Bollywood & Indian cinema mini-challenge 2017: Comedy & the masala genre. (December theme)

This film is a slapstick comedy, a detective crime story, a Bollywood-style musical, a Western-style musical (first time I've seen this genre in a Bollywood film btw), a romance, an adventure film, a family film, a political drama about the illegal weapons trade, a family melodrama, an action film and probably a few other things I've forgotten to mention. Even in masala film terms it packs in a lot of stuff. And as much as trying to put in so much into one film is an interesting experiment, it doesn't result in a coherent film IMO.
I liked the second half a little more, particularly one of the sequences…

Anurag Basu's imaginative vision has to be applauded.Like him or not he had the audacity to make such a film despite the numerous hurdles it faced.Think Tin Tin Meets Umbrellas of Cherbourgh. Exhaustive in length and over indulgent and yet i found it entertaining.The real surprise was to depict one of the most beautiful women in the world as a clumsy character and pull it off convincingly.This is probably the first time i feel a director was able to tap into the slapstick aspect of an actress who let's face it is not a very good actress on the surface level but here i was bewitched by whatever she did on screen. Ranbir Kapoor by default is bound to be…

Hindi films are not 'musicals' in the Hollywood sense of the term, and it is evident straightaway that Anurag Basu fails to make that distinction. What Basu lacks in thematic understanding he makes up with some vibrant richness of the film even if it feels cheap at times.

The narrative structure of rhyming everything gets tiring really quickly and it doesn't help that the plot itself is really stupid. Performances are quite poor and the dependable Ranbir Kapoor struggles to do a serviceable job with his character.

Sidenote - By principal I cannot and will not support anything that enables careers of terrible talentless actors like Katrina Kaif who could not speak (and to this day struggle to) the language…

A self proclaimed detective is raised by the man of many secrets he rescued after falling off a train. An adoptive father of sorts who imparts a worldly wisdom of espionage, thick coat of bad luck and severe kindness. Suddenly he leaves under highly suspicious circumstances and is later gone missing when, now grown Jagga (Ranbir Kapoor), puts himself on the case. After colliding with a beautiful journalist, Shruti (Katrina Kaif), hunting for hidden clues about secret arms shipments being dropped around India they team up to find answers to both their mysteries. Both, I might add, with a great deal in common.

It's light, even when its heavy. With lots of high stakes but little at risk with the…

I haven't seen much of Bollywood, but this is almost, almost a place I might start if I wanted to share it with someone else. It's a wonderful, light-hearted yet actiony adventure inspired strongly by TinTin and shot in a vibrant, popping comic book palette that just makes it a joy to sit and bask in.

It's framed as three stories combining to tell the main gun-runners conspiracy story. The first hour is dedicated to Jagga as a young boy, and while his friendship with his adoptive father who is forced to leave him an orphan again is necessary to both the story and the emotional weight of the movie, this hour feels overlong, and I was concerned about how…

The essence of any good detective story is the presence of a remarkable protagonist - he need not necessarily be 'likeable', but he needs to have a characteristic that makes him stand out from the rest. Feluda, for instance, is a well-built young man who relied on brains more than brawn (even though he had brawn). Tintin represents the everyman with certain attributes of the stereotypical 'good boy' nature. Sherlock is not likeable, but his methods produce results more often than not - and he loves boasting about it. Hercule Poirot is the classic armchair detective who prefers using 'the grey cells', as he likes to call 'em.

Who then, is Jagga Jasoos? A boy with a speech impediment -…

It's good, but it could've been great.

'Jagga Jasoos' has a lot of positives, but there's one big negative that affects everything else - the run time. There is simply no reason for this to be 155 minutes long, there's so much unnecessary faffing about. There's a fantastic spine to the film, but it's just flooded by lameness.

Ranbir Kapoor is entertaining in the lead, he very much commits to the role of Jagga - he's amusing but does have a few moments of heart also. Katrina Kaif (Shruti) and Saswata Chatterjee (Bagchi) support Kapoor extremely well. A few of the others, like Saurabh Shukla, are decent too.

The music is pretty good, the core premise has potential and the…