Filmi Geek

Loins of Punjab Presents (2007)

I waited almost a year for my chance to see this film, and the charming comedy was worth every minute of the wait.  11 months after its successful festival opening and notable 7-week run in Indian theaters, Manish Acharya's adorable and fun debut film, Loins of Punjab Presents, has finally begun a limited theatrical run in the United States.

Loins of Punjab, the largest distributor of pork loins on the east coast, is sponsoring a weekend-long talent contest called Desi Idol, and desi dreamers from all over New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut have descended on a humble New Jersey conference hotel to work their talents for a chance at the $25,000 prize.  The contestants include Sania Rehman (Seema Rahmani), a mediocre New York actress with Bollywood aspirations; Vikram Tejwani (Manish Acharya), a laid-off financial analyst who breaks down everything - including romance - into probabilities and statistics; Preeti Patel (Ishitta Sharma), a high school student suffocating under the thumb of her rigid, but loving, immigrant family; A gay hip-hop Bhangra dancer calling himself the Turbanotorious B.D.G. (Ajay Naidu); and Joshua Cohen (Michael Raimondi), an American admirer of Indian culture.  Joshua enters the contest at the urging of his girlfriend Opama Menon (Ayesha Dharker), who soon grows less supportive when she realizes he is the ridicule of the Indian contestants. 

The film's delight is in the detail with which each of these characters, and even the many others who come and go throughout the film, are painted.  Although Acharya draws on stereotypes, he does so with deep affection for the many-faceted NRI culture from which the stereotypes arise.  And more importantly, he does so with great original humor; the jokes are not merely based upon the stereotypes, but are built upon them in satisfying layers.  So while there are broad laughs to be had from such moments as a Gujarati uncle asking for "wedge snakes" (his mispronounced version of "vege snacks") or Sania's inability to string together a sentence in Hindi despite her Bollywood dreams, there is subtler humor as well - like a running joke of desi characters taking Joshua for a waiter, or the poignant jokes about the contestant called Saddam Hussein, a security specialist who can't get work because of his unfortunate name.  This sort of joke adds a slight tinge of edginess to the humor, hinting at the darker aspects of life as a desi in America, without burdening the film with too much preachy politics. 

Of course the main attraction for me is the vicious socialite, Mrs. Rrita Kapoor (Shabana Azmi), for whom no tactic is too low if it will help her win the contest.  She intends to donate the prize money to her pet charity - if only to upstage a generous donation by her chief rival in her high-tone social scene - but her noble intentions can't compensate for the dirty pool she plays.  Her performance is as broad and scene-chewing as any in her career, and watching it almost is almost as much fun for us as giving it seems to have been for her.  But notwithstanding my own Shabana-centric reasons for awaiting this film so eagerly, no one character stole the show.  They are all likeable (well, except Mrs. Kapoor), sweet, and very, very funny. 

The resolution of Loins of Punjab Presents carries a warm-hearted message which, in one of the film's many clever and funny twists, is incoherently verbalized by its dumbest character.  If you have the opportunity to see it, you should.  It is an outstanding debut film, full of smiles and "awwww"s, and deserves to be picked up for broader distribution. 

36 Chowringhee Lane (1981)

Taken at face value, this quiet film by Aparna Sen is a melancholy tale about a lonely woman facing her twilight years.  It has a clear allegorical reading, however, that is a forceful commentary on the role of the British in post-Independence India.

Violet Stoneham (Jennifer Kendal) is a mousy, quiet Anglo-Indian woman.  Living in 1970s Calcutta, she teaches Shakespeare to inattentive little girls, occasionally visits her senile brother (Geoffrey Kendal) in a nearby nursing home, and returns home to her tiny flat and the company of her cat, Sir Toby.  One day Violet encounters one of her former students, Nandita (Debashree Roy) and Nandita's boyfriend Samaresh (Dhritiman Chatterjee).  Eager to reminisce - and starved for companionship - Violet invites the young couple to her home for tea, and they politely, if reluctantly, agree.  In Violet's flat, Samaresh smells opportunity - the flat would offer a perfect, discreet hideaway for afternoon trysts with Nandita.  Nandita explains to Violet that while Samaresh is a writer, he finds it difficult to concentrate on poetry in his family's crowded home, and Violet is delighted to offer him the use of her flat.  Nandita and Samaresh frolic there every day, taking care to be dressed and presentable when Violet returns from school.  Often they serve Violet her tea or take her out for walks in the city, and their daily company cheers and energizes her.   It seems a very genuine and tender friendship, but Samaresh and Nandita see it quite differently from Violet.

At its face, 36 Chowringhee Lane is a very sympathetic tale.  Violet Stoneham is a lovable character, and her loneliness will resonate with anyone who has ever thought about getting older and being alone.  Her increasing isolation and marginalization is poignant.  And the tenderness that Nandita and Samaresh show her - at least while it appears sincere - and the warmth and joy in her response to it is touching. 

But the film seethes with symbols suggesting that its real message is a strong critique of the Anglo presence in India:  You are dated, you have outlived your usefulness; you aren't wanted or needed, so get lost.  The young couple uses her while it's convenient, but as soon as they have the opportunity to take off on their own, they do so.  The new principal at Violet's school - the school's first Indian principal, we are told - cuts back on her course load, assigning her a dreary grammar class while a new young teacher takes over the Shakespeare; even teaching quintessentially English subjects, Violet's English perspective is no longer needed.  Violet's visits to her brother are particularly unsubtle; a relic of the colonial era, he is now weak, helpless and disoriented, and Violet must repeatedly explain to him that the Raj is over, that India is independent. 

These two levels of meaning make 36 Chowringhee Lane a full meal, engaging, poignant, and thought-provoking.  The performances are smooth and natural - unlike some of Aparna Sen's later films (such as 15 Park Avenue and Mr. and Mrs. Iyer), in which her actors sometimes fumble stiffly with English dialogue.   The result is a satisfying film, and if it is a little bit sad for the increasingly irrelevant Violet Stoneham, it also portrays a confidence in the rising of an independent India.

The Namesake (2007)

Mira Nair's adaptation of Jhumpa Lahiri's bestselling novel The Namesake is fairly true to the book; Nair's eye brings vividly to life the flavors and colors splashed through Lahiri's pages.  The result a lovely film with all the same strengths - and all the same weaknesses - as the novel it adapts. 

Ashima's (Tabu) marriage to Ashok Ganguli (Irfan Khan) is arranged by her parents in her home city of Calcutta; immediately after the marriage she is whisked to New York, where her new husband is a graduate student, and begins to adjust to the new and different life she will lead in America.  Their first child is a son, and they name him Gogol, after the Russian author, who (for a variety of reasons) is very close to Ashok's heart.  Gogol (Kal Penn) grows into a sullen teenager and eventually a discontented young man, disconnected from his Indian roots but also unmoored in the urban and urbane company he keeps.  As he moves through a series of romantic relationships and weathers some family tragedy, Gogol's identity shifts and reforms, and in time he reaches an understanding of the gifts his parents have given him in his Bengali heritage, his name, and his autonomy.

The Namesake's greatest strength is that it is a real, uncaricatured story; it avoids the trap of lapsing into cliche, of recycling the tired themes of the strained arranged marriage, the overbearing immigrant parents, the second generation's rebellion.  Instead,  Ashima and Irfan's marriage grows from its formal beginning into genuine, moving tenderness; while Ashima laments the brash, American mannerisms of her children she and Irfan are committed to letting them have their own choices and freedoms; and Gogol's distance from his parents is not so much a reaction against being Indian as it is a general malaise.  His identity crisis is focused through his particular cultural lens, but his drifting of purpose perhaps resonates universally.

Because The Namesake is so much about what goes on inside its character's heads - Ashima's and Gogol's in particular - it would fail without excellent performances from its actors, and Mira Nair gets what she needs from her talented cast.  Tabu and Irfan Khan are particularly outstanding, communicating volumes even with very little dialogue; young Kal Penn stands up well also, with a handful of superb scenes that outweigh his few sullen teenager moments.  Indeed, Gogol's occasional shallowness is not really Kal Penn's fault.  One irritating aspect I recall from the novel is that Gogol is not always an interesting enough character to have a whole book about him; this weakness is not corrected in the film.  As with the novel, I am left wishing for more about Ashima and less about Gogol.  Still, there is enough substance in Gogol's arc to maintain the focus, even if the women in his life are thinly-drawn tokens.  And the film's eye never drifts too far from Ashima, navigating the vast confusion of American suburbia. 

Like the novel, The Namesake is episodic, sometimes disorientingly so, as the viewer is jerked through the passage of time, often with no hint of what transpired in the interstitial years; one moment Gogol is a high-school graduate headed to Yale; the next, he is a young architect living in a swanky apartment in New York with a rich, white girlfriend.  In fact the film omits some episodes in which the novel touched down, leaving the film to feel even more compressed and speedy at times.  But these are minor complaints, small flaws in a film that was on the whole lovely, sweet, and fairly satisfying.   

The Guru (2002)

As a white American with an obvious interest in Indian culture, I am sensitive to the stereotypes of white Americans interested in Indian culture, and I try very hard not to reinforce them.  Even so, I sometimes squirm a little uncomfortably when these stereotypes pop up in the movies.  I can't help but wonder: is that what I look like?  Fortunately, the version of the stereotype that is sent up in The Guru is so over-the-top that I didn't really have to worry.  And the film, a comical diaspora story about exploitation and love that draws on a number of Bollywood-ish elements, is a light, cute, and entertaining story.

Ramu (Jimi Mistry) is a dance instructor in Bombay who longs to be a star.  At the urging of his NRI friend Vijay (Emil Marwa), Ramu follows his dreams to New York, but arrives to discover that Vijay's tales of penthouse living and fancy cars were exaggerated just a smidge.  When a swami-for-hire passes out drunk before an appearance at a high-society party at which Vijay is working as a waiter, Ramu steps in and fakes his way through an impromptu discourse on sex and spirituality.  The ditzy, spiritually-searching socialite Lexi (Marisa Tomei) is taken with Ramu, and declares him her guru, the "Guru of Sex."  Suddenly Ramu finds he can make a ton of money by churning out pseudo-exotic sexual philosophy that rich, bored ladies who lunch will pay generously for.  But Ramu needs material, so he enlists the help of a porn star, Sharonna (Heather Graham).  Believing that Jimi is trying to break into the porn business - and knowing nothing of his spiritual sideline - Sharonna reveals her most personal thoughts and philosophies about sex and sexuality, and Jimi repackages these for his new disciples.  Sooner or later, Sharonna will find out that Jimi is using her - but not before he falls in love with her. 

The story is sort of dumb and some of the humor is a little crude, but on balance, The Guru is warm and funny, offering an unlikely love story amongst a fun and diverse collection of characters.  While there are some gems in the casting, the characterizations and performances are a little spotty.  Ramu's childlike dreamy innocence is somewhat at odds with his willingness to carry on a sexual relationship with Lexi, whom he does not seem to care for very much.  But Jimi Mistry is sufficiently cute and appealing that the inconsistencies in his character are not a serious distraction.  Lexi herself is spot-on; Marisa Tomei offers a perfect comic presentation of the spoiled rich kid who is hungering for something deeper than BMWs and penthouses, but who is too clueless and sheltered to recognize the difference between real spiritual depth and flaky trendism.  She is both a caricature and fully human.  Heather Graham's philosophical porn-star is neither here nor there, serviceable but not memorable.  There is one real treat in the cast, though - Christine Baranski, sharp-clawed as Lexi's sneering yet indulgent mother, is as delicious as she always is.

The Guru features a few musical numbers, mostly in Hindi; these are meant as tributes to the Bollywood form, I guess, and while some of them were quite good - Heather Graham was more alive in her song than she  was in the rest of the movie - others left me feeling that I'd rather watch the real thing.  The film's ending was delightful, drawing on one of Bollywood's favorite tropes - the interrupted wedding, with a couple of light-hearted surprises.

I would generally rather watch a Hindi movie than a western film inspired by Hindi movies.  Still, The Guru is a charming enough timepass, worth a watch if you happen to stumble across it. 

Being Cyrus (2005)

Damaged people make for really good stories.  Being Cyrus is a dark, raw story about a dysfunctional family full of broken people, shattered by the intrusion of a man who is not what he appears to be. 

Dinshaw Sethna (Naseeruddin Shah) is an aging, reclusive, pot-addled artist who lives in a dingy, cluttered rural bungalow with his restless wife Katy (Dimple Kapadia). One day Cyrus Mistry (Saif Ali Khan) shows up at their doorstep.  Cyrus, who narrates the story, offers his services to Dinshaw, and ends up taking on a wide variety of household jobs and errands for the family, especially Katy.  Cyrus introduces the Bombay branch of the family - Dinshaw's frail, elderly father Fardoonjee (Honey Chhaya), Dinshaw's brother Farokh Sethna (Boman Irani), and Farokh's demure bride Tina (Simone Singh).  As Cyrus's narration grows increasingly dark and cryptic, he airs the Sethna family's dirty laundry.  Fardoonjee lives in squalor and dementia in a back room of Farokh and Tina's apartment, starved and neglected.   Katy, flirtatious and frustrated, is having a clandestine affair with her brother-in-law Farokh.  And Cyrus, as his narration announces, is "playing them like a violin."

As the film spins and twists toward its grim climax, the wrinkles in Cyrus's psyche unfurl in a series of complex metaphors - chess games, scrambled eggs, torn dolls - suggesting the film's themes of manipulation, of irreparable, catastrophic change, and of the lasting effects of familial contempt and dysfunction.  The symbolism is at times a little too thick, too self-consciously arty, but on the whole Being Cyrus is suspenseful, engrossing, and satisfying.   

Being Cyrus offers fresh cinematography and evocative visuals.  Everything in Dinshaw's rustic home is gray with pottery dust, and the garden is a verdant tangle of overgown brambles; Fardoonjee's one-room Bombay prison seems caked in a layer of grime.  The film also sports spooky background music that sets a sinister tone long before the narrative has begun to uncover the Sethna family's lurking demons.  But what really drives the film is the astonishingly good performances from all of its principals.  Saif Ali Khan presents Cyrus as shielded, methodical; wearing the numb, languid expression of a man who is truly broken, he is both chilling and sympathetic.  Naseeruddin Shah, though underused, is perfect as the tripping, philosophical potter. 

Dimple Kapadia, though, thoroughly steals the show.  Her Katy vibrates like a fly trapped under a glass, straining and agitated, driven to distraction by the failure of her life and marriage to live up to her romantic, cosmopolitan expectations.  It is a tremendous credit to Dimple's talent that she is vastly charismatic and appealing, even when playing a singularly unappealing, trashy, and narcissistic character.  Being Cyrus is a compelling illustration of the range and potential of this fascinating actress. 

Mr. and Mrs. Iyer (2002)

Aparna Sen, the filmmaker who wrote and directed Mr. and Mrs. Iyer, never seems to garner criticism for casting her own daughter in her films.  Perhaps that is because her daughter is the best young actress in India.  Konkona Sen Sharma was the shining star of her mother's 2005 film 15 Park Avenue.  Before that, she earned a National Film Award for her charged and real performance as the skittish Meenaxi Iyer in Mrs. and Mrs. Iyer.

The film opens on a bus traveling through an unspecified rural province, carrying a varied assortment of passengers who are a distillation of the diversity of India.  The chatter on the bus is a Babel of the nation's languages - Hindi, Punjabi, Bengali and Tamil are represented, as well as English, the lingua franca of the entire subcontinent.  Many of India's religions are represented as well - there are Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, and even one of India's rare Jews.  Meenaxi Iyer (Konkona) is a sheltered, traditionally Hindu, Tamil Brahmin wife, en route with her infant son to Calcutta to meet her husband.  Raja (Rahul Bose) is a Bengali wildlife photographer also traveling to Calcutta.  When the bus is waylaid by a curfew imposed as a result of some local sectarian violence, the journey turns dark and treacherous, as riots and killings spring up all around.  Circumstances throw Raja and Meenaxi together - soon they are traveling as the titular Mr. and Mrs. Iyer - and what follows is a tense exploration of Hindu-Muslim relations, the interplay of traditionalist prejudices and modern biases, and the strange way that intimacy sometimes finds people even when they are not seeking it. 

During their ordeal, Meenaxi and Raja do not talk much about their real lives.  This lends a sense of unreality to the journey, as if it is bracketed and separated from real life.  There is an echo in that unreality of the characters' own mixed perception of their adventure.  By shutting out their reality they can take comfort in the shared illusion of being Mr. and Mrs. Iyer and in the closeness that develops between them within that illusion.  But it serves another purpose as well; if they think too much about reality, they will have to acknowledge that the journey and the violence and the danger is real as well.  In one of the film's most breathlessly chilling scenes, Meenaxi is jarred fitfully into that acknowledgment when she witnesses a sectarian killing.  Thanks to Konkona's brilliant work, Meenaxi's anguish leaps out of the screen.

I am coming to suspect, based in particular upon Mr. and Mrs. Iyer and 15 Park Avenue, that Aparna Sen is at her best with high drama and powerful emotion.  In her films, mundane, quotidian dialogue sometimes comes across as forced or stilted.  But when she lets her characters go, prepare to be shaken to the core.  The most charged scenes in Mr. and Mrs. Iyer left me breathless and stunned. 

Finally, in the allegorical language of Indian film, the interaction between Meenaxi and Raja may be mapped to the intersection of traditional and modern India, respectively.  Raja challenges Meenaxi to leave off the caste and religious prejudices with which she was raised; Meenaxi demands Raja's respect.  That they ultimately manage both to compromise and to bond with one another suggests that the film's message is not merely that the disparate elements of Indian culture learn to get along, but  that if they are willing, they can each be enriched in the process. 

Mr. and Mrs. Iyer is mostly in English; as Raja speaks no Tamil and Meenaxi no Hindi, the two must communicate in India's lingua franca.  (Indeed, any awkwardness in Aparna Sen's dialogue, both here and in 15 Park Avenue, may be attributable to a less-than-deft handling of English.) 

Bombay Talkie (1970)

Some films tell the stories of extraordinary individuals, true heroes.  Others show us very ordinary people tried by extraordinary circumstances, and the response of those ordinary people in rising - or in failing to rise - to the occasion is what makes the story compelling.  Then there are films that expose the lives of vapid, shallow people, films in which in which nearly every character is a pathetic, even hateful person.  Bombay Talkie, a relatively early product of the Merchant-Ivory-Jhabwala collaboration that produced so many of my favorite films in the 1980s and 1990s, is one such film.  And if you like the genre, it is a pretty good exemplar.

Lucia Lane (Jennifer Kendal) is an insufferable, superficial best-selling author who has traveled to India in search of ideas for her next novel.  Vikram (Shashi Kapoor) is a handsome Bombay movie star, a spoiled child accustomed to having whatever he wants, whenever he wants it.  They meet, sparks fly, and Vikram and Lucia dive headlong into a volatile relationship, to the chagrin of both Vikram's wife Mala (Aparna Sen) and a bitter scriptwriter named Hari (Zia Mohyeddin), who also has fallen in love with Lucia.  The film follows their on-again, off-again relationship, focusing primarily on Vikram's and Lucia's feeble attempts to figure out what they really want; somewhat less so on the toll their relationship takes on Mala and Hari. 

In one of the film's more interesting arcs, poor Hari, who (along with the sad suppressed Mala) is one of the few somewhat sympathetic characters in the film, is manipulated and goaded and victimized by his inexplicable love for Lucia; he seems to know she's not worthy of his love, and he despises himself for loving her all the same.  Even the relatively human Hari is not wholly likable, as he drips with open contempt for Vikram.  Still, his final outburst - though broadly telegraphed - is heartbreakingly tragic. 

Just as the film would have benefited from a closer look at Hari, it also spent too little time on the troubled Mala, doomed to be merely the movie star's wife.  We are given a tiny hint of the strain that her inability to have children has placed on their marriage (a time-honored theme in Indian film).  We also know that Lucia is hardly Vikram's first extra-curricular excursion.  There is a lot to be said about why women sometimes feel duty-bound to maintain a strong public face around philandering, selfish husbands, and Bombay Talkie only scratched the surface of that, because it wasn't about Mala.  And that's unfortunate, because she was much more interesting than the two petulant brats that the film actually was about. 

Finally, what irked me most about Bombay Talkie was that it seemed to treat India (and Indian films) with a certain condescension that I found both offensive and inappropriate.  The best example of this is in a sequence in the middle of the film in which Lucia, hoping to clear her head and put Vikram behind her, joins an ashram.  The sequence was promising in the beginning; there is a wonderful scene in which Lucia, so clearly uncomfortable and out-of-place, ducks out of sight of the guru and his devotees to adjust her sari, tucking and retucking, draping and redraping, unable to get the hang of the unfamiliar garment.  But instead of presenting Lucia's growing discomfort as an aspect of her own character, it is presented with a condescending wink and nod - not "Look at Lucia, too inflexible to adapt to a different culture," but "look at this adorable weird little Indian spirituality, too primitive for a civilized person like Lucia."  The film's whole approach - to the Bombay film industry as well as to Indian spirituality - rather had this tone to me. 

I have a friend who loves this film for the window it offers into a certain segment of Bombay society and the Bombay film industry of the late 1960s.  I have trouble appreciating Bombay Talkie on these terms, especially given its condescending tone; I can't take much pleasure in a putative insider like Ismail Merchant offering to the English-speaking audience such a contemptuous look at the world in which he cut his teeth.  Still, the film was compelling - rather the way a car wreck is compelling - and people who enjoy films that explore the weaknesses of the famous and powerful may similarly enjoy Bombay Talkie.  And the film has its whimsical highlights - one is the "Fate Machine," a giant typewriter upon which Vikram shoots a musical number with Hindi film's legendary item girl Helen.  The Fate Machine gave me the feeling that I've been watching the wrong Hindi films, as I have never seen a set that wild and surreal.

Morning Raga (2004)

Watching this recent film starring GOAT's favorite actress, Shabana Azmi, one gets the impression that she took the role as a favor to a friend. She completely elevates the movie, which would hardly have been noteworthy without her. 

Shabana plays Swarnlatha, a carnatic (a South Indian classical style) singer who, on the way to her first public concert, is in a bus accident and loses her son and her best friend.  She withdraws in her grief, and never sings or even leaves her village again.  Twenty years later, Swarnlatha's friend's son Abhinay (Prakash Rao), who has grown up to be a popular musician with grandiose dreams of reinventing Indian music, re-discovers her and convinces her to sing again.  Joining their band is Pinkie (Perizaad Zorabian), a young woman whose life turns out also to be intimately connected with the accident that changed both Swarnlatha and Abhinay's lives so many years before.

Morning Raga's story had some potential, but the film simply wasn't well-executed and consequently didn't live up to its promise.  The script and the acting were amateurish and clunky; the rest of the cast failed to hold their own against Shabana's skilled touch, so that rather than lifting them to her level, she only made them look that much worse.  The film should have been all about the music, but the music isn't anything special, just garden-variety synethetic pop-fusion.  In the end I found  Morning Raga a decent enough time-pass, but I am Shabana's biggest fan-girl, and for me she saved the film. 

Bend It Like Beckham (2002)

This is an English rather than an Indian film, but I like it so I'll make a post on it anyhow.

Bend it Like Beckham revisits the oft-told tale of a first-generation Westerner caught in a neither-here-nor-there limbo between her immigrant parents and the dominant culture around her. Jesminder (Parminder Nagra) lives in a tidy working class London neighborhood, and wants nothing more than to play football (soccer to us Americans) like her idol, David Beckham.  Then Jesminder (or "Jess" as she prefers to be known) meets Julie (Kiera Knightley), who invites her to try out for a competitive football league.  Jess is an instant star.  But her Punjabi family - her mother in particular - doesn't find that a suitable pass-time for an Indian girl, and soon Jess is sneaking out of the house to play.  She can't keep up the ruse forever, though, and eventually the pursuit of her football dreams threatens to tear a rift in her family.

Bend it Like Beckham's take on the culture clash theme is sweetly told, and I liked it much more than I expected to. It is driven by stellar acting performances, including one from the prolific Anupam Kher (who has been in hundreds of Hindi films) as Jess's father, and one from Parminder Nagra herself, who makes the most adorable use of her expressive face. The only weakness in the film is a rather contrived and improbable romance between Jess and her football coach (Jonathan Rhys Meyers); the chemistry between Jess and Julie was so strong that I think the story might have turned out rather differently - and evidently I am not alone in that impression.

Mitr (2002)

This low-budget, second-rate film seems to be fairly well-respected, but I can’t quite tell why. It is a not particularly refreshing take on the life of Indian immigrants in the United States, here a Tamil family living in a wealthy, exclusive California suburb. The wife and mother (the gorgeous South Indian actress/dancer Sobhana) is isolated and lonely, until she connects with a mysterious online friend (Mitr means "friend."). The script is trite, and the acting stiff and amateurish (except for Sobhana, who rises above the material). There are a few promising elements in the story but on the whole it just goes nowhere. Disappointing.