Excerpts from reviews of Madhur Bhandarkar’s Calendar Girls:
What worked for Bhandarkar in 2005 in ‘Page 3’ can obviously not work in 2015 because he is unimaginatively and rather cockily serving us the same dish in a different plate.
Someone also needs to tell the scripting team that this is 2015 and casual sex, powerful men asking for escorts, a straying husband are not materials inducing shock and awe anymore.
And yes, talking about Twitter in every second dialogue won’t magically make the film modern and contemporary.
– Shubha Shetty Saha (Mid-day.com)
...is this a film about women having agency, or an outdated lesson on morality?
A hurried after-thought, which talks of how these girls are really, truly ‘proud achievers’, comes right in the end. And it’s just that, an after-thought. The rest of it exploits—smugly, tackily, uncomfortably explicitly—young women being exploited.
– Shubhra Gupta (Indianexpress.com)
Calendar Girls indicates that the voyeuristic pleasure of watching innocent flowers being crushed into the dirt has finally worn thin. The 131-minute saga says little that is not already known about the seamier side of modeling and cricket. Its shocks are as weak as its performances, and perhaps its most scandalous aspect is Bhandarkar’s meta-moment. He appears in the movie as himself ‒ a conscientious, honest and bold filmmaker who goes where few others dare to.
When a director feels compelled to include a self-aggrandising press release in his own movie, it’s perhaps time to turn the page.
– Nandini Ramnath (Scroll.in)
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