Movie Reviews: Delhi-6, Fired Up, Madea Goes to Jail

BILLU A troop of top Hindi character actors work overtime trying to goose the entertainment value of this surprisingly enervated small-town comedy, directed by hit-making slapstick specialist Priyadarshan (Bhool Bhulaiyaa) with about a tenth of his usual manic energy. The local eccentrics, played by Om Puri (imposingly bloated as a bullying money-lender,) and diminutive comic spark plug Rajpal Yadev (as a compulsive versifier who dreams of writing film song lyrics), add as many deft riffs as they can to their one- or two-note village folktale roles, treading water as they wait around to be poleaxed by the season’s most predictable plot twist. The only performer who rises above the fray is the great Irrfan Khan, the fine-grained actor who was the dad in The Namesake and the cop in Slumdog. Khan has his first his first mainstream Bollywood leading role as the gentle, puzzled Billu, a struggling barber who wanders around in a state of chronic distraction, pre-occupied with his schemes to upgrade his decrepit shop and scrape together his children’s school fees. For years, the wool-gathering Billu has been telling his kids and his stalwart, handsome wife (Lara Dutta) that his closest boyhood chum grew up to be India’s leading movie star, Sahir Khan, a god-like celebrity closely modeled upon — and portrayed by — the film’s producer, god-like celebrity Shah Rukh Khan. This extended cameo dovetails with the main action when this star shows up in town to shoot a film (glimpsed as a series of disconnected, garish production numbers) and Billu’s big-talking bluff seems about to be called. The scenes in which rumors of the barber’s bond with the star spread through town, igniting a dozen different strains of wide-eyed greed, are the movie’s best. Ultimately, though, the emotional center of this hard-working movie turns out to be the star rather than the barber. It is dedicated to the proposition that god-like celebrities are ordinary folks at heart. Groans all around. (Fallbrook 7; Naz 8; Laguna 16; AMC Covina 30; Ultrastar 8) (David Chute)

GO  CHAIN LINK Luckily, first-time feature filmmaker Dylan Reynolds’ Chain Link isn’t as clichéd as its official synopsis makes it sound: Newly released from prison, Anthony (Mark Irvingsen, a low-rent Billy Bob Thornton) attempts to mend relations with his young son (Luciano Rauso) and ex-wife (Yassmin Alers) but gets knocked off the straight-and-narrow path to redemption by snowballing circumstances beyond his control. In fact, Chain Link’s seemingly generic trajectory is interestingly complicated from the start by Anthony’s erratic behavior — he gets into an altercation with a cop on his first day out, then shows up late to his new job — signaling an unrepentant delinquency confirmed when he casually mugs a woman halfway through the movie for no more than a few bucks and an opened box of candy. Abetted by his enabling mother and a friend of his late father, Anthony isn’t misunderstood or particularly motivated to pursue a newly virtuous life but remains instead a strangely entitled fuck-up oblivious to anyone’s needs other than his immediate own. Although Reynolds’ script sometimes slips into sentimentality and entertains the odd delusion of grandeur, the film mostly presents a spare, refreshingly clear-eyed depiction of a deadbeat’s downward spiral. (Grande 4-Plex) (Kristi Mitsuda)

GO  DELHI-6 Addressing the crowd at the New York world premiere of Delhi-6, Indian actor Abhishek Bachchan announced that the film “truly represents the India of today and the youth of today.” “The India of today” (and spurious representations thereof) is a concept currently under review; by the time a grudging consensus is reached, the India of next week will have crowded in. But in his claim, Bachchan (nicknamed “Little B” — he is the son of “Big B,” Bollywood superstar Amitabh Bachchan, whose autograph is sought by a certain sewage-covered boy early in Slumdog Millionaire) posed an intriguing question: Could a true-blue Bollywood film ever represent something other than the highly referent, tightly clockworked chaos of Bollywood cinema? The story of an American-born Indian who accompanies his ailing grandmother (Waheeda Rehman) to Delhi and, duly appalled and enchanted by what he sees, undergoes a cultural conversion, Rakesh Omprakash Mehra’s Delhi-6 attempts to address the generational, economic, and religious problems dividing modern India, but does so in an unapologetically broad, whacked-out way, with each of Bollywood’s four food groups (corn, cheese, treacle, and nuts) present and accounted for. Which is to say, of course, that it’s pretty much irresistible and, in that sense, represents the enigmatic India of today as well as anything ever could. (Culver Plaza Theatres; Fallbrook 7; Naz 8; AMC Covina 30; Laguna Hills Mall) (Michelle Orange)

GO  ELEVEN MINUTES Two years after winning the first season of Project Runway, flamboyantly charismatic fashion designer Jay McCarroll still hadn’t launched his first clothing line, the pressure of being internationally famous for being famous playing hell on his nerves and insecurities. Beginning production then, doc filmmakers Michael Selditch and Rob Tate’s charming and unexpectedly perceptive portrait cum procedural proves the DIY-authentic corrective to Unzipped, a warts-and-all chronicle of McCarroll’s yearlong preparation for his inaugural show at New York Fashion Week. Hardly living a glamorous daily existence, McCarroll — a stressed-out but good-humored teddy bear whose naked sensitivities balance his ego — scours Chinatown for cheap material, milks as much as he can out of hemorrhaging budgets and unpaid employees, attempts to micromanage when outsourced work is botched, and squabbles with his publicist over creative compromises. What truly elevates it all is how the directors (deliberately appearing onscreen at times) subtly address our perceptions of filmed “reality,” from their even-handed vérité here to the more grossly manufactured confines of reality TV, a medium McCarroll is quick to call “vulgar.” Like Soderbergh’s two-part Che — yes, I’m making this comparison — Eleven Minutes is less about its subject and more about formalist processes (both McCarroll’s and the filmmakers’), and shouldn’t exist as a standalone without viewers having experienced its other half, Project Runway. (Sunset 5) (Aaron Hillis)