A still from ‘ED – Extra Decent’
| Photo Credit: Special Arrangement

Dark comedies have a different ring to them, and a small misstep can leave them neither here nor there. Aamir Palikkal’s ED – Extra Decent has managed to fit into that space quite well, with the right mix of suspense, intrigue and some laughter.

The film opens with Binu, the protagonist, being hit on his head by his apartment’s security. He loses his memory and efforts are on at the hospital to make him remember something from the past. But his parents (Sudheer Karamana and Vinayaprasad), sister (Grace Antony) and brother-in-law (Shyam Mohan) are wary of that situation. It seems they fear for their lives. That is where Binu’s past, which is dark and disturbing, unfolds.

Binu, the jobless, subdued protagonist, is a loser in the eyes of his father, a retired tahsildar, whereas his mother and sister are sympathetic towards him. Binu’s behaviour is attributed to childhood trauma and bad parenting. But there comes a point when the embittered Binu goes into psycho mode and sets out to settle scores with his family in a ruthless way. However, for the residents of the apartment, he is that ‘extra decent,’ smart youngster who loves his family, and they do not know that he is in the process of transforming from extra decent to extra dangerous.

Even though certain actions of Binu look far-fetched, the impact is not lost on the audience, thanks to the fine actor that Suraj Venjaramoodu is. The National Award-winning actor, also the co-producer of the film, has pushed his limit as an artiste. The quirky and twisted but engaging narrative is shouldered by Suraj, whose measured performance transitions unabashedly between humour and villainy. The transition is subtle and with a smile that does not give away who he really is. It seems the actor has been let loose by writer Ashif Kakkodi and director Aamir, and his talent shines through in a scene where he loses control.

The taut screenplay has several moments that keep the viewers hooked. Even though the audience knows that all is not well with Binu, one keeps guessing about what he will do next. Just when you think the script is losing its grip, the writer springs a surprise.

Although promoted as a dark comedy, the humour is not that pronounced in the film. In fact, the film would have worked even without certain dialogues and situations.

A scene from ED – Extra Decent
| Photo Credit:
Special Arrangement

Sudheer Karamana and Vinayaprasad have done well as Binu’s parents. Grace is always a delight to watch on screen, and so is Shyam, especially after his impressive outing in Premalu.

Ankit Menon’s music is almost a character in the movie, with the tracks playing in the background, complementing the emotions unfolding on the screen. Editing (Sreejith Sarang) and cinematography (Sharon Sreenivas) add to the layers of the narrative, especially in the scenes shot inside the apartment that involve several close-up shots.

ED – Extra Decent is currently playing in theatres

BOTTOM LINE
Visually Stunning, Not Timeless

CENSOR
U/ 1hr 58m

What Is the Film About?

Mufasa: The Lion King traces the origin story of two lions, Mufasa and Taka (who later becomes Scar), focusing on their childhood and the events that led to their eventual rivalry. Mufasa is an orphaned cub, befriended by Taka, a young lion prince, near a waterbody. Over time, as Mufasa’s true origins are revealed, it affects his friendship with a resentful Taka.

Performances

It’s absolutely delightful that a leading star like Mahesh Babu chose to dub for Mufasa. He complements the character with his trademark wit and dialogue delivery, excelling both at humour and intense situations. Satyadev, as the voice artiste for Taka, is equally impressive and gets adequate scope to showcase his vocal modulation as per the transformation of the character. 

The artistes who truly bring the roof down with their delightful comic timing are the legendary duo Brahmanandam and Ali as Pumbaa and Timon. Their improvisation, while staying within the boundaries of their scenes, is impeccable and yet again reiterates the value they could bring to a film, even if it’s through their voices. Ayyappa P Sharma brings a new dimension to villainy as Kiros.

Analysis

It’s interesting how franchises are ruling the roost in world cinema – helping studios ensure a minimum guarantee sum at the box office in unpredictable times through glitzy technological upgrades. One also can’t deny the prospect that franchise-driven cinema limits the avenues to tell newer stories. Is there a middle ground though, where the producers and film connoisseurs are equally satisfied?

The iconic ‘The Lion King’ got a new lease of life with its 2019 reboot, which may have lacked the soul of the original but was successful in capturing the imagination of a new generation of filmgoers. The idea for a spinoff in this universe is by all means redundant and exploitative, though you give it a chance because of Mufasa – and the desire to know him beyond the obvious. 

Mufasa: The Lion King transports you back to Mufasa’s childhood, where he’s separated from his parents during a flood and eventually bumps into a young lion Taka. Much to the disappointment of Obasi (Taka’s father), Taka and an orphaned Mufasa are raised by Eshe (Taka’s mother). While Mufasa wins over their family, his rise eventually threatens his friendship with Taka. 

The film is constantly on the move, taking the viewers through many critical junctures in Mufasa and Taka’s journey towards Milele, how they forge an unlikely friendship with a lioness Sarabi, a hornbill Zazu and a mandrill Rafiki. The visual world-building is meticulous and jaw-dropping, alternating from a musical to an action-adventure, integrating drama with humour.

The heart of the tale lies in Mufasa’s childhood portions, which simply sweep you off your feet. From exploring Mufasa’s vulnerabilities as a child to his playful friendship with Taka and the action sequences that establish his leadership skills- you truly get a sense of his genius and instincts in crises. However, the film takes a turn for the worse as the stakes are raised.

The subplot portraying the supposed animosity between the white lion Kiros and Obasi is hurried and doesn’t grow on the viewer. The screenwriting choices are particularly absurd – in how Taka is reduced to a staple antagonist (due to Mufasa and Sarabi’s growing affinity). It’s baffling why a film that tries so hard to create a visual extravaganza fails to liberate the plot from its obvious problems.

As films chase photorealistic remakes of iconic films with posterity and attempt to give them a believable visual exterior, they sacrifice the idea of ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ (while chasing something realistic). If The Lion King aims to be more relevant with times, writers must relook at the franchise’s storytelling tropes, altering gender equations and reanalysing animal behaviour. 

Mufasa: The Lion King has the story of an Indian potboiler that takes its audiences for granted. Many a time, you end up feeling if the creators simply replaced humans with animals in a typically massy story. How else can you explain the adopted son-true son conflict, betrayal between friends and a love triangle among lions? This spinoff has the scale but is devoid of magic and soul. 

Music and Other Departments?

If there’s anything that keeps the film together in its direst situations, it is Nicholas Britell’s emphatic music score and the terrific imagery – constructed photo-realistically using CGI, under the expertise of James Laxton. However, the same can’t be said about the ‘musical’ aspects of the film. 

Neither are the songs catchy nor do they add much value to the proceedings. The Telugu dialogues for the film are inconsistent at best, the slangs keep changing conveniently and the wordage is hardly appealing to its target audience. 

Highlights?

Dubbing of Mahesh Babu, Satyadev, Ali and Brahmanandam

The visual imagery and music score

The first hour focusing on Mufasa’s younger years

Drawbacks?

Too many illogical, cinematic liberties

The humanistic behaviour of lions 

Musical portions

Did I Enjoy It?

Yes, in parts

Will You Recommend It?

Yes, if you’re a hard core fan of The Lion King universe

Mufasa: The Lion King Movie Review by M9

When Colombian director Laura Mora was first approached about joining the team tasked with adapting Gabriel García Márquez’s novel “One Hundred Years of Solitude” into a TV series, she was more than skeptical.

“I first heard of the project back in 2018, and I remember saying, ‘What is this madness?’ ” Mora said in Spanish in a Zoom interview. “How could they possibly want to do this? I was terrified. I really thought it was an act of folly. Irresponsible, even.”

José Rivera, who would eventually pen the scripts that changed Mora’s mind, was initially just as wary.

“I’m not going to go watch that,” he recalled thinking when he heard about what Netflix was trying to do. “It’s going to suck. They’re going to blow it. It’s not going to be good.”

But as was the case with everyone who eventually signed on for what’s an ambitious and assured adaptation (Part 1, consisting of eight episodes, is now available to stream), Rivera, Mora, fellow series director Alex García López and the entire creative team realized that the best way to guarantee the series would have made García Márquez proud was to take the plunge and make it their own. To honor it but to let go of the idea of being wholly faithful to it.

Published in 1967, “One Hundred Years of Solitude” earned the Colombian novelist known affectionately as “Gabo” a Nobel prize in Literature in 1982. More than 50 years since its publication, the story of the Buendía family and the tragicomic events that ravage their small town of Macondo remains one of the most beloved novels of the 20th century.

In García Márquez’s prose, Macondo is Colombia and Colombia is Macondo. An entire sense of history was contained within its melodramatic stories. The town founded by José Arcadio Buendía (played by Marco González as a young man and Diego Vásquez as his older version in the series) with his wife, Úrsula Iguarán (played by Susana Morales and later by Marleyda Soto), slowly tracks the arrival of mysticism, then science, later still politics and the Church. Macondo soon finds itself at the heart of a political civil war wherein Buendía’s grown son, Col. Aureliano Buendía (Claudio Cataño), becomes a revolutionary leader destined for glory and infamy.

The novel covers so much ground that adapting it had long seemed impossible. Rumblings about Hollywood taking a stab at it followed the book ever since it had been published, with people as varied as Anthony Quinn and William Friedkin expressing interest at some point over the last few decades. But García Márquez, who died in 2014, always resisted such offers.

With the arrival of streaming giants like Netflix and their commitment to bolstering local talent and productions, García Márquez’s family — which includes his son, filmmaker Rodrigo García — saw a chance to give “One Hundred Years of Solitude” the adaptation it deserved, one that would be shot in Spanish and in Colombia with mostly Colombian talent in front and behind the camera. (The series uses English subtitles.)

García serves as an executive producer on the show but said he tried to not be too involved. He knew his mere presence might have distracted the creative team.

“I did say that I thought a lot of the adaptations that have been done with my dad’s work suffered from too much respect for the book,” he said over Zoom. “And too much awe for the writer. I told them they should feel free to truly adapt it.”

García Márquez’s poetic language and his iconic imagery were always going to be hard to translate into the language of episodic television, especially since the book didn’t follow a neat timeline.

Rivera, who was nominated for an Oscar for his screenplay for “The Motorcycle Diaries” (2004), knew that to tell the Buendías’ story he’d have to wrangle the novel’s circular sense of time. In the drafts for the show’s 16 episodes — which then were fleshed out and co-written by a coterie of Colombian writers, including Natalia Santa, Camila Brugés, Albatrós González and María Camila Arias — Rivera tidied up the chronology of the show’s titular century, which begins roughly in 1850 and ends in the middle of the 20th century.

That alone unlocked a way to structure into 16 hours of what is otherwise a 400-page novel that features little dialogue and covers six generations of the Buendía family — not to mention civil wars, bloody massacres, illicit love affairs, family betrayals, ill-fated marriages, cold-blooded executions and everything in between.

Another signficant obstacle was how to import García Márquez’s signature sensibility onto the small screen. Mora and García López worked to ground the world of the series in a believable, tangible reality. Shot on location in Colombia with sets that allow characters to move freely in long wandering shots, “One Hundred Years of Solitude” has a handcrafted, theatrical sensibility.

“One of the great gambles of the language of the series was precisely the chance to distance ourselves from that magical realism that has often been interpreted as a fantastic place, and embrace it instead as a poetic place,” Mora said. “A place where our reality, sometimes because of its beauty and harshness, surpasses any fiction. To do so not in an artificial way but in a very artisanal way, instead.”

“The book is well known to be a book with magical flourishes,” García adds. “But it is also a very grounded, realistic, psychological story of relationships. Of desires and frustrations. I think that’s what keeps the book alive. It’s about life.”

The currency of “One Hundred Years of Solitude” hasn’t diminished precisely because Gabo’s stories have long served as both a chronicle and a warning. As history and template.

“One of the things that marks a great work is precisely that it doesn’t lose its relevance,” Mora said. “That it always gives us insight into the world we live in. It doesn’t matter when it was written. The author becomes a prophet of his times.”

For its cast, the series’ themes — on political violence and a divided people, on the cost of peace and the price of corruption, on families torn apart and traumas passed from generation to generation — remain as topical as ever. And not nearly as local as they may at first appear.

Even as the show is clearly rooted in Colombia, “One Hundred Years of Solitude” is a text that transcends borders.

“The contradictions at the heart of the human experience will forever resonate across time,” said Cataño, who plays the famed Aureliano Buendía. “It is a theme with which all races on Earth can identify. All of humankind’s dualities and ambiguities are the dualities and ambiguities that exist in these characters. It is impossible not to identify with them.”

“I think its significance and relevance comes from the fact that we have gradually lost our memory,” Vásquez adds. “The cycle just keeps repeating itself.”

It’s a bleak message. But one that by its very nature, and as the Buendías themselves learn, will never get old. And it will continue to resonate not just in Colombia but elsewhere. Particularly in countries that face challenges with the very issues of power-hungry figures Gabo sketched out close to half a century ago.

“The book touches on many universals, one of which is the ever-present problem of tyranny,” Rivera says. “The idea of revolution and revolutionary fervor is universal. And it’s apropos to today, if you understand that Trump is a tyrant, or a would-be tyrant. Then we’ll have to ask ourselves, Where is our revolutionary spirit? Who is our Aureliano?”

This is why Mora is most excited, if apprehensive, about exporting this most Colombian of stories to a global audience once more.

“I do wonder how this may resonate in a place like the United States, in a country that is so divided at the moment,” Mora says. “But then I think that the whole world is very polarized. And ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ gives us insight into how difficult and dangerous such a divided world can be, and about how poetry and beauty are also what can save us.”