I'm almost 35. In less than a month, I'll be 35.

I have been watching a lot of movies and tv-series lately. Not because I've got time. In-fact, I've been busier than ever. There's always something that needs attention now. Kid, family, office, possessions such as car, house whatever. I have learnt how to deprioritize office. I don't really give a fuck about deliverables being late anymore. Because, who gives a fuck about office deliverables, except maybe office? And who gives a fuck about office?

I'd like some time on my hands, so that I could focus on some of the things that I'd like to do. Pursue a PhD, build a business, pick a city, build a permanent house, make movies, and just stop the chase. I'd pick the age of 45 to be a hard deadline. I don't think I want to work for someone else beyond that. Honestly, I don't want to work for someone else right now. But, the chase just doesn't end. I'd be okay with less. Less salary, less responsibilities, less things to do. 'I do less things' is not the same as 'I have less things to do'. I am keeping the burnout at bay.

So I watched a lot movies and tv-series lately. And the 'less things to do bit' is maybe something that's crept into what I want from the movies that I watch. I have reached a stage where Nolan's cinema I can enjoy, but not care as much as. I'd want a great Shah Rukh Khan film, but I'd get 'Jawan'.

Holy shit. Jawan probably is an abject mistake. I try as much as I can to avoid bad movies. Because life 👆. I need food that can give me a dopamine high. Same with movies. In-fact, I need a dopamine high every now and then otherwise life is just hard to deal with.

And then there's Jawan.

tl;dr 

The bar is so low, that I must admit that I rather enjoyed Pathaan in-comparison. At-least that's a movie. I'm glad I didn't spend money separately to watch either of them in theatres.
 
Okay, I might end up writing a review of the movie, that may not be to your liking. If you want to walk, walk. Otherwise, here goes. (Oppenheimer review, a few thoughts on The Killer, and minor other things in life follow.)

I have watched Jawan once, on Netflix. But most people watched it more than once (how else would it make a 1000crores at the box office)? So, I have watched Jawan once. But it felt like I watched a TikTok timeline or YouTube shorts or Instagram reels for 9 hours. 

It's not like people don't do that. In-fact, way too many people watch Instagram reels for hours and hours. 

But I don't. Beyond 15 minutes, I'm done with Instagram and I uninstall it. I can't watch stupid ass meaningless dance clips or 'here's 25 tips to fix your hair in less than a minute' videos. 

Jawan is the same thing. It's 'here's 50 clips of SRK showing up on screen.' Yes, that's it. There's absolutely nothing more to the movie. Yeah, sure, it has serious issues in play, like farmer suicide, corrupt politicians ruining healthcare, Soldiers dying because of poor weaponry, etc. etc. 

But the movie isn't about any of that. In-fact, I don't think Jawan is a movie either. It's, and I'll repeat, 'here's 50 clips of SRK showing up on screen.' 

See, the movie had a banger of an opening. It has a superstar entry that's truly awesome. In-fact, it starts with intrigue upfront! It asks the question, who is this guy? And you're immediately hooked.

But then, it simply loses its way. What follows is essentially a short film that wraps a money-heist like 8 episode series in 20 minutes. The whole focal point: SRK is badass.

Immediately after that, there's another short film. Which is SRK's love story. And I was genuinely interested in it. It starts with a girl looking for a father and not a husband for her mom. You fall in love with the little girl. You learn why her mom (Narmada: Nayanthara's character) is a single mom. That dialogue exchange is great. You learn of that short story and you fall in love with Narmada. SRK's charm shines through in that scene. You admire Azad. Aaaand... they get married in two minutes. I'm like, yo! That's fast.  

And here's what's fast... the next short story. 

Oh, there's another short film in between actually. It's on corrupt healthcare system and infant mortality. 
God damn! I forgot about it entirely.

Yeah that happens in between too. But, moving on. Where was I? Oh, yes. The marriage. So, they get married... and another short film that's on another problem in the country, has another SRK entry that culminates in another SRK entry. And on and on and on.

And why? I mean why? I need film makers to make their movie! How hard is that? Aren't you trained in making a movie? Don't you understand that a film has to work like music? A 3 hour movie needs as much cohesion and flow as a 5 minute song. A song isn't just about the singer. It's about the feeling, the mood, the lyrics, the melody, the instruments, the singing, and so many other things. 

Similarly, a lot goes into a movie. There has to be a mood, a flow, a make-believe fantasy that I should 'believe' is realistic in a movie. If you're showing a world, that I need to explore then at-least let me explore it. Just because it's similar to ours doesn't mean I can walk in it. 

I can't simply believe that you can:

*: 40,000 crores is USD 5 Billion btw... in my head, a villain who has USD 5 Billion to spare won't let the Robin Hood go that easily. In-fact, he'd announce his daughter a martyr, and force the govt. to take out every single terrorist and wouldn't even give a fuck about others dying as collateral damage. Also, why would his daughter take a metro? Heck, they can afford chopper. And no bodyguards? 

See I couldn't buy any of it. My brain totally rejected the inner workings of this film. If you have vigilantes who take people hostage to blackmail someone or something, then make your fantasy 'believable'. At-least make the crisis interesting. Let me feel the thrill. Let me see the villain sweat. Let me see your Robin Hood play his game. Let me see your awesome policewoman put up a fight and make things harder for the Robin Hood. All of this looks like cakewalk. You can attach your political themes and messaging along the way. 

Between all the kidnappings, and hostage situations, and heists, there's barely any story. The political messaging is not nuanced. There's no intelligent dialogue about the issues you want to discuss. In-fact, I don't even think that there's any intelligent dialogue at all. The issues are presented like headlines and the dialogues exist solely in the service of the superstar.

Emotional manipulation won't make me remember the messaging either. I will remember the headline anyway. There's nothing special that the movie is doing. Bad things are bad, and that's not a revelation.

Here's the deal, I don't think the superstar cares as much. Or the film-maker for that matter. They care about: SRK plays SRK's dad. That's the revelation. 

There's something to be said about a movie in which Deepika Padukone's (almost inconsequential) character is more memorable than its central 'the whole point of the movie' villain. Sorry Vijay Sethupathi. It's unfortunate that mainstream Bollywood has no idea how to use your talents well. 

Because, Jawan is not a movie. It's, unfortunately, an adulation. It's Atlee's adulation of Shah Rukh Khan. Atlee does it for about 2 hours and 40 minutes. The movie doesn't care about any of the issues it's talking about. It doesn't even care about the art of storytelling either. It only cares about how to magnify the already enormous image of its superstar. It wants to show that the boss is big.

But here's the deal. I don't give a fuck about any of that. I want a movie. I spent almost 3 hours looking for it but I couldn't find one. 

Which takes me to another 'too much' movie, and that's Chris Nolan's latest triumph: Oppenheimer. Even if Nolan stumbles his way to it. The movie lands the ending.

Its issues, politics, messaging, and themes add up even if Nolan is a tad too focussed on building a cinematic moment rather than focusing on the overall narrative of his movie. Especially when his narrative is generally Byzantine to begin with.

With 'Dunkirk', 'Tenet', and now 'Oppenheimer', I have observed something about Nolan. He's trying to establish a little too much at the very beginning of the movie and because of that it's unnecessarily confusing. The net result is actually the opposite of what Nolan wants to do.

Let me try to explain.

In Dunkirk, the threat is German army closing in on Britishers trapped at Dunkirk. Three teams have to save the Britishers: Surface team that Kenneth Branagh leads, Ocean team that Mark Rylance leads, and the Air team that Tom Hardy leads. Simple and easy to understand. That's why the movie works well.

In Tenet, the threat is... eh 🤔.

The threat is a bomb, ultimately. And to get to the threat, Nolan meanders. I think he himself lost his track somewhere and that's why the scientist says: "Don't try to understand it. Just feel it." Lol 😂
I hope you get my point. Nolan basically loses track of his own story, and his urgency works against the movie. In his pursuit to get the plot going, he brings it to a complete halt. Many times.

Something similar happens in Oppenheimer. He wants to convey a very specific message. And that message is: men, through blind ambition and ego, end up creating things that are capable of destroying everything -- in this case the nuclear bomb.

So, the real threat is the "creation of the nuclear bomb," which is a tad counter intuitive to diffusing a bomb. Generally, in movies, heroes have to diffuse a bomb or prevent a bomb blast. Here, scientists have to create a bomb and conduct a bomb blast. From a higher level you could infer that we are watching a movie about villains and not heroes.

Okay, so the problem with Tenet was that for a while the movie meanders just to get to the threat. And Nolan tries really hard to get to the threat early on. He declares that there was a blast in Stalsk-12, Sator's hometown. So we kinda know we are dealing with a bomb. He declares very early that the bomb has three pieces, and the heroes need to stop Sator from assembling the three pieces. But the problem is, despite declaring the plot really early... he still takes a lot of time to build a sensible narrative. Tenet unfortunately doesn't even make much sense even after it's done.

Luckily, Oppenheimer is based on a true story. It's a biopic. And here, again, Nolan tries really hard to get to the threat as soon as possible. And this is the problem with the movie. Because he is too impatient to get to the plot, he misses out on building scenes that could be important. Like, Oppenheimer's meeting with Heisenberg. Oppenheimer travels to Switzerland to meet Heisenberg, just to tell him he wants to go home. What was the point of that scene? We learn later that Heisenberg was someone with formidable intuition that could help Germans build the bomb before the Americans. Nolan could have built on it, even if he wanted the movie from Oppenheimer's PoV alone. The threat of Germans winning the nuclear arms is barely felt. 

Also, another major threat gets watered down. And that is the creation of the Hydrogen bomb. Lewis Strauss was responsible for that. So broadly, there are two threats in the movie: Oppenheimer creating a nuclear fission bomb and Teller creating a nuclear fusion bomb.

Because of Nolan's insistence to get to the plot and create iconic moments, the second threat is pushed behind when it's really the bigger threat. It makes Lewis Strauss and Edward Teller the bigger villains but that's in retrospect.

Another problem of the movie is Nolan's constant obsession with accelerating the movie. Because of this, there are moments when there are no scenes. It's just a series of clips put together. You have a scene, cut to a flashback, cut to something else, and then back to the scene. It goes directly against the stellar acting on display. Because Robert Downey Jr. chooses a more physical approach, he stands out in the first viewing. But when I watched Oppenheimer the second time, I realized how subtle, understated, and sublime Cillian Murphy is. In my first viewing, a lot of the acting didn't even register. In my second viewing, I realized how good Emily Blunt is. Her Kitty Oppenheimer exudes frustration and intelligence like a boss. The narrative betrays its actors, but they show up with full strength.

However, at the end of the movie when we see what Einstein and Oppenheimer actually talked about, we have felt and understood everything. The biggest achievement of Oppenheimer, the movie, is that we are scared when it ends. It reminds us that we are at the edge of annihilation. The movie has two men focussed on building a bomb: Oppenheimer and Strauss. Both the men are blinded by ambition and both of them betray people they are close to. Both of them want a seat at the high table. Both of them are denied.

I'd recommend that you should watch the movie twice. It's a little too distracting to watch the first time. The second time it feels a bit slower since you have watched it already. It's a far superior movie the second time. You can see Nolan's ambitions, his politics, and the messages he wants to convey. 

When the movie begins we see a young scientist, who is an egoistic, passionate man. Blinded by ambition. He poisons his teacher's apple but has a change of heart and stops anyone from eating it. At the end, he has failed. He couldn't stop the world from eating his poisoned apple. He leads the world to dangerous outcomes.

The movie ends with an old man, filled with regret.

--
salil