Kabir Singh - Reviews & Box Office Thread - Page 6

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-lRyevxevA

Kabir Singh Movie Review: Shahid Kapoor plays Vijay Deverakonda in B-Grade Arjun Reddy

Kabir Singh shows Shahid Kapoor in the eponymous role while Kiara Advani plays his girlfriend. The Sandeep Reddy Vanga-directed film is a second ode to toxic masculinity after his Arjun Reddy. It was not cool the first time, it is worse the second.

• • Ananya Bhattacharya
• New Delhi
• June 21, 2019
• UPDATED: June 21, 2019 10:34 IST

Kabir Singh starring Shahid Kapoor and Kiara Advani and directed by Sandeep Reddy Vanga is the big Bollywood release today

Movie Name:Kabir Singh

Cast:Shahid Kapoor, Kiara Advani

Director:Sandeep Reddy Vanga

A hapless maid in Kabir Singh breaks a drinking glass by mistake. Our protagonist chases her, glare in place, and cigarette hanging from his lips. When an entire theatre erupts in applause to this man chasing his maid, with the intention of beating her up, you realise Kabir Singh will be a hit. No matter how many reviews try to pry open the eyes of the filmmaker, Sandeep Reddy Vanga, and its lead actor, Shahid Kapoor. It did not happen with Arjun Reddy the film. It will not happen with Kabir Singh.

The women in Kabir Singh are beaten, kissed without consent, forced to take off their pants at knifepoint, slapped and treated like street dogs. Strike that. Kabir Singh's dog gets a meatier role and better treatment than his women in this mess of a film. What worked with Arjun Reddy the first time, is a little too much for the Bollywood audience to take (is it?). Did director Sandeep Reddy Vanga think he would get away with this level of misogyny a second time? Maybe he did. And he wasn't wrong. The answer lies in that theatre, where 90 per cent of the audience claps when a man sets out to beat a woman, even as the other 10 per cent squirms in discomfort.

Kabir Singh is about an uber-masculine, testosterone-driven person. But take it from someone who has walked out of a toxic, abusive relationship. There is nothing 'cool' about it. The 'manly' men in these relationships don't deserve the end that these films pander to us. No matter how many Sandeep Reddy Vangas and Kabir Singhs try to tell you otherwise. Some women leave this breed of abusive partners. Others cannot muster up the courage to do so. And then there are the heroines in Sandeep Reddy Vanga's Arjun Reddys and Kabir Singhs. Abuse is so normal in this world that the lead woman in the story is robbed of her voice.

Through the three-hour film - 2 hours and 54 minutes, we see a Solar System that has Medical Student, and then Surgeon Kabir Singh as its resident star. He is one of your Biology projects. For everyone. Everyone around our hero has only him to worry about. They go to their clinics and 'refer' women to Kabir to sleep with. They keep a count of the days he has been out of home for. They leave him, but only for everything else to fit perfectly back in the scheme of things. In this grand scheme of things, director Sandeep Reddy Vanga stays downright faithful to his first child, Arjun Reddy. Except, while the Telugu audience got to see an exotic Italy as the 'therapy vacation', their Hindi counterpart has to make do with somewhere a few kilometres off Mumbai.

Kabir Singh the film is the same film as Arjun Reddy. It is the same story, the same dialogues, the same character, the same. So if you have seen Arjun Reddy, you would know that Shahid Kapoor is merely play-acting, trying to do a Vijay Deverakonda. Shahid tries so hard to be Vijay Deverakonda that Kabir Singh loses himself after the first few scenes. So what did Sandeep Reddy Vanga and this entire cast and crew do with Kabir Singh? That's a question we don't yet have an answer to.

Kabir has anger management issues, we are told. We are shown. We are made to swallow. Then your acid reflux kicks in, like after a night of limitless drinking. Nine-tenths of Kabir Singh the film is spent on showing this brilliant student getting away with the worst of misdemeanours, just because he is the 'topper of his batch, college, university'. Come on. Your story is set in a top Delhi medical college. Is it really that 'free' a world out there? Kabir Singh the guy sees Preeti Sikka the girl. He falls in love at first sight. He warns her entire batch to concentrate on the rest but leave her out because she is 'meri bandi'. He plants a kiss on her cheek in front of the entire college and says 'kisine nahi dekha'. Hello, ever heard of consent?

Kabir chooses Preeti's 'friend' for her. "You're a goodlooking chick, she is a healthy chick. Good combination." And he has just begun. Over the next 2.5 hours, director Sandeep Reddy Vanga and actor Shahid Kapoor take us through the absolute worst of toxic masculinity. If you groan in disgust at what is going on in front of you, you are supposed to forgive Kabir Singh as the guy who has 'anger management issues'.

Kabir keeps lamenting that 'it is 2019, but we cannot get married because of caste'. It is 2019. A lot of the people associated with this film seem to have forgotten that.

Among the redeeming factors of Kabir Singh is the acting by Soham Majumdar, who plays Kabir's unrequited best friend Shiva and the sole voice of reason in this film. The supporting cast in Kabir Singh has very little to do except cater to this man's whims and fancies. Arjan Bajwa plays Kabir's elder brother Karan in a short but memorable role. Kiara Advani has nothing much to do in the film. She brings a freshness to her character Preeti but thanks to the director, gets a role not worth shining in. So passive is the character of Preeti that you cannot even pity her. Suresh Oberoi as Kabir's father and Kamini Kaushal as his grandmother, like the rest of the supporting cast, have little to do in Kabir Singh.

The music of the film is outstanding. Songs like Bekhayali, Kaise Hua and Tujhe Kitna Chahne Lage are downright chartbusters.

Kabir Singh spends 120 minutes of its 154 in showing Kabir either drinking or drunk or snorting cocaine or needling in morphine or fighting with people or, slapping his girlfriend or screaming at her. Or making out. In the remaining 24 minutes, his repentance is done with, and we all go home with a happy ending. If you think it is okay, if you think it is justified because 'movie hai yaar, it's not real life', you are part of the problem.

Misogyny is not cool. Neither is Kabir Singh.

1.5 out of 5 stars for Kabir Singh. Watch Arjun Reddy a second time. With subtitles, there's really no difference. There's Lonely Planet: Italy for the rest.

Kabir Singh' Review: There’s Some Movie in This Misogyny

The relentless misogyny in the Shahid Kapoor-starrer makes you question your own sense and judgement, eluding even basic comprehension.

Tanul Thakur

FILM

1 HOUR AGO

At 1:08 am last night, before starting to write the review of Kabir Singh, I pinged my friend, a fellow film critic, to check about a moment in the movie. “So there’s a scene at the start where he [Shahid Kapoor] holds a knife and tells a woman to undress?”

“Yeah,” he replied.

I pinged him again to confirm whether the woman was not “Jia”, played by the movie’s second heroine Nikita Dutta, but a peripheral character.

“No.”

“That happens, right?” I had a sudden impulse to fact-check the entire scene. That bit felt, more so in hindsight, so vacuously shocking that I thought I had made it up.

“Can barely believe myself but yeah.”

Kabir Singh is the kind of film, one steeped so deep in viciousness, that it needs a genre of its own: ‘Lynchian’ misogyny. ‘Lynchian’ – named after American filmmaker David Lynch, the maker of surreal thrillers that keep you hooked and nonplussed – befits this movie, because the relentless misogyny here makes you question your own sense and judgement, eluding even basic comprehension. Maybe it is not the movie, you first tell yourself, it is me.

After surgeon Kabir Singh (Kapoor) threatens the woman to undress, a part of the audience in a Connaught Place multiplex laughed. The subsequent scenes were no different – the maid in his house breaks a glass; Kabir runs after her: the audience laughed. At the hospital, a nurse comments on his beard and shabby look. Kabir turns towards her, pretends to unzip himself in a bid to scare her, and she scampers: more laughter.

This, quite quickly, becomes a pattern: Kabir, nursing some kind of heartbreak, is a raging alcoholic who is also hooked on to drugs, and his irrational aggression is almost always played for laughs. Maybe it’s just the character, you tell yourself again, not the movie. We, after all, don’t know this guy; it’s only fair to give him, and the film, a chance.

Kabir Singh cuts to a flashback. He’s provoked on the football field, picks a fight and punches his opponent. The college decides to suspend him for a month, but not without the dean (Adil Hussain) informing us that Kabir is the “topper of the board, college and university”, a student with an “impeccable academic record”, “one of the best ever”. Kabir, on the other hand, refuses to apologise, saying, “This is me. I have no regrets.”

Also read: How the ‘Good Guy With a Gun’ Became a Deadly American Fantasy

Director Sandeep Vanga plants a rather insidious assertion here: that Kabir’s behaviour is excusable because he’s a genius; that he, presumably for the same reason, transcends decency; that normal rules don’t apply to him. This is both an excuse and a defence, the cinematic equivalent of a man with a ‘golden heart’, stretching the argument of ‘boys will be boys’ to its most terrifying conclusion.

Kabir doesn’t leave college because he sees Preeti (Kiara Advani), a girl in a junior batch and, just like that, falls in ‘love’. In fact, it is not love as much as a desire to own someone. “Woh meri bandi hai [she’s my woman],” Kabir threatens his juniors, adding, “barring her, every other girl is yours.” And of course, he has not even spoken to her once.

When Kabir meets her for the first time, the power differential between them is uncomfortably obvious – a senior boy, scary, aggressive, masculine; a junior girl, scared, quiet, hesitant – and, without any context, kisses her on cheek in front of everyone. The film thinks it’s a romantic moment; it cuts to a song.

Kabir never asks Preeti, always orders. Orders her to sit on the front bench with a stocky classmate because “healthy chicks are like teddy bears: warm and cuddly.” Orders her to leave the class with him, in front of everyone, where he’s come to teach, more than once – the film thinks it’s romantic; it cuts to a song. She’s hardly gotten a dialogue by then. Here’s the list of things she does, in fact, before getting a chance to speak: roam around Delhi with Kabir, move into his hostel, make out, have sex, eat pizza.

She gets her first proper line around 50 minutes into the movie. “What do you like in me?” She asks Kabir. Finally, you think, we’d get an answer or something – anything – that would make sense. “I like the way you breathe,” he says, with the confidence of a man drunk on feminist literature. I wanted to walk out.

Let me break down its next 124 minutes for you: misogyny, entitlement, violence, alcohol, drugs, “Woh meri bandi hai”; more misogyny, more entitlement, more violence, more alcohol, more drugs, more “Woh meri bandi hai”; even more misogyny, even more entitlement, even more violence… hang on: I think I need a glass of water. As you can see, there’s some movie in this misogyny. If Jab Harry Met Sejal were a dude, it’d have approached Kabir Singh and asked, “Bro, aise kaise?”

https://youtu.be/9bRkBEuMuqY

https://youtu.be/Aj8hztY60OA

Noida m aag ugal Rahi ha non holiday pe

Haven't people known all along it's a remake of Arjun Reddy and would be misogynistic movie 🤔

Nice to see the good opening !!

Good luck to Shahid and Kiara.

Shahid has always been one of my favorites, so talented and hard-working yet so underrated

Hope he gets his 100cr movie this time<3

https://youtu.be/C-lRyevxevA

Originally posted by: YoWorld

Haven't people known all along it's a remake of Arjun Reddy and would be misogynistic movie 🤔

Nice to see the good opening !!

Exactly!

Originally posted by: 2RsFan

Feminists SJW riled up as expected

It’s not about feminism....Some people are not just comfortable with such stories...I couldn’t even watch 10 minutes of the original and Vijay happens to be my favorite...Shahid is another favorite but I am not even planning to watch this one...Just happy for him that he is finally getting his due...