Priyanka Roy

Logic, chronology, geography, sensitivity, ear drums and brain cells all take a hike in Baby John. The big-budget production that attempts to launch Varun Dhawan as an all-out action star is an all-round assault on the senses, partially redeemed by only a few clap-worthy moments mostly credited to ‘VD’, which is what the baby-faced actor is introduced as at the beginning of Baby John. I haven’t watched Theri, the 2016 Tamil blockbuster which was purely a fan-service exercise for diehard followers of Thalapathy Vijay. I am not sure if Varun has the kind of fans — I mean by demographic and not volume — that would queue up feverishly to watch him defy the laws of physics to make easy work of 10 men at one go or swing his sunglasses in one swift movement as some sort of a signature style, a mid-level tribute to everyone from the iconic Rajinikanth to the magnetic Chulbul Pandey.

Sometimes truth isn’t justice, and justice isn’t truth’. Delivered with both pain and profundity in the penultimate moments of Juror#2, this incandescent line not only sums up the film, but the justice system as a whole, anywhere in the world. Exposing the fault lines in our rules of crime and punishment, but in the kind of quiet yet forceful manner which has been a signature of his brand of filmmaking ever since Clint Eastwood first put on the director’s hat a staggering 53 years ago, Juror#2 is the type of film that makes your mind go back to it time and again even days and weeks after watching it.

If the 2019 reboot of The Lion King, that came out 25 years after the original, also called The Lion King, taught us anything, it is that one should never tamper with anything that has made a place for itself not only in the hearts of the audience but also in cinema history. Mufasa: The Lion King, though not a reboot or remake, can be added to that list. Serving as a prequel to the 2019 film, it takes us back in time to when Mufasa and Taka — as Scar was once known — were young cubs roaming the plains together.

A watch of Despatch, especially in its penultimate moments, sent me straight to Google in search of some facts and figures. That, in turn, led me down a rabbit hole where I was bombarded with one astounding (‘uncomfortable’ would be more apt) revelation after another. According to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation’s UNESCO Observatory of Killed Journalists, more than 1,600 journalists have been killed since 1993. Earlier this year, UNESCO director-general Audrey Azoulay broke it down bluntly, stating that in 85 per cent of such killings, the perpetrator has gone unpunished.

Q. Why can’t Miley Cyrus afford to buy Pushpa?
A. ‘Pushpa flower(s) nahin, fire hain.’

This PJ masquerading as a riddle — something which I made up while writing this review — is perhaps as low IQ as it can get. Much like the Pushpa franchise, which thrives on being low IQ, but does one thing pretty much consistently: it serves up, in Silk-speak, what it promises — entertainment, entertainment and more entertainment. Pushpa 2: The Rule, arriving three years after Pushpa: The Rise that became a bona fide pan-India blockbuster and laid the foundation for a big-budget franchise, packs a punch in almost all departments, even going up a notch or two from the first film.

“At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom”. This momentous line from Jawaharlal Nehru’s Tryst with Destiny speech, delivered on the eve of India’s Independence on August 15, 1947, remains etched in the annals of history. What also remains an indelible part of our country’s birth into freedom after 200 years of colonial rule is the bloodied, agonising, gut-wrenching division of one nation into two.

The never-say-die mantra of its 69-year-old protagonist is what forms the crux of Vijay 69. This is a story of spirit, spunk and resilience which is birthed within Vijay Mathew when he, ironically, is given up for dead. Played by Anupam Kher with the kind of chameleonic ease that has seen the actor make 500-plus films in 40-odd years, Vijay Mathew’s moment of epiphany arrives in the film’s initial moments when he lands up at his own ‘funeral’. When former swimming coach Vijay is spotted ‘diving’ into the sea in the middle of the night and not turning up till the morning, his friends and family assume the worst. The truth is that Vijay was spending the night at a drunken sesh and when he stumbles on to his coffin the next morning, it is a wake-up call for him.

A man, holding a gun, chases a woman through the nooks and crannies of Belgrade. Finding himself in a cul-de-sac of sorts, he sees her pointing a gun back at him. “Put your gun down,” she barks at him. He, a seasoned special agent, lets go of his gun and promptly gets shot. The law of probability points to the fact that if he had held on to the gun, there would be a 50 per cent chance of him being shot and a 50 per cent chance of him being able to shoot the woman in front of him. When he drops the gun, for no explainable reason, he makes that probability convert to a 100 per cent chance against him.