Plus, reviews for Dream Girl 2, Akelli, and Adam Sandler's You Are So Not Invited To My Bat Mitzvah
Asteroid City Is 'Peak Wes Anderson' In The Best Way |
Asteroid City works as a master key that decodes all Anderson's pop-up book fantasies, writes Prahlad Srihari. |
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| OF all the trends to come out of the generative AI craze, one of the worst has to be the Wes Anderson mash-ups. Social media is flooded with all sorts of ghastly miscreations passed off as grand feats of “prompt engineering.” What if Star Wars, Avatar, Harry Potter and The Shining (the list goes on) were directed by a filmmaker with the most unmistakable style? Except, each mash-up mistakes aesthetics for cosmetics. Each cheapens the precise symmetry, the kitsch cool, the pastel colours and all the mannered extremes to algorithmic feed. To bored TikTokers, Anderson represents aesthetic-core: a glorified filter for their morning commutes, lunch breaks and pandemic quarantines. For the very same reasons TikTokers and AI apostles can’t get enough of Anderson, the naysayers refuse to give him due consideration. Every new film is like a stick being handed on a silver platter to those who see his formal affectations as frivolous adornments — a knee-jerk reaction from the kind of viewers who have grown too suspicious of pretty surfaces to see the terrible depths of sadness underneath. Anderson’s stories are inextricable from his sense of style, from the alternate worlds in which the repressed emotions of his characters inexorably burst through the pretty surface. Foregrounding the artifice doesn’t prevent the artifice from assuming its own truth. Recognising art by definition as artifice, Anderson has doubled down on the heightened realism with each successive film, readily branded by the press as “peak Wes Anderson” and called out by the detractors as “self-indulgent”, as if that’s a bad thing. Truth be told, who deserves to be indulged more than an artist at his most creatively and emotionally naked, throwing all caution to the wind? Asteroid City, his latest, is indeed “peak Wes Anderson” and “self-indulgent” in the best sense of the word. Because it works as a master key that decodes all his pop-up book fantasies, opening the door to the creative process of an artist seeking answers to the unknown and the unknowable through the artifice of unreality. Anderson doesn’t yield his secrets readily however. He embeds them between layers upon layers of metatextual playfulness. |
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Akelli: Three Films In One, & Not A Single One Among Them Works |
PRANAY Meshram’s outing is a bloated survivor drama based in Iraq when ISIS seized Mosul in 2014. Given the times we are living in, it is easy to see the film as an offshoot of the burgeoning Middle-East genre where one religion is used as the face of all evil to underline the vulnerability of another. Earlier this year Sudipto Sen’s The Kerala Story milked this to great commercial success, freely sensationalising its central premise of women from Kerala being converted to Islam and inducted into the IS. Meshram’s film sticks to the story. Sure, there are terrible people who raise their guns in the name of religion but it has the sense to depict them as extremists. This makes Akelli’s politics bearable, the film not so much. — ISHITA SENGUPTA |
| You Are So Not Invited To My Bat Mitzvah: The Sandlers Steal The Show |
YOU know you’re getting old when you go from hard-relating to YA comedies to tut-tutting the kids in them. I’m now the parents of the protagonists in these movies — forever amused, cool, concerned, semi-invested. In this case, I’m Adam Sandler, the basketball-shorts-wearing Jewish father of the girl who falls out with her best friend over a boy on the eve of their epic bat mitzvahs. At one point, I even yelled “Oh no, missy, don’t you dare!” at the screen when she snuck away to kiss that popular dude (who I’m going to kill) in school. Which is why I found myself nodding my head vigorously at Sandler’s slightly exaggerated dad-rant (“We fought the Nazis for this?”) after she’s caught. Of course he’s disappointed. Of course I am. — RAHUL DESAI |
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Dream Girl 2: The Kapil Sharma Show With A Budget |
This is #CriticalMargin, where Ishita Sengupta gets contemplative over new Hindi films and shows. |
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| RAAJ Shaandilyaa’s Dream Girl 2 is a spiritual sequel to his hit 2019 outing. It makes little sense. Apart from the protagonist and his propensity to play-act as a woman to earn money, there is little in common. Sure the main characters are reprised but even if they were not, it would not have mattered. Nothing does. Dream Girl 2 is hardly a film. What makes sense though is that before directing, Shaandilyaa’s background in television involved writing for comedian Kapil Sharma and for shows like Comedy Circus. This detail fits like a glove. Dream Girl 2 unfolds as an episode straight out of the comedy shows except it has a budget, more actors and pretends to be a film. At all times, multiple characters enter and exit the frame. They wear exaggerated wigs, speak absolute nonsense and cushion it with two offensive punchlines. There is no semblance of a plot, no space for logic. There is one caricature after another, meeting in a world which is more dated than the current David Dhawan films and more unfunny than the whole Housefull franchise. |
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