Latest news with #FOMOFix
The Hindu
a day ago
- Entertainment
- The Hindu
Watch: Same plot, new bottles
This week on FOMO Fix, Sudhish Kamath breaks down Bhool Chuk Maaf — the latest entry in the overdone time-loop genre that ironically forgets to be original. Also on the episode: TV Gold: Taylor Sheridan's Landman — where oil meets fire and Billy Bob Thornton holds it all together. If Yellowstone was your vibe, this one is worth drilling into. Heads Up: Vijay Sethupathi stars in Ace, a film that tries to bluff with comedy, action, and a heist — but doesn't quite have the right cards. Retro Ride: Mohanlal's Thudarum revs up old-school action with Ilaiyaraaja music and raw nostalgia — but don't expect Drishyam-style twists. PSA: JJ Abrams throws it back to the '70s with Duster, where fast cars, FBI agents, and blue suede shoes collide. 👁🗨 Watch, skip, or wait — Sudhish Kamath is your binge guide, your designated driver through the noisy streets of content chaos. This is FOMO Fix, brought to you by The Hindu.
The Hindu
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Hindu
Planning to watch Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning? Here's a quick recap of the franchise's movies so far
My week began with a message that self destructed in five seconds: Your mission, should you choose to accept, is to watch all Mission: Impossible movie series this weekend. That amounts to 15 hours of preparation before I get to the latest instalment. Here's your recap. Mission: Impossible (1996), based on a 1966 TV show created by Bruce Gellar, kick-started this franchise about 30 years ago. American film director and screenwriter Brian De Palma made the first movie edition as a brooding, dark, cerebral thriller that was high on stunts but not the spectacle it has become. Luther (Ving Rhames) became the first regular member of Impossible Mission Force (IMF) along with Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise). FOMO Fix: Episode 8: Mission Impossible, Fire, The Studio The template was set. Hunt accepts a mission to recover a McGuffin to save the world. To do this, he needs his team to break into a highly secure facility that can only be accessed by impossible means. The fallout ultimately leads him to a choice — to save someone he loves or let millions die. He always does both as the best of men in the worst of times. John Woo, who directed Mission: Impossible 2 (2000), gave it the action-movie flourish it is associated with today. Slow-motion shots, high on emotion, so much so that every Hindi heist film made ever since has paid homage to it. Hunt saved the world from a deadly virus 20 years before we knew the damage it could do. The Limp Bizkit version of the theme still find its way to your ears before you finish this sentence. It was with Mission: Impossible III (2006) that the franchise got much needed reinvention. JJ Abrams, the creator of television series Lost, gave the franchise that grounded, gritty, high stakes action movie by creating a villain (Philip Seymour Hoffman) smarter and stronger than Hunt. Benji (Simon Pegg) joined the IMF as a regular from this point. Abrams brought in Brad Bird for Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol (2011) to lend humour to the franchise. But the pivot to humour got in the way of storytelling as Oscar-winner Christopher McQuarrie was brought in to doctor the script. McQuarrie took all the best elements of the first four movies and helped define the DNA of the franchise — intrigue, action, strong villains, drama and comedy. With this formula, McQuarrie made two near-perfect movies — Rogue Nation (2015) and Fallout (2018). As the scale became bigger, the franchise reeled in Jeremy Renner to join the IMF. Fun fact: Upon learning that they planned to kill him, Jeremy declined to return. The last two editions of the Mission: Impossible series, also helmed by McQuarrie, were originally titled Dead Reckoning Part 1 and 2, since the movies share a common AI villain called Entity that wants to take over the world. Though not quite as smart as the fourth and fifth instalment, Dead Reckoning (2023) made up with scale and spectacle — with the daredevil stunt where Tom rides a dirt bike off a cliff and sky dives, parachuting himself onto a speeding train. This brings us to The Final Reckoning (2025), a film that tries hard to tie up loose ends and threads from the franchise to mixed results. Some are fun, some are contrived and some completely unnecessary. To ensure you needn't have watched the other seven films, this one uses recaps, inserts and spoon feeds information to the point that would make Brian De Palma squirm. The franchise has come a full circle from assuming the audience is smart to assuming they are dumb but the joys of movie magic remain. Good, better, best Here's how I would rank all the Mission: Impossible films: Mission: Impossible Mission: Impossible – Fallout Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation Mission: Impossible III Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning Mission: Impossible 4 – Ghost Protocol Mission: Impossible 2 From the hottest shows to hidden gems, overlooked classics to guilty pleasures, FOMO Fix is a fortnightly compass through the chaos of content. Expect timely recommendations, spoiler-free insights, and an honest heads-up on what to not miss.
The Hindu
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Hindu
Watch: John Abraham charms in The Diplomat, The Royal Mess, and Poker Face returns
Watch: John Abraham charms in The Diplomat, The Royal Mess, and Poker Face returns | FOMO Fix This week on FOMO FIX, Sudhish Kamath shares a skill set with Charlie Cale as Poker Face returns. Hype Check: Netflix's The Royals claims to be a guilty pleasure — but is it just guilty of glorifying privilege and tone-deaf fantasy? TV Gold: Rian Johnson's Poker Face is back — and it's smarter, funnier, and pulpier than ever. Heads Up: John Abraham plays it cool in The Diplomat — no punching, just calls for help. TVF's Gram Chikitsalay tries to cure your Panchayat blues. Vadakkan offers high-quality Malayalam horror… until it loses the plot in Kantara land. All that, and your early reminder — Mission: Impossible drops a week early in India. Cut through the clutter. Watch FOMO FIX. Your weekly BS detector. Music: Ivan Avakian
The Hindu
08-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Hindu
Retro, Four Seasons, Thunderbolts and more
The day you find your purpose… or realise you've wasted 200 bucks on a bad movie. This week on FOMO Fix, I, Sudhish Kamath, help you navigate stories about people chasing meaning while the world burns around them. In Hype Check, we look at Retro — Suriya's masala-packed tribute to classic cinema. It's love, laughter, and war… but does it live up to its own hype? In TV Gold, Tina Fey and Steve Carell bring us The Four Seasons, a funny and heartfelt Netflix series about changing relationships through the year. Heads Up covers Marvel's latest misfit team-up — Thunderbolts (now rebranded The New Avengers). Meta, messy, but actually watchable. Also recommending: Muthayya, a charming Telugu indie about a 70-year-old chasing his movie dreams. The Rehearsal, Nathan Fielder's absurd, brilliant deep-dive into fake lives and uncomfortable truths (yes, there's a diaper scene). Watch now for the weekly lowdown on what to stream, skip, and why good marketing sometimes looks a lot like purpose. Music: Ivan Avakian
The Hindu
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Hindu
‘Kesari 2' and more: Revisionism, representation and appropriation
Welcome back to FOMO Fix, your weekly dose of what to watch — and what to dodge — across film and television. This week, we take a hard look at revisionism in storytelling: the kind that reimagines history with purpose and perspective, and the kind that distorts it to fit an agenda. From the jingoistic inventions of Kesari 2 to the smarter narrative choices of Quentin Tarantino and Aaron Sorkin, we unpack the essentials of revisionism. Also this week, we applaud a sharp animated satire from Ramy Youssef, a surprisingly effective thriller with a terrible name — Crazxy — and a take an honest look at representation and appropriation in Superboys of Malegaon. HYPE CHECK: Kesari 2 'Beep off.' 'Beep right off.' 'Go beep yourself.' 'Get the beep out of my country.' Yes, that's the complete collection of Akshay Kumar's punchlines and 'winning arguments' in Kesari 2, a film that takes a nugget of history and revises it into jingoistic mythology. Despite criticism for historical distortion — and plagiarism accusations over a Yahya Bootwala poem — the film has collected over ₹70 crore in its second week. But this courtroom drama is no The Trial of the Chicago 7 or A Few Good Men. Those films made the war of ideas compelling with well-crafted arguments and ideological nuance — not just one-sided F-bombs thrown around like confetti. Tarantino rewrote history too — by killing Hitler in Inglourious Basterds and saving Sharon Tate in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. But if you're presenting an alternate timeline, the least you can do is not market it as The Untold Story of Jallianwala Bagh. It's not just dishonest — it's straight-up pretentious to end the film with names of real-life victims followed by an asterisk: 'Names from public domain.' Translation: 'No attempt was made to verify these names, but Aaron Sorkin did it too, so… vibes?' Representation? Akshay Kumar plays Sankaran Nair — which now apparently makes him an expert on all things starting with K: Kerala, Kathakali, Kalaripayattu. Meanwhile, R. Madhavan is fantastic in the film — making you wonder: why isn't he Sankaran Nair? Why not stay true to the book it's based on — The Case That Shook the Empire? Maybe because real history doesn't stir up the nationalism quota enough to provoke? The only history lesson Kesari 2 teaches is that Bollywood doesn't care about representation, sensitivity, or even basic screenwriting — even when dealing with one of the most haunting tragedies in Indian history. TV GOLD: #1 Happy Family USA In the wake of the Pahalgam tragedy and the surge of hate Muslims across India have endured lately, the show to watch is Ramy Youssef's animated series #1 Happy Family USA on Prime Video. Set in the aftermath of 9/11, the show follows the cultural fallout faced by the Husseins — now under the scanner for being Arab.. Ramy leans into absurdity, throwing in nosy neighbors, shady FBI agents, and even the American President. Yes, George W. Bush shows up for a sleepover. The lead, a teenager named Rumi, joins a punk rock band. 'We need Satanic Verses — Rushdie, not Rumi.' (That line alone deserves a standing ovation.) If you liked Ramy or Mo, this one belongs on your watchlist. If you haven't seen either, it's time. HEADS UP: Crazxy You know those titles that are trying too hard and turn you off instantly? Crazxy — yes, that's 'crazy' with an X — is one of them. Surprisingly, it's actually good. Sohum Shah stars in this real-time thriller about a bag of money, two parties waiting for it, and escalating stakes. He can either use the money to save his career — or ransom it to rescue his kidnapped daughter with Down syndrome. What would you do? The thriller rarely slows down — except for one surprisingly tense tyre change mid-surgery. By the end, you've had so much fun, the slightly predictable climax barely matters. If it had just been titled 'Crazy', more people would've watched it. STREAM THIS FIRST: Superboys of Malegaon Zoya Akhtar's Superboys of Malegaon, on Prime Video, is a fictional adaptation of Supermen of Malegaon, Faiza Ahmed Khan's beloved documentary. It's a classic case of cultural appropriation. Not only does it fail to credit the original as 'based on' or 'adapted from,' it gives it a shoutout — like tagging it in a meme. To be fair, the film — written by Varun Grover — is entertaining and lovingly captures the spirit of Malegaon's mumblecore parody-makers. But the documentary already did that — with authenticity and humility. The appropriation here is twofold: A privileged member from the Javed Akhtar family tree — Sholay lineage and all — gets her writing partner Reema Kagti to direct instead of empowering someone from Malegaon to tell the story. And it mines a marginalised, low-income community while sidelining a documentary filmmaker — one of the most undervalued voices in the industry. So how do you celebrate without appropriating? Take notes from Netflix. When they acquired One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez's sons insisted it be made in Spanish, shot in Colombia, using local talent. That's called platforming the people who lived the story. Want to celebrate the filmmakers of Malegaon? Start by watching Faiza Ahmed Khan's Supermen of Malegaon on YouTube — before streaming the fictional take. JUST SAY NO: You (Netflix) This is not a recommendation. This is your cue to skip. The stalker series You has ended after five seasons. While the show had its guilty-pleasure highs, the final season offers nothing new. The thrills are limp, the ending is predictable. and the Joe Goldberg is too tame for a psycho we've watched get away with murder for five years. Landing a show is an art form. This one crash-lands into clichés. Skip the FOMO. Embrace the JOMO: Joy of Missing Out. Watch Jewel Thief instead. The Vijay Anand one.
