Good Fortune: An Angelic John Wick Rescues A Flailing Master Of None
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Good Fortune is fun when Keanu Reeves turns earnestness and bad writing into an art form. But as a Barbie-styled comment on modern American society, it comes across as performative and dishonest, writes Rahul Desai.
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| | | Cast: Keanu Reeves, Seth Rogen, Aziz Ansari, Keke Palmer, Sandra Oh | | | | GOOD FORTUNE plays out a bit like a smart-alecky Aziz Ansari comedy sketch. A skit-like one-liner — what if a well-meaning but incompetent “budget angel” body-swaps a wealthy white guy and a miserable brown guy? — is pan-fried with a series of thematic keywords: gig economy, American dream, immigrant struggle, racial biases, capitalist greed. It’s a deadpan spoof that counts on looking like a deadpan spoof; even the sincerity is supposed to sound designed and clunky. It has the narrative scale of a gag, too. As a film, it doesn’t know where to go after the social gimmick wears off; it just fizzles into the sort of artificial resolution that, if I didn’t know any better, passes off as image-renovating and self-righteous tripe. The film is fun when Keanu Reeves turns earnestness and bad writing into an art form. But as a Barbie-styled comment on modern American society, it comes across as performative and dishonest. Look Ma, (no) Wings! Your pop culture fix awaits on OTTplay, for only Rs 149 per month. Grab this limited-time offer now! I like Ansari as much as the next brown apologist who accepts an ambivalent male celebrity after they turn sexual misconduct allegations into personality fodder and subconscious racial profiling, but Good Fortune might have been infinitely more enjoyable if it didn’t unfold like a boys’ club date where everyone has important thoughts to share. The filmmaking hides behind the modest sitcom-coded staging, while the plot tries to be clever about all the heavy things in the world. Sometimes it succeeds, but for at least half of its 98 minutes, the humanity of its messaging feels curated. The idea is too busy patting itself on the back to offer any deeper curiosity about the Trump-era America it’s set in. |
| | Bison Kaalamaadan: A Rousing Tale Of A Boy Who Runs From Strife Into Sport
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Mari Selvaraj stages Bison as a tale of rising above oppression, a peek into the human condition, the role of a family unit, and how everyone is made up of various shades from white to grey and black. Subha J Rao reviews.
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| | | Cast: Dhruv Vikram, Pasupathy, Rajisha Vijayan, Anupama Parameswaran | | | | I CAN'T REMEMBER the last time leaders of two opposing factions in a film spoke about the futility of their struggle and its relevance with more muddled honesty than in Mari Selvaraj’s Bison Kaalamadan. It helps that the leaders are played by Ameer (Pandiaraja) and Lal (Kandasamy), artists whose faces and voices convey honest anger and built-up fury, but also wander into areas filled with doubt. This makes them very non-leader-like and utterly human. This ability of Mari’s to question his own character is one of his defining traits. On the other end of the spectrum is Pasupathi, who plays Velusamy, a widower, who, in his words, has raised his children Kittan and Raji (a fabulous Dhruv Vikram and Rajisha Vijayan) hidden under his armpits to protect them from the strife and murders that abound around them. Pasupathi is Tamizh cinema’s gem who safeguards and nurtures his craft and emerges once in a while to gift us a performance we can remember for long. Velusamy knows anger, thinks he has learnt to control it, and struggles not to unleash it once the scourge of caste comes calling at his doorstep. There’s a familiarity with which he extracts hidden daggers and hides them on his person, but his face belies that past. ALSO READ | Mari Selvaraj: 'If you are waging a war using an art form, you need patience'
Teachers are an important part of Mari’s universe, and in Bison, we get the wonderfully written Santhanaraj (Aruvi Madhan), who is from a privileged caste, but thinks sports erases boundaries, and that one should strive to reach a place where no one can build fences. He, too, begins from a place of doubt, but belongs to that category of people who constantly work on themselves, seeing the world around them, and becomes Kittan’s biggest strength. The role of village schoolteachers has rarely been explored much in cinema, and that’s a rich subject filled with possibilities. |
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