Meenakshi Rao's Bollywood and Hollywood movie reviews

Cast : Meryl Streep Rated : 6.5/10 On stage Ricci was magic. An unhindered voice of rock & roll. A diva in worship of music. A woman, or should we say a musician of conviction. Bring her down the stage, and she is a mess. She is not even Ricky, she is a woman of a different name, an absolute shirker of a mother, a horror for the well heeled society from where her ex-husband comes and a woman in acute emotional distress. Ricki and the Flash is a movie that gets its moments from Meryl Streep in both these contrasting roles. As we know over the years, Streep is a powerhouse of deep seated histrionics and meticulous performances on screen. Over the years, she has also developed her alternate talent — of singing and that is in wholesome display here as she sings everyone from Bruce Springsteen to rock and roll greats. Her booming voice makes you tide over her edginess of a failed mother and a woman in the lookout for money and stability. After her grown up daughter comes close...

Cast : Saif Ali Khan & Katrina Kaif   Rated : 5/10   26/11 capers were always the thing to do in Bollywood. But this one, to say the least, is audacious. It plays to the gallery of avenging the dastardly attack on India by going into enemy territory and liquidating — under cover of course — the perpetrators of 26/11 who are enjoying their freedom and patronage in neighbouring Pakistan.   Such capers are usually thrillers and Saif has earlier too been in some such trans-national spy-kill-terror mounts (Agent Vinod). However, he and the director, for some unexplained reasons, takes it very slow in this one. The result is that even though the subject is pulsating, the means to get to it is rather unhappening.   From America to London to Kashmir to Beirut to Pakistan — it’s a journey under cover agent Danial Khan takes to kill all 26/11 masterminds, including David Hadley in an American Jail and Maulana in Pakistan.   Even though the terror...

Staring : Justin Fletcher, John Sparkes, Omid Djalili Rated:  6/10   It is not your regular kind of Hollywood animation. It is different, the characters are all angular, there is veritably no dialogue, and the story is largely through music and incomprehensible murmerings.  And yet the flock of sheep that have a black face and creamish fur find their way into your heart as they step into the big city lights to find their compatriot and then manage to return home without much of a dent in their group.   The humour, the hilarity, the cuteness and the warmth take this adult-child film to places not many others go. Without dialogues you may think it would turn a bit too silent and monotonous. But the good use of gestures and expressions more than makes up for the vocal silence and fills in so completely that you forget that there should have been some human talking by these animals too.   Some of the humour may get a bit too subtle for kids but the f...

Staring:  Vinay Pathak, Konkona Sen Sharma, Tannishtha Chatterjee, Ranvir Shorey, Divya Dutta Rated:  6/10   How could a real life freedom fighter’s post Independence fight for recognition not be full of moving moments? How could Vinay Pathak not make a mark playing such an intense but determined struggler? How can a movie so relevant to an independence day release fall so flat on its stomach? These and many such questions stare Ananth Mahadevan’s well-meaning Gour Hari Dastaan caper. With all the Government apathy, the decades of struggle of a real life character in Gour Hari Das to merely get a freedom fighter’s certificate not have drama in it? Amazingly, that’s the single most important thing missing from this film of utmost potential.   Konkana Sen Sharma as the wife of Gour Hari is wasted in the role of a wife-has-to-take-it-all roll even as Ranvir Shorey as the journalist gives some pithy moments to the film. Not that Vinay Pathak forgot his histri...

Cast:  Akshay Kumar, Sidharth Malhotra, Jacqueline Fernandez, Jackie Shroff Rated:  5/10   Hollywood action with Bollywood emotions seldom go well and Brothers too falls into this big trap.  Bhai meets chhota bhai in a league-style made-for-TV boxing contest and the punches just stop keep coming. A dead maa comes between them, a loser-killer-alcoholic father watches from the sidelines and a bevy of emotions flow out of the tight gloves instead of the punch the audience waits for.   The good thing about the film is that the fights, which are the mainstay of the film, come in a taut grip, leaving no breathing space for you to wonder about the viability of all this intensity. The bad thing is that there is too much intensity and too less fight left in Akshay Kumar once he meets his younger, seething brother in the ring.    Based on the Hollywood boxing thriller Warrior, the film is a virtually a cut-to-cut of the English version with Nick ...

Staring:  Pernia Quereshi, Imran Abbas, Muzaffar Ali, Carl Wharton, Dilip Tahil & Beena Kak. Rated:  4.5/10   First and foremost: This film should not have been compared with Umrao Jaan — at all! The comparison is thoroughly mismatched and it does Jaanisaar in more than anything else. Umrao Jaan was a classic, this one a greedy wannabe, affected, out of sync with our times and totally sedentary in portraying the Awadhi days of British Raaj.    Umaro Jaan had the heartbeat of Rekha and the polish of Farooque Shaikh. Jaanisaar has a dead faced Pernia Quereshi who debuts under the wrap of dark lights and sepia shades more to hide her newness of acting than to enhance the ambience of this period drama. Imran Abbas is surely a beef cake but lacks the nazaakat and nafasat of the nawabi culture. Together, they speak the lyrical language of Urdu with an accent that gives away their modernness.    Amid all this mismatch, there is a story of ...

Staring:  Ritesh Deshmukh, Pulkit Sharma, Tom Alter, Jacquiline Fernandes & others Rated:  5/10   The need for secularism and the stupidity of communalism gets a slick Deshmukh-Sharma touch in Bangistan, a land where everything is in a heightened state of being. So be it hate, humour, polarisation or the complete craziness of the global terror movement — you laugh and think about all the issues raised in a super light manner. If there is an FcMcdonald, there is also a bunker BPO of Muslims, the temple runs and the rogue netas.    Bangistan may be veneered in slick satire but it comes with a relevant message. Its beauty is that it does not ruffle any feathers even though it deals with the ticklish subject of conflict among religions, the stereotypes about Muslims, the conniving power mongers among Hindus and a global religious meet which is a target of a terror operation.   The good thing about Bangistan is that blows the lid off layers a...

Staring:  Tom Cruise, Alec Baldwin, Sean Harris, Jeremy Reyner & Rebecca Ferguson Rated : 8/10 Last time Ethan Hunt had your jaw dropping and you praying fervently for his life when mounted the sky scraping Burj Khalifa in Dubai to dangle from dizzying heights. This time, he does the same — and in all earnestness — when he dangles from the outer door of a military aircraft carrying nerve gas all those 20,000 feet high swaying with terrifying winds, hanging on to dear life literally with his finger nails. This is the fifth time since 1996 that Tom Cruise, as the inscrutable Ethan Hunt, has kept his promise of entertaining his loyal viewers with thrills, fills, kills and a little bit of unsaid romance — of course with a fellow agent. Rogue Nation was initially being touted as the last of the Mission Impossible series but seeing the youthfulness of Hunt, and probably the meticulously ‘kept-high’ entertainment value that this James-Bond lookalike series always delivers, C...

Starring:  Jake Gyllenhaal, Forest Whitaker, Rachel McAdams Rated:  5/10 Hollywood content from the boxing ring have a familiar ring to them. An out of limelight boxing champion, ridden with tragedy, living in a haze of drug, alcohol and depression — you’ve seen them all. This one too is similar if not same. Losing his beloved wife in a brawl initiated by him, lightweight boxing champion of the world Billy Hope goes rogue — he drinks, he attempts suicide, he neglects his daughter and he goes out of the ring too. When coaxed by his agent, he fights only to lose shamefully. His luxury pad, his cars, his bank accounts are all seized and his daughter Leila — whom he incidentally loves very much — is sent to child care. Familiar? All this mess in Hollywoodian boxers life down the ages? Exactly, and that’s why we question why this movie was at all made and how shamelessly it tries to be an ape of former such ones. The dark insides of the film, the over-running emotion of...

Starring:  Kathleen Robertson, Michael Peña, Djimon Hounsou, Dougray Scott, John Patrick Amedori Rated:  4.5/10 The Vatican Tapes  come riding on heavy repute — after all when did a movie ever end in which the anti-Christ wins the world and followers over Christ himself. This one does and reeks of a need for a sequel though I wonder how many takers it would have for the next one, if in line? All horror films have to have some basic criteria — the prime one being the need to generate enough fear to block breaths. The next one is the area which you could contest but is traditional — the need for the ultimate triumph of good over evil. The Vatican Tapes  keeps you away from both these tenets of the horror genre. A happy, normal blond girl is possessed by none lesser than anti-Christ and she commits murders at will after startlingly coming out of death just after her ventilator is removed after a fatal accident. Her journey through the hospital, her night wal...

Starring:  Adam Sandler, Kevin James, Michelle Monaghan Rated:  5.5/10 Pixels is an imaginary wonder but it comes sans a soul. But gamers, and even children who have grown up on Packman, Lady Lily, Smurfs and other such iconic animated characters, might just find a link here even though the moviemaker’s target audience is quite blurred. Adam Sandler as the loser gamer of yore who, as an adult, corrects technology rather than leading it because once upon a time in his childhood he lost a video game arcade competition to a saucy imposter, is tasked here to save the world from a unique alien invasion. The invaders are characters he grew up defeating in races and the major one among them is Packman himself “Packman a bad guy?”, he asks in astonishment as the creator of Packman, the good old Japanese fellow can’t believe “his son” can turn rogue. The special effects used to spread the bigness of this invasion from outer space are gigantic and the imageries quite well-re...

Starring:  Ajay Devgn, Shriya Saran, Tabu, Rajat Kapoor, Ishita Dutta, Prathamesh Parab Rated:  8/10 First in Malayalam, then in Tamil and now in Hindi — and yet as gripping as ever.  Drishyam  is one of those slow suspense thrillers that come only once in a while and they are almost perfect to a fault. The almost perfect in Ajay Devgn’s venture comes in the form of a slow start and the way the film takes off after the initial 20 minutes makes you wonder if the start had been great how much more you would have loved it. Having said that, there are very few directors who can keep the tension up for more than an hour-and-a-half as the villain and hero (in this case heroine) set up a cat and mouse game in which — hold your breath — someone goes scot-free. Very unBollywood where correction always happens in the end for what filmmakers feel is the need of the audience.  Drishyam  steers clear of such and many more prototypes and hence makes a mark in...