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Afwaah (2023)
A document of troubled times
This is a masterpiece from a master filmmaker.
Superb acting and a true portrayal of the times India lives in. Go and watch. You won't regret! Afwaah is an indictment of politics that thrives on building divides amongst communities. While its blows aren't always stinging, the film chooses its targets and sides wisely, and it isn't afraid to go all-in on its hatred for forces that thrive in troubled waters. This film is about how a resourceful individual or group may spread a lie like wildfire on social media, exploiting the public's confirmation bias towards the underprivileged - religious minorities, women, anybody - until that deception is accepted as the truth. Afwaah is riveting cinema. Riveting and incredibly relevant.
Love Hostel (2022)
This is a wonderful film. Go watch!
Being an Indian with the majority on my side (it starts with an H), I really loved this movie. It depicts the truth as it is: one of the many evils of the Indian society. People who claim otherwise must be "you-know-what-kind-of-people". Wink wink. Avoid those "people" and watch this movie. Don't do the opposite. The acting is superb, the direction is top notch. We haven't seen anything as fearless and powerful as Love Hostel in a long, long time. Vikrant and Sanya's outstanding performances are complimented admirably by Bobby Deol. What a triumph for Shankar Raman who keeps getting better. As compared to Shanker Raman's 'Gurgaon', 'Love Hostel' has more immediacy in its execution, which makes its nonstop violence more impactful. It's a lawless, ruthless, endless minefield where uncertainty and bigotry go hand in hand and patriarchy is a foregone conclusion.
Sandeep Aur Pinky Faraar (2021)
A film about patriarchy and bending gender roles
So, Dibakar is perhaps the most clever storyteller in the current Indian cinema milieu. The film is not about a road trip or a story about how two people escape from a revengeful police force, etc. Etc. No, it's not about any of those that many so-called critics have sadly bet their reviews on. Dibakar is too good a filmmaker to show us such a naive narrative. It highlights the patriarchy, its evils that don't spare women of all ranks and colors - be a high-ranking police woman, a, educated modern girl, a classic housewife. It not only portrays the hierarchy, but shows how a patriarchy can bend traditional gender roles to its advantage. It's just too allegorical in nature to escape your attention if you are still thinking it's a movie about two individuals and how they bond while busy to flee the country!
Ajeeb Daastaans (2021)
A little gem
Such anthologies are the order of the day. Neatly woven, topically relevant and finely acted. The third story about the relational dynamics of an untouchable girl and a Brahmin girl uncovers the fiercely hypocritical, discriminatory, and oppressive Indian society that we support and live in. That story is one of kind and the other three also deserve adulation. Go watch.
Tandav (2021)
A great show
I am not interested in politics. I understand if people are disappointed if it wasn't right-wing people playing the good parts. But I'm SO glad I ignored 95% of the reviews on here. This is a good series. People are rating it so poorly because of politics (as I say, they may have a point but that's not *my* point).
I'm confident the majority of 1 star reviews are written by a few people with multiple accounts. It's a shame, as if I had listened to them - and avoided the series, I wouldn't have learned what happened. I am now (because of this series) more aware about the intermingling of politics and education and state's ability to interfere in student politics.
But anyway! I was gutted when this ended, and it made me feel plenty of emotions. I got angry, I got upset when I related to the student. leader so much, I liked the brazenness of the student leader, and I mourned what happened with their political ambitions.
If like me you're looking for a series that will make you feel and make you think - I'd definitely recommend Tandav.
Made in Bangladesh (2019)
A hidden gem
I was casually browsing through Amazon Prime and nonchalantly zeroed in on this film. From the first frame to the very last, I was hooked. The subject matter is super relevant. The acting of all the characters achieve the naturalism of a documentary. No frills, no make-up, no vulgarity, not apologetic. It's cruelly honest. It addresses a plethora of topics of utmost concern: workplace exploitation, gender bias, right to life and freedom, patriarchy, women empowerment. All of it without being preachy for a moment.
This is one of those films that never receives what it deserves. I hope it breaks away from that tyranny and achieves the bright star that it so deservingly need.
Go watch it. Don't miss it for your life.
Paava Kadhaigal (2020)
An honest and daring representation of an abominable society
I am a cinephile in the honest sense of the word. I have navigated every inch of ground of Indian film universe. I consume Indian cinema unabashedly. Without any inhibitions, without any pretense and without and apologies. However, I have hardly watched anything like Paava Kadhaigal. It is an honest representation of a society as abominable as India. As an Indian, I was angry, I was ashamed and I was immensely sad. Go watch it. Otherwise, not watching it like being born but having never experienced light.
Bhaag Beanie Bhaag (2020)
Great hilarious show!
So, let me straighten this out for the uninitiated. In this series, Ms. Bhaskar, the female central character, has enough character and moral courage and integrity to stand up against the Modi government whose prime aim is to create a pack of ship who should uncritically follow their master's order. As a result, a show that is pretty funny has been thrashed by the hair-brained followers of a dictator.
In essence, if you are love comedy and some female-centric shows, this is your mojo. BY contrast, if you are a person of infantile love for a dictator, watch the show, love it, but give it a low rating because in your otherwise pathetic life, the most excitement comes from devaluing a justifiably hilarious and female-centric show!
Laptop (2012)
It is not a remotely great film. It is a bad film.
Laptop, written and directed by Kaushik Ganguly, is an odd film. It is not a remotely great film. It is a bad film. It is thematically untenable, ethically ambiguous and condescending, technically ill conceived, and art-wise artsy. Period. There are four stories in the film that have been transplanted from various echelons of the modern day Bengali society and the stories are made to cross over with each other with the intervention of a stolen laptop, a symbol of emotional connectedness among characters and vacuity thereof. Lets start with the narrative. A laptop, a trove of confidential medical information belonged to the owner of an infertility clinic, is stolen by a taxi driver to pay for his wife's treatment at the clinic. The driver concocts a story and sells the laptop to a hotel manager, a languishing father who works in a dingy, musty low-scale hotel so that he can afford his engineer son a laptop. The boy discovers on the hard drive of the laptop a number of pictures of a good looking girl who is the daughter of the infertility clinic's owner. The boy chases the girl's car, traces the physical address of the girl, and is finally appointed as the computer teacher for the girl. They instantly develop a liking for each other.But the girl discover's the stolen laptop at the boy's house and dumps him (and her own bike for apparently no rhyme and reason). The laptop then travels to a visually challenged author (and his typist), as a debt-clearing-device by the manager, who resides in the house owned by the author. Subsequently, the machine ends in the hands of a divorced publisher, who is in search of the kid born as a result of his sperm donation. As the laptop traverses, it touches lives only to change them in some inexplicable ways. I have hardly known a "good" film that works with a bad script. The problem is that this film loses focus when it centers on lesser-written tales, which Ganguly does not make better, and on some tales which he actually makes worse. The director has little regard for character development. So we never know why a particular character engages in an immoral act. For example, we are not shown what causes the driver to engage in an unethical activity. Is he intrinsically immoral, unethical? There is zero information. The character of the driver comes and goes with the blink of an eye. Consider the character of visually challenged author, the most righteous and saintly figure in the film. Despite knowing the background tales about the laptop, he suffers from no moral scruple when accepting the laptop from his renter. The manager's character also displays the same nonchalant sentiment towards a laptop, which has been supposedly left behind by an amnesic passenger. The manager reveals to his family that the laptop was mistakenly left behind a forgetful passenger in the taxi. But being a typical middle-class family, they decide to ignore the episode and the film jumps forward. These characters come from various socio-economic classes and all of them exhibit the same apathetic behavior toward the stolen laptop; accept without any compunction. Ahem! So, in a nutshell, as if, the whole gamut human species have submitted to complete moral corruption. That is just to difficult to swallow even if one hails from the most corrupt nation from the earth. But, Ganguly marches on because the laptop is the driving force of the plot. There are also a few other minuses there. The film fails to devote enough screenspace to characters that occupy central roles and, erroneously focus attention to plot points or characters that disappear without no apparent rhyme and reason. For example, the character of the divorced publisher occupies the last 20-30 minutes of the film, but we have no clue to his psychological dilemmas, pains, and aspirations. As a result, we are never emotionally invested in the character. On the other hand, the director spends considerable amount of footage on the understated chemistry between the visually-challenged author and his typist, but the whole episode ends with no major dramatic culminations. The same frustration grips us with the story of the young boy and girl or the hotel manager. They end too abruptly. It seems that the director was trying to connect stories that are apparently disconnected and one story lends its way another by the way of a laptop. Ganguly fails miserably on this front as well as the transition from one to another is either too haste or too sporadic for a cohesive plot. In this connection, an exemplary film that pulls it of gracefully is Jafar Panahi's The Circle. Another minus is the film's lack of cohesiveness. Some scenes are juxtaposed with one another to evoke emotional responses, but their placement is too arbitrary in nature, which can be attributed to bad editing. The music is suitable for the mood of the film. The camera movements are slow, in keeping with the underlying sensibility of the film. But Ganguly must know that slow-moving camera and heart-wrenching music are not the only property of a good film. That way a film can be artsy, but no further it can progress. Actors have very little scope to perform. Bose is artificial or does not know what to do. Ganguly's character is too self-congratulatory, the actor playing the role of the wife of the tea estate couldn't touch the nerve of her character. She is the weakest link in the film. The climax is utterly ridiculous. Overall, this is a Laptop that performs its best when untouched. See my page: http://sdugar.blogspot.ca/
Bhooter Bhabishyat (2012)
A unique achievement in filmmaking
In recent times, Indian and in particular Bengali media (in the state of West Bengal, India) are unjustifiably generous when it comes to heaving accolades on the current generation of Bengali filmmakers. This surplus of praise is mostly indefensible as recent Bengali films are still imprisoned by their strange obsession with relationship centric dramas. Exploring relation-based dramas, however, is not the main problem. The problem lies in elsewhere. Most of these cinematic efforts can mostly be characterized by the following undesirable elements: characters that are outside the bounds of possibility, only scratching the surface of emotional layers without much regard for deep character analysis (a lesson in this regard would be to watch, for example, the highly acclaimed Iranian film A Separation by Asghar Farhadi), lack of sensible dialogs, strong desire to pose as an "intelligent" filmmaker who is up-to-date with the world cinema (read literally stealing from these films; an example would be the much-hyped Bengali film Autograph), choosing style over substance, under-appreciation for aural instruments of a film (Ritwik Ghatak was a pioneer for using sound brilliantly), sometimes unconvincing and archaic plots (when plots are convincing they are marred by some of the other factors mentioned here), and sheer inability to build up narratives that do not satisfy two important criteria of narrative cinema: credibility and coherence. Although, these films are technically much superior than their 1990s and last decade counterparts. Bhooter Bhabishyat avoids just about all of the above pitfalls.
The story is exceptionally imaginative and yet simple. A gang of eclectic ghosts (a cook, a Bengali music band member, a Zamindar aka landlord, a representative of the East India Company, a refugee from Bangladesh, a Bengali theater actress, a revolutionary from 70s' Calcutta, a Rickshaw puller, and a few others) need help as they are about to be evicted from their current home as a businessman is all geared up to make way for malls and multiplexes.In the backdrop of this, an aspiring director steps in the same old mansion (where these ghosts are housed) for checking the site of an about-to-be-made film. What follows is a burst of activities replete with spoofs, puns, songs, and dance. Although, beneath all these lies a satirical message about the greed of the modern society that spreads its gluttonous wings at the expense of rich sculptural heritage of cities. The first time director Dutta is a master storyteller. Humorous and sharp dialogs (although being an ad filmmaker himself, Dutta couldn't escape the usual knack of an ad-maker for inserting punchlines after every two lines of dialog), first-class camera-work, unforgiving editing, clever montage of sound pieces, keen eye for details, credible reproductions of a bygone age and society, idiosyncrasies of ghostly creatures - everything seem to jell for the film. Dutta heavily borrows from the master director Satyajit Ray's works and he is not at all reticent about this. In fact, when the aspiring filmmaker and the narrator of the ghosts' lives converse to build up the suspense, their performances strongly remind us of the interactions between the famous Bengali detective Feluda and his assistant Topshe. Delivery of some of the dialogs in the film that rhyme with each other is reminiscent of the lyrical exchanges from Heerak Rajar Deshe ( The Kingdom of Diamonds). In many other aspects, the film is replete with references from Ray's films. In fact, Dutta pays a grand tribute to Ray in this film. Overall, Bhooter Bhabishyat is a rare combination of ingenious plot idea, almost flawless execution, skillful exploitation of the medium as an art form, and an eye for commercial success - a combination that is visibly absent in most of the recent Bengali films.
Slumdog Millionaire (2008)
Again, who directed this Bollywood flick?
I was ecstatic, elated, on cloud nine after coming out of the theater. What a Bollywood flick I just finished watching! But then I found myself in a confused state. Why revered film critics across the globe have showered so much accolades on this Bollywoodish make. I must be missing something. And I don't.
The movie centers around tumultuous life of two boys, their journey from a Mumbai slum to two different worlds, dominated by corruption and adolescence like naiveté.
The movie has all the elements of a Bollywood masala flick that is ridiculed by foreign and Indian media on a regular basis because of its filmsy, melodramatic, and often childish like treatment of any and every subject. THIS MOVIE IS NO EXCEPTION.
Recall the following scenes from the movie:
Two brothers, one treads the path of eternal honesty while the other ventures into the world of immorality. That reminds me of Deewaar (1975). I bet Mr. Danny Boyle must have taken few lessons of Bollywood movie-making from likes of Subhas Ghai, David Dhawan, Manmohan Desai etc. Come on Admit it.
Then the love interest of the younger brother is found in Mumbai's red light areas? Reminds me of Sadak by Sanjay Dutta, among others. Damn it! It must be me. Danny simply imagined these stuff from his vast experience with Indian way of life and it has NOTHING to do with Bollywood masalas.
Then recall the death scene of the older brother. That's a typical Indian death scene. The last scene where the male and female leads meet each other, are we watching a romantic Hindi flick?
The script of the movie is filled with Mr. Boyle's faulty and nonsensical imaginations. Where the older kid gets the gun, suddenly? How these two most shabbily looking kids manage to check into an apparently five-star hotel? How come the older kid knows the address of the local mafia? There are many. What Mr. Boyle was thinking.
Then there is efficient selling of world famous Indian poverty filled with filth and pain, and agony and all other stereotypical things that go well with Western view of any "third world countries". Ultimately Mr. Boyle dishes out a palatable Bollywood flick.
If all these things were captured in celluloid by a NON-WHITE filmmaker, then western media would simply reject it straightaway. But this is not the case here. Its made by a WHITE filmmaker, for a WHITE audience who love those movies made on third world countries, which only reinforce their age-old ideas about India. I can bet that all the Bollywood directors are weeping in secret and thinking why can't I make such a terribly bad movie and garner all these international accolades. YOU CANT because you are not a white. As simple as that.
So Mr Boyle thanks for selling India to the western world, making a cliché non-sense melodramatic movie and hiding behind neo-realism film-making shell and at the end of the day just pretend (when you will be receiving some filthy award) that you are such a genius. And for western film critics, you may have some knowledge of good films, but you are ultimately a White person, enjoying deep in heart the poverty of a developing world. What a nonsense.
Taxi Driver (1976)
To summarize, it is ridiculous to say its a masterpiece, its NOT
Well, the title of this post says all that I want to say.
See some great movies made during Neorealist age. Well this is a problem with American movies. Some of these movies are great but then with so much hype and propaganda these movies are unnecessarily touted as the "epics" or "masterpieces" or anything humongous: larger than the frame. The problem is those people who write these things or say those things, they have hardly any understanding of world cinema- the whole spectrum of movies about "anti-establishment", about "loneliness" that this movie will falter on those grounds.
I am NOT saying that this is a bad movie, this is a pretty good movie, BUT see a lot others (which are non-American in origin) and then draw a conclusion.
Its everywhere in this country that if something a bit better and unusual comes out, people immediately claim it a master "in the world cinema".
Now, I know many of you will dismiss this as an anti-American sentiment, many will dismiss because I am not discussing why I think so, and I DO NOT care to answer because the onus is your part to UNDERSTAND why there are many excellent and even better movies that this movie tries to portray.
Kannathil Muthamittal (2002)
A pretty much awful movie, like the rest made by an over-hyped director.
Maniratnam, who in India, is often compared with prominent world film makers and is regarded a genius in film-making, has yet again proved that he can only make the frames look visually good, without offering much food for thought.Forget about pure cinematic pleasure that can be derived from cinema as a very old form of art.
While I would not like to claim and portray myself as someone who has seen all the beautiful movies made around the world, still any thoughtful and a bit educated film goer can identify that his films do not contain innovative ingenuous plots, does not contain lingering effects afterward and MOSTLY contain ridiculous ending and a LOT of melodrama, seen profusely in Indian movies.
Overall, Maniratnam has successfully confirmed my distaste for his films once again.
Sorry for those who on this board were claiming otherwise. My suggestion to you: WATCH SOME BEAUTIFUL CINEMAS MADE AROUND THE GLOBE.