Sneha Jaiswal's Blog, page 244

Night Teeth Review – All Bass, No Bite

The only thing good about the 2021 vampire Netflix film “Night Teeth” is the music. The movie is laden with some groovy hip-hop songs with good bass, makes you want to use one of those music apps to recognize the tracks. For the first time that I didn’t even bother to finish the film to look up the sound-track, even took a ‘social media’ break, browsed through my feed, tweeted a little, before hitting resume on the pause button.

Directed by Adam Randall, ‘Night Teeth’ feels like it’s made by a rich teen who really wanted to make something vampire-themed for Halloween. Visually, the film looks great, it’s stylish, has a very video-game aesthetic, with a lot of neon-lights and bright colors. The first few minutes feauture a lot of cool street-art and graffiti. Actor Jorge Lendeborg Jr. plays the protagonist Benny, a young college student, who covers for his brother as a chauffeur one night. He is driving two mysterious young women, who want to party-hop around Los Angeles through the night. They are actually vampires on a mission to annihilate some their own kind. Lucy Fry is Zoe and Debby Ryan plays Blaire, the blood-suckers Benny is driving around town. While Jorge has some charm as the clueless college student, the two ladies have zero charisma. They feel more like adult delinquents, than the badass killers director Randall perhaps intended them to be.

After the first thirty minutes, it gets challenging to keep your interest up; maybe Randall’s team shouldn’t have picked all those kick-ass songs, the plot just cannot keep up with the beats, and comes across as a shit-fest in comparison. There is a completely useless ‘blink and miss’ cameo by Megan Fox, so if you are a fan, don’t get your hopes up. Also, it’s probably good that Fox had only a few seconds, because I don’t even remember the last time I saw her on screen, and she seems to have gotten rusty in the acting department, or maybe she didn’t get paid enough to care.

‘Night Teeth’ is so boring and disappointingly predictable that I wouldn’t even put it under the bracket of ‘silly flick you can watch with your friends if you don’t want to pay attention to details’. There are no details anyway. The writer is someone called Brent Dillon who hasn’t written any other screenplay in the past, this is literally the only writing credit he has on his IMDB page.

It’s a 4/10 from me. Reminds one of the phrase ‘all bark, no bite’.

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Love in a Fallen City Review – Vivid Prose From The 1940s

She wasn’t a bird in a cage. A bird in a cage, when the cage is opened, can still fly away. She was a bird embroidered onto a screen—a white bird in clouds of gold stitched onto a screen of melancholy purple satin. The years passed; the bird’s feathers darkened, mildewed, and were eaten by moths, but the bird stayed on the screen even in death.

Excerpt from ‘Love in a Fallen City’ by Eileen Chang

If it hadn’t been for an online literature course offered by Harvard on EdX, some readers like me would’ve never learnt of Chinese author Eileen Chang. It’s such a shame, because despite having a literature degree, I had not heard of her until September 2021. Not from friends, or teachers or fellow ‘bibliophiles’ in the online community.

“Love in a Fallen City” is a short-story collection by Chang, set mostly in the 1940s, spread over 300 pages, with six distinctly different tales. Four of them are almost novella sized, while just two are actually short. The book starts with ‘Aloeswood Incense’, a story of a teen-girl called Weilong, whose parents plan to move cities and expect her to repeat a whole year, because they cannot afford her tuition & boarding fees. So Weilong hopes to seek help from her father’s estranged sister, Madame Liang, a wealthy widow living in one of the poshest districts of Hong Kong. It almost feels like a Chinese reboot of ‘Great Expectations’, except that Madame Liang is no Miss Havisham; instead, she is a young woman, still in her 40s, charming enough to lure young men and have her fun.

Chang weaves engrossing sentences, filled with rich imagery of the scenes where the stories unfold. Long descriptive sentences that I usually find tedious/annoying in most other novels (even if the author is a literary rock-star), were soothing and essential in Eileen Chang’s prose. A lot of lines almost feel like poetry in motion. However, the most interesting bit about her stories is the fact that they are set in a time when the Chinese people were struggling to strike a balance between their traditional customs and the rapid Americanisation of life in the upper circles of their cities. So there is a lot of this ‘east versus west’ struggle that some of the characters face. Like how her women protagonists want to be able to go out and date men, but fear gossip and slander, which holds them back from speaking their heart and resorting to mind-games.

This struggle seems to be most stark in the story titled ‘Jasmine Tea’, where the protagonist is a young college boy, whose father loathes him, because his deceased mother was never happy in the marriage. The boy viciously curses his dead mother, wondering why she couldn’t just pursue her dreams – which included studying further and pursuing a relationship with a man who wasn’t her equal in class – and lead a more content life, because he thinks it could’ve meant having a father who cherished him. But he then chides himself, rationalizing that the times his mother lived in was much more conservative and she couldn’t lead life on her own terms. The women protagonists throughout Chang’s stories are held back in different ways, because of the unequal place they hold in the society due to their gender. It almost gets frustrating at points, to see these women being restrained and stifled by bizarre expectations.

It’s easy to see why publishers picked the title of the story called ‘Love in a Fallen City’, because it’s definitely the most vivid of them all – of two adults falling for each other during wartime, when the city around them is crumbling. There’s a sudden shift in scenarios in the story, one minute the protagonists are dancing at fancy parties in expensive hotels, the next they are surrounded by bombings, with little food to themselves, since the most of rations is reserved for front-line soldiers. The name for this romance that’s filled with contradictions couldn’t have been more apt.

A lot of readers might not enjoy how manipulative Chang’s women leads are, but given the cultural/historical context, it’s not like they had a lot of choice – a woman couldn’t just get what she wanted if she asked for it upfront. Ridiculous, yes. Readers will also get to learn how Hong Kong and Shanghai are a world apart from each other – their food is different, their language is different, among other cultural elements. Add to that the tumultuous period itself – the 1940s.

The only story that I did not like at all was the one called “The Golden Cangue”, it felt like an Indian “saas-bahu” family drama, a genre that is all about scheming mother-in-laws and evil sister-in-laws. Also, it was the only story where it was hard to keep up with the names of the multiple protagonists and just what the hell was going on. Fortunately, the next one is ‘Sealed Off’, a great short story that completely changes the mood. We are in the thick of World War II in this one, where people are stuck in a tram-car for hours because of an air raid. Two passengers, a married man and a single teacher strike a flirtatious conversation, forgetting their regular lives for a while, imagining a romance that could’ve been.

For someone who has never read any Chinese literature but is curious about it, Eileen Chang seems to be a great place to start. She conjurer up moods, places, aromas and relationships that are spirited and colorful. It almost feels like you are watching a mini-series. It’s a 4/5 from me.

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Sardar Udham Review – An Epic Tale That’s Protracted

The year is 1931, we first hear the clang of prison bars over a black screen, a policeman soon comes into view and unlocks a cell, where our hero is lying. “Azaadi mubarak ho” the cop says, congratulating him on his freedom, the first dialogue in the 2021 biopic ‘Sardar Udham’, perhaps a deliberate use of irony, because the revolutionary never saw what he fought for all his life – the independence of India from British rule.

Written by Shubhendu Bhattacharya and Ritesh Shah, the film’s directed by Shoojit Sircar, who has delivered some quirky movies in the past, but is new to the historical drama territory. Actor Vicky Kaushal plays the titular role of Udham Singh with aplomb, exuding every bit the stubborn-obsessive revolutionary who wants to revive the broken spirit of Indians and send a strong message to their British oppressors – they must quit India. He went down the pages of history for assassinating the former Governor of Punjab, Michael O’Dwyer, who had approved of General Dyer’s massacre at Jallianwalla Bagh, where soldiers open-fired at a peaceful gathering of unarmed protestors, killing and wounding over 2000 innocents. The movie follows Udham’s journey from India to England, and how he patiently plotted the assassination over years.

What’s most applause-worthy about ‘Sardar Udham’ is how the makers haven’t scrimped at all when it comes to the sets and props. More often than not, too much money is spent on big-ticket actors, and little of the budget is left to spend on actual production value. Not with this film. From the snow-cold wilderness of Russia, to the alleys of London, or the bloodied-streets of Punjab, Shoojit Sircar has lavishly shot this epic tale, never resorting to clever tricks of photography or storytelling to avoid the extra costs of making a period piece. With a significant foreign cast playing roles of British officers and activists, Sircar lays his bets on some interesting actors. Stephen Hogan plays detective John Swaine, delivering a measured performance as the Britisher in-charge of Udham’s case and as someone who seems to understand the Indian’s ideological purpose. What we end up with is a solid first hour, of how Udham Singh flees India, despite being under surveillance, hoping to gather support for India’s independence movement abroad. Indian viewers will find themselves reaching for tissues in the first hour itself.

What makes the movie falter is Shoojit Sircar’s lack of faith in the audience – because his team of writers over-imagine, over-explain and overstretch a tale that could’ve been wrapped up in two hours. But there’s an additional 40 minutes of fictional things that were unnecessary. For example, there are some fictional interactions between Udham Singh and O’Dwyer in London (months before the murder), which is an attempt by the makers to display just ‘how evil’ Dwyer was. There’s also a pointless sequence of Udham ranting against the British, while he is drunk and alone at a London park. And then, out of nowhere, there’s a girl (Banita Sandhu), introduced in flashbacks, after zero foreshadowing in the first 60 minutes. It was quite disappointing to see Sircar resorting to the typical Bollywood trope of romance, but thankfully, he doesn’t overdo it. And there are no songs. Phew.

The movie has a heart-wrenching flashback to the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in Amritsar, when Udham Singh was a 20-year-old man. The film doesn’t hold back on the gory details of the bloodbath, and will have viewers in tears. But, again, Sircar and team stretch the night of the massacre for far too long, showing sequence after sequence of mangled bodies being carried around, of mothers and children wailing in excruciating pain. It goes on for about 30 minutes. And while I was hoping for a longer/fiery courtroom exchange at the end, when Udham finally goes on trial for killing O’Dwyer, that bit was surprisingly brief.

Despite projecting Udham as a revolutionary who wasn’t just hankering for ‘revenge’ for Jallianwala in the beginning, they sort-of reduce him to just that – a man thirsting for vengeance. They wash away all the other layers to him towards the climax – like that of the working class Indian immigrant who worked several odd jobs around the world, to both survive and gain support for the Indian cause of Independence.

Flawed as it is, ‘Sardar Udham’ is a long due tribute to the revolutionary and is performed to perfection by Vicky Kaushal. It’s a 7.5/10 from me.

(The film is available to stream on Amazon Prime.)

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Searching – Quick Movie Review

It’s been a while since the 2018 film ‘Searching’ came out, in-fact I saw in on Amazon Prime two years ago. So why review it now? Because the thriller is now available to stream on Netflix and is worth a watch. So this is really a more of a ‘movie recommendation’ write-up, than a review. Which is why it’s also going to be quick.

Directed by Aneesh Chaganty, the film is about a father desperately trying to piece together clues to track down his missing daughter. Actor John Cho plays David Kim, a strong-willed unrelenting father, who refuses to believe that his teen daughter deliberately disappeared to lead a new life; because that’s what the cops seem to believe from circumstantial evidence. How David goes about piecing-together clues to crack the case forms the rest of the story.

What makes ‘Searching’ stand-out, is the fact that most of the movie unfolds on a laptop screen – through chats, videos, cctv footage, video calls and what not. And even though it’s not the first time a film-maker has tried this, Chaganty and team are able to pull it off quite well. There are a few slow moments, and it’s not like those mystery-thrillers that will have you on the edge of your seat, and yet, most viewers will find themselves invested in Daniel’s search for his lost daughter.

It’s a 7.5/10 from me. If you are looking for a thriller to watch, stream it on Netflix. It’s no longer available on Amazon Prime.

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Please Tell Me So – Short Film Review

Director: Jang Youngsun
Cast: Han Hyunjun, Ahn Jong Sun

The opening shot of the 2021 Korean short film ‘Please Tell Me So’ is art in motion – a man is sleeping on what looks like a steel kitchen counter top, like he is tired of everything. The scene exudes a cold sad loneliness, and then a hand comes into the frame, waking the man up, bringing him back to reality. Our tired protagonist is Yu Gyeom, who works at a barista, and is woken up by a handsome young customer.

Only eight minutes long, this short-film sweetly captures the essence of love in the time of dating apps. Yu Gyeom is completely mesmerized by the handsome customer Seung Woo (Ahn Jong Sun) and keeps describing Woo as his ‘ideal type’ on a gay dating app Blued (they sponsored the movie). Will the two move beyond exchanging glances at the cafe to something more?

Director Jang Youngsun keeps it simple, balancing the warm loneliness of a cafe, with some bright outdoor shots in the second-half of the film. There’s a dramatic flourish of piano music in the first few minutes, that makes the story seem more serious than it really is. The two leads are comfortable in their skins and play their roles to perfection – Han Hyunjun as the smitten, nervous Gyeom and Ahn Jong Sun as the more intimidating/mysterious Seung Woo. The plot has the potential of being a larger length movie or series.

‘Please Tell Me So’ is a fun little short film with a photo-finish ending. It’s a 4/5 from me.

The movie is available on the Korean brand Strongberry’s YouTube’s channel (also embedded below).

Book Vs Show – Haunting of The Hill House

American author Shirley Jackson’s horror novel ‘The Haunting of Hill House’ was first published in 1959. It’s been a while. The spotlight came back on the novel when Mike Flanagan made a Netflix mini-series by the same name in 2018, loosely based on Jackson’s work.

One of the biggest differences is the fact that Flanagan’s series is not a retro horror show, but is set in the current times. So there are obviously very little similarity between the two works, except for the haunted house theme. In the latest episode of ‘Abstract AF’, we list 20 ways the two of them are different. Listen in and please subscribe.

Confessions of an Invisible Girl – Film Review

First off, there is nothing remotely akin to a ‘confession’ in the 2021 Netflix teen comedy ‘Confessions of an Invisible Girl’, which is both written & directed by Bruno Garotti. The problem is, Garotti is still stuck with last century ideas of female beauty. The protagonist is 15-year-old Tete, a ‘nerd’, who moves to a new school and tries hard to start over. What’s her problem? She doesn’t have friends, studies too much and is practically bullied by everybody around her, including her grandmother and mother – for having too much body hair & being a loser.

Even an idiot can see from the very first minute of the film that Actor Klara Casthanho who plays Tete is a total cutie with uncombed hair. The excessive ‘body hair’ everybody keeps taunting her about wasn’t even visible to me. All that girl has to do is comb her damn hair a little and she is easily the most adorable kid in class. Tete does have a condition that makes her sweat more than usual, which for a change was a realistic addition.

So if we discount the 1900s ideas of ‘hotness’, ‘Confessions of an Invisible Girl’ is about a cute dreamy girl, who gets googly-eyed over any guy that is mildly good-looking. She is a regular horny teen, with good grades, and a bad sense of fashion. Luckily for her, she becomes friends with Zeca and Davi, two boys who are also sort of outcasts in the class. Davi because he is ‘loser nerd’ and Zeca because he is gay. Together, the three try to find more social acceptability.

The three kids actually make a sweet group and the makers do get a lot of things about teen crushes, social-media, bullying, parties and popularity right. For the large part, the story is funny, a lot of it is because Klara Casthanho effortlessly portrays the nerdy clueless Tete. The other actors playing her teen friends are charming enough.

Shot in Rio, the movie exudes the bright spirit of a teen comedy. There is obviously some bullying, but quite mild, nothing to get worked up over. But there are some moments that will make you cringe, like Tete making-out with the mirror in her elevator (the scene is in the trailer, so no spoiler really). The background music is fun, and unlike a lot of foreign-language Netflix films trying to vow an international audience, director Bruno Garotti keeps the playlist largely limited to Brazilian musicians and the beats are uplifting, the kind you want to look up on the internet.

Viewers who prefer some meat in their stories will find this flick a complete waste of time. But if you are looking for a breezy brainless movie, ‘Confessions of an Invisible Girl’ is a pretty entertaining flick to just lay back and have a few laughs.

It’s a 6/10 from me.

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The Tasty Florida – Quick Korean Mini-Series Review

It’s like a 13-year-old moon-eyed school student wrote the script for the 2021 Korean mini-series “The Tasty Florida”. Grown men behave like teens, they are either sunny like an excited puppy, or sulky like a spoiled baby. It has only 8 episodes, barely 10 minutes long, but it’s hard to keep your interest up after the 5th one. But if you want to watch a bunch of handsome men that look like K-pop idols serve food and flirt around like they are in still in middle-school – stream it.

The protagonist is college freshman Hae Won (Cha Woo Min), who arrives in Seoul and falls into the arms of the good-looking Eun Gyu (Kim Yoo Hwan), who happens to be running a rooftop Chinese restaurant in the same building Won is going to live in. Eun Gyu’s restaurant is called ‘Tasty Florida’, and it’s popular with the locals because the four men who run it are total eye-candies. So both men & women flock to ‘Tasty Florida’ to take selfies with Eun Gyu and the other boys.

That’s really the only strong point of the drama – it has a bunch of gorgeous men facing the camera. In-fact, everything is aesthetically pleasing about the show – the actors, the locations, the food, the props, etc… But the content is blander than boiled veggies. The actors do what they are told, and because that’s not much, it’s not like anybody stands out for their acting talent.

It’s awesome that Korea is churning out gay romances, but this one is too old-school/boring, with the done to death “two best friends fall in love with the same person” plot. While other mini-series in the same genre are entertaining and too short, ‘Tasty Florida’ feels slow and long-drawn, even though it’s only 8 episodes long, with each being only 10-11 minutes in duration.

It’s a 5/10 from me. Sorry, but even the tasty-looking men couldn’t keep me invested in this series. (You can stream it on WeTV or Viki)

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American Born Chinese – Graphic Novel Review

‘American Born Chinese’ by Gene Luen Yang combines mythical heroes & folklore with the ‘great American school’ experience… through the lens of first generation Asian immigrants. If you’ve seen any teen Hollywood flick, you’d know why the school bit is in single quotes. As a non-American, I sometimes wonder if teen bullying is as rampant in the U.S as their films make it out to be. Although, it’s not like women go to bed in full make-up and sarees, if Indian television soaps are to be believed.

Well, let’s get back to Gene Luen Yang’s graphic novel. It starts off with a vibrant dinner party in heaven for deities, demons and spirits. Yang uses a lot of bright colors, giving the panels a very early 2000s cartoon-network-like vibe. In fact, one of the protagonists, the monkey king, reminded me a little of ‘Mojo Jojo’ from Powerpuff girls. Although Yang’s money king doesn’t look like a toxic green chimp with bloodshot eyes. But both of them are megalomaniacs with anger issues.

There are actually three parallel story-lines running through the book, each very different from the other. First there is the monkey king who aspires to become a God, especially after he is denied entry into the heavenly dinner party. Then there is the more contemporary story of little Jin-Wang, the only Chinese-American boy in his class, who has no friends. And finally, the bizarre story of Chin-kee, the Chinese cousin to white-boy Danny. Chin-kee is excruciatingly annoying, a giant walking-talking stereotype, due to which Danny is constantly changing schools, so he can escape his cousin’s infamy. Had a non-Asian author created Chin-kee, they would’ve definitely been ‘cancelled’. The buck-toothed dude is like a racist-bully’s wet-dream come to life.

Author Gene Luen Lang hilariously ties up these different tales into a story about friendship, identity and being comfortable in one’s own skin. It’s really hard to tell till the end just what on earth can connect the three protagonists with each other, which is why the Chin-kee story seemed uneccessary and creepy. Through these unique characters, Lang illustrates the alienation of being different, and the racism immigrants face – from unintentional humiliations to deliberate ostracization. And then there is the absurd expectations of strict Asian parents – that you survive life without dating anybody until you maybe get a PhD and a job.

The monkey king chapters were the most engrossing, with a lot of elements from Chinese classic-literature blended in, so you get gods, demons, kung-fu, monks and a quintessential moral fable at the end of it all. Little Jin-Wang however has more relatable and hilarious experiences, as the loner child who is trying very hard to fit in. Yang’s artwork is not very intricate, but is bright and fun to look at. There are a lot of yellow & green tones, which automatically makes the panels cheery.

If it hadn’t been for the irritating Chin-kee, I would’ve given this graphic novel a 5/5. Also, even though Yang merges all the sub-plots seamlessly, the climax was very abrupt. It felt like you are watching a movie, and when it’s time for interval, you realize the movie is over, with your popcorn bucket still half full.

‘American Born Chinese’ is entertaining, will have you laughing out loud, and will make you expect a lot more. It’s a 4/5 from me.

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Alice In Leatherland #5 – Ends Too Soon!

Quick recap of the first 4 issues of the comic ‘Alice in Leatherland’ by Iolanda Zanfardino & Elisa Romboli – Alice the protagonist, a children’s fairy-tale writer, moves to San Francisco, shares a flat with two BDSM enthusiasts, and gets a job at a sex toy store. Coaxed into exploring dating apps, she goes through a bunch of disastrous dates, and when she finally finds the ‘right girl’, something seems missing.

Can Alice find a spark with her current girlfriend, or does destiny have other things planned? The 5th issue of ‘Alice in Leatherland’ finds the protagonist fumbling through her relationship, to figure out what she really wants. The author treads on standard romance territory in this issue, and nothing comes as a surprise. But the beautiful buoyant artwork by Romboli keeps you hooked to every page.

The mood of the comic, just like the previous issues, continues to be chirpy and bright. The peachy tones of the panels adds a warm charm to everything, even the smutty bits. And then there is Alice – Iolanda & Elisa have created such an adorable protagonist, that no matter who appears in the story, most readers will always be ‘Team Alice’. In this issue, they redeem Robin’s character (the hot friend Alice has a crush on) by offsetting some of her mean traits. One just wishes there would’ve been more scenes of the foxy flatmates, they seem like the kind of folks you’d love to have a few drinks with.

I was also hoping for some more story in the 5th issue, but it gets over sooner than anticipated. Well, despite the quick climax, it has all the fun elements of a lgbtq+ romantic comedy and is wholesome. Alice almost gets her ‘fairy-tale’ like ending. I say almost, because if the creators continue the series, we can hope for some more kinky adventures in Leatherland!

It’s a 4.5/5 from me for the 5th issue.

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