Shool

Good movie to watch for especially the manoj bajpayee best performance the movie is very well shot great movie and great direction.

Shool is an excellent crime drama about corruption and murky politics in India. This plot isn't anything new, but what makes the movie work is the mind-blowing performance of Manoj Bajpai as an honest cop trying to do his job in a corrupt environment. With his work in this film, Bajpai has proven himself as a great character actor, at par with another cinema great, Shah Rukh Khan. Both these actors have proven that you don't need good looks to make good movies.

Aside from Bajpai, Shool is filled with wonderful performances, such as the de-glamorized Raveena Tandon's heart-breaking portrayal the police officer's wife, and Sayaji Shinde's genuinely scary villain!

A mature film intended for a mature audience, Shool is a film that shouldn't be missed by anyone looking for quality in the otherwise lackluster world of Indian cinema!

Debutant director E Nivas bravely tells the story of a courageous police officer and his fight against the system for justice. Though the man-against-the-system story has been overused in Indian cinema, 'Shool' has a grittiness and honesty that makes that sets the tone apart. The movie doesn't merely show the battle but it delves into the psychology of the protagonist and his inner conflicts. The viewer can really connect to Samar Pratap Singh and his wife Manjiri.

Shot in washed out green-tinted colours and the use of the shaky camera and with the lack of overdone sets, 'Shool' looks very raw and authentic. The violence, though suggestive, implies very brutal and graphic mental images. The film starts with a telephone-call which is followed by a brutal murder and this already tells us what kind of a person Yadav (the antagonist played by Sayaji Shinde) is.

The performances are superb. Manoj Bajpai nails the part. The character seems to have been written for him and a lesser actor could have easily made a caricature out of this, but not Bajpai. He's simply excellent in displaying even the toughest expressions and this ranks among his best works. Sayaji Shinde is great. Even though his mannerisms are the same as other characters he's played, they perfectly suit Yadav's personality. Raveena Tandon takes the role of Manjiri after Juhi Chawla who had to walk out due to an accident which caused her to be hospitalized. 'Shool' couldn't have come at a better time for Ms. Tandon. After all the glamorous roles and comedies, the actress was looking for something different and in 'Shool' we see a deglamourized Raveena Tandon. Here she gives a very subtle, convincing and heartbreaking performance as Manjiri. The child actor is expressionless.

On the flip side, 'Shool' is quite predictable but one can't think of an alternative ending that would have made it better. Nonetheless, even though we know what will happen, the last scene is very effective, mostly due to Manoj Bajpai's performance and dialogue delivery. Anurag Kashyap's dialogues and E.Nivas's screenplay are good. Some scenes would have stood out more without the background score (which isn't that impressive). The songs are passable (and fit the situations) and of course there's the famous item number 'Main Aayi Hoon UP Bihar Lootney' filmed on a raunchy Shilpa Shetty. This is perhaps one of the few films where an item number actually works as it both fits the situation and tells more about the character of the actors (e.g. Sayaji acting all wild around Shilpa).

On the whole, 'Shool' is a great piece of Indian cinema. Although the story isn't new, it's presentation is and unlike others this one digs into both the protagonist's and antagonist's psychology.

Motihari is a one-train town in the badlands of Bihar. As a sanctuary of evil it resembles a piece of pre-riots Bombay, without the smells and the early closing. As though in recognition that the underworld everywhere is essentially the same, debutant director E Nivas -- who began his career as spot boy under Ramgopal Varma and graduated to become his chief understudy -- has shot Shool in dank, washed-out colours, so that the red is drained to maroon and the blue to navy.

Hi Any influence, unconscious or otherwise, that Satya may have had on Shool and Varma on Nivas, however, ends there. Although cast in the typical Bollywood potboiler formula, its portrayal of the political milieu in the Hindi heartland is as authentic as it is rivetting. Shool offers enough on this score to be a tempting alternative to curling up with the latest of William Darlymple's prize-winning despatches, if not a sojourn itself to Bihar's back of beyond. Bacchu Yadav (Sayaji Shinde) is the MLA of Motihari for 15 years running but, more pertinently, is the lord of all he surveys in the district. The film itself begins with a midnight call informing Yadav that the ''high command'' has decided to give the ticket this time to his local political rival, a Thakur. The caller, before hanging up after confidentially confiding this information, darkly hints that the announcement will be made public only in the morning and that Yadav could do a lot by then. And does he! It's a simple expedient: he himself leads his goons to Thakur's home, wakes him up and makes some small talk before stabbing him through the heart.

The next shot cuts to a sylvan sunrise and a train steaming into a station. A young man, lugging two ancient trunks, and with wife and kid in tow, steps out into the dappled light and... well, a few sequences later, to a cutting knowledge of what life as an idealist police inspector means in Bihar.

Manoj Bajpai, as inspector Samar Pratap Singh, has risen to the expectation, pulling off a robust and salty performance. At times he tends to go overboard, as with the scene where he pleads with the mute crowd for a glass of water for his dying child, and the result is smirky and jejune. Otherwise, whether as a character out of his kilter or as a villain in a script he can't remember writing, Bajpai's acting is controlled and commendable, and he has an advantage here for so much of his personality resides in his eyes.

The scene-stealing performance, however, has come from Sayaji Shinde. Incidentally, Bacchu Yadav is the darker confiere of Bhiku Mhatre in Satya, played ironically enough by Bajpai. Yadav is a vain priss who reigns through terror and wouldn't be remotely liked by his dependants even if he were to declare a general amnesty and donate a mangalsutra to every family with an unmarried daughter. As though that weren't enough, he is truly reptilian in temperament: his eyes narrow in mock scrutiny of an unfortunate henchman, even as his smile has a pixie twist to it, making his next step unfathomable. It's a memorable performance of a feudal politician, dumb and dictatorial, his virility and maschismo shading into bullying, his sheer physicality flatulent and dangerous.

But Inspector Singh, the cop on the tear, is scarcely deterred by all this. Each transgression by Yadav and each new incident revealing the obsequiousness of his superiors, rather than making our hero lose scales from his eyes, makes him more amped up. His wife's -- played by Raveena Tandon who has done a subdued and convincing no-frills job --- remonstrations, as that of a trusted colleague, the only one, fall on deaf ears.

From now on, formula takes over. The climax is not predictable only in the excess of melodrama it contains. And you have music accompanying the whole scene which sounds like something the music director-trio --- Shankar, Ehsaan and Loy --- dreamed up after a Mexican meal. Understandably, the whole thing turns the movie into mush.

Trying for an infernal starkness, Nivas has achieved an infernal tackiness. In the earlier parts of the movie the camera whirls and swoons among bursts of fauvist light and that combined with the authenticity of the various characters' nuances. Their dialogue had managed to convey something feral and ominous. In the end one can only say that Shool is for the most part a slovenly film and its politics fuzzy, but there is a vitality to the fuzziness. Not something every Hindi movie can claim. And lastly, congrates to the director and the actors team for working in such not-so-commercial serious movies.

It is too real to be a movie. If you have been to that part of India, eastern UP and Bihar, you will feel as if the things happening to Samar Pratap Singh or others have, or may have, happened to you / your family / your friends. Particularly for me it seemed more near to my heart as My Dad, though he is not a police officer like Samar Pratap Singh, is idealistic like him, and faces problems like he faces. After watching this movie, the desire to become an IAS officer and start cleaning up the system becomes very high, it took some days to put it back under control.

E Niwas, a 23 yr old boy, probably in his directorial debut has given a marvellous movie.

It is story of an honest police officer, in fact an honest man who happens to be a police officer. His only fault is that he is honest, honest as per the real definition of being honest. Here it should be noted that in India in general and in those parts of India in particular, the definition of honesty is changed. In those parts, If a person demands his share from the bribe that his colleague has taken, he is normal, if he does not demand, he is honest. And if he does neither of these, he tries to stop his colleague from taking bribe, he is ..... there is no adjective to describe a person, probably people never felt the need, exactly as Eskimos did not feel the need to have a word for cactus.

The only unrealistic part in the movie is its end, where Samar, after having lost his wife and kid, goes on to kill Bachchoo Yadav the villain, a rowdy who becomes politician. But however unrealistic it be, it should have been that only. After all it is this unrealistic stuff that differentiates between a movie and a documentary. And Shool is a movie, not a documentary.

Let us all hope for the day, when after watching Shool, instead of the end, one will feel the other things were unrealistic.

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