Not a joyride!

Crazxy (Hindi; 2025)
Written and Directed by: Girish Kohli

https://www.filmfare.com/reviews/bollywood-movies/
crazxy-movie-review-71820.html

When Girish Kohli shared his story, nobody believed it would sell. The idea of a lone man driving around in a car telling his story did not excite them. Therefore, Kohli turned to Sonny Shah, who agreed to finance and play the lead role. The end result turned out to be a real head-turner and an edge-of-the-seat, high-octane thriller. It is a road movie of a different kind, where most of the action and storytelling take place within the confines of the car, on the highway, and through phone conversations.

There are a few flashbacks and a video conference; otherwise, Sonum Shah is the only actor in the film. In the finale, his teenage daughter makes a brief, touching appearance. The caller ID images provide us with a rough idea of the other character's demeanour and role in their life.

I recall an instance when a medical officer, a mother, was busy at work in the Emergency Department, attending to a room full of sick children. Anxious parents were making a fuss, complaining about the long wait, the staff shortage, and the precariousness of their children's situations. They quickly shifted their anger toward the doctor, whom they perceived as incompetent. They became silent when the receptionist told the parents to bear with the doctor as her daughter was undergoing chemotherapy for cancer. 

That sums up the multitasking some professionals must undertake to responsibly execute their assigned tasks while fulfilling personal duties as a father, spouse, or child to their loved ones. Even in times of adversity, they must put on a brave front to give their subordinates undivided attention; they must remain pillars of strength despite the uncertainties they face. They must act professionally amidst all the turmoil in which they may be immersed. The world shows no sympathy for individual needs; it considers the bigger picture. An individual is merely a minute speck within the greater scheme of the Universe.  

The film begins with Dr. Abhimanyu Sood packing a bag filled with ₹5 crores in cash into his car. Dr. Sood, a general surgeon, finds himself in a predicament. A teenager he operated on for appendicitis dies due to complications, and he is squarely blamed for the death because of his antics outside of work. He has admitted to snorting cocaine. His lawyers have advised him to pursue an out-of-court settlement, as his chances of winning in court are slim. Therefore, he is making his way to drop off the money at a disclosed location.

It was April 1st. The radio was blaring, with April Fool's pranks filling the air. So when someone called him on his phone to inform him that he had kidnapped Sood's estranged daughter and wanted a ransom for the exact amount he was carrying, he was sure it was just a prank. 

Sood had previously left his wife and their daughter with Down Syndrome on less than amicable terms. His new girlfriend is eager to begin a fresh start. Juggling emotionally draining calls to verify the legitimacy of the claims and conversations with his current crush, Sood finally realised he had not been a good person. He had been unfair to his young daughter and wanted to make amends. He decided to use his stash of money to rescue her.

His situation becomes more precarious as his lawyers press him to deliver the money. His car tyre developed a puncture and needed to be replaced. To top it off, Sood's patient in the ICU requires urgent surgery. Sood assigns his inexperienced, reluctant junior surgeon to perform a major surgery under his direct video supervision via mobile. 

Despite being a solo performance with limited dialogue and a monotonous background, it succeeded in gripping its audience and maintaining their attention until the end. 4.5/5. Recommendable.

P.S. It is based on the 2013 Hollywood film 'Locke', starring Tom Hardy.

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When stock pundit be held responsible!

Money Monster (2016)

Director: Jody Foster

That it is. There is no shortcut to making that first million. First, one must realise that one's journey to the land of gold and honey may meet impassable obstacles and not reach the intended destination. Or, he may be skewed away from the path and end up in a ditch. Or, he may be swallowed by a beast (or troll under the bridge, if you still believe in fairy tales!)

Wealth is finite. It is a zero-sum game. For one to make a million, somebody else must lose a million. The way advertisers do their thing, prospectors buy the idea that no one is a loser. They entice you into the gravy train, which never runs short of curry!

With the advent of complex algorithms, the unholy union of data scientists and conniving dupe masters never had it better. Speaking in incomprehensible jargon that they do not understand, they create a smokescreen that can cleverly hide their true malfeasances. Their spick appearances and polished social etiquettes belie their demonic intentions beneath their mask.

Even nations are getting involved in this debacle. When fiat money is churned out indiscriminately, even small Governments with altruistic intentions gamble on their children's future when their investments appear robust and are backed by the greenback. 

Have you noticed how financial experts have such short life spans on the airwaves? Like swallows before the summer, they appear in droves when the stock market is doing well. They yak and yak like they have perfected the art of making money out of the market. It is as if they are there for everyone's picking. Overnight, they will be uncontactable when things go south; swallow fly south. This must be why their actions are termed 'flight by night' activity. And the market will swallow everything in one big lump. 

What happens to all those sycophants who promote and sing praises of the moneymaking product as if it is the best thing to happen to mankind since sliced bread? Are these mere messengers? We do not kill the messengers. Or can they be held accountable for what comes out of their mouths? 

These are the questions that go through the mind of the compère and controller of a popular money programme named 'Money Monster' when a disgruntled investor holds the host at gunpoint and straps a bomb vest over him. The investor had lost his inheritance in stocks after taking the programme's advice, hence the frustration. 

As expected, life on the silver screen is more black or white. By the film's end, the cause of the stock prices' fall is pinpointed to fraud by its owner, and instant justice befalls the wrongdoer.

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Paedophilic Ring - Fact or Fiction?

 Sound of Freedom (2022)
 Director: Alejandro Monteverde

This movie drew a lot of flak from either side of the spectrum. People over the subject matter put forward in the movie cry foul over the lack of publicity about this movie. On the other end, those who stand by the belief that the whole talk of the existence of secret pedophilic prostitution is bunkum are up in arms. They cannot believe that Tinseltown is pandering to conspiracy theorists. It does not help that it is the third highest-grossing film in the US after Barbie and Oppenheimer. 

On one end, big studios had malaise, like Fox and later Disney, which bought Fox to get off the ground. It had to be purchased by a small independent studio funded by crowdsourcing and the excellent work of Mel Gibson and the movie star Jim Caviezel, who played the protagonist Tom Ballard.

For a long time, during Trump's tenure, a strong lobbyist swore to the presence of an entity called QAnon. Nobody could pinpoint who QAnon actually was, but rumours were rife that it could be someone entrenched deep within the Administration, or it could be Mr Donald Trump himself. QAnon was supposed to be prophetic, a seer who could foresee events yet to happen and would whisper cryptic messages to the general public. 

One of the most damaging rumours that went around then was the existence of Pizzagate. Pizzagate became a code word for the proof of the existence of Satanistic, hedonistic, cannibalistic child abusers with a big pedophilic ring within the Democratic Party of the USA. They allegedly drank tortured children's blood to reap the benefit of adrenochrome, an elixir of youth. The ring later involved a more comprehensive web, including moguls of the cinema industry, royalties and public figures. Nobody has been convicted thus far for such crimes, but it will not die soon. The latest victim is Hunter Biden, the son of POTUS Joe Biden. 

Slavery never really died. It just got rebranded. The hunt for wealth will continue as long as the economic divide grows exponentially worldwide and fiat money is used to gauge an individual's success. With wealth, decadence becomes a well-deserved fringe benefit. The march to the wild side becomes a dare. The market for sex for hire and appetite for experimental experiences grows exponentially, too.

Despite the numerous laws enacted worldwide by governments and world bodies, children are abducted and trafficked over borders for multiple reasons, including child labour, adoption, begging, working as child soldiers and serving as sex slaves.

This film is based on the real-life experiences of Tim Ballard, a Homeland Security Agent who left his job at the agency to start a non-profit organisation called Operation Underground Railroad (OUR), credited for rescuing thousands of children from sex trafficking rings. In this movie, he travels to Columbia to rescue a preteen Honduran girl from one of these rings.

Detractors to the successes of OUR insist that their laurels were highly exaggerated. They insist that all the trafficked children were abducted and kept outside the USA. What they forget is that there is a market for it, and their customers are Americans who frequent them outside American shores.

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Energies calling for help?

The Black Phone (2021)
Director: Scott Derrickson

It was in the mid-70s that innocence was lost. Before this time, life on Earth was a peaceful one. Children could wander about without fear of being abducted. Ladies could go out unaccompanied. They would not end up as tomorrow's headline. And road rage was not a thing yet and be assured that Mat Rempit would not crash into your car in the dead of night, unannounced, as you scramble back home, following all the road rules, after a long day at the office.

It used to be serial killers, looneys, and UFOs only attacked America. Well, other nations have caught up too. The world is no longer a safe place. Mad people are everywhere, in every society. It is just a question of how competent the arm of the law is in that locality. With more money at their disposal, time and manpower can be put aside for that purpose. If day-to-day living is in peril, they just have to accept victims as collateral damage of changing times.

It is said that energies with unfulfilled ambitions roam around us as spirits causing 'disturbances'. Seances commonly describe them as entities yearning to fulfil their needs, not intending to scare or cause disharmony. In short, they are asking for help. We should not lose sleep over them. The correct people with sort them out.  

This film is set in 1978 when 'Happy Days' was rave and bell bottoms were sweeping the world. Many schoolchildren go missing in a Denver suburb. Finney and Gwen, children of an alcoholic single father, see their schoolmates go missing one by one. Eventually, Finney gets abducted and is kept in a basement. The basement has the bare minimum but a wall telephone. The phone is a landline, but the problem is that the line is cut. The phone still rings, and Finney manages to talk to the abducted children who are dead. Meanwhile, Gwen is having vivid dreams about the abductions.

A forgettable movie which gives the vibe of the film 'It'. 

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Just hanging on...

Ugly (Hindi; 2013)
Written and Directed by Anurag Kashyap

A cursory look at modern relationships may suggest that they are held together loosely by threadbare bonds. Everyone seems to be unhappy and cannot wait to be out. They hang on, just barely, on flimsy excuses, just buying time. Looks like everybody is experiencing existential crises and is looking all over the place for the reason of their existence. They say they are trapped. Some feel smothered, unable to express themselves. For some, it is tradition and social norms that bog them down. Others still find their passion in waiting for Prince Charming to sweep off their feet. Amidst all these uncertainties, pops out an offspring to further complicate the relationship. Each party wants to do right yet wish to do the best for themselves in their personal development. Life just gets more complicated. 

Life has a funny sense of humour. Just when everybody thinks that they are high and mighty, life tries to play the game of humility. When siblings do not see eye to eye or cannot stand the sight of each other, it would create an emergency where, like it or not, they have to come together and make it all right. I am thinking of the death of a family member or some kind of medical emergency. The events also bring out how weak our bonds are and how vulnerable human life is.

'Ugly' can be described as a crime thriller. It starts with Rahul losing his preteen daughter during his visitation outing. Rahul's estranged wife, Shalini, is a depressed lady who had big ambitions in life, like appearing on the silver screen, but nothing really materialised. Shalini is now remarried to her college sweetheart, Shoumik, who used to be bullied in school by Rahul, hoping for better times, but zilch.  

The problem is that Shoumik is the Police Chief in charge and has a bone to pick with his old foe. As time ticks and the lost child is nowhere to be found, Rahul and his best friend, Chaitanya, are accused of staging a kidnapping instead. Things get more twisted as everyone tries to outdo and outsmart each other to get the girl first. Then there is another party who is eyeing the ransom money.

It is a fast-paced thriller with real everyday people with all their good, bad and ugly qualities, warts and all. Viewers can really feel the hopelessness felt by the father as the police start looking at him as an aggressor rather than as a victim. 

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All talk, no results!

The disappearance of  Madeline McCann (Documentary, 2019)
Netflix

The work of policing and prosecuting evolved in modern societies to protect its citizen. It was thought that solid police and robust legal systems would ensure peace and harmony. No wrongdoer would go unpunished, and the system is supposed to deter crime.

But looking at how the whole system has turned out to be, instead of protecting the very people it is supposed to shield, it is inconveniencing them.

Aggrieved parties who report a crime are instead having the table turned against them. The whole machinery of defending one's innocence has begun to be so cumbersome, costly and convoluted that upholding one's good name remains in the domain of the rich.

Having investigations and litigations go on and on like forever gives no peace of mind to any party but a reason of existence for civil servants to push pencils. These are further fueled by media that cries wolf and create a mountain out of a mole of every questionable information that pops up in the public domain every now and then. Many of these are just half-truths at best. Sometimes informants just want that one minute of the limelight before their evidence crumples, but not before causing many inconveniences to all parties, except the media. The media just increases their sales. 

The media does not call this misinformation but merely informs the public about how things of public interest develop. 

This 2003 case of a missing 4-year-old British girl, Madeline McCann, while on a family holiday in Portugal is probably the most reported case of a missing person in the world. It was reported as an abduction of a young child and made many dizzying turns in its prolonged investigation.

The McCanns were on vacation in Praia de Luz with their three kids and five other friends with five children. Madeline went missing from her bed in her room when the adults were having their dinner nearby. The police were called in. The investigations started but proceeded nowhere. With little evidence to go on, the police looked at the parents as possible criminals.

Then it started. The circus of trial by media, accusations of the parents being involved in their child's disappearance, accidental killing by parents, conspiracial cover-up by fellow holiday-maker friends, paedophilic tendencies of a Good Samaritan and the list went on. At one stage, the parents were even interrogated as the accused. 

The parents, of their accord, created a national alert (and possibly international) for their missing child. Years after seeing that their daughter was nowhere to be found, they hired a reputable private investigator with the help of a philanthropist. It led to nowhere too. Then came the American investigators. At the end of the day, they realised that everyone promised more than they can deliver. More than 16 years after Madeline's disappearance, despite all the advancements in tracking and investigative tools, neither she nor her abductor had been found.

This case only exposed the cavalier attitude of the Portuguese police and the predatorial nature of the British tabloid. It further opened a big can of worms into the darkest nook of the Dark Web -child pornography

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