If you’ve been following these biweekly grids at all, you might’ve noticed that they have been distinctly devoid of American films. In the past, this has been the result of some specific rabbit hole we have gone down on or some project taking up our collective imagination but this year has just been one where American cinema has felt genuinely dormant. But this week, despite Warner Bros. best efforts to the contrary, all three members of the Lucky Star editorial team caught up with one of the most anticipated American releases of the year – Clint Eastwood’s Juror #2.
The entire Lucky Star project is the direct successor of a series of podcasts that Jhon and I did over a decade-plus ago talking about films and filmmakers at length with each other and fellow travelers. This week we break our oath to never do a podcast again and revive the medium with the very first Lucky Star podcast to talk about Juror #2, just like old times. People seem to be calling Clint’s film a throwback to a classical style so this feels apropos of something.
In other news, as we get towards the end of the year, it has me mourning not one but two different film industries that seem to have self-sabotaged horribly around the same time. We covered Hollywood already but the demise of Bollywood feels just as fatal. Even a year ago, I recall coming out of a long illness and endlessly watching Rocky aur Rani ki Prem Kahani, a movie that serves almost as a perfect example of a lot of the pleasures of a Bollywood romantic comedy. There are stars, songs, sentiment and it was a blast to go watch in a movie theater with a crowd, albeit with some self-consciousness about how some of those tropes are viewed now – it’s all about the family but the family has got to be woke now. Even Rocky aur Rani was only a modest success compared to the event that a Karan Johar movie used to be a decade or more ago. Now even that kind of success seems elusive or even impossible.
This year feels like the culmination of something that has been fermenting for about a decade in Bollywood. Between the death of star power as a guarantee of box office success, a hostile political climate leading to either pandering or withdrawal by filmmakers, the rise of streaming services as the primary and often only viable mode of distribution – we have gone from choosing between multiple films to go watch in the cinema on a given week to none. The industry seems to have genuinely lost the faith of its audience with no way to win it back. The movies that have failed at the box office this year have been mediocre or even downright poorly made films and the audience cannot be blamed for turning their backs on the whole damn thing.
The only glimpses of life seem to be in relatively small authorial projects like Berlin with no major stars shot over a mere 2 months or Hansal Mehta’s Buckingham Murders produced by and starring Kareena Kapoor who seems to have a perfect understanding of her own stardom and the kind of films it can finance and make successful, at least on streaming platforms. On the podcast, we talk about the precariousness of filmmakers relying on funding from streaming and the inevitable loss of control – Dibakar Banerjee’s film Tees getting buried, Thangalaan release getting endlessly delayed, Meiyazhagan getting key dialogue scenes cut out and even Hansal Mehta acknowledging publicly on twitter that a free hand is what he needs to make a truly great film.
All of this warrants a lot more thought and a deeper discussion and each of the myriad issues raised above have a dozen antecedents and there are no easy answers. The only thing to do is to keep watching and discussing. And we are all fickle and go where the shiny objects are. So even as I mourn not having another Rocky aur Rani to put on my year-end list, I have at least three Kiyoshi Kurosawa movies I am yet to watch (an industry unto himself it would seem) and nearly half a dozen Tamil films vying to disrupt any ranking I have so far. So I will leave the post-mortem to wiser minds and go back to the quiet comfort of star ratings, bombs and fire emojis.
Lucky Star 