“Mishan Impossible” is a picaresque tale of clueless but cute kids hunting “India’s most wanted criminal” to score some cash, set against the ultra-violence of India’s child trafficking epidemic.
It takes forEVER to get started — a 30 minute prologue doesn’t quite kick things off. And writer-director Swaroop Rsj tosses every coincidence, impossible gadget and unlikely piece of police procedure at this teetering, tottering interminable blend of the cutesy and the cruel. It’s a rough ride.
“Mishan” opens with an apparent police-sanctioned/arranged political assassination. Is Shailaja (Taapsee Pannu) — who smirks and strolls away from a murder in the middle of a corrupt candidate’s victory celebration — an undercover cop or “investigative journalist,” as some press releases for the film suggest? Either way, she helped arrange this on-camera murder, and that’s uh, not ethical.
Shaijala and her team of two are taking down or taking out India’s worst of the worst. As she’s able to arrange raids, it’s obvious that she’s a police investigator. But I don’t blame anyone — on or off the subcontinent, in the press or writing up press releases for this hash — for being confused.
It took me over an hour to figure out the lead character’s name.
Because the boys who find themselves mixed up in Shailjala’s sting are three village kids named Raghupathi (Harsh Roshan), Raghava (Bhannu Prakshan) and Rajaram (Jay Jayateertha Molugu). They’re just three dreamers from tiny Vadalamapeta, a village in the middle of nowhere.
Raghu is a school-skipping film fanatic who wants to make movies someday. Ragha is a delusional dunce who longs to make it on “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” He gets Raghu to film his audition for the show on his cell phone, with Raghu “directing” the kid’s father and mother about when to cry. And Raja dreams of becoming a famous cricket player, even though he can’t bowl worth a damn.
To fulfill their dreams, they need cash. Maybe hunting down India’s Most Wanted terrorist in Bombay is the solution. They’ll train and scrounge up a little travel money and go there, nab their most-wanted prey and collect the reward.
There’s some confusion about who this fellow is. Raghu figures this photo of a film star he has on his wall looks like him, so that’s what they go on.
The jokes come from their cutesy/clueless “training” (with fireworks) and mission planning. They have no idea where Bombay is. They can’t read a map. They don’t speak Hindi (the film’s mostly in Tegulu, with English subtitles).
“Can you teach us Hindi in three days?” they beseech one educator.
And they keep turning to Ragha, whose “low IQ parents” figure he’s a genius — a lie that’s spread all over town — for answers, answers that are always wrong.
They arrive in Bangalore and Ragha tells them that’s the “old name for Bombay.” Stuff like that. You want to name your plan “Mission: Impossible,” he’s the last one you should turn to for spelling tips.
Meanwhile, the cops are plotting their big score against “industrialist,” politician and child-trafficking mobster Ram Shetty (Hareesh Peradi). Kids are being grabbed left and right. Sooner or later, our intrepid trio will join their ranks.
The director stuffs his picture will details — a child’s mismatched sneakers, kids’ confusion about how to translate centimeters to kilometers off a map, unhappy marriages that produce concerned parents when their child goes missing, careless civil servants and overwhelmed cops.
The tweenage boys elude the police, who are looking for these missing kids. They trick this adult or fool that one. There’s an endless succession of musical montages — village boys plotting, village boys training, village boys traveling without much of an idea of where they’re going.
“I have watched many RGV movies,” Raghu enthuses. “Villains hide in places like this!”
And then they witness a mob murder. We see a little kidnapped girl’s traumatized shock, not even recognizing her father as she’s rescued from sex traffickers.
“Mishan” is an altogether unpleasant blend of tones and stories aimed at wholly different audiences. The picture is all over the place, jumping from locale and point of view (cops, kidnappers, parents, kids) and back and forth in time right up to the closing credits.
Coincidental meetings, the kids transition from clueless dolts into seasoned help-the-cops-by-playing-“bait” operatives and ruthless bad guys turn into total klutzes just when the story needs that.
The kids are pretty good actors, but this clumsy, hacked-together story does nobody any credit.
Call it culture shock if you want, but I was thrown by the “arranged” murder in the first scene and was wrong-footed all the way through it. If you think watching it’s a chore, try watching “Mishan” and taking notes on it — waiting over an hour for the script to identify a character, jotting down the tsunami of syllables that make up even a tiny village’s name.
And I live in Florida, where some people call Thonotosassa, Eucheena, Okahumpka and Wacahoota home.
Let’s just say that I waded through this Swaroop swamp so you don’t have to.
Rating: TV-14, lots of violence
Cast: Harsh Roshan, Bhannu Prakshan, Jay Jayateertha Molugu, Harseeh Peradi and Taapsee Pannu
Credits: Scripted and directed by Swaroop Rsj. A Netflix release.
Had enough Spiderverses and “Everything Everywhere All at Once?” No?
Then here’s the movie for you.
We can see there’ll be loads of fan service/favorite characters in this latest “infinite universes” take rendered on the big screen.
Boy, you mention a wild haired theory in physics about the insanely unlikely but possible, and comic book writers, “Star Trek” producers and filmmakers of every stripe run with it and beat it to death.
The effects promise to out “Inception” “Inception.”
Will Dr. Strange have as much fun with it as Spider Man or the hilarious “Everything Everywhere All At Once?”
Because in the multiverse of multiverse movies, that raised the bar.
“Strange/Madness” opens Friday and everyone in every universe will see it.
We shall see what we see and try to believe what passes before our eyes. Because three movies on this gimmick since Christmas and that hoss is about beaten to death.
This is why we travel “Around the World with Netflix.” We peek into other cultures, weigh their differing values, mores and customs.
Sometimes, we puzzle over how different we can be, from culture to culture, continent to continent. And sometimes, we see how much alike we all are, and stumble across a cute comedy in the process.
I didn’t have high expectations for the Malaysian rom-com “Kongsi Raya.” Other romances and comedies from this predominantly Islamic state failed to surmount the stodgy conservatism of the place, something that tends to smother the life out of comedies and play as “backward” or at least “retrograde” to a Westerner, whose movies seem more modern, more tolerant and more hip by comparison.
There’s a whiff of Doris Day’s America to this chaste, cheesy little rom-com that puts “Romeo & Juliet” into the blender with “Iron Chef.” It can feel 60 years out of date, even though it’s (clumsily) framed within a TV interview set in 2029.
But stick with it. It starts to work. And even if it never gets up to door-slamming farce speed, the laughs come and the “finally getting a clue” message comes through loud and clear.
Qasrina Karim and Wilson Lee, a couple of big screen cutie pies, co-star as a couple that’s been married ten years, parents of a young son who interrupts as they’re being interviewed in 2029.
The reason they’re TV worthy? The show’s is titled “Kongsi Raya,” which is a mash-up of the names of Chinese New Year’s and the Islamic holiday Eid al-Fitr. Sharifah (Karim) and Jack (Lee) are an interracial/interreligious couple. And it doesn’t look like they get along all that well.
But the film, which tells the story of their meeting and courtship and struggles to argue, cajole or trick their families into accepting this match, ten years before, just might get them back on the same page.
Sharifah was producing her father Rahim’s (Harith Iskander) Malaysian TV cooking show. Jack was a chef himself, having studied at the elbow of his father (Kin Wah Chew), the third generation of the Long family to preside over their popular restaurant.
Jack and Sharifah meet when they’re the only ones on part of the ride of their daily bus commute. What’s her deal?
“I’ve been waiting for you to speak to me,” she says (in Malay, Chinese and even English at times)!
Malaysian rom-coms tend to depict love-at-first-sight romances because of cultural (and cinematic) strictures on courtship, kiss-free dating and such. It takes some getting used to, because that long chat on the bus means these two are pretty much deciding to get married and bonded for life. Just like that.
His mother (Ai Leng Ong) is pretty hip and easygoing, as is hers (Erra Fazira). But whatever their dads say, when the kids lie and float trial balloons about “a friend” who is going through this sort of romantic “never-the-twain-shall-meet” situation, there are limits to their theoretical “tolerance.”
First-time writer-director Teddy Chin’s picture gets airborne in the silliest way. Jack sneaks into Sharifah’s room, her mother almost barges in, so he dons Sharifah’s clothes and pretends to her Islamic friend Siti, the one with the Chinese beau.
Confusion piles upon confusion, with Jack’s dad bristling with rage at the idea that his son might convert to Islam and abandon their (not Islamic diet friendly) Chinese restaurant and Sharifah’s dad sticking his big clueless foot in the middle of a situation that is about to turn a lot more personal than he suspects.
There’s cross-dressing and lying on the fly, Jack’s adopted brother (played by writer-director Teddy Chin, hilariously) is brought in as a doofus co-conspirator and the two dads vow to settle this nonsense Eastern Hemisphere style.
Nobody shouts “Allez cuisine!” in Japanese-tortured French. But damned if these two cooks don’t throw down, “Iron Chef” style.
Chin’s film takes a while to get going, but by the time the two dads are trading ethnic-stereotype insults about “Malaysians” and Muslims and “Chinese,” and one dad’s son has donned a dress and a hijab, it’s clicking.
Lee vamps-up his cross-dressing turn, the mothers give their voice-of-reason characters (subduing their husbands) funny twists and Karim is befuddled sweetness and light in the middle of it all, wondering how many lies she’s going to have to tell to get this romance from meeting on the bus to walking down the aisle.
Iskander is the stand-out in the cast, loud, broad and borderline bawdy when he talks in hypothetical terms about what can happen in a proper Islamic courtship vs. “anything goes” wink wink once whoever this Siti and Jack he doesn’t know consummate their cross-ethnic union.
“Kongsi Raya” may never fully shake the feeling that we’re watching a Malaysian take on some Doris Day “Virgin Queen” rom-com from the early 1960s. But Chin manages to get G-rated laughs out of this subject in 2022, which is saying something.
And if American comic Albert Brooks is still “Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World,” I’ve finally got a suggestion for you, pal.
Rating: TV-G
Cast: Qasrina Karim, Wilson Lee, Harith Iskander, Erra Fazira, Ai Leng Ong, Kin Wah Chew.
Credits: Scripted and directed by Teddy Chin. A Netflix release.
Running time: 1:41
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The only wide release of note this weekend was the Liam Neeson Alzheimer’s action pic “Memory,” and despite delivering much of what was promised, it only earned $3.1 million on its opening weekend.
The family audience continues to dominate movie ticket sales with the animated “Bad Guys” scoring another $16 million, and the partially animated “Sonic the Hedgehog 2” pulling in another $11.3.
The “Fantastic Beasts” Dumbledore sequel may yet justify a final installment in this series. It earned another $8.3, may hit close to $100 million In North America (maybe not);and has done well enough overseas.
A $6 million or so weekend would be a grand second weekend for “The Northman” had it cost less. Still glad they gave Eggers the money and that something definitive and thoroughly entertaining was put on film about Vikings.
The last weekend “Everything Everywhere All at Once” had its last weekend alone in the “multiverse” multiplex, after “Spider Man” and before next weekends “Doctor Strange”sequel and added another $5.5. it is about to become A24’s biggest hit ever.
No such luck with Lionsgate’s “Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent,” which lined into another $3.92 million. Not a bomb, but not the hit they all hoped for. Cage isn’t a big screen draw any more.
“The Lost City” added another $3.4, “Father Stu” added another $2.2, “Morbius” added another $1.1 and those bombs were joined by the horror tale “Hatching” which bombed in limited but wide enough release.
Roger Michell, the South African-born British director of theater, film and TV, passed away without notice (“undisclosed”) last fall, before his final two filmed works — one of them a new documentary about Britain’s longest reigning queen — were released.
But the director of “Notting Hill,” “Venus,” “Hyde Park on Hudson” and “Enduring Love” could not have arranged a finer, more representative curtain call that what turns out to have been his final feature.
“The Duke,” a remembrance of notorious British crime — the theft of a famous painting for political purposes in the 1960s — begins as a lighthearted caper comedy and then transforms into something almost magical, an essay on grief, old age and community, the shared humanity of a simple working man’s turn of class conscious phrase — “I’m not me without you.”
A simple, sentimental story told with panache and cast to perfection, it’s entertainment with heart, and allows a director who once turned his back on a James Bond movie to bow out with a winner.
Two scenes tell you its tone. In the first, our thief, an ever-protesting OAP (old age pensioner) played with extra twinkle by Oscar winner Jim Broadbent, leans down, squints and regards the famous painting of The Duke of Wellington by Francisco Goya, which he’s just nicked from Britain’s National Gallery. He tells his son (Fionn Whitehead), “It’s not very good, is it?”
Granted, the grumpy gadfly Kempton Bunton had greeted the recent news that the British government acquired the masterpiece for £140,000, as the “toffs” “spending our hard-earned money on a half-baked portrait by a Spanish drunk of a Duke who was a bastard to his men and who voted against universal (British) suffrage.” So he’s not exactly unbiased.
And in another scene, the crack 1960s British coppers bring in a handwriting analyst to tell them about the “international criminal gang” that stole “The Duke.” They’re convinced “Italians” nicked it. She tells them the hand-written ransom note is British, working class in origin, that it reveals “a poor education,” that the note composed by “an autodidact.”
“Car mechanic?” Scotland Yard’s finest wants to know.
That’s how this lighthearted romp goes, an elderly (disabled, it turns out) retired bus driver, griping about Britain’s means of paying for TV programming — the “television license” — fights The Man through the press and attempts at addressing Parliament.
His embittered, repressed wife (Oscar winner Helen Mirren), housecleaner to a local posh (Anna Maxwell Martin), is no support, muttering about his endless attempts at playwriting and his embarrassing willingness to go to jail over the damned TV license, which he figures pensioners should get for free.
“My wife always supports me,” he quips to the postal police who show up to enforce the TV license thing, “in private.“
And then Kempton goes off and steals a painting from a hilariously insecure pride-of-the-nation museum. Protest is protest, he figures.
“Rome wasn’t burnt in a day,” Kempton cracks. “How you do eat an elephant? One bite at a time!”
Michell, working from a wry script by Richard Bean and Clive Coleman, tells this story in shades of working class grit and fading “class loyalty,” with a touch of 1960s cinematic pizazz — split screen “caper comedy” editing set to a jazz and jazz pop score that includes a little Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass.
Broadbent has played plenty of “toffs” in his time, but always seems more naturally a working man with a Dickensian touch — putting on airs, attempts at eloquence beyond his station. He looks right at home with a homemade megaphone, railing against the TV license, losing a taxi driving gig because he wouldn’t charge a disabled WWI veteran or sacked from a bakery gig for sticking up for a co-worker.
Kempton Bunton is a leftist Don Quixote without a horse, a Robin Hood in his own mind.
Michell and company mine the story’s mother lode — the trial. The estimable Matthew Goode plays Bunton’s barrister, a wealthy lawyer who happened to be married to the Queen of the British theater, Dame Peggy Ashcroft. Goode lends a misty-eyed idealism to Queen’s Council Jeremy Hutchinson, a man who knows how to feed straight lines to a born performer and natural wit — Kempton Bunton — in the form of questions.
“The Duke” isn’t an award contender of any note, and the older cast and period piece nature of it rule out box office glory. But it’s adorable, finding laughs (look for the Bond joke in the finale) and connecting with shared sentiments. It’s one last feather in the cap of a filmmaker who always touched as he entertained, who often wore his heart on his sleeve and made damned sure his actors did as well.
Rating:R for language and brief sexuality
Cast: Jim Broadbent, Helen Mirren, Anna Maxwell Martin, Fionn Whitehead and Matthew Goode
Credits: Directed by Roger Michell, scripted by Richard Bean and Clive Coleman. Sony Pictures Classics release.
Today’s “Around the World with Netflix” film is a lot like its lead character, a young Amish man in search of his identity, his place in the world. “Rumspringa” follows this lad on that teenage walkabout amongst the sinful temptations of the modern world, and has just as much trouble figuring out who and what it is as he does.
This German film anchored among the Pennsylvania Amish but mostly-set in Berlin begins as a “fish out of water” comedy, lightly mocking the quaint Amish reactions to air travel, convertible cars and raves. But it’s too respectful and tentative to go all-in on mockery. So it turns sensitive and sentimental.
In losing its nerve, it’s neither fish nor fowl, dramedy nor comedy, an is doomed to wander across your Netflix screen like a pilgrim in the comic/cosmic wilderness, a picture with a purpose, but no rewarding way of fulfilling it. It feels like work.
Jacob (Jonas Holdenrieder) is packed off “to the Old Country” to find himself, and with the help of the genealogically-thorough family Bible, meet lost lost kin — a Mennonite uncle, for starters.
But being polite to this gorgeous Berliner (Gizem Emre) in the taxi line leads to losing his “sack,” his luggage. No cash, no clothes save for the ones on his back, no family Bible. He dashes off in pursuit of that stuff and misses the uncle, there to pick him up.
A taxi ride into town ends with an honest confession — “I’m Amish,” he says (in German, or dubbed into English). “My people believe that money has no value!”
In his straw hat and homemade clothes, he may be “Vintage! Retro! Old school!” to the gay trend setters. But he won’t allow photos — “It’s vanity!” And he mistakes a straw-hatted chin-bearded hipster as a fellow buggy-rider, a savior who can solve his predicament.
Alf (Timur Bartels) wants little to do with this “stalker.” But his “save the planet” sometime girlfriend (Tijan Marei) is ALL about the Amish. “Those guys live REALLY sustainably!” So Alf is shamed into helping Jacob track down his luggage, house him and guide him into decadent, partying Berlin.
The elements to a broad farce, something like the Amish portion of the teen comedy “Sex Drive,” are introduced and allowed to wither and die.
Jacob’s ingrained sexism — “But cooking is for WOMENfolk!” — and delicacy about matters young people talk about frankly is brought up, and the jokes just don’t land.
His eagerness to “experience” this time in his life is touched on, is mentioned but not followed through on.
“I went to school for eight years. My Daddy says ‘You’ve learned enough!”
A cute sight gag — he takes on a job as a vegan cafe’s delivery boy — on skates — to search for the missing bag and the beautiful art taste maker (Emre) who accidentally took off with. No joke comes from it.
All the while, the two young men — Jacob and Alf — fall into romantic crises, wondering if each has found “the one” and if their lives with change course, and exactly how they’ll know this is happening. That plays as flat as most of what surrounds it.
Jacob’s “questioning” his destiny, which his father laid out on his departure — Go, have your rumspringa, “come home, get Baptized, marry and grow a beard” — pops up as a here and there afterthought.
I think director and co-writer Mira Thiel wanted to get a comedy out of this, and either lost her nerve or she and her cast just don’t have the knack. An Amish farce showing us partying, sex and and getting stoned should be like shooting a fish-out-of-water in a barrel. This feels like a comedy that never gets past sensitivity training.
Rating: TV-MA, nudity, sex, smoking, profanity
Cast: Jonas Holdenrieder, Timur Bartels, Gizem Emre and Tijan Marei
Credits: Directed by Mira Thiel, scripted by Nika Heinrich, Oskar Minkler and Mira Thiel. A Netflix release.
A family haunted by suicides past and present wrestles with Camus’ “the only serious question in life” in “All My Puny Sorrows,” a somber and biting new adaptation of Miriam Toew’s book, filmed by the director of “Saint Ralph.”
Two of Canada’s finest, Alison Pill and Sarah Gadon, play artistically-inclined sisters, raised “in the community” of Mennonites scarred by whatever that upbringing denied them when their father (Donal Logue) took his own life in the most emphatic way one can — stepping in front of a train in the filn’s opening scene.
Elfrieda or “Elf” (Gadon of “True Detective”) is a celebrated and beautiful concert pianist. Yolandi or “Yoli (Pill, of “Vice” and TV’s “Star Trek: Picard”) is a novelist parsing out her latest book, fearing she’s “peaked” before 40 and that it’s all downhill from here.
“All My Puny Sorrows” is built on their debates over Elf’s latest suicide attempt, and her determination to make the next one permanent. The two bicker and banter as only sibling’s who’ve been through it can — joking about one’s “placement” in the suicide note — with flashbacks revealing the controlling, smothering nature of “the community,” their soulful father and loving but blunt mother (Mare Winningham) trying to cope with gifted children whose talents predestine them for greater things.
Elf fumes over nurses and others in the hospital for “equating intelligence with a desire to live,” while Yoli tries to lighten the mood. “Do you have any desire to rejoin the world? Thinking of reasons to stay alive?”
Elf’s “You have a low grade understanding of despair” seems a low blow. Yoli’s marriage has ended, her new lover is an insensate dullard and her teen daughter (Amybeth McNulty) does what teen daughters do — punishes and judges.
Such movie (“Whose Life is It Anyway,” “‘night, Mother” both based on plays) are cursed with an interminable “terminal” quality, which “Puny Sorrows” tries to overcome with literature and music — quoting poets (Philip Larkin), glimpsed concerts, suggesting Camus’ question can be intellectualized and rationalized.
There’s no judgement here, not from the sister, the hospital shrink (Martin Roach) or the mother.
“You carry a lot of sadness, and for that I am sorry” Mom apologizes — to Yoli, not Elf. Neither sister seems to be in the healthiest place.
Director Michael McGowan, whose specialty is downbeat, musing movies about meaning and/or mourning (“Still Mine” and “One Week” preceded “Saint Vincent”), gives “All My Puny Sorrows” a blue-grey cast that matches the mood. It looks and feels fatalistic and Scandinavian.
The acting can be measured and restrained — with Winningham’s mother keeping it all together, realistic about the gifts and shortcomings of raising children in “the community” and carrying the guilt of that. Pill and Gadon’s sisters have their understandable meltdowns under their individual strains.
“All My Puny Sorrows” never quite escapes the burden of its genre. The literary framework artificially raises the tone of the discussion, but heavy helpings of voice-over narration weigh on it with a gravitas that is already implied and need not be pounded into our ears, scene after scene.
That said, it never quite lapses into glib or draining, the way most screen treatments of this subject and this debate do. And while it’s not for everyone, intellectualized, rationalized, justified and emotionalized, it’s still an honest enough treatment of an imponderable question, the only one that matters, according to Albert Camus, “whether to kill yourself or not.”
Rating: Rated R for language and brief sexuality
Cast: Alison Pill, Sarah Gadon, Donal Logue, Mimi Kuzyk and Mare Winningham.
Credits: Scripted and directed by Michael McGowan, based on the novel by Miriam Toews. A Momentum/eOne release.
You read that and you almost don’t need to see the trailer to this Searchlight pic coming to Hulu in June.
All you could possibly have a question about is if “Fire Island” is a period piece about say, the birth of a Gay Mecca, or if it’s a contemporary romance/bacchanal.
The latter would seem to be the case. Looks riotous and..sensitive.
Movie Nation 