Shubhra Gupta

The Ba***ds of Bollywood — the name itself has been causing non-stop buzz because it taps into current public perception of how the Hindi film industry is full of baxxds — is a mixed bag. The problem, in fact, is in the name itself. When ba***dly behaviour is on full display, we feel that promises have been kept, and that it is not just calling its detractors out by putting itself out there, but having some fun at our expense while it’s at it; it’s when the seven-part series segues into the showing us ‘the other side’, that it deflates into seen-before ordinariness. Watching glittering stars sending themselves up is always going to be a send. It never gets old, and we’re so here for it. Aamir, Shah Rukh (a no-brainer, given he is the debutant director Aryan Khan’s proud daddy-o), for pan-Indian appeal, SS Rajamouli, Ranbir Kapoor, Ranvir Singh, Rajummar Rao, Arjun Kapoor, and of course, Karan Johar, who is not just a cameo like the others but a full-fledged presence: who better than Johar to personify the much-reviled movie mafia which ‘buys paps’ and warns people not to ‘cross them’. Salman is a blink-and-miss even as cameos go, and him muttering about not wanting to a be a dad is sort of hilarious, in this whole parade of daddies. It’s all nudge-and-wink, and smile-worthy.

Kajol and co are back in Season 2 of ‘The Trial’ as legal eagles working their way through and around the system geared towards saving the powerful and damning the weak. The previous season began with Noyonika Sengupta (Kajol), reeling by the betrayal of a cheating spouse Rajiv (Jisshu Sengupta), having to find her way back into a profession which she thought she had left behind. The cases, handed out by senior advocates Malini Khanna (Sheeba Chaddha) and Vishal Chaubey (Alyy Khan) plunges her into a discovery of the self — away from the roles of wife and mom to two young daughters — even as she learns to navigate office politics, learning the difference between who is a plunger of the knife (Gaurav Pandey), and who has her back.

Anurag Kashyap is back in the zone. The one which belongs to the nexus between small-town hoods, local netas-and-pehelwans, crooked cops, with men taking aim and putting one, not just right between the eye, but betwixt certain nether regions which have colourful descriptions in Purabiya.

Jolly LLB 3 has two Jollys, Jagdishwar Mishra (Akshay Kumar) and Jagdish Tyagi (Arshad Warsi), for the price of one, facing off in and out of a Delhi court. Their initial rivalry, spread over the first half, predictably rolls over into the two joining hands against the victims of a huge land fraud perpetrated by greedy land-grabbers, and their partners.

Two old friends get together to create a new brand. Of craft beer. In Gurgaon. Troubles pile up. The going doesn’t look as if it will be easy. Stop press. Gotta spill it right here, that the going is so hard that by the end of the first episode (there are eight in all), all I wanted to do was flee. It would have been one thing if this show, the latest offering from Dharmatic, was simply daft. Daftness, well done, can be a lot of fun. But ‘Do You Wanna Partner’ is plain terrible: there’s not one idea or performance that it can grab on to to save itself from going under, and staying there.

Some films come up to you, and slowly draw you in, until you are firmly within their spell. This is what happened to me when I watched ‘Jugnuma: The Fable’ : the quality of life being lived in the slow lane — the film is set in 1989, in the upper reaches of the Uttarakhand hills — where nothing much seems to happen, one day passing uneventfully into another, is ruptured by the growing feeling of something more, something elemental, something beyond our grasp. What writer and director Raam Reddy, with the help of cinematographer Sunil Borkar, and a cast which is one with the plan, has managed to pull off is quite remarkable. The two-hour film weaves in the prosaic, the quotidian, with quiet strokes of magical realism, leaving us wondering about our world, and the tantalising possibility of other worlds.

You know that a film baldly calling itself Bad Girl will be about a girl who is ‘bad’, but you also wonder how it will be different from films about a similar subject that have preceded it. Bad Girl makes no bones about telling us why Ramya (Anjali Sivaraman) is labelled so. All her instincts rebel against what ‘good girls’ are expected to do– be seen, not heard– in fact, not even be seen if that is going to upset her core family, which in Ramya’s case is her mum, dad, and grandmum, as well as school-teachers, principal, and every one else who makes a girl’s business their own, because, of course, a girl has no business that’s strictly her own.

First things first. For those who go looking for a detailed sketch of Gopal Patha, the so-called ‘Butcher of Bengal’, will be disappointed. The reason for this is evident. For the past several weeks, all we’ve been hearing in the context of Vivek Ranjan Agnihotri’s The Bengal Files is how it thrown a light on a forgotten chapter of our recent history in which Gopal Chandra Mukherjee, a local strongman, saved Calcutta from being ‘annexed by Pakistan’ on Direct Action Day on August 16, 1946. The first part of the statement is accurate. Yes, there are several slices of pre-Partition, pre-Independence events recreated in the three-and-a half-hour film, in which we see Gandhi arrayed on one side and Jinnah on the other, with the latter’s demand of a Muslim Pakistan being put into motion by the reluctantly-departing British.