Mega daughter Niharika Konidela makes her debut as a movie producer with Committee Kurrollu, and it hit the screens today amid significant anticipation. Check out our review to see how it stacks up.

Story:

In the peaceful village of Purushothapalli, West Godavari, a close-knit group of friends-Shiva (Sandeep Saroj), Surya (Yaswanth Pendyala), Subbu (Thrinadh Varma), William (Eshwar Rachiraju), Peddodu (Prasad Behara) and others- share an unbreakable bond. But a sudden dispute between them sends shockwaves throughout the village, disrupting their lives and the community’s harmony. What caused this fallout among the friends? How did their conflict affect the village and its culture? Will they reconcile? And what role does Bujji (Sai Kumar) play in this unfolding drama? The answers will be unveiled on the big screen.

Plus Points:

The film’s promotional campaign set the stage for a lively, youthful entertainer, delivering a blend of humour and heartfelt moments.

Commendable performances from Sandeep Saroj, Thrinadh Varma, Yashwanth Pendyala, and Prasad Behara make their characters come alive, adding depth to the story.

Supporting roles by Kishore Kumar Polimera, Sai Kumar, and others contribute effectively to the film’s appeal.

The childhood scenes are a major highlight, filled with youthful antics that evoke nostalgia and provide plenty of laughs. These well-written moments will surely remind viewers of their golden days.

Minus Points:

While the film shines in comedy and a few emotional scenes, the storyline falls short of being engaging. The plot fails to fully captivate.

The first half is well executed and entertaining, but the momentum wanes in the second half. Some scenes miss the mark emotionally, and the election subplot and climax seem rushed and underdeveloped.

The conflict and reunion scenes could have been more impactful to enhance the drama and emotional engagement. Some scenes appear forced, and confrontations involving characters like Sai Kumar and Goparaju Ramana lack depth. Although the heroines and their romantic subplots are well-crafted, they receive minimal screen time in the second half.

Technical Aspects:

Director Yadhu Vamsi delivers a visually engaging film with entertaining moments, though his writing needs refinement. Anudeep Dev’s music is enjoyable, featuring several standout tracks. The cinematography by Edurolu Raju captures the village setting beautifully, while the editing by Anwar Ali could have been tighter to enhance the film’s pacing. Production values are rich.

Verdict:

On the whole, Committee Kurrollu is a decent youthful comedy-drama that delivers laughs, nostalgia, and strong performances. While the second half lacks engagement and the storyline isn’t particularly captivating, it remains an enjoyable watch for a weekend, especially with friends, offering a generous dose of nostalgia.

123telugu.com Rating: 3/5

Reviewed by 123telugu Team

Click Here For Telugu Review

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An hour after leaving a screening of the new Borderlands movie, directed by Eli Roth (Hostel) and starring Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart, Jamie Lee Curtis, and Ariana Greenblatt, I’m staring at a blinking cursor in a blank Google Doc, urging inspiration to strike.

Surely a live-action movie based on the wildly successful edgelord video game franchise from 2K and Gearbox would inspire a couple hundred words, right? Surely the star-studded cast, which includes several Oscar winners (and Jack Black), would prompt a spark of creativity. Surely the vibrant visuals, cacophonous explosions, and poop and pee jokes would destroy the writer’s block dam, sending forth a surge of witty words and succinct sentences. But I’m at a loss.

Borderlands is not just bad, it’s depressing.

On the border of a breakdown

I saw Borderlands at an early screening at Alamo Drafthouse, during which cosplay was encouraged. No one wore costumes, and the theater was solemnly silent, as if we were about to watch archival video of the deadliest WWII battle or found footage from 9/11. R-rated trailers aired before it, prompting me to question if this movie, directed by Roth (known for his gory, gross violence), was rated R (it’s not).

Before I have a chance to double-check the rating, Cate Blanchett’s voice echoes through the theater. “Long ago, our galaxy was ruled by an alien race,” she intones, sounding bizarrely flat for an incredibly talented actor who endeavored to deliver a fun, frenetic performance in another superficial flick: 2017’s Thor: Ragnarok. I’m immediately assaulted by aggressive, slap-dash cuts and shimmery CGI images of guns, neon signs, and Psychos, as Blanchett (who plays Lilith, a character who inspired early-twenties me so much I got one of her quotes tattooed) gives us the plot overview with as much energy as a ‘50s housewife who regularly mixes mood stabilizers and martinis.

Lilith tells us that the Eridians laid the foundation of this galaxy, then disappeared, leaving behind a secret vault hidden on the planet Pandora, inside of which are powerful relics of the long-lost civilization. “That sounds like some wacko B.S., huh?” Blanchett asks. I stifle a groan with a huge bite of my burger. Rather than giving moviegoers the free-wheeling wanderlust that the Borderlands games offer, the film is incredibly linear and straightforward: Lilith, a bounty hunter, is hired by the head of arms manufacturer Atlas Industries to track down his daughter Tiny Tina on the planet Pandora.

We’re introduced to almost all of the main cast rather quickly: Hart as Roland, Greenblatt as Tiny Tina, Florian Munteanu as a Psycho named Kreig. Roland breaks Tiny Tina out of some kind of facility by way of a fairly bland action sequence, during which he punches a guard and calls him a “fake Stormtrooper-ass bitch.” I guess that means Star Wars exists in the Borderlands universe? It doesn’t improve after this.

If you told me Borderlands used AI for its dialogue, I’d believe you without question. Nearly every line that’s uttered with the kind of fake peppiness I’d reserve for my elementary school cheer competitions is either a limp-dicked “edgy” joke that wouldn’t warrant a single Reddit upvote or a cliche phrase like “I’m too old for this shit” and “This has been a really long day.” I could count on one hand the lines that were thoroughly genuine—or at least not dripping with so much snark they were almost sticky. There is no humanity here, just humorless humans.

When a needle-drop of Muse’s “Supermassive Black Hole” bleeds into a scene in which it’s playing over the speakers in a Pandoran bar, I nearly slam my head onto the table. What are we doing here?

We need to talk about Tina

Blissfully, Borderlands isn’t that long of a movie, and the breakneck speed at which the film is paced means we meet Jamie Lee Curtis’ Tannis just before I need a pee break (I chugged a beer). Curtis plays her with a socially awkward twitchiness that I didn’t expect from the actor, and while it’s at least an attempt at imbuing the character with a personality, it is incredibly grating. But again, she tried—Blanchett is phoning it in, Hart has no business playing the straight man, and Greenblatt is doing the best she can with material that’s based on a white character doing a blaccent (which the film, thankfully, avoids). But even she can’t save a line read that requires her to say “badonkadonk” in the year of our lord 2024.

And also, not to be ageist, but why the fuck is everyone so old? Lilith is 22 years old in the original Borderlands game and Tannis is in her thirties—aside from the star power afforded by casting Blanchett and Curtis, the only reason for aging up these characters is so they can play matronly figures to Greenblatt’s Tina.

And therein lies the main problem: centering Tina. The plot revolves around her believing she is the child of Eridia and the key to opening the vault, and the film hinges all of the emotional weight on a character who wears a bunny-ear headband and throws explosive teddy bears at people while spewing one-liners like a sugar-crazed 11-year-old in a Fortnite lobby. She does not inspire any sort of empathy, even with Greenblatt’s valiant efforts and Blanchett’s only real acting taking place in their scenes together. It’s like making a Gears of War movie with a Carmine brother at the center—it’s going to be annoying from the jump.

All of this takes place in a weird CGI world that occasionally looks decent but is more often an illegible green-screen mess of explosions or muddy, dark, murky nonsense. Lilith’s flame-orange hair and comic book costume set against a dusty, bland landscape and broken-down industrial buildings is visually and tonally jarring—it’s like the filmmakers got halfway to making a movie inspired by the cel-shaded world of Borderlands and then dumped it all onto the sets used for the Halo series. Speaking of costumes, I’d love to know what the budget was for push-up bras. Tannis, Mad Moxxi, and Lilith all have their breasts pushed up so high they’re nearly in their throats—it is so desperately 2006, so reminiscent of the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show, that I couldn’t help but giggle. Boobs, am I right?

By the time the film ends and Jack Black’s Claptrap pops up on screen during the credits to lament the loss of his Easter egg, I am ready to go home and cleanse my palate. I need some proper aughts trashiness, some expensive needle drops, and some questionable costumes. I get home, plop down on the couch, and turn on Gossip Girl. At least this has personality.

The Borderlands movie isn’t so good it’s surprising, and it’s not so bad it’s worth a hate-watch. It is simply sad. It feels like the result of a bunch of suits who sat around a glossy mahogany table (like in that one Key and Peele sketch) and reminisced about the early aughts, a time before the financial crisis, a time when the term “cancel” was reserved only for television shows, a time when Muse was one of the biggest rock bands on the planet.

It is devoid of humanity and personality, despite trying very, very hard to establish that it is quirky. It is the woman with frozen peas on her head in the grocery store aisle—she’s so crazzzzzyy, love her! It should not exist.

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In August 2007, an endless white space appeared on Nickelodeon’s Nick Jr., into which stepped a man wearing an orange track suit and a fuzzy orange hat. He carried a boom box, which turned out to be a carrying case containing five figurines, which the man — DJ Lance Rock (Lance Robertson) — placed in four dioramas spread out across a long table. With a bit of magic, the figurines — four monsters, Muno, Foofa, Brobee and Todee and a robot called Plex — came to life-sized life. And the party got started.

This was “Yo Gabba Gabba!,” which took its name from hip-hop and the Ramones. It was arguably the funkiest kids show in history; “Sesame Street” could be pretty funky, it’s true, but it never put Questlove, Bootsy Collins, Biz Markie, Mark Mothersbaugh and Erykah Badu onstage together. It achieved the usual markers of cultural penetration — the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, a traveling stage show, a Delta Airlines safety video, 57 varieties of merch — and an eight-year run.

Now the monsters are back, with a few new friends, in “Yo Gabba GabbaLand!,” an upgraded 10-episode series that premieres Friday on Apple TV+. Once again, it’s the creation of Scott Schultz and Christian Jacobs, also known as M.C. Bat Commander of the neo-new wave/ska/punk/synth-pop superhero band the Aquabats! (He is the voice of Plex as well.) DJ Lance has been succeeded by Kammy Kam, 13-year-old Kamryn Smith, who, like Lance, dresses in orange and greets viewers with a cheerful “Hello, friends.”

The dioramas have been expanded into full-blown environments — spring meadow, summery desert, autumn forest, arctic winter — arranged in a hub like the lands of Disneyland, each connected to a monster that reflects its color scheme. The look of the show draws from a few decades of mid- to late-20th century design; practical stagecraft is abetted by digital effects, painted flats are arranged theatrically in a three-dimensional space. Visual and conceptual precedents, obvious to students or survivors of that era, include “The Banana Splits,” “H.R. Pufnstuf” and “Pee-Wee’s Playhouse.” (Even the original “Mickey Mouse Club,” from way back.) But it has a spirit quite its own.

The show is aimed at the pre-first grade demographic and includes a host of children being children. They dance, like little kids who have not yet progressed from thinking they can dance well to dancing well. They make funny faces. They are digitally inserted into dream tableaux — floating in a bed surrounded by giant rubber duckies, piloting a barrel with feet toward a parrot in a cowboy boot.

In a recurring segment, a child and a celebrity (Utkarsh Ambudkar, Gillian Jacobs, Sam Richardson, Chelsea Peretti, Flea, Diplo) collaborate on a story Mad Libs-style, with the child filling in the blanks. The resulting images — a cloud shaped like “an angry sandwich,” a bird making a home inside “a nice friendly bear” — would not have been out of place at the Cabaret Voltaire. A series of short films feature children from around the world showing what they eat for breakfast, where they live and how they play.

Punk band the Linda Lindas, in shrimp costumes, make an appearance in “Yo Gabba GabbaLand!”

(Apple TV+)

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That doesn’t mean that adults won’t watch. You can get things from children’s programming that grown-up TV never thinks to give you. It’s colorful, absurd and stylistically bold. It creates its own logic. There is singing, dancing and, often, puppets. And where many children’s shows are crafted to satisfy an educational or psychological agenda — that is, they represent an adult point of view — “Yo Gabba GabbaLand!” comes from somewhere more purely … artistic. It’s like a metaphor for its own creation: Letting one’s imagination run wild is at once the point of the show and the thing that produced it.

An extension of playtime rather than a break from it, “Yo Gabba GabbaLand!” wants to rev things up. It’s a pre-pre-pre-teen dance party, with sounds provided by the Linda Lindas, dressed as shrimps; Portugal. The Man, with Paul Williams; Betty Who (as the Wind); Thundercat and his six-string bass; Big Daddy Kane and Reggie Watts bringing the “beat of the day” and Kurt Vile as King Silly, leading a “silly parade.” “Get silly/get silly/get silly/get silly” is a repeating refrain through the series. This might not be the best thing to show your kids right before bed.

To be sure, there are moments of relative repose. There are discussions among the monsters about feelings and how it’s OK to have them, even the sad and bad ones, along with some simple stratagems for dealing with them. Viewers are reminded, “You’re just the right size (color, shape) … exactly how you are.” Some passages one might almost call psychedelic if that word didn’t seem inappropriate to small fry. “I can feel the air, the air is warm.” “Look at the clouds, the clouds are moving through the air.” “Listen to the water/Sing with the water/Dance with the water.”

It always comes back to dancing.