Sunday, April 3, 2016

International Movies to Avoid: April 2016 Edition

This is the second installment of my continuing series of the worst international movies out there.

Don't watch them!

Naxal 

India (Bengali), 2015
109 min, drama
Directed by Debaditya Bandyopadhyay
Starring Mithun Chakraborty and Dhritiman Chatterjee

How do you make a movie about Naxalites boring? Focus on their middle class struggles.

No, really.

What could have been an interesting film about people with a history of violence and revolutionary feelings in present-day Bengal quickly falls apart into a disjointed, incomprehensible massacre of a movie. I mean that in the worst way possible.



Bangladesh (Bengali), 2014
149 min, crime thriller romance
Directed by Mohammad Mostofa Kamal Raj
Starring Arefin Shuvo, Mim Bidya Sinha Saha, and Arifa Parvin Mousumi

Ibrahim is the notorious hit man for an underworld mafia don in Dhaka city. But he likes children and plays cricket with them, so that shows that he is actually good at heart. At some point he was forced into becoming an evil hit man, and as a result his sister threw him out of their house and cut off his access to his niece who he loves. He keeps trying to get back into his sister's good graces. 

Meanwhile he meets a girl and falls in love with her, although she is not actually interested in him. He does what he can (in other words, goes around threatening people) to make her life better. But will she ever realize who her benefactor is? 

I wasn't able to finish this movie, because the plot just didn't hold up.

Abby Sen 

India (Bengali), 2015
128 min, science fiction, drama, romance
Directed by Atanu Ghosh
Starring Abir Chatterjee, Raima Sen, Paran Banerjee

Abby Sen is a failed television producer on the lookout for a new job. Someone recommends that he apply to the first private Bengali TV channel in the year 1980, which is possible with a new technology that has been discovered. After agreeing to go back in time to prove that this technology actually works, he must figure out how to work his way into the TV studio and navigate in 1980 while attempting not to erase his wife's existence.

A weird, boring knockoff of Back to the Future, the only part of this movie worth seeing is the 20 second long scene in which Abby realizes that he doesn't have his cell phone and crawls around under the table to find it - in 1980. The rest put me to sleep. 
India (Hindi), 2003
172 min, romance, science fiction
Directed by Rakesh Roshan
Starring Hrithik Roshan, Rekha, and Preity Zinta 

In this bizarre mishmash of classic Bollywood love story, attempt at depicting someone with mental disabilities, and Indian version of E.T.: The Extraterrestrial, a scientist's message to aliens ends up bringing them to Earth and causing him to die in a car accident. His unborn son, Rohit, is injured in this accident and grows up with severely impaired mental faculties. When Rohit finds and befriends an alien, it miraculously heals him using the power of the sun, giving him the superhuman abilities of a film hero. 

Setting aside the bizarre alien plot (spoiler: no alien appears until halfway through this 3-hour movie), it seems that the film team did no research beforehand. Hrithik Roshan's version of a developmentally delayed person, who "has the mind of a child" even though he's grown up, is completely unconvincing. The love story makes very little sense, especially when the newly cured Rohit decides to show off by dancing in a club (?). The alien plot line is completely subservient to the random love story, which in turn just seems like a way for Rohit's character to show a slight amount of very weird development.  

Plus, somehow Rohit's father has contacted these aliens by sending sound waves into space. 

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