Uncategorized – Page 7 – gopakumarpurushothaman

Theevandi : Far From The Madding Crowd.

That there was something endearing about the visuals of Theevandi was evident right from the time the first song streamed it’s way into the hearts of Malayalis across the globe. If you were away from Kerala, the song made you want to hop on the next ride home. It presented before us a place that we wanted to go back to, away from the maddening swipes left, right, up and down our lives are. A place you were not quite sure if it existed for real anymore but desperately wanted to believe it did. Of late more than one film maker has used this as a tool to rope in the audience in the southern most tip of the country who feeds on anything nostalgic with fervor. It started with Maheshinte Prathikaram if I’m not wrong. Felt its tugs again when the song of Thondimuthalum Driksakshiyum debuted and then to some extent in Godha. In Theevandi director Fellini TP and writer Vini Viswa Lal have done their best to ensure that this element of nostalgia flows unhindered throughout the movie.

Theevandi chronicles the lives in a rustic smalltown and the characters are a cross section of the people we would find in a place like that in any part of Kerala. The film focuses on the problems faced by a chain smoking slacker whose habits ultimately end up having even political ramifications in the sleepy laidback countryside where the stroy unfolds. Opening to an incident which lays a sort of mystical foundation for the significance of smoking in the life of the character played by Tovino, the movie is part family drama,part love story and part political satire of sorts. There’s no magical realism here, in fact Mario Vargas Llosa whose book is seen to be held by a character in a passing scene was never exactly an exponent of the literary style though it could be an indicator to the inclinatons of the individuals at the helm. The film takes it’s sweet time to tell the story and there are more than a few laughs once the film gets going. Every actor has delivered in perfectly cast roles. Tovino, Suraaj and Surabhi prove their mettle again. Samyukhta Menon has made a decent breakthrough though it remains to be seen if she is going to stick around or move to the more lucrative industries next door. Most notably Sudheesh has finally shed the tag of the eternal boy next door of Malayalam Cinema that he held close for almost three decades here and makes a mark too.

When it comes to humor in Malayalam Cinema, the bar was set more than a bit high by the likes of Sreenivasan, Sathyan Anthikad, Siddique-Lal and Priyadharshan. In fact these stalwarts themselves have never come close to the standards they set from the mid 80’s to the late 90’s in their more recent works. So it’s hardly surprising if the new crop of filmmakers and actors have fallen short often in their attempts to make Malayalis laugh their hearts out. Sequels to the most loved classics were attempted by desperate wannabes and the results are unforgiveable, at least in my book. Theevandi may not be perfect but it is indeed a functional homage to the golden era of humor. Tovino, who has won hearts with compelling and diverse performances is on a roll with movies like Mayanadhi, Maradona and now Theevandi striking a chord with the audience.

Stree : Raj & DK Gets It Right Again, So Does Rajkumar Rao.

If you have followed the work of writer-director duo Raj and DK in Bollywood in the recent past you obviously do not need to look for more reasons to spend your hard earned money on their latest offering, Stree. They have stuck to just production and writing this time around but their brand of humor and quirky filmmaking is more than intact here. Unlike most Indian filmmakers who try to emulate Hollywood genre films the duo have always tried to put a delicious Bollywood spin to the most western of themes. They did it to the zombie genre with Go Gone Goa, gave us the slick spy action-comedy A Gentleman and now they have decided to give horror a most desi of twists. In Stree they have ventured into Anurag Kashyap territory, the North Indian hinterland, only gleefully.

Stree manages to make you laugh and scare you in equal measures successfully and that is no mean task, in fact its the most difficult thing to do cinematically. The movie is based on an urban legend, a ridiculously true one as the makers proclaim in writing on screen early on. Lending his creative energy in abundance to the brilliant writing is Raj Kumar Rao who has literally stretched every acting muscle in his body to the limit. His performance in the climactic showdown with the titular demon is worthy of an Oscar I’d say. Giving him ample support are Shradha Kapoor, Aparshakthi Khurrana,Pankaj Tripathi and Abhishek Banjerjee. Atul Shrivastava who plays father to Rajkumar’s character makes his mark too. Stree is one of those movies where you the viewer, at some point stops being just a viewer and becomes a part of the events that unfold on the screen. You are not watching a movie anymore, you are in fact hanging out with the characters and you love it so much so that you end up not wanting the movie to end.

Amar Kaushik has graduated from assistant to independent director with flying colors. Raj and DK have helped him deliver a slick yet intelligent debut film here. Strewn liberally across the are hilariously bold digs at the political situation in the country. They’re so subtle that you might actually miss it if you’re not listening intently. Some you might miss because it’s almost hidden in plain sight. One such joke that runs throughout movie is about motorcycles that run out of petrol constantly because people just can’t afford to fill up their tanks like they used to do. There’s one about how some people think peacocks reproduce. Another deadpan line asks you not to be a blind believer. That brings me to the fact that seeing and hearing is believing and believe me this is one movie which proves that despite Netflix and it’s clones watching movies in a packed house where people laugh out loud at the same jokes and jumps at the same scares is an experience in its own. You end up taking sides when you are watching sports. Cinema on the other hand brings people together like no other form of entertainment. Stree is that kind of cinema.

Ghoul S01 | Netflix : Z meets The Exorcist In A Familiar Landscape.

Ghoul lured me in with it’s trailer. Hot on the heels of Sacred Games, here was an Indian Original that looked interesting and featured a prominent cast member from that other rage of the season Anurag Kashyap – Vikramaditya Motwane production too. Though the series speaks Hindi it is set in a more or less unnamed land – except for a brief historical reference by one of the characters- and looks nothing like anything that we have come across on Indian screens, the fact that Sacred Games had set the bars high notwithstanding. Adding to the intrigue off-screen is the presence of a non-Hindi speaking writer-director, Patrick Graham at the helm. Maybe that explains the kind of tone and mood that’s alien to shows and films from our part of the world. Ghoul is pitched as a superatural horror series and it is scary, but not because of the horror element.

Costa Gavras’s Z is as political a movie could get and The Exorcist set the mould in which every other horror movie since has been made. Ghoul has elements of both the classics and their genres in a delicious mix. It presents a dystopia which is not about a dusty, windy, rundown future or a world where machines have taken over, neither is it one where humans have moved to Mars, rather Ghoul leads us into a very real place where the government has taken control of lives and any voice of criticsim and dissent is in danger of being clamped down ferociously. Patrick Graham was researching torture in modern warfare when he hit up on the idea he claims. Now, that must give you an idea. Ghoul even reminded me of The Silence Of The Lambs not necessarily because it had a female officer walking down a dark corridor with prisoners in cells on either side. Radhika Apte seems to be doing at home what Priyanka Chopra is trying away. Manav Kaul transforms into an army officer who’s eons apart from other characters he has recently portrated with ease.One actor to watch out for.

Anurag Kashyap’s first two films never saw the daylight thanks to run-ins with the regulatory authorities, namely CBFC and it later turned into a regular excercise for almost all his productions. So when a giant like Netflix streamed its way onto Indian screens with the kind of creative liberties it bestowed upon talented individuals with whom they joined hands like Kashyap, who has been working the system from within for decades us as an audience were definitely the ones to benefit most. If Kashyap flexed his muscles with Sacred Games, he has gone for the sucker punch with Ghoul. It’s not the demon that’s the scariest in this miniseries, it’s the people in it and the system they represent that leaves you disturbed. If you thought Sacred Games was perfectly timed, Ghoul would leave Rahul Dravid drooling. The release eerily coincided with the crackdown on activists across the country . Kashyap and Co have almost done a Nostradamus I’d say.

The Equalizer 2 : The Equalizer With New Bad Guys.

Denzel Washington is a favorite. So when he took on the Russian Mafia with DIY tools at the local home improvement retailer in the first Equalizer movie, I enjoyed it. He remains a favorite and that’s the sole reason why I didn’t mind watching him do it all over again in The Equalizer 2. Having said that, I’m not too sure I’d look forward to a third Equalizer movie unless Antoine Fuqua comes up with maybe an Equalizer origin story, with Denzel Washington of course. You don’t go to a Denzel movie necessarily to watch him go all Jason Statham on his opponents, you already have Statham doing that. You just want to see him do another John Q, another Training Day, another Remember The Titans. There was even a movie where he chased a bad guy lying paralysed in a hospital bed. But I guess it’s that era cinematically where every actor either joins the MCU or finds a franchise of his own.

The Equalizer of 2014 banked on an element of surprise where you as a viewer was curious to see Denzel in an out and out action role which involved more physicality than what he displayed even in his frequent collaborations with Tony Scott. Here in the sequel Antoine Fuqua uses the same tropes as he did in the first. The only major difference being his change of career as an online ride for hire who does’nt hesitate to beat the hell out of his riders for a better rating. If McCall was helping a co-worker in the first, it’s the troubled neighbor kid who is in bad company that he helps out this time. He is still reading but not as much as he used to. There’s more of incoherent globetrotting vigilantism but, which could take a toll your reading habits, there. You expect each of these encounters to turn into the main narrative but they end up as minor amusements mostly. When McCall finally gets going it’s for the sake of his former colleague who was introduced in the first film. Pedro Pascal who made a name for himself in Game of Thrones and Narcos is a notable addition to the cast.The climax of the film is set in a coastal town hit by a hurricane which probably is supposed to hold a mirror to the truth that climate change is but it mostly served to remind me of Hurricane Heist.

Between The Magnificent Seven remake and Equalizer 2 Denzel Washington did two movies that are more “Denzel Washington” than the ones he has done in the recent past. Fences was directed by Denzel himself and was a success commercially and critically, Roman J. Israel Esq not so much. Movies like The Equalizer might be necessary to keep Denzel the star in the reckoning but as a viewer from the other side of the globe it’s his acting chops rather than his Karate chops that I’d pay my money for. Nevertheless the man doesn’t disappoint in any of his avatars.

The Meg : Statham vs Huge Shark .

When Jason Statham jumps off a boat after a friend who is being pulled into the depths of the ocean by a giant prehistoric shark, another character screams not in fear but in excitement, almost echoing the emotions of any average viewer out looking for some plain old fun on a lazy weekend at the local IMAX screen. Yes, when it’s about a giant shark you have to have a giant enough screen too. If it’s in 3D, all the more better. But this is no Jaws mind you, The Meg is more Deep Blue Sea than any other shark film from our collective memory as viewers. It’s exactly how a monster film would look like if AI was asked to make one, without the discriminatory algorithms of course. People are at risk of being eaten by the shark irrespective of barriers like gender and race. Still if you do have to watch it, do that at a cinema with the best screening facilities.

There’s absolutely nothing novel about the plot simply because with such film formats you as a maker either choose between jaw dropping CGI or a moving storyline and there are no prizes for guessing what’s on sale here or you could ask Marvel to make a shark movie. Rich investor, good scientist, reluctant hero, jump scares, the movie has it all and more. It’s basically Jurassic Park set in the sea only this shark isn’t cloned. Within the limitations of the genre, The Meg tries earnestly to deliver a fun 113 minutes for the audience and much banks on the broad shoulders of Statham and his on screen persona as the tough guy with a sense of humor.The makers have tried every trick in the monster movie handbook to keep the proceedings on screen interesting. They do get most of it right unless of course you’re at the movies with National Geographic or Science journals on your mind. Not much on screen time is wasted here. The shark doesn’t wait around much and is quick to attack and kill. Statham and his co stars too are quick with the acts of saving lives, the mandatory self sacrifices and the dumb moves which are integral to the genre.

Two of the last surviving action heroes of our times who aren’t part of the Marvel or DC Universes , Statham and Dwayne Johnson aka The Rock have had curiously similar cinematic turns recently I’d say. Rock recently took on a giant Gorilla ,a giant crocodile and a giant wolf in Rampage. Then he saved his family from a fire in a Hong Kong skyscraper in the eponymous film. Here Statham battles a giant shark to save his Chinese friends and a whole crowded Chinese beach towards the end. Trump wouldn’t be too pleased I think but then he isn’t the one funding the films. Or he could simply ask Marvel to take a pause and let the likes of Rock and Statham to do what they do best, save the day that is, but exclusively in the USA.

Vishwaroopam 2 : A Legend, A Career Switch and Some Leftover Footage.

Kamal Hassan went silent with Pushpak back in 1987. Aamir Khan turned a hearthrob only an year later with Qayamat se Qayamat Tak in 1988. Aamir’s Dil, another regular 90’s Bollywood fare was released an year after Kamal awed us with Apoorva Sahordangal. Aamir was doing Raja Hindustani and still hadn’t earned the perfectionist tag when Kamal hit the screens with Indian and Avvai Shanmughi. His ambitions then just got too big not just for Tamil, but for the Indian film industry as a whole. Marudhanayagam unfortunately was reduced to an YouTube clip. Marmayogi never took off. Vishwaroopam too hit troubled waters with Selvaraghavan leaving , leaving Kamal to take over the reins.

Vishwaroopam 2 starts rolling with an ad for Kamal Hassan’s newly incubated political party and the rhetoric on display resonates conveniently with the central theme of the film in more ways than one. The actual movie then starts off almost like the next episode of a TV show would from where the first movie ended five years back replete with a recap which also doubles up as the titles. The proceedings then on are too dull for a spy thriller here and when Kamal refers emotionally to an officer played by a nondescript foreign actor slain by the bad guys in the first installment, you as audience can hardly connect. The jokes are dead even before they’re spoken. Waheeda Rahman is the notable new addition to the cast and Kamal again withdraws into the background when the yesteryear leading lady performs. The movie mostly works like a sleeping pill with occasional jolts of hyperactivity which are when the action sequences happen. You see bad guys looking out of airplane windows like kids on board their first flight. Shekar Kapur gets to relive his Digjam moments,walk around in suits that is. Andreah and Pooja Kumar do their bit nonchalantly. Anant Mahadevan is not quite sure if he’s a bad guy or a good guy. Then there is the hurried climax because even Kamal Hassan himself could’nt take it anymore I felt.

Though marred by manufactured controversy the first Vishwaroopam was more or less a good watch where Kamal the star actually gave space to the story being told. But then he did that in Hey Ram too. He actually tried to say something relevant and sensible with the Afgan leg of the movie. In Vishwaroopam 2 there’s nothing left to say. Yeah, there’s a twist but you don’t really care after five years. The man’s vision and ideas are too radical for the Indian commercial film format one can’t but help feel. Still he thrives in that space with hits and misfires in equal measure. He went bersek with Aalavandhan and then turned social commentator in Virumandi. His Dashavatharam was underrated I feel so was Anbe Sivam, two works at the extreme ends of the cinematic spectrum. Anbe Sivam infact held a mirror to his political leanings. Vishawroopam 2 was never meant to be but when you have enough footage leftover from your first movie to almost make a second one, why let it go down the drain, especially when it might help as an overlong commerical to take the cause of your political aspirations forward.

Mission Impossible – Fallout : Tom Cruise Falls Out, Gets Knocked Down, But He Gets Up Again. And Again. And Again.

Wake up in Belfast. Lose Plutonium in Berlin. Get grilled in Rammstein. Do a HALO jump in Paris. Crash a party, literally. Kill a bad guy. Catch up with an old flame. Ride a motorcylcle fast. Kidnap an old foe. Cool your heels in London. Chase a bad guy on rooftops. Fly to Kashmir. Chase a helicopter in another helicopter. Hang from a cliff. Defuse a couple of bombs. Save the world. Brood and have nightmares when you are not doing any of the above. In an alternate cinematic universe, it would take a bunch of superheroes in capes and latex to do all that in a single movie. Doctor Strange couldn’t get around like that. It’s impossible you’d say but that’s precisely why Ethan Hunt, aka Tom Cruise exists. James Bond ain’t got shit on him. Sorry, no not even Daniel Craig. Tom Cruise pushes the limit like only he can in the sixth Mission Impossible film and he takes us on a ride again. He says it’s impossible but you know it’s not but you still let him do that to you, tell you it’s impossible for the sixth time I mean. This is where I stop bickering, and ask you to go, sit back and enjoy the action.

Tom Cruise teams up with Christopher McQuarrie again and you can see why he trusts the writer-director. If you want to know what I am talking about watch the first Jack Reacher movie and then the second, the difference shows. McQuarrie knows his action movies. He is the John McTiernan of our times, I’d say. In the follow up to his fifth MI film, Mcquarrie starts from where he left off in Rogue Nation but reaches back even farther from the series for whatever drama he can manage to squeeze in between the brilliant action sequences. In this movie Tom Cruise does a bit of everything he has done in the past MI films, call it homage. The bike stunts are reminiscent of the John Woo MI, so were the cliff hanging scenes.Rogue Nation had a great bike chase too. Jumping out of planes are almost a regular fixture in all the MI films I guess. The car chase in the vintage BMW reminded me of Ronin for some reason, which is touted as the best car chase movie since Bullit. The movie takes a leaf out of the Marvel handbook and tries a hand at self depreceating humor just so the MI series props doesn’t get too old on the viewers. There’s more than one reference to men in rubber masks and the bad guys teases Hunt time and again with the MI disclaimer , “should you choose to accept it” . Cruise on the other hand has a new line, “I’ll figure it out.”

In addition to Cruise, Ving Rhames is the longest surviving actor of the series and is joined by Simon Pegg again as the ever loyal tech-support team to Hunt’s stunts. Alec Baldwin has turned believer from his Rogue Nation days in Fallout and has handed the responsibility of giving a hard time to Hunt on behalf of the very system he works for, over to Angela Basset. That’s where Henry Cavill comes in. Hammer he is you’d agree to Cruise’s scalpel as Basset puts it, considering the stuff he gets to break. Rebecca Ferguson reprises her role as the MI6 agent. Jeremy Renner had date clashes. Michelle Monaghan returns again as mostly memories and a bit more. The movie hints that when choosing life partners, people should look within their own professions, just for practical purposes entirely, like a day where you have to defuse bombs and strangle people too. All of these does not matter really because all you are going to remember are the action sequences. They are special because Tom Cruise has taken the pain to deliver them himself. The helicopter chase and the rooftop jump are my top picks but I loved the car and bike chases too. This might not be the greatest action movie ever but it’s indeed one of the best ones in the series though for some reason the first one remains my favorite or is it the second.Or the fifth maybe? Yes, I can’t make up my mind. How about you?

Neerali : Get A Grip, You Will Not.

Everyone’s in danger these days. You, me, everyone we know are potential lynch victims at the mercy of a share button. In such times, what would it take to make a decent thriller movie, I mean one that would actually make the viewer push his own fears back and edge closer to the edge of the seat by the minute, much like the fate of the character portrayed by Mohanlal in his latest, Neerali. In his first outing on the big screen since the much publicised makeover to play a younger version of himself in the upcoming Odiyan, which saw him losing some weight and undergoing a purported botox treatment, Mohanlal plays a gemologist who for no fault of his own finds himself between a rock and free space, so to speak. The movie was hit by a barrage of negative responses online right from the day of it’s release which was quite surprising given the huge army of fans the actor has at his disposal on the social media. The producer quickly came out in defence and the movie which was initially marketed as a thriller turned a family entertainer over the weekend in the ads. Now, I am not blaming anyone here, it was entirely a personal decision which had me watching the movie. It was one of those cases where you were told something was so bad that you actually wanted to know for yourself how bad it actually was.

Mohanlal himself had vouched that he said yes to the movie because it was something that was never attempted in Malayalam Cinema. Now that I am done watching the film, I can say for a fact the nothing like this has been attempted in World Cinema. The director has to have a thing for Probability Theory and Murphy’s Law. I mean what are the odds of a gemologist who chills with his colleagues on the steppes of Mongolia, taking a trip to Cochin from Bangalore to meet his wife who is in labor, in a run down pickup truck with his company driver ? Probable ? Okay, I’ll give you that. From then on, everything just goes wrong not just for the characters, but the viewer too. Murphy’s law on speed indeed. When they’re not shown dangling between life and death in the pickup perched precariously at the edge of a cliff, Mohanlal’s Sunny and Suraaj Venjaramood’s driver Veerappa are seen singing songs, sharing personal anecdotes, consoling each other and cracking jokes. We are also fed regular doses of nostalgia in terms of songs and scenes from yesteryear to drive home the fact that Mohanal and Nadia Moidu are being paired after eons. Every woman in Sunny’s life has a crush on him because he’s played by Mohanlal and Sunny being Sunny gives us and Veerappa a brief lecture on the psychological disorder that possessivenes is. Another intriguing character in the film is a suicidal monkey who haunts the viewer long after he has left the movie hall. Notable was the scene where Mohanlal tries to hypnotise the monkey which actually holds a mirror not just to the state of the minds of the characters but the audience too at that point. The director was definitely trying to say something there, which reminds me of another creature, a beetle that makes ominous appearances in the movie, more than once.There is also a parallel storyline involving a bunch of young aspiring criminals who are on the trail of Sunny and Veerappa. But halfway down the movie the director and the writer seems to have deciced that it’s a story for another day and another film.

The “new” Mohanlal looked visibily uncomfortable early on and something was clearly amiss. This was most evident in the scene where the mandatory M.G Sreekumar song came on. Any Malaylai worth his mundu and meesha would recognise the fact that their favorite actor is not all there. Being a self confessed fan I have a fan theory of my own about this new look.Mohanal is a known practioner of Ayurveda and has been known to go on retreats from time to time. More than the fans, the man himself must be having a hard time to come to terms with the botox injected cheeks and it shows on screen too. Maybe we will get used to this, like we did with the change in his voice in the mid 90s. The Veerappa character of Suraaj is a Tamilian which is to give credibity to his back story where his inter caste marriage left his wife dead and him disabled at the hands of his wife’s family. That’s overreaching considering the recent developments in our own state.But to be fair to the writer, I guess the honor killing in our own backyard maybe wasn’t yet news when he put pen to paper.Honestly these thoughts are irrelevant in a film thats so ridden with potholes that the audience just gives up their sense of logic and surrenders entirely to the whims of the director early on. But the one question still haunts me, why monkey why?

Sacred Games : S01 | Netflix

Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra, Shantaram by Greogory David Roberts and Maximum City by Suketu Mehta are three books which were published few years apart at the dawn of the millenium and all three of them have a common central character, that being Mumbai. Mehta and Chandra coincidentally had collabroated on Mission Kashmir too. Apart from Sacred Games, the rest could safely be called non-fiction with Shantaram treading a thin line between fiction and reality. But then any story about Mumbai is a genre in itself, magical realism meeting Mario Puzo, if I may. Shantaram was the one book that I looked forward to being made into a movie and if I am not wrong Mira Nair was supposed to do one with Johnny Depp in the lead. That never took off I guess. Sacred Games to be honest was a difficult read, in terms of the sheer number of pages it ran into and was a slow burner but it had all the makings of a potential gangster drama, in the hands of the right filmmaker. Ram Gopal Varma was fresh on the heels of his take on the Mumbai gang land with Satya and Company and looked the perfect candidate in those days, now not so much. So it was only natural that one of his early collaborators who went on to make a distinct name for himself in India and globally, Anurag Kashyap turned out to be the one who brought Vikram Chandra’s magnus opus-as it would be touted now- to life on the screen finally, and how. It’s also a landmark in terms of the fact that it’s the first Indian Netflix Original.The book was a critical success, commercial not so much back then and given the hype and rave reviews Season One has generated thanks to Kashyap and Co. , I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a revived interest in the book itself and offer some consoloation to the author towards the cause of the unrecouped original million dollar advance by Harper Collins.

Ganesh Gationde, the surreal character who is a hero, a villain and a victim simultaneoulsy needed a Nawazuddin Siddiqui to be elevated to greatness as one of the most memorable characters ever written.Back when I read Sacred Games, Gaitonde did not have a face. Now, I cannot imagine anyone else but Nawazuddin as Gaitonde. It’s his destiny as an artist, I can’t but help feel. Consider this, it took Vikram Chandra around ten years to write the book.He travelled to Bihar and attended Bollywood parties as part of the writing process.The book was released in 2006. Nawazuddin Siddiqui made one of his early screen appearances in a minor role in Anurag Kashyap’s unreleased Black Friday in 2004. Little did Siddiqui or Chandra know that their creative talents would come together and were fated to take on Netflix by storm decades later.This will go down as Nawazuddin Siddiqui’s greatest role ever and the man scorches the screen every second he’s on it.When he is not on, his voice over holds sway over the audience. Sartaj Singh, a cop, the other central character in Sacred Games interestingly had made an appearance in Vikram Chandra’s earlier novel, Love and Longing in Bombay, I am told. Saif Ali Khan brings Sartaj Singh to life here and delivers a performance that is a testimony to the fact that Bollywood is a jungle where even the most talented artists could get lost for eternity. Anurag Kashyap has rescued Khan here from that jungle, so to speak, who has shown in the past that in the right hands, he could give the best in the business a run for their money. He plays Sartaj Singh with such depth and sensitivity that he has transformed himself completely into the character. Even his silences tell the audience stories here. Most notable is the scene where he meets constable Katekar’s wife. Katekar played brilliantly by Jitendra Joshi is an endearing character and is Sartaj’s sidekick, as the genre would have it. Radhika Apte is a no-nonsense intelligence officer who is far removed from the female cop characters we have come across on Indian screens. Luke Kenny, a familiar face on Channel V of yore is seen as an assassin here. Jatin Sarna makes an impression as Bunty, Gaitonde’s man. Rajshri Deshpande plays a different kind of gangster’s wife here, quite unlike anything that we have seen on Indian screens before. Kubra Sait is Kukoo the primary love interest in Gaitonde’s life, a character already being talked about in the media. Every other actor from Neeraj Kabi to Shalini Vatsa to Geetanjali Thapa lingers in your psyche as the characters they play. Vikramaditya Motwane and Anurag Kashyap have co- directed the series with Motwane working on the Sartaj timeframe of the story and Kashyap on the Gaitonde origins. The decision was right on the money given the fact that the urban landscape is where Motwane’s stories have flourished till now in contrast to the hinterlands that we are now familar with in Kashyap’s films.

Sacred Games is a case of art-imitating-life-imitating-art.The timing of the show could not have been more perfect, considering the central theme it deals with and the times we live in. In the Mumbai of Chandra, Kashyap and Motwane, the good guys are not that good and the bad are not exactly evil. The city decides the fate of the individual.Delhi, the power centre is no match for Mumbai, it’s a different world altogether, a character reiterates that in a line he speaks. Sacred Games explores the underbelly of Mumbai where agents of politics, businesses, movies and religion are indulged in a constant process of evolution in a struggle for power and control. Gaitonde is almost Forrest Gump here with major incidents that shook the nation in the past couple of decades proving turning points in his life as a career gangster. Even someone as dreaded as Gaitonde is a pawn in the hands of the people in power, politically. Motwane and Kashyap have successfully brought in an element of suspense and maintains it without losing their grip on the aesthetics of the tales being told. The series is particulary critical about the past governments who were in power when incidents which changed the country forever occurred. Sacred Games is what happens when an irresistible force in the entertainment industry like Netflix meets a filmmaker with immovable vision and outlook. Kashyap and Co. have come out all guns blazing here and have delivered a world class piece of entertainment. Looking forward to the next season and I think I’m going to revisit the book again.

Straight Outta Compton to Unsolved : Coincidences In The Age of Machine Learning and A Brief History Of Rap Music.

In these times when you search for something online and an ad for the very same thing that you searched for pops up on your Facebook Timeline the next day, it’s hard to believe in coincidences.So I had my suspicions when Unsolved debuted on Netflix a few days after I had watched Straight Outta Compton, but I shook them off ultimately as within my humanly possible powers of deduction I could not find any logical links between the two events and I made peace with the possibility that I had indeed been a benefeciary of a genuine coincidence.Straight Outta Compton told the tale of the rise of hip-hop as we know it and how it changed the lives of a couple of youngsters and the music industry altogether.Unsolved was about the untimely and tragic demise of two of the most influential proponents of the genre, Tupac Shakur and Notorious B.I.G., whose lives , art and deaths were intertwined for eternity.

Ice Cube,Eazy E and Dr. Dre who joined ranks to form N.W.A were pioneers in the genre who spoke to the world through their music.These were angry young men who used art to hit back at the oppressive system, especially the policing.In terms of the politics it represented, ‘Gangsta Rap’ was the new rock music. F.Gary Gray traces their initial days, fallouts and the eventual disbanding in Straight Outta Comtpon.It also gives us a glimpse of the business of hip hop music. Ice Cube, portrayed by his real life son comes across as the one with a business acumen that’s second only to Dr.Dre’s in the group.He bails out of N.W.A early on, over financial differences with the rest of the members.Eazy E is a tragic figure who trusted the wrong person and later succumbs to a terminal disease, on the verge of a reunion. Dr.Dre who went on to mentor many big names in the business today is the most ambitious of the lot. N.W.A ran into trouble with the police on a regular basis for the politics their music blared.They were banned by radios but they had already captured the imagination of a generation of music listeners which reflected in their records sales and their ultimate success. Music was a way out for these boys and they believed in themselves and their art when most of the world refused to address them as artists.True to the politics of the artists it portrayed, Straight Outta Compton was also in the news for being snubbed by most major award ceremonies including the Oscars.

Unsolved deals with the lives and deaths of Tupac Shakur and Christopher Wallace aka Notorious B.I.G. Wallace and Tupac were contermporaries in work and by a strange twist of fate ended up on the wrong sides of the East Coast- West Coast rivalry. They had contrasting approaches to music too. Tupac was again heavily political in his lyrics. Biggie on the other hand was known as a storyteller.Both of them were close to their mothers who were strong influences in their lives.Tupac was gunned down in a drive by shooting in 1996 and the next year Biggie was killed in a similar shooting.Unsolved traces the attempts of the law enforcement personnel involved to solve these murders.To date, the murders remain unsolved and the show has dual narratives, one from the time of the murders and the other from the investigation launched by a Federal Task Force in response to a lawsuit filed by Wallace’s mother against the LAPD.The show tells us how the events affected the lives of the people who investigated the murders too.The task force follows every lead and also try to gather informaiton from the investigations by the troibled cop, Russel Poole who ended up an outcast amongst his colleagues for the stands he took.

Suge Knight, the record producer is one looming figure who appears in both Straight Outta Compton and Unsolved. An extremely influential player in the business at the peak of his career, Knight has a presence in all the theories that are in circulation, related to the deaths of Tupac and Biggie.He was also charged for allegedly threating F. Gary Gray, the director of Straight Outta Comptoon because he was unhappy with the way he was portrayed in the film.Knight was riding alongside Tupac on that fateful night and still there are conspiracy theories afloat that implicate him in both murders.There are also people who believe that the investigating agencies were worried more about saving their own faces rather than solving the murders as it turned out that some of the cops were on the payroll of the music moguls, when they moonlighted as secuirty for the artists. Tupac was 25 and Biggie was 24 when they were slain in the streets.The fame, success and influence they garnered across the globe in their short lives is only surpassed by the mystery that shrouds their deaths.