Kaminey (Hindi) Review - Doesn't get any better...and the Quentin curse

My rating: 4.5 out of 5

The Quentin curse: many movies and their directors aspire to match Quentin Tarantino - most (including QT himself - see Death Proof) don't succeed. Kaminey proves it can be done...with all the trappings of a good Bollywood movie to boot. This has to be the best Bollywood movie of the year - maybe in the last couple of years, or even longer.

The story is complex, but plays to the most basic of emotions - greed. Shahid Kapoor plays twins who can't stand each other and who both have speech impediments - Good Twin (GT, for short) stammers, Bad Twin (BT, of course) has a weird lisp (says "f" for "s" - watch him talk about his "fell phone" in one particularly good scene). GT works for an NGO. BT is constantly on the lookout for a get-rich quick scheme to, well, get rich quickly (because he knows that "life is a b**ch") and set himself up as a bookie. The movie begins with BT and GT having one of those days when nothing goes right - BT loses money on a fixed race at the tracks and GT finds out his girl-friend (Priyanka Chopra) is pregnant. There are at least 3 gangs - a Bengali gang of 3 brothers that fixes races and deals in guns and ammo, a Mumbai is for Marathis gang-leader with political aspirations and a fearsome drug dealer with an African wife whose brother (the wife's brother, complete with an African dialect and African English) is setting up a drugs for diamonds deal. And, let's not forget the guys who fixed the fixed race (right at the beginning of the movie, remember?). BT, while out to break a leg (quite literally) comes to possess a guitar case full of cocaine - and in come corrupt cops, armed henchmen of various shapes and sizes, very rainy streets, blood-spattering violence and some real trash talk, and you have a wonderful, exhilarating ride of a movie.

Kaminey is remarkable on many fronts, but mostly in the high expectations it has from the audience - in a strange way it expects you to enjoy movies enough for you to work hard at understanding Kaminey to enjoy it. For instance, the characters speak a mix a mix of Hindi, Mumbai hindi, Marathi, Bengali and an African dialect - no default subtitles anywhere (I had the benefit of subtitles while watching it in the US) - you are just expected to make sense of everything. Vishal extracts humor in practically every situation - in one particularly interesting sequence, the cops give GT a good work-over, and then almost gently ask him to sing out the information he has to offer to overcome the stammer - they are working on a tight deadline, you see, and this stammering slows things down to an unacceptable degree. Or, where GT questions his girlfriend about her Home Science credentials when it turns out she got pregnant - one of those scenes you really need to see to get the humor... Vishal's background score is excellent, and the songs actually accelerate rather than interrupt the pace.

See Kaminey to know how good movies can be fun to watch (and apparently fun to make and act in). And Quentin bhai, here is a worthy entry to the long list of contenders...

Kandasamy (Tamil) Review - Coulda been worse, but could have been a LOT better...

My rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Some movies inspire and others are "inspired" - this one definitely falls in the latter category...and inspired by neither Hollywood movies nor Hindi movies nor old Tamil movies, but by just other recent Tamil movies like Anniyan and Sivaji.

The story is simple, no suspense anywhere: Vikram is Kandasamy, a CBI officer raids rich, bad guys; one of them is Ashish Vidyarthi - his daughter Shriya Saran vows revenge by batting her eyelids at Vikram (and apparently wearing very skimpy clothes); in parallel a do-gooder who appears to possess superhero powers helps the poor and needy; no prizes for guessing the do-gooder's identity; cut to Mexico and some drug money; cut to more raids; climax exposes all bad guys, and how unaccounted, tax-free money flowing in and out of country is bad and can help all the poor...all ends well.

The first half is actually somewhat engrossing - the introduction of the rooster-costumed hero helping the poor, some good fights, some great shots of the Madras Boat Club and canoeing on the Adyar River (yes!) and a network of the hero's die-hard loyalists who are just about everywhere. The second half drags - and drags and then drags some more. The Mexico angle is completely unnecessary other than to have Vikram and Shriya cavort in Mexico - there are passing shots of some wonderful locations in Mexico, but ruined by either the cameraman or the editor or both (more on that in a moment). It looks like the Producer and / or director were looking for places that Tamil movies had never been to and picked Mexico and decided to up the ante by shooting not just a song there, but a whole sequence. So we get some passing references to kidnappings in Mexico, a Tamil local who "handles all the money for the top 23 rich guys in Tamil Nadu", song-and-dance and a fight sequence. The problem is that all this does is drag the movie on without adding any value. And, all this waiting produces no pay-off - the climax is so limp and rushed that it is all over before you know it...except it happens about 3hours and 15 minutes after the movie begins.

Vadivelu's comedy track is completely unrelated to the movie, and actually plumbs new lows with some scatological stuff - that was quite inexcusable, Mr Director, for a movies that purports to be cool and new. The villains are caricatures - nothing new there. Yesteryear Telugu superstar Krishna appears as Vikram's boss in the CBI. Prabu is the police officer (thankfully always in plainclothes and not in any tight-fitting uniform) who wants to get to the bottom of this whole super-hero affair - he is good at the little he gets to do. Shriya has nothing much to do and excels at it. Vikram looks cool and fighting fit - he really is the biggest plus point for this movie. But his broad shoulders and bulging biceps (and one scene as a quite beautiful woman) cannot make up for Kandasamy's poorly written characters and sleep-inducing length.

Music by Devi Sri Prasad is good - the songs are hits - some say copies (the only one I could figure out was Meow, Meow which sounded suspiciously like Africa Kaattu Puli from Aalavandhan) .

My biggest complaint about this movie is that I got a head-ache from all the fast cuts and rapid editing - this has been shot like a music video on steroids, except that this one doesn't end in 10 minutes. The technicians seem to have had a free hand in parading their wares here - they seem to be operating on some unwritten rule that no shot should be longer than 5 seconds without a jolt of some kind to the camera. This ruins many of the excellent set-ups - especially in the Mexico sequence - great scenery and wonderful local color, including a bullfight - all ruined by not letting us see anything in any great, or even little, detail. The technicians gave me more to complain about than the weak script, poor character building or the length.