After watching Marigold you feel like saluting Sanjay Gupta. Why? Well, he makes Hollywood copies much better than any phirang director has ever been able to recreate Bollywood on a global canvas. Marigold — “like the flower”, which you are reminded a zillion times in the movie — is so soggy and saccharine-spiked that you feel like throwing up at the end of the ordeal.

It starts off on an even keel, though. Marigold Lexton (Larter) is an American actress who only gets movies with numbers at the end. Matlab? She has appeared in Indecent Proposal 2, Fatal Attraction 3, Basic Instinct 3 and is in India to star in Kamasutra 3. Phew! It’s quite revealing when she herself says that she shows “more than just promise” in her movies.

But Kamasutra 3 gets stalled, Marigold gets stuck in Goa and Prem (Salman) is the Bollywood bloke in shining armour. Salman is the choreographer of a movie which has Vikas Bhalla (the actor who sang Dhuan dhuan to resurrect a career gone up in smoke) as the hero and Simone Singh (a tacky take-off on Ash, ex-Miss World and all) as the heroine. No wonder director Manoj (Rakesh Bedi) quickly rewrites his non-existent script and suddenly there’s an American actress happily jiving to Bollywood beats.

Half Two, by which time Marigold is trying to say “main tumse pyar karti hoon” to Prem, moves from one Indian tourist location to another. Prem is suddenly the prince of Jodhpur — yes, Salman sure has a janmon ka rishta with the Blue City — and the man stalking him is the mute royal guard (not Eklavya, but Gulshan Grover). A few reels and quite a few glycerine bottles later, bouts of wrecked relationships, childhood engagements, maternal mamta and ex-lovers’ naggings lead to the hackneyed battle of tradition and love. And, of course, you know, what wins.

Willard Carroll has got it all wrong. Perhaps he was better off making a mockery of Bollywood rather than this cheeni-zyaada hotchpotch, a tribute to Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam, where even taxi drivers speak in chaste English. It’s unreal, unbelievable and unwatchable.

The best thing about Marigold is Marigold, not the flower but the actress playing the actress. Ali Larter puts in quite a performance and her transformation from the “supreme bitch” to the susheel bahu comes off convincingly. There sure is an “arc” and “motivation”.

Salman tries to be the Prem of Maine Pyar Kiya but where is that brash naughtiness, those mischievous eyes and that know-it-all smile? Good ol’ Barjatya goodness gets all lost in his mumbo-jumbo English accent. And he never dances like a choreographer — the steps are unsure and half-hearted. In fact, Marigold does the thumka much better.

The support cast makes it worse. Ian Bohen as Barry the boyfriend and Nandana Sen as the maudlin lover-in-waiting are so bad that they make Suchitra, Vikas and Rakesh look like Oscar-winning thespians. The cinematography by Anil Mehta, though, is top class and some of the Shankar Ehsaan Loy songs (Yeh pyaar kya hai and Truth hurts) make melody out of the noise. But those are reasons not strong enough for you to waste two hours on Marigold.

Pratim D. Gupta

Car Wars

Boys and their toys are in full formation in Transformers, a movie of epically assaultive noise and nonsense. Originating with the shape-shifting toys — created in Japan, rebranded in America — that transform from robots into stuff like cars and planes, then back again, the movie has been designed as the ultimate in shock-and-awe entertainment. The result is part car commercial, part military recruitment ad, a bumper-to-bumper pileup of big cars, big guns and, as befits its recently weaned target demographic, big breasts.

First introduced in 1984, just in time for the rise of geek culture, the Transformer toys have spawned comic books, television shows, video games, an animated feature and a fan base that has grown beyond children to include collectors like Steven Spielberg, an executive producer for the new movie. Not surprisingly, there’s a touch of mawkish Spielbergian sentiment in the movie’s empathetic hook, a riff on the boy and his alien friendship from E.T. This time the boy is Sam Witwicky (LaBeouf, talking fast, running hard), a high schooler who discovers that his dingy 1970s Camaro is actually a gentle giant of a robot, Bumblebee.

There’s more — a few goofy caricatures, some throwaway laughs, a lot of technological gobbledygook, the usual filler. Written by Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, who cobbled the story together with John Rogers, the movie takes flight with a raucous, confusing attack on an American military base in Qatar. There, under the desert sun, muscly, sweaty military types (Duhamel, Gibson) clash with an ominous helicopter that converts into a mysteriously angry critter with an articulated tail like that of a scorpion. Back in the United States the secretary of defence (Voight) barks orders at other military types while Sam juggles his weird ride, his mounting fear and his agitated hormones.

The guy charged with keeping the movie in gear is director Michael Bay, the hardcore action savant whose other eruptions include The Rock, Armageddon, Pearl Harbor and Bad Boys II. Like his last effort, The Island, the new flick isn’t as propulsive and casually sadistic as the movies that he made with the producer Jerry Bruckheimer; it feels slower, more tamped down than the usual Bruckheimer assaults. The camera, or rather multiple cameras, are still shooting every which way, and the cutting sometimes registers as eye-blink fast, but not compulsively so. Bay allows himself to linger here and there, which explains the bloated, almost two-and-a-half-hour running time.

On the face of it Transformers is a story as old as the Greeks versus the Trojans, the difference being that these warriors are visitors from another planet. It’s kind of nifty when the robots transform the first time; they furiously shake back and forth like wet dogs desperately dry off. But by the 99th time there’s no fun left at all, even during the rock-’em, sock-’em knockdown that delivers a movie, in Spielbergesque pastiche, first to a violent and then to a warm-and-fuzzy close.

The actors tend to be more engaging, notably LaBeouf, who brings energy and a semi-straight face to the dumbest setup. Just as easy on the eyes, though for other reasons, are the two female leads, the genius hacker in throw-her-down heels (Rachael Taylor) and the grease-monkey bombshell (Megan Fox) who helps Sam rise to the manly occasion.

The movie waves the flag equally for Detroit and the military, if to no coherent end. Most of the Autobots take the shape of General Motors vehicles. Last year the director of GM brand-marketing and advertising clarified how the company’s cars were integral to the movie: “It’s a story of good versus evil. Our cars are the good guys.”

Manohla Dargis
(The New York Times)

Stalk-and-slash tale

The unhappy marrieds who stray off the interstate in Vacancy think that the most unpleasant thing awaiting them is a night in the same bed. But when their car breaks down on a quiet rural road, the only place to stay is a run-down motel with some particularly creepy amenities. Staffed by a twitchy manager (Frank Whaley) whose passive-aggressive hospitality is straight out of a Jim Thompson novel, the Pinewood Motel is a city dweller’s idea of hell.

No restaurant, no cable, not even running water, unless you count the brown sludge oozing from the taps. What it does have is hidden video cameras, a secret entrance and a stack of videotapes showing previous occupants being gruesomely murdered by men with long knives and silver masks. David (Luke Wilson) and Amy (Kate Beckinsale) have been cast in a snuff film, and its climax is fast approaching.

At first glance, Vacancy seems to be the latest entry in the “torture porn” genre. But director Nimrod Antal and writer Mark L. Smith are up to something cannier and more devious. Vacancy is a ruthlessly efficient stalk-and-slash machine. But it starts to turn in on itself once David discovers they’ve been imprisoned in a psychopath’s version of a movie set. Wilson and Beckinsale’s brittle bickering quickly grows tiresome, but Whaley gives his off-kilter killer surprising depth.

That still leaves open the question of whom those tapes he’s been making are meant for. What kind of sicko would watch this stuff? The answer lies no further than the ticket in your hand.

Sam Adams
(Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service)