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Business News/ Industry / Media/  Friday Film Wrap: ‘War,’ competes with ‘Joker,’ ‘Sye Raa Narasimha Reddy’
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Friday Film Wrap: ‘War,’ competes with ‘Joker,’ ‘Sye Raa Narasimha Reddy’

Telugu epic action film Sye Raa Narasimha Reddy tries too hard to impress
  • For the Hollywood fans, American psychological thriller Joker comes to India this week
  • ‘War’, starring Hrithik Roshan and Tiger Shroff, was released on Wednesday. (Photo: Mint)Premium
    ‘War’, starring Hrithik Roshan and Tiger Shroff, was released on Wednesday. (Photo: Mint)

    New Delhi: It’s an exciting and packed week at the movies, with a big Hollywood offering competing with multiple local films.

    War directed by Siddharth Anand starring Hrithik Roshan, Tiger Shroff and Vaani Kapoor is in some ways an exciting action thriller, says Firstpost. The overall excitement in the screenplay compensates for some flaws and the inordinately loud background score, especially if you are in an indulgent mood having accepted that in most departments War is conventional Bollywood. All in all then, this could have been a suspenseful, eyecatching, entertaining ride. But for its politics. Behind the guns, gloss and glamour, what this film is, is a painfully condescending ode to Muslim loyalty to our nation, an ode that is particularly cynical and offensive considering that the past five years have been marked by unprecedented Islamophobia in India.

    The Indian Express calls the film flashy but familiar. Every frame bristling with the combined smirk-and-swag of Hrithik-Tiger, lavish locations all around the world, lots of fast-paced chases--War has all of the above, and yet, it’s in the not quite there zone: not quite smart enough, and most importantly, not quite new enough.

    Telugu epic action film Sye Raa Narasimha Reddy directed by Surender Reddy starring Chiranjeevi, Nayanthara, Sudeep, Vijay Sethupathi and Jagapati Babu tries too hard to impress, says NDTV. History as hysteria, India's freedom struggle as mythology and a megastar as a giant, spotless cutout in live-action overdrive: that, in a nutshell, is Sye Raa Narasimha Reddy, a film that is out to sweep the audience off their feet with sheer scale and spectacle. It succeeds only sporadically. Chiranjeevi's charisma hasn't waned one bit. He holds parts of the film together but an uneven screenplay prevents Sye Raa Narasimha Reddy from serving up anything more than a showy basket of tricks that are superficial at best.

    For the Hollywood fans, American psychological thriller Joker directed by Todd Phillips starring Joaquin Phoenix comes to India this week. Empire magazine calls the film bold, devastating and utterly beautiful. Phillips and Phoenix have not just reimagined one of the most iconic villains in cinema history, but reimagined the comic book movie itself. The movie could, particularly in the current climate, be viewed as a lament for outsiders and the ignored. That’s too simple and Joker does anything but deliver you easy answers. It’s a sad, chaotic, slow-burn study of someone who isn’t visible; who doesn’t even exist to the world around them.

    Joker manages the nimble feat of telling the Joker’s origin story as if it were unprecedented, says Variety magazine. We badly need comic-book films that have a verité gravitas, that unfold in the real world, so that there’s something more dramatic at stake than whether the film in question is going to rack up a billion-and-a-half dollars worldwide. The movie does something that flirts with danger — it gives evil a clown-mask makeover, turning it into the sickest possible form of cool.

    Tamil romantic comedy 100% Kadhal starring G.V Prakash Kumar and Shalini Pandey directed by M.M Chandramouli is an interminably long, juvenile romance, says The Times Of India. The line readings lack any bit of authenticity, making the performances highly artificial and unconvincing. No wonder that not even a single scene works, save for the unintentionally funny ones.

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    ABOUT THE AUTHOR
    Lata Jha
    "Lata writes about the media and entertainment industry for Mint, focusing on everything from traditional film and TV to newer areas like video and audio streaming services. She loves movies and spends a lot of her free time watching them, which makes her job both fun and a bit of a challenge. Lata tries to find and write about things in the entertainment world that most people don't notice, even though a lot of people in her country are really into movies and entertainment news often just talks about the glamorous side of things. "
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    Published: 04 Oct 2019, 12:22 PM IST
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