Phir Aayi Hasseen Dillruba: Taapsee's Film Suffers From Clumsy Storytelling |
This is #CriticalMargin, where Ishita Sengupta gets contemplative over new Hindi films and shows. |
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| Cast: Taapsee, Vikrant Massey |
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SOME FILMS make others look better, not just in terms of comparison but also in rekindling interest and rediscovering certain merits. In other words, watching one reflects the other’s potential. Phir Aayi Hasseen Dillruba is a good example of this. The Jayprad Desai outing is a sequel to the kitschy Haseen Dillruba, a film so polarising that the reactions overshadowed the reading. When the Taapsee Pannu and Vikrant Massey starrer dropped in 2021, the radicality of it (the aesthetic was borrowed from pulpy Hindi novels, as was the excessive plot design) came across as a tropey mess that shocked because it could. But with the second venture out, in what is clearly turning into a franchise, it becomes evident what worked the first time — and, by extension, what doesn’t this time. (Stream top-rated movies and shows across platforms and languages, using the OTTplay Premium Jhakaas pack, for just Rs 249/month.) Vinil Mathew’s Haseen Dillruba was a strange beast of a film that shapeshifted as it unfolded. It started off as an oddball template-driven small-town film about the misadventures of a saucy, Delhi-bred woman, Rani Kashyap (Pannu) who comes to the quaint Jwalapur after marriage, only to find her husband Rishu (Massey) to be too timid for her taste. Midway, it morphed into a thriller with a crime of passion thrown in and Rani being pulled up as the suspect. She had an affair with Rishu’s cousin, Neel (Harshvardhan Rane) and her husband, it appears, is dead. But through it all — police procedural, shifting timelines, outlandish revenge subplots — Haseen Dillruba culminated as a swooning romance that committed to its worldbuilding with abandon and fielded our scepticism with uncurbed conviction. Our belief in the twisted love story hinged on our willingness to believe in the irrationality of love. Could someone amputate their arm, like Rishu did for Rani, as a damning proof of love? If one believes so. |
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It Ends With Us: Blake Lively Anchors A Deceptively Powerful Drama |
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: Blake Lively, Jenny Slate |
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HER NAME IS Lily Bloom and she dreams of owning a flower shop. She falls for a hunky neurosurgeon, Ryle, who looks like he’s stumbled in from the set of 365 Days. He’s perpetually a heartbeat away from growling: “hey babygirl”. What’s more, their meet cute unfolds on the terrace of a skyscraper. (G)room with a view. They make for a charming couple. The world is at their feet — until her Atlas shrugs. Lily’s childhood sweetheart, a restaurant owner named Atlas, re-enters her life. The impossibly good-looking love story becomes an impossibly good-looking love triangle. Lily is torn between her past and her present; between the charismatic commitment-phobe and brooding green flag. For those (like myself) who are unfamiliar with Colleen Hover’s madly popular novel that this film is based on, everything about the story points to a corny Hallmark-style, sepia-tinged romcom. Even the whispery title: It Ends with Us. Of course it does. You can almost smell the lens flare, country hats, flossy flashbacks and magic-light-strewn shots. Even Hasan Minhaj plays the best friend’s beta-male hubby. The unserious publicity drive — which also includes leading lady Blake Lively’s husband Ryan Reynolds and bff Hugh Jackman dead-pooling their way into interviews — further supplies this notion. As does Lively’s performance (I’m resisting the temptation of a “Blake is lively” pun), which, for much of film’s 132-minute runtime, is steeped in the traditions of lightweight entertainment: a quick wit, a quirky wardrobe, a 35mm smile, a sweet-and-sour bantery vibe. |
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Three Browser Games To Enliven Even The Dullest Of Weekends |
It's time to grab some hydration, open a new tab, and put your thinking caps on! Harsh Pareek writes. |
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THIS WEEK — for no particular reasons than ¯_(ツ)_/¯ — we bring you not one, but three games to make your day more bearable. More specifically, three games that you can play — for free, no less — from the comfort of your browser, and moreover (perhaps even more importantly), finish in a single sitting (although, no shame in taking your time). We're talking witches, ghosts, emperors, spiders, cats, dragons, spooky times, happy times, sad times, the whole nine yards. So, time to grab some hydration, open a new tab, and put your thinking caps on. |
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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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