Kirubhakar Purushothaman

Black and Blue, the fifth episode of the sixth season of Vince Gilligan’s Better Call Saul, begins—like a lot of cold openings typical of Gilligan’s work—with a silent montage of an artisan encasing a slide rule in a block of clear acrylic. The engraving reads, “In Liebe… Deine Jungs” (“With love… your boys”), and the piece is packed into a wooden box. (It becomes a cardinal sin to invoke the series without mentioning how criminally underwatched it is. So, here you go: it is criminally underwatched.) If you’ve managed to watch up to this episode, you already know that this setup will have a massive payoff. You also know that you will completely forget about it within a few minutes, as you get engrossed in the incredible writing of one of modern-day long-form geniuses. But when the payoff hits, the memory of the setup rains down on you!

Guru (Sandeep Kishan), the protagonist of Sigma, is a struggling library owner and podcaster. He lives in an inherited, dilapidated bungalow that doubles as a library—a space his late mother cherished and asked him to protect. However, along with the property, he has inherited a crippling debt of Rs 1.5 crore from his late father, leaving him struggling to make ends meet. Strangely, in the many scenes set in the library, we see only books on engineering and various other study course/exam

‘Why did Karthik Subbaraj have to make Dorothy?’ It is a natural question for anyone who either loved or detested the film. Dorothy is a risk. It is a commercial, public relations and career risk not just for Subbaraj, but also for the cast members — especially the brilliant Rishikanth and Sananth. Which is why it wouldn’t be out of place to wonder, ‘why’. But then, it is also easy to see that Dorothy isn’t entirely uncharacteristic of Subbaraj. Dorothy is not the kind of film that can just bomb at the box office; that would be the least of its problems.

Raghava Lawrence cracked a great template for making an easy, mindless entertainer by blending horror and comedy with a revenge drama. The story goes something like this: a scared hero meets a gory ghost. The gory ghost possesses the scared hero for a secret mission. The hero rebels. Then the ghost tells a sad backstory. The sympathetic hero relents. The ghost gets its revenge. Now, replace the ghost with a transplanted hand, and that is pretty much what I’m Game is. Dulquer Salmaan plays Dan John, a rich businessman with a gambling problem. He is a spoilt brat who wants to make a point to his father, mother and the world in general, but only ends up losing money in cricket league betting. While escaping gangster moneylenders, he meets with an accident, loses his hand and gets it transplanted from an anonymous donor. Once his transplanted hand starts to function, it starts operating on its own.

Of course, Toxic has a narrator. How can it not? How can it not have the lazy storytelling device that’s quintessential of this brand of film that’s basically ‘stuti puranam’ (hymn of adoration) of the protagonist. How can we just have an introduction scene of Yash without a narration in the background that is all talk and no sense. How can he make a direct entry, without teasing the fans with glimpses of his hands, neck tattoo and cigar, before finally revealing his face. So, yes, Toxic has a narrator, the bazooka gun, small guns, big guns, big cigars, small joints, women, more women, beheadings, blood splattering, mutilated hands, mutilated legs and for good measure, also another Yash! What it doesn’t have is the depth and style it so badly attempts at.

Vishwanath & Sons deals with a red-flag subject, fronted by a protagonist who is a walking, talking green flag. Sanjay Vishwanath (Suriya), a multi-millionaire businessman and Olympic-medal-winning shooter, credits his father for teaching him all those valuable lessons. He becomes a skilled shooter after his father buys him a toy gun and when Sanjay hits his first target, his dad is overjoyed and claps.

Any criticism against Jana Nayagan hits a brick wall of an excuse, one that demands cinema be compromised for a superstar. Viewers are expected to overlook the film straying from narrative and form to cater to fans, because the film is a farewell gift made for the fans by a superstar who has built his career on such mindless commercial films. Hence, expecting anything out of the ordinary is dismissed as unwise. It becomes a matter of bargain. But Jana Nayagan can’t just be that. It has another job. While it’s a swansong for a superstar-actor, it also has to serve as a war cry for a new political leader. In the end, Jana Nayagan is less a film and more fan service, and even more a campaign reel.

There are several hilarious chunks in Idhayam Murali, but the funniest one is unintentional. In the second half, Sam (Preity Mukundan) tells Idhaya (Atharvaa), in the same breezy tone you’d use to describe wrapping up a work call, “Ippa thaan oru mission mudichom. So konjam naalaiku rest” (We just finished off one mission. We will rest for a while). By this point, it is well established that Sam is a NASA astronaut, which is exactly why the line lands as comedy rather than drama. It’s a very specific kind of silliness, one Tamil cinema has flirted with before. The film doesn’t hide that it’s chasing a Gautham Menon-ish vibe, and this scene recalls a bit from Neethaane En Ponvasantham: a throwaway line establishing that Varun’s (Jiiva) family has grown rich and posh, simply by mentioning that his retired parents are now off travelling the world. Both moments reach for a big, specific, hard-to-verify detail and use it as shorthand for status or drama, without doing any of the narrative work to earn it.