Member Reviews

The 1919 Jallianwala Bagh massacre remains a pivotal event in India’s fight for freedom. The deadly killings of hundreds of Indian civilians during the British Raj have been covered several times in cinema. SonyLIV’s new limited series looks at the painful historical event through the eyes of a young lawyer who is part of the Hunter Commission, which aims to find out what happened that day in April 1919. Led by a very able Taaruk Raina as the London return lawyer, The Waking of a Nation is less a historical recreation of what happened but rather an examination of the events that led up the massacre.

Picture This, led by Simone Ashley, is a remake of the Australian rom-com Five Blind Dates from star Shuang Hu. Relocated to London, director Prarthana Mohan’s film takes the same elements but places it within a dysfunctional but loving British Asian family. Amidst wedding planning, blind dating, and reconnecting with an old love, Ashley’s Pia finds herself again in this funny and enjoyable romantic comedy. The Amazon Prime Video feature is fast-paced and colourful, with plenty of laugh-out-loud moments. Ashley is Pia Jaswani, a talented photographer who owns her own photography studio, The Ninth Mandala, and runs it with her best friend Jay (Luke Fetherston). Her younger sister Sonal (Anoushka Chadha) announces she’s getting married with a month-long series of events. Their mother Laxmi (Sindhu Vee) calls an astrologer (Kulwinder Dhir) to check the groom and bride’s janampatris (birthcharts), when he suddenly predicts Pia will meet her soulmate after going on five dates. Her meddling family gets to work with unsuitable suitors, while her first love Charlie (Hero Fiennes Tiffin) walks back in her life.

Many a time in Sumanth Bhat’s Mithya, conditioned by today’s happenings and a generally unsafe world, the stomach knots up with uncertainty, wondering what would befall a child that seems to trust adults. You heave a sigh of relief, only to realise that the child can still be injured through other means — what he hears and how he’s treated — especially when he’s too young to remember it all, but also too old to forgetfully. Snatches of these conversations linger and play on in his head like scabs being yanked off.

Gajraj Rao can act in his sleep. Quite literally. An agreeably slapstick moment in the new Prime Video comedy series Dupahiya finds Rao’s character, a kindly but superstitious school principal, snoring away on a cot, making sweet music with those silly, rumbling, guttural sounds. Rao has the training of theatre, of engaging a crowd with the bare tools of physicality and behaviour, and is so warm and winsome a comedian that we tend to forget his nastier roles (he played the menacing, mysterious caller in 2008’s Aamir). Perhaps Dupahiya could have harnessed Rao’s lurking nastiness to lend itself some zing. Built around a stolen motorcycle in a village, this is a ‘Panchayat’ lite, a sweet, soporific series that passes the time, exceedingly flaky and forgettable. Director Sonam Nair, who made the charmingly zany short film Khujli once upon a time, is decidedly out of her depth in the rural setting. The writing (by Chirag Garg and Avinash Dwivedi) is vacant and amateurish, the texture crumbly and second-hand. The oddball cast exhausts its whimsy in the first three episodes; indulged for six more, they verge on annoying.

सोनी लिव पर आई नौ एपिसोड की इस वेब-सीरिज़ के पांचवें एपिसोड के अंत में जब नायक ऋषभ नायिक सुरभि से कहता है-‘मुझ से शादी कर लो प्लीज़’ तो उसकी आंखें नम होती हैं। यह सुनते हुए सुरभि की भी आंखें नम होती हैं। इस सीन को यहीं पॉज़ कर दीजिएगा और गौर कीजिएगा कि एक हल्की-सी नमी आपकी आंखों में भी होगी। अब याद कीजिएगा कि आपकी आंखें इससे पहले के एपिसोड्स में भी कुछ जगह पनियाई होंगी और ध्यान रखिएगा, अभी आगे भी आपकी आंखों में कई बार नमी आएगी। बल्कि कुछ एक बार तो यह नमी झरने का रूप भी लेना चाहेगी। जी हां, यह इस कहानी की ताकत है, उस सिनेमा की ताकत है जो ऐसी कहानी को आपके सामने इस तरह से लाता है कि आप, आप नहीं रहते बल्कि इस कहानी के किरदार हो जाते हैं, कभी मुंबई, कभी उज्जैन तो कभी रतलाम हो जाते हैं।

The first time we meet Bob Dylan (Timothee Chalamet) in A Complete Unknown, he’s uncomplainingly laying in the back of a wagon amongst a pile of luggage. He’s just hitched a ride to New York City to see his hero, folk musician Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy), who has been hospitalised after being diagnosed with Huntington’s disease. Dylan overhears an impassioned discussion trying to determine if Guthrie is a folk or a country musician. “There’s no need to box him,” one of them says. It’s 1961 and a particularly tense period in America, as the House of Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) is summoning people for their alleged communist ties. The celebrities of Hollywood are understandably first in line, just like the musicians of the time like Pete Seeger (Edward Norton), who was critical of the American government. Social justice is becoming a street-side topic among many, as America is sinking deeper into the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights movement is picking up steam. Two years later, a president will be assassinated during a motorcade, fuelling the paranoia of the public and future governments alike.

The first Daredevil series was launched nearly a decade ago on Netflix and lasted for three seasons. Much has changed in the Daredevil universe, and we’ve seen Matt Murdock, aka Daredevil, pop up in the MCU to interact with other characters. However, it is great to see him back in his own show, Daredevil: Born Again, tackling new cases and standing up to Kingpin, aka Wilson Fisk, again. The actors who play these characters step right back into it as the nine-episode series sets up a new collision course for Daredevil and Kingpin. The relative peace of the law firm Nelson Page and Murdock is shattered by a tragic event in the premiere, which spurs Matt (Charlie Cox) to retire his Daredevil persona for a bit. Meanwhile, Wilson Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio) returns after an assassination attempt with a renewed sense of responsibility and decides to run for mayor of New York City. A more sober Matt is focused on his law firm, while Fisk wants to be the people’s politician who wants to rid the city of all its vigilantes. The former rivals have their radars set on high again as events keep pulling them back in each other’s orbit.

Shabana Azmi is the fiery queenpin of a female outfit. They ply a disreputable trade. Her underlings feel the heat of her glare. She suffers no fools. I’m talking, of course, about a film called Mandi, directed by the late, great Shyam Benegal and released in 1983. Its coolness remains unsurpassed, 42 years on. Dabba Cartel, a new Netflix crime series with Azmi again at the helm, tries its best to be cool. Co-created by Shibani Akhtar, the show has a novel core: a home chef’s dabba (tiffin) delivery business spirals into a perilous drug operation. The pin-balling narrative is tugged along over seven episodes. The characters are stock, but, coming at you in numbers, they keep up a busy rhythm, like players on a revolving stage. It has the mark of an Excel production: ample efficiency, not a lot of excellence.

Reviewing a film often involves stating the obvious: an interesting or amusing idea does not always translate into an engaging cinematic experience. Yet, after watching director Trinadha Rao Nakkina’s Telugu comedy Mazaka, written by Prasanna Kumar Bezawada, it feels necessary to reiterate this point. The writer-director duo take a premise with potential for outrageous humour but dilute it with predictable tropes, making the film tedious. The saving grace is the performances of Sundeep Kishan, Rao Ramesh, and Ritu Varma, though even they can only do so much to redeem the narrative. The film opens with a morning walker discovering a trail of red leading to two men washed up on Visakhapatnam beach. Alarmed, he alerts the police, only for the inspector (Ajay) to find that the men — Krishna (Sundeep Kishan) and his father Ramana (Rao Ramesh) — are not injured but simply hungover. The red stain, in fact, comes from a packet of avakaya (mango pickle) in their shirt pockets. The inspector, who is struggling with writer’s block while working on a novel, takes an interest in their story. The absurdity of the situation sets the tone for mindless fun and signals to the audience not to take anything too seriously — or ask too many questions.

In a short epilogue, The Brutalist finally shows us László Toth’s buildings. Brady Corbet’s film presents as a given that Toth is a genius architect of the Bauhaus school, but we are only shown one of his creations—a library—in full right up till the final 10 minutes. The format in which they’re presented is strange: a showreel for a biennale that looks like it’s shot on cheap video, with cheesy transitions. A film with startling pristine images spends its last moments looking like DTV. It’s a strange end to the film – and that’s without even getting into the whole Israel of it all. The Brutalist hits you several times with shots of roads and rail tracks zipping by, as seen from the front of a car or train. If the intention is to have the viewer recall the opening of Lawrence of Arabia, it worked on me. Corbet’s film has that David Lean sprawl, certainly in terms of runtime (202 minutes), but also in the ambition and density of its storytelling.