Reviews

A very badly produced documentary, if you can call this one. No attempt has been made to improve the quality of videos or even have a script to string history chronologically with a voice over. Several big artistes and events have been omitted (no archive, so let's pretend they never were part of R'nR history) Digital technology was available for the big studio which released this. But all it seems to have done was to have a video editor to intersperse archived 'live shows' with spliced interviews to make it look like a documentary. Who made Peter Townshend and Tom Petty an authority on everybody? It's a rip off from Warner Brothers. Clearly, nothing worthwhile has been spent in producing this. It is not worth watching, even if someone gifts it to you.

A mediocre film from the Merchant Ivory stable. One wonders the standards of Columbia University if this won an award for screenplay despite showing an entire community in poor light. Worse, the Indian roots of the directors, several actors or supporting cast or crew could not redeem a hopelessly biased script which has damaged the reputation of a community.

It's not about just the protagonist, but every character from her community is shown as petty-minded, ignorant, thieving, drunk or wannabe brown madams. There is not a single character to tell an unsuspecting viewer that like every other community, even this one has its good and bad apples. One of the dialogues uttered by a British 'mam sahib' is "the Anglo-Indian community has the worst of Indian and English characteristics".

The movie should have been flagged for willful portrayal of hateful and distorted content and for tarnishing the image of a microscopic minority. It can be categorised along with dangerous propaganda movies made by certain regimes in western Europe in the mid-1930s. Inheritors of Merchant Ivory Productions must be sued for making this ugly film. And that's not too late

I guess there are enough reviews here but thought of writing a few lines because of the meta score. My personal experience so far suggested that those whose reviews make for the meta score comprise a pretentious lot who give 10 stars for any movie that can be termed as 'the emperor's new clothes' but shudder at something that can give a beautiful experience for ordinary moviegoers. The rating for this movie just confirmed that theory. This is a powerful movie which puts across the limitations and manipulations of the American health insurance system, apart from telling a moving tale, even if too dramatic is powerful. It compels one to sit back and think about the fat cats who live off poor people's miseries.

This is not a new story. One would have come across reports in the media of similar incidents in real life. However, if you are one who believes a movie is a medium that provides a unique visual experience, you would be disappointed. For almost 50% of the duration of the movie, you wouldn't miss a thing even if you remained seated with your eyes shut because everything is dark. For some uncanny reason, such movies win critical acclaim but fail to entertain normal movie lovers. Only critics can see the emperor's new clothes, may be. This movie is more of a sound track. Why anyone should have attempted to make a 'blank-screen movie' may remain a mystery that only a Hercule Poirot could solve. Of course the pretentious critic would say that it represented the dark nature of the theme. I would ask such people to watch a John Alton classic to know how one can create beauty out of darkness and shadows It may have been a clever way out for a lazy director who wanted to save time taken for adjusting the light for each shot. A smart way would have been to reduce the run time because the film moves at a painful pace from the beginning. An average director could have wound it up in less than 90 minutes. If you want to see how a parent keeps a child protected and motivated in the most challenging circumstances, watch 'Life is Beautiful'

The movie has everything to leave people touched and educated on the trauma a family undergoes when a member fights a deadly ailment. However, the overemphasis on showing how such a person looks and suffers, leaves viewers disturbed. Good movie-makers convey these subtly, through few shots and lines.

I have no idea what I watched. I then wondered why I bought the DVD. It has "Terrific" and similar comments from movie critics of well-known American newspapers. What they were on while they watched this stuff or when they wrote the synopsis is not clear but it seems it was the same stuff the makers of this celluloid product had. They should have kept it in their private library and watched it every time they had the stuff. Why trouble poor movie viewers who want to relax or at least have a laugh or two at the end of a tiring day or week?

What would it be like for an Indian youth to have a spirited, smart and naughty woman to suddenly pop up in his neighbourhood? 'Nokketha Dhoorathu Kannum Nattu' manages to capture his emotions well, as well as the male ego at being beaten in every prank and joke she plays. But why is she here to suddenly visit her grandmother? Why does she bear with her cantankerous grandmother to win her over? The answers may leave you wishing that the fun and games just went on and on. Director Fazil may have been inspired by 'Terms of Endearment', released a year before this movie. But even if that is the case, he has certainly made better use of the theme.

Those who were not born when JFK was assassinated could go through a newspaper's archives to know about now irrelevant details shown in this film to be more enlightened. Although based on a book about a theme on which roughly 600 books have been written, and which raises curiosity and interest internationally even 50 years later, the movie meanders along like an amateur video. Even if the idea was to tell the viewer that Lee Oswald was a nut case, whose mother was no different, why struggle so much? Most people are not bothered, because the majority don't know even that Saddam Hussein's regime had no 'weapons of mass destruction'. At one point it even looked like the movie was a biography about Lee's 'noble brother'. Is this movie about the Oswalds? Is it about doctors attempts to revive Kennedy? Is it to show how the inside of an hospital looked in Dallas in the 1960s? An innocent viewer may end up asking these questions. Those who wanted to make this should have at least got Oliver Stone to their side before attempting a movie to say Oswald had no accomplices. At the end credits it says that it is a 'work of fiction'. Truth prevails, after all

This film, if it can be called one, can be basically described as 'the awful invention of a script' to trash God and believers. The movie has been created by people with so little imagination that everyone keeps repeating two lines -- "short fat kids with stub noses" and "the man in the sky" countless number of times. I wonder how anyone can venture to make a movie with such limited imagination. It looks like an amateur attempt at movie making, completed in a few days with minimum people. Obviously, those behind the script, screenplay and direction have been gifted very little with creativity by "the man in the sky". If you have time to waste, please go try counting waves that lash on the beach. And if you have money to waste just put it through a paper shredder. But definitely, don't waste a nickel on this apology of a movie.

The 'ultimate' in a series of movies which aims to dumb down human understanding of how intelligence agencies and their agents work. Move over movie-makers who believe that films are supposed to inform apart from entertain and closely resemble reality. Who needs your painstaking research in this digital age when a few humans in front of monitors can chase and track everyone they want by pressing a key? The movie portrays the working of CIA that no intelligence agency can hope to attain even if half the world is populated by its robots and can move on to track 'targets' as soon as a single voice instruction is given by an individual sitting pretty somewhere in the US. Bourne Ultimatum's 8.1 rating as against Topaz's 6.3 is the giveaway clue on why people are encouraged to make such movies. If not of fantasy genre, it should be classified as a comedy, given the number of times I laughed out loud.

For those who have seen 'Absent Minded Professor' or 'Flubber', there is nothing novel about 'Her'. People who sit in a drawing room and sometimes cynically discuss where computers, gadgets and software could take humans in the future surely could put together a script that would be refreshing and funny than 'Her'. Where 'Her' has excelled is in perversion, literally illustrated in the armpit drawing. If someone thinks that's funny, I would rather talk to an operating system than watch movies rated 9/10 by metacritics. If anything, this movie has taught me to be suspicious of anything rated that high, especially by the 'experts.' If your idea of watching movie is to be entertained, please don't watch 'Her.' You would wish the operating system hanged in 30 minutes.

An unusually amazing true story of a second world war veteran -- who credited his faith for his triumph over unbelievable cruel torture at the hands of Japanese as a prisoner of war -- has been royally bungled by a team that seems sadistic as the character Watanabe and puts the viewer to almost a similar kind of torture that the prisoner underwent while failing to highlight the indomitable spirit of the prisoner(s). Wonder why she decided to show less blood (unlike Steven Spielberg). Thanks for that! May be Angelina Jolie should take lessons from Hugh Hudson (Chariots of Fire) on how to adapt real life incidents into a mesmerizing film. But the better thing for her would be to keep away from directing movies in future.

This is a feedback on the blu-ray version of Planet Earth: In an age when 'free downloads' are preferred mode for owning movies and documentaries, I shelled out three times more money to buy a blu-ray version of the DVD version I possess just to appreciate the hard work undertaken, to contribute one's mite to fund such beautiful projects and to have an even more spectacular view of the documentary. But 'Planet Earth Diaries' (12 such episodes) part of the 'complete series' in the DVD version has been culled out in the blu-ray version. Although the blu-ray experience is breathtaking, I feel shortchanged by this culled version of Planet Earth. One of the reasons why I bought the blu-ray version was to watch the 'diary' on the snow leopard. It would be an understatement to say I am thoroughly disappointed that this is not there in the blu-ray version. The blu-ray should ideally have the warning, 'the incomplete version'