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Showing posts from November, 2020

JAWAAN (2023) : review

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And finally the much hyped, much awaited Jawaan saw light of the day ! Big stars, big budget( humongous budget actually), big music composer, everything super large. But does it meet the expectations of the average viewer? No it goes not. Read on.  A decorated jawan locks horns with a criminal called Kaali, this is in 1986 ( the year movies like Aakhri Raasta released, just for reference). Kaali gets him eliminated and send the pregnant wife to jail. The baby born in jail grows up to become the hero (look alike of the father) and decides to avenge the misdeeds done to his innocent patriotic parents. Well, isn’t it a masaaledaar full on Bollywood- Tollywood drama subject ?  And then the director Atlee also borrows ideas and references from various retro movies, some idea from Sholay (1975) as the hero assembled a gang of jailed Qaidis in order to form a team to nab the villain, then there’s an entire episode borrowed from Dhartiputra (1993), and the basic theme is copy pasted from Kaml
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Fabulous Lives of Bollywood Wives(2020): Review

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Directed by: Uttam Domale  Featuring: Bhavana Pandey, Neelam Kothari, Maheep Sandhu and Seema Khan  No points for guessing the various western shows and series that have inspired this melancholic series based on the window dressed lives of four “Bollywood wives”!  Created by Karan Johar under the banner Dharmatic productions he also chips in as an agony aunt in two episodes. We follow the four women through their daily lives where they’re dealing with children issues, teen temperament, escalating moods, household chores blah blah blah. We realise they’re such bad actors (except Neelam) as they look disoriented and expressionless while emoting and mouthing their scripted dialogues. Even Aunt KJo can’t help them with his glamourising presence.  Did we actually need a series like this which shamelessly displays vulgar show of filthy wealth and masked glamour? Nope we did not. There could’ve been a lot more better conceptualised humour and staged drama, what we see is a bland and frigid re
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MISMATCHED(2020): Review

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Directed by: Akarsh Khurana Cast: Rohit Saraf, Prajakta Koli, Taaruk Raina, Muskaan Jaffri, Vidya Malvade, Ranvijay Singha, Aditi Govitrikar, Suhasini Mulay, Kshiti Jog, Jatin Sial & others.  It’s raining romcoms on the OTT platform, if you lapped up cheesy flicks like ‘Emily in Paris’ and MASABA MASABA then you may fall in love with ‘Mismatched’ which is an confused adaptation of Sandhya Menon’s novel ‘When Dimple met Rishi’.  Set in picturesque Rajasthan(and you get a lovely tour of the beautiful locations) the story is about a young teenage girl who joins a short term course in gaming/apps/coding in an institute where she meets all kind of people from her generation, a friendly roomie, a physically disabled bully, an American born desi project partner and the quintessential lover boy ! It’s her journey that’s it.  Not sure what more the director could’ve added to glamourise or enhance the storyline, it’s infused with unlimited saccharine that after a point you feel like throwing
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BARD OF BLOOD (2019) : A review

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Directed by: Ribhu Dasgupta  Cast: Emraan Hashmi, Vineet Kumar, Jaideep Ahlawat, Sobhita Dhulipala, Danish Aslam, Kirti Kulhari, Rajit Kapur, Shishir Sharma, Shruti Marathe, Soham Shah and others.  Excellent! If it’s just one word that I need to describe this espionage thriller then it’s excellent. And so bloody underrated and thrashed mercilessly by critics and IMDb users. Wonder why?  Based on the novel by the young author Bilal Siddiqui this hard hitting fast paced thriller series (seven episodes each averaging around 40 mins) follows the revengeful journey of an Indian agent/ spy Kabir (Hashmi) who revisits Baluchistan to free some Indian agents who’ve been held captive by Talibani terrorists, he also has to settle some old scores.  Dasgupta’s direction is first rate, focussed on one track throughout the best part is there are no unnecessary side plots, even the flashbacks don’t seem to deviate from the centre plot, no complicated or elongated sequences which makes the entire serie
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AASHRAM 2(2020): Not Upto The Mark

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Directed by: Prakash Jha  Cast: Bobby Deol, Darshan Kumar, Anupriya Goenka, Sachin Shroff, Chandan Roy Sanyal, Aditi Pohankar, Tushar Pandey, Tridha Chaudhary, Anurita Jha, Adhyayan Suman, Rajeev Siddhartha, Vikram Kochhar & others.  Season one had it’s gripping moments with some unpredictability and authenticity, typically in Prakash Jha’s trademark pattern, somehow that’s missing in part two, and things look monotonous.  Spread over nine long elongated episodes and also very strongly hinting at part three this could’ve easily been wrapped up this time. Continuing from earlier season the fake Godman Baba Nirala(Deol) continues his power hungry game, when he’s not raping innocent women or campaigning for politicians he’s found playing with puppets in his grand bedroom. There’s a lot of focus on the political affiliations this time, and after a point it drags and appears boring, if you don’t yawn then you are used to such repetitive fare.  Jha is no doubt in great directorial form,
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CHHALANG[2020]: an “offbeat” leap !

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Director: Hansal Mehta  Cast: Rajkumar Rao, Mohammad Zeeshan Ayub, Nushrat Bharucha, Satish Kaushik, Saurabh Shukla, Ila Arun, Naman Jain, Jatin Sarna, & others.  This offbeat ‘coming of age’ movie belongs to those Bollywood fares where as a viewer you know what’s going to happen in the end, that it’s the hero who’ll triumph victorious, and yet you flow with the tide notwithstanding the predictability.  Set in Haryana, it’s a simple story about a young PT teacher in a govt aided school played by Rao (brilliant), who’s laidback, callous and has a ‘chalta hai’ attitude towards his work. Things take a major u-turn when a rival PT teacher joins the school and is determined to displace Rao from his position. Realising how he’s been taking his life, work and the students for granted, Rao undergoes an attitude transformation to consolidate his position and prove his capabilities.  We’ve seen such stuff earlier in Hollywood as well as Indian movies, there have been some lovely sports based
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LUDO(2020): a game worth playing

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Director: Anurag Basu  Cast: Pankaj Tripathi, Abhishek Bachchan, Aditya Roy Kapur, Rajkumar Rao, Shalini Vatsa, Fatima Sheikh, Sanya Malhotra, Bhanu Uday, Rohit Saraf, Asha Negi, Pearle Maaney & others.  Have to confess, all this while I’d been under the foolish impression that Ludo is an Anurag Kashyap film, until the opening credits flashed! No idea why, but the teaser had that Kashyap kind of touché.  The other Anurag ie Basu is no less a maverick film maker, here he combines four parallel tracks that keep bumping into each other leading to a climax where all ‘accidentally’ meet-up. Basu has experimented in the past and going by his instincts he’ll surely keep experimenting for as long as he makes movies, this one is an over the top black comedy, nobody’s complaining as it’s meant to be over the top, colourful, sometimes loud, at times incomprehensible and most times entertaining.  Basu does a commendable job, thankfully the humour is managed responsibly, nothing slapstick, tho
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LAXMII (2020): no bomb 💣 here

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Directed by: Raghava Lawrence  Cast: Akshay Kumar, Kiara Advani, Rajesh Sharma, Manu Rishi Chadda, Tarun Arora, Ayesha Reza, Ashwini Kalshikar, Prachi Pandya, Adhvik Mahajan, Master Jason, Baby Grace, and Sharad Kelkar.  Now this one is an official remake of an over the top south movie, so you got to get used to the loud background score, superficial hamming by all artists, stunts defying gravity and the likes, if that’s not your cup of tea, well then you’ll have to skip this supernatural comedy, which unfortunately has nothing ‘super’ nor ‘comical’ about it.  Haven’t watched the original hence unsure whether that had any authenticity but the remake is awful and generously low on substance. The story (or the lack of it) is about a man who gets possessed by the revengeful ghost of a transgender who has to settle score with some evil conspirators. The screenplay is loaded with loopholes, you’ve to try really hard to laugh at the onscreen proceedings, the humour somehow sucks, quite lite
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