Plus: Our critics' verdict on Tejas, 12th Fail, Mujib & Sajini Shinde Ka Viral Video
Killers Of The Flower Moon Scrubs Whitewash Off America's Bloody Past |
For most filmmakers, a film like Flower Moon might have been their magnum opus. With Martin Scorsese, it feels like a sign of even better things to come, writes Prahlad Srihari. |
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| | Cast: Lily Gladstone, Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro |
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TikTok star Martin Scorsese returns in some style with Killers of the Flower Moon: a late-career moral reckoning with the myths that defined the Western genre, whitewashed America’s past and fuelled his own love for the movies. The director picks up from where he left off on the introspective path of his previous film. By challenging the violent underpinnings of the Western, as The Irishman did with the mob epic, Flower Moon transcends the limits of its genre. There is a marked difference between how the West was won and how the West was spun. The myth of the civilised white cowboy dishing out harsh but fair justice against the savage Native American became so powerful it overwrote the truth. History couldn’t compete with the narrative curated by painters, writers and filmmakers who invested the colonisers with all the heroic symbolism they could muster. Scorsese sets the record straight by casting Native Americans not as hurdles but actors in the shaping of the American economy. (Killers Of The Flower Moon isn't on OTT yet. But John Wick: Chapter 4 is. Stream using the OTTplay Premium Jhakaas pack at Rs 199/month.) In fact, the Osage nation was one of the wealthiest communities at the start of the 20th century. An introductory mock-newsreel shows how not too long after being stripped of their land in Kansas and sold a part of Oklahoma, the Osage discovered there was black gold beneath their new home. The resulting oil boom brought in millions of dollars which paid for chauffeured cars, mansions, clothes, jewellery, and even white servants. The trouble is it also brought the wolves and the parasites: white opportunists of all stripes eager to get their teeth into the wealth of a burgeoning community. Soon the men and women of the community began dying: some shot, some bombed, some poisoned, some drugged, some lost to a "wasting illness." To paraphrase Ian Fleming, once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, more than three times is conspiracy. It is white interlopers making a concerted attack against Native Americans, cocksure in their belief that history will paint their serial murders as “taming” another frontier. |
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Tejas: Kangana Ranaut’s Film Puts The Prop In Propaganda |
YOU know a film has broken you when you laugh at a pivotal moment and find that you are not the only one doing it. You know a film has gone too far when a quiet person, who hitherto was an impassive member of the audience, sighs loud enough to be heard. You know a film puts the ‘prop’ in propaganda when the news channel it features is called ‘T**es Now N****arat’, the fictional journalist it includes is a real-life reporter known for being the mouthpiece of the current dispensation, and the crisis at hand is a bomb scare at…a Ram mandir. You know the joke writes itself when a film loses all objectivity and treats its lead as both the pilot of a fighter plane and the fighter plane itself. But then the actor is Kangana Ranaut and this is her film. — ISHITA SENGUPTA |
| Sajini Shinde Ka Viral Video: Interesting But Confused |
WHAT does “viral” even mean in 2023? There’s “break-the-internet” viral. There’s word-of-mouth viral. There’s the million-metric viral (million-plus views or shares). There’s a kind of virality that contributes mainly to bad publicity. There’s virality that can make a career. And then, there’s virality that can lead to suicide. None of these sound outlandish, and we’ve all heard stories about them. And that’s why, not once does a character in Mikhil Musale’s Sajini Shinde Ka Viral Video ask, “Why does Sajini Shinde attempt suicide after a video of her goes viral?” They know. We know. Like Nimrat Kaur’s character Bela says in the film, “Yeh iss generation ka problem hai (this is the problem with this generation)” referring to online validation. — SWETHA RAMAKRISHNAN | |
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12th Fail: A Vikrant Massey Show All The Way |
WHEN Vikrant Massey smiles, the entire frame lights up. When Vikrant Massey emotes, you feel things in the pit of your stomach. Which is why Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s latest film, 12th Fail, is a Massey show, all the way. It has all the ingredients of a commercial tearjerker: an underdog protagonist; the big brutal system of corruption and bureaucracy; a small-town man who migrates to Delhi with big dreams in his eyes only to realise dreams don’t pay the rent; the triumph of truth over systemic dishonesty. But is a story of this nature worth a trip to theatres? For Vikrant Massey, yes. — S.R. |
| Mujib: The Making of a Nation | An Unnecessary & Trite Biopic |
SHYAM BENEGAL’s Mujib: The Making of a Nation, a biopic on Bangladesh’s founding father Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, is barely a film. It is an overwrought venture held together with dry artifice. It is a collation of the past with such stagey awkwardness that it is surprising that someone directed it, let alone the fact that the person is Benegal. Mujib is not just the antithesis of what a political film should be like — commentaries are dwarfed to jibes and any form of criticism is obliterated — but it is also evidence of what controlling directives can do to art: it can ruin them. — I.S. |
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The one newsletter you need to decide what to watch on any given day. Our editors pick a show, movie, or theme for you from everything that’s streaming on OTT. |
| 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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