Archive for February, 2010
Movie Review: Karthik Calling Karthik (2010)
3 Stars (out of 4)
If Shutter Island has piqued your interest in psychological thrillers, check out Karthik Calling Karthik, which manages to turn a corded home phone into a terrifying piece of communications equipment. I think I need to cancel my landline.
KCK stars Farhan Akhtar (the film’s co-producer) as Karthik, a hard-worker who’s unwilling to stand up for himself. Karthik’s meekness stems from the fact that he blames himself for his bullying brother’s death during a scuffle when they were children.
When he finally tries to stand up to his overbearing boss, Karthik is publicly humiliated and fired. At home, his suicide attempt is interrupted by a call on his recently purchased home phone. The caller is Karthik.
This voice-only Karthik knows enough details about his corporeal counterpart to convince Karthik that he’s not being duped. The voice promises to help Karthik improve his life, and his advice works. Karthik gains a new confidence that helps him land a better-paying job and a date with his dream girl, Shonali (Deepika Padukone). Karthik comes to accept these conversations with himself as something natural.
The voice insists that Karthik never mention his calls to anyone. But when Shonali asks Karthik for complete honesty, he tells her about the calls. The voice on the line isn’t pleased, and the consequences of Karthik’s disclosure are severe.
There’s an undercurrent of fear throughout Karthik Calling Karthik. Even during playful scenes of Karthik courting Shonali, it’s impossible to forget that they owe their romance to Karthik’s disembodied voice. The voice is terrifying because there’s no physical person to connect it to, and because it’s never clear what the voice is getting out of the phone calls. If Karthik really is calling himself, then anything that benefits corporeal Karthik benefits voice Karthik as well. But he can’t really be talking to himself, can he?
Akhtar deftly handles the challenge of playing essentially three different characters: shy Karthik, bold Karthik and disembodied Karthik. His voice acting is good enough that, even without reading the subtitles, it’s obvious when disembodied Karthik is providing encouragement versus threatening retribution.
Writer-director Vijay Lalwani’s debut effort is a strong one. He gets a little heavy-handed manipulating colors in scenes where Karthik is supposed to be confused or frightened. And there’s an epilogue that feels tacked on, undermining some of the film’s emotional impact.
But Lalwani deserves credit for providing a satisfying explanation for the phone calls. It would’ve been easier to leave the reason ambiguous under the guise of “letting the audience decide what happened,” but Lalwani manages to tie the threads together in a way that makes sense in retrospect.
And it speaks to Lalwani’s skills as a storyteller that I found myself inadvertently covering my ears during several scenes of the phone benignly sitting on a bedside table. The next time my own telephone rings, I’m making my husband answer it.
*Karthik Calling Karthik’s runtime is listed as 2 hrs. 35 min. It’s closer to 2 hrs. 15 min.
Movie Review: My Name Is Khan (2010)
2 Stars (out of 4)
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The message of My Name Is Khan is a laudable one: good and bad people are identifiable by their actions, not by characteristics like race or religion. But a laudable message can’t excuse the fact that My Name Is Khan just doesn’t work.
MNIK‘s protagonist is Rizvan Khan (Shahrukh Khan), an Indian Muslim with Asperger syndrome. Asperger’s is an autism spectrum disorder usually characterized by physical awkwardness and trouble forming emotional connections with other people. As a child, Rizvan’s special needs demand almost constant attention from his mother, alienating his younger brother, Zakir.
As an adult, Rizvan is forced to move to San Francisco to live with Zakir (Jimmy Shergill) after their mother dies. Zakir makes Rizvan work as a traveling cosmetics salesman, an odd assignment for a guy who doesn’t make eye contact and who’s frightened by loud noises and the color yellow. Rizvan is capable of navigating San Francisco, but he’s better at following instructions than he is at improvising.
Rizvan develops a crush on Mandira (Kajol), a divorced hairdresser with a young son named Sameer. Rizvan eventually wins over Mandira with his persistence, and they marry. They live happily for several years until the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
Tragedy strikes the family, and Mandira — a Hindu — tells Rizvan that she regrets marrying a Muslim man. She tells him to go away until he can convince the President of The United States that he’s not a terrorist just because his last name is Khan. Rizvan takes Mandira’s command literally and sets off to find the president.
For a number of reasons, MNIK just doesn’t work. American filmgoers won’t be able to ignore the things the movie gets wrong about America. While the non-Indian American actors in the movie are actually pretty good (most Hindi films hire terrible American actors), characters don’t speak in proper American colloquialisms. Phrases like “piss off” and “bloody Paki” are British insults, not American insults.
The movie shows footage of a turban-wearing Sikh man targeted by thugs who mistake him for an Arab, establishing correctly that many Americans can’t differentiate between people of Indian, Middle Eastern and northern African origin. But the movie later attributes a beating to the fact that the character’s last name is Khan, a Muslim surname. This defies the movie’s own conclusions about American worldliness. Most Americans don’t associate the name Khan with Islam; they associate it with Star Trek.
MNIK‘s weakest element is the romance between Rizvan and Mandira. The movie spends a long time establishing that Rizvan, despite certain competencies, isn’t able to live independently. He’s not able to be a full partner to Mandira, and she often treats him the same as she does her son. It’s hard to understand why she agreed to marry him.
But, given that they are married, it’s incomprehensible that Mandira would be so cruel as to send Rizvan on a fool’s errand by himself. That she doesn’t feel bad about it makes her heartless, and the excuses the film offers on her behalf don’t hold water.
The movie tries to explain how Rizvan is able to execute a cross-country trek that spans years, but I don’t buy it. The movie doesn’t make it clear exactly how long Rizvan’s journey takes, but it would be almost impossible for anyone to execute, let alone someone coping with Asperger’s.
My Name Is Khan is watchable, but it ultimately fails by overreaching. It might have worked as a story about a couple dealing with the challenges of one partner’s Asperger syndrome. It might have worked as a story about a man who wants to show America that not all Muslims are terrorists. But compressing both stories into one movie is an impossible task, even for superstars like SRK and Kajol.
*AMC theaters list the movie’s runtime as 2 hrs. 25 min. It’s closer to 2 hrs. 35 min., plus 10 minutes of previews. Also, the movie has an MPAA rating of PG-13, though there’s nothing in the film’s content to warrant a rating stronger than PG.
Movie Review: Striker (2010)
4 Stars (out of 4)
When I sat in front of my computer to watch Striker on YouTube, I had some concerns. I was glad that I didn’t have to drive over an hour to the only theater near me that was showing it, but I wondered if I’d be as immersed in the experience watching it at home as I would be in the theater. Within minutes, Striker‘s riveting characters put my fears to rest.
Striker flashes back and forth through three time periods in the life of Surya (Siddharth), a young man who lives in Malvani, a Mumbai ghetto. As a child in 1977, he watches his older brother playing carrom — a table game like billiards, where small wooden disks are flicked with the fingers into corner pockets. Surya excels at the game but loses interest as he gets older.
Flash forward to 1988. Surya works as a courier who specializes in transporting jewelry and large amounts of cash. Because it’s a risky job — he’s responsible for repaying the money if he’s robbed en route — Surya pays a broker to find him a lucrative manual labor job in Dubai.
When the broker disappears with Surya’s money, his childhood friend, Zaid (Ankur Vikal), comes up with a scheme to get it back: playing carrom for money. Zaid runs errands for the local don, Jaleel (Aditya Pancholi), and is able to get Surya into some high stakes games.
Jaleel is, of course, not to be trusted. He and his goons don’t brandish weapons openly, but there’s an unmistakable air of menace about them. Zaid isn’t much more reliable, given his drug use and frequent arrests. And the rules governing life in Malvani are in flux after the arrival of a tough police inspector, Farooque (Anupam Kher).
In 1992, a time when religious riots are engulfing Malvani, Surya turns to Inspector Farooque for help. The movie begins and ends in this timeframe.
Striker opens with a note from the filmmaker, Chandan Arora, stating that the movie is based on true stories from people who live in Malvani. The movie’s structure, which shows Surya at various points in his life rather than following one linear narrative, makes Surya seem more like a real person than a typical hero. He’s not the poor kid who grows up to transcend his meager upbringing by leading a righteous life. He’s a guy who doesn’t have many options and occasionally tries to make good choices, but often doesn’t.
Zaid is the most interesting character in the film. Vikal plays Zaid as just charming enough to get by without any real vocation or goals. But, from the moment he shows up in the 1988 timeframe, it’s clear that whatever fate awaits Zaid is not a happy one.
Striker is wonderfully atmospheric. Malvani isn’t a slum as decrepit as the one in Slumdog Millionaire. It’s a neighborhood with houses and shops and various places to get into trouble. The carrom-playing scenes are as evocative as any scenes set in the smoky pool halls of Hollywood films. Appropriately, there are no song-and-dance numbers. Striker will appeal to fans of mainstream American films, inviting them to explore Indian movies beyond the musical masala fare.
Runtime: 2 hrs. 7 min.
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Notes on the YouTube viewing experience:
I was impressed with the quality of the YouTube rental experience. The movie downloaded in its entirety almost immediately, so I didn’t have to pause and wait for the video to load. The English subtitles appeared in white text on a black band below the main movie, making them easier to read against a consistently colored background (and, I presume, easier to ignore if you don’t need them). I’d happily rent more movies from YouTube in the future, especially if they’re made available the same day as the theatrical release.
