Tatsam Mukherjee

Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s Digger might be the most self-serious unserious film I’ve seen in recent memory. Ostentatious sets, unsubtle acting punctuated by facial tics, and a score (by Cosmo Sheldrake) that underlines nearly every emotion: the film rarely looks like the finest hour of its star-studded team. Then, about a third into the 129-minute film, Inarritu reveals his conceit: what we’ve been watching is a rehearsal of a play called Fossil Fools, supposed to premiere later in the day. Built around greedy fossil fuel baron Digger Rockwell (Tom Cruise), who [in the film’s world] triggered an apocalypse with his reckless extraction rigs in Greenland and Alaska, Inarritu’s film admits to be aiming for a deliberately underwhelming play. Its lead, Curtis Markson (Cruise, the actor playing Digger) says he feels “disconnected” with the play. However, Digger also commits the cardinal sin of supplementing the play with a film that has frustratingly little to add to modern discourse. As a result, the over-the-top play begins to look like an excuse for a shoddy film.

One of the great joys of watching a Kartik Subbaraj film is enumerating a list in your head of his possible sources of inspiration. It remains true for his latest directorial venture, Dorothy, too. Like how a home without a woman’s touch has echoes of Kanu Behl’s Titli (2013) – a film about a carjacking crew, comprising a father and his three sons. A scene where the couple bows down to touch an elder’s feet, only to cut to a marriage scene when the couple gets back up, but the man has been replaced by someone belonging to the same dominant caste as the woman. It’s the kind of deadpan comedy scene I’d expect in a modern Malayalam film. A character tries to clumsily kill someone, and repeatedly fails, reminiscent of the assassins in Martin McDonagh’s In Bruges (2013). A black-and-white track takes place in the present, while cutting to a flashback in colour, like in Christopher Nolan’s Memento (2000). There’s also the grit and rigour of the Madurai gangster film, championed by the likes of Vetri Maaran, M. Sasikumar, given how the film centres itself around young boys being taught to ‘man up’ each time they walk, eat or wince while seeing a floating corpse, violence. They’re also repeatedly told crying ‘like a woman’ is disgusting.

In the last few years, a strange but recognisable character has emerged on social media feeds: the lifestyle influencer. Preying on our voyeuristic tendencies, some of them stand at the junction of substance and salaciousness. Every trending topic becomes an opportunity to package their grandstanding as introspection, and monetise their exhibitionism. It’s an endless repository for ‘content’, and it is only a matter of time before the dopamine spikes (surrounding engagement) begin to sidestep the ethical quagmires. I was reminded of lifestyle influencers a lot while watching Lance Oppenheim’s Primetime, because before one could peek into people’s lives through phones, there was reality TV. Even though To Catch A Predator (on NBC) started out as an exposé on creepy men soliciting sex from minors, the quest for ratings and well-known host Chris Hansen’s ambition, turned a news piece into a muggy, diseased version of the American dream.

In Zach Cregger’s reboot of the Resident Evil franchise, a character appears capable of killing the zombies unleashed on Raccoon city. Appearing halfway into the film, I finally settled into my seat – taking comfort in the fact that the Milla Jovovich version of the film was about to begin. Designed as a shooting videogame in 1990s Japan, the film franchise gained notoriety for its genre thrills and Jovovich’s elaborate action set-pieces, which only got bigger, more intricate with the success of each film. But true to Cregger’s ability to pull the rug from underneath us, in the eighth film of the franchise, the action hero character unceremoniously disappears. Another well-known face, who you imagine will stick around for longer in the film, is taken out. In Zach Cregger’s apocalypse, there are no saviours.

Unfortunately, I’m not on team Kunal Khemu. I used to be, when I thought of him as an actor who didn’t get his due. However, his directorial debut, Madgaon Express (2024), changed that. Laced with typical “boys-will-be-boys” silliness, I found myself drifting off during many points of the inanity that was unfolding on screen. It needs a special kind of wit and sorcery to keep people invested in a film where nothing truly matters but the makers’ whimsy. Then I heard his views on pay parity, on his wife Soha Ali Khan’s podcast, and he didn’t seem all that wise. It’s futile to assume the above instances wouldn’t colour my perspective of his directorial venture, Vibe, a film he has also co-produced, and is starring in. But for the sake of fairness, I have to concede that there are few things more effortless in Hindi cinema than Khemu enacting a gag he wrote.

Netflix’s Lust Stories is the only anthology to have made it to its third season, and there might be good reason. For a society as repressed as ours, sex brings out adequate intrigue on the part of the audience, assuring a base viewership. Meanwhile, by constantly shuffling filmmakers, the interpretations remain fresh, and sex becomes a capsule to be filled with commentary on inequities, female desire, and a rarely spoken language in an otherwise verbose film industry. Lust Stories 3 features a line-up of directors, which audiences will forever be curious about: Kiran Rao, Vikramaditya Motwane, Shakun Batra and Vishal Bhardwaj. The results are middling to positive. But one thing I genuinely appreciated about all four films, is their intent to showcase the length and breadth of Hindi cinema, and its varying aesthetic, refusing to paint Bollywood as a monolith – which it has begun to seem like, given its over-dependence on star-led spectacles. Also, I enjoyed the music in all films, complimenting the sensibility of the respective mise en scene.

In a hyper-capitalistic city where everything/one is for sale, where desires can be preyed upon as a means to an end, how does one take on a man who wants… nothing? It’s the question at the heart of Aravind Adiga’s Last Man in Tower (2011) – following Yogesh Murthy, a resident of Vishram society, who refuses to cower in front of a gleaming offer by builder Dharmesh Shah. In director Ben Rekhi’s feature film adaptation, Murthy is changed to Mishra, presumably because of Manoj Bajpayee playing the part. Bajpayee played a similarly stoic, wilting Mumbai resident in Bhonsle (2018). Shah is played by Boman Irani, who was a builder in Khosla Ka Ghosla (2006) too. Irani is great at making his villains palpably human. There’s a wonderful moment where he coughs through his chronic bronchitis—and then takes a deep breath of the noxious fumes at a building site. “It gives me life,” he tells a doctor earlier in the film, after being informed about his deteriorating lung condition because of his very line of work.

A lot of what I like about the Mirzapur franchise can be boiled down to its title theme by John Stewart Eduri. The sound of blacksmiths at work, a minimal bass and synth line, with some light orchestration. Nothing else exemplifies the workman-like focus and the leanness of the early seasons like Eduri’s score. After three seasons of diminishing returns, the show has been rebooted into a feature film, in a parallel timeline when the events of season one concluded. Kaleen Bhaiya (a role that propelled Pankaj Tripathi to stardom in the streaming space) strategically protects his Mirzapur throne, a primary bastion to power in Purvanchal. His son Munna (Divyenndu) is too volatile to automatically be entrusted with it.