indian popular cinema

[nrh]

super deluxe (thiagarajan kumararaja) immediate thoughts: wtf...?

haven't revisited the film since i saw it in the theater but...

Spoiler!

more than the genre jumping or the flashier elements what works really beautifully here for me is the density of the urban space, the feeling that all of these intersecting trajectories are mapped out in this same small space, with intricate background detail and repeated locations appearing again and again. and that goes through the colors (especially in the interior decoration, the painted walls of the streets), the raja music, the intricate sound design. in the moment, especially in a crowded theater, it's all kind of mesmerizing.

still feel more than a little uncertain about the film. in regards to casting a cis actor in a trans role, it's not really my place to say and the trans community in india has been more than vocal on the subject (to predictably mixed conclusions). i find the greater arc of the film's stories to be more disturbing - essentially several women who transgress social boundaries in matters of sex or sexuality, are subjected to abuse or suffering, and are rewarded at best with a restoration of some kind of normative social code. the way that pornography is used as code for social freedom here is more than a little indicative of some of the wider issues the movie has with sex and (women's) sexuality...

and i have to say the sheer amount the movie wants to focus on abuse, especially at the hands of the rapist police inspector, the sheer enjoyment it seems to have giving him awful things to do and say, is kind of unnerving. his death is poetically right in a way (shilpa's curse on his forehead leading to the falling television) but seems truly insufficient considering what's gone before.

so i don't know. mysskin and ramya (as preacher and his wife) are amazing, sethupathy is as great as ever no matter the politics of his casting, the kids are great. i thought fahadh gave one of his only bad performances and samantha is samantha but their whole story suffers from the most severe writing issues. i liked the alien?

definitely a film that i somewhat soured on in the days after seeing it...

[thoxans]

i know what you mean about all of that tbh. can't speak to the casting of the cis actor in the trans role, other than to say that i thought the actor did a great job, and felt that the character was the most three dimensional in the film. meanwhile, as you said, fahadh faasil's character is one of the most one dimensional (the bad cop is obvs the most one note, simply a thing rather than a person). faasil's an ass for most of the runtime of their particular story, and then his overly easy out is that he and his wife survive a traumatic experience, whereby she ends up experiencing a major surplus of the trauma. it only helps that their sequences are really well done in conveying comedy at first, and then actual suspense (even if their dire circumstances are a bit more than exploitative). also, have to agree about 'essentially several women who transgress social boundaries in matters of sex or sexuality, are subjected to abuse or suffering, and are rewarded at best with a restoration of some kind of normative social code.' there was many a time i got the sinking feeling that the exceptional craftsmanship belied what was in reality some rather juvenile (at best) or even (outright) wrongheaded (at worst) content. it's the fight club paradox. highbrow bullshit, basically. as one boxd review put it: 'this is the kind of film that would change my life at 14.' now that i'm not 14, i know there's much to dislike, and yet i'm still fooled into liking a lot about it. the ambition imo seems earnest, admirable even. i don't get the feeling the filmmakers were trying to fool their viewers into thinking that there's more than meets the eye. sure, there's a ton of spectacle (i wish my dreams were in these sorts of colors); and sure, there's a ton of nonsense; but it all seems like shooting for something special, and in that way, it is (even if it's really not). idk. i guess my tl;dr thoughts would still be wtf...? glad i watched it no matter what

[Evelyn Library P.I.]

Can't speak to the film itself, but as a trans person I can chime in on the general question of casting. While it's always a bad idea to cast a cis actor in a trans part, it's important to realize that there are two different forms of that, and one is worse than the other. In the case of casting a cis actor in the role of a trans woman character, you could cast a cis woman in the part or you could cast a cis man. In Super Deluxe's case they cast a cis man as a trans woman. This is so, so offensive and actively harmful to both cis people's understanding of transgender experience and to transgender people's self-esteem and quality of life. The problem isn't so much that Vijay Sethupathi is cis, the problem is that he's a man. Regardless of intention or dialogue, it produces implications, unmistakably expressed at the level of film form and extra-textual film promotion etc., that trans women are cis men merely play-acting the role of womanhood or, not much better, that trans women are men becoming women rather than women from birth remaining women. Casting a cis woman would be more affirming and appropriately challenging to cis audiences, though of course casting a trans woman as a trans woman (and trans men as trans men and non-binary people as non-binary people) would be far better still. Pay us to play us, baby! My life isn't a costume. All that said, I'm not Hijra and can't speak to that specific context. Wouldn't want to force my Canadian perspective and discourse on gender onto South Asian trans self-understanding. But whatever differences there might be from Canada to India, I think it's safe to say that there's no way that a man should ever be playing a trans woman.

[nrh]

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mDa42EkgO1A

[thoxans]

saaho (sujeeth) what a mess. begins with a brief but delirious backstory montage. then devolves into a pretty substandard cops vs. robbers cat and mouse game for the first half of the film. and it's pretty cringey during this whole section tbh. i can't take prabhas seriously, if he doesn't have a beard. shraddha kapoor's character is horribly under written. she's pretty much only there to serve as the love interest for prabhas, though she does occasionally bumble and futz about and screw everything up for the police officers. some twists and turns eventually pop up out of nowhere, livening things up a bit, even if they reek of being convenient contrivances. the plot gradually goes nonsensical, as if the filmmakers forgot what they were making a movie about. spectacular set pieces become the name of the game. then some more twists and turns. then the title card pops up after 1hr 30min. and finally it feels like we're off to the races. the story remains impenetrable drivel, but the set pieces ramp up to the point of saving what had been a fairly blah affair thus far. this really feels like two films, one entirely uninteresting (but only cuz it turns out to be pretty much all setup), and the other entirely mesmerizing. the ridiculousness factor goes through the roof, in a good way. a chase sequence features a motorcycle, semi trucks, a freakin excavator, and dudes with flying jet packs. at one point prabhas throws a parachute pack off a cliff, and then jumps off after it. he doesn't jump off the cliff with the parachute pack. no. he free dives after the parachute pack. and why? idk. just cuz. this movie's whole reason for existing is just cuz. and once it realizes that in the second half, it becomes hella entertaining. unfortunately, it takes an entire first half to muddle through before finally freeing itself from any expectation of narrative coherence. but once it does, 'it's showtime'

[rischka]

Anaarkali of Aarah -- great colors and female empowerment sex positivity and performance by lead actress swara bhaskar!

https://twitter.com/rbgscfz/status/1215 ... 45088?s=20

and remember kids: SMOKING KILLS



these ads are very effective. i felt guilty and i quit years ago

[arkheia]

Anaarkali of Aarah -- great colors and female empowerment sex positivity and performance by lead actress swara bhaskar!

https://twitter.com/rbgscfz/status/1215 ... 45088?s=20

^ watchlisted!

[thoxans]

twenty min into kucch to hai (anurag basu / anil v. kumar), and it's like gregg araki and john hughes had a baby who grew up to become a dir of '80s slasher flicks. feels like something only maybe arthur might find cool, but idk. i'll have to finish it, and see wtf happens, cuz it's def an odd duck...

[thoxans]

forty min in, and it's like gregg araki and john hughes had twins, one that grew up to become a dir of '80s slasher flicks, and the other that became indian jerry lewis

[nrh]

forty min in, and it's like gregg araki and john hughes had twins, one that grew up to become a dir of '80s slasher flicks, and the other that became indian jerry lewis

if i remember correctly basu and ekta kapoor (big deal producer of tv serials of questionable taste, and star's sister) had a giant falling out during shooting and he only directed part of it. which might explain some of the oddness of it.

[thoxans]

makes sense. that even further bolsters its b-movie cred. cuz watched from start to finish, it's like gregg araki and john hughes had twins, one that grew up watching nothing but giallo, i know what you did last summer, and the shining, ultimately becoming a dir of '80s slasher flicks, and the other that became indian jerry lewis, in a time and place where martin and lewis doesn't exist, and so jerry plays both the singing dancing dean martin straight guy role, as well as his usual comedic sidekick role. in short, it's an intensely bipolar film. pretty much a romcom of the boy-meets-girl-but-boy-loses-girl-so-boy-has-to-win-girl-back sort, with a shameless horror film crammed and smashed and forced inside. ffs the film has three diff endings because of this! (all three of which are glaringly obvs pretty early on in the story.) that being said, for much of the running time, it all seems pretty self-aware. the intense jump scare soundtrack becoming so jarring at times that it's equally effective at making you jump, as well as making you smile afterwards at how over-the-top it all is. the backstory to the horror aspects of the flick are this: creepster teacher is suspected of killing his wife, but the local school is kinda laissez faire about the whole thing, and the principal basically just tells the dude 'hey man it's cool we'll give you your job back but just please don't kill anyone anymore kthxbai.' creepster's response is to fuxkin death stare the principal, but it's all good. guy must be a really good teacher. idk. it's all dumb af, but kinda sorta fun, cuz you feel the filmmakers winking at you at least half the time. possible fav moment: girl escapes certain death from being trapped in a steam room where the temp has been turned up full blast, and her would be lover's immediate reaction is to take off his big thick leather jacket, and wrap it around the girl to comfort her. slow clap, bro. slow clap. the problem is that these sorts of lulz moments do not a movie make. it eventually grows stale. the wild swings from intense shocks and thrills (which are well done) to corny vapid young love (which isn't well done, including the horrible songs) never cohere. hot fuzz, this ain't. i think it'd be a blast for the right audience, a neat curio for the starved b-horror film fanatic, but can't say i'd rec it to most peeps. especially after y'all dismissed barfi!, even with my masterful review. grrr

[thoxans]

mandi (shyam benegal) wowowow! benegal, where have you been all my life? what a richly textured, multilayered, beautifully composed piece of work. benegal doesn't impose striking compositions, so much as he lets them happen, capturing them within his frame; the same way he deftly juggles the many storylines. characters flit in and out of focus, and yet everyone seems very clearly defined throughout. we're able to figure out these people, in even the smallest moments. for much of its runtime, it's a pic about people trapped in places, first the brothel, then the prison, then the crumbling outskirts. only in the end, once the protag has lost everything, is she free, out in the open world. while i know sally hates a good prostitute pic, this one transcends any typical tropes. highly recommended for one and all. can't wait to explore more benegal in the near future!

[nrh]

finally caught up with lijo jose pessary's jallikattu now that it's streaming on prime in the us. like his last film ee ma yau this is a kind of black comedy focusing on the social fissures of a small community thrown into relief by small event - there it was an unexpected death and a botched funeral, here it's a buffalo escaped from slaughter. but where that film was moody, burdened by never ending rain and mud, this one is kinetic, with the seemingly never ending movement of crowds of people. it's kind of a marvel just on technical grounds - the choreography of the crowds, the night photography, the bull itself (mostly realized with animatronics!). kind of interesting that western critics don't seem to have picked up on any of the meticulous social detail here, but also interesting that they liked it nonetheless?

sadly like ee ma yau this kind of falls apart for me in the last gestures - it's great to see any director going for something that bold but it really didn't work for me, and kind of amplifies other reservations i have about the film as a whole. still highly recommended.

[Umbugbene]

Has anyone here seen C/o Kancharapalem (Maha Venkatesh, 2018)? It gets almost unanimously glowing reviews on Letterboxd and IMDb... I mean I've never seen anything like the consistency of high ratings.

I just watched it (probably my first Indian film not in Hindi/Urdu or Bengali), and happy to confirm it's storytelling of a high order. I tentatively gave it 8/10, but my heart is leaning toward 9/10. We'll see how a second viewing goes down. Too bad I missed this for the decade poll.

[thoxans]

have not seen it, other than seeing it being added to netflix a few months back, and since wondered if it was worth a look, so based on your nod, i'll add it to my watchlist

[Umbugbene]

Very cool... looking forward to your report.

I'm stuck with Netflix for a few months, so I'll probably be watching a lot of Indian movies. Hope there's more of this caliber.

[nrh]

great to hear that kancharapalem is worth checking out - it's one of about a dozen recent movies from the regional film industries playing on netflix that i've been dying to catch up with - merku thodarchi malai, bulbul can sing, thithi, nathicharami, angamaly diaries, sairat, sudani from nigeria...sadly they got rid of some of their best stuff like deool and maheshinte prathikaram but still a few great films like eeda and visaranai hanging out.

but it's a good time to be on neftlix for indian films, since they just added a whole bunch of '70s/80s art film classics like basu chatterjee's rajnigandha, shyam benegal's trikal and mandi, sagar farhadi's bazaar, sai paranjape's katha, all in better quality than the ones floating around kg for years.

[Umbugbene]

Argh, just when I was getting my queue under control Thanks for the recs nrh!

[thoxans]

totes concur on mandi and visaranai! also, solely in an effort to screw your queue (ewww that sounds gross even merely typing it) even more, also highly rec anarkali of aarah, andhadhun, dev.d, dil se.., kabhi haan kabhi naa, om shanti om, petta, trimurti, and yuva. would also enjoy seeing another view on super deluxe just for the sake of discussion. and when all else fails, just type 'shah rukh khan' into the search function, and thank me later. finally, full disclosure: the only reason i know about any of these films is cuz of our boy nrh so all props deservedly go to him

[nrh]

watched avane srimannarayana, a kannada film by debut director sachin ravi. very clever (almost too clever) throwback masala, to a very specific '70s indian western genre b movie period, with rakshit shetty as an unscrupulous village cop caught in the dispute between teh two half-brother scions of a bandit clan looking for a lost treasure.

so you get bandit fortresses, a saloon bar in the desert presided over by the mysterious figure of cowboy krishna who employs four cowboy hat wearing motorcycle assassins who have an anonymous drop box hit system, a secret society of theater artists in hiding, mythological resonances and buried treasure in a fog shrouded hilltop forest. it's all a lot, and at over three hours maybe a little too long.

but there is a real joy in the making of it, some great set-pieces, a tendency to use bad cgi almost more like old school rear projection than anything else, and one wonderful music sequence that comes from a totally unexpected direction.

haven't seen thugs of hindostan but this sounds like the exact mix of elements they were trying to go for, and much much better than saaho...

[Umbugbene]

totes concur on mandi and visaranai! also, solely in an effort to screw your queue (ewww that sounds gross even merely typing it) even more, also highly rec anarkali of aarah, andhadhun, dev.d, dil se.., kabhi haan kabhi naa, om shanti om, petta, trimurti, and yuva. would also enjoy seeing another view on super deluxe just for the sake of discussion. and when all else fails, just type 'shah rukh khan' into the search function, and thank me later. finally, full disclosure: the only reason i know about any of these films is cuz of our boy nrh so all props deservedly go to him

You guys are burying me. Okay then, recommendations noted, and I'll be happy to thank you later. I have seen Dil Se and Om Shanti Om, and I love SRK... especially in Mohabbatein.

[nrh]

also think i've posted this on forum before but this is constantly updated list of all indian films on netflix (there is similar one for prime on same site) - https://accessbollywood.net/bollywood-m ... n-netflix/

don't trust her reviews or anything but it's a good resource.

[mesnalty]

I watched C/o Kancharapalem tonight, and I liked it, though not as much as the consensus. Without spoiling anything, the way the stories developed in the end did elevate it for me, so my assessment might go up after ruminating on it for a bit longer.

[nrh]

we watched kaithi last night, lokesh kanagaraj's follow up to his sleeper hit debut maanagaram and one of the bigger tamil films of last year.

this one is a full action film - no songs, no romance, no flashback - with a fairly elaborate premise. karthi, who is always great but is genuinely impressive in this, has gotten out of jail on parole and is on the way to meet his daughter for the first time. he gets picked up by the cops for being suspicious on the same night they make an 80 crore drug bust. so when an entire retirement party full of police officers is drugged he's handcuffed in the back of a police car, and the only one left to drive a lorry full of sleeping cops to a doctor while the gangs make two pronged attacks - one on the traveling lorry, one on the near empty police station where they think the drugs are being hidden.

so essentially we get two parallel action sequences - a small scale fury road set on winding rural backroads at night, and an assault on precinct 13 riff where brand new chubby officer napoleon and a few students picked up for drunk driving are all that's left to fend off the assault. that the movie doesn't really have anything on its mind other than getting the most exciting results out of its overworked premise. karthi really is mvp here - both totally convincing in the action sequences and projecting a world weariness that kind of reminds me of shintaro katsu in some of the late zatoichi films.

[nrh]

imtiaz ali's love aaj kal, 2020 edition - the 2009 version of love aaj kal was probably imtiaz last commercially approachable film before launching into a more improvisational, less structured series of films with rockstar, so it was kind of assumed that this newer "reboot" (it borrows the alternating contemporary/past love stories but nothing else) would be a strategic retreat of sorts after the total critical and commercial failure of his srk film jab harry met sejal.

but it's hardly a retreat, even if it is a return to more meticulously composed narrative structure. switching the past story from the golden '70s to the confusing, post economic liberalization '90s is telling; the fact that this story ends in heartbreak even more so. more than anything a feeling of confusion dominates everything - confusions about career, self, future, the various narratives you've tried to adjust your life to fit. nearly every character is given free rein to act erratically, abrasively, without censure. the ending is more tentative than celebratory, and imtiaz finally manages to merge his solipsism with his romanticism for the first time since jab we met - no matter the final fate of the couple they each have moved more fully into being themselves.

of course it's imtiaz so many of the usual irritations exist. the leads aren't exactly miscast but both seem slightly overmatched by the material (that side character randeep hooda is much more appealing than lead kartik aryan doesn't help). his grasp of social reality can feel tenuous enough that it's often hard to tell if he's being stylized or or merely blockheaded. the way he used to mix hindi and english slang in the earlier films now feels a little "hello fellow teenagers" at times. but all of this feels like small price for one of the only commercial auteur figures who still really throws himself, time and time again, into this genre, especially when the results have been this odd and engaged. not enjoying the films is one thing but the degree of critical dismissal has been really depressing...

[thoxans]

yeah, jab harry met sejal was a hard one for me to pin down. didn’t enjoy it near as much as jab we met, and it really felt like that’s what it was trying to recreate. the rambling sense of narrative was there, and this sense of real people inhabiting this fairytale-esque narrative was kinda sorta there, but it left me wanting. i didn’t care anywhere near as much for harry or sejal as i did for kareena kapoor’s character alone, and cuz of this the emotional payoffs were extremely underwhelming. i still really wanna see ali’s highway tho. seems like that one is supposed to be pretty good

[thoxans]

kaithi [...] a small scale fury road set on winding rural backroads at night, and an assault on precinct 13 riff where brand new chubby officer napoleon and a few students picked up for drunk driving are all that's left to fend off the assault

forgot to mention this one sounds amazing!

[nrh]

yeah, jab harry met sejal was a hard one for me to pin down...i still really wanna see ali’s highway tho. seems like that one is supposed to be pretty good

highway is very good. definitely more conventional than the 2 ranbir films, if only because ranbir i think really pushed imtiaz into much looser, less planned filmmaking, similar to what he did for basu in barfi! and jagga jasoos, but then highway also doesn't have the issues that rockstar (nargis fakhri's performance) and tamasha (the theater stuff) have. but i kind of can't help but think of those 3 as being all of one piece.

jab harry is just a mess - if the earlier films seem exploratory this one just seems formless, like you could pick whole scenes from one section and dump them in another and it wouldn't change the overall shape of the film at all. the punjab stuff is pale reflection of shahid's homecoming in jab we met, but even that was the interval point (he still had a long way to go!) rather than the climax. srk is pretty good but that didn't stop people from mocking srk for his declining career...

[nrh]

finally got to see abhishek chaubey's sonchiriya, one of the most anticipated movies of last year that was impossible to see for months because of how it got fucked over by its distributor and streaming partner. it's an exceptionally bleak dacoit western - that this is set in 1975, both the release year for sholay and the start of indira ghandi's emergency - about the gangs that famously hid in the ravines of the chambal river valley, fighting the police, themselves and the villagers to survive.

this is basically a haunted death march built out of one amazing set piece after another, making the most out of both the landscape and the deep cast of character actors. his earlier films (the great ishqiya and dedh ishqiya, the interesting but somewhat frustrating udta punjab) hinted at this but there is a real seething anger here that keeps this from ever feeling like a genre exercise or a period piece; the history here is barely history, after all...

[thoxans]

fan (maneesh sharma) the acteur, defined. this film thrives not on its direction (which is perfectly serviceable; nothing spectacular), but on the star power of srk. as a relatively new fan of the man, the myth, the legend that is srk, it's always curious to hear about his recent decline, the waning of the once bright shining superstar. i'm still playing catch up in so many ways that in flitting back and forth between his early and later films, his coming back to earth seems a lot less obvs to me. imo he's still the go-to for a really entertaining, if not always interesting, time at the movies. this flick though was both, entertaining and interesting. underneath the surface-level standard thriller fare is a fascinating rumination on celebrity, with srk playing dual roles (the titular fan, as well as a version of himself that might as well be himself). if srk's career is in fact declining, then the film is very reflective about just that, never shying away from acknowledging the bottoming out. sometimes, it feels like srk is looking in a mirror, trying to tell himself that he's still got it. can't imagine this film being made in the us, as there's nary a hollywood celeb that would be willing to put themselves out there like this. while the thriller aspects mostly work, it's on the reflexive level that the film really comes alive. a fascinating watch for any fan of the acteur. after all, the only thing better than srk is two srks