Rohan Naahar

College kids of a certain age would be familiar with the practice of filtering assignments through a very rudimentary anti-plagiarism software, mainly to avoid being caught cheating by professors. So worthless were the results of this scam that a kid might even be shamed into putting in the actual effort and writing their assignment themselves. Not only were they submitting something unoriginal, it was also impossible to read. Essentially the same route is now being taken by filmmakers. This week’s new romantic comedy, Picture This, isn’t merely a remake; it’s a remake that is happy to be released in the same week as the Oscars and actively aim for a 2/5.

“Jackie Chan could come to Malegaon,” says a young man who has had the misfortune of being born there. “But his films won’t.” The young man is Nasir, the protagonist of director Reema Kagti’s new film, Superboys of Malegaon. Played by Adarsh Gourav, Nasir is the sort of cinephile who would have been logging at least three movies a day on Letterboxd had he been born a decade later, perhaps in a metropolitan city. And as hyperbolic as his words are, there is an element of truth to them. As we speak, the German auteur Wim Wenders is touring the length and breadth of India, taking selfies with Madhabi Mukherjee and reclining on Satyajit Ray’s favourite armchair. But you could be forgiven for not remembering the last time one of his films received a theatrical release here.

A few years ago, the global cinephile community — the sort of people who compose their Letterboxd reviews even before a film has ended — was thrown headfirst into a heated debate. As far as these folks were concerned, this was a debate of presidential magnitude — the kind of debate that could make a disagreement about Marvel movies seem like a ‘kavi sammelan’ in Lucknow. The British magazine Sight & Sound, which compiles a list of the greatest films of all time every decade, had published its latest rankings. And for the first time ever, the Belgian film Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles — previously viewed as a favourite only in niche circles — had claimed the top spot, sneaking past perennial favourites such as Citizen Kane, Tokyo Story, and Vertigo.

Inviting Javed Akhtar to the premiere of Nadaaniyan, and making him sit through it — it doesn’t matter that he had a recliner to relax on — is tantamount to elder abuse. Directed by Shauna Gautam, the Netflix romantic drama singlehandedly demolishes any argument that nepotism apologists might have preemptively constructed in the run-up to its release. Ineptly put together, lacking any insight whatsoever into the human experience, Nadaaniyan is a blot on Karan Johar’s career as a film producer, and one of the most questionable originals ever produced by Netflix India — remember, this is the streamer that deemed Shirish Kunder’s Mrs Serial Killer to be worthy of sharing the same server space as Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma.

Malayalam filmmakers aren’t just pushing the boundaries of genre cinema in India, they’ve evolved to a stage where they can confidently toy with tropes. In Aattam, director Anand Ekarshi created magic within the framework of murder mysteries by unraveling the expectations that they come attached with. Ekarshi performed a deft act of cinematic misdirection, revealing that Aattam wasn’t a mystery at all, but a sharp satire of patriarchy. In Rekhachithram, director Jofin T Chacko observes the doctrines of police procedurals, pays due respect to them, and then sends the movie down an altogether unexpected path in the final 30 minutes.

Someone on social media the other day posted that each of the last 15 Best Picture winners at the Oscars could’ve been funded for the amount that Netflix spent on The Electric State, the astronomically expensive new movie from directors Joe and Anthony Russo. We’re talking about films like Oppenheimer, which itself would’ve taken up $100 million of this cash pool, leaving the remaining $220 million to be spent on landmark films such as Parasite, 12 Years a Slave, and this year’s Anora. Starring Chris Pratt and Millie Bobby Brown, The Electric State is the kind of movie that seems to get longer while you’re watching it. No matter how deep into it you are — it could be the end of the first act or the second — it always feels like there’s an hour still left. On the face of it, The Electric State isn’t a particularly long movie. It taps out at around 120 minutes, which is positively merciful of the Russos, whose first gig after the global success of the three-hour-long Avengers: Endgame was Cherry, a 141-minute drama about a drug addict who robs banks to fund his habit.

In a recent interview, actor Rajiv Thakur admitted that audiences that have seen him as a fixture on Kapil Sharma’s comedy shows will have no idea that he played a menacing terrorist in the spectacular streaming series IC 814: The Kandahar Hijack. And those who discovered him through IC 814 wouldn’t know that he has spent years as a part of Sharma’s silly troupe. In the Venn diagram of Indian entertainment, these audiences will never intersect, even though both IC 814 and The Great Indian Kapil Show are available on Netflix. Similarly, it is possible that cinephiles familiar with Takeshi Kitano through his art-house yakuza movies, or his memorable appearance in the hyper-violent Battle Royale, will collapse in shock they are told that he was so central to the game show Takeshi’s Castle that they named it after him. Kitano gets to play with his two creative personalities — the Golden Lion-winning filmmaker and the court jester — in his latest movie, Broken Rage, which was released on Prime Video with less fanfare than what you’d find at funerals in certain cultures.

Both Mark Zuckerberg and the movie based on his early life, The Social Network, are referenced in the new Netflix mini-series Apple Cider Vinegar. Named after the snake oil that was being peddled online by seemingly every lifestyle influencer a few years ago, the show is inspired by the rather unbelievable story of Belle Gibson, a young Australian woman who scammed millions into subscribing to her personalised diet plans. Belle claimed that she’d beaten brain cancer by consuming clean food instead of conventional chemotherapy. The truth was that Belle was never diagnosed with cancer at all; it was the neglect that she experienced in childhood that compelled her to con the world. She’s played in the six-episode series by the wonderful Kaitlyn Dever, who rose to fame with the coming-of-age film Booksmart, and the even better Netflix series Unbelievable. In Apple Cider Vinegar, she puts on a convincing Australian accent, and finds a balance between Belle’s delusion and ambition. Abandoned by her troubled mother, Belle supposedly ran away from home at the age of 12. She gave birth to her first child when she was still a teenager, and subsequently embarked on a career as a huckster. Fuelled by a desire to be loved and accepted, she turned to social media to scratch this itch. Belle founded The Whole Pantry mobile app, through which she literally influenced terminally ill men and women into shunning traditional forms of treatment.