A Hero Gets His Last Hurrah |
Harrison Ford gets one final but frail crack of the whip in Indiana Jones & The Dial Of Destiny. There are riddles to be solved, Nazis to be bashed, and a mysterious artefact to be secured. |
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| EVERY Indiana Jones movie is built around a MacGuffin: a coveted artefact which is at once the most and the least important object. Most important because the pursuit of it provides viewers with a guide rope; least important because it could be just about anything and nothing. Meaning the artefacts are catalyst and currency in the Indiana Jones universe. But what gives the objects meaning is the people after them. For whatever reason. For the bad guys, it is a Faustian shortcut to the usual Big Three: power, fortune, immortality. For Indy, each paves the way for his evolution from a professional looter acting out of self-interest to a swashbuckling archaeologist trying to do better. Every MacGuffin came with its own design. The quest for the Ark of the Covenant in Raiders of the Lost Ark teaches Indy to put science aside and respect the intangible power of the Divine, while the Nazis pay for their disrespect with their lives. The quest for the Holy Grail in The Last Crusade coincides with Indy reconnecting with his father and learning to move on from the past. The quest for Sankara Stones (American for Shiva lingas) in the Temple of Doom lets Indy play white saviour to us Indian savages who enjoy our boa constrictors stuffed with live baby eels and chilled monkey brains served like coconut cocktails. The quest for the alien whatsit in the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull allows Indy to chance upon the only way to survive a nuclear explosion: hiding in a refrigerator. Fifteen years later, Harrison Ford gets one final but frail crack of the whip in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. Per the norm, there are riddles to be solved, Nazis to be bashed, and a mysterious artefact to be secured. The artefact, this time around, is the Antikythera: a device, the movie insists, was invented by Ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes and rumoured to be capable of time travel. Not by coincidence, we have a hero who built his legacy searching for artefacts lost to time — and who is close to becoming an artefact himself. A man who broke into burial chambers aplenty now has one foot in his own grave. — PRAHLAD SRIHARI |
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SatyaPrem Ki Katha: Misguided Saviour Complex |
IT is June and Satyaprem Ki Katha is Kartik Aaryan’s second theatrical release of 2023. Rohit Dhawan’s Shehzada released earlier this year. Honestly, it is hard to tell the difference between the two and not least because they share the same garish aesthetic. The songs sound more of the same (if ‘Pasoori’ was a person, it would have been declared dead), the characters cannot be told apart and in both, Aaryan shoots off a monologue the moment someone asks him, “Toh problem kya hai?” But what really ties them together is the positioning of the actor. In both outings, he plays the role of a middle-class boy, who wakes up cursing his fate and goes to sleep doing the same. He is dismissed by his family members (father and sister in Shehzada; mother and sister in Satyaprem Ki Katha), not valued highly by others and yet, he is the hero of the story. — ISHITA SENGUPTA |
| Vadivelu Is Maamannan, & Maamannan Is Vadivelu |
EVEN before the release of Mari Selvaraj’s Maamannan, the film suffered a huge disservice. The conversation after the director’s speech at the audio launch — during which he cited Thevar Magan (1992) and how Maamannan was not merely a reimagination of its central conflict but also inspired by it at a formal level — turned into feverish cacophony. What was said, how it was said, what was right and wrong about the director’s speech… the discourse followed the by-now-familiar news cycle of everyone weighing in with their opinions whilst reevaluating a famous work in Tamil cinema. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But what people seem to have lost in this debate is the little fact that this is Mari Selvaraj’s film. What about this film? What does it say? How does it say it? Maybe Thiagarajan Kumararaja is right when he says ‘do not talk to creators’. — ADITYA SHRIKRISHNA |
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Lust Stories 2: One Terrific Short In A Sea Of Mediocrity |
TO know lust is to acknowledge it. Hindi films, not unlike pop culture, have a tendency to portray it as an adjective — a verb even — and not a noun. Which is to say, that the emotion is never really depicted for what it is. Instead, it is used to describe a person (“lusty”) or an act (“lusting”), thus narrowing something which is inherently universal. The first edition of Lust Stories, a 2018 Netflix anthology helmed by a diverse group of filmmakers like Anurag Kashyap, Zoya Akhtar, Dibakar Banerjee and Karan Johar, was an attempt to outline the nature of lust by stressing on its ubiquity. That all four shorts were headlined by women with their desires forming the narrative crux only accentuated the forbidden-ness of the theme in hand. It was a largely competent outing that gained from the singular perspectives of the makers. In comparison, Lust Stories 2 is a flat out inferior series, preoccupied with diluting the emotion by making excuses for it. For the most part, its understanding of lust is so painfully reductive that it yields stories that encourage neither attentive watching nor ingenious reading. All save one. — I.S. |
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| Each week, our editors pick one long-form, writerly piece that they think is worthy of your attention, and dice it into easily digestible bits for you to mull over. |
| In which we invite a scholar of cinema, devotee of the moving image, to write a prose poem dedicated to their poison of choice. Expect to spend an hour on this. |
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