Inga Naan Thaan Kingu Movie Review: Vetri (Santhanam), our protagonist, isn’t exactly Mr. Lucky. He’s pressured to find a wife, is stuck in an unenvious job at a matrimonial company, and is drowning in debt thanks to a loan he took from his boss (Vivek Prasanna). His quest for a suitable partner leads him straight into a hilariously disastrous marriage scheme (brokered by late Manobala), leaving him saddled with an eccentric royal family to lodge and feed. Marital bliss? Not so much. Having tied the knot with Thenmozhi (Priyalaya), Vetri has to deal with her bumbling father (Thambi Ramaiah) and brother (Bala Saravanan), all while trying to keep his head above water financially. A company party turns into a catastrophe and leads to Vetri’s termination.

Fate throws a ludicrous twist into the mix. A terrorist (a look alike of Vivek Prasanna) dies in Vetri’s apartment due to a series of comically improbable events. Vetri and his equally clueless in-laws dispose of the body to a middleman. There’s breaking news of a ₹50 lakh reward for the capture of the terrorist, and Vetri and his family see an opportunity to turn their misfortunes around. Thus begins a turbulent heist, with several parties wanting to claim that corpse.

Inga Naan Thaan Kingu is your typical Santhanam fair – situational comedy revolving around a bunch of dimwits. What makes it tick is Ezhichur Aravindan’s original scripting. The scenes are just a setup – doesn’t matter how illogical they are, and in a way, the audience too don’t care for such stuff. So it’s all about whether the jokes can be fresh or not. Some of them land, like when Vetri is offered a cashew and an almond at his wedding to keep up with zamindar standards, while being conned. The beginning was a riot, filled with a handful of sidesplitting scenes.

The story veers off track in the second half with drastic turns. The parts involving the brother-in-law pretending to be a dead body are hilarious, but the rest are hit or miss. You get Kamal Haasan’s Panchathanthiram vibes, with all the hiding of the dead body and funny moments around it.

The combo of Santhanam, Bala Saravanan, and Thambi Ramaiah enhanced the movie. Rather than stealing the spotlight, Santhanam gives other comedians the space to deliver their jokes. After a considerable time, Munishkanth’s farce as Body Balaraman actually works. There are a few familiar faces like Seshu and Maran who have small appearances but shine. Priyalaya looks pretty and dances well. Vivek Prasanna gets to play a dual role and he makes for a silly corpse.

Nevertheless, Santhanam is the star of the show. He’s lively and in sync with the others who are attempting to bounce off his energy. His delivery is still up there.

Imman’s songs are adequate, and Om Narayan has delivered good camerawork. At a time when the heat just sucks the life out of you, one thirsts for some good timepass in an air-conditioned room. Inga Naan Thaan Kingu fulfills that.

Written By: Abhinav Subramanian

IF, 2024. 

Directed by John Krasinski.
Starring Ryan Reynolds, John Krasinski, Cailey Fleming, Fiona Shaw, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Louis Gossett Jr., Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Maya Rudolph, Jon Stewart, Bobby Moynihan, Sam Rockwell, Sebastian Maniscalco, Christopher Meloni, Richard Jenkins, Awkwafina, and Steve Carell.

SYNOPSIS: 

After discovering she can see everyone’s imaginary friends, a girl embarks on a magical adventure to reconnect forgotten IFs with their kids.

John Krasinski’s masterful A Quiet Place was horror built on the foundation of a strong, believable family dynamic. Here he skews towards a younger audience for a similar tale of a fractured family surrounded by fantastical creatures, but instead of striking terror in the hearts of viewers, with IF he has crafted a film that will fill them with joy and wonder. 

Not wanting to shy away from issues that have permeated some of the best children’s movies of days-gone-by, from the off Krasinski grounds his fable in grief and loss. It’s a brave opening gambit on which to build a story of colourful characters and magical events, but you can leave the complaints to the professional cynics, because the emotion is delicately handled, and narratively it pays off in spades.

That it achieves this fine balancing act is largely down to the superb cast. You might turn up for the purple thingies, a farting gummy bear, or a glass of water voiced by Bradley Cooper, but IF‘s driving force is the performance of Cailey Fleming. Brilliant in the final few seasons of The Walking Dead, here she runs the full gamut as Bea. Carrying the dramatic moments with aplomb, and thoroughly convincing during her interactions with the imaginary creations, Fleming brings a weight to her character which makes you invest in the story, one which from the outside might seem like a gimmicky summer family-flick, but which turns out to be so much more as the movie unfolds. 

Taking a back seat to her is Ryan Reynolds, who is restrained and charming as the Imaginary Friends’ human liaison. As Bea’s guide through this secret world full of manifested menagerie, he shares countless interactions with the film’s starry-voiced creations, of which Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Steve Carell’s characters leave the most indelible impressions. 

Waller-Bridge’s Blossom, an anthropomorphic butterfly with a penchant for tea, goes on a character arc which culminates in one of the most beautiful scenes of the year. It’s a sequence which sums up Krasinski’s film in microcosm, one which constantly catches you off guard with moments of heart-swelling happiness. 

Sharing more than a few positive similarities with Robert Zemeckis’ classic Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, spending time in the world of IF is also some of the most fun you’ll have this side of Toon Town. There is a bonkers tour through an Imaginary Friends retirement home which feels like an experimental night at Glastonbury, and ends with a smile-inducing song and dance number, and you’ll be hard-pressed to choose who your favourite IF is from the likes of Sam Rockwell’s ‘Guardian Dog’ or Christoper Meloni’s scene-stealing private-investigator ‘Cosmo’.

Ordinarily this kind of creative overload could result in hyperactive chaos, but held together by Michael Giacchino’s beautiful, comforting and immediately affecting score, Krasinski ensures that the focus never shifts from the relationships that join the dots between the characters, both real and imaginary, or the very human story at its core. 

Another one in the win column for Krasinski the director, IF is one of the first big surprises of the year. Go for the unicorns, dragons, and A-list cameos, but stay for the big beating heart and Cailey Fleming’s star-making performance. It will leave you glowing. 

Flickering Myth Rating – Film ★ ★ ★ ★/ Movie ★ ★ ★ ★

Matt Rodgers – Follow me on Twitter

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=embed/playlist

British auteur Andrea Arnold follows up her last feature, the poignant, non-verbal slice-of-farmyard-life that is the documentary Cow, with a new member of her cinematic menagerie: drama Bird, an uplifting competitor for Cannes’ Palme d’Or.

With mostly human characters and actual dialogue, in some ways this is taxonomically more like her gritty-as-asphalt, early social-realist work, especially Fish Tank and Oscar-winning short Wasp, which, like Bird, were shot in the southerly county of Kent, U.K., where Arnold grew up. But then suddenly, out of the milieu’s marshy semi-urban landscape of empty beer cans, cigarette butts, domestic abuse and despair, the film takes magical-realist flight and transforms into something unlike anything Arnold’s done before. Thanks to the director’s magisterial knack with actors (especially non-professionals such as terrific adolescent discovery Nykiya Adams, who, as the protagonist, is in nearly every frame of the film), the result is quite entrancing.

That said, at times this teeters on the brink of sentimentality, as if all that time Arnold has spent in the U.S. directing episodes of upscale television (Big Little Lies, Transparent, I Love Dick) has rubbed off and added a kind of American-indie-style slickness to the script — a tidy, over-workshopped tightness that the raw early films and American Honey mostly eschewed. But that may be exactly what some viewers will love about Bird. Given the presence of stars like Barry Keoghan and Franz Rogowski (both of them amping up the Barry Keoghan and Franz Rogowski-ness of it all to the max), this could be Arnold’s most commercial feature film.

Like nearly all of Arnold’s previous films, even Cow at a stretch, Bird takes pains to show all the beauty and the bloodshed, to borrow a phrase from Nan Goldin’s life, of working-class life. That means copping to the fact there is violence, addictive behavior and outright neglect within families, the sort of stuff middle-class folks primly call “bad parenting.” At the same time, “neglect” can also produce self-reliance and independence in children, who in this film are often seen running around the streets by themselves, playing unsupervised, older ones looking after younger ones, inventing their own games like “jump on the disused mattress in the front yard” and so on. All of it is exactly the sort of stuff kids got up to in the proverbial old days, the golden-hued mythical past that was also supposedly so much better than things are now.

Twelve-year-old Bailey (Adams) certainly has a remarkable amount of freedom, maybe a little too much. She lives in a large, squatted building in Gravesend, a ramshackle property — festooned with graffiti and furnished with furniture that looks like it was salvaged from a dumpster — that houses quite a few people in apartments on each floor, many of them animal lovers like Bailey and her family. On the floor Bailey lives on, she shares a space with her dad Bug (Keoghan, having an absolute blast), an unemployed party animal whose latest get-rich-quick scheme is to harvest the hallucinogenic slime off an imported toad, called “the drug toad” throughout. Bailey’s slightly older half-brother Hunter (Jason Edward Buda), who was born when Bug himself was only 14, also lives there, although he spends a lot of time with his “gang” (really just a bunch of kids) and his girlfriend, Moon.

As the film opens, Bailey learns that Bug plans on marrying Kayleigh (Frankie Box), his latest squeeze whom he’s only been dating for three months. The wedding is set for this coming Saturday, and when Bailey refuses to wear or even try on the sequined, pink, leopard-skin patterned catsuit Kayleigh has picked out for her and her own daughter to wear as bridesmaids, there’s a noisy row between Bailey and Bug that gets a little physical.

Later on, we meet Bailey’s mother Peyton (Jasmine Jobson), who lives in another house across town that seems perpetually full of high 20somethings in the living room. Upstairs in Peyton’s bed, there’s a monstrous new boyfriend named Skate (James Nelson Joyce). Peyton’s kids, Bailey’s three younger siblings (it’s not clear who their dad is), fend for themselves as best they can. Subtly dropped hints in the dialogue suggest Bailey went to live with Bug at a young age, and feels unwanted by her mother. Guilt, anger, recrimination and hurtful words drift all around this family, like poplar tree fluff in June.

It’s a crowded extended community where everyone kind of knows each other and Hunter and his buddies dish out vigilante violence to people rumored to have hurt kids or their friends. But one day, a stranger arrives among them: Bird (Rogowski). Dressed in a swingy skirt and a complexly cabled thrift-shop sweater, the German-accented Bird has a fey, otherworldly quality about him. Like the seagulls and ravens that Bailey is drawn to and often films on her cellphone (clearly she’s a budding filmmaker), Bird is enigmatic, itinerant, restless and fundamentally other. After doing a charming, flappy dance around a field for Bailey’s camera, he flounces off to town to look for his parents in a tower block. Gradually, he and Bailey become friends — or as much as two wild creatures of different species can be friends.

Arnold starts dropping little hints early on that some supernatural or fantastical force is at work here, and it would spoil the movie to reveal too much. It all gets quite plot-heavy for an Arnold film. For example, nothing much at all happens in American Honey for massive stretches, which was charming and tedious in equal measures. This one has last-minute dashes to stop people leaving on trains, a melodramatic backstory reveal, and even visual-effects-generated surprises involving visits from yet more members of the animal kingdom. (Spoiler: It’s an adorable fox!) Indeed, throughout, there are shots of bees, butterflies, crows and all manner of urban beasties, underscoring the fecundity of the Kentish landscape: a compellingly primal mix of wild estuarine marshes with factories, beaches fringed with lurid amusement arcades and unattractive attractions, a sense of faded, sticky and sand-flecked splendor gone to seed.

And yet, despite the palpable darkness in the corners of the story and the pervasive sense of melancholy, the film ends on a gloriously optimistic, cotton-candy-scented note of joy. Nearly the whole ensemble enjoys a line dance to “Cotton Eye Joe,” a needle drop almost as good as the opening electric-scooter ride sequence set to Fontaines DC’s punky, atonal song “Too Real.” As per usual, Arnold picks a killer soundtrack, and she loves to get her cast dancing.

Keoghan, of course, obliges, offering a little throwback to his end-reel naked romp in Saltburn. (A character can be heard at one point dissing that viral moment’s backing track, “Murder on the Dance Floor,” only for another character to confess he loves that song.) Rogowski, who threw a mean shape or two in such films as Disco Boy and Passages, also contributes a very physical performance, cavorting around Gravesend like a shy woodland faun or fowl. It’s enough to send an audience out feeling giddy and a smidge weepy in the best sort of way.