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Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani (2023)
Poor writing with no redeeming qualities
Imagine you're an extremely rich person who has never stepped a foot outside of your rich Bollywood bubble and you're trying to write a story that has tropes of Punjabi and Bengali culture. You're also integrating the themes of dismantling the toxic Punjabi patriarchy and you've decided that the best character to do that would be a modern strong Bengali woman. It all sounds so very well intended but now consider this -
1. You haven't really met a Punjabi from West Delhi in real life so instead of actually learning about them via firsthand experience, you go by the cliches and stereotypes that music videos by mostly NRIs have created for you. All Punjabis seem to do is lift weights, avoid any kind of education, party and chase women.
2. Now, you haven't met a non-Bollywood normal Bengali either. So, your lazy self draws a character from Bengali stereotypes like being educated, artsy and you keep them a little low on the masculinity side. North India has a copyright on masculinity after all in your world.
3. Since you haven't had struggles that most commonfolks have like financial hardships and raising a family, the biggest struggle for you is how to stand up to your own family. Thus, you create a narcissistic character masquerading as a strong character who preaches to the Punjabi family and demands changes so that she can have a relationship. Now, a lesser person would have sensed the incompatibility from the outset and would have chosen to date others. Not our Rani though. When Rani fixes a bulb, she stand still with the bulb in her hand and demands that the whole world revolve around her.
4. The actual strong character creates an empire from scratch and keeps her son away from the influence of a cheating unambitious father. That character is actually the villain of the story because she maintains "some" control over the family.
That just really sums it up for me how I think the director went about making this one.
Animal (2023)
Ranbir Kapoor drives this action saga.
This has to be Ranbir Kapoor's best performance. Actions sequences are great to a point that they're setting up new standards for Bollywood. The background music is of top quality and adds a lot to the movie. The movie has a lot of scenes with high shock value which makes it engaging. All of the supporting cast did a great job as well with Anil Kapoor standing out as the regretful father.
The movie could have been edited more and could have been 20 mins shorter without losing anything of value. Despite being this long, the movie hastily sets up Bobby Deol's character and doesn't give him meaningful screen time. The story of the movie was sort of ordinary. Many of the scenes/dialogue seem to be inserted only because they are controversial or just show extreme brutality and these scenes don't add anything of value to the movie.
I see a lot of reviews criticizing the values of Ranbir's characters and downrating the movie because of that. It is important to note that Ranbir's character is not someone to be inspired from and learn your social values from. The movie is called "Animal" for a reason and those values are a net positive for the script.
Bawaal (2023)
Varun Dhawan shines as a comedian in an otherwise absurd mess.
We all have seen and heard stories of people maturing up or coming of age. In a good plot, a character goes through life situations, realizes his own life mistakes and learns from them. A good example would be Lakshya. In bad plots, the character gets spoonfed by someone and changes himself instantaneously as if nobody told them in the past about their bad qualities. One past example of spoon feeding was Doctor G and Bawaal is the most recent one.
I don't quite understand Bollywood's obsession with Europe and the idea of finding yourself there. It's as if people's personality changes while they're onboarding the plane and we see an entirely different person in Europe. Bawaal suffers from this phenomenon and it becomes very hard to explain how these conservative characters become all so open to criticism and feedback in Europe.
The comparison with Hitler was naive to say the least and very insensitive at it's worst. Hitler was not a street conman with an image to maintain. He was a very calculated and cunning leader.
I find it hard to believe someone actually thought that comparing a romcom situation to a devastating world war was a rational move. It's just absurd.
Kohrra (2023)
Some good performances but poor writing.
The show has way too many plot points and stories for its run time and because of that very reason, it couldn't do justice to any of them. Everything feels like it's forced upon us. It tries to go into backstories of its characters but never provides us with any convincing explanation.
The other problem is that none of the plot points feel unique which makes all of them very predictable. These plot points would have been sensational 5 years ago, but not anymore. Nothing caught me off guard and nothing really impressed me. Nothing stood out either. It's too dark of a show to be played in background and it's not excellent enough to deserve our full attention.
Doctor G (2022)
Kind of a coming of age story with incoherent character development and some funny moments.
Final verdict - Not really worth the time.
The Good :
1. The progression of the story was at a a good pace where you see Ayushman's character starting out as sort of an inconsiderate male chauvinist, then slowly learning a few things about life, women and how important the role of a doctor is in people's lives. He eventually comes out on the other side. By the end of the movie, he becomes somebody who you'd at the very least respect and at best even admire.
2. Unlike Anek, this movie does not come off as preachy and it tries to send it's message via storytelling, instead of weird out of place one off speeches.
3. Everybody acted really well. While the story doesn't exactly have way too complicated scenes where the actors have to show the depth of their acting, everybody did what was required of them very well.
The Bad:
1. Like many Bollywood movies, the love story pushed in this one also was sort of unnecessary and didn't exactly add anything of value to the main plot.
2. I had a really hard time understanding the characters in this one. For eg., Ayushman starts off as the kind of guy who doesn't listen to women, but he listens whenever he is shamed or bullied by other women. He even seeks their approval. It's like he is a male chauvinist who also cares too much about what women think of him at the same time and tries to please them at times. A little paradoxical. Rakul Preet Singh's character basically cheated on her fiance and yet somehow the director tried to paint her as a good person.
3. Shefali Shah seems underutilized in the movie. She is probably the actor with the most potential in the entire starcast of this movie. It seems like the director saw "Delhi Crime" season 2 and asked her basically to do the same one dimensional authoritarian woman here as well. I'd have been more interested in her story than the weird time wasting love story.
4. The movie has subplots that really go nowhere and add no value. About 20 mins could have been easily trimmed without losing much of the main plot.
The Ugly:
1. The movie has basically a "women can do no wrong" undertone and tries too hard to portray every one of them as basically a person with good intentions. It does so at the cost of making the male characters look as either extremely flawed or just downright weak.
2. At one point, an underage character says "I'm not ashamed of falling in love, but I'm ashamed of being stupid". This is horrible messaging. I don't want a 16 year old to think they're falling in love with a guy in his late 30s. The 16 yr old in this case is just a victim of being groomed and it taken advantage of. They should see it as such.
Delhi Crime (2019)
Season 2: Political messaging with poor story-telling.
Oh Netflix, why do you keep doing this to your shows. You prioritize political messaging over a coherent story telling so much so that you make even a good show like Delhi Crime look like a poorly written joke by an 18 yr old American liberal art student.
Season 2 just follows the standard Hollywood MCU garbage template - men bad, minorities good, and women dominant and super awesome. Apply this template to Delhi's society, throw in some crime sauce and you have Delhi Crime season 2.
I'm leaving 4 stars for Season 1 and Shefali Shah's acting. Unfortunately, good acting cannot save horrible writing.