36 hours of flights either side of 30 days off!
Maqbool: Bollywood adaptation of Macbeth, set in the Mumbai underworld.
8/10
Very Urdu-ised, really felt like a foreigner having to read subtitles half the time. Going to use the excuse that plane audio was hard to hear. Full thing is up on Youtube.
Parasite: Lived up to the hype
9/10
Glass onion knives out 2 whatever: Awful. Totally neglects the detective story in favour of trying to shit on Elon Musk. The left's answer to Ben Shapiro movies where every culture war grievance is laid out and everything else including plot is forgotten. A few jokes land.
3/10
Crimes and misdemeanours: Annie Hall is my favourite movie. This doesn't hit those highs - is less funny and more serious - but still works well. All the scenes with his niece are super uncomfortable now
8/10.
Shinde Ka Viral Video: The first Netflix movie I watched and exactly as bad as I expected from Netflix's reputation here and on twitter. Bad acting, stupid everything. Was hoping it was leading up to the Gone Girl twist, which would have made it interesting, but ignored that in favour of getting its social messages across.
2/10
A Wednesday: A tale of
two cities two movies in one city. The first half is a 10/10 B-movie. Great over-the-top caricatures of tough cops, fat corrupt cops, naive journalist, cool internet hacker!!. Plus the most useless police chief in human history, delusions of Mumbai police professionalism that are so transparently rubbish, using the same few 360 pan shots again and again, insane sense of commuting which should be an obvious joke to anyone who's ever been in Mumbai*. Loved all of it. Second half is a super serious ode to vigilantism. The two halves average out to a
5/10.
Continuing the previous page discussion - it was probably a bit Islamophobic, but wouldn't have cared a bit if the silliness of the first half continued.
Get Out: Lived up to the hype despite almost knowing the full plot by osmosis.
9/10.
Manhattan Murder Mystery: pleasant light film, Woody Allen always plays the same character and hits the same themes, surprisingly good action sequence at the end.
7/10.
Past Lives: In the mood for love and Frances Ha are great movies. This one reminded me of both, and didn't come close to either. Cliched, self-pitying. A protagonist who has it all, very unlike those other two movies, hard to empathise with. The absolute perfect husband and crush for the story, Disney-like if you want a semi-sad ending. Wiki says that it parallels the writer-director's life - least surprising news ever. The immigrant stuff didn't work for me, for a while, every second word in the movie was "Korea", "Korean", "Seoul".
"I want to understand the language of your dreams". Oh feck off!!!!
5/10.
*For anybody from there -- cop moves from CST to Goregan/Borivali by road, a 2+ hour journey, in under 30 minutes, reaches back instantly, while the Chief Minister goes from Bandra to CST, half the distance, in a longer time. All this in a movie with a ticking clock element where time is supposed to matter. Small detail which I loved: while taking the prisoners from CST to Juhu, they keep showing them on Marine Drive going in the opposite direction, towards Nariman Point, in maybe 5 different shots.