Shaitaan Is Horrifying, But Not In The Way It Wants To Be |
Shaitaan is the latest addition to the Ajay Devgn father-verse where the actor portrays different iterations of the common man and channelises ordinariness as a superpower to protect his children, writes Ishita Sengupta |
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| | Cast: Ajay Devgn, Jyothika, R Madhavan |
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AT 11 in the morning, I saw a severed tongue fly across the screen. At around the same time, I witnessed a group of women hanging on to every word uttered by a middle-aged man, a dead rat lying very dead in a desolate forest, and a man wrecking havoc based on the conviction that he is god. Around then, my phone buzzed and three realisations occurred to me, one after the other: 10 years ago Queen had released on one such Friday and catapulted Vikas Bahl’s career to great heights — and he has not made a decent film since then. Shaitaan, his sixth directorial feature, only reaffirms this trajectory. (Stream top-rated movies and shows across platforms and languages, using the OTTplay Premium Jhakaas pack, for just Rs 199/month.) The film exists to unsettle. This intent is so strong that it becomes a need almost with Shaitaan stopping at nothing to showcase that it can stop at nothing. For instance, every time the outing fails to engage (a recurring occurrence), the filmmaker includes an uncalled for twist (kid falling from the roof, a knife slicing through someone’s hands) to pull us back in. It is a strangely self-serving exercise designed to evoke interest, no different from a kid doing somersaults in a room full of people as a last ditch effort to garner attention. The troubling bit is even these antics leave us cold. |
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Showtime: More A Blind Item Than Bollywood Exposé |
Showtime is too trapped in mining sensationalism to make sense of the world it is occupied with |
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| Dir: Mihir Desai, Archit Kumar |
| Cast: Emraan Hashmi, Rajeev Khandelwal, Naseeruddin Shah |
| Stream on: Disney+ Hotstar |
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A FILM CRITIC, fired for doing her job honestly, suddenly finds herself helming one of the biggest film studios in India. An heir of the same studio finds himself ousted from the coveted position overnight. In a span of a couple of hours, an insider from the Hindi film industry and an outsider switch places. Showtime, the new show on Hotstar, has a premise that feels designed to counter the debate that has been raging in the Hindi film industry for a while: nepotism. The intent behind orchestrating this swap is obvious. The makers want to insist that every insider was an outsider once and every outsider has the potential (and the desire) to be an insider. And more crucially, underline that for all purposes of debate, these labels are facile. Reactionary or not, it is a fun setting. Not least because Showtime, the eight-episode series of which the first four are available, has been produced by Karan Johar, the filmmaker and producer whose reputation has come to be stained by accusations of favouritism. After years of defying and defending it in interviews, he has greenlit a longform show to address it. Created by Sumit Roy (one of the writers of Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani) and written by Mithun Gangopadhyay, Lara Chandni and Roy, Showtime is a pulpy takedown of the mechanics of an industry that always has plenty of grist for the gossip mill. The problem is, the show veers too much towards extremes to have an impact. It is too flimsy to be seriously regarded and too consumed by mock self-seriousness to be enjoyable, coming across thus as a blind-item equivalent of a series which engages us by indulging in a guessing game. — I.S. |
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Gris: Nomada Studio's Game Is A Stunning, Surreal Exploration Of Grief |
Rarely has there been a game tackling the intricacies of loss and sorrow as staggeringly beautiful as Nomada Studio's Gris, writes Harsh Pareek |
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| “EVERYONE can master a grief but he that has it,” wrote the Bard. Like the vastness of the night, grief has perpetually been part of the human experience, often enveloping one whole without so much as a forewarning. And for centuries — from Euripides to Vincent van Gogh to Joan Didion — artists have ventured into the depths of this ocean through various mediums. Video games have been no exception. There have been the more obvious titles like What Remains of Edith Finch, and then there are the unexpected gut punches provided courtesy of likes of NieR:Automata. But rarely has there been a game tackling the intricacies of loss and sorrow as staggeringly beautiful as Nomada Studio's Gris. A 2D platform-adventure, the game follows the titular character, a young girl navigating the stages of grief in a fantastical world comprising four environments — a desert full of windmills and dust-storms, a lush forest with an apple-loving creature, a maze of underwater caverns, and one with buildings made out of light, featuring gravity distortion. Over the course of the game, Gris gains abilities such as turning her cloak into a heavy block of stone or a double jump, all the while as she struggles to find her voice that will allow her to sing once again, and strength to restore her crumbling world. |
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The one newsletter you need to decide what to watch on any given day. Our editors pick a show, movie, or theme for you from everything that’s streaming on OTT. |
| Each week, our editors pick one long-form, writerly piece that they think is worthy of your attention, and dice it into easily digestible bits for you to mull over. |
| In which we invite a scholar of cinema, devotee of the moving image, to write a prose poem dedicated to their poison of choice. Expect to spend an hour on this. |
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