 Celebrate good times, come on. Celebrate good times, come on. There's nothing. Jalsa. That means celebration. What does it mean? Welcome back to our stupid reaction to Jalsa Corbin. I did not know where that was going. Is that what it translates to? Yeah, celebration. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Jalsa? Yeah, that's, yeah. Why? Remember it, the title comes up. As a certain, no spoilers yet, but remember it, yeah. And it comes up at a particular time. Yeah, we'll talk about it. Oh, yeah. Interesting. Oh, yeah. Anyways. You saw the title, you know what we're doing. Yeah. We're doing a movie review. Subscribe, hit it, choose, follow Twitter and Instagram. But we're doing a movie review, everybody. And it's of the new film that just came out on Amazon Jalsa. 22 film, directed. Suresh Trevini. Suresh Trevini, written by him as well. As well. And then some other folks contributed to dialogue and story. It looks like Prajwal Chandra Jashkar. Forgive mispronunciation, please. Abbas Dalal Hussein Dalal. And then starring Vicky. Sorry. Sorry. He just saw the first movie. Yeah, sorry. I assumed it was Vidya, but it wasn't. Vidya and Shafali Shah are the two main leads in this, as well as the other sporting cast. But those are the two that we know. They're not our dofus, I wish they were. Not yet. But anyways, it still be, since it just came out, it's on Amazon. We're gonna do a little non-spoiler review and then we'll get into spoils just because, you know, if you haven't seen it yet, I wanna give you the option to go watch it. But it's on Amazon, it's about two hours. So if you don't wanna hear anything, you can just go watch that, come back. If not, we're gonna do a little non-spoiler and then we'll get into spoils. Rick, your initial thoughts, please. Well, this is our 21st of the year, our 142nd Hindi and our 228th all-time. A very entertaining, well-crafted, consistently captivating story about how good and innocent people are routinely crushed by the powerful and how those in power can easily cover up their crushings at the expense of more innocent people being crushed. There's a moment we'll refer to in the spoiler section. Yet, even in the midst of horrific realities, good people can still choose to do the right thing and still be good people. It, for me, lived up to the trailer excitement I had. Yeah, yeah. I enjoyed it as well. It's not a perfect film, but it's definitely an engaging film that, if you watched a trailer and you were engaged in the trailer, it's basically the film in terms of- It does a very solid job of letting you know what you're getting into. Yeah, and it keeps you entertained. You're gonna get two great performances from Shafali Shah and Vidya, who, shouldn't surprise you, kind of knew what's gonna happen already. And so I think it was a really, they did a really good, and it's not like a new story either, in terms of somebody does something. That aspect agreed. That aspect. That aspect. But there is, in the spoiler section, we're gonna get into, and this doesn't ruin anything. When you watch this, you can watch it and walk away being entertained and see the main story and not realize that there is a very subversive undercurrent happening at the same time that's quite intelligent and very impressive to me. Yeah, so overall, no one spoilers, I think the acting is great. I think the writing did a really good job at keeping you engaged. In the middle, I think, it didn't really falter, but I think they probably could have cut it up a little bit and made it even more tighter to get to the point a little faster. But I liked the writing. I thought the dialogue was good. I thought some of the twists and turns and all the underlined messaging was really, really nice. It was really good. We'll get into the spoilers, yeah. And Casting Bay, a couple of casting choices that I absolutely love. Is that how you cast it? Yeah, Casting Bay cast it. And I saw it in the credits. And I mean, obviously, with Vidya and Shafali, we knew we were gonna get great stuff, but there's three shout-outs that I wanna give. First is to the man, Shikrant Yadav, that we saw in Kila, who plays More, the police officer. Oh, yes. Yep. Also, Kashish Rizwan, who plays Alia, was, I mean, we'll get into this in the spoilers, but I thought what she got with her screen time and she's, she's just getting started. You know, the first? Yep, just getting started, did a, I thought she did a great job. And then, the really cool thing is, there is a primary character in this that you'll see. I don't remember if he was in the trailer or not, but Vidya's son in this, his name is... Aiyua, Aiyua. Yeah, he plays Surya Kasibatlan, forgive me if I mispronounced your name, but he plays a character in this who's a boy with cerebral palsy. Yeah. And the actor does have cerebral palsy, so beautiful addition of inclusive casting of a character who, it plays a part in the story, but that's not the primary thing. You didn't have to, this could have been written without that. And I love that they just said, I don't know if they did this, but it seems like they just said, this little guy can act, let's put him in it, and the character's gonna have cerebral palsy. I don't think it was, it just happens to happen, which I really love. It's not really integral to the story. Does it have to be there? He was just a normal son who happened to have cerebral palsy. Sure. I thought it was a really good casting job of him as well. I think it's funny. The way I end to be sometimes, obviously, I know, second build. Second, and then all the way down. All the way down, he's so falling top, like, yeah. Exactly. I end to be as hilarious. But anyways, I think it's definitely a film that is worth your time in terms of, if you're like, I wanna watch an entertaining kind of different thriller that might have like a similar storyline that you've seen before, but it's gonna keep you engaged the entire time with some great performances from leads, and a intriguing ending that I think some people might like and other people might not. Yeah. And some good editing choices with the direction and leave something up for conversation as well. Absolutely. So, yeah. Should we spoil? Yeah, yeah, let's go into spoilers. Yeah, let's go into spoilers. I don't watch it, go watch it, come back, and they're just gonna get into spoilers. Yeah. So, spoiling time. Yeah. You spoiled a little. Okay. So, yeah, let's get into it. I thought, let's talk about the two leads that we normally start off with. And if you don't know why we do that, we're both actors. That's our favorite part. That's our favorite part of that. Storytelling is watching the actors act, and wanting to act with the actors in it. That's usually why we start with acting. But Shafali Shah just continues to show me why she's one of my favorite actors, one of the strongest actors, I think, in India. Agreed. In general, she has something behind her eyes. And I think that's, it's something that you can't teach. Nope. Obviously she has a talent there, and I'm sure, I don't know if she's done training as well, I'm sure she has. But there's a certain quality about certain actors. That quality of something's going on behind, without them saying anything. Yes. And she has it. Absolutely does. And like easily. And her character was so complex, because once again, we're in spoilers, like you don't know what, because at normal, the whole time you're like, oh, this is grieving mother. Right. It was from a different cast of the person she's working for. Yes. Very submissive most of the time. She has a great job at that relationship. Yep. But you could tell she's like, she has this fierceness behind her. And then towards the end, she's like, oh, is she? Yeah. She really. I literally. Is she really gonna do this? I literally, because I didn't see that coming. And when I saw that coming, and she took him in the car, I put my hand over my mouth like this, and I went, she's gonna do this. And I wrote in my notes, hell hath no fury, like a woman's scorn. Yeah. I thought, is she really gonna do this? Yeah, and it was, it's really good in the writing because when, it's hard to say, you understand why she like, if she would have done that, it would have gone through. You'd like, you wouldn't understand it because obviously you should never do that to a child, then obviously you say it. But you're like, I mean, I know why you're doing it. You want to teach her a lesson. Bob, I'm gonna leave. As revenge. I'm gonna leave your son the way you left my child. Which was beautiful. I thought that was great writing and editing that that was done in the midst of her actually saying her testimony and what she did as she's doing it. Yeah. And so I really enjoyed that part. But yeah, her, and then I guess we'll just, well, I got one thing about, I'll let you know. If you're an actor and you're learning about acting, especially, pay really close attention. If you see this, I hope you paid really close attention to the fact that this role that Shafali played, both actresses, these roles required extremely talented and experienced actors to portray these roles because these kinds of roles for lesser trained and lesser available actors would be really easy to indicate and show grief and try to be what you think they should be in the moment rather than just be. And there's a stillness level and this is the pinnacle of stillness. The two actors who are the pinnacle of stillness, and obviously Daniel Lewis is in that category too, but even more so we talk about Irfan all the time. And Shafali has that quality of being able to be on screen doing absolutely nothing but thinking and you're mesmerized. And you know what she's thinking, or you don't know what she's thinking. Yeah, and you care. Yeah, you believe her, you care, you're mesmerized. She's a great actor or somebody you can just sit in a chair and put a camera on them for an hour and you don't wanna stop watching them think. And she's a great listener. When she was talking to Vidya in that scene in the kitchen when she accuses her of having, right? The jar drop, she says, you left the stove on. The shock and the hurt of why are you attacking me? She doesn't understand and she was just trying to, and she obviously knew her dynamic width. This was a Ross, but also somebody she thought was like, kind of a friend in the family because she's like helping out with my kid. Now you're lashing out at me for no reason, but yeah, I agree. She was just, she's 100% and they're just listening. Great listener. And it's one of the things you want as an actor. You almost want it to be like, I don't know what they're gonna say. That's what you wanna make it look like. I just wish there was, I wish there had been more screen time with the two of them together. Cause watching them together is just watching two heavy weights go at it. But yeah, I do agree. Cause she didn't have a lot of, a ton of dialogue for somebody who's basically the lead in the film, right? I guess she would technically be supporting, right? Yeah, I think in this video would be the lead and she would get the supporting. But yeah, she doesn't have a ton of dialogue and it's mostly just kind of reactive. Finding out her daughter got hit by a car to basically all the aftermath of that and then everything else. She had probably more dialogue with the kid than she did with the video. She did. And that's one of the things I'd love to have known on set if she even had this conversation. But I know that I would, if I was portraying a character like that, one of the things I'd wonder from the writer and the director and would probably even question it on set, like when she's there toward the end and she's just cooked for them and she's about to take the boy to the beach. How, you know, it'd be like, so where am I right now? Am I really, do you want me to be vacant? Do you want me to, do you want the distraughtness? I know I can't give too much of that away to the grandma. Where would you like me to be? Because I can give you what I wanna do and the director may say, just show me what you've got with it right now. And then the director may say, you know, whatever little adjustments are gonna be made to that. But that's again, why you need somebody who my guess is she just brought what she did and they were like, okay, cut, print, moving on. Yeah, you gotta do a question at that point. In Vidya as well, I thought she did a phenomenal job. Yes, she did. Very different performance. She was playing a person, a big time journalist in India. Somebody of, obviously, I don't know, I mean, I know of some journalists in India, but the more personalities I know are like big time journalists on CNN, Fox News, or something like that. She's playing somebody like that, essentially. Well, she was about true, so probably not on Fox. Sorry, a little dig there. But yeah, I thought she did a really good job and I thought she had some really good scenes with everyone. But the fact that this whole story revolved around her and something that I think a lot of people face of this internal guilt. Yes. It's actually the main thing to film, and there's a bunch of things the film's about, but I think the main thing is internal guilt and what that does to a person of trying to hold something in that they probably could have gotten away with, but they're gonna have to internalize this for the rest of their life and can you do that? Right. This was really the more complex role. This was a more difficult role in terms of the complexity, not in terms of the overall work, because Shafali's character, like I said, requires you to be a substantial actor. The same thing for hers. And the reason her had the more complexity was because of all of the different nuances she had to deal with. She had to deal with the immediacy of the grief, but she also had to deal with covering up, anxiety attacks, who do I tell, who do I not tell, I'm covering it up, now I'm mad, now I'm diverting my anger over here when I shouldn't be. She had a lot of stuff that she had to deal with that's really hard as an actor because so much of that is internalized with the character in the story. And the last thing you wanna do as an actor is think about, okay, how can I get my internalization to be seen? That's the last thing you wanna do, but that's the end goal. We need to see that. And the only way a good actor does that is Vidya did her homework and she had believable panic attacks and I really believe she, and again, shout out to just the way it was shot. Even though I knew it was coming, it still shocked me when she got hit by the car. Yeah, it was a really good stunt work, CGI worked all together, whatever it was, I was still like, I still jumped when she got hit by the car, both times. Both times. I knew they were coming. And then her beautiful choice, hard to look at of her laying in the gutter, face down, half up, and doing a good job by the actor, by the way, and VFX and makeup. I wanna give this shout out to her. She did right at the very beginning and I knew it was gonna be her. So we're starting at the very beginning of the film and Alia, the actress who plays Alia is Kashi Rizwan. She has that moment with him and she starts to cry and I went, wow, you're emotionally available. That's beautiful. Damn it, I think you're the one who's about to get hit by a car. And then sure enough, but she did have to be there. And I'm very excited about that young actor. I think she's really good. I think she did a great job with the little time she had. And makeup did a great job. Yeah, that shot of her on the ground was intense. Intense, as was. It could look bad. Bad. And if you're not terrible. It's like, these are your strokes or just, just obviously your brain damage. Brain damage. So it's easy to make that look like it's not real. Yep, because I mean. You can't really prepare for that. With makeup and with the actor not doing it right. And that worked as did makeup, did a great job of showing us the progression from where she was laying in the street after the immediacy of the hit. But then when you see her afterwards, she's pretty much unrecognizable because of the swelling that would happen in the head. And I thought makeup did a great job. Yeah, really good job by all involved. The overall writing of this, I thought it was really, really nice for not only dialogue, but story. Just like I said, I think the main story that I would take away is from the internal guilt that you have to deal with and how that personifies itself, I guess, outward or with lashing out or anxiety attacks or whatever. And also there's so many other things the fact that she was trying the story and then there's so many other stories that other people were trying to cover up. Yeah, they didn't even know it was her, but they were covering up their own problem with this exact same event that happened from the boyfriend to the police officer. Correct. So they can't, like there's so much going on here and all the corruption that ensues, right? And that was the other story. So you do have the main story, which is of the guilt and the stuff, right? But what I think, and it's a wink and it's a tip of the cap to the director and the writers and the whole team because that's the primary thing and everybody could see that and walk away and not know what the film to me is really about. I think what the film is really about and it's why we saw the title when we did. That was pretty early towards the end. It was almost at the end of the film and that's on purpose. I'm sure it is. I'd love to talk to any of them about it because what she gets stuck in is this celebration moment of the win of this political guy who if you remember, he's the one who's responsible for the paying of the money to the cop because he doesn't want anything bad going on in his jurisdiction so he can win his election. And what this really points to when you take it from that pinnacle of power with the politician and then the cops and then a media person all the way down to this sweet little villager woman who's the servant. It's about the fact that, and there's a reason it's called what it's called and it's the reason that she got stuck in that moment of that celebration and that's what I said in my paragraph and why I phrased it the way I did of that the powerful crush the non-powerful and get away with it and the non-powerful have a choice to try and lash out or remain good people and that's why I love the way they filmed the final shot because I had no idea I thought she did it. I thought she let him die. Yeah, I didn't, I was obviously between the two. I was like, one, I just, I was like, even though I get it, like as a mom, even though also as a mom, would you do that to another kid that you basically also raised as well? Right. And so I was like, I was like, I don't know if this actually happened but also they made it think like it did. They did that and they did a beautiful job because if you notice in the shot, so she's out there on that long extension into the water and you see the boat floating. When we come back to her after the traffic stop when Vidya's trying to get to the beach, that boat is now on the sand which means the tide's gone out and she's sitting there still and you're thinking, holy crap and then they use that boat for the reveal beautifully with just his hand coming up like that and nothing was said. Yeah and what it, what it reminds me of a lot of people take this out of context you'll hear as a justification for revenge an eye for an eye. And that was, I'm gonna pontificate a little bit but here from my pastoral ministry years that text was never used to justify revenge. That text was specifically given to encourage me moderation because what would happen would be it should be an eye for an eye not you get to take a life for an eye because that's what was happening at that time when that scripture was given is like someone lost an eye, okay well we're gonna go kill him and his family and it was temper that back that is not justice you're not looking for justice that way and that's what I felt this was about it was like the objective isn't an eye for an eye which goes back to what I said about it's a hard decision to choose good when you've been crushed unjustly and that's really a redemptive thread that happens in the film which is I think that's what's reason to celebrate that's reason to Jalsa is the fact that this woman who has every reason to become embittered and just lash out and say I'm done even her squatting and doing the sweeping of this woman who with all of her power and everything else has been able to cover up the murder of my almost murder of her child yeah I liked the moment at the end where there was nothing said and it was the director of choice used many times in the film to silence the dialogue or just silence the film of like when she was yelling at her son and you couldn't hear what she was but you can kind of assume what she was saying it's almost more powerful sometimes to not know you just know she's saying something she probably should never say to her son that she was gonna regret you saw it on his face yeah and so I thought it was a nice directorial choice and he did it many times he also did it I think when she was stuck as well which is also good on Vidya she basically, that's not an easy thing to do because she was in the car for a good couple of minutes that's what, yeah and so the director basically said I try to get out try to get out try to get out you need to go see your son because she might be murdering your son the way you basically almost murdered her kid and the camera was probably just on her I was like okay do it that's difficult very difficult great choice because as an actor one she has to do it believably and she has to live in the moment but she also has to know I have to stay in this framework as well so I know I actually can't get out even though my character actually wants to get out and you have to justify the fact that I can't get out so what do you do with that if what's happening around you literally is like okay I know I can just open up the store and get out but I have to make it look like I can't it's hard it's acting it's acting that's what separates the good ones from the bad ones exactly and then also towards the end when she was walking along the beach as well and assuming that she lost her son and walking and then just sitting down next to Shafali I thought she did a marvelous job I did too and one of the things I mean I don't know if you noticed this but I wanted to say I put it in my notes I am so happy to see that the censor board has been able to get there smoking is injurious to your health warnings on the OTT platforms I am so happy that's happened man it was so long I didn't get to see it and thought it would always stay that way but boy am I happy you know it'll stop people anyways overall I think it's a really worthwhile film to see I think it's an entertaining film and you'll see some good acting as well from the film yeah and I thought the score behind it as well it was really subtle at times and it also brought the emotion of certain moments at other times and so I thought the composer Guarav Chatterjee and the cinematographer sorry we didn't chat him about it yeah Sarabh Goswami I thought the cinematographer in the film was actually good yeah good choice I think it was lens choices that you guys used it may have been post-production but I think it was lenses that they chose for the discordant sense of panic attack that she got into they did several things they did those I forgot what it's called technically but when you do the the background and foregrounds separate the foreground stays and the background leaves but the foreground looks like it's moving with the blur around the edges and they did stuff like that especially the blur around the edges to enhance that sense of you being in her panic attacks I thought those were well done but let us know what you thought about this film down in the comments below and what should be the next Shafali Shah and Vidya film that we should I know Vidya has no one killed Jessica that we haven't seen a lot of people talk about that one and then Shafali I'm sure she has a ton that we have I just I'm looking forward to when's telecrime to telecrime season 2 yeah you know the first thing we saw her I think it was Satya man probably so and Vidya was Kahani was it Kahani? I think so oh no Shafali did we see juice before or after oh Satya I can't remember I can't remember but that might be before I know we jumped up and down yeah with her in that film yeah oh yeah she does have a new series out that uh yeah I've heard about it human human human um anyways if you've seen that please let us know how it is if not what should be the next film that we should watch down below