My quick take on two ‘class’ movies – “C U Soon” & “The Gone game”
Just don’t miss these ‘out of the box’ movies available on Prime video and Voot platforms. It is said that the human mind and its creativity is boundless, even a deadly pandemic like COVID cannot confine the human’s creative quest. We could be crippled with social distancing norms but that did not stop the makers of “C U Soon” and “The Gone game” to come out with something brilliant.
I had once written that “COVID” for me was an anagram for “COming together with VIDieo”, as we had come closer in this pandemic thanks to ZOOM and other online video meeting portals. Social sites are filled with clippings of such video chat (most of then are mindless chats), but I had never imagined that a full-length feature film can be made using these “new age tools”, take a bow guys !!!
Both these movies are superb thrillers and you will not believe they are shot on iPhones – Phew !!! and mind you there is nothing amateurish about the end product. The screenplay, acting, crisp editing, online screenplay graphics are simply exemplary.
“The Gone game” has few known faces of Bollywood in its cast (Sanjay Kapoor, Shriya Pilgaokar, Dipyendu Bhattacharya, and few more) and the plot is the real hero here. It is simply riveting 4-episode long web series. This lockdown thriller will definitely ‘rivet’ you to yr seats and make you binge-watch it.
“C U Soon” is a Malayalam movie, but the movie is so intelligently made that one need not know the language and yet he will enjoy and understand the movie to its minute details (thanks to subtitles). It was joked about Malayalam movies that you don’t need a big budget to make a Malayalam movie all you need is a camera and an Umbrella (to ward off rain). No fancy sets, No song and dance sequences, No Make-up, just ordinary costumes, on-location shoots, and yet they come up with brilliant movies. In fact, there is so much to learn from MMMs (Malayali Movie Makers), they are simply class apart. In this pandemic when Bollywood was trying to survive by releasing its shoddy products on the OTT platform (Gulabo Sitabo, Shakuntala Devi, Yaara, Sadak2) the MMMs have written, shot, and released a brilliant movie in this lockdown days.
I have been a great fan of Malayam movies (thanks to my office colleagues who used to recommend good movies to watch) and after watching “C U Soon” I have become an ardent fan of these classy films.
I had read about the brilliance of Fahad Fasil & Roshan Mathew, but the real star of the movie was Darshana Rajendran, remember the biggest constraints in such “online” movies is the small frames of phone cameras and hence the body language and gestures are limited only to your facial expressions and your eyes. Darshana was simply brilliant in her performance.
One should give credit to the writer/director Mahesh Narayanan for conceiving this experimental project and delivering a moving thriller. The plot is about an online love affair when two individual meets on ‘tinder-like” online platform and come closer and suddenly the girl is found missing. The boy takes the help of his “hacker” buddy played brilliantly by Fahad Fasil who tracks the missing girl. The plot is very close to Gulf NRI’s, however, I will deliberately stay away from elaborating it (remember it’s a thriller)
Both movies are fitting reply to the bloody virus that you can dampen our physical movements, but you just cannot arrest our creativity. These are eye-openers for us that days of Big budget Big Banner blockbusters can be replaced by small budget brilliant movies and all you require is a creative brain, and an I Phone.
Watch it, don’t miss
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