Goodfella’s Best of ‘08

Inspired by an awful year for the movies and the increasing amount of “best scenes” lists. No order here:

1) Subhash Nagre confronts his son’s killer – Sarkar Raj, though deeply flawed, remains an aesthetically interesting film. Within its calculated, canted frames, Ram Gopal Varma’s sequel to his garishGodfather remake toys with darkness and light in a manner befitting the black and white era of movies. In the film’s final beats lies a masterstroke. Amitabh Bachchan (in the year’s most under-regarded performance) offers us a masterful, silent moment in which his character, so far relegated to the shadows, assumes control and commands the very light of the world around him as he unveils his wretched retribution to an aghast, terrified enemy. Dilip Prabhavalkar, as the deviant-Gandhian Rao Saab, seems amazed not only at being foiled, but at the power Bachchan invokes with a mere nod and wave.

2) Akbar kills a man. Twice. – A finer attempt at storytelling than Ashutosh Gowariker’s previous Swades, this year’s Jodha Akbar offered up Hrithik Roshan’s first truly thoughtful, commanding screen performance. Particularly effective at capturing this newfound, grownup star-actor was a scene of sadistic violence. After roaring angrily at an attacker—his half-brother—who just killed a close associate, Akbar orders the traitor tossed from the dizzying heights of a palace wall. The first dive doesn’t kill the man, though, and Akbar orders his guards to raise up the near-carcass, bring it back to the top, and toss it down again. Second time’s the charm, but hardly charming—a fact that does not escape Akbar’s princess, Jodhabai (Aishwarya Rai). She looks on, flinching at the ugly inner monster that might exist under the naïve veneer of her supposedly benevolent, inclusive Emperor. In what is essentially a fairytale marital romance with some mild political resonance, this is the film’s most morally complicated moment.

3) Tukaram Patil retires – This year’s most moving Hindi film was Mumbai Meri Jaan, directed by Nishikant Kamat and starring some of the best and most reliable actors working in Hindi cinema. Irfan Khan, Madhavan and Kay Kay Menon all acquit themselves with their usual, respective levels of excellence. But the cast standout is Paresh Rawal (also a knockout in Oye Lucky Lucky Oye, but more on that in a bit) as the soft-spoken, jokey police officer Tukaram Patil. Rawal doesn’t feed too deeply into the schmaltz that this character could have easily been overwhelmed by. He instead makes the character a genuinely empathetic soul, and rightly becomes the film’s unifying element. The actor’s best scene is, naturally then, the film’s best scene. Near the end, the aging cop gives his colleagues a retirement speech full of his characteristic good humor, but then laces his words with a real sense of hurt and anguish. His words and his fleet emotions capture the state of his city following another horrific attack, and Kamat smartly intercuts “epilogue shots” from the film’s fragmented storylines here, using Rawal’s monologue as the binding throughline. The montage is an affecting, deeply cathartic moment.

4) Sanjay forgets why he just kicked SO much ass – Ghajini was a poor movie that showed us Aamir Khan in an ass-kicking avatar that we’d previously never seen. That was the ultimate novelty, and that was what director AR Murgadoss showed us (and showed us, and showed us) for well past two and a half hours. The only scene worth mentioning (mainly because it never existed in the Tamil incarnation) is a Rajini-esque fight sequence that begins with the typical, gloriously over-the-top Superman moves and ends with a meditative, sublime moment that takes on a dimension of depth and thoughtfulness that both this Ghajini and its Tamil predecessor never has. Aamir, having destroyed an army of men single-handedly, once again finds himself forgetting everything about who he is and where he is. He wanders around a series of long, tightly-spaced alleyways that are deserted and littered with broken, discarded items. This physical space, with its remnants of things past—of nameless, unknown things—is a physical embodiment of the central character’s broken inner life. When is the last time we saw a largely disposable action film offer a glimmer of cinematic thought on this level?

5) Nameless talks about The Good, The Bad and The Ugly – Unlike Sergio Leone’s nameless cowboys, striking in appearance and deadly at gunplay, the anonymous vengeance-seeker in Neeraj Pandey’s A Wednesday is an average everyman dressed in semi-formal wear and whose primary weapon is technology. Like Leone, Pandey frames his film—and his central character—with wide, panoramic shots. The closest we get to Naseeruddin Shah (giving the year’s best lead performance) is in a scene towards the end, where his furious vigilante offers us insight into his motives. In an exchange nearly as riveting as Nihalani’s back-and-forths in Droh Kaal, Shah talks about the good, common people in his city, the villains who kill them in the name of a political or religious agenda, and the hopeless nature of this violent existence. The monologue touches on what the film has been about all along, and eloquently brings to the surface a raw anger at both injustice, and, more troublingly, the propensity to forget injustice.

6) Amar Singh Rathore smiles – Naseeruddin Shah’s other memorable performance this year was a very surreal one. He played a living painting—the deceased father of Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na’s protagonist. Shah, as a proud Rajasthani royal named Amar Singh Rathore, periodically comes alive within a portrait to hold parental conferences with his widow, played wonderfully by Ratna Pathak Shah. Amar Singh knows that his son will grow up to be the kind of horse-riding, fist-fighting warrior that their clan has long produced, whereas his still-living wife wants to shield their child from this violent legacy. Abbas Tyrewala’s flawed, superbly shot film has a lot of problematic, tangled story elements that are ironed out by the end in a rather crazy manner. But even as we roll our eyes, guffaw or yawn at where it all goes, we can’t help but smile upon seeing Amar Singh Rathore smile in frozen relief, vindicated that he was right all along.

7) Bachchan Pandey’s entry – Wearing the elaborate cardboard headpiece of a stage Ravana—complete with multiple heads—Akshay Kumar delivers his finest, funniest, most detailed screen performance as the UP thug Bachchan Pandey in Vijay Krishna Acharya’s bloated, fun, loony, flawed Tashan. The character’s introductory scene is riotous with color, humor and action. There’s even a good amount of sexual innuendo. If all of Akshay Kumar’s career and screen persona (as well the frantic aesthetic of this film) could be encapsulated smartly in the span of a single scene, this is it. At a very close second would be, of course, Kumar’s delightful cameo in Farah Khan’s Om Shanti Om. There are few men who can fire a gun with their pelvis and make it look just right.

8 ) Jogi bares his soul in the forest – Kunal Kapoor has a childlike innocence about him that’s put to good effect in Yashraj’s Bachna Ae Haseeno. Kapoor plays Joginder Singh Ahluwalia, and in a scene where he first meets Raj, (Ranbir Kapoor, slyly playing the lothario who long ago broke Jogi’s wife’s heart) the actor’s innate boyishness betrays an insecurity that carries back to a moment from the past. Jogi, holding a repentant Raj captive in a leafy forest after knocking him senseless, shares the story of how he met and quietly fell in love with his wife, Mahi. In a quick, monochromatic flashback, we see the young, bashful Jogi utterly ignored in his efforts to draw Mahi’s attention. The glimpse is fleeting, and casting Kapoor, we realize, truly is a smart stroke since this child from the past ages into an adult still stuck in the same phase as a reluctant romantic. It’s a thoughtful move in a film that makes a number of thoughtful choices, which incidentally buck some very old Yashraj trends.

9) Blood on the snow – Scene for scene, Oye Lucky Lucky Oye was the year’s best film by quite a stretch. Directed thoughtfully by Dibakar Banerjee, who previously debuted with the nice but overrated Khosla Ka Ghosla, this film is all fun, masala energy without the masala. It’s also the only movie of 2008 where picking a best scene is tasking because there are so many candidates. I’m sticking to a moment involving Abhay Deol (in his best outing) playing the professional thief Lucky, who runs into his brother in Himachal Pradesh after years of separation. Visibly uncomfortable, the older brother recoils at Lucky’s attempts to join him on a journey back to their family home. It is in this scene—which starts with Lucky’s characteristic nonchalance and humor, and ends in dejection and violence—that we begin to see Lucky’s noncommittal philosophy towards his own life start to come back at him, to wear him down. In his frustration, he gets into a fight with some nearby ne’er do wells and, as his brother watches in horror, Lucky spills droplets of their blood over the soft, clean Himachal snow. The visual is more than just a grotesquerie—it is a cue to the first real cracks that appear over the shell of Lucky’s confidence game. Bannerjee doesn’t let this moment define the remainder of the film, nor what preceded it, however, because nothing lasts for this superchor—not least his failures.

10) Lucky courts a girl—Since I can’t think of a tenth film that had a more impressive scene, I’m going back to Bannerjee’s film. The first act of Oye Lucky Lucky Oye is its most impressive. Like the film it often quotes—Steven Spielberg’s Catch Me if You Can—we begin with the protagonist’s childhood. This whole segment—shot on location and capturing a very real local, Delhi flavor—is mesmerizing in the way it’s shot, acted and staged. Before the thieving Lucky becomes an adult portrayed by Abhay Deol, he’s briefly played by a sensational young actor named Manjot Singh. Singh has an absolutely transcendent scene that captures the reluctant, excited state of pubescent love. He crosses paths with a young girl at a gift card shop, and since he can’t read English, he asks her to choose a card for him. When she asks what kind of card he wants, young Lucky, smirking and raising his head from behind a rack, tells the girl that he’s looking for the kind of card to give a girl like her. The girl smiles at the pickup line. This is more than courtship; it’s the birth scene of a future con man.