Hollywood: Movie

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Saturday, December 28, 2013

Movie review: 'Fire In The Blood'

Dylan Mohan Gray?s important award-winning film 'Fire In The Blood' raises difficult questions.

Director: Dylan Mohan Gray

Cast: Yusuf Hamied, George W. Bush, Indira Gandhi, Donald G. McNeil Jr.

The Indian Express rating: ***1/2

That Big Pharma almost always equates to Evil Pharma is something we've always been aware of in a subterranean manner. But to have it said out loud in a documentary backed by solid, detailed research is rare. Dylan Mohan Gray's important award-winning film Fire In The Blood raises difficult questions and finds that the answers are not as simple. Or easy.

Drug pricing has always been a contentious issue. And the majority of pharmaceutical multinationals have been zealous in guarding the price line to such absurd limits that those who live beneath poverty lines have had no access to expensive drugs. Fire In The Blood talks to people affected by the AIDS virus, and those who are engaged in bringing succour to them ? officials, NGOs, and other organisations in Asia and Africa. And comes to the inescapable conclusion: that millions of lives could have been saved if the rampaging greed of the pharma companies, and their cohorts in high places, had been replaced by the desire to save lives.

The hero of the 1.5-hour film is Yusuf Hamied, the chairman of Cipla, a company founded by his father in the 1930s. Gray, who is married to one of Hamied's nieces, gets access (and doubtless, difficult-to-reach information) and shows us how overpriced drugs can kill, and how simple it is to prolong lives if the imperative is humanitarian rather than financial .Cipla's generic inexpensive antiretroviral drugs (priced at a fraction of the branded medicine) were a true game changer in the '90s. Suddenly, lives that were considered lost were being saved. As a bright-eyed AIDS survivor in Tamil Nadu, who caught the virus from her infected husband (who died within a few months of the marriage), says: I was supposed to be dead, but look, I am not!

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Movie review: White House Down

Director: Roland Emmerich

Cast: Channing Tatum, Jamie Foxx, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Joey King, James Woods

The Indian Express rating: **1/2

Roland Emmerich is back again at what he does best: blowing things up spectacularly and relentlessly. We are in the safest house in the world, shrieks a guy. Uh huh. Not. White House, the seat of the President of the United States of America, is under a terrorist attack. Masked gunmen carrying rocket launchers are rampaging though the grand interiors, with the Prez (Foxx) hiding out with a wannabe secret service agent (Tatum) in one corner, and his daughter (King) being held hostage in another.

For over two hours, we career up and down the White House crevices as Channing Tatum reprises the Die Hard Bruce Willis, single-handedly fighting off the bad guys and staving off World War 3 in a blood-stained singlet, and a singularly set expression. The plot is a marvellous series of coincidences, which would befit a Hindi movie. Cale just happens to be at the White House to interview for a Secret Service post. His sulking little girl is along because he wants to get back into her good books. His tough interviewer (Gyllenhaal) used to know him in college. And of course the attack happens when Cale and kid are still in the building: he has brawn and she has brains, and of course it is a winning combination.

White House Down isn't as bad as I thought it would be, given Emmerich's previous outings, a mix of noisy creature features or disaster flicks (Independence Day, 2012, The Patriot). It has some resonances: Foxx as the Black President who declares, 'I just want to make a difference' could well be an echo of the Obama man. President Sawyer wants to yank American troops from the Middle East. The arms cartels and their moles in the defence machinery in high places in the US administration are mighty cheesed off: what, no more kickbacks? Out comes the resentful father (Woods) who lost his son in Afghanistan, and the guy who gets the biggest cut on arms deals, and the sneering fellows with enough arsenal to bring the White House Down.

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Movie review: Delivery Man

Cast: Vince Vaughn, Cobie Smulders, Chris Pratt

Director: Ken Scott

The Indian Express Rating: **

A sperm donor who discovers he has sired children in the hundreds, a shocked girlfriend, and a reunion with the children bathed in giggly laughters and warm sunlight. We could almost be talking about Vicky Donor, but minus all its insights into Delhi's Lajpat Nagar and what happens when it clashes with the city's Bengali sub-culture just a few kilometres down the road.

Delivery Man, actually a remake of Scott's successful French-Canadian film Starbuck, plays it straight, stolid, sentimental and sanctimonious, to middlingly satisfactory but highly expected results.

David Wozniak (Vaughn) delivers meat for the family's meat business, and is apparently inept at even that, among other things. His girlfriend Emma (Smulders, of How I Met Your Mother) tells him she is pregnant with his child and dumps him for how irresponsible he is. His father and brothers have had about enough of him. And he owes $80,000 to some not-so-nice people. It is in this situation that David comes to know that the 693 sperm donations that he did over four years back in the '90s have resulted in 533 children, 142 of whom want to know their biological father.

The 142 have sent their short profiles and photos, and David starts visiting them one by one, clandestinely. Invariably each of these visits results in him coming across as a warm human being who helps them out in their moments of distress. The children include a gay, a Black and even one disabled teen.

You know where this film is headed. And while Scott makes David's journey back to Emma's heart thankfully short, he takes an even lesser time winning over all those "lost teens" needing their biological father, even without revealing his true identity to them.

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Movie Review of 'Thor: The Dark World'

Cast: Chris Hemsworth, Natalie Portman, Tom Hiddleston, Anthony Hopkins, Christopher Eccleston, Stellan Skarsgard

Director: Alan Taylor

The Indian Express rating: **1/2

In India, astrologers will tell you just how rare and momentous and powerful can be the 'convergence' of the 'nava graha' ( nine planets). But given that the people who are invested with any knowledge in 'Thor: The Dark World' are mere Western astrophysicists, all they know is that the laws of physics become 'weaker' when the nine planets are about to be arrayed in a line. From an abandoned warehouse in central London, the beauteous ( Portman) is funneled up into a mysterious space, and soaked with a strange red-coloured element called Aether.

We know this because a Norse-ish alien race and its enemies are in search of that very substance. Both the good guys, whose king is Odin ( Hopkins in an eye-patch), and the bad Dark Elves, lead by Malekith ( Eccleston), want it. The battle for Aether spills out from Asgard, travels to various hot-spots across the universe, and reaches London. Enter the Almighty Thor, the Marvel superhero with the Huge Hammer ( Hemsworth), who shows up to save our planets, (and the world, of course) from the marauding elves.

'Thor : The Dark World' comes two years after the first outing of the crown prince of Asgard, with most of the same faces but with a different director ( Alan Taylor, who has, on his resume , a few episodes of the TV series 'Game Of Thrones'). The time has been spent in ramping up the special effects, some of which are gorgeous. Look out for a panoramic view of Asgard, and the funeral of a noble lady, all glitter and poignance. Some of the inter-galactic chases are quite eye-catching, too, despite the 3D. But what mars the spectacle is the pace ( why do Hollywood superhero flicks have to be so long? ), and the collection of leaden baddies, with no personality. What's a tale like this without a real, solid villain? Eccleston, as Malekith, has no menace, and the fellows who accompany him, strutting about with headgear with horns, are just so much background noise.

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Friday, December 27, 2013

Movie Review: The Hunger Games Catching Fire

This second part of the successful Hunger Games trilogy manages to carve itself a notable space. (AP)

Cast: Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson, Liam Hemsworth, Woody Harrelson, Donald Sutherland, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Elizabeth Banks, Stanley Tucci

Directed: Francis Lawrence

The Indian Express rating: ***1/2

THIS is one of those rare films where the character, the actor and the movie treatment all develop together in tandem to signify a maturing that mere words won't do. Devoid of both the adrenalin-fuelled action of the first film as well as the satisfaction of a climax, this second part of the successful Hunger Games trilogy manages to carve itself a notable space.

A large part of it has to again do with Jennifer Lawrence. Though several years older than the heroine of the books, Katniss Everdeen, she has that air of wounded innocence that one would expect from someone in her shoes. Plus now that the Games and their horror/rush are behind her, Lawrence is really in her elements as a reluctant rebel and fleeting celebrity caught between some very difficult choices. The fact that in real life too she has seen her career graph veer in quite the same direction perhaps helps.

Suzanne Collins's series with its obvious political overtones, starting from the name of the land, Panem -- Latin, conveying superficial appeasements -- also doesn't have to try very hard to establish its dystopian credentials here.

Catching Fire so has an easier, less jarring progression where it captures well the simmering undercurrents of rebellion against the Capitol here -- often going beyond the book. Led by the mocking President Snow (Sutherland), the Capitol continues to rule Panem and its impoverished 12 districts with an iron hand.

Francis Lawrence, who charted similar ground while directing I Am Legend and salubrious romance while helming Water for Elephants, particularly impresses in how he conveys the effect of two different worlds cohabiting in the singular form of Effie Trinket (Banks). Her outlandish clothes (the costumes overall deserve a special mention), her elaborate get-ups, her fuss, her seeming attention to non-essentials, her stress on "We are a team, isn't it?" are revealed to a whole new meaning here. The screenplay has been co-written by Simon Beaufoy, of Slumdog Millionaire, 127 Hours and The Full Monty fame.

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Movie review: Paul Walker's last outing 'Hours'

Director: Eric Heisserer

Cast: Paul Walker, Genesis Rodriguez

The Indian Express rating: ***1/2

IT'S tempting to watch this film and wonder what could have been. Paul Walker, who died last month in a car crash, ventures as far away as he can from his Fast & Furious roles for this film about a father trying desperately to keep his newly born daughter alive, stranded alone in a hospital as Hurricane Katrina strikes.

Walker also produced this film while it's the debut directorial venture of Heisserer (the screenplay writer of films such as Nightmare on Elm Street and The Final Destination 5). They could have been pardoned for feeling the need to prove something. But creditably, they don't, letting the events speak for themselves.

Nolan (Walker) has walked into a New Orleans hospital with his wife in premature labour at 2 am just as Hurricane Katrina is gathering full strength. Within five hours, his wife has died and his child has been kept in a ventilator. Within the next few, the hospital has been evacuated but for those that can't be moved. A few more hours and Nolan realises he is practically the only one left in the hospital with his child. The power goes, so does the back-up, and as the battery starts running out, Nolan manages to discover an old one that needs winding every 2 minutes or so.

He will spend more than 42 hours in that situation, without power, cranking up the battery every 2 minutes, filling up his daughter's saline drip, and somehow managing to sustain himself on dwindling supplies and creeping witness. Any options he hunts for also have to be structured around that two-minute window.

Heisserer, who also wrote Hours, keeps the film engrossing despite the confines of the story, putting Nolan in risks of different forms. And of course we can't get the picture of that helpless baby wrapped in just a towel and a cap out of our heads. The lives of the two are intrinsically linked and the film knows that, and plays on it well.

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Movie review: 'Walking with the Dinosaurs 3D'

Director: Barry Cook, Neil Nightingale

Voices: Charlie Rowe, Karl Urban, Angourie Rice, John Leguizamo, Justin Long, Skyler Stone, Scowler, Tiya Sircar

The Indian Express rating: **

CAN Walking With Dinosaurs have the prattle of Happy Feet? You would think not, and not the least because the two films involve wildly different creatures. However, watching the first, you wouldn't know the difference. A short story about a Pachyrhinosaurus with a difference, who is small in size, has a hole in his sort-of ear, goes on to save his herd, falls in love and has babies of its own -- ring a bell? -- is bathed in cuteness completely disproportionate to the dangers crawling in that world.

Presumably dinosaurs in the dinosaur era (70 million years ago) were confident fellows with no inkling of the wipeout ahead. However, they still lived in inhospitable times of scarce food, forest fires, ferocious predators, and few friends. Shouldn't writer John Collee, who also wrote Happy Feet, not treat it with the same breathless tone of barely concealed giggles and smart-alecky asides? Particularly as they are not even a patch on the original Happy Feet.

And if that isn't enough, Walking With Dinosaurs, involving computer-animated dinosaurs in live-action settings, is also faux documentary-like in how it pauses to explain us the numerous awesome details of the dinosaurs filling its screen. A child reads out the scientific names, the meaning, and where that particular creature is placed in the food chain. In the case of one particularly ferocious dinosaur, there is a whole animation explaining all that it can do.

Obviously, Walking With Dinosaurs 3D, produced by BBC Earth and named after a BBC TV documentary miniseries, takes its dinosaurs seriously. And given the detailing and the variety, they did go to great length to get it right. It's sad then that such magnificent creatures have been laid unnecessarily low by the dialogues humans have saddled them with.

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