What Film Companion Watched This Week

Dear Reader, Another week, another slew of Bollywood sports films. It's easy to understand why so many of these are made — the elements of patriotism, scrappy underdog success, thrilling montages and climactic euphoria, each intriguing on their own, can be combined and recombined into a dozen readymade templates. Sometimes this mixture produces a heady cocktail; other times, a damn squib. This Friday's releases include Srijit Mukherji's Shabaash Mithu, a biopic on the legendary cricketer Mithali Raj, and Sameer Saxena's Jaadugar, a fictional tale of a young magician who can only win the heart of the girl he loves if he reaches the finals of an amateur football tournament. If you're on the fence about watching either of these, let Rahul Desai and Deepanjana Pal's reviews be your guide: REVIEWS Shabaash Mithu Looks For Goalposts On A Cricket Pitch By Rahul Desai Shabaash Mithu Turns An Eventful Life Into A Tedious Story By Deepanjana Pal Jaadugar Is A Glorified Skit Parading As A Sports Dramedy By Rahul Desai In more cheerful news, this has been a week of celebrating anniversaries for us. The Indian streaming space turned 5, making us think about how the world has steadily flattened into the size of laptop screen over just a few years. Newer and more niche OTT platforms now launch every day, blurring the streaming landscape into one long endless scroll. This makes it hard not to feel nostalgic for a simpler time, one when Amazon Prime and Netflix were the only two streaming platforms to which most of us subscribed. For a deep dive into how streaming altered not only the landscape of Indian storytelling, but also the way we consume art, check out Rahul Desai's article.  Of the many, many adaptations of Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay's novel Devdas — and there really have been many — we celebrated the biggest and starriest of them all. Sanjay Leela Bhansali's Devdas turned 20 this week, prompting Sankhayan Ghosh to examine five pivotal moments from the film and Prathyush Parasuraman to piece together the story of how its background score came together.  And finally, if you're someone who fixates on themes, trends and trivial bits of information from the world of entertainment, you're in luck - Gayle Sequeira does too. That's why she's starting a new column, Spin-Off, to write about her pop-culture obsessions in depth. The first instalment explores director Taika Waititi's ability to upend expectations of what the most familiar figures should act and look like. From vampires to Nazis to pirates — he's long turned symbols of power into the butt of jokes. So why didn't this formula work in Thor: Love and Thunder? We'll let Gayle explain: PICKS OF THE WEEK Be Kind, Rewind: Streaming Turns Five in India By Rahul Desai Sanjay Leela Bhansali's Devdas, In Five Scenes By Sankhayan Ghosh Behind The Background Score Of Sanjay Leela Bhansali's Devdas By Prathyush Parasuraman Spin-Off: Thor Is Making Taika Waititi Lose His Superpower By Gayle Sequeira Copyright © 2022, Film Companion LLP, All rights reserved. Our mailing address is: info@filmcompanion.in Want to change how you receive these emails? You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list filmcompanion.in