A still from ‘Vaazha’ 

Five aimless youngsters who bear the load of their parents’ ambition on their frail shoulders! An oft told tale of angst, anger and anguish. But what redeems Vaazha, ’the biopic of a billion boys’, is the humour woven in all the scenes in the first half of the film and the relatability factor in the second half. Smart one-liners — some crude, some crackling — bring on the laughs.  

Ajo Thomas, Vishnu, Moosa, Abdul Kalam and Vivek Anand are five thick friends who can’t seem to crack examinations, and the travails of the backbenchers strike a chord with many viewers. The five buddies come from middle-class families, as the film tracks their lives from pre-school to college and beyond.

But for Moosa, whose father stands by him through thick and thin, the other young men have to deal with parents who have no time to listen to their woes or even let them follow their dreams.

Vaazha means plantain tree in Malayalam; it is also a take on a popular grim adage in Malayalam that says that instead of spending money on a good-for-nothing kid, it would have been better to plant a plantain tree instead!

Film director Vipin Das of Jaya Jaya Jaya Jaya Hey and Guruvayoor Ambalanadayil is the writer of the movie, which is directed by Anand Menen who made his debut with Gauthamante Radham.

The Reels-like feel of the film is enhanced by crisp scenes that depict the youngsters’ encounters with unsympathetic, unimaginative teachers in school and college. There is action, fisticuffs and comedy. Somewhere, after the interval, the writer and director suddenly realise that the film — like the protagonists — has been drifting along happily. So, they decide to bring in reality bytes to firm up the story.  

As they plod through engineering college, with seats bought by their parents who dream of the sons achieving their dreams, reality begins to hit them in the form of failed examinations, botched interviews and dead-end flings.

That is when the film shows how parents fail their children by forcing them to follow paths the parents have navigated. How teachers and educators go by examination marks as markers of achievement and have no time to cater to students who might want to chase rainbows of a different kind. Toxic parenting comes under the scanner with age-old practices of abject obedience and gaslighting by nosy relatives being questioned in the movie. A scene in which Ajo’s father (essayed by Azzez Nedumangad) takes on his toxic brothers who gaslight and put down his son, is bound to be a heartwarming moment for youngsters who are forced to exist with such folks.

Even while portraying the hurdles posed by the students’ lack of academic success, writer Vipin does not forget to keep the laughs going. Moreover, even certain poignant scenes in Vaazha do not become cheesy at any point.

What works for this movie most is the relatability factor; director Anand ensures that the film does not become maudlin, although the second half has plenty of scenes where it could have turned into a typical tear-jerker.

Amith Mohan Rajeswari, Siju Sunny, Joemon Jyothir, Anuraj OB and Anu essay the five classmates, and Saafboi appears as the antagonist, the top-scorer and teachers’ pet who ticks all the boxes as an A-lister.

Kottayam Nazeer as Vishnu’s disappointed dad aces his role, and so do Jagadish and Azees. Noby Marcos, appearing as Moosa’s father, keeps its subtle, yet scores as the supportive father. Basil Joseph’s guest appearance adds a zing to the storyline.

Although the women in the film have nothing much to do, Vipin does not make that an excuse for chauvinism or toxic masculinity. Instead, the script underscores how the lack of emotional empathy and maturity make it difficult for them to strike a healthy relationship with women.

The several loopholes in the script are filled by the overall feel-good tone of the movie. The technical team supports the director with apt editing by Kannan Mohan and cinematography by Aravind Puthussery.

Vaazha is a full-on comedy that also asks certain pertinent questions about parenting and education.

Vaazha is currently running in theatres

I’m no stranger to lament when it comes to the disintegration of quality in what passes for movies today, but then along comes a bucket of swill like The Union to remind me things are even worse than I thought. This contrived, pointless, blindingly boring Nutflix vehicle is a pathetic, desperate attempt to keep Halle Berry and Mark Wahlberg’s careers alive. Berry’s beauty is pleasant enough for a single-star rating, but the rest arrives six feet under and stays that way.

She plays Roxanne, a sexy spy and two-fisted killer who works for a powerful secret agency called “The Union,” dedicated to saving the free world. (It’s not clear from what.) After a job that goes wrong in Trieste, Italy, resulting in a colossal massacre, The Union decides it needs a new face, plain as pizza dough and unrecognizable to the criminal underworld (translation: i.e., a nobody). Roxanne thinks immediately of her old high school boyfriend Mike (Mark Wahlberg), a construction worker in New Jersey whose banal life of sophistication and adventure extends no further than climbing ladders and hanging out with his brain-dead buddies drinking beer. When she looks him up to renew old memories, he moves in for a clinch, but instead of a kiss, she stabs him in the neck with a hypodermic tranquilizer and he wakes up in London, where the boss of The Union (J.K. Simmons) encourages Roxanne to teach him the power of persuasion any way she can. 

Mike hasn’t seen Roxanne for 25 years, and now she’s recruiting him to risk his life as an innocent, inexperienced and untrained secret 007. The purpose of all this hugga-mugga is neither coherent nor believable, but the lure of being the next James Bond, delivering five million dollars to an army of the world’s most dangerous international thugs while simultaneously falling for a sexy spy with an assault weapon, convinces Mike to join The Union immediately (provided, of course, that he gets back to Jersey in time to be the best man in a pal’s wedding). He’s never been anywhere beyond downtown Hoboken, but before you can say Rambo, he’s dodging bullets, leaping from London rooftops, and driving on the wrong side of the street. The movie doesn’t make one lick of sense, which means it falls perfectly in line with most of the other moronic time-wasters that are polluting the ozone these days.

Roxanne focuses on rigorous physical and psychological training to prepare Mike for his first mission: infiltrating an auction offering stolen intelligence information to the highest bidder for hundreds of millions to retrieve a hard drive containing the names and identities of every spy in the history of Western civilization which, if obtained by the wrong spies, could destroy the free world. In a movie composed of endless predictable cliches, it’s got Iranian terrorists, a motorcycle race through the Italian streets, mediocre explosions and shootouts we’ve seen before in scores of Tom Cruise programmers. The goofball heroics are so second-rate they rob the film of any personality of its own. Hack director Julian Farino lacks the talent and the interest to explain what The Union is all about in terms anyone can understand. The script by joe barton and David Guggenheim never rises above a second-grade level, and there is nothing original or engaging about the film or the shallow performances in it. Halle Berry and Mark Wahlberg have zero chemistry, but who can blame them for being so bland in a movie that reads like a manual from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology?  

It’s not surprising for an action picture to be this humorless, but how can any film be so noisy, deadly and boring at the same time? The Union is to movies what salami on rye is to four-star gastronomy.

A controversial bill that seeks to protect Californians from artificial intelligence-driven catastrophes has caused uproar in the tech industry. This week, the legislation passed a key committee but with amendments to make it more palatable to Silicon Valley.

SB 1047, from state Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco), is set to go to the state Assembly floor later this month. If it passes the Legislature, Gov. Gavin Newsom will have to decide whether to sign or veto the groundbreaking legislation.

The bill’s backers say it will create guardrails to prevent rapidly advancing AI models from causing disastrous incidents, such as shutting down the power grid without warning. They worry that the technology is developing faster than its human creators can control.

Lawmakers aim to incentive developers to handle the technology responsibly and empower the state’s attorney general to impose penalties in the event of imminent threat or harm. The legislation also requires developers to be able to turn off the AI models they control directly if things go awry.

But some tech companies, such as Facebook owner Meta Platforms, and politicians including influential U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Fremont), say the bill would stifle innovation. Some critics say it focuses on apocalyptic, far-off scenarios, rather than the more immediate concerns such as privacy and misinformation, though there are other bills that address these matters.

SB 1047 is one of roughly 50 AI-related bills that have been brought up in the state Legislature, as worries have grown about the technology’s effects on jobs, disinformation and public safety. As politicians work to create new laws to put guardrails on the fast-growing industry, some companies and talent are suing AI companies in hopes that courts can set ground rules.

Wiener, who represents San Francisco — the home of AI startups OpenAI and Anthropic — has been in the middle of the debate.

On Thursday, he made significant changes to his bill that some believe weaken the legislation while making it more likely for the Assembly to pass.

The amendments removed a perjury penalty from the bill and changed the legal standard for developers regarding the safety of their advanced AI models.

Additionally, a plan to create a new government entity, which would have been called the Frontier Model Division, is no longer in the works. Under the original text, the bill would have required developers to submit their safety measures to the newly created division. In the new version, developers would submit those safety measures to the attorney general.

“I do think some of those changes might make it more likely to pass,” said Christian Grose, a USC political science and public policy professor.

Some tech players support the bill, including the Center for AI Safety and Geoffrey Hinton, who is considered a “godfather of AI.” Others, though, worry that it could damage a booming California industry.

Eight California House members — Khanna, Zoe Lofgren (D-San Jose), Anna G. Eshoo (D-Menlo Park), Scott Peters (D-San Diego), Tony Cárdenas (D-Pacoima), Ami Bera (D-Elk Grove), Nanette Diaz Barragan (D-San Pedro) and Lou Correa (D-Santa Ana) — wrote a letter to Newsom on Thursday encouraging him to veto the bill if it passes the state Assembly.

“[Wiener] really is cross pressured in San Francisco between people who are experts in this area, who have been telling him and others in California that AI can be dangerous if we don’t regulate it and then those whose paychecks, their cutting edge research, is from AI,” Grose said. “This could be a real flash point for him, both pro and con, for his career.”

Some tech giants say they are open to regulation but disagree with Wiener’s approach.

“We are aligned with the way (Wiener) describes the bill and the goals that he has, but we remain concerned about the impact of the bill on AI innovation, particularly in California, and particularly on open source innovation,” Kevin McKinley, Meta’s state policy manager, said in a meeting with L.A. Times editorial board members last week.

Meta is one of the companies with open source AI models called Llama, which allows developers to build on top of it for their own products. Meta released Llama 3 in April and there have already been 20 million downloads, the tech giant said.

Meta declined to discuss the new amendments. Last week, McKinley said SB 1047 is “actually a really hard bill to red line and fix.”

A spokesperson for Newsom said his office does not typically comment on pending legislation.

“The Governor will evaluate this bill on its merits should it reach his desk,” spokesperson Izzy Gardon wrote in an email.

San Francisco AI startup Anthropic, which is known for its AI assistant Claude, signaled it could support the bill if it was amended. In a July 23 letter to Assemblymember Buffy Wicks (D-Oakland), Anthropic’s state and local policy lead Hank Dempsey proposed changes including shifting the bill to focus on holding companies responsible for causing catastrophes rather than pre-harm enforcement.

Wiener said the amendments took Anthropic’s concerns into account.

“We can advance both innovation and safety,” Wiener said in a statement. “The two are not mutually exclusive.”

It is unclear whether the amendments will change Anthropic’s position on the bill. On Thursday, Anthropic said in a statement that it would review the new “bill language as it becomes available.”

Russell Wald, deputy director at Stanford University’s HAI, which aims to advance AI research and policy, said he still opposes the bill.

“Recent amendments appear to be more about optics than substance,” Wald said in a statement. “It looks less controversial to appease a couple of leading AI companies but does little to address real concerns from academic institutions and open-source communities.”

It is a fine balance for lawmakers that are trying to weigh concerns about AI while also supporting the state’s tech sector.

“What a lot of us are trying to do is figure out a regulatory environment that allows for some of those guardrails to exist while not stifling innovation and the economic growth that comes with AI,” Wicks said after Thursday’s committee meeting.

Times staff writer Anabel Sosa contributed to this report.