Tag Archives: Movies

Movie Review: Crazy Rich Asians

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Last week during the September school holidays, finally GG and I caught Crazy Rich Asians. I had read the book a few years back when it first released and was actually looking forward to the movie when it was announced.

The film was super hyped here in Singapore and probably rightly so since the movie is set in this city-state and would bring tremendous world attention, especially the tourism dollars here.

The movie, to me especially, didn’t live up to the book. But then, that’s me and there’s rarely any movie which lives up to the movie in my head, so I’ll let that ride. The film is an unabashed and cinematic depiction of Singapore and the Singapore Tourism Board should be happy with the outcome of the dollars they have spent on this movie. The movie is a celebration of Singapore and even though I am sure not all scenes shown as Singapore has actually been shot here, it was fun to see familiar landmarks on the big screen and try to decipher where a particular scene could have been shot.

Crazy Rich Asians follows Rachel Chu (Constance Wu), a Chinese American economics professor at NYU who’s been dating fellow professor Nick Young (Henry Golding) for over a year. For their spring break, Nick invites Rachel to visit his home of Singapore, where he’s returning for his best friend Colin’s (Chris Pang) wedding. Rachel decides to join him, meaning it will be the first time she’s met his family, including his mother Eleanor (Michelle Yeoh). Plus, it gives Rachel the chance to visit her college best friend, Peik Lin (Awkwafina), who also lives in Singapore. However, when Rachel and Nick are upgraded to first class on their flight, she quickly realizes her long-term boyfriend hasn’t been completely upfront about his family – particularly how wealthy they are – and it takes her by surprise.

Once they arrive in Singapore, Rachel is quickly accepted by Colin’s fiancée Araminta (Sonoya Mizuno), and she’s invited to the bachelorette party, while Colin and Nick must suffer through a bachelor party thrown by their former classmate Bernard Tai (Jimmy O. Yang). However, Rachel’s approached by Nick’s ex-girlfriend Amanda (Jing Lusi) and feels less than welcome. Things only get worse when Nick introduces Rachel to Eleanor, who decidedly doesn’t think Rachel is good enough for her son. With the help of Peik Lin – and some allies in Nick’s family, Nick’s cousin Astrid (Gemma Chan) and second cousin Oliver (Nico Santos) – Rachel must decide if she wants to fight for Nick, or escape from the extravagant world of Singapore’s rich and famous in favour of her relatively quiet life in New York City.

The film is fun, light and frothy and I loved Rachel’s character. She is a smart, well read and an independent woman who is not afraid to call out Nick when he is wrong. Another strong woman on the show was Astrid played by Gemma Chan. I loved her in the book and though her character was not as well fleshed out as I would have liked it, I am looking forward to her story in more detail when the sequel comes out.

Someone watching this movie may think Singapore is filled with Chinese millionaires and billionaires as almost everyone in the film is Chinese and a millionaire. You would be hard pressed to find other races in the film (Singapore is a multi-cultural and multi-racial society), not even in scenes which show them socialising (except for the one where Rachel befriends the Malay princess Intan).

All in all, this is a fun film and for those who don’t know Singapore, this is a good starting point. Singapore is shot very well and I am sure the STB will use parts of the film as marketing campaigns moving forward.

My verdict: Do go and see the film, you won’t regret it!

 

 

Movie Review: Raazi

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Based on a real-life female spy immortalised in Harinder Sikka’s spy thriller, Calling Sehmat, Raazi was a real treat to watch.

Set in the months before the India-Pakistan war of 1971 and the liberation of Bangladesh, this film is all about Sehmat (Alia Bhat), a young 20-year-old Kashmiri Delhi University student. She comes from a family who believes in the adage, ‘country before self’ and whose father Hidayat Khan (Ranjit Kapoor), is a double agent for the Indian intelligence community whose close friend is Brigadier Syed (Shishir Sharma) from the Pakistan Armed Forces to whom he feeds carefully curated information.

Since Hidayat has been diagnosed with cancer, he decides to send his untrained daughter into the enemy camp in an audacious plan, get her married to Syed’s son Iqbal (Vicky Kaushal)  and plant her into the home of the enemy to glean information and pass it to the Indian intelligence. The film is then all about how Sehmat tries to win over her in-laws and how she gathers information from their home and from that of the homes of their friends and colleagues and how she is almost caught every time.

She is never suspected by anyone, except an old family retainer, Abdul (Arif Zakaria) who came over from India at Partition and one day is caught by him. She then kills him by crushing him under a vehicle, her first murder in this operation. Her brother-in-law (Ashwath Bhatt) then starts suspecting her because the retainer tries to use her name when he is found and hospitalised, and she then kills him too.

The Pakistani intelligence then suspects that someone from the Syed household is leaking secrets and when Sehmat fears that she will get caught, she hides all her spying equipment in Abdul’s room. When the cache is found out, Iqbal realises it’s his wife and not Abdul who is the real spy. Sehmat also realises that Iqbal knows her secret and she flees from the home using the grandson of a senior officer as a shield and when Iqbal confronts her with the authorities, the Indian spymaster and her handler, Khalid Mir (Jaideep Alhawat) decide to eliminate both of them, only to realise that Sehmat had tricked everyone and she was safe. She returns back to India only to find out that she is pregnant. She refuses to abort the child and moves away from everything. It is shown that the child is now an officer in the Indian Armed Forces.

I found the casting absolutely spot on! The actors portraying the Pakistani characters seemed so authentic that it seemed to me I was watching a Hum TV drama (a Pakistani television channel).

With every movie that I see, Alia Bhat impresses me even more. I feel she has come a long way since her debut and her fresh-faced innocence as Sehmat is wonderful. She owns the movie and you find yourself rooting for her at every turn (even though you kind of know she will triumph in the end, this being a Bollywood film). The film also stars Alia’s mum Soni Razdan and when you see the two of them in the same shot, you realise how much Alia resembles her mum.

Jaideep Alhawat as Khalid Mir, the Indian spymaster and Sehmat’s handler was very impressive as the cold-blooded, ruthless spy for whom it is country before everything else. Vicky Kaushal as Iqbal was fantastic and the chemistry between him and Alia was superb!

The music in the film was evocative of the seventies and was fairly unobtrusive, never really becoming a focus of attention, but blended beautifully in the background. I loved both the rendering of Ae Watan.

Meghna Gulzar really deserves each and every award that she is sure to get when the awards season starts.

My verdict – please do go and watch the film, it’s worth it!

 

 

 

Woohoo…Friday’s here…

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It’s the end of another work week and a week closer to my holiday! You must know by now how excited I am about it (I can’t stop talking or rather blogging about it!)

Image from Pinterest

This week has been a mixed bag one with a dash of mommy guilt thrown in for good measure! GG has been pestering me to do something special with her, but other than shopping, which I’ve promised her soon, I can’t think of anything which I will be able to exclude BB. The thing is that I am incapable of doing something with one of them and excluding the other. In fact I am scrupulously fair to the two of them – even if I buy someone something, the other will get something else of the exact same value!

So what are we planning for this weekend? We’re going to take BB & GG to watch Puss in Boots tomorrow morning. I’ve heard many good things about the movie and so will review it later. My only concern is that it’s been rated PG, but hope any fears are unfounded.

Then later, it’s some spring cleaning time (time to clear GG’s closets of the clothes she’s outgrown) and then maybe the library!

See you on the other side of the weekend!

Ra One: Not really what I expected

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Shahrukh Khan got two new fans to bolster his legion of fans. We caught Ra One en famille over the weekend and while they didn’t like the movie, GG & BB liked the hero.

So Ra One….Where do I start. Before I start with my observations on the movie, here’s a Wikipedia link with the detailed storyline and reviewsThe movie had a PG 13 classification here and since BB & GG are eight, and they saw Enthiran/Robot last year in the theatre, I thought they could handle a similar genre of movie. I was wrong, they can’t handle violence, so I am going to try and get them to see something softer, maybe a romance or a comedy soon. Since they are learning Hindi in school, this was supposed to be something which had undertones of education attached to it.

I found the movie to be a big disappointment. For a movie which was the most anticipated movie of the year and which had so much hype surrounding it, the actual movie was a complete let-down.

The film starts with a double meaning joke which is supposed to be a dream which Shahrukh Khan’s (SRK) son, a 10-12 year old is dreaming about! This is not the only crude joke in the film. The whole film is peppered with such jokes, with a ‘condom’ joke running through the entire film. This ‘condom’ joke is offensive, not for the content, but for the fact that it is supposed to be a wrong version of the tamil word ‘konjum’ (little) which Kareena’s Punjabi character mangles all the time.

The stereotypes alluded to Shekhar Subramaniam is typical, which is quite irritating given that he is supposed to be living in London for a minimum of 12-13 years (they show a song with the courtship of Sekhar and Mona then the birth of their child), so in that time, it is inconceivable that he would learn to speak English without that irritating accent and also lose all those stereotypes like eating noodles with yoghurt with bare hands! Come on, nowadays, most people are more sophisticated that that!

I also found the back story between SRK and Kareena very vague. She is a typical gaali (ephitet) sprouting Punjabi kudi while SRK is a sterotypical Tamil scientist nerd. How did they meet? Where did they meet? If the couple is based in the UK and Sekhar Subramaniam (SRK) is a British citizen, then how does he own a huge house in Mumbai with the house holding loads of memories for him and his wife? These questions were never answered and leads you with a sense of the storyline missing something.

SRK’s Shekhar Subramaniam dies within 30 minutes and the hero of the film, the good guy G One appears at the point just before the interval is announced. The villian, Ra One is initially an Asian guy and the real villan Arjun Rampal, appears in the last 40-50 minutes of the film!

The songs are ok, I loved the Chammak Chalo song which comes almost at the climax. At the climax you also see Ra One on a running train, something that reminds you of Enthiran/Robot. Alluding to the same movie you have Rajnikant make a 1 minute appearance as Chitti, his robot character in the movie which is greeted with awe by the characters in the scene.

So all in all, the movie is worth is a watch, just to see the special effects and especially if you are a Shahrukh Khan fan. But if you are planning on taking children below 12 to see the movie, then exercise caution. If your child/ren are the innocent variety like GG & BB, then give the film a miss or see it alone/with adults. If your child likes/understands adult and toilet humor, by all means take them with you

What Kind of a Blogger Am I?

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I was stuck today with nothing remotely intelligent to say. Then while I was surfing the net, I came across this quiz which asks you some questions about the things you blog about and then tells you what kind of a blogger you are. So what kind am I? I am a Life Blogger. To quote…

“Your blog is the story of your life – a living diary. If it happens, you blog it. And you make it as entertaining as possible. You may be guilty of over-sharing a bit on your blog, but you can’t help it. Your life is truly an open book. Or in this case, an open blog!”

Am I really a life blogger? I do blog about things going on in my life – after all this blog was started with the intention of being something like a digital diary. Well that should give me things to post about another time.

This weekend is going to be a long one with Hari Raya Haji or what is called Bakri Id in India on Sunday, so Monday’s an extra holiday. We’ve got plans this weekend – on Saturday we go for a birthday party for the child of a friend, one whom GG & BB also know well, then on Sunday GG and BB will see their second Hindi Bollywood film in the theatre! The first non-children film was 3 Idiots and the first Tamil film was Enthiran. We’re seeing Ra One on Sunday and both BB & GG are super excited about it. I’ll review the film sometime next week.