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City Of Dreams 2: Nagesh Kukunoor On The Joys Of Revisiting
In 2019 the prolific Nagesh Kukunoor made his digital debut with the stunning political series City Of Dreams produced by Applause Entertainment.Time to renew the applause.
The second season of City Of Dreams is back on Disney-Hotstar from July 30.
Nagesh who in his own words is “just chilling” in the US, can’t wait to see the audiences’ reaction to City Of Dreams Season 2. “We did the first season because we had a story to tell.A really powerful political story. The challenge in Season 2 was to make the story even more powerful. All ten episodes of 40 minutes had to be crisp.
[tnm_video layout=”mnmd-post-media-wide”]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uf-I9GPnf_M[/tnm_video]
It had to have a cutting edge. Were we up to the challenge? This is the question that my co-writer Rohit Banawilkar and I had to face. The answer, luckily, was yes. There is so much story to tell this time again!I wouldn’t jump into a sequel just for the heck of it. It took me a good 6 years to be convinced that I can do so sequel to my Hyderabad Blues.”
Nagesh who started his career with the clutter-breaking feature film Hyderabad Blues in 1998, sees the OTT platform as the way out and the way ahead. “A filmmaker like me has had to constantly face a paucity of theatres. Every film of mine has been subjected to scrutiny and no-show by the gatekeepers of the movie-exhibition business. Do you remember the agony I had to go through to release my last feature film Dhanak in 2016? My only film that did not have a problem getting movie theatres was 8×10 featuring Akshay Kumar. And look at the irony: movie theatres went on a strike just when 8×10 was to release.”
The agony of having to find theatres for his cinema ended for Nagesh with the digital boom . “I had seen the long format being popular on HBO. I used to wonder when I’d finally get to be part of it. City Of Dreams was dream come true. It opened a whole new world for me. It ended the shameless self-promotion that my films had to be necessarily subjected to.”
City Of Dreams has also given Nagesh a chance to work actors from Marathi cinema. “Atul Kulkarni needs no introduction. But Priya Bapat is also sensational .We’ve done our best to make Season 2 of City Of Dreams every bit as engaging as Season 1. I feel Season 2 has turned out even better.”
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Chhatriwali So Earnest Yet So Awful

Chhatriwali(Zee5)
Rating: **
There are some films which one can’t wait to see the end of. Chhatriwali is a prime contender for the most dreary dreadful and dull film of the year. I know, the year has just begun and I am sure there are several more slumberous celluloid atrocities waiting to inveigle our senses before we can say, ‘Akhanda’.
But seriously, Chhatriwala is a pill hard to swallow. Or perhaps considering the theme, a protection hard to trust . Like one of those leaky condoms that Rakul Preet Singh and Satish kaushik giggle over, Chhatriwala is like an umbrella with so many holes that you stop counting after a while and just run for protection from the pouring rain.
There are some good actors here, like poor Rakesh Bedi. I can’t remember when was the last time he played something better than a buffoon. In this film he comes and goes as a matchmaking Chacha and pharmacist who frowns at anyone who asks for condoms. It’s like the Bihar police arresting a Russian citizen for an ampoule of vodka.
Satish Kaushik as condom-factory owner is given a hideous wig , probably as protection against the people of Karnal attacking him for…a) selling something as evil as condoms , b) being in a film so terrible that one forgives Raza Murad for doing Kanti Shah’s films.
The very talented Rajesh Tailang is the eldest son in a conservative family who refuses to wear protection although his wife has had multiple miscarriages and abortions.
“You must persuade your husband to practise safe sex.” The gynaecologist counsels Prachee Shah Pandya who ties a cloth around her forehead throughout the film to control a perpetual headache.
I tried the same while watching the film. It didn’t work.
What exactly is the purpose of this film? Beyond telling the public that condoms are not evil.Surely there could be a more entertaining, less painful way of putting the message across. The film is also about dignity of a labour. Even a woman can work in a condom factory without blushing.
Sanya Dhingra takes a long time to reveal her job profile to her husband played by Sumeet Vyas who looks so lost he could be a potential patron for Pathaan who strayed into a shooting location while searching for a tout selling tickets.
The film seems to have been written to highlight for Rakul Preet Singh’s cosmetic collection. Even when she is in the kitchen pretending to fry pakodas she looks drip-dried and dewy. She throws her lines about safe sex at the other characters as though rehearsing for a school play on sex education.
There is a standing joke about Sanya riding pillion daily into the factory next to her workplace so that her husband doesn’t get to know what she does for a living. She befriends a watchman who becomes her ally in a situation that he doesn’t understand.It is the only time we get to smile in this tedious humourless comedy .
I don’t see the sale of condoms going up after this film. But I do see the tourism in Karnal going down.Who would want to spend his holiday in a town filled with such boring people?
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Trial By Fire: It Makes You Think Hard About Your Priorities

Trial By Fire(Netflix,7 Episodes)
Directed by Prashant Nair, Randeep Jha, Avani Nair
Rating: ****
This is not a series. It is a piece of history regurgitated into a meticulously re-designed eyewitness account of what happened on 13 June 1997 when Delhi’s Uphaar cinema went up in flames extinguishing the joy and wellbeing of several families who lost their near and dear ones in the tragedy.
This series recreates the long and endless legal battle of a couple Shekhar and Neelam Krishnamoorthy who lost both children in the Uphaar cinema fire while watching J P Dutta’s Border.
The battle is long . But the couple’s patience, especially Neelam’s , is unlimited. This is the story of resilience determination and obstinacy , so real so tangible you can feel the pain of the couple every step along their painful battle.It won’t be wrong to say the couple fought their own war as fiercely as the soldiers seen in Border.
Rajshri Deshpande and Abhay Deol are pitch-perfect. The series creates a credible ambience around the couple. The time leaps for eighteen years(yes, that’s how long the Krishnamoorthy’s legal battle has gone on) are achieved with the least amount of fuss. Blessedly we don’t hear songs from every phase in the couple’s legal battle playing in the background.
But yes, the anthemic song from J P Dutta’s Border does play a vital part in the articulate sound design…Or maybe ‘design’ is not the word I am looking for. Nothing in this series seems designed. There is flow of inevitability about the proceedings. Of course this is all preordained since it is a scrupulous recreation of actual facts. But the series never feels it is indebted to facts. Rather, facts flow freely and fluently into storytelling.
Even the fictional moments(like the electrician Veer Singh played Rajesh Tailang and his wife Sarla, played by Kiran Sharma, having frantic sex after he returns home from prison, or a gay couple holding hands at the catastrophic first-day screening of Border) seem to be intimately interwoven into the plot.
On the minus side: too many characters which are either ill-formed or dangerously sidestepped . Neelam and Shekhar’s neighbour played by Shilpa Shukla is around for no particular reason. Anupam Kher and Ratna Pathak Shah as a retired army officer and his wife struggle to make their presence felt.
Many capable actors like Ashish Vidyarthi, Nimisha Nair, Shardul Bhardwaj, and Siddharth Bhardwaj try hard to justify their presence in the plot. But this is really not about them. It is about the Krishnamoorthys , and Rajshri Deshpande and Abhay Deol are as credible as any two capable actors can get given the tragic circumstances.
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Something Not To Be Missed On Zee5

The Final Call(Zee5) :Arjun Rampal has an inscrutable face. It is the face of man who doesn’t reveal much. In “The Final Call”, he plays Karan Sachdeva, a pilot with many secrets all ruinous and devastating. As all of them come undone layer by layer in the cockpit of an airborne flight to Australia, we know the passengers on board are doomed.
And yet, here lies the formula to a whacking screen saga. You know. Yet you hold your breath. The writing in this 4-part series is clearly of that caliber. We know. Yet we sit riveted. Right at the start we meet an astrologer-scholar Krishnamurthy, played with wonderfully whittled wisdom by Neeraj Kabi who takes that ill-fated flight because his kundali says that’s where his end is destined. Krishnamurthy’s family rightly advises him to just stay away from the destined.
But Krishnamurthy “how I love his transcendental wisdom” has other ideas. Kabi gives a fatalistic spin to the proceedings, wrapping his character’s prophecies in a surge of immediacy. His interaction on board the doomed flight with a jaded tycoon (Javed Jaffrey, who plays it cool, as only he can) has us reading between the lines, looking for valuable clues to something beyond what is happening in the plot.
The truth about The Final Call is that it does things which we normally don’t see happening on the big screen. It opens up the characters’ inner world to reveal the dark interiors. The view is frightening and funny, as only a story told in leisure can be.I came away deeply riveted by this impressive adaptation of Priya Kumar’s bestseller I Will Go With You: The Flight Of Lifetime. The characters, whether it was the Australian girl rushing back home to surprise her cheating boyfriend, or her co-passenger in the next seat, a cocky 18-year old trying to hit on her. Everyone left a lingering impression. There are no cardboard characters on board this flight. Rest assured. And don’t forget to fasten your seatbelt.
But my favourite in the series besides Arjun Rampal, is Sakshi Tanwar playing a pregnant terror negotiator. There is a sequence where she leaves home for work promising her worried husband that she won’t do anything dangerous, then returns in the evening fatigued while he watches her on television dealing with a dreaded terrorist in a hostage situation. Sakshi builds a case for women taking on patriarchal jobs and beating the hell out of the cynical competition.
The plot is relentlessly robust unveiling unfurling thoughts and looping action faster than we can process their relevance. With performances that solidly anchor the action, the first four episodes have me waiting for the next season.
Shirin Farhad Ki Toh Nikal Padi(Zee5): While watching Bela Sehgal’s sweet tender story of Shrin and Farhad passed the age of marriage, determined to find love and companionship in each other’s unexciting company one immediately thought of Basu Chatterjee’s Khatta Meetha and Vijaya Mehta’s Pestonjee. The first, because it was a film about a widow and a widower from the Parsi community overcoming their children’s opposition for an autumnal marriage.
Vijaya Mehta’s Pestonjee was remarkably accurate in portraying the benign quirks of the Parsi community. So is Bela Bhansali Sehgal. Though not a Parsi herself she plunges into the centre of the dwindling community’s eccentricities without trying to give the characters any kind of a novel existence beyond what they are stereotypically known for.
The love story of Shirin (Farah Khan) and Farhad (Boman Irani, as natural as ever) holds no surprises. They meet, they smirk, they walk hand-in-hand… he mistakes her invitation for coffee in her home for suggestion for sex. While she makes he coffee, he waits for her undressed, and… you know the rest.The portrayal of Farhad’s mother (Daisy Irani) and grandmother (Shammi) reveals the film’s writer Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s penchant for loud extroverted singing, dancing, chortling aging woman characters, e.g Helen in Bhansali’s Khamoshi: The Musical and Kirron Kher in Devdas.
Beneath all the feminine giggles (bras and panties, hee hee) and male guffaws (“tera rocket kab phutega”?) that surround the theme of courtship between a middle-aged couple for whom life is neither a picnic nor a funeral, director Bela Bhansali Sehgal seeks out silent passages of undulating sensitivity.Listen carefully. The film makes terrific use of silent moments that are becoming progressively rare in our cinema.
Sehgal has cast true-blue Parsi actors in all the roles, big and small. In fact I could hardly spot any non-Parsi in the cast!
The comic vein tends to get unwieldy at times, as if the attempt to be funny has taken a toll on the characters’ sense of self-identity. We get a Parsi wacko (Kurush Deboo) who runs amok with an antique gun threatening to kill anyone who comes in his way. He does’t make much sense in the scheme of the plot. But then, what makes sense in life other than the senselessness that we see see all around us?
Bela Bhansali doesn’t try to make sense of the chaos. She flows with the chaos seeking laughter in the eccentricity. Hence when an old Parsi gentleman constantly writes love notes to Indira Gandhi you know he has lost it. And you smile, because eccentricity is a pre-condition in a rom-com about two over-the-hill Parsis, one of whom sells lingerie and meets the woman of his dreams when she comes to buy a brassiere.
Laughter designed on inner-wear can never fail.Luckily the film goes beyond inner-wear and seeks a place in heart. The director emerges with some truly heartwarming moments between Boman and Farah. Unki love story to nikal padi. The debutante director has carved an endearing relationship between the unlikely couple. The romance is embellished with charming little incidents that add beautifully to the pacy perky pastiche of Parsi proceedings.
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CAT is The Finest Webseries On The Punjab’s Predicament

CAT(Netflix, in Punjabi, 8 Episodes)
Starring: Randeep Hooda, Suvinder Vicky, Hasleen Kaur, Geeta Aggarwal, Dakssh Ajit Singh, Jaipreet Singh, Sukhwinder Chahal, KP Singh, Kavya Thapar, Danish Sood
Directed by Balwinder Singh Janjua, Rupinder Chahal, Jimmy Singh
Rating: *** ½
He is neither a Sikh nor a Punjabi. But Randeep Hooda is firstrate as Gurnaam Singh a member of a former anti-terrorist organization named CAT which is back in business as a new menace, drugs, takes over Punjab.
Remarkably, Hooda’s presence in this arresting series is not about heroism. It is only about survival and selfpreservation, and that includes Gurnaam’s silly immature sibling who gets sucked into the drugs business even as Hooda’s brotherly act tries to shield the boy from selfdestruction.
This is a powerful series, better than any that I’ve seen on Punjab in recent times. Its authenticity level is exceptionally high,primarily because the spoken language in the series is Punjabi, and I suggest you watch the series in Punjabi with subtitles, although a competent dubbed Hindi version is also available.
CAT casts a gallery of authentic Punjabi actors who bring a blizzard of believability into the goings-on.Geeta Aggarwal and Hasleen Kaur are especially compelling in their complex roles. Geeta as a criminal politician brings the right tone of gender-scoffing menace to her role.Her daughter’s crush on a local Punjabi singer has an unexpected closure , a closure that would have been funny if only it were not so tragic.
Hasleen Kaur plays Babita, a starry-eyed idealistic cop who is repeatedly manipulated into compromises by her (male) seniors. Gurnaam, himself heavily compromised by his brother’s misdemeanours, becomes Babita’s bad-time buddy.There is mutual attraction here, unexplored as the series in spite of its vast runningtime has no patience with getting into relationships.
Not everything adds up. Some of the plot points do their damndest to drag down the intensity level of the narrative, for example, a debauched patriarch with a limp who is so awful he seems to have been planted into the plot purely to project poison .
CAT is revved up with detailed production design (Prerna Kathuria, Ranjit Singh) which is credible without making a song and dance of it. I wish the series was edited down by at least three episodes. It runs on for way too long. But it is a journey well worth making. Don’t miss it.
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