Sneha Jaiswal's Blog, page 286

House At The End of The Street

Netflix needs to hire somebody that can do a better job at classifying genres for their films. When I looked up for ‘horror’ on the site, one of the first few suggestions that came up was ‘House At The End of the Street’ starring Jennifer Lawrence. Assuming it was a horror film, I started to watch it.

In the very first few minutes, the direction seems sketchy and annoying. A seemingly possessed/deranged girl murders her parents and escapes. Months after the brutal double murder, a teen girl and her mom move in to the same neighborhood. What follows is a weird tale of how the teenager befriends her asocial neighbor, a college-going boy called Ryan, who was not at the crime scene when his sister killed their parents. However, Ryan has his own dark secrets. The ‘horror’ bit is about how locals believe that his psycho sister still lives in the woods.

Jennifer Lawrence was 22-years-old when this film came out, but looks the part of the teen she is supposed to play, almost baby-like. However, there’s not much to her character. She is a reclusive teen who according to her doctor mother – “likes to play savior & picks the most damaged kid, so that she can fix them”. The damaged kid here is Ryan, the boy everybody has ostracized due to the murders.

I cannot recall one good scene from the film, everything is just so forgettable. Even the acting by most of the cast is pretty flat, nothing impressive. The movie is slow and has several unnecessary scenes. While there is a pretty good twist at the end, the rest of the film is so irritating, that it doesn’t even mater.

I think I was majorly disappointed because I was expecting a horror film and instead got a mediocre thriller on my hands. If the makers deliberately bracketed this film in the ‘horror’ genre, it makes it even worse, because it’s absolutely misleading for horror fans. Very early on the movie, the viewer can establish that this is just a thriller, a bad one at that.

Mamma Mia! – Streep Saves It

I just wanted to watch a fun little chick flick to chase away some of those weekday blues earlier this week and the pick for the day was – Mamma Mia! Directed by Phyllida Lloyd, this musical is an out & out chick flick. The kinds you want to watch with your girlfriends and a laugh.

If I hadn’t been a big admirer of Meryl Streep, I highly doubt if I would have enjoyed this film as much as I did. The story is about how 20-year-old Sophie (played by Amanda Seyfried) sends out her wedding invitations to three men because one of them could be her father. She feels she would just ‘know’ who her dad is when she meets him in person. So she mails the invites without breathing a word about it to her mother Donna (Streep), who runs a resort on a pretty Greek island.

Soon, we have Donna’s ex-flames Bill (Stellan Skarsgård), Sam (Pierce Brosnan), Harry (Colin Firth) arriving by a fancy boat on the eve of Sophie’s wedding and chaos ensues. Since this is a musical, everyone keeps breaking into fun songs by ABBA. All the three possible dads are sweet and I loved the fact that there was no tension or rivalry going on between then. Instead, the men share an easy camaraderie. Meryl Streep is adorable as the overworked single mom who is running a resort by herself and suddenly faced with not one, but three ex-boyfriends at one go. But who is the dad? That’s the mystery.

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The cinematography is gorgeous, everything is picture-perfect and pleasing to the eyes, especially the pristine blue Greek waters. The plot is cute and larger than life. Everybody is sweet, happy and singy-songy. It makes you want to tear up, because you feel like “I want that life!!! I want to own a resort in a beautiful island and do nothing but sing songs on the beach with the love of my life!”.

Despite being a mother-daughter tale at its heart, Seyfried and Streep don’t share too many scenes. The few times the two leading ladies do come together in a frame, they look lovely. The casting guys did a damn good job with their picks. And gosh, Pierce Brosnan still looks so hot, he can still make both men & women weak in their knees. “Pierce Brosnan makes Daniel Craig look like a joke in James Bond,” husband said from the sides while I was watching the film. Agreed.

As far as the pace is concerned, it’s fine, but the story sort of drags towards the second half. While 3/4th of the film is enjoyable, the fun fizzles out as the seconds tick by. “Mamma Mia” is two songs too long. Also, the climax takes ‘happy endings’ too seriously, so we have a very farcical conclusion, which was sort of a bummer. I guess, if it wasn’t for Streep singing and hopping around like a queen, making even ridiculous scenes look genuine & warm, this movie would have been unbearable.

Okay, I am going to go listen to some ABBA songs. You have a fun week ahead!

Weekend Book Giveaway

To any book blogger looking at this post – I am giving away my debut fiction book ‘Love, Loss, Lockdown’ for FREE this August 15-16th weekend as a promotional drive. It’s free for all and not just kindle unlimited subscribers. So grab your copy now.

A little about the book – It falls under contemporary fiction and is a collection of 10 short stories, each dealing with a different theme. The only thread binding the tales are that they are loosely set against the Covid19 pandemic.

If you get the book, do leave a rating/review, it means a lot to new independent authors like me; especially since I do not pay for reviews and rely on organic reader feedback.

Following are some links –

Amazon India

Amazon U.S

Amazon UK

Amazon Germany

Amazon France

If I’ve missed your country, look for it on Amazon or on your kindle store.

FYI – It’s also an Amazon Bestseller.

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If I Was Your Girl – Review

A seemingly innocent question on Twitter – “Can anybody recommend me a good fiction book with a trans protagonist” – made me realize that I have never read a novel with a trans person as a central figure.

After I saw the tweet, I decided to google for books with a trans lead and the most popular recommendation seemed to be the young-adult novel called “If I Was Your Girl” by Meredith Russo, a transgender author. Three days later, the paperback arrived at my door.

The story is told in first person by Amanda, who used to be Andrew and has left her mother’s hometown to move in with her estranged father to start a new life in a new school, with her new identity. What struck me in the very first few pages was how the author details the names of the hormonal pills Amanda is taking to help with the male-female transition post her gender surgery. It added a certain authenticity to the book.

Amanda’s story flits between the present and past. We first meet her as an 18-year-old getting ready to change schools and then we keep meeting Andrew in between, a teen trying to grapple with gender identity disorder. Some of these flashbacks are very poignant and deal with bullying, depression & self-harm. The most touching bit was where a six-year-old Andrew writes an essay in school about how he meets his future self, who is a successful woman. The little one is excited to show his story to his parents, to tell them he has been a girl all along and that they have mistaken him for a boy. The flashback is heartbreaking.

Most of the book is about Amanda trying to put her past behind and embracing a normal life. She finds herself attracted to boy called Grant but is scared of getting too close to somebody who isn’t aware of her past. Amanda’s only agenda in the new school is this – survive without being beaten & killed. Luckily for her, a bunch of girls befriend her and in a departure from regular high-school novels, none of them are evil scheming bitches. So we have some interesting side-characters apart from Amanda’s love interest.

What I didn’t like about the book was that Russo uses some done to death tropes to add twists in the tale. This could be any teen’s story struggling with identity issues. And Russo herself admits in a note to readers that Amanda had it too easy versus most transgenders. I am not saying that I wanted terrible things to happen to Amanda, but just that, since a lot in the present was going in her favor, the conflict introduced in the end was too contrived & ‘Hollywood-ish’. But that’s perhaps also the strength of this book. Because of its softer approach to male-female journey of a young teen, it would appeal to a lot more readers. It’s got all the ingredients for a hit coming-of-age Hollywood film.

“If I Was Your Girl” works really well as a ‘young adult’ novel and is an absolute page turner. It may not be the sorts that compels you to be awake throughout the night, but it’s definitely worth your attention. And perhaps a great start for someone wanting to read books with trans protagonists.

What Makes 6 Million+ ‘Hate’ A Trailer?

Do you remember Rebecca Black’s ‘Friday’? The song that got famous for having more dislikes on its YouTube video than likes. It’s a song that a friend of mine uses to terrorist people. There is no doubt that it’s a really bad number, can’t think of any English song that’s worse, at least not right now.

But guess what? Now there is a Bollywood movie trailer that has almost double the number of thumbs down on it than Friday. As of 13th August 2020, Friday has 3.7 million dislikes.

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But an upcoming movie called “Sadak 2” has raked up 6 million + dislikes and I am guessing the number is only going to keep increasing by the day. Some news reports suggest that its trailer video is now the most ‘disliked’ video in YouTube India. So why all the hate surrounding the trailer? Especially when it’s not as spectacularly bad as a lot of other trailers.

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Here’s the thing – right now, there is a lot of hate going around against star kids who made their way into Bollywood due to their sheer connections with people in the industry. This is because of the recent death of a Bollywood star called Sushant Singh Rajput. Most people blame ‘insiders’ in the industry for trying to sideline the actor who was self-made and didn’t come from a Bollywood family. So there is a massive wave of hate against those who are considered products of nepotism. Fans of Sushant Singh Rajput are spearheading smear campaigns against upcoming films that have actors who belong to famous film families.

Unfortunately for ‘Sadak 2’, the entire lead cast is a product of nepotism. All the three lead actors have strong industry connections –

1. Sanjay Dutt is the son of famous veteran actors Sunil Dutt & Nargis.

2. Alia Bhatt is the daughter of famous director Mahesh Bhatt, who is also the director of ‘Sadak 2’.

3. Aditya Roy Kapur is the brother of famous producer Siddharth Roy Kapur.

While the nepotism is strong in this one, it doesn’t help that the trailer was pretty shitty too. If one scrolls down the comments of the video on YouTube, you will see a lot of people urging others to hit the ‘dislike button’ too. So there are folks who might have not even seen it at all and just went on YouTube with the sole purpose of giving it a BIG thumbs-down.

Honestly, I don’t give a damn about who is starring in the film, as long as I like the trailer, I’ll go watch it. So I am going to write about what I thought of the trailer and that doesn’t include any sentiments attached to the choice of cast.

The trailer starts with off with a scene from the 1991 film ‘Sadak’, so there is a flashback to a young Sanjay Dutt driving a taxi and mouthing some dialogue about how love can turn even trash into gold. (How about ‘love can mistake trash for gold’? makes more sense right?)

I haven’t seen ‘Sadak’ which was one of the biggest hits of its time, so I have no idea what the hell is going on. And the trailer doesn’t help explain much either.

Suddenly, there’s Alia Bhatt, who randomly mentions fake babas (spiritual gurus) and drops at Dutt’s shop because she has booked a cab to go meet her boyfriend. If this film is supposed be in the current times, it makes no sense for a young girl to book a cab from an obscure shop over an app based service. Guess the writers are still stuck in the 90s.

Anyway, for a brief 20 seconds, the trailer wasn’t all that bad, Alia & Aditya actually make a good-looking onscreen couple. The little romantic moments between them are cute & cosy.

But the unexplained craziness begins in the second-half. You have a Cleopatra type God-man living in an opulent mansion & making ominous predictions about deaths. He looks more like a millionaire rapper high on drugs, than a ‘godman’ or whatever it is that he is supposed to be –

A bunch of baddies are introduced. Basically there is some danger to Alia and her boyfriend and Dutt the driver decides to help them, for no reason, except that his dead girlfriend/wife will judge him in heaven for not helping a young couple in need. L-O-L.

We are stuck in the 90s? Yes.

Also the acting of both Alia Bhatt and Sanjay Dutt in the second half of the trailer didn’t seem very convincing. Everything is just too random and makes no bloody sense in the second half. I had a frown on my face throughout, wondering ‘what the hell is going on?”.

And that is why I disliked the trailer – it’s random as fuck. But I have seen worse.

(P.S – I originally wrote a version of this post on the Q&A site Quora)

Life Like – A Review

Directed and written by Josh Janowicz, the trailer for the 2019 film ‘Life Like’ looked too intriguing to be ignored. It’s about a couple Sophie & Julian who inherit a LOT of money when Julian’s father dies.

Addison Timlin who plays Sophie is very pretty for the role but her character arc is absolutely flat and annoying. While Julian (Drew Van Acker) struggles to take over his father’s business, Sophie has no job or ambitions whatsoever and does nothing to make his life easier. The bratty bitch instead fires all their house helps & then expects her husband to abandon work and rush back home to mow the lawn. Seriously?

Julian ends up buying a robot that is eerily human-looking to help Sophie in maintaining their mansion, without the guilt of having a real human work for her. The robot is called ‘Henry’ and does everything around the house to keep the couple happy.

Steven Strain who plays Henry is quite convincing as a robot that keeps evolving based on his interactions with his human owners. The fact that he is so ‘life-like’ begins to create problems for the couple as Sophie is unable to treat him like a machine. Again, I can’t emphasize enough how unlikable her character is.

Aesthetically, the film is very pleasing to the eye, most of the cast is very good-looking and move around in beautiful spaces. Everything is so perfect on the surface, that you sense that there are deeper problems lurking around the corner.

There is a very unexpected twist in the end, and it’s unexpected because it just doesn’t fit in with the rest of the narrative. I will have to give a big spoiler to explain what the problem is, but instead I’ll just say this – the twist makes the entire film look like a LOAD OF BULLSHIT. Too many loopholes and questions begin to pop up in your head and one wonders why the director didn’t think of them at all?

The film is bearable only because of the combined charm of Drew Van Acker & Steven Strain, otherwise it’s just a forgettable below average film.

A Rapper’s Confession & A Long Rant

If you want to sell something online these days, a lot of your marketing strategy just boils down to ‘brand influence’. How many followers do you have? How many likes do your posts garner? How many people are talking about you?

As a newbie writer, most articles bombard me with information on how I should concentrate on being heard on social media sites to sell my book. And man, it is hard to get even an iota of attention on any platform. It’s bloody fucking difficult.

Here’s the most annoying bit of having few followers online — people think they can take you for a ride. For example, I have only about 300 followers on my Instagram account and several people who call themselves ‘book reviewers’ keep reaching out to me, asking me if I would like to pay them for a review. Some of them had 100,000+ followers. I felt flattered, but there was no way I was going to pay anybody for a review. However, out of curiosity, I checked their Instagram pages, and what surprised me was the low engagement on their posts. Despite having 100,000+ followers, they had only an average of 100 likes per post. That just seemed a little odd and made me wonder if most of their followers were just bots. Or people with fake profiles. I mean I have friends who are just regular friendly people, who are not trying to become ‘influencers’ and their posts rake up 200/300 ‘likes’ with just 700/800 followers. And that’s because regular people have their friends and family following them, or people who are actually interested in their life. Not bots.

Days later, I see an interesting news article on my feed — RAPPER BADSHAH ADMITS HE PAID RS 75 LAKHS TO BOOST LIKES, VIEWS.

Rs 75 lakh is almost 10,000 dollars. I am not even kidding. This Badshah guy is pretty popular in Bollywood, consider him Kanye West of South-Asia. He apparently paid some firm to gain more views and likes on his music videos and confessed the same to cops. While I first laughed at the news article, I thought about just how desperate even established artists are to gain more ‘likes’ and ‘views’ on their content to establish they are popular or whatever. It’s just sort of sad.

A popular Bollywood singer lamented how even established personalities succumb to such cheap tactics to maintain the optics of their brand. Here is a screenshot of the tweet —

Well she is right about the artist being ‘lazy’, because garnering organic likes and followers is a hard hard job. While some of his songs are very catchy, the bulk of them are pretty average and their lyrics even worse. Sample the fucked up lyrics from one of his songs — ‘If you follow your diet plan, your figure will make me change my flight plan’ — the fuck? March this year he dropped a song whose title sounded like an already popular song and what he came out with was just a ‘cringe-fest’. At least 700,000 people have hit the ‘dislike’ button on the video. Take a look for yourself —

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Sure, you might argue ‘hey, cut him some slack, the video has 4.5 million likes, so what if there are some haters?’. But well, we don’t know if he bought those ‘thumbs ups’, do we? It totally makes sense that this guy needs to pay people to increase the positive buzz around his creations.

And this just makes you question just how ‘real’ the millions of followers of certain celebrities are. Remember the time when big names like Opran Winfrey, Ellen has lost million+ followers when Twitter decided to eliminate suspicious accounts on its site?

Well, here’s the link the the NYT article to jog your memory — In Twitter Purge, Top Accounts Lose Millions of Followers.

Kim Kardashian West lost about 3 percent of her Twitter following, dropping down to about 58.5 million as of Thursday evening. Justin Bieber had been stripped of about three million followers so far, while Ariana Grande lost about 932,000. -Excerpt from the same article.

I am not saying these guys paid firms to boost their followers, but it just establishes that there are millions of fakes accounts and bots that just follow several famous accounts. And some these accounts are obviously owned by firms that offer services to people to buy ‘likes’ and ‘follows’. And some celebrities were indeed found guilty of paying firms to get them more followers. One celebrity lost over 70% followers after the ‘clean up’.

A lot of sites now have stricter policies when it comes to fake account and you can end up being banned if it’s found that you have bought followers. Because being an online ‘influencer’ is serious business, with brands paying people with a large following, because they believe their followers are ‘real’.

As a new writer, I see no point in paying anybody anything, because I want to make money out of my books. I want people to pay to read my book. I don’t want to pay them to read my book. That’s just fucking stupid. Me paying any sort of money to buy fake followers also wouldn’t help me in any way either. I need real people following me, showing real interest in me and my work and actually bothering to buy my damn book and leaving a review because they wanted to and not because I paid them to. That’s like setting up a shop and then giving away your product for free to the customer and topping it off by giving them money for taking it for free.

I have been reading books all my life and only after becoming an published writer am I beginning to understand some knew facets of the publishing world and how some writers work. Now I have a concrete idea as to why some SHITTY BOOKS become bestsellers — they are probably by writers who are simply buying favorable reviews. Some ‘reviewers’ ask for less than one dollar to do review books, so if you can set aside 100 dollars to pay small-time reviewers to leave a reviews on a bunch of sites, you can easily rake up 100+ fake positive reviews. That’s just insane. Because getting product reviews on any site is a herculean task. It took me 6 months to get 10 organic book reviews on my debut book. And I have seen somebody on social media get 100+ reviews on their book within a month and I know for a fact that almost all of them are paid reviews.

Here is the thing — I can definitely afford to set aside 100 dollars to just get paid reviews on my book. One just needs to make up their mind about looking at it like an ‘investment’. A 100 favorable reviews will obviously give my book a massive boost, both in terms of visibility and rankings and will definitely influence other unsuspecting readers into thinking “ooh this book has such great reviews, let’s me try it out”. Next thing you know — BOOM — you are probably selling thousands of copies due to a ripple effect.

I just can’t ever get myself to do it when it comes to my books. I have been reading books since I have no idea when, those are my fondest memories. I might have become a writer only recently, but I have always been a reader first. Books are my first love, they were in my life before music and films became an obsession. As a reader, I could never betray/mislead fellow readers with paid reviews of my books. I just cannot.

Nobody is getting a single dollar out of me, forget 10,000 dollars. I do believe in giving free copies of my book in exchange of a ‘honest review’. A fair trade? That’s a debate for some other day.

Disclaimer – I originally published this post on my Medium account – Would You Pay 10,000 Dollars For ‘Likes’?

A ‘Blah’ Kind of Day

It’s a Sunday, I don’t even have a regular job anymore and still feel like Sunday is supposed to be a day when you sleep late and do nothing. It’s supposed to be your reward for slogging your ass off for the rest of the week. I didn’t do that either. And yet, my morning was spent in sleeping.

All I did the whole day was eat, drink and see a film – The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, which by the way was a good film. My original plan was to write a full-blown review, but guess what? I don’t feel like it.

Do you have these days? Where you want to do nothing, so you do nothing, and yet you feel frustrated for wanting to do nothing? I feel like that today. So I just browsed through a lot of art and random articles that add no meaning to my life. I didn’t see anything moving or read anything worth remembering. It’s was just a ‘blah’ kind of day.

Her – Uncomfortably Real

Theodore Twombly, an introvert writer, buys an Artificial Intelligence system to help him write. However, amazed by the AI’s ability to learn and adapt, he falls in love with it.

That’s the Netflix description for the 2013 film ‘Her’

I wonder what served as inspiration for this Spike Jonze film starring Joaquin Phoenix. While for some, the premise might be bizarre/laughable, humans falling in love with AI systems doesn’t seem too futuristic or fantastical. Men in nations like China, where the gender ratio is skewed, already live with sex dolls and treat them like ‘real’ partners.

So when Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix) buys a new computer system that supposedly has a ‘consciousness’ of its own, him falling in love with the operating system that calls itself ‘Samantha’, it doesn’t seem weird at all. In fact, even the film doesn’t treat it like an anomaly. Only Theodore’s estranged wife thinks it’s his way of avoiding responsibilities of a ‘real’ relationship.

Phoenix brilliantly plays a lonely man who writes letters for a living and is on the verge of a divorce. A divorce he didn’t want until ‘Samantha’ came into his life. Theodore’s loneliness & need for love is palpable in his eyes, you just want to pat him in the head and tell him “everything is going to be all right”.

But can a relationship with an AI system – one that can think for itself, that’s constantly evolving and is beyond intelligent – come without its own complications? Can it really be that easy, without any ‘real’ consequences?

And those questions make the viewer reflect on one little problem with the plot – why would an intelligent system bother being in a virtual relationship with a mildly interesting man? I thought this to myself while watching the film and then pretty much guessed what the climax would be. So the film is a little predictable but also has its ‘what the fuck’ moments.

It’s Scarlett Johannsson’s voice that breathes in life to this film, despite her Samantha being a formless entity, the AI’s voice has more life than all the characters put together in the film. ‘Her’ is a unique film, that falters a little towards the end’ Fortunately just when it’s on the verge of becoming overbearing, the director thankfully wraps it up. So while the pace is not perfect, it comes pretty close.

‘Her’ makes for a compelling watch, giving the viewer a lot to think about, especially about where human relationships are headed in a world increasingly dependent on technology. I mean, aren’t a lot of us guilty of being excited about talking with a random stranger online – because without a body, the possibilities of who they could be are infinite.

And here’s why I had pushed washing this film for all these years – because the plot sounded uncomfortably real. Having your system talk to you, sing to you, laugh with with you, even dirty talk to you – that’s the dream for asocial, lonely people.

“This is like being in a long distance forever,” I told husband, as the two of us watched Theodore romance his operating system’s voice through his phone.

“We wouldn’t have lasted in long distance forever,” he laughed.

And that’s the moral of Theodore’s love story with his operating system – virtual relationships aren’t easy either.

P.S – I published my second book ‘Love, Loss, Lockdown’. It’s a collection of short stories set against the Covid19 pandemic in India, get a copy if it piques your interest.

If… Time Could Stay

It just blows my mind – the pace at which time is flying these days. More than half of the year is over and it still feels like all the fear & paranoia around the pandemic had only began last month.

For some reason, I ended up reading the poem ‘If’ by Rudyard Kipling. It’s probably because poetry makes you feel like time has slowed down a little, as you read each word slowly. I first read the poem when I was 11, it was in our English textbook. And today, I am just going to share it on my blog, for those who might have not read it –

If you can keep your head when all about you   
    Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,   
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
    But make allowance for their doubting too;   
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
    Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
    And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;   
    If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;   
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
    And treat those two impostors just the same;   
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
    Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
    And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
    And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
    And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
    To serve your turn long after they are gone,   
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
    Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,   
    Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
    If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
    With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,   
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,   
    And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

– Poem by Rudyard Kipling