Piku, meet The Avengers.

I was privileged to see a preview of Piku on Monday, four days before its worldwide release, courtesy of Mitu Bhowmick Lange and her team at Mind Blowing Films. I enjoyed it and left the cinema thinking it would be an easy write-up, that finding a hook for Western filmgoers would be a breeze.

Only it wasn't.

There were basics. Piku is an actor-dominated film, in this case three of Indian cinema's finest: Deepika Padukone, Amitabh Bachchan and Irrfan Khan. It's refreshingly, brutally honest, a rarity among commercial films. Director Shoojit Sircar does a phenomenal job portraying a peculiar father-daughter relationship without the usual sappy cliches. His depictions of family interplay, usually over meals, made me think of similar scenes in Francis Ford Coppola's Godfather trilogy and the brilliant Modern Family tv show.

A lovely film, a heartwarming film, a unique film ... accurate labels, but cheap superlatives. What context could make this film properly vibrate with a Western audience? I was drawing a blank.

Until my wife and I saw The Avengers: Age of Ultron Saturday night. And then it was easy.

The success of Marvel's Avengers franchise and its many spinoffs is attributed by some to multi-million dollar CGI budgets and villians bent on global annihilation that automatically draw an international audience. It's a tried and true formula employed by many but few enjoy box office numbers like the Avengers. Its phenomenal success, to me anyway, stems from two qualities that stray from the 'How much shit can we blow up in 90 minutes?' formula:

1) a star-studded cast
2) a collection of extraordinarily gifted heroes who relate to each other in the most casually human of ways

First, the cast. Robert Downey jr, Samuel L. Jackson, Scarlett Johansson, Mark Ruffalo, Chris Hemsworth et al. are marquee names that studios trust to open films on their own, much less as members of an ensemble cast in exceptionally tight-fitting outfits. Second, the interplay between these characters cleverly relies on simple glances, warmth and humour to connect them to an audience, regardless of the often ridiculous scenarios they're fighting through. Even the best CGI descends into a series of cartoons if nothing in between touches a nerve, and the talented actors who comprise the Avengers rise above their high-concept surroundings to do that more often than you 'd expect. Heroes with genuine humanity resonate long after cities are smoldering and villians are banished and a premise for the next sequel has been revealed at the end of the credits. They need to make us care.

Which brings us to the heroes of Piku.

Bashkor Banerjee (Babu)

In Indian cinema, the trio of Deepika Padukone, Amitabh Bachchan and Irrfan Khan has just as much if not more gravitas than the cast of the Avengers. There is no greater star in Indian cinema's long history than Mr. Bachchan, a 72-year-old who's nonetheless appeared in a staggering 36 films in the past 10 years alone. He's also hosted six seasons of Kaun Banega Crorepati (Who Will Become a Millionaire, popularly known as KBC), a wildly popular Indian TV show, in that span. All this from a man who reached legendary status in India before the 1990s. And when I say legendary, I mean bloody legendary: When Amit-ji was injured doing his own stunt during the filming of a fight scene in 1982, thousands converged on his hospital and prayed for his recovery. Cut to present day and hundreds flock every Sunday to his home in Mumbai, hoping for a glimpse of/wave from one of the most famous men on earth.

The man's not a hero: He's a god. Which, in the Marvel universe, would make him Thor. But over the course of Piku, Mr Bachchan's Bashkor Banerjee transforms instantly from a rumpled, sweater-wearing, bespectacled, mild-mannered man to a nearly unrecognisable monster, capable of wreaking havoc with little effort or regret.

Which makes him, in fact, Bruce Banner/Hulk. A constipated Hulk, no less. (Let that roll around your imagination). He hurls abuse and offers support to his caretaker daughter in equal measure, all the while consumed by his body's self-defeating tendencies. Bachchan's Babu destroys without hesitation but deep down you know he wants to protect his daughter -- but to do so requires defeating his own nature.

Piku

Deepika Padukone is simply the most dynamic actor in Bollywood at the moment. She shifts from sensuous item girl to independent film heroine with ease. Only eight years removed from her breakthrough role in the Shah Rukh Khan blockbuster Om Shanti Om, the 29-year-old makes actors around her better by absorbing light rather than reflecting it, never overshadowing but always self-assured. Deepika's astounding natural beauty would make her easy to write off but Piku and 2014's Finding Fanny find her eschewing the glamour every Indian actress must wantonly project if she wants to be cast as anything but a suffering wife or insufferable mother. Not all of her films have been blockbusters but she's yet to sell herself short, and in Piku she's created a modern heroine that by the film's end you wish you'd gotten to know better.

The name of Deepika's character is the name of the film because everything that happens in the film flows through her. Her father's pain, misery, and love; her family's heartache over the prospect of selling their ancestral home in Kolkata; and the growing interest of Irrfan's character Rana all get processed by her multi-tasking, high-strung mind. She's confident and successful but ultimately unsatisfied.

She's Tony Stark/Ironman. The dark intellect of every scene she's in. Stark's best lines often come when all we see are his eyes and digital jibberish inside Ironman's helmet. Likewise, Deepika's eyes are powerful enough to convey ... well ... anything, everything or nothing at all. I found myself watching her eyes when I should have been reading subtitles. Not for the first time in one of her films.

Rana and Babu.

Irrfan Khan can't match the legendary status of Mr Bachchan or recent box office success of Deepika but I think he's the most natural actor of the trio. All the characters I've seen him play are old souls, whether it's an unflinching police inspector in Slumdog Millionaire or besotted office worker in The Lunchbox. The versatile 48-year-old's been in dozens of films and TV shows during a career that's included roles in several Western production and have allowed him to unleash a pair of eyeballs even more evocative than Deepika's. Like Ms. Padukone, Irrfan makes fellow actors better by infusing his presence on screen, whether spilling his guts or staring out to sea, with a billion human emotions in the blink of a hypnotising eye. Rana, his character in Piku, is a man burdened by family and failed expectations who delivers truth to Babu and Piku at the same measured pace he delivers them from Delhi to Kolkata in one of his company's vehicles.

Rana is Thor. He brings an otherworldly perspective to the daily battle of wills between a father-daughter duo that calls on reservoirs of superhuman patience and strength. Rana is a subdued voice among attention seekers and when he does blow (with a mighty 'CHUP!') it's momentous. He wields a hammer of simple normalcy and knows when to use it, judiciously and with a grin.

I fear comparing an Indian family drama with a comic book blockbuster gives an impression of folly -- of course a strict comparison of them is silly -- so here's the serious bit. Piku represents a once-in-a-generation assemblage of talent that benefits from a director wise enough to understand the forces at his command. One need not understand Bengali to appreciate the nuances of often frantic dialogues that reveal a plain, complicated and very modern Indian family. I loved Age of Ultron and am a fan of director Joss Whedon but there's no need to see that film again until it's out on DVD and need to shut my brain off for two hours 20 minutes. Piku is a film I look forward to seeing again this week because I want to revisit the company of Babu, Piku and Rana, and marvel at the depth of their deliverers.

Piku is a special film about ordinary people dealing with shit. (Yes, literally.) No aliens, no doomsday machines, no apocalyptic showdowns. Just the very things we face every day in the struggle to lead satisfying lives before we die. Which is a helluva lot harder to depict than a wiseguy in an Ironman suit saving the planet.

See Piku, and you'll understand why.

'Finding Fanny'. Losing hope. [SPOILERS]

Pride is the main culprit of 'Finding Fanny', a gorgeous piece of Indian cinema set in modern-day, mildew-covered Goa. Pride is also why the film has zero chance of performing well at the Indian box office: its all-Indian cast speaks clever dialogues in English, the film lacks a strong male hero, and an actress (Deepika Padukone) beloved for her girl-next-door appeal plays a lovely local widow who lusts for and enjoys premarital sex -- outoors!

All reasons for (nearly all male) guardians of Indian cinema to dismiss this film as too quirky, too oddball, too intelligent, too .... ambitious.

Can you even fucking imagine?

Angie (Deepika Padukone) and Savio (Arjun Kapoor).

Finding Fanny doesn't race down a hill like a child's bicycle, all plot and clumsy exposition, like most Bollywood fare. I've seen it twice and without question enjoyed it more the second time. The story is simple and encapsulated by a line Deepika's character Angie says to Naseeruddin Shah's hapless Ferdie: "No one deserves an incomplete love story." A quintet of characters is allowed to breathe and expand, their eccentricities lovingly indulged, from Dimple Kapadia's Rosie Eucharistica (27% of Goa's population is Catholic) hoarding biscuits to Pankaj Kapur's Don Pedro spouting cheap poetry over for Rosie's ample, and apparently fake, buttocks. Arjun Kapoor's Savio is the least fleshed-out character but in a milieu so dominated by comically macho lead males it's a nice change. He may be behind the wheel of the rusty Dodge that takes the quintet along Goa's single-lane backroads but it's Angie and Dimple who are driving everything that follows.

Deepika's the biggest female star in Bollywood right now so it's almost a relief to see her captured in natural light, sans caked makeup and stripper costumes. The Goa of cinematographer Anil Mehta is overgrown and decaying but Angie glows like sand on a beach at sunset. Dimple's Rosie first appears on wobbly heels wielding a collapsible fan like a switchblade but she too is adored by Anil's camera; a later shot of her laying beneath a tree in a field may be the first time I've seen a Rubenesque figure in an Indian film. The pleading sexuality of an older woman laying on her side in a Western-style dress is funny at first, but the longer Rosie luxuriates and drinks cheap booze and chats up the hapless Ferdie, all to the annoyance of Don Pedro, the more she loses her comic persona and becomes what she really is: A desperately lonely woman whose seafaring husband disappeared decades ago. Her relationship with man-child Ferdie is the last thing you'd expect to evolve but it does, which leads to a frustrated, impotent Don Pedro destroying Rosie in the only way he can -- by painting her as an ogre without a face, i.e., without a soul.

Don Pedro (Pankaj Kapur) with his grotesque portrait of  Rosie (Dimple Kapadia).

And that's what dooms 'Finding Fanny'. It's normal in Bollywood -- and Hollywood, for that matter -- for 50-year-old men to be cast with romantic leads the age of their daughters. These men always lack emotional maturity and always gain it from falling in love with women half their age. Here, the characters of Angie and Rosie, in vastly different ways, save men OF THEIR OWN AGE crippled by pride and self-imposed celibacy. The only man who gets an upper hand -- Don Pedro -- does so temporarily before landing at the bottom of the sea with a bullet through his brain in a beautifully justified comeuppance.

Director Homi Adajania is a young man with one commercially successful venture (2012's Cocktail) and two critically acclaimed flops, Being Cyrus (2006) and 'Finding Fanny'. The man has bills to pay so it's fair to expect his next film to appeal to the masses but I hope he keeps chipping away at audience -- and critics' -- expectations. Film lovers around the world stand to benefit.

Madhuri Dixit. Wow.

Aradhna, Enid and I made a road trip to Dandenong yesterday to see the surprise Indian blockbuster 'Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani'. Starring Ranbir Kapoor and Deepika Padukone it features an item number from Bollywood legend Madhuri Dixit-Nene, shown here.

Good god almighty.

Race 2 the Bottom

Some films should end careers. 'Race 2' is one of them. Like a roadside bomb, this calamity should be defused and taken apart and studied before being dumped into the desert and blown into a million pieces.

Aradhna and I hadn't seen a Bollywood film at the cinema for several weeks so I foolishly booked tickets without skimming a single online review (Times of India & Rediff & are reliable red-flag-wavers). Dumb. Almost as dumb as 'Race 2'. No, very little is that dumb. An opened can of white paint is more clever than this film. My lapse of judgment will augment future behaviour but I can guarantee not one person responsible for this self-parody will extract wisdom from his/her cinematic treachery.

Treachery. That's what this film felt like. An act of violence against us, humankind. You need not be religious to believe a day is coming when our legacy as a species will be examined and judged. Who were we? To what did we aspire? What were our values? If 'Race 2' falls into the hands (or flippers or pincers or scanners) of our future evaluators all of humankind is doomed to perpetual ridicule, a meaningless, mean-spirited punch line in a sprawling 'All Recorded Life in the Universe' compilation.

I hesitate to admit Aradhna and I left at the film's interval because criticising a film not seen to end credits invites comparisons to knee-jerk book burners or shrill condemners of anything that draws blood from our fucked up world. But I'd bet the cretins responsible for 'Race 2' don't care who stuck around after laying out their dollars or rupees or wedding jewelry; admission fees aren't calculated on a rolling scale. You pay full price, you take your seat, you get sprayed with garbage, TOUGH TITTIES. By the time I knew 'Race 2' was doing actual physical harm to my nervous system, clipping it strand by strand with every intellect-gouging line uttered by fatuous, integrity-free actors, it was too late. My money and mind were G O N E and weren't coming back.

So I feel no shame venting about this film without knowing its ending. If anything, our early exit was a moral victory, an affirmation of free will, a guilt-free 'Up yours!' to The Mumbai Movie Man.

I won't describe the plot because there is none. 'Race 2' is a collection of loathsome characters who don't say or do anything that deviates from 1) showing how much they deserve to be avenged, or 2) showing how much they crave revenge. Whether it's due to Botox or boredom or both, emotions range from glamorous lassitude to glamorous ennui. These characters are all exceptionally good-looking. They live beneath cloudless skies. They're capable of superhuman powers when threatened. But they're mindless, one-dimensional cut-outs from an unimaginative child's dream. Each male and female glamazon stares just off-camera like a cat eying a dangled piece of string or a model-turned-actor imagining how they're going to screw their agent out of his or her cut. Lots of walking and talking and preening and glowering and pouting -- so much pouting! -- but nobody acts. Imagine being haunted by the inanimate ghosts of a fashion magazine for 3 hours in a darkened theatre. Oh, the paper-thin humanity!

"It looks good" was the consensus of the reviews I belatedly read. The shallowest of compliments and therefore appropriate for ‘Race 2’ -- but only if spoken slowly aloud, with a slight catch in the throat, like your enlightened self is leading a final charge for control of your voicebox so it may reverse course but the words have already been loaded and launched.

A female friend on Facebook wrote 'Race 2' was a "good movie" and mentioned the lead actress’s stellar fashion choices, a salient point if she’d just returned from a runway fashion show. I refuse to label my loathing of this film as a 'guy thing'. Not in 2013, when scores of websites monitor the style hits and misses of paparazzi-chased 'celebrities' around the globe. (Not to mention Aradhna was the first to say, "Let's go.") No. A basic standard for a film is its story, not its wardrobe. "It looks good" is zero justification for seeing a film, unless it's screening on overhead screens at the young adult clothing section of a mainstream department store.

The dearth of acting negates reviewing performances. Hence, a few cheap shots:

Saif Ali Khan: A new drinking game -- every time SAK yanks off his sunglasses, do a shot. You'll be hammered in 4 minutes.

John Abraham: You can dress a gorilla in a suit but it's still a gorilla.

Deepika Padukone: Makes her entrance in a long, white dress that’s slit into ribbons. Her thighs burst forth like sausages bubbling atop boiling water and nearly answer the prayers of every 13-year-boy in India. Maybe her Sharon Stone moment will make the Director’s Cut.

Anil Kapoor. A legend of Hindi cinema reduced to a character ‘hook’ that involves an addiction to fruit salad and making lewd comments to a bosomy, brainless personal assistant whose name is ..... wait for it ... Cherry.

Aradhna and I love seeing Bollywood films on the big screen and don't mind the occasional mindless escapism that Indian filmmakers crank out like samosas at a Hyperabad street market. But 'Race 2' is a blasphemous rebuke to the progressive evolution of Bollywood. It’s a ‘revenge film’ that succeeds only in unleashing a desire for hot vengeance upon its producers, publicists, distributors, and media defenders. Worse, 'Race 2' is the product of a male-dominated, incestuous industry that hates its audience and never met a woman it didn't believe deserved to be debased.

Considering the horror unleashed by a pack of animals last year on a bus in Delhi, and the resultant protests against India's corrupt police and misogynistic culture, you'd think a steaming mess-in-progress like 'Race 2' would have set off alarm bells around the studio. Of course it was shot and edited before that horrible rape and murder occurred but that doesn't excuse its makers from displaying a semblance of sensitivity or understanding of the current zeitgeist.

The truth is they're happy shoveling this shit because it's all they know. Like coal mining companies stripping the tops off of mountains or fishing trawlers laying waste to ancestral breeding grounds, there's neither concern nor responsibility taken for the permanent damage wrought by their avarice. Since vacating the cinema midway through 'Race 2' Aradhna and I have seen 'Zero Dark Thirty' and 'Silver Linings Playbook', a pair of Oscar-nominated films bursting with every imaginable human emotion and intriguing, multi-dimensional characters.

Even when I try to remember, I can't conjure the 'fashions' of either film ... besides the Philadelphia Eagles jerseys that pop up throughout 'Silver Linings Playbook'. I'm a Giants fan -- I've been wary of people in Eagles jerseys since before Bradley Cooper was born. But I'd still trust the judgment of an Eagles fan over someone who watches 'Race 2' and doesn't immediately curse humankind's creation of the moving picture.

Love Aaj Kal

Aradhna and I saw a wonderful Bollywood film called Love Aaj Kal yesterday afternoon. A love story pitting modern versus traditional (no surprise which one wins) with big stars Saif Ali Khan and Deepika Padukone and the usual masala of spectacular locations, bouncy music and Desi morality plays. Great fun.