Kochadaiiyaan
Genre: Animation
Cast: Rajinikanth, Deepika Padukone, Jackie Shroff, Nasser, Sharath Kumar, Shobana, Adhi
Director: Soundarya
It is the week where Indian and American film industries use technology to take us to the times when our superstars and superheroes were agile and virile. Leading the way is Soundarya Rajinikanth Ashwin’s rendering of a tale of courage and commitment, capturing the enduring charisma of Rajinikanth through photo-realistic motion capture technology in 3D. Here is a chance for the fan boys to see their aging star with six-pack abs in a period setting.
Told in a once-upon-a-time mould to engage both kids and their parents, it is about Rana, a mighty warrior, and how he fights to restore the legacy of his father Kochadaiiyaan. Rajinikanth plays the two roles (and one more!) with characteristic relish. As Rana, he plays to the gallery and as Kochadaiiyaan, the warrior with a long curly mane, he lends gravitas to the proceedings. Though present in the animated form, he is head and shoulders above the rest of the cast when it comes to expressions and punch lines. Originally made in Tamil, the Hindi dub is not bad but one does miss the voice of Deepika Padukone as princess Vadhana and fails to understand why only Rajinikanth’s voiceover has a Tamil accent.
Director Soundarya has weaved an engaging tapestry of emotional turmoil where a people’s warrior puts the national interest ahead of personal gain, where he talks of forgiveness even when he is cheated. Where he talks of changing with times as the only mantra to survive and sustain. In the process, the audience forgets where the character and the actor intertwine and this is perhaps what the director wants. When Rana stands up for the slaves in the rival territory, you get a sense that the superstar is in a mood to give us a reality check in what is essentially a kid’s format but ultimately, K.S Ravikumar’s script flattens to generate mass appeal and Rana, in fact, states towards the end that his ‘art’ will go on only like this.
Soundarya devotes ample time to establish the characters and prepare the audience for an emotional upheaval with a romantic track laced with A.R. Rahman’s tunes. It is in the second half where the drama beholds you as the reasons for Rana’s rebellion against his own king (Nasser) unravels. Jackie Shroff is impressive as the king of the rival empire and Sharath Kumar and Shobana lend good support in cameos.
The use of multiple cameras and tracking movement lends depth to the ambience but the limited eye ball action and the unusually slow movement of some frames come in the way of storytelling and reduce the beauty of Deepika by a few notches.
The film is full of exciting set pieces like Kochadaiiyaan’s tandav and his flight on a horse in the sea at night. Not to forget Rana’s one-on-one fight with princess Vadha and the resurrection of late actor Nagesh through animation but the lack of finesse in the movement of horses and intricate dance movements indicate that while it is a leap for animation film in the country, we are still far from the global standards set by Pixar and Disney. Interestingly, you notice all the discrepancies in the design only in the first half where the plot has more gas than substance. The moment the pot gets boiling in the second half you can’t take your eyes off Rajinikanth.
X-Men: Days Of Future Past
Genre: Sci-fi/ Superhero
Cast: Hugh Jackman, Jennifer Lawrence, Michael Fassbender, James Mc Avoy, Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, Peter Dinklage, Halle Berry
Director: Bryan Singer
As the summer gets brighter, life inside Hollywood tent poles is getting bleaker and believable. This week, X-Men take a shot at turning the clock back to correct the follies of the past so that the future can be secured. Once again, an aging superhero franchise tries to look beyond the stunts and spectacle to probe the popular conscience and manages to keep the emotions perceptible. Director Bryan Singer, a master at assembling comic book superheroes, has kept the complex proceedings entertaining without letting the intrinsic logic slip for a large part.
We are in near future where both humans and mutants are under grave threat from sentinels, a robotic form of mutants created in the ‘70s by a crazy scientist to vanquish the mutants from the society. Magneto (Ian McKellen) and Professor X (Patrick Stewart) put together a plan where in Wolverine’s (Hugh Jackman) consciousness is sent back in time to prevent Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) from killing Bolivar Trask (Peter Dinklage), the scientist who created sentinels. The idea spirals immense possibilities. With Wolverine, we claw back to the period when Professor X was Charles Xavier (James McAvoy), desolate about the closure of his school and Magneto was Erik Lehnsherr (Michael Fassbender), languishing deep down the Pentagon for killing the President of America.
It allows Singer and his team of writers (Simon Kinberg, Matthew Vaughn and Jane Goldman) to bring in the bickering among mutants and inside jokes because Wolverine knows what lies ahead while his mates don’t. Singer doesn’t let the superlative action make the writing lazy. It reflects in the imaginative set piece involving Quicksilver (Evan Peters), who has time to have fun even as he outpaces the bullet. It echoes in the emotional track involving Mystique and Charles. And it oozes out of the dry wit.
If Hugh Jackman has emerged as the first among equals in this motley group of mutants, where the likes of Halle Barry have been reduced to sidekicks this time, Jennifer Lawrence enjoys her chameleonic brilliance in a blue suit.
Amidst the display of sound and fury on the surface, where a stadium flies and Richard Nixon is pulled out of his bunker by a magnetic force, Singer joins the dots of past and present to give the narrative a moral and socio political lining. The narrative travels back from China to Vietnam War and in between revise the theory behind John F. Kennedy’s assassination to make us see the bigger picture. At times, it does seem far-fetched but then, Singer has used larger than life instances judiciously.
Among other things, mutants have always existed in popular culture as metaphors for racial stigma and here again within the layers you can read that they represent the outsiders in the comic universe, who are ready to give up their hostility towards humans to take on a common enemy. The fact that it is the female among the mutants that is going bellicose against the atrocities adds another coat. The fact that Singer has cast Dinklage, a dwarf actor, as the ‘human’ scientist allows another reading. But one thing is certain. There is not much difference between the robotic sentinels and the present day terrorists or radicals. Both are created to pillory the minority as a threat to further the goals of a powerful lobby. It all adds up to give the fan boys their adrenaline diet and the discerning something to chew on.
