RIFLE RANGE BOY

Maharaja (2024, Tamil) Director:  Nithilan Swaminathan If you are fed up watching the same old-time-tested formulaic Indian movies, this one is for you. The story starts as a comedy, but as it goes on, the storyline gets twisted.  Just when you think you know how the story will go, it takes a tangent and yet another. And it goes on and on until it ends with a final twister.  Maharaja, a mild-mannered barber, leads a simple life with his wife and a little daughter. Right in front of his eyes, he sees a lorry, with its driver obviously off its rails, crashing into his house, killing his wife instantaneously. His ‘daughter’ is miraculously saved by a metal dustbin.  Maharajah continues life as a widower and a doting father. One day, his house is broken into, and the metal dustbin that saved his ‘daughter’ goes missing. Maharaja makes a police report.  What happened afterwards is a series of flashbacks, parallel storytelling, police brutality, and police power abuse...

In this day and age, would feminists find Rakshabandhan relevant anymore? Increasingly, we see ladies becoming the alpha and highly testosterone-charged beings. If domestic abuse victims were assumed to be fairer sex, think again. Imagine telling a modern 21st-century lady that she needs a male guardian to protect her from the vulgarises of society. Someone with a cape to rise to the occasion to shield her to save her life and chastity. It may have been relevant when society comprised males with unabated raging hormones on steroids. With civilisation, these toxic behaviours had been identified and put a lid on. Women empowerment efforts, education and job opportunities have sprung open for them to clinch their list positions in society. The male community members have been conditioned to respect women, tolerating smug and passive-aggressive manipulations. Many men have suffered in silence in the name of peace of mind and wanting to maintain sanity. Don’t get me wrong. The world is stil...

The Bad Guy (2022) Director: Pierre Perifel Covalent bonds are hailed as one of Nature's strongest bonds. Nevertheless, with the correct amount of energy and the help of appropriate enzymes, it can be broken down into its basic structures. Unlike bonds cemented by DNA or the ones sanctioned by the Elements of Nature, friendship is a convenient arrangement amongst misfits who share the same mental illness. What others refer to as self-demeaning and a sheer waste of time, they find joy and purpose in life. Since nothing is cast in stone, friends make rules as they go on. They call it a 'bro code'. The code, a whimsical array of regulations that are made up as the friendship goes on, protects each other's interests and maintains zen in other concrete long-lasting relationships. In the good old days, before our digital devices filled up the void of long-haul journeys or protracted stop-overs, we actually struck up a conversation with a fellow passenger who looked charming e...

The 10th Victim (La Decima Vittima, Italian; 1965) Director: Elio Petri Riding high on her fame as Honey Ryder, 1962 Dr No's Bond Girl, as the Ultimate Bikini Goddess, Ursula Andress continued making movies banking on her sex symbol status. She also appeared in the 1967 Bond spoof 'Casino Royale' as Vesper Lynd, whose grave we saw in 'No Time to Die'. In between, this Swiss vixen also found time to act in this B-grade Italian movie.  'The 10th Victim' is a futuristic movie set in the 21st century, where the world enjoys peace as society has managed to put a stop to wars. Man's predilection for violence is curbed by having society-sanctioned killing. Each person has the opportunity to kill ten people in a computer-drawn programme named 'The Big Hunt'. In five of the hunts, the selected play hunter and the other five, he plays the hunted. The hunter is given all information about his target but not the hunted. The hunted is clueless about who the a...

No Time to Die (2021) Director: Cary Joji Fukunaga In my youth, I used to think, "with the collapse of the Berlin Wall, soon these espionage movies will all be passé." How wrong I was. And here I am in the 21st century, and the Russians are still posing a threat to the Western capitalist world, so we are told. The Slavs, dressed in Red Soviet uniform then, have changed into their sharp suits, digital devices, and oligarchic money to play the same espionage and political manipulation game to portray a rosy picture of communism to the world. World domination, it seems, is high on their agenda.  But frankly, let it be vulture capitalism and Red ideology; they are merely just two sides of the same coin. Think US election, think Bashar al-Assad to usurp power, think despotic leaders trying to suppress dissidents, you will find American and Russian handiwork in action. It is all about world domination, absolute power and total control by the powers that be. So, come the 21st centur...

Breathe ( Amazon Prime, Hindi; 2019) Miniseries (8 episodes) Humankind is quick to determine what is right and what is not for its kind. All rules and regulations are cast in stone for others to religiously adhere to and live by. Most of these 'prophecies' had been self-thought when Man was at an altered state of consciousness. To lay credence to these rules, the name of God was invoked. To go against this grain would incur the wrath of the Divine Forces, they would say.  This sort of arrangement would work just alright most of the time when the general populace is ignorant and obliging. Trouble starts when people start thinking, or the ones in power believe that the laws do not apply to them.   Many external factors make people assume that the rules should not apply to them. The selfish gene, in wanting to care for its progeny and to maintain continuity of species, tries in whatever way to protect its offspring. If the law states that it is criminal to murder som...

Some say that the mere fact that we are born on Earth is torture. It is a punishment of sorts. All the aches, the physical pains, the emotional pains, the disappointments, the cheats, the fall and loss of function may be just an ellipse of what a man faces in his lifetime. Saying all these, even the wisest of men, would like to hold on to his last breath not matter what in exchange for all the wealth in the world. Many religions that promote themselves as a way of life suggest that the relationships that we develop along the way in our life are the cause of most of our problems. We should either not to take to heart all the miseries that develop in our daily interactions with our friends, colleagues, and loved ones or cut ourselves from these relationships. In the other words, renunciation is the word.  Renunciation can be done, it seems, in two ways. In the first instance, one can choose a life of self-sacrifice and self-avoidance from the time of adolescence or at com...

Spectre (2015) With all the hype that preceded the launch of latest of the James Bond's franchise release, it was only natural that we were all riled up to be one of the early viewers of this offering. It started with the usual 'edge of the seat' suspense befitting of a Cold War hero who is out to save the world from despotic domination with a licence to kill! The build-up before a spontaneous collapse of building and rogue rudderless helicopter created the atmosphere for more suspense. The filming technique of a street parade in Mexico to honour the dead was quite interesting as the camera appear seamlessly be lifted off the ground and down as if the camera was mounted on a drone! The buck stops there! After the credits rolled in, it was the same old swashbuckling display of pyrotechnics. My head grew heavy and eyes grew dim. Trying my level best to keep my eyelids open was a Herculean task. In between the eye-shut, twilight and occasional eye-opening, all I s...

Skyfall (2012) Maybe my expectations were too high. You cannot blame me for that. After all, it is the 'larger than life' film of Bond, James Bond, and in his 50 years of existence after Dr No. Maybe because of his two prior convincing performance as a spy in Her Majesty's service fighting baddies in a swashbuckling never-say-die attitude, I expected more cliff hanging moments from Daniel Craig. 50 years into its inception, Fleming's hero had snowballed the creation many copy cat spy thrillers and heroes and its successors have tried and managed to outdo him. (e.g. Indiana Jones, John MacClane of Die Hard fame) Skyfall starts on a promising note with no nonsense straight to action scene with its trademark 'cat and mouse' chase in the busy bazaar,streets of Istanbul, the less affluent roof tops of old houses all the way atop a moving train till our hero is ordered to be shot at by a direct command from M (Judi Dench). Our hero is hit, falls deep into the...