Tag Archives: Cobalt Blue

Worst Bollywood Movies of 2022

While plenty of the Hindi films that I reviewed in 2022 could be described as bland but inoffensive, there were still enough stinkers to warrant making a list of the biggest duds. Without further ado, here are my eight Worst Bollywood Movies of 2022.

Ram Setu makes the cut as an example of what happens to a potentially good film when you target it for the lowest common denominator. There’s lots of evidence that writer-director Abhishek Sharma knows what a better version of his Akshay Kumar adventure flick would have looked like, but Sharma takes the easy way out to avoid hassle.

Plan A Plan B and Cobalt Blue both suffer from awkward dialogue delivered poorly. The juvenile sex jokes of Plan A Plan B sound like they were from the screenplay’s first draft, while Cobalt Blue‘s characters speak as though they are reading lines from the novel from which the film was adapted.

I’m a little conflicted about putting Heropanti 2 on this list because it is 100% the most fun Hindi film of last year, but it’s also a complete mess. The plot makes no sense and neither do the characters, yet it’s a raucous and silly good time. I’ve re-watched the scene where Tara Sutaria shatters a mostly full bottle of Champagne by tossing it onto the ground rather than setting it on a table like a normal person god knows how many times.

Govinda Naam Mera is what happens when twists and attempts at audience misdirection go out of control, resulting in a muddled story populated by inscrutable characters.

The dingy thriller Cuttputlli winds up on the list for fetishizing violence against women and for being hypocritical about police brutality, which is only bad until the hero of the story wants revenge on a suspect. Then it’s okay. Also, 54-year-old Akshay Kumar plays a character who’s supposed to be 36.

Double XL is easily the biggest disappointment on the list (no pun intended). I had high hopes for this comedy starring Huma Qureshi and Sonakshi Sinha as a pair of women who overcome weight prejudice to pursue their dreams, but the screenplay feels like a rough draft that offers little insight about an important subject.

By the time the credits rolled on the final film on this list, I knew it was going to be my worst movie of the year. I had trouble imagining any other film that could come from such a morally corrupt place, and thankfully I was correct. My Worst Bollywood Movie of 2022 is Hurdang.

Hurdang stars Sunny Kaushal as a violent, privileged cheater whom the film positions as a poster-child victim of an affirmative action policy that seeks to redress caste discrimination. The movie contends that because some students might have to alter their paths to stable, desirable middle-class government jobs, it’s better to perpetuate a discriminatory system. In Hurdang, there’s no contradiction between the meritocracy that the film contends exists and a hero who steals exam answers. It’s a garbage movie that’s truly the worst of the worst of 2022.

Kathy’s Worst Bollywood Movies of 2022

  1. Hurdang – stream on Netflix
  2. Double XL – stream on Netflix
  3. Cuttputlli – stream on Hulu
  4. Govinda Naam Mera – stream on Hulu
  5. Heropanti 2 – stream on Amazon Prime
  6. Cobalt Blue – stream on Netflix
  7. Plan A Plan B – stream on Netflix
  8. Ram Setu – stream on Amazon Prime

Previous Worst Movies Lists

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Streaming Video News: April 8, 2022

I updated my list of Bollywood movies on Netflix with two new Hindi films added this week: the comedy Dasvi and the LGBTQ drama Cobalt Blue (which was not very good). Also new this week is the social justice action flick Etharkkum Thunindhavan, available in its original Tamil plus dubbed versions in Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, and Telugu.

In other Netflix news, the Malayalam film Night Drive debuts on the service in the US in the early afternoon on April 9. Also, the title of the upcoming Netflix Original Hindi film Jaadugar — which I wrote about in my 2022 preview for What’s on Netflix — has been changed to Love Goals.

I also updated my list of Bollywood movies on Amazon Prime with the streaming premiere of the Malayalam film Naradan. Amazon just released the trailer of their upcoming Hindi legal drama Guilty Minds, which debuts on April 22:

Finally, I updated my list of Bollywood movies on Hulu with the worldwide premiere of the Tamil police drama Taanakkaran, also available in Kannada, Malayalam, and Telugu.

[Disclaimer: my Amazon links include an affiliate tag, and I may earn a commission on purchases made via those links. Thanks for helping to support this website!]

Movie Review: Cobalt Blue (2022)

1.5 Stars (out of 4)

Watch Cobalt Blue on Netflix

Authors don’t often direct the movie versions of their books, and perhaps with good reason. The Netflix Original film Cobalt Blue — based on a novel written by Sachin Kundalkar, who also directed the movie — could have benefited from an outsider’s perspective.

The story takes place in 1996 in Kerala. Literature student Tanay (Neelay Mehendale) lives with his grandparents, parents, brother Aseem (Anant V Joshi), and sister Anuja (Anjali Sivaraman). When the grandparents die, Tanay’s parents rent their vacant room to a paying guest, who is never named (played by Prateik Babbar).

The Guest is an artsy beefcake, prone to shirtlessness. His looks draw the admiration of Anuja and the other young women in the neighborhood, as well as Tanay. The Guest correctly interprets Tanay’s constant hovering as romantic interest, and the two have sex. Tanay is in love, but the Guest is coy about his feelings.

Meanwhile, Tanay’s parents are trying to find a groom for tomboy Anuja. She wants to take her field hockey career to the next level, but her parents insist that she start looking and acting like their idea of a proper lady.

While I’ve not read the book on which Cobalt Blue is based, I suspect much of the dialogue is taken directly from it, because it sounds like dialogue written to be read, and not actually spoken. Few of the conversations in the film actually sound conversational. Most lines are delivered with flat affect and punctuated with unnatural dramatic pauses.

The performances across the board are quite stiff, but none more so than that by Mehendale as Tanay. His posture and gait are so rigid as to make Buckingham Palace guards look relaxed by comparison. On top of that, some of his facial expressions — especially in the final shot of the film — are plain odd.

This is Mehendale’s first film, but his inexperience isn’t solely to blame for his awkward performance. That’s on the director, who should have given him better guidance. Kundalkar himself is not new behind the camera, with eight Marathi and Hindi films under his belt before this one.

Considering that Kundalkar wrote the book on which this movie based and adapted the screenplay himself, it’s reasonable to conclude that this is precisely the film he wanted to make. But its flaws feel like issues that could have been rectified by someone with a fresh perspective — someone who hasn’t had these characters in his head for more than two decades. The film has interesting things to say about the loneliness of being gay in a time before widespread internet access. The story isn’t the problem, just the way it’s presented.

Links

Streaming Video News: December 9, 2019

I updated my list of Bollywood movies on Amazon Prime with the today’s addition of Saif Ali Khan’s October release Laal Kaptaan.

I also updated my list of Bollywood movies on Netflix with yesterday’s addition of the Hindi version of Saaho. (Saaho was already available on Amazon Prime in Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, and Telugu.) The Priyanka Chopra Jonas/Farhan Akhtar family drama The Sky Is Pink hits Netflix on December 11.

Over the weekend, the Twitter account Cinema Rare tweeted a thread of Netflix Originals from India coming to the service in the next year or so. The only one with a confirmed release date is the anthology movie Ghost Stories, from the filmmakers behind Bombay Talkies and Lust Stories. It premieres December 31. I found links for nine of the twenty-two Netflix Original movies and series Cinema Rare mentioned, in case you’d like to add them to your Netflix queue: