MAMI Day 6: Movies That Missed The Mark

A couple of things happen when you spend 6 straight days straight almost exclusively within the confines of cinema theatres. You memorise the snack counter menus and make your peace with spending exorbitant amounts for teas, coffees and food. You start memorising the faces of the security guards who frisk you throughout the day. Most of all, you become victim to a constant bombardment of film marketing aimed at regular cinegoers.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, with due respect, if I hear that song from Secret Superstar One more time, I might pop a blood vessel. Songs from the film have been playing on loop at every single theatre so consistently, that it’s come to sound like bad lift music that you just can’t get away from. This is less a comment on the quality of the songs themselves and more about the headache of having to listen to them on loop anywhere and everywhere.

Aside from that, it was day of running (quite literally) between PVR ECX and Icon which didn’t help the already dire levels of fatigue and sleep deprivation being felt at this point.

Blade Of The Immortal: A Tiring Action Saga Which Takes Itself Far Too Seriously 

I so wanted to like Takashi Miike’s Blade Of The Immortal. It looked to be a refreshing change of pace from the standard festival films, offering no holds barred violent entertainment. However, Miike’s film takes itself far too seriously and tries to do too much rather than stick to its strengths.

Based on the popular Manga series, the stylistic Samurai revenge saga is a violent, blood-and-guts action flick aimed at those who enjoy one-man-cut-down-hundreds-of-bad-guys showdowns and limbs flying left right and centre. The film follows an immortal Samurai warrior’s quest to help a young girl get revenge on the men that killed her parents.

While the action works well for the most part, it leaves very little to the imagination. The film also stresses too much on the emotional threads between characters which are uninteresting and difficult to care about.  Blade Of The Immortal would have strongly benefitted from leaning into its own campiness, less lazy dialogue and dialling up the swag factor. Lord knows it could also use some comedy.

While it has some exceedingly cool hairstyles and costuming, it fails to justify in length and proved more exhausting than explosively entertaining.

 Signature Move: Painfully Disappointing And A Sorely Missed Opportunity

It is a real achievement to make a cross-cultural lesbian rom-comfeaturing female wrestlers boring.

Signature Move was one of the films I was looking forward to most this festival season and it ended up to be a sorely lacking experiencing. From director Jennifer Reed, the film centers on Zaynab (a bland Fawzia Mirza who’s also the film’s writer) a New York-based lawyer who’s caught between her budding love life with a new woman and inability to come out to her orthodox Pakistani mother (ShabaanaAzmi). Also, Zaynab wrestles which plays a weirdly big part of story, I guess for entertainment value?

Signature Move is a shallow, simplistic, contrived and fluffy rom-com which can’t even claim to be much fun. Though it does boast of some workable characters and certain funny sequences, these are pitifully few and far between. To its credit, the film strikes a pleasant enough tone, which probably lets it get away with more than it perhaps should.

It also somewhere suffers from a case of an actor hijacking a film. The film gives far too much importance and screen time to the mother’s character for no real reason other than perhaps they felt it necessary to give an actor of Shabaana Azmi’s calibre as much screen time as possible.

The film’s biggest failure however, is how little it gets us to care about Zaynab and her complex struggles which are just skirted over and barely fleshed out. Perhaps most of all Signature Move frustrated me because of what it could have been. It had such a wonderful premise and all the right elements in place. They just needed better writing and execution.

In The Shadows: Imperfect But Rewarding Nonetheless

In The Shadows was my chance to redeem an otherwise lousy day of films and while it didn’t quite soar, it was full of promise and intrigue.

The film is a confident piece of cinema with director Dipesh Jain doing a fine job at mustering intrigue and gathering momentum for the film’s many mysteries with some fantastic sequences. The film is unfortunately grossly let down by its slow-burning pace, extensive length, and predictable climax.

Still, it’s an honest piece of filmmaking which also boasts of some memorable performances, primarily from the unwaveringly talented Manoj Bajpayee who is particularly fantastic as a man in pain with a questionable hold on reality. The fine supporting cast of Neeraj Kabi and Shahana Goswami and the young actor who plays their son are no less.

Despite its many issues, In The Shadows had a lot to offer and really took me places, leaving me grateful for the experience.