the whole timid translator business is a role a man could have played (it feels kind of like a Rajpal Yadav role actually), but they gave it to a woman and she made it her own. "Character" roles for women, aside from mothers, grandmothers and the occasional sister or more mature vamp are still rare; a comedic female character that isn't about fat jokes or an overwrought libido is downright unique. I hope to see more like her.
Amy Jackson is also playing something a bit more than a standard flowerpot heroine; she's sort of simultaneously playing Sonu Sood's character from Singh is Kinng (the stone-cold bada$$ who needs to get in touch with his warmer side) and Katrina Kaif's character from Singh is Kinng (the bossy Nonresident Eyecandy looking to reunite with her mother). The film handles the fanservice moments with her in a fairly restrained fashion; she wears form-fitting clothes a lot of the time (and goes bare-legged in Goa) but it doesn't cross the line into being vulgar. She has very little dialogue and is kind of hit and miss when it comes to emoting verbally, but you believe in her as the tough chick, you believe in her as the girl sadly brooding over her lost mother and bonding with her potential mother-in-law (Rati Agnihotri), you believe in her progression from being annoyed with Raftaar (but rather cold-bloodedly aware that he's an impressive specimen) to being grudgingly impressed with his good traits to being attracted to him. The romance is carefully structured so that Raftaar and Emily fall for each other more by observing what the other does than by romancing each other head-on; so that you're not hit in the face with the huge age gap. (The decision to darken Akki's beard digitally in post and the fact that he was in particularly good physical condition after shooting Brothers both help as well.)
Akshay is playing a character type he's had a lot of experience with, but this time he plays it with more warmth and dignity, more sympathy for the character's failures, than he usually does, while still being pretty darned funny. He kicked butt when required, he made me giggle, he made me cry, he made me root for him, and he wore outrageous clothes with great panache, and he generally didn't embarrass me, which is all I ask from his more light-hearted films. I liked his character refusing to brawl in a church.
As a director, Prabhudheva is all about putting fun embellishments on other people's ideas; his directoral debut was a Telugu film remixing elements of Sooraj Barjatya's hits, his Hindi-language debut was Wanted (a remake of a Telugu masala film originated by someone else that Prabhu had already remade in Tamil); his most financially successful film to date was Rowdy Rathore (a remake of a Telugu film originally directed by the guy who did Baahubali, and written by the guy who wrote Baahubali and Bajrangi Bhaijaan). In between, he did Tamil remakes of the Munnabhai films, and a Tamil-language remake of Billy Wilder's Love In The Afternoon. In this case, he observes the components of the Singh is Kinng formula-the comedic gangsters, the simple Sardar, the exotic locations and angrezi-spouting heroine, and produces an equally mellow, unthreatening movie with (IMO) more entertaining song picturizations and more consistently entertaining material in between the songs. The songs themselves are above-average by 2015 standards but not ZOMGosh awesome; my favorite songs were Singh & Kaur and Dil Kare Chu, my favorite picturizations were Tung Tung, Cinema Dekha Mamma (which is AWESOME on the big screen), and Singh & Kaur.
In terms of problematic content, I would say there isn't much. The film somehow makes the 48-year-old hero, the 54-yr-old character actress playing his mother, the late-20s/early-30s actors playing his buddies, and the 23-yr-old firangi playing his NRI girlfriend, all seem like they belong in those roles. I'm not going to judge the filmmakers too harshly for hiring Amy when their previous (desi) heroine left due to schedule conflicts and they needed a girl with some action experience who could give them her dates on short notice. The fact remains: Ms Jackson belongs in Hollywood, not Bollywood or Kollywood. There's a well-intentioned but awkwardly executed scene where Raftaar encourages two young women to fight their harassers (it's meant perhaps as an oblique reference to the women's self-defence school Akshay sponsors and promotes in Mumbai), and a few slightly off-color gags handled in a PG-rated fashion: the one with Lara sleepwalking, another brief one with Prabhudheva peeing on Akshay and Anil in the men's room, and a car chase where Emily doesn't trust Raftaar's driving skills and can't explain to him that she wants to switch places with him, so she ends up sitting on his lap to drive, with predictable consequences, including him getting slapped. I didn't expect to laugh at them, but I did end up chuckling, and I guess that's a pretty good summary of the movie overall.
SIB was produced by PEN, which distributed and promoted Akshay's film Entertainment last year. SIB, like Entertainment before it, had an incredibly awful trailer and pretty charming song promos, so I was expecting something at about the level of Entertainment: good-natured, bland, mostly harmless, sort of midway between the two extremes that the promos represented. I was pleasantly surprised to get a movie that was consistently cute, likable, funny, cool to look at, and where the supporting cast actually held up their end well. The humor is silly and comes with its share of wacky sound effects but feels much more mellow and comfortable than the standard Stupid Shouty Bollywood Comedy.
Akki plays Raftaar Singh, a mild-mannered and not overly bright Punjabi who's pretty physically adept but just can't finish what he starts. His father ships him off to work for a friend who owns a fairly legit casino boat in Goa, who in turn assigns Raftaar and his minions/buddies (played by Anil Mange and Arfi Lamba) as bodyguards/factotums to Sara (Amy Jackson), the heavily westernized daughter of an NRI friend of the casino owner. Sara's lying low in Goa to get away from an unwanted gangster admirer (Kay Kay Menon, who is having a blast) and to search for her estranged mother. Since Sara speaks no Hindi and the "three morons" as she terms them, speak no English, they hire Emily (Lara Dutta) to translate for them with complicated results. Raftaar, after being mildly annoyed by Sara at first meeting, quickly falls for her, but has no way to communicate with her, especially since Emily decides it is her job to shield poor sweet innocent Sara (who's already in trouble for kicking one bad guy's rear end, and will kick numerous other bad guys' rear ends over the course of the film) from Raftaar, whom Emily believes to be a dangerous gangster.
Lara Dutta is someone I don't normally feel strongly about, but she is really funny and likable here, and the running gag about her sleep-walking around the bungalow and the minions thinking she's trying to seduce them is handled with a light, PG-rated touch while making the case, that yes, at 37, she's still a looker, it's just Emily's dubious fashion sense that keeps people from noticing. What I like about the Emily character is that the whole timid translator business is a role a man could have played (it feels kind of like a Rajpal Yadav role actually), but they gave it to a woman and she made it her own. "Character" roles for women, aside from mothers, grandmothers and the occasional sister or more mature vamp are still rare; a comedic female character that isn't about fat jokes or an overwrought libido is downright unique. I hope to see more like her.
Amy Jackson is also playing something a bit more than a standard flowerpot heroine; she's sort of simultaneously playing Sonu Sood's character from Singh is Kinng (the stone-cold bada$$ who needs to get in touch with his warmer side) and Katrina Kaif's character from Singh is Kinng (the bossy Nonresident Eyecandy looking to reunite with her mother). The film handles the fanservice moments with her in a fairly restrained fashion; she wears form-fitting clothes a lot of the time (and goes bare-legged in Goa) but it doesn't cross the line into being vulgar. She has very little dialogue and is kind of hit and miss when it comes to emoting verbally, but you believe in her as the tough chick, you believe in her as the girl sadly brooding over her lost mother and bonding with her potential mother-in-law (Rati Agnihotri), you believe in her progression from being annoyed with Raftaar (but rather cold-bloodedly aware that he's an impressive specimen) to being grudgingly impressed with his good traits to being attracted to him. The romance is carefully structured so that Raftaar and Emily fall for each other more by observing what the other does than by romancing each other head-on; so that you're not hit in the face with the huge age gap. (The decision to darken Akki's beard digitally in post and the fact that he was in particularly good physical condition after shooting Brothers both help as well.)
Akshay is playing a character type he's had a lot of experience with, but this time he plays it with more warmth and dignity, more sympathy for the character's failures, than he usually does, while still being pretty darned funny. He kicked butt when required, he made me giggle, he made me cry, he made me root for him, and he wore outrageous clothes with great panache, and he generally didn't embarrass me, which is all I ask from his more light-hearted films. I liked his character refusing to brawl in a church.
As a director, Prabhudheva is all about putting fun embellishments on other people's ideas; his directoral debut was a Telugu film remixing elements of Sooraj Barjatya's hits, his Hindi-language debut was Wanted (a remake of a Telugu masala film originated by someone else that Prabhu had already remade in Tamil); his most financially successful film to date was Rowdy Rathore (a remake of a Telugu film originally directed by the guy who did Baahubali, and written by the guy who wrote Baahubali and Bajrangi Bhaijaan). In between, he did Tamil remakes of the Munnabhai films, and a Tamil-language remake of Billy Wilder's Love In The Afternoon. In this case, he observes the components of the Singh is Kinng formula-the comedic gangsters, the simple Sardar, the exotic locations and angrezi-spouting heroine, and produces an equally mellow, unthreatening movie with (IMO) more entertaining song picturizations and more consistently entertaining material in between the songs. The songs themselves are above-average by 2015 standards but not ZOMGosh awesome; my favorite songs were Singh & Kaur and Dil Kare Chu, my favorite picturizations were Tung Tung, Cinema Dekha Mamma (which is AWESOME on the big screen), and Singh & Kaur.
In terms of problematic content, I would say there isn't much. The film somehow makes the 48-year-old hero, the 54-yr-old character actress playing his mother, the late-20s/early-30s actors playing his buddies, and the 23-yr-old firangi playing his NRI girlfriend, all seem like they belong in those roles. I'm not going to judge the filmmakers too harshly for hiring Amy when their previous (desi) heroine left due to schedule conflicts and they needed a girl with some action experience who could give them her dates on short notice. The fact remains: Ms Jackson belongs in Hollywood, not Bollywood or Kollywood. There's a well-intentioned but awkwardly executed scene where Raftaar encourages two young women to fight their harassers (it's meant perhaps as an oblique reference to the women's self-defence school Akshay sponsors and promotes in Mumbai), and a few slightly off-color gags handled in a PG-rated fashion: the one with Lara sleepwalking, another brief one with Prabhudheva peeing on Akshay and Anil in the men's room, and a car chase where Emily doesn't trust Raftaar's driving skills and can't explain to him that she wants to switch places with him, so she ends up sitting on his lap to drive, with predictable consequences, including him getting slapped. I didn't expect to laugh at them, but I did end up chuckling, and I guess that's a pretty good summary of the movie overall.