The second season of this well made family political drama City of Dreams - is here upon us now trending on Disney Hotstar. All you wanted to know how politics works and what people do to remain in power is a lesson beyond that one learnt from Mahabharat as there the fight for power was between cousins but here it is within the family, between the brother-sister in the first season with the brother ending in a watery death at the hands of the sister and now in this season the tussle for power is between daughter and father.
The series is structured well as far as the story-screenplay combo goes however it is not entirely seamless as it regresses in flashbacks without warning. The acting department is well managed with veterans Atul Kulkarni and Sachin Pilgaonkar enacting important characters around whom the series usually revolves.
There are two surprises though in the form of Ejaz ....
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The kind of movies (most of them) that have been releasing on the OTT platform due to the pandemic situation was making one lose faith in the movie making abilities of Bollywood hoi-poloi with no-brainers like Radhe and co. unleashed on us. Mimi film review...
Had practically given up on these films, which led to disillusionment building up, it made me wonder are we making films for over a hundred years and here's where we have reached dishing out illogical movies viewing which even the frontbenchers would cringe.
However amid all this gloom there is a silver lining in the form of Mimi. It is like a breath of fresh air in the out laying stench. Not only are we exploring a new topic on which some grim/overtly emotional movies have been made but this one is different. Not only is the story good but also well made (could have easily gone down the dumps).
Great screenplay. Tight clo ....
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The latest movie Hungama 2 which credits it to be filmed by Priyadarshan has hit the OTT platform on Disney Hotstar (available to ordinary members) 23-07-21. it was supposed to be a follow-up of the hugely successful and highly rib- ticking comedy Hungama with even Paresh Rawal reprising the character Radheshyam Tiwari and Akshaye Khanna albeit in a special appearance however it is a very very big let down.
This was not expected of Priyadarshan to come down to low level comedy in a high class environment. It is a good subject, only if it was handled with love and care which seemed missing here and just a rush to complete schedules.
Why are all the characters screaming and why is everyone behaving like caricatures is beyond understanding. Then there is tribute to a few hit Bollywood movies, like some scenes taken right out of Jeetendra's Parichay and Shilpa Shetty breaking ....
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The much awaited or shall we say much anticipated movie this time of the year after a dud called Radhe. The trailer of Toofaan seemed fabulous and hard-hitting but the actual movie was a disappointment. This movie now streaming on Amazon is about national integration. Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Parsi only a Sikh and a Buddhist missing from the main religious diversity that India is.
Jokes apart, one would have expected it to be a sports film ala Bhaag Milkha Bhaag what with the same team of director, producer and actor teaming up again. Namely Rakyesh Omprakash Mehra with the directorial baton (who even regales us with his two bit August presence as some national boxing official), Excel Studios as the producer and Farhan Akhtar as the hard working actor. There is no doubt that Farhan has but in his sweat and blood to look every inch a boxer at his age.
Though Toofaan is a feel good ....
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So every now and again Hollywood brings about a new concept about future of mankind how it would finally turn out to be. Will The Tomorrow War be like in Stanley Kubrick's Space Odyssey 2001, or a beautiful and progressive one as in Startrek, or total annihilation due to a meteor as in Deep Impact, or some strange disease turning people into zombies as in I Legend, or a future as shown in the Terminator series and so on and so forth.
We actually lapped it all up as we somewhere accepted such possibilities and because of the innate romanticism of doomsday which is ingrained in every individual. This may actually be attributed to the fact that many religions who prophesied this, like the Kayamat ka din in Islam and Apocalypse mentioned in the Bible. However what they have come up with now boggles the mind.
It is about fighting a war for the future generation. Well the various activis ....
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'Jawani janeman haseen dillruba, mile do Dil Jawan nisar Ho Gaya, Shikari khud yahan shikar Ho Gaya' thus sang Parveen Babi in Namak Halaal at that time we never visualised or even thought in our wildest dreams that we will be viewing and reviewing two vastly different movies which are titled with the first two letters and then the subsequent two letters of the song.
So we had a dud in Jawani Janeman of Saif not too long ago, my sympathies with Aliyah Furniturewala, now it's the turn of Haseen Dilruba which is aptly described in the follow up line of the song i.e. Shikari Khud yahan shikaar ho gaya, any which way you see it.
Now streaming on Netflix fresh out of Bollywood oven - which has this as it's catch line 'A damsel in distress or a devil's mistress' presenting the effervescent 'Haseen Dillruba'. It is a frothy mix of many stories like Taming the Shrew, Unfaithful, Fatal Attr ....
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While we at FilmyTown celebrate our own Bollywood retro gems, thought it would be great to check some Hollywood ones who will pass the muster, though did not dig too far back unlike their Bollywood counterparts cause what we were looking for fell straight into the lap, not too old, this Israeli drama film was released in 2010, but every bit what we were searching for. The Debt movie review...
Such movies do get talked about however it appears to have had a quite existence in our press as despite being movie buffs never came across this one. Like many this movie too must have given India a miss for a theatrical release.
The Debt has great content, super star-cast of some Hollywood regulars and veterans and of course good acting and screenplay. For once Hollywood does not talk about America or the bravado of their heroes-superheroes rather it deals with a sensitive subject of the Hol ....
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Streaming on Amazon is The Little Things - one of the better made psychological murder mysteries, starring some formidable actors from the the current stock in Hollywood namely Denzel Washington, who needs no introduction and Rami Malek, the guy who shot to fame playing our own Freddie Mercury's character in the 2018 Queen's biopic 'Bohemian Rhapsody'.
Even the antagonist is played by another well known Hollywood face, Jared Leto. The movie explores art of deduction as Deacon, known as Deke to one and all, played by Washington literally takes the newbie precocious detective Baxter under his wings, though Baxter is good but has a stiff nose, who has joined in Deke's place in the LAPD precinct he was famous in.
Deke explains the small nuances of crime and murder detection which if overlooked will leave the cases unsolved and will literally be shelved in cold case files. The camarader ....
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The latest OTT offering on Disney+Hotstar, GRAHAN is a police - politics drama about re-investigation of cases of anti Sikh riots of 1984 in the aftermath of the then Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's killing by her own Sikh bodyguards.
Set in Ranchi in 2016 Grahan revisits in intervening flashbacks to 1984 to Bokaro which was home to a small Sikh trading community who like elsewhere in India were a target of public frenzy whipped up by zealous politians for their own political interests.
Grahan is loosely based on the novel 'Chaurasi' by Satya Vyas. It is a romantic story of the past in turbulent times and it's effect on current political scene. It is an eight part series with each episode approximately 40-50 minute duration.
The series moves effortlessly back and forth in time without breaking the rhythm of the story and as each layer opens up with the progress of the epis ....
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A movie without any hype, however it is a refreshing tiger tale, providing succor from the mundane commercial cinema. The Sherni here does not allude to the heroine or her character in the movie, Vidya, but is about an actual tigress T-12 who has now turned a man- eater. The wild cat is on her trail that everybody is on and so is the film.
The Forest Department's officer Vidya Balan wants to contain the damage that the tigress is causing while jumping from jungle to jungle along with her two cubs to find a final resting place. She wants to save the animal and human life both, from men who find hunting down wild animals as their passion and gives them a machismomatic kick.
Sherni is about forest conservation and how human civilization co-exists along with the wild and how both are dependent and also take care of each other. However some elements, specially the political kind, have t ....
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