I updated my list of Bollywood movies on Netflix with today’s premiere of the new Hindi spy thriller Mission Majnu, starring Sidharth Malhotra. Earlier in the week, the Malayalam film Kaapa became available for streaming, and the Telugu movie Dhamaka becomes available tomorrow.
Netflix announced earlier this week that it secured the rights to a slate of 18 Tamil movies and 16 Telugu movies that will stream on the service after their theatrical release. Netflix has long been criticized for its heavily Hindi-focused catalog, and this is a strong statement about the company’s desire to expand its Indian offerings into other languages.
This week’s other new direct-to-streaming Hindi film is the comedy Chhatriwali on Zee5.
I’m planning to review Mission Majnu and Chhatriwali next week. Today and tomorrow, I’m catching up on movies so I can vote in the annual Online Film Critics Society awards. The winners will be announced on January 23. This year’s list of nominees contains some really, really good movies, including RRR, which is nominated in three categories.
Finally, I updated my list of Bollywood movies on Hulu with the addition of the 2022 Marathi film Sarsenapati Hambirrao and the debut of Season 2 of the Telugu series Jhansi (also available in Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, and Tamil). Hulu/Disney+Hotstar just released the trailer for the new Anil Kapoor-Aditya Roy Kapur series The Night Manager, which premieres February 17:
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I updated my list of Bollywood movies on Netflix with two new additions today: the 2022 Hindi comedy Mister Mummy — starring married couple Riteish Deshmukh and Genelia D’Souza — and the new Netflix Original series Trial By Fire, which is based on a true story. The Tamil film Varalaru Mukkiyam becomes available for streaming tomorrow.
I also updated my list of Bollywood movies on Amazon Prime with today’s surprise streaming debut of Ajay Devgn’s thriller sequel Drishyam 2. Amazon also released the trailer for Shahid Kapoor’s first OTT series Farzi, which debuts on February 10:
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Phone Bhoot is almost a very good movie. It has a distinct style and point of view, and Ishaan Khattar gives a hypnotic performance. But it badly needs editing.
It’s not just that Phone Bhoot is too long (though it is, especially for a comedy) or that scenes are too slow (though they are). It’s that all the cruft in the film makes the jokes less funny than if they were quick hits. There’s a reason why the Hamlet quote “Brevity is the soul of wit” endures over the centuries.
For example, take how the film’s main characters acquire their superpowers. Friends Major (Siddhant Chaturvedi) and Gullu (Khattar) are two horror-obsessed slackers. While fixing the glowing eyes of their Frankenstein-like monster statue named Raaka, our heroes are electrocuted. Instead of just convulsing for a few seconds then dropping, director Gurmmeet Singh has the camera repeatedly cut between Major, Gullu, and Raaka as the humans convulse for what feels like forever. The prolonged electrocution sequence has been a tired Bollywood comedy trope for a long time.
When the guys wake up, they find that they can see ghosts. Specifically, they can see Ragini (Katrina Kaif), a beautiful spectre who makes them a proposition. She will help them start an exorcism business, thereby earning enough to pay back the money that the guys owe their fathers. In exchange, they have to help her with a favor, no questions asked.
An interesting theme that comes up as the trio’s exorcism business takes off is the financial ramifications of death. The ghost of a young woman haunts the family of the man who killed her in a hit-and-run not just because of the unfairness of her life being cut short. It’s also because the woman was the breadwinner for her aging parents, who now live in poverty. Other ghosts have similar stories. It’s a thoughtful acknowledgement that justice may be best served in forms other than jail time or equivalent physical punishment.
Another cool thing about Major and Gullu is that they are obsessed expressly with Indian horror movies. There are very few references to Hollywood horror films in the movie, and all of the posters and props in their apartment are from older Bollywood flicks. Ragini’s name obviously comes from the Ragini MMS series, and I’m sure there are tons of other references for those with a deeper knowledge of spooky Hindi classics than I have.
Unfortunately, as with the electrocution sequence, the movie draws too much from outdated comedy and storytelling styles. Jokes last so long that they stop being funny. The story moves too slowly, especially since there isn’t really a b-plot. There’s plenty of room in the narrative for characters like the Major’s and Gullu’s dads to reappear to check on their unconventional sons’ progress, or for there to be more to the guys’ thin association with a witch whose name translates in the English subtitles as Wicky Witch (Sheeba Chaddha).
Likewise, it would’ve been better to have the guys encounter the movie’s villain Aatmaram Shastrashakti (Jackie Shroff) earlier in the story, rather than keep the evil sorcerer sequestered in the underground lair he’s leasing from Big Trouble in Little China‘s David Lo Pan.
Another disappointment is that the songs and choreography are forgettable. None of the numbers will rank among Kaif’s greatest hits, despite pairing her with an excellent dancer like Khattar. (Chartuvedi holds his own on the dance floor, too.)
Kaif’s performance is solid as the stand-in for the audience, rolling her eyes at the two dopes she’s forced to rely on for help. Chaturvedi’s mugging as Major is a bit much at times but mostly fits with his character’s personality. Khattar is the real standout, totally immersing himself in every scene, no matter how silly, and reacting authentically.
Were it 30 minutes shorter, Phone Bhoot would be a real winner.
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Posts will be sparse over Christmas break. In the meantime, please check out the MASSIVE update on all of the new Netflix Indian Originals coming in 2023 that I wrote for What’s on Netflix. Merry Christmas, and Happy New Year! — Kathy
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There are a lot of movies still to come to Netflix before the end of December, so head to my Netflix page to see the titles we already know about. I’m half-expecting to see one more big Hindi theatrical release debut on the service during Christmas break, but that’s just a hunch.
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One note about Hulu is that it seems like they’re the streaming service with the most disparate regional restrictions on marquee content. With some regularity, stuff that they promote on their social media channels is ultimately available in India, but not in the United States. For example, Liger is now streaming in Hindi in India, but not here. [Update:Liger in Hindi was added to Hulu over the weekend. I guess the other lesson is: stuff isn’t added to Hulu as quickly as it’s added to Disney+Hotstar.]
Plenty of titles are available on Amazon Prime in India that aren’t free with Prime in the US, but they aren’t usually titles that are promoted in advance. All this is just to say that, while I try to be accurate in the “Coming Soon” section on each of my three streaming pages, don’t be surprised if some titles mentioned on the Hulu page never make their way to the USA.
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Who we are is a complicated question because so much of our identity is relational. Descriptors like wife, mother, sister, friend, or co-worker all depend on there being at least one specific person on the other side of the equation. Navigating all those identities is tricky enough before we introduce individual identities that can be broader yet also more personal: artist, woman, gay, or straight. Maja Ma follows the members of the Patel family as a rumor makes them examine their own identities and their relationships with each other.
Tejas Patel (Ritwik Bhowmik) is trying to convince the wealthy parents of his Indian-American girlfriend Esha Hansraj (Barkha Singh) to allow him to marry their daughter. Tejas already passed a lie detector test required by Texans Bob (Rajit Kapoor) and Pam Hansraj (Sheeba Chaddha) to ensure that he isn’t just after the family’s money. The real challenge is a meeting between the families in India to prove that the Patels embody Bob’s idea of true Indian values. Bob believes anything less might harm Bob’s future campaign to become mayor of Houston.
The Patel family is pretty typical — dad Manohar (Gajraj Rao), mom Pallavi (Madhuri Dixit), Tejas, and his sister Tara (Srishti Shrivastava) — but Tara is the wildcard. She’s working on her PhD in gender studies, and she’s a vocal supporter of LGBTQIA+ rights. She’s so vocal that even the advocacy group she volunteers for asks her to tone down her fiery rhetoric to spare them the negative press.
Pallavi is supportive of her daughter, but she’s not keen on discussing sexuality with her. During an argument in which Tara presses her mom to admit whether she would have accepted Tara if she was gay (she’s not), Pallavi blurts out that she herself is a lesbian. It’s an effective way to end the argument, but Tara suspects that maybe there’s some truth behind her mom’s words.
When the Hansraj family arrives in town, the Patels do their best to tolerate their insufferable future in-laws for Tejas’s sake. Bob leers at Pallavi and says things like, “Exotic,” during her welcome ritual. When Tara serves snacks, Pam asks her if she’s menstruating (she’s not) since Bob won’t eat any food prepared by a woman who is.
At a festival that night, the host shows a video recorded by one of the nosy neighborhood kids that includes secretly recorded footage of Pallavi’s confession during her argument with Tara, sending the whole town into an uproar. Women exclude Pallavi from their activities, Manohar’s manhood is mocked, and Bob and Pam threaten to call off the engagement — unless Pallavi can pass a lie detector test.
Whether Pallavi’s confession is actually true is immaterial in the sense that everyone in her life changes the way they treat her anyway. Manohar’s concerns are the most understandable since Pallavi being a lesbian alters the foundations of their marriage. Tejas is willing to haul his mom off to conversion therapy if it means he can still marry Esha. Tara is thrilled at the prospect of having a lesbian mother, as it would give her more credibility in her gay rights organization.
One of the counselors in Tara’s organization emphasizes that it’s entirely up to Pallavi whether she decides to publicly embrace being a lesbian. The reactions by her family, the Hansrajs, and everyone else in the neighborhood show that doing so would not come without a cost. In addition to being a lesbian, Pallavi is a mother and a wife — two roles she’s let define her knowing that other options were not available to her when she was of marriageable age.
As far as the audience knows, Pallavi loves being a mom and being part of her community, and she and Manohar have an amicable relationship. Is making a public declaration worth risking damage to the other parts of her life she’s spent decades building? Director Anand Tiwari and writer Sumit Batheja compassionately provide context for a heart-wrenching decision people are still forced to make in places where it is not safe to come out.
Maja Ma also thoughtfully depicts the changing family dynamics as adult children finally realize that their parents are more than just “Mom” and “Dad.” Likewise, Manohar’s attempts to rekindle the physical romance in his marriage are handled with grace and good humor. This is a movie that is very fond of the main family at its core.
Conversely, Bob and Pam are shown to be buffoons who get away with awful behavior because they have money. One curious point is that the movie gives Esha a pass for tolerating her parents’ rude, bigoted behavior. Her unconditional love of them is painted as a good thing, but that doesn’t mean she should condone their abuse. Far less emotional growth is demanded of her than the other adult children in the film, and it seems like a missed opportunity.
Still, Tiwari’s and Batheja’s attempts to address as the many complications that would arise from Pallavi’s confession is worth applauding, as are the performances by Maja Ma‘s terrific cast.
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I just updated my list of Bollywood movies on Netflix with yet another massive list of films that will soon expire from Netflix. Following the big purge of UTV titles on October 1, most of the rest of the UTV catalog will expire on November 1. Because of the ways that films are co-produced by multiple studios, I suspect a lot of this activity is due to a realignment of streaming video contracts. Many of these titles may wind up on Netflix again, although some will likely make their way other streamers (such as Disney+/Hotstar/Hulu in the case of movies produced by Disney India, like ABCD 2 or Zokkomon.)
Here are all of the movies leaving Netflix on November 1, with titles I’ve reviewed at the top followed by other titles in alphabetical order:
In other streaming news, the mass exodus of Yash Rash Films content from Amazon Prime that I wrote about last week turns out to have been more of a housekeeping matter. Previously, every YRF title had two separate catalog IDs: one from the initial time they were added to the Amazon Prime catalog and then when the movies were added again (for some reason). All of the original YRF catalog entries were wiped out on October 1, but the newer catalog IDs remain. So for now, the vast majority of YRF movies are still available on Amazon Prime. You can find all of them on my list of Bollywood movies on Amazon Prime.
[October 3, 2022 update: At least for now, this appears to be a catalog cleanup rather than a mass expiration. Previously, all Yash Raj Films movies were listed in the Amazon Prime catalog twice, with two distinct catalog ID numbers for each title. The older of the two catalog IDs for each film has expired, but the newer one remains. For now, YRF movies are still available on Prime.]
It’s last call at Amazon Prime for the majority of movies in the Yash Raj Films catalog. 65 titles are set to expire from Prime on September 30, 2022.
This removal may be temporary, but there’s also a chance that the departures presage the launch of the independent streaming service YRF announced it was working on last year. The company already assigned a December 2 release date to its first streaming series The Railway Men, and the show needs a home, so the timing seems right. A handful of YRF films from 2016 — including Fan and Sultan — are currently unavailable for streaming anywhere, presumably waiting for the debut of the YRF Entertainment streaming service.
All eleven of the YRF movies released since August, 2017 will remain on Amazon Prime for the time being (check my list of Bollywood movies on Amazon Prime for links). The company’s four most recent films — Bunty Aur Babli 2, Prithviraj, Jayeshbhai Jordaar, and Prithviraj — have their own separate streaming contract with Amazon Prime and will likely be last to leave the service.
Here are all the titles leaving Amazon Prime on September 30, 2022, organized first in descending order of my star-ranking, then alphabetically:
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Netflix India announced the details on their slate of non-fiction content set to debut before the end of 2022, including release dates for two of the titles. Season 2 of The Fabulous Lives of Bollywood Wives launches on September 2, and the second entry in the Indian Predator series — The Diary of a Serial Killer — comes out September 7. Other titles mentioned in the reveal video (embedded below) include the previously announced series Social Currency, the new series IRL: In Real Love, and two new documentaries — Mumbai Mafia: Police vs The Underworld and Nayanthara: Beyond the Fairytale.
Bonus: Aditya Roy Kapur’s action flick Rashtra Kavach Om is now streaming on Zee5.
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