Member Reviews

The Dhanush signature is all over Nilavuku En Mel Ennadi Kobam (NEEK). Usually one would find the writer and director’s stamp in their film but, with NEEK, it is a little extra. As an actor and a star, it is not just Dhanush’s artistic preoccupations that show up on the screen but also his favourite themes and persona, pet peeves and theories along with the usual homages that follow every big Tamil star. The writing on the wall is stark because we don’t see Dhanush on screen, but we see it in the writing, we hear it in the sound, we identify it in the intonations, and we get all the references. As people pointed out, the main lead is named Prabhu (Dhanush’s birth name), and he is a chef (what Dhanush wanted to become). In the final scene, just before the writer-director credits appear, Rajesh (a fun Mathew Thomas) is holding a ukulele and playing ‘Rowdy Baby’.

What happens when a mistake you commit uproots the life of an already struggling person? How do you overcome this? Does it make you realise your mistake or does it push you into the depths of depression? Director Ashwath Marimuthu’s ‘Dragon’ is a film that provides definite answers to these questions. D Ragavan (Pradeep Ranganathan), a archetypal ‘good boy’, is a gold medallist in school. He confesses his love to a girl after he gets awarded the gold medal. However, she rejects him, stating that she sometimes prefers ‘bad boys’, who are unruly and roam around the school with gethu (swag). Cut to his college days, D Ragavan becomes Dragon because of the rejection and has 48 standing arrears. What he earned in college was the love of Keerthi (Anupama Parameswaran).

EARLY ON in Drew Hancock’s Companion, two young women named Iris (Sophie Thatcher) and Kat (Megan Suri) have a prickly moment on a boozy night. When Iris asks why Kat — a close friend of Iris’ new lover Josh (Jack Quaid) — doesn’t like her, a tipsy Kat says she just doesn’t like the ‘idea’ of her. “You make me feel replaceable,” she continues. The conceit of this confession is two-pronged. Iris is deeply in love with her new boyfriend Josh, but Kat is in an abusive relationship with a controlling Russian man; the obvious implication is that Kat is bitter. But the real implication emerges a scene or two later, when the film reveals that Iris (“Siri” when spelt backwards) is actually a companion robot. Up until then, it speaks volumes that the average male viewer may not be able to tell. Iris loves Josh so much that she is subservient to him — she wants to please him by hanging out with his friends on a weekend getaway, she craves to see him smile, and sex for them is basically Josh grunting and rolling over to sleep. It’s all too familiar. So Kat saying she feels “replaceable” by Iris is the film admitting that — in a world captured by the male gaze — a woman robot is no different from a woman.

Dragon has a protagonist who is insufferable for most of its runtime, which, more often than not, doesn’t work in the favour of movies. Pradeep Ranganathan as D Raghavan aka Dragon is one of those bullies in the engineering colleges, who believes being macho makes him a hero. He is an instantly off-putting personality. His college attendance is 2 per cent. He is notorious for his on-campus violence. He has several ‘cases’ against him in college. You get the drift. On top of it all, he has 48 backlogs, nearly all of the subjects in the course. He was not always like this. In school, he was the naive D Raghavan with a glorious progress report. He becomes Dragon when his school crush tells him that bad boys are the thing. Once Dragon gets out of his den, which is his college, he ends up becoming a nuisance to his friends, a failure to his girlfriend, and a fraud to his parents. When the girl breaks up with him, he takes a shortcut to become a successful person, but his mistake comes back biting when everything looks up.

Between done-to-death tropes and flimsily updated ones, Mere Husband Ki Biwi sticks to ancient formulae yet gives a semblance of keeping up with the times only to confirm that old habits die hard. In Mudassar Aziz’s routine rom-com, a divorcee dangles between his fiery ex and doting fiancée sparking off a battle for one-upmanship. It starts like a cheesy David Dhawan comedy salvaged by Govinda’s inimitable lunacy back in the day and advances into a My Best Friend’s Wedding rehash sans the deliciousness of Julia Roberts and Cameron Diaz’s jell-o pitted against creme brulee. Except this return to the 1990s style of whimsy evokes more nausea than nostalgia with its drab humour and out of sync performances.

That Dhanush is an extraordinary actor is known to everyone. He also proved his mettle as a director with his debut film, Pa Paandi, and Raayan. His third directorial venture is Nilavuku Enmel Ennadi Kobam aka NEEK, a romantic comedy centred on a bunch of youngsters that generated positive buzz. Will it help Dhanush strike a hat-trick? Let’s find out! Prabhu (Pavish Narayan) is an aspiring chef who is in love with failure. His best friend, Rajesh (Mathew Thomas) has been by his side through ups and downs. Prabhu’s parents (Saranya Ponvannan and Aadukalam Naren) inform him about a potential match and force him to visit the girl’s home with them. With reluctance, he ends up at his school friend Preethi (Priya Prakash Varrier’s home. Prabhu and Preethi decide to date for a week before they can decide on moving forward.

An overarching similarity in the three directorial ventures of actor Dhanush is their simplicity. Their stories are straightforward and so are their screenplays. Pa Paandi is about a retired stuntman trying to find his lost love. Raayan is about a brother trying to save his family from itself. Now, Nilavuku Enmel Ennadi Kobam is a rom-com about a guy trying to patch up with an ex-lover during her destination wedding. These are time-tested stories that had high success rates in the past, and Dhanush attempts to revive these old-school narratives in a contemporary setting. The best metaphor to describe this marriage of the old and the new is the image of Pa Pandi cruising on a Royal Enfield bike to find his love in Dhanush’s debut. An old guy trying to get back his lost romance is old, but his taking on a long ride to see her is new. Similarly, Nilavukku Enmel Ennadi Kobam has an age-old story with cliches, but the ethos is new.

A significant addition to the small canon of Indian media industry dramas, Crime Beat, like Scoop before it, is based on a book written by a journalist who was in the thick of the action that forms the core of the series. Even its fictional elements largely flow from fact. The Zee5 series is marked by realism, an attribute that stems from its abjuration of overt generic flourishes. The dialogues co-written by the author of the novel (The Price You Pay, published in 2013)—scribe-turned academic Somnath Batabyal—contribute conversational authenticity to the show. Crime Beat investigates the Delhi underworld, the media’s attritional brushes with it and with men in uniform charged with keeping crime in check in the city. The lines that separate the three domains from each other as well as from party politics are frequently blurred, even erased.

A marriage annulled returns to haunt a man all set to move on in life in the lovey-dovey company of another woman. Love quickly flies out the window when the ex-wife, with a massive axe to grind, decides to do everything in her power to queer the pitch and picks up cudgels against the bride-to-be. Isn’t that the stuff that zany rom-coms are usually made of? Yes, but only in an ideal world. Mere Husband Ki Biwi, caught in a yawning gap between intent and execution, gropes in the dark for inspiration and fresh ideas and finds none worth a mention. The breakup has left a sorry trail of bitterness and the new hookup is riddled with challenges created by the man’s messy past. That is an obvious boilerplate for a cocktail of emotional bedlam, romantic recriminations, and much triangular to-ing and fro-ing. It’s all sufficiently flighty and frothy and yet painfully tedious. To biwi or not to biwi? That is the question the film runs concentric circles around and does not formulate a convincing answer.