The Ba***ds Of Bollywood Is Both Satire & Sobering Exposition On Stardom |
Aryan Khan’s debut work, imbued with a zany visual language and skillfully orchestrated action sequences, is more than its shiny outer shell, writes Ishita Sengupta.
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| | | Cast: Bobby Deol, Lakshya, Raghav Juyal, Sahher Bambba, Anyaa Singh | | | | BOLLYWOOD IS MANY THINGS. The ugly, sweeping, mimicked moniker is an industry and a genre. It is a person and a personhood, a lifestyle and a livelihood. Over the years, multiple films have attempted taming the beast and dissecting, in varied ways, the mechanics of the space. If Farah Khan depicted an origin story of sorts in Om Shanti Om (2007) then Zoya Akhtar offered a more intimate portrayal of the industry through the lens of outsiders. Aryan Khan’s directorial, The Ba***ds of Bollywood lies somewhere in between. The seven-episode series has the campiness of Khan’s film and the conviction of Akhtar’s debut, culminating eventually as a show that deftly straddles emphasis with frivolity. Your pop culture fix awaits on OTTplay, for only Rs 149 per month. Grab this limited-time offer now! The premise is all too familiar — sparking more assumption than curiosity. An outsider from Delhi, Aasmaan Singh (Lakshya) is primed to be the next big thing in Bollywood. His film Revolver is a hit. The success has led to brand deals and a three-film offer from the producer who launched him, Freddy Sodawallah (the smirkiest Manish Chaudhari has been). While his high-strung manager Sanya (Anya Singh) cautions against it, Aasmaan commits to the deal and puts a prospective romantic film with Karan Johar in jeopardy. When the legal hurdle clears (Freddy, initially, agrees), another problem crops up. Ajay Talwar (Bobby Deol), the ageing and reigning superstar, is reluctant for his daughter, Karishma (Sahher Bambba) to debut with an outsider. Unknown to the rest, he plans to sabotage Aasmaan’s casting. |
| | Nishaanchi: Anurag Kashyap Calling Anurag Kashyap
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In Nishaanchi, the filmmaker is caught between the expectations of him and his projection of self, and this constant straddling results in a piece of work that has Kashyap imitating Kashyap. |
| | | Cast: Aaishvary Thackeray, Monica Panwar, Vedika Pinto | | | | IN ANURAG KASHYAP'S Nishaanchi, one of the lead characters derives his personality from the movies. Although named Babloo, he calls himself Tony Montana, the infamous mafia leader from Scarface (he even inflicts a scar on his face like the character from Brian De Palma’s 1983 film). When primed to kiss the girl he loves, he sticks his tongue out and borrows his action from Dharmesh Darshan’s Raja Hindustani (1996), where the leads passionately kissed under a tree. And when fighting for love, he likens his rebellion against a father-like figure to Mughal-E-Azam (1960). The film follows suit. The filmmaker’s new work, closely following on the heels of Bandar, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival this month, pulsates with love for cinema. An entire song is stitched with the titles of Hindi films — ranging from Dostana to Baghban — but that is embellishment. The writerly bones, too, are drawn from celluloid archetypes. It is all too familiar: a widowed mother and her two sons fated to war against each other. Yash Chopra’s Deewaar (1975) is an obvious source, but Kashyap even draws on his own filmography. Designed as a generational revenge drama and made in two parts, Nishaanchi is crafted in the same mould as Gangs of Wasseypur (2012), Kashyap’s culture-defining film whose fame persists through unending memes. But a little over a decade later, the cast is broken. He is no longer the same filmmaker; he is also a lesser filmmaker. As a result, his homages play out like empty reiterations, and his self-referencing is like a callback to a lost time. — I.S. |
| | Jolly LLB 3: Forced (Comedy Of) Errors
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Jolly LLB 3 suffers from confused direction, an overemphasis on its star power, and writing that is both manipulative and complacent. Swetha Ramakrishnan reviews. |
| | | Cast: Akshay Kumar, Arshad Warsi, Saurabh Shukla | | | | THERE'S A SCENE in the third act of Jolly LLB 3 where a widow, Janki Solanki (Seema Biswas) and a lawyer, Jolly Mishra (Akshay Kumar), are weeping in the waiting room of a hospital. They’ve lost many of their village brothers in a pro-farmer protest against illegal land-grabbing by evil real-estate developers, the Khaitan group. The scene is being mounted as extremely emotional, you know, melancholic background score and all. It’s a classic third-act trope in a story that focuses on the David vs Goliath theme. The immediate next scene focuses on Judge Sunder Lal Tripathi (Saurabh Shukla) and his extracurricular activities. He’s newly into fitness, having lost a few kilos after a health scare (those of us who’ve been following the Jolly LLB series carefully would know this reference) and is now dating a cute police inspector, Chanchal Chautala (Shilpa Shukla). In the scene, he calls her up while cameras are being fixed in his court for a live recording of his next proceeding, and informs her to watch him online. The scene is quirky, almost comedic. WATCH | Jolly LLB and Jolly LLB 2 on JioHotstar, now available with your OTTplay subscription. There is no segue between the two scenes, no narrative thread connecting them that would make sense in the larger scheme of things. These scenes seem completely detached from one another, like they belong to two different films. This is the core issue in Jolly LLB 3: confused direction, overemphasis on the actors (who are all brilliant but can only take a weak story so far), and manipulative, almost complacent writing. |
| | Thandakaaranyam Is A Forest Of Missed Opportunities
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Despite a powerful premise and timely themes, the film is over-scored and underwritten. Moments never have room to breathe, resulting in a highlight reel that struggles to leave a lasting impact, writes Aditya Shrikrishna.
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| | | Cast: Kalaiyarasan, Dinesh, Shabeer Kallarakkal, Bala Saravanan | | | | IN ATHIYAN ATHIRAI'S sophomore film, Thandakaaranyam, the eponymous forests become a MacGuffin that is forever out of reach of the protagonists. It’s a story that’s ostensibly about the fault lines and simmering tensions between the state, comprising a nexus of the police, paramilitary forces that collude with politicians and conglomerates, and the tribal population that is given the unqualified title of Naxalites. The forests remain in the margins in Athirai’s film (his Irandam Ulagaporin Kadaisi Gundu remains one of the best debuts in Tamil cinema of the last decade); they are not landscapes for conspiracy, separatist forces or ambushes — it comes across as a conscious decision. The forest is more life and livelihood, one that is as one with the self as skin. But the forest security offices and the training camps, the locations where injustices truly roost, are the places of interest. We begin at the ISGS training camp, a paramilitary force expressly founded to tackle the threat of Naxalites in the Dandakaranya forest states — Madhya Pradesh, Odisha, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Maharashtra. Somewhere near Ranchi, Murugan (Kalaiyarasan) and Rupesh (Bala Saravanan), two young men from Tamil Nadu, begin their training in an area that creates geographical and linguistic barriers for them. But that’s only the tip of the iceberg. While the training regimen is strict and brutal, they are bullied and assaulted in various ways by their Hindi-speaking peers, headed by Amitabh (Shabeer Kallarakkal). Athirai’s script gradually peels back the layers in this story. Murugan’s immediate past in his village in northwest Tamil Nadu, his soft and naïve nature contrasted with the fiery ways of his elder brother Sadaiyan (VR Dinesh), tells us why he is at the camp, far away from his loved ones. |
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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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