Indian Police Force: Rohit Shetty’s Cop-Verse Needs To Stop Expanding |
This is #CriticalMargin, where Ishita Sengupta gets contemplative over new Hindi films and shows. |
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| | Cast: Sidharth Malhotra, Shilpa Shetty, Vivek Oberoi | | |
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ROHIT SHETTY’s Indian Police Force, a seven-episode series on the bravery of Delhi Police, is a strange beast. It walks like a Rohit Shetty film, talks like a Rohit Shetty film, and refuses to make sense — like a Rohit Shetty film. The difference in the ecosystem makes no difference to it. Shetty’s recent work does not care that it is situated in the streaming space where the rules of engagement differ from a feature film. The result is an agonising watch with such a listless group of actors that the ever-roving camera emerges as the most active participant of the venture. (Stream top-rated movies and shows across platforms and languages, using the OTTplay Premium Jhakaas pack, for just Rs 199/month.) If there was a dime for every time one has to write about a Hindi language show whose premise centres on an impending bomb blast and a Muslim man with kohled eyes waiting to blow up India, I wouldn’t have to worry about paying rent in Mumbai. With every passing day the number is only increasing. But even within the hackneyed setting, one can do things differently if one tries. With the first season of The Family Man (2019), that revolved around an intelligence officer whose family is in the dark about his profession, filmmakers Raj and DK showed how it's done by outlining the difference between nationalism and patriotism, and more crucially by peering into the corroding soul of the country. Shetty, who is making his digital debut with Indian Police Force, does not share the intent and the outing possesses neither the tools nor the language to make such nuanced commentary. The farthest the director goes in this direction is implying that not all Muslims are terrorists but never entertains the idea that a terrorist may not be Muslim. |
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Anyone But You: A Cloying & Cutesy Main-Character-Energy Romcom |
This is #CineFile, where our critic Rahul Desai goes beyond the obvious takes, to dissect movies and shows that are in the news. |
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| | Cast: Sydney Sweeney, Glen Powell |
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THE LATE William Shakespeare would not have been too pleased with the latest quasi-adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing: a Hollywood romcom called Anyone but You. The film — starring two impossibly good-looking leads who’ve generated the kind of gossip that doubles up as great publicity — is passable at best. It’s also basic at worst. (I know they’re the same thing, but that says more about the deterioration of this once-classic genre.) Mind you, I’m not just being a cranky old millennial who’s grown up in the golden era of romantic comedies like Pretty Woman, Notting Hill, When Harry Met Sally, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Love Actually or even 500 Days of Summer. I’m not even being that ancient guy sitting on a park bench and yelling: What the hell is wrong with the kids today? Anyone but You is a recycling plant of not just tropes but chemistry too. It’s the kind of movie that Instagram would produce to make us feel bad about our unaesthetic lives, looks, bodies, problems, jokes and joys. |
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Main Atal Hoon: A Sham Of A Biopic That's A Disservice To Vajpayee |
Vajpayee did not deserve this and, needless to say, neither did we. |
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| THIS YEAR started with hope. The second week of January witnessed the release of Abhishek Chaubey’s Killer Soup and Sriram Raghavan’s Merry Christmas. Both outings were inventive, fun, and reiterated the merit of the filmmakers helming them. But more than anything else, they offered relief at a time when political extremism has infiltrated Hindi cinema. One could watch them without holding one’s breath and worrying about the many different ways they are espousing propagandist politics. But by the third week and with the release of Ravi Jadhav’s Main Atal Hoon, a shamelessly agenda-driven film that exists to only needle and provoke, the reassurance has already begun to feel like an anomaly. Touted as a biopic on India’s former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Jadhav’s film is anything but that. Granted it focuses on Vajpayee but the gaze is perfunctory, an excuse really to outline a glossed over portrait of India pre and post Partition that villanises anyone and everyone who is not Vajpayee and from his party. The dishonesty shows in the way the film reduces the depiction of the enigmatic figure and his equally riveting life to Wikipedia entries. Jadhav’s film presents nothing about Vajpayee’s life that is already not known or is in the public domain. — ISHITA SENGUPTA |
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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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