It’s Showtime!

Two posts in one day yay! Well, I am just clearing out my draft backlog and there were only two :) So here's the second post for today:

Over the last couple of weeks, we managed to watch a few movies so it’s time for some quick reviews:

1. Rajneeti – Excellent reviews here and here. All in all, a good watch but lots of clichés and same old same old corrupt politicians and cops saga. The ease with which everyone was just killing one another with no repercussions was just cartoonish. N thought that in the end the chauffer/dad will udaofy Ranbir kapoor on his way to the airport with a car bomb – and I thought that would have been an AWESOME ending! Oh and you can’t miss Katrina’s Hindi speech with her weird hand motions – I absolutely love her, but that was just too cringe-inducing.

2. Kick Ass – This was a fun movie, I had no expectations and no idea about what the movie was about before watching it and it turned out to be quite funny and enjoyable. Good one time watch, go for it! The lead actor who plays the ordinary guy/kick ass is quite likeable and so are all the villains, but I didn’t particularly like the Big Daddy and Hit-Girl characters – I can’t stand Nicholas Cage and precocious kids.

3. Everybody’s Fine – EVERYBODY’S BORED!! Stay away from this one.. So here’s a dad who supposedly didn’t pay any attention to his 4 kids when they were growing up and put them through a lot of pressure, so now that they are not leading picture-perfect lives that he had planned for them, they lie to him to make him feel like they are all doing good. EXCEPT – they are all really doing good! I mean, two of his kids have these swanky million dollar homes/apartments and three of them are making a good living pursuing their hobbies and yeah the fourth one had some problems but big deal! Plus just to stretch the length of the movie and throw in some scenery, the dad is shown to “never fly” so he goes from NY to Chicago to Denver to Vegas using trains and buses! Oh the contrivance! And of course, the biggest goof up of all – showing wireless chatter going through the electric wires/poles!!!

4. An Education – Coincidentally we watched this movie the night I wrote my previous post! This movie is really good but I think it’s a kind of movie that a certain type of audience will really enjoy and others would get bored. It’s not your typical cutesy coming-of-age movie and definitely not a chick-flick – it’s kind of in-between a cute and serious movie and I would thoroughly recommend it especially for Carey Mulligan – she is absolutely amazing in that lead role.

5. Mother (Korean) – This movie starts a bit slow, but gets very engaging after the first half an hour or so and then just takes off! It’s about an overprotective mother who takes care of her mentally unstable teenage son and then goes a wee bit too far in cleaning up after him. The lead actress was really good and you will be hooked the moment you see her break out in a dance in the fields during the titles. Overall the movie could have been a lot better with some tighter editing.

6. A Single Man – SLOW, quite boring most of the time, but Colin Firth is really good and plus the 60s era adds a different dimension to the movie. I wouldn’t recommend it though.

7. Brothers – Here is a movie where the acting is better than the storyline.. Natalie Portman is good as the grieving wife, Tobey McGuire is great (I never thought I would say this about Tobey!) as the stressed out soldier, Jake Gyllenhaal is okay/good.. but the scene stealer is the little actress who plays the elder daughter.. amazing acting coming from a 10 year old girl (although the dialogues she is given are rubbish sometimes). There are tons of inconsistencies, mainly the premise - Tobey, threatened with being shot at, is made to kill his co-captive American soldier in Afghanistan so he is haunted by it and loses his mind. BUT, while in captivity, Tobey is shown to repeatedly assure the other soldier that the Afghan bad guys would not kill them because they would have already done so if they wanted to – which makes sense! Also the wife refuses to read Tobey’s last letter as she doesn’t think he is really dead, but then he is enough dead for her to kiss the brother-in-law! Anyway.. this movie is so lost between what it’s trying to depict – the psychological horrors of war or the brotherly love or the “Dhadkan” storyline of wife falling in love with another man/brother-in-law thinking her husband is dead – that it mixes up all three in a mess, but it’s a one-time watchable mess.