Sneha Jaiswal's Blog, page 211

‘Nowhere To Be Found’ – Book Review

‘Nowhere To Be Found’ by Bae Suah is a fleetingly quick book narrated by a nameless protagonist, who meanders through her life, yet barely acquaints herself with the reader. Set in the 1980s, the narrator talks about having to work more than one job, starving half the time, and forming an abstract relationship with a young man who is two years older than her.

The blurb for the book goes – “A nameless narrator passes through her life, searching for meaning and connection in experiences she barely feels. For her, time and identity blur, and all action is reaction.”. But it doesn’t feel like the she is searching for any sort of meaning in anything, instead, she just passively goes through the motions of life, hoping perhaps for a quick burning death. Her father is in jail, mother an unemployed alcoholic, older brother looking for a new job, younger sister a school student. These relationships are barely scratched, although, there isn’t much to explore because the protagonist doesn’t share a deep bond with anybody in her life. There isn’t enough time for that.

While on one hand, it’s easy to read this book, some parts of it are quite poetic, while others feel too random. There is no cohesive flow to the events or narration, and it really becomes difficult to understand what exactly the point of the story is… probably nothing? For some reason, I was expecting a violent mysterious twist in the end, but the climax was just overwhelmingly bland. Maybe some of us are just not philosophical or ruminative enough to understand author Bae Suah’s intention with this work.

“Nowhere To Be Found” did nothing for me and is not something I would recommend anybody. It’s a 2/5 from me.

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Uncoupled Review – Fun For A Weekend Binge

By Sneha Jaiswal (Twitter | Instagram)

I woke up earlier than usual on a Saturday morning for a dentist appointment and had over an hour to kill before leaving. So, there was enough time to stream two and a half episodes of the 2022 Netflix series “Uncoupled” starring Neil Patrick Harris. Created by Jeffrey Richman and Darren Start, the story follows 40-something Michael, a real estate broker who gets dumped by his partner of seventeen years without a reason. Blindsided, heartbroken, angry…. newly single Michael tries to navigate the gay dating scene in New York with the help of some friends.

Neil Patrick Harris might not be as young and smooth like Barney Stinson from his ‘How I Met Your Mother’ days, but his sassy, snarky, supportive pack of friends keep you hooked to the show. A painful break-up is the crux of the plot, but the script keeps things witty and breezy, instead of spiraling into a long pity party where being 40s and single seems like the end of life. Michael hops on the Grindr (smelling sponsorship there) train to hedonism and shakes off the 17-year-old monogamous dust on his bed. There are enough cringe-y moments, along with some genuinely hilarious encounters, that keep things entertaining.

All the secondary characters fit in with the main storyline well, even the rich snooty divorcee Claire (Marcia Gay Harden), who plays a supercilious client being wooed by Michael and colleague/best-friend Suzanne (Tisha Campbell) for her fancy house up for sale. Marcia Gay Harden does the bitter new divorcee act with perfection and develops an uncanny friendship with Michael after finding out both off them have been unscrupulously dumped by their partners. Tisha Campbell is endearing as the ‘fun friend + colleague’, the only one isn’t as self-centred as Michael and everybody else in his social circle. Other friends include – Emerson Brooks as playboy weatherman Billy; Brooks Ashmanskas plays Stanley, an art dealer who is too ‘old school’ for dating apps; Colin Hanlon and Jai Rodriguez play long-time partners referred to as ‘the Jonathans’. While most of the characters have a narcissistic streak, their friendships are warm and it’s nice to see how they make time for each other despite successful careers and a long list of personal problems.

The series is eight episodes long, but Tu Watson who plays Michael’s long-time partner Colin is only seen in 4 of them. Because of his limited screen-time, it’s easy to root for the new men the protagonist meets through the show. With each new encounter, Michael has a new lesson for mid-life dating in the era of Grindr. Like going to a club full of hot prospective dates, yet looking up an app to see who is immediately available for what, instead of walking up to them with a pickup line. Brace yourself for some dick pics, steamy scenes and a big gay skiing getaway holiday.

Sure, Neil Patrick Harrison does a fantastic job with his whiny but sexy character, but it’s all the other elements of the show that make ‘Uncoupled’ entertaining. Marcia Gay Harden is only a side-show, but her cold character thaws slowly and begins to grow on the viewer and it makes you want to see some more of her in the episodes. The climactic episode was rather emotional in tone, unlike the light tone of the rest of the show, and surprisingly ends in a predictable cliff-hanger. After all the excitement and upheaval in his life, Michael has a shot at the comfort of domesticity again, will he take it? Jeffrey Richman and Darren Start leave that question hanging in the air for a possible season two.

It’s a 7.5/10 from me.

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Listen To – Persuasion Review – Anne With A Drinking Problem

Good Luck Jerry Review – Kooky, But Gets Chaotic

By Sneha Jaiswal (Twitter | Instagram) Scroll down for audio review

Jerry AKA Jaya Kumari, is an innocent looking girl from a lower middle-class family living in Punjab with her widowed mother and younger sister. When their mother is diagnosed with stage II cancer, Jerry takes up a job to transport drugs to make quick money.

Directed by Siddharth Sengupta, “Good Luck Jerry” stars Jahnvi Kapoor as the titular protagonist, and Mita Vashisht plays her mother. How Jerry stumbles into the world of cocaine makes for a rather amusing watch – an accidental encounter with a drug peddler on the run from the cops leads her at the door-step of Timmy (Jaswant Singh Dalal) a local supplier. Jerry charms Timmy into giving her a job and soon becomes not just the only woman in the gang, but also the most successful at hoodwinking cops. So things get dangerous when Jerry decides to call it quits.

This film is a reboot of Tamil movie “Kolamaavu Kokila”, so the decision to set the Bollywood adaptation in Punjab was a wise decision, since the state is known to have a drug problem. A problematic cop-thug nexus is depicted in the region, which enables drug peddlers to spread their tentacles with ease. All the actors do a pretty great job, the most fun was Deepak Dobriyal, who plays stalker/street romeo Rinku, madly and creepily in love with Jerry. In-fact, most of the male characters in the story are creepy in some or the other way. Unfortunately, despite a long-ish runtime, nobody gets enough space to grow on the viewer. And Jahnvi Kapoor’s Jerry is only sad or scared throughout the runtime, and even though the character does see a transformation, it just doesn’t shine the way it should, and it’s really the fault of the script-writers and director for not doing more with the protagonist’s characterization.

Viewers expecting some authentic Bihari twang from Jerry and family will be left disappointed, because all the Punjabi characters get the local accents bang-on, but the Biharis just sound out of place. However, I don’t really get the need of having a character sound from a certain place, especially if they aren’t even born and brought up in the region they are supposedly from. A few north-eastern characters get blink-and-miss appearances, which made it seem more like a half-heart attempt to show some representation, than an actual plot requirement.

There a few witty twists, but they involve minor characters and feel extremely underwhelming. You are made to wonder “why?! what’s the point?”, quite often in the second half. The pace gets slow, random shit starts to happen and viewers get a “Kaante” (the 2022 film) style climax. The ending is completely chaotic, and not in the ‘mad fun’ way. Since “Good Luck Jerry” is a reboot, the script-writers just had to tweak the script a little to make it more suitable for a north-Indian tale, and yet deliver an extremely poorly written ending, where Jerry is annoyingly “lucky”, so much so that it makes no sense. What starts off as a fun experience soon turns into regret.

It’s a 5/10 from me. You can stream the film on Disney Hotstar.

‘Live Is Life’ Review – Slice of Spanish Summer

Set against the expansive greenery of rural Galicia, the 2021 film ‘Live Is Life’ is a laid-back summer story about five friends spending their vacation together in 1985. So there’s a lot of talking, cycling, swimming, laughing and some fighting. I’ve never even been to Spain, but some scenes reminded me of the summer vacations we would spend at our grandparent’s village in the 90s, without the luxury of technological distractions.

Directed by Dani de la Torre, ‘Live Is Life’ is largely shot outdoors, against thick forests and lakes that look like post-card pictures. The five teen boys plan go hiking on a mountain known for a magical flower, each has their own reason for seeking it out. For example, one of them hopes to fix his grades, while another hopes the flower could help wake his father from a coma. The boys are often bullied or chased by mean older college boys riding motorcycles, which seemed a little far-fetched, but added a touch of excitement to the otherwise leisurely paced story.

The friendships between the boys is sweet, they behave like kids their age, and chat about things that range from completely silly to rather profound. All the young actors do a great job slipping into their roles, while the adults have very brief cameos, mostly only to mind the boys. Dani de la Torre and team strike a fine balance between the serious and silly, it’s what makes a lot of moments from the film very relatable. And anybody who has ever spent a school summer vacation in the countryside will get reminiscent about being a kid.

It’s a 7/10 from me. You can stream it on Netflix.

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‘Let Them All Talk’ Review – Mundane

My blind belief and love for Meryl Streep made me have a ‘watch party’ on Amazon Prime to stream the 2020 movie ‘Let Them All Talk’. One girlfriend joined from Mumbai, the other from Krakow and the three of us watched this film about three friends in anticipation of a crescendo… that never came. The problem is, the characters don’t talk all that much, and when they do, it isn’t as engaging as you’d expect it to be.

Directed by Steven Soderbergh, the film is about a famous Pulitzer winning author Alice (Streep), who is traveling on a cruise to receive an award in England and has invited two estranged friends on the luxurious ship in a bid to re-connect with them. Dianne Wiest plays practical friend Susan who works with domestic abuse victims, while Candice Bergen plays the only interesting character in the entire cast – the divorced Roberta who sells lingerie and thinks Alice ruined her life by writing about her. So, she attempts to lure rich men on the cruise and blatantly ignores Alice on the trip.

Streep-Wiest-Bergen are terrific trio, but since their friendship in the story is fraught, they never really talk heart-to-heart and come off as a bunch of boring old ladies. There’s a mundane sub-plot involving Alice’s nephew Tyler (Lucas Hedges) who accompanies her on the ship and tries to spark a romance with his aunt’s agent Karen (Gemma Chan). Now Tyler and Karen are young, but they are just as dull as a lonely old person waiting to retire so they can stare at empty spaces the whole day.

Maybe there is a lesson for viewers, about how life can be terribly lonely for famous eccentric authors, and that you won’t necessarily be forgiven if you’ve wronged a friend… but do we need to watch a boring film to learn life can be mundane, painful and sad? I don’t think so.

It’s a 5/10 from me.

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Reading ‘Blue’ by Emmelie Prophete

I’ve been trying to finish ‘Blue’ by Emmelie Prophete, and I tried even harder to stir up enough interest within me to keep reading a few more pages each day… but it didn’t happen. I gave up after reading half the book, because despite the author’s beautiful poetic writing, there’s is no coherent narrative and things start to feel repetitive.

Translated by Tina Kover, it’s written in first person and the narrator starts off by talking about her mother and aunts and what it’s like to grow up as a girl in a country “when it was no place to be born and no place to be female”. She speaks of leaving home, of dreaming of a better tomorrow, of happiness always being a little out of reach. The reader at the beginning of the novel is informed this is a work of fiction, the characters imaginary, yet the words feel deeply personal, like your are thumbing through someone’s private diary meant for the eyes of those near and dear. While works like these can be engaging, here it felt like you needed to know the women personally to care about the narrator’s thoughts. And those thoughts are all over the place.

Blue is like a long never-ending poem, where the poet rambles on and on and on… reading this book is like watching a river flow through a forest, sure, it looks beautiful, maybe even calming, but after a point, you are going to get bored and move on to doing something else.

After over a week of struggling through the first sixty pages, I stopped reading it. So no rating from me. It’s just not meant for everybody. Maybe you’d like it. Or not.

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Footfairy Review – Dry Dialogues Kill This Murder Mystery

Gulshan Devaiah plays CBI inspector Vivan Deshmukh, who heads the investigation into a string of peculiar serial-killings in Mumbai in the 2020 crime-drama ‘Footfairy’. An ingenious killer murders women around railway stations, cuts off their feet and leaves the bodies for the police to find. Without a trace of evidence.

Directed by Kanishk Verma, the plot about a bunch of cops trying to nab a serial-killer with a foot-fetish is definitely intriguing. However, for those who’ve lived in Mumbai, it’s hard to believe that a sparsely populated Bandra station can exist at 11 pm on any given day, or that roads can be deserted along local rail lines in a city that barely sleeps. But for the sake of enjoying a fictional murder mystery, we can let those details slide by. However, despite a riveting story, the banter and dialogues between the cops and characters in general are very dry and boring. There are a few clever or funny liners in between, but not enough to keep a two hour long film engaging.

The characters oftentimes over-explain situations, so the script feels patronizing; maybe the intention was to make things simpler for those who aren’t used to watching crime dramas or are unfamiliar with fetishes. However, in a bid to befriend those new to the genre, the makers alienate seasoned crime fans. Any episode of the Indian series ‘Crime Patrol’ is a lot more entertaining than ‘Footfairy’, in-fact Verma and team even borrow a dialogue or two from Crime Patrol officers; like a line that goes “kundali nikaalo iski”, metaphor for doing a thorough background check.

There’s a small romantic sub-plot involving Vivan Deskhmukh and a pediatrician called Devika (Sagarika Ghatge in a very awkward cameo) which is tied to the primary plot but could’ve been completely avoided. It does nothing but slow the story down and there’s zero chemistry between the two actors. Devaiah has better onscreen partnership with all the actors playing his colleagues.

An open-ended climax was the most disappointing aspect of this film, viewers are left to make their own calculations and for all you know, maybe the real murderer was never shown in the story. Had this been a franchise, say like a Sherlock Holmes, where amid multiple stories there is one case left unsolved, it might’ve been okay, but for a new standalone film with a slow-burn investigation, the ‘go figure’ ending was exceedingly frustrating.

It’s a 5/10 from me. You can stream the film on Netflix.

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Too Old For Fairy Tales Review: Low-Key Entertaining

Most kids munch chips while playing games, but little Waldek snacks on a bowl of chocolates as he fights opponents on the computer. The boy dreams of winning a gaming tournament with his team, but when his mother puts him in the care of an eccentric aunt for a few days, Waldek is forced to live a completely different life than he is used too. That’s the primary plot of 2022 Polish movie ‘Za Duzy Na Bajki’ aka ‘Too Old For Fairy Tales’, and if having to watch a pampered overweight kid deal with a disciplinarian old nut sounds like a fun film idea to you, definitely stream it on Netflix.

Directed by Kristoffer Rus, the family-comedy is based on a novel by Agnieszka Dabrowska. Maciej Karas plays protgaonist Waldec with ease, he is annoying at first, but slowly grows on the viewer. Dorota Kolak is wickedly amusing as the ‘psycho’, who takes away all of Waldek’s chocolates the moment mom is out of the building and tries to teach him the importance of moderation. From the poster, ‘Za Duzy Na Bajki’ appeared to be just another film about kids playing games and creating trouble, but it turned out be more wholesome than I was expecting it to be.

The cinematography is simple, bright and compliments the linear straightforward storytelling. In an interesting decision, the makers use minimal background music to enhance scenes and it works in making the characters and situations believable. There are a lot of little life lessons along with a generous sprinkling of subtle humor throughout the film; however the most important theme is perhaps a warning against helicopter parenting. Karolina Gruszka plaus Waldek’s over-protective mother Teresa, who is absolutely supportive of his gaming ambitions, but is also constantly hovering over him, doing everything for him. Kids needs some independence too.

Unlike the English title of the film, the climax does have a cliched ‘happy ending’ straight out of a modern fairy tale, so you will probably finish the movie with a smile.

It’s a 7/10 from me.

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Valley Of The Dead – Quick Movie Review

The Spanish zombie horror film ‘Valley of The Dead’ ( Original title – Malnazidos ) is a comedic-period piece that will only amuse zombie-horror fans. So I was amused and entertained.

Directed by Alberto De Toro and Javier Ruiz Caldera, ‘Malnazidos’ is set sometime during the Spanish Civil War and starts off with a wedding horribly gone wrong. A community is gathered outside a church to celebrate a wedding in their small Spanish village, when a band of Nazis arrive at the scene and gun them down. Meanwhile, Captain Jan Lozano (Miki Esparbe) is sent on a dangerous mission with a young soldier and the two land in the hands of enemy soldiers on their way, but they have a bigger problem – zombies. Rival soldiers are forced to unite against diseased men & women who rise back from their deaths to eat those alive.

The plot-line is intriguing to say the least, there are enough zombie flicks out there, but ‘Malnazidos’ makes things crazy by setting the plot during the Spanish civil war, a time when soldiers would’ve never thought they’d encounter something worse than blood-thirty Nazis. What’s worse than a Nazi? A zombie Nazi! In large parts, the film is breezy in tone, it doesn’t get too serious, but is not an out and out horror comedy either.

For a timeline where people weren’t as familiar with zombies the characters in the film are quick on their feet and don’t make dumb decisions, despite struggling to understand what they are dealing with. And most characters are soldiers, they sure know how to work a gun and kill a walking dead person. (Reminds me of how irritated I was with some characters in the series ‘All Of Us Are Dead’, especially because they literally mention ‘Train To Busan’, yet not behave like they are in a life-and-death situation).

Unfortunately, this a very generic zombie flick, with little suspense and close to zero nail-biting scenes. While stories that explain the origins of a zombie outbreak tend to feel more satisfactory, ‘Malnazidos’ would’ve been better off keeping it a mystery. Overall, it’s a decent watch for horror fans.

For a zombie flick, it’s a 6/10 from me. You can stream it on Netflix.

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Listen to Ep 39 -15 Horror Films You Might Want To Skip

Five Graphic Novel Adaptations Worth Checking Out

By Sneha Jaiswal (Twitter | Instagram)

A lot of times you want to read a book, but just cannot squeeze in the time in your busy day. That’s why we have graphic novels – long standalone comics that make time fly by.

Listen to the latest episode on Abstract AF’s podcast where I recommend 5 graphic novel adaptations of popular fiction books. They may not capture the essence of the originals in their entirety, but are engaging and delightful nonetheless. These books are absolutely worth checking out if you’ve never had the time to read the long-form versions.