Mufasa, Yo Yo Honey Singh: Famous

Mufasa: The Lion King Is A Disney-Sized Waste Of Director Barry Jenkins

I’m not sure what happened during the four years of making Mufasa, but I don’t see the point of putting so much work, passion, sweat, and life into something that’s already been done before, Rahul Desai writes.

Dir: Barry Jenkins

Cast: Shah Rukh Khan, Aryan Khan, AbRam Khan, Makarand Deshpande

Playing in: Theatres

WHILE WATCHING MUFASA: THE LION KING, all I could think about was this: 4 precious years of Barry Jenkins’ career were spent in front of Disney green screens and sound stages to not even create something madly original? Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against effects-driven or photo-realistically animated movies; visionaries like Peter Jackson and James Cameron have redefined the relationship between technology and storytelling over the years. But Disney? Another Lion King film? My viewing experience was laced with the frustration of realising that yet another Hollywood studio franchise was doing wasteful Hollywood things.

That’s the problem with Mufasa, though. You can tell that Jenkins set out to exit his ‘comfort zone’ (which most directors can only dream of being in) and reinvent an old medium. You can tell that he might have wanted to do something different. It’s not easy being an important filmmaker these days; there’s always the pressure to be culturally responsible and carry the weight of Black storytelling. The pressure can swing between privilege and burden. So you can’t really fault Jenkins for needing to mix things up a little — and the Lion King legend is replete with racial metaphors, inclusion messages and marginalisation fables. But the result is a movie painfully generic and devoid of authorial stamp. I’m not sure what happened in the 4 years, but I don’t see the point of putting in so much work, passion, sweat and life into something that's already been done before. It raises a question we all need to ask ourselves more in this deluge of remakes, reboots, franchises and sequels: Have we simply run out of fiction?

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Yo Yo Honey Singh: Famous Is A Gratuitous Documentary On The Controversial Pop Star

If the documentary was a showreel, the maker should have been embarrassed to show it, but we are witnessing a major streamer and Academy Award recipient producer like Guneet Monga backing it, reviews Ishita Sengupta.

Dir: Mozez Singh

Cast: Yo Yo Honey Singh

Stream on: Netflix

FEW COMBINATIONS are as bad as Indian documentaries and Netflix. In the last couple of years, the streaming giant has routinely commissioned a host of template-driven non-fiction that include the aesthetics of reality TV and unravel with the purpose of milking tropes while fanning nostalgia. The Romantics outlined the legacy of Yash Chopra did it, Modern Masters: SS Rajamouli hyped up the myth of the filmmaker, and waiting in the curtains is The Roshans on the Roshan family. Technically, Yo Yo Honey Singh: Famous, on the rise and fall and the rise of the pop star, is built with the same brick but the ambition is so stunted that even in unremarkable company, the Mozez Singh film manages to reach for the floor.

The signs are all there. The title — Yo Yo Honey Singh: Famous — reads like a sentence one forgot to finish, audio clips from news channels, echoing the time when the singer was undergoing trouble in his life, are dubbed to a silly effect, and crucial moments like a fan breaking down on seeing Singh on the road, which if untampered could have been the centrepiece, are staged. If the documentary was a showreel, the maker should have been embarrassed to show it, but we are witnessing a major streamer and Academy Award recipient producer like Guneet Monga backing it.

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