Sneha Jaiswal's Blog, page 297

Fundamentals Of Caring

Not sure if my mild crush on actor Paul Rudd has anything to do with it – but I absolutely loved the 2016 film ‘The Fundamentals of Caring’.

The film would always throw up on my Netflix suggestions and would remind me of the last Rudd film I saw – the 2014 romantic comedy ‘They Came Together’ which was mind-numbingly bad. So maybe the crush has nothing to do with it.

Rudd plays Ben Benjamin, a middle-aged man who is going through a personal crisis and decides to become a caregiver. His first job involves looking after an angst-y, sarcastic teen called Trevor, who suffers from Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy and is confined to a wheelchair. So be mentally prepared for a lot of brief scenes that involve Ben helping Trevor pee. Yup. 

Craig Roberts plays the weirdly cute Trevor, who is sexually frustrated due to his health condition and is constantly cranky, passing crude remarks & pulling mean pranks on his caregivers. All the while, sticking to a boring routine that largely limits him to the four walls of his house.

Things shake up a little in both Benjamin and Trevor’s life when they decide to do a week-long road trip to see ‘the world’s deepest’ pit. Trevor’s mom grudgingly agrees. And an interesting adventure begins, bringing a few new interesting humans into their life.

The casting directors have cherry-picked just the right people to fit into every small character that appears in this lovely little film. There is Selena Gomez, who at the time of this film was probably at least 23, but looks just right for the role of a young adult on the run from home. “I am 21,” she declares at some point in the film, while she doesn’t look a day over 16. Megan Ferguson, who has very little screen time, is endearing as Peaches, a pregnant woman, whose car goes bust on the road and is given a ride by Benjamin and Trevor.

The road trip bit in the plot allows the makers to give us viewers some amazing shots of the lush American countryside. The fields, bridges over streams, clear blue skies, all making you smile, reminding you of how the world was, before the COVID-19 pandemic pushed us all indoors.

Even the little pauses and lingering shots, still scenes that just try to show you the feelings of the protagonists, they are all worth staring at. In some review, I had mentioned how they are two kinds of slow films – 1. That makes you savour the slow moments 2. That makes you hit the ‘forward button’. ‘The Fundamentals of Caring’ falls into the first category.

Director Rob Burnett, who has also written the script which is based on a novel, has made a fun, sweet movie. And I hope there is a sequel.

The Half of It…

If you do a lot of reading and are into Greek mythology, you probably already know what the myth surrounding the whole ‘soulmates’ business is.

Plato in Symposium said –

“According to Greek mythology, humans were originally created with four arms, four legs and a head with two faces. Fearing their power, Zeus split them into two separate parts, condemning them to spend their lives in search of their other halves.”

The 2020 Netflix film ‘The Half Of It’, starts off with the protagonist Ellie Chu narrating this Greek belief for a school essay. She had written it for some other student. Chu lives alone with her dad in a small town called Squahamish and makes money on the sides off her fellow college students by writing their papers.

One day, a shy jock called Paul Munsky asks her to refine a love letter he has written for a pretty girl called Aster. And that’s how an innocent deceptive wooing of the pretty girl begins; who by the way – already has a hunky boyfriend.

The Netflix description pretty much sums up the entire film –

She’s a gifted introvert. He’s a sweet jock. Both are smitten with the same girl. Friendships — and first loves — can be complicated.

There is actually nothing too original about this film, except for the fact that the lead is not your usual white girl stereotype. The plot reminded me of “Sierra Burges Is A Loser”, a pretty bad Netflix film, where the lead pretends to be somebody else and texts the pretty boy. Here, the texting is done by a girl, to a girl.

[image error]Alexxis Lemire who plays Aster is absolutely gorgeous in the Film. (YouTube Screenshot)

So Ellie Choo sends letters and texts to woo Aster, pretending to be Paul. Eventually, Paul and Aster go on an awkward first date. And things begin to get complicated from there.

All the actors are really good at their parts. Daniel Diemer who plays Paul, comes across as a lost cute puppy and has the potential to be the next teen heart-throb. We are talking Noah Centineo kind of fame, after he appeared in ‘Too All The Boys I’ve Loved Before’.

Coming back to the plot – the makers conveniently don’t give any thought to the cheating bit at all. Aster goes on dates with Paul, even kisses him, while she is still in a very serious relationship with another guy. ‘Marriage is on the cards & family agrees’ kind of serious. Which is weird, considering they are just college seniors.

The film is slow in parts, owing to the fact that a lot of conversation is indirect – via texts. There are no high humor points, I mean if I had to recall a very funny scene right now, I can’t think of anything. And I finished the film just half an hour back. However, there are parts that do manage to tug the heart-strings. The accidental friendship that develops between Ellie & Paul is adorable.

[image error]Ellie & Paul watching a film at her home. (YouTube Screenshot)

The film also has an interesting Bollywood reference that only Indians will probably get. Ellie Chu & Paul watch the film ‘Ek Villain’ (a terrible film, just saying), which foreshadows the ending scene for their film.

Ellie’s homosexuality is a matter that is not given a lot of space or thought. We don’t know if she is gay, or bisexual, or pan-sexual, or asexual or any other sexual binary that is out there. Maybe the positive way to look at it is – it shouldn’t be a big deal either. It was nice to see close to zero negativity surrounding homosexuality, in a film where the lead is seemingly gay. There are no crude jokes, no condemnation.

In the first few minutes of the film, I noticed that the cinematographers used a lot of symmetry in the background to make the sets look pleasing to the eye. So visually, the movie is pretty good.

The lesbian plot twist, which is given away in the trailer and in the description, is probably the only thing that saves ‘The Half of It’ from being a completely forgettable ‘coming of age’ teen romance. Although it does serve as a breath of fresh air from the other teen films where everything is over-exaggerated. In this film, everything is subtle, smooth, sweet and slow.

Keywords & Copy Cats

If you type the words ‘hoka fruit’ in Google, chances are high that the first result would be a travel blog post by me from 2016. Even before the Wikipedia result.

How do I even know this random piece of weird information?

Well, a couple of months back, I noticed that the 4 year old post showed up in my ‘top posts’ section. And that was just weird. Since it was such an old entry. Usually, my top posts comprise of recently published stuff.

Out of curiosity, I just googled a relevant keyword and found out that someone in the Trip Advisor community had copy-pasted my post and passed it off as his own. The post had some 800+ likes. My own blog post – a measly 17 likes I guess.

I was amused and irritated. Not only did I report the post to the Trip Adviser community, I also sent a message to the dude. Told him it was not cool to steal content. I mean, except for changing pictures, he hadn’t even rehashed my post.

Never really followed up after that, but I think the dude deleted the content. This incident came flooding back to me yesterday, after someone who follows me on twitter plagiarized my tweet.

“Should I be offended or flattered?” I asked my friend.

“Imitation is the best form of flattery,” my friend said. And both of us laughed.

Has something like this ever happened to you?

Extraction Review- Extra Action

While I was watching Chris Hemsworth’s new Netflix film Extraction this Saturday morning, I was interrupted by a video call.

“What were you doing?” Mom asked.

“Watching a film called Extraction,” I said.

“Watch and tell us how it is,” Dad said in the background.

“It’s good so far, lot of action, Dad will like it, you will probably fall asleep,” I told mom.

And that’s the problem with Extraction, while it has damn good action sequences, shot to look like it’s one take (yes, slightly reminiscent of the film 1917), at one point, it gets a little boring.

The plot is pretty simple- Chris Hemsworth plays ex-army guy Tyler Rake, who is out on a paid mission to Dhaka, to extract an Indian drug lord’s son Ovi Mahajan (played convincingly by 16-year-old Rudhraksh Jaiswal) from the clutches of his Bangladeshi rival.

[image error]

Director Sam Hangrave and team need to be applauded for the tight, violent but gripping combat scenes. Just one indoor action sequence failed to compare with the others that were more racy and intriguing.

The biggest problem with Exraction is that the exaggerations in the plot begin to bother you eventually. Joe Russo has written the script and seems to have forgotten that this is not comic-book/fantasy territory. For the uninitiated – Russo has directed some of the Captain America and Avengers films.

While on one hand, the makers seem to take exceptional effort to make all the gun fights and car chases real, on the other hand, the very scale of the entire operation seems too far-fetched to be palatable. The Bangladesh Drug Lord seems to have the entire police force and army force at his feet, with hundreds losing their lives trying to get their hands on one boy.

Hemsworth fits into his role perfectly, he seems straight out of a ‘Call of Duty’ kind of a game, mercilessly shooting down cop after cop, goon after goon. Randeep Hooda is also laudable as Saju, an ex-army guy, who is Ovi’s bodyguard.

The main villain however, is not convincing enough. Priyanshu Painyuli who plays Amir Asif, the ruthless Dhaka drug-lord, seems more like a bratty party boy tripping in the wrong room.

[image error]The Actor who plays the Dhaka Don

‘Extraction’ could have been an amazing action thriller, but is pulled down to being mediocre by some unnecessary emotional back-stories and over-dramatic sentimental pauses.

If you don’t know what to watch on the weekend and have a thing for action flicks, this is definitely worth a watch. It’s a 6.5/10 for me.

 

My Dark Vanessa – A Review

I learnt about the book ‘My Dark Vanessa’ by Kate Elizabeth Russell by accident. It was after I had stumbled across an online article about how there was a debate raging in literary circles over a book that hadn’t even hit the stands yet. The release date was March 2020.

Kate Elizabeth Russell, who apparently started working on her debut novel as far back as 2009, was accused of plagiarism by another author Wendy Oritz. The latter claimed that Russell’s novel was just the fictional version of a reality she lived as a teen; her experiences chronicled in the 2015 book called ‘Excavation’.

So what is ‘My Dark Vanessa’ about? The story is about how a vulnerable 15-year-old girl is emotionally manipulated into a physical relationship with her teacher. Jacob Strane, a 40-something English teacher, singles out Vanessa, who has no friends and is struggling at boarding school to be his ‘Lolita’. The book, by the author’s own admission is heavily inspired by Vladimir Nabokov’s controversial classic about a middle-aged man’s obsession with a 12-year-old.

Just the mere thought of a 40-plus man physically abusing a 15-year-old in a methodical manner is repulsive. And when you read the story from the point of view of the teen, who was brainwashed into believing that she was in a ‘consensual’ loving relationship with someone probably older than her dad, it’s uncomfortable, to say the least. But despite the unpalatable premise, the book is interesting.

Russell has written this book in what seems like an effortless flow. The language is neither too colloquial, nor too formal/heavy. The plot flits between 2001 & 2017. The story is a slow but smooth ping-pong match between the past and the present.

While like a lot of books, this one too has a slow start.  After a first few chapters, the next 150 pages are gripping and binge-worthy. And then comes a point where as a reader you think that the book is heading to a climax, when you rudely realize the fact that you are only half-way through. (I was reading the e-book)

‘My Dark Vanessa’ soon gets tedious and irritating and I found myself skipping a lot of paragraphs in the second half. Russell could have perhaps slashed the book by at least 50 pages, if not more. Too much of the text is spent on Vanessa trying to justify her abusive relationship with Strane, even when she is an adult woman of 30.

Strane finds himself accused of abusing several of his students, the allegations coming in the midst of ‘Me Too’ movement. And as other victims hope for her to step up and implicate him to bolster their fight, she never does. On the contrary, Vanessa refuses to even believe the victims, adamant on living in her own delusional bubble.

There are some inconsistencies with the protagonist’s characterization, while for most part, she is portrayed as an asocial, mature girl, a literary genius in the making; yet there are plenty of times when she acts like nothing but a 10-year-old brat.  These inconsistencies are irritating.

None of the characters in the book are likable. It’s probably because none of them get enough space in the book, they are just weak shadows on the sides. What I really didn’t like about the book is how there is absolutely no background story to Strane. His life before Vanessa is an absolute blank. Instead there are boring mundane details of Vanessa’s college life that can be skipped. Like I said, it’s 50 pages too long.

The book is thought provoking, making you question institutions, like schools and even families. Who is to blame for the ruin of a 15-year-old girl’s life? It seems like everybody had a little role to play.

‘My Dark Vanessa’ gives the reader an eerie peek into the mind of a young girl, who was ‘groomed’ by a pedophile into a repulsive relationship. The girl is made to believe she is a ‘nymphet’ who is in power of what happens, when really its the odious older man who is in charge of the story.

If that subject is something you are not interested in, you are perhaps better off without reading this book. It could turn into a frustrating experience.

Third Hand Tragedy

I went to bed at 5 am, which meant, waking up was not going to happen any time soon. At around 10 am, husband tried to wake me up, said something about a ‘gas leak in Vizag, almost like what happened in Bhopal’. That’s all I figured while still half-asleep. He said he spoke to my parents and they were fine.

Some context – Vizag is a beach city in south-India and Bhopal Gas Tragedy was a gas leak incident in 1984, which caused an immediate death toll of over 2000 people.

I have spent a significant amount of my life in Vizag, a little over ten years, up until college, which was 2011. Since my parents still live there, visits to the city are made pretty often.

When I finally woke up, there were several unread messages on my phone, from concerned friends and family, asking me if my parents are fine.

‘Read about Vizag Gas Leak, hope your parents and relatives are fine,’ was the basic gist of most messages. So I read 2-3 online news reports to understand what the heck was going on, before calling my parents with second-hand information.

This is what happened – there was a gas leak in a chemical plant owned by LG Polymers in an area called Gopalapatnam, which was on the outskirts of Vizag. The immediate death toll was 8 and over 1000 people were affected.

“Phew, that’s nowhere close to where my parents stay. Nothing to worry about.” I tell myself. In fact nobody I knew stayed any where close to the area. But suddenly I remembered that maybe a close friend of mom’s lived in the area.

One of the messages from my mother-in-law said “spoke to your mom, she is quite upset, which is understandable”.

A video call to my mother confirmed my guess, a close friend of hers did stay in the same area and had to evacuate her flat with family because they were within 1km radius of gas leak site.

“Her son said that they can move to a friend’s place. I told her that she could come and stay with us too. It’s such a terrible time. Because of this lockdown, most hotels and lodges are also closed…” Mom went on.

However, the timing was not co-incidental. Sample this from an Indian Express report –

An official of LG Polymers issued a statement that there was 1800 tonnes of styrene in the storage tank. He said that due to stagnation and changes in temperature it could have resulted in auto polymerization which could have caused vapourisation.

Almost all initial reports suggest that one of the reasons why this tragedy happened was because the plant was left unattended, owing to the COVID19 lockdown. A thorough investigation will help us better understand what really went wrong.

Mom seemed a little shaken from the incident and complained that the air around our house felt a little different. She seemed to be suffering from a negative placebo effect, because our house in Vizag is at least 12 kilometres away from Gopalapatnam.

I decided to check on a few other people I knew in Vizag, even though I was sure that they stayed at a safe distance too.

Turned out that a college classmate of mine who teaches, two of her students had gone to visit their grandmother in the same area and had to be rushed to the hospital. They were taken to the intensive care unit but were later declared out of danger.

[image error]Screenshot of an excerpt of the chat with my friend

I looked up some helpline numbers issued by the state government and shared it online, just in case it could turn out to be useful to someone.

[image error]Someone else mentioned a friend who lived in the area and saw people writhing helplessly on the roads. To him, death seemed all too real. For us, far away, miles away, death was just a third hand experience on our televisions. Not even second hand.

Reading Old Works

Have you ever gone back to something that you might have written a decade ago? Something that seemed exciting at the time, but now, with years in between, when you go back to those words, they seem alien, strange, almost unbearable.

Six years ago, I almost finished writing a novel, only the last chapter was pending. It was about a guy recalling his past relationships with women from a jail cell. Doesn’t sound like too bad a plot right?

I found myself reading the manuscript after discovering a hard-drive that hasn’t been touched in three years. It’s survival for almost eight years is almost a miracle. Because I am someone who easily loses things, including useful memories. Honestly, I could not read beyond a paragraph. In fact, that was the reason why I abandoned the project over a decade ago – it was unreadable. The sheer discovery made me seriously question my skills as a writer, but soon, I just went back to being a regular journalist, writing generic mediocre crap, with no time on the sides to write any fiction.

Sometimes, when the mood wasn’t right, my mind would drift into the need to write poems. And on extremely rare occasions, I would get this burst of desire to pen down a short story and most of the times, it would only be half a short story, sometimes just a paragraph and everything would be forgotten.

But then, thanks to the old hard-drive, there has been a discovery of some interesting old short stories, some half-forgotten novels, some terrible, others exciting. I am trying to salvage one, which originally was intended to be a long novel, but it’s silly, so maybe I would curtail it to a novella for personal reading and as some writing practice.

Mrs Serial Killer – Why?

I rarely watch films without seeing the trailer. And when Netflix boldly showed Mrs Serial Killer on my home page last Saturday morning, I thought “okay, let’s give this a try”.

It starts off with the leading lady Jacqueline Fernandez (Jacky) crying and saying “this story is about to end”.

It doesn’t look like the start of a movie. Instead, it’s like you are watching a very bad audition tape of some wannabe actor.

She does a mix of crying and laughing that is hideously terrible. Her way of talking is *cringe cringe*

And then somebody with an even more irritating voice starts shouting in the background.

There is a girl tied on a bed and apparently Jacky has been torturing her.

The scene looks unreal and out of some early 2000s video game. What the hell are so many glucose drip bags doing there?

Anyway, this other actor says something on the lines of “you think you can scare me with your psycho stare? I can do better”.

And then comes the horror. The other actor gives what is supposed to be a mean glare to Jacky. As a viewer you are totally confused. You cannot decide who is the worse actor!

Next we see Manoj Bajpai, who plays Jacky’s husband talking to her over a video call. And that scene was just uncomfortable to watch. Bajpai is naturally acting his part, while Jacky with her unnerving Hindi is so bad, so bad, that I couldn’t watch further.

I was wondering how did Manoj Bajpai even do his role without breaking into a laugh at his co-actor’s lack of skill?

This movie was extremely unbearable in the very first few minutes. Just didn’t have it in me to ruin my Saturday morning. Had Jacky been a side character, it would have been a different story. But with a lead actor so bad in their role, you just cannot survive this movie if you value your time.

The Farewell, Or Not.

‘The Farewell’, a 2019 film directed by Lulu Wang piqued my interest because it has actor Awkwafina in the lead, the actor who stood out in the romantic hit film ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ as the zany best friend of the protagonist.

In farewell, Awkwafina stars as Billi, who despite growing up in New York, is extremely attached to her paternal grandmother who has been left behind in China by her two sons. While the elder brother is settled in Japan, the younger one, Billi’s father, is settled in the U.S.

The central plot is about how both brothers decide it is best to shield their aging mother from the knowledge that she had been diagnosed with cancer and has only a few days to left to live.

“In America it would have been illegal (to not inform a person about their medical state)” Billi tries to argue with her parents, when they fly to China to spend some time with her grandmother.  Since I am not from China, I am not sure how normal it is for families to get doctors to hide the real diagnosis from aging patients, but if the makers of this film are to be believed, apparently it’s very common.

‘In China, we have a saying, it’s not cancer that kills, it’s the fear of Cancer,” Billi’s mother explains. That seems to be the clinching logic.

The film is slightly slow, but the kind of slow that I don’t mind, because as a viewer I was prepared for a realistic, simple film that is just about a family trying to cope with the impeding death of a close relative. How fast or exciting can that be? To the director’s credit, she does manage to make this grim subject interesting and heart-warming. But this one is definitely not for the impatient viewer.

While Awkwafina is brilliant as lost 30 something emotional wreck, Han Chen, the actor who plays Hao Hao, is highly underrated as her first cousin who is forced into an early wedding with his girlfriend of three months, so that the entire family can fly to China and spend time with his grandmother without making it seem unnatural.

[image error]The actor who plays Hao Hao (the groom) was low key brilliant. Source – YouTube

The entire cast slips into their roles effortlessly, there is no weak link in the movie, the casting director needs a pat on their back for the perfect ensemble. Despite being a lot about Chinese culture, ‘The Farewell’ has scenes and moments that are universal to families across the globe.  The story not just explores the theme of death, but that of alienation from one’s roots and culture, and the sacrifices one makes for a supposedly ‘better’ life.

The cinematography is apt. While this film is not visually brilliant, it’s not artistically challenged either. The colors are just right, nothing too dark to metaphorically represent the looming death. I did have a little problem with the background music, sometimes it was too jarring, or way too serious against what was unfolding in the scene corresponding to the audio score.

Shuzen Zhao, who plays the grandmother, blissfully unaware of her cancerous state, is the star of the film, the matriarch the holds the entire cast and story together. Some of us may be in need of a handkerchief for the waterworks this little film turns on. The film ends on a surprisingly positive note and that’s the best part. You go in expecting a tear-jerker that might leave you as a ball of mess, but you are instead left with a feel good sense at the ending.

 

 

 

The Gentlemen – Too Cool?

I hadn’t heard of ‘The Gentlemen’, a film directed by Guy Ritchie until my brother recommended it to me. This flick has an admirable cast – I mean obviously, Guy Ritchie has all the money to draw some biggies. There is Matthew McConaughey, Colin Farrel, Hugh Grant and Henry Golding who became famous after starring in ‘Crazy Rich Asians’.

The film has an interesting plot. Matthew plays baddie Michael Pearson who runs a huge, profitable marijuana empire in the UK and is looking to sell it off and settle down for a nice retired life on the money. Michael has his marijuana ‘farms’ spread over across various confidential locations that no competitor is aware of. He zeroes in on a potential buyer and demands his rightful pound of flesh for an empire that was built on a significant amount of blood on his hands.

However, one of his locations gets compromised and the buyer now tries to squeeze him tight by offering a much lower price. Enter Hugh Grant, who wants some X millions of dollars from Michael Pearson’s aide in exchange of what he claims is a fantastic ‘script’ that could reveal what really led to the compromise of the marijuana farm.

Henry Golding plays the role of a Chinese gangster who is part of a cocaine ring and expresses interest in buying Michael’s greens and begins to mess things up. It’s hard not to notice some racist tones when the Chinese mafia is talked about in the film.

Next, enter Hugh Grant, who plays ‘Fletcher’, a private investigator, who is trying to get money out of Michael’s aide in exchange of what he claims is a brilliant script that would explain why his plans to sell off his empire for a profit was getting fucked up.

The film is fast, funny, even gritty in parts. But one cannot help but feel that Guy Ritchie is trying really hard to make everything seem very ‘cool’ and ‘slick’. Despite a great cast, some of the acting is wooden, which I would like to believe is due to the fallacies in the script.

Some of the twists are pretty predictable, and if you are intuitive enough, you will be able to guess pretty early on in the movie who the real culprit is. I really enjoyed the small cameo of Colin Farrel, who plays a cool ‘coach’ who is training a bunch of kids to fight. His bits were fun.

The film also brilliantly mocks those who run British Tabloids and are always out to get it’s next salacious scandal on the Centre-spread. Woman don’t have much space in this all boys film, there is just Michael’s wife, who seems to be wearing the pants in the relationship, but barely gets any screen time.

‘The Gentlemen’ is a paradoxical and an obviously deliberate choice of title for a film that’s just about a bunch of bad boys running amok. It’s a fun film to watch, but all the style and the smart dialogues might begin to get on your nerves at some point.