Talaash: The Answer Lies Within (2012)

The film opens with footages from around Bombay. Bombay, crowded, colourful, with a dizzying variety of lives, myriad hues of reality and endless possible alternatives of perception. Night in Bombay. Adult DVD stores, people breathing-in marijuana, call girls lounging and throwing glances in street corners. Night stretches into midnight. The stretch of seafront caught in the camera is empty except for two homeless guys and their dog. The footpath adjacent to the seafront is clean and flooded by the amber streetlights of the night. A hawker cycles his way back home. Suddenly, the dog senses danger, howls and jogs off. In comes a car at high speed, breaks without necessity, turns and dives headlong into the sea. The homeless guys and the hawker gape in astonishment. A freak accident in the middle of a road devoid of any other vehicle. Morning takes over from midnight. Inspector Shekhawat (Aamir Khan) arrives to take charge of the case. Talaash, a neo-noir set in the streets of Mumbai is a grippy, engaging tale told in a neat, aamirkhanlike fashion.

Inspector Shekhawat (Aamir Khan) is a man with apparently a good career record and belief in values. He handles cases and people with good sense and respect. When he takes up the case of the accident of Arman Kapoor (a film actor) and plunges into questions of why and why-not, his personal tragedy of losing his son in a picnic mishap haunts him. In comes Kareena, a call-girl, who helps him out with clues to the case and listens to his sorrow of losing his son. One lead takes him to another until things start connecting and making sense.

The movie ends with the Inspector solving the case and coming to terms with his personal loss. Kareena Kapoor and Rani Mukherjee deliver good performances, Shernaz Patel as the neighbour with an occult gift has done a commendable job. The story is etched in realism even though the mystical part of life after death is integral to its storyline. The film is a taut psychological thriller with profound social angles between the lines. It is engrossing and satisfying.

8/10 

Skyfall (2012)

When Bond sits down in front of a painting to meet his new Quartermaster, a young tech-wizard not without some degree of affable narcissism, to get his mission's equipments, he gets an improvised gun and a mini position transmitter (a radio). 'It's not exactly Christmas, is it?' Bond quips. 'What were you expecting, a pen that explodes? We don't go in for those kind of things anymore' Q retorts. That scene insinuates the treatment and style of the James Bond theme in 'Skyfall'. The rituals of a bond movie are not disregarded but they lie underneath shades of progressing scenes. The scene in a Shanghai pub is a case in point. The Bond babe (not the Bond girl but the beautiful babes who end up dead in Bond movies) Berenice Marlohe gets in touch with Daniel Craig and the impressive self-introduction of Bond takes place. 'Bond', he says to her, 'James Bond.' And then the bartender hands to him a shaken martini and he accepts it with one word - 'Perfect'.

Apart from a taut screenplay, very well shot action scenes and an engaging villain (played by Javier Bardem), the film also probes, questions and quakes the relationship between M and her agents, the choices operatives make in their minds in split seconds that become irrevocable decisions in the next second and how they have to live with their acts, for the rest of their lives. Their actions might turn out right or wrong but that also hangs on if they are fortunate or not at the given point of time. The film also dwells into the role of MI6 in British democratic politics, their efficiency which is based on secrecy and their effectiveness which needs cooperation which is attained by transparency. There is also the intuition of the field-worker that is in conflict with the informed reasoning of the desk-job facilitator that reaches a breaking point in M's decision to 'take the bloody shot'. Sam Mendes makes us feel that difference right from the start when Bond and Moneypenny chase the bad guy while M constantly nags them for updates. When cars roll out on either sides of Moneypenny's jeep and M asks 'What happened?', the difference between being on the field and behind a desk becomes apparent. 'A couple of VW beatles, I think' Moneypenny replies.

M loses some of her unassailable professionalism and dignity because the director falters at points in his treatment of the character. In one scene she is decisive and impressive as in her meeting with Ralph Fiennes where he tells her that she should retire. 'You must retire with dignity' he says. 'The hell with dignity, I'll step down when the job is done' she slams back. In other scenes she comes across as someone struggling with her emotions and wrestling with her demons. And in the scenes after she is fake-kidnapped by Bond to lure in Silva, she seems even frightened at times. Her old age becomes suddenly visible and her self-control falters (she even confesses 'I fucked up') and her helplessness surfaces. The direction in such scenes appears unsure.

Daniel Craig delivers. With him there is a toughness, even if it means compromising on the charm, about being Bond. When Pierce Brosnan walks in a suit, he tantalises with his charm. When Craig suits up, it gives him the look of a grizzled operative, tough and focussed. The Aston Martin was a beauty, the blown up castle well located for a finale and Javier Bardem as the villain Raoul Silva, super-talented but a victim of acute suffering and a little touched in the brain, is a poetic Satan.

Skyfall is a well-made Bond film and when Adele croons in the beginning 'This is the end', you can get set for a grippy story told by Sam Mendes, the Bond way.

Skyfall - 7/10 

Argo (2012)

Ben Affleck is endearing. The movies he has directed so far - Gone Baby Gone, The Town and Argo - have all reached excellent standards of film making. He seems to move from strength to strength and Argo, despite all the cinematic constraints that go with translating a complex international issue from paper onto the silver screen within 120 minutes and trying to keep it engaging but not populist, manages to make a mark. It takes a lot of clarity and a top class team to film retrospectively about important issues that really happened, reconstructing scenes from photographs, recordings and research, getting the sequences straight in their own heads and then extracting performances from different actors with their own personalities and styles and making it fit into the particular situation, a hostage crisis in this case. Ben Affleck manages to do that well and in his capacity as an actor, he displays restraint and as a director, resourcefulness.

The effort has been to deal with the hostage crisis as such and stay away from debates of the right and wrong of the Iranian revolution itself or the moral culpabilities of the Cold war era U.S government and the Islamic Republic of Iran that emerged under Ayotollah Khomeini. Affleck has a lot to pack in the two hours and he does so with style. The dialogues are one of the best elements in the film and their delivery by the cast is timed and measured in a way that it puts those wonderful lines right into context. The casual rogue humour of Hollywood filmdom and Washington bureaucracy combine to conceive Mission Argo, so to speak, and the characters from both these worlds, with a glass of whisky in their hands, come up the clinching line of the movie - 'Argo fuck yourself.' That line packs the nonchalance of both the worlds, the daredevilness of the operation, the panache of the persons involved and even a philosphical detachment from the result and a disenchantment with heroism. 

Middle eastern style music in some scenes adds to the effect of the credible sets of revolutionary Iran. The persian-esque music during scenes where the flight takes off from U.S to Iran and when Ben Affleck (Tony Mendez) changes into a blue shirt after a sleepless night to call on the 6 Americans gives an almost physical jerk and draws the viewer all the more powerfully into the plot. The actors have all performed well, Alan Arkin as Lester Siegel especially  delivers a riveting performance. He times his dialogues, beautifully cheeky dialogues, with an uncanny finesse. The scene where he negotiates with a director to sign him for Argo is immensely enjoyable and the smile it produces gets revived in the viewer's lips whenever he comes before the camera. It was a smile expecting a shrewd humourous line and also noddingly acknowledging the sharp spontaneity of his behaviour and therefore making readymade allowances for its wit.

The climax is highly cinematised yet Ben Affleck, the director easily steals the show and wins over the audience primarily because he avoids taking sides and his own character in the film, that of exfil specialist Tony Mendez, calls a spade a spade and comes across as a man of action and pragmatism rather than of eloquence and charm.

Argo - must watch - 8/10