Jojo Rabbit: Dressed Down

“It’s going to be intense.” Right off the bat, we know we are in for a rousing ride when the 10-year old protagonist monologues to his reflection. The German version of The Beatles’ I Wanna Hold Your Hand leads us into the opening credits after Taika Waititi, who is just smashing the ball out of the park and into space with all that he does these days, peps up young Jojo with Heils. It’s Hitler Mania, after all, and the upraised Hand is crucial. A power packed cast awaits us. Let’s begin Jojo’s weekend.

Taika Waititi’s latent talent has just erupted over the past decade or so…

One fun propaganda and training montage later, Jojo is face-to-face with the Herculean task of killing the eponymous rabbit. Of course he can’t kill it, and out comes the inevitable father-son comparison from the sadist seniors. He runs away, but pumped up by Hitler, rushes back to be the cunning rabbit. His bravado backfires, blowing up in his face, leaving him blemished. As he recovers, his mother gets him feeling useful, working as a literal poster boy. There is a delightful blink-and-you-miss-it switcheroo of Waititi and the real Hitler in one of the posters he is pasting. Returning home, his trusted dagger helps him reveal a hidden hole in the wall, inside which is hidden a most unholy Jew girl.

Intense angst and familial pantomime follow, culminating in JoJo progressing towards ‘becoming a man’, put almost exactly in those words by Sam Rockwell as Captain K (like the main protagonists in Kafka’s novels), who then sends him out as a metal man.

Kafka: where would we be without him, if ever we were to get there?

The obligatory Gestapo visit is meted out by Stephen Merchant with his usual self-mocking finesse and thin-lipped smile. An audacious gambit by the rabbit girl works only because of the unexpected help of gay Captain K.

The colors turn drab – blue, brown, grey, green – as the town prepares to be invaded, and Jojo’s mother’s shoes (red and white, my favorite color combo for a plethora of reasons) slide jarringly into frame just as a blue butterfly flutters out of sight after leading Jojo to her. The eyes on the rooftops look down upon the public hanging square.

The air raid begins, and the town is reduced to rubble because of which Jojo is reduced to foraging. Yorki, Jojo’s adorable second-best friend after the Fuhrer, accidentally adds to the detritus when distracted by Jojo. India is apparently one of the countries coming at them according to Yorki, but that’s small potatoes compared to Yorki’s bombshell: Hitler blew his brains to smithereens.

As a disillusioned Jojo wanders about the destroyed town, the German Shepherds, pun literally intended, are there at the end, as is gay Captain K and his paramour Finkel, in fittingly glorious flamboyance for the theater of war. Jojo rabbits into a hole. When the dust settles, the Americans round up the Germans, including a now-disheveled Stephen Merchant, and Jojo is saved, once again, by K.

As can be expected, brains-blown-hither & thither Hitler appears again as a dithering apparition, only to suffer defenestration. Jojo learns to tie shoelaces and snap his fingers, the mirror monologue and out-the-door scenes spiral back into the climax, and as promised, the rabbit girl and Jojo Rabbit dance to David Bowie’s (We Can Be) Heroes, which is also the name of an upcoming Robert Rodriguez movie starring Christian Slater, Pedro Pascal and our very own Priyanka Chopra, who was born in erstwhile Bihar (India), my home state, so there’s that. I dig spirals – the more convoluted the better.

The Last Word

A great watch, mainly because of Waititi’s irreverent treatment of a ghastly chapter in human history. Pinpoint production values, superb cinematography and an excellent adaptation of the source material (hence the Oscar) make this a must-see movie.

Fleeting Thoughts

* Caging Skies, by Christine Leunens, is the book adapted by Waititi. So there’s the New Zealand connect. Ever since Peter Jackson shot The Lord of the Rings out there, I can’t (hardly) wait to visit.

* Personally, I love the use of “correctomundo”, which I use all the time IRL. The matching mom and son PJs are a nice touch, too.

* There is heaps of snark, both in the script and the screenplay. Waititi’s over the top (OTT platforms are all the rage these days, aren’t they?) Hitler is a scene stealer in almost every scene he’s in, including the throwaway pan of him eating a unicorn as Jojo feeds on scraps.

June 3, 2020June 3, 2020 by opendurbar

Paatal Lok (Amazon Prime Video)

Paatal Lok

Chock full of vulgarity and mostly devoid of humanity, this series is a concentrated dose of most of the things that plague the elephantine and labyrinthine Indian “system”, which is a well-oiled machine, as opposed to the chaotic mess it appears to be, as one major character puts it in the denouement of the series.

It reminded me of Seth McFarlane’s Family Guy: it seems today, that all you see, is violence in movies and fornication on TV. Over the top platforms like Netflix and Amazon have made it trendy to create and promote shows that have gratuitous obscenities and mostly unnecessary graphic violence. I mean, where’s the subtlety that goes into treating the viewer as an intelligent human who can derive meaning from a scene? Instead, the creators go for titillation while staying just above the line that makes it fully pornographic or exploitation content. Adding controversy by using – yes, using – Muslims seems so easy these days, and yet draws accolades from many quarters. The mantra for these flagship series seems to be the good old “any publicity is good publicity”. I feel it’s a lamentable state of affairs as a viewer who feels uncomfortable watching such series with family, and yet that is the point: the makers want to portray the harsh realities of criminal India. Well, Ms Anoushka Sharma and team, mission accomplished (to say nothing of the stray dogs being ‘taken care of’).

Objectively, though, I must concede that production values are superb. I’m ‘Amaz’ed that Delhi police vehicles, settings and branding are liberally used. The ‘Prime’ character, while not exactly Elephant Man in terms of acting like the late John Hurt, can certainly take hits, both mental and physical, like the strong pachyderms. His path of redemption leads him through a maze and , ultimately, to the ‘door of heaven’ in the series finale. The story is good, with quirky characters and family matters galore. Fine actors – most of them probably happy at being given a chance to be profane on screen because that’s what grabs eye’balls’ these days, haha – come through superbly. Amazon spared no expense, and there’s a good amount of suspense.

Very little imagination or effort in naming the episodes, which irks me like much else about this series, except the main character. Let me give a rundown:

Bridges: ok, sure, nothing wrong about that, quite literally the setting of the main action sequence of the episode.

Lost and Found: again, cliched but true, a key suspect is lost and a key piece of evidence is found against all odds.

A History of Violence: ripped off. Blatantly. Look it up, if you will. It stars Aragorn.

Sleepless in Seatt-sorry, Seelampur. Wow. Just…wow.

Of Fathers and Sons: apart from being a Syrian documentary on terrorist training, it’s a little on the nose.

The Past is Prologue: is there a pun I’m missing or something?

Badlands: do we see a pattern here? Terrence Malick directed and Martin Sheen (more famous today as Charlie Sheen’s father, quite unfairly) starrer.

Black Widow: a tenuous link to a character’s behaviour pattern, and referenced by a politician in a rally, of all places. Plus, Marvel brownie points.

The Doors to Heaven (Swarg ka Dwaar): the most apt, perhaps, and fitting for the finale.

But enough deprecation from me. It’s no Godfather or Sopranos, but for a short, self-contained web series designed to drive up subscriber numbers, it’ll certainly (as far as I feel) net Amazon Prime quite a lot of the young, hip, escapist crowd looking for Gangs of Wasseypur thrills with gory kills and goosebump chills.

May 23, 2020June 11, 2020 by opendurbar