From The Gray Man to Good Luck Jerry: Best streaming picks from July

I have to admit, July was not a great month for the OTT platform. There was the usual quota of gangsters and giggles and in one case, giggly gangsters. Speaking of case, there was one very interesting mock-court celebrity-grilling show and a standup comedy series, where, if the comics opened their mouths too much, then case toh banta hai. Here’s looking at the best on the digital domain in July 2022:

The Terminal List (Amazon Prime Video)

The month started with this stirring series, said to be one of  the most expensive products from Amazon. So was the  expense worth  it? I would say, every penny of it. This edge-of-the-seat action thriller takes us through a robust labyrinth of  betrayal and escape. Chris Pratt  stars as Lieutenant Commander James Reece, who doesn’t quite know  which side he is on, and who his friends are in the Government. The action is fabulously frenetic. Chris Pratt  occupies centre stage trying hard to be taken seriously in a non-comic role. He succeeds. So does the swift-moving series, no matter what the critics said. Audiences loved it. This time I am with them.

_ The Gray Man (_Netflix)

It’s amazing how at odds the tastes of critics and audiences can be. While Amazon’s premium product, The Terminal Man, was given the cold shoulder by critics, The Gray Man didn’t get treated any better. But make no mistake, the  Russo Brothers mean business. Their sense of action is unparalleled. In The Gray Man, they have conceived and choreographed some of the best stunts we have ever seen. I can only wonder what they would have looked like on  the big screen. The good-looking cast dazzles with its charm. Acting skills are not needed. Not this time. Dhanush ’s presence was severely limited. All that talk about the ‘Sexy Tamil’ from the co-directors and the cast sounded like  consolation.

_ Case Toh Banta Hai (_Amazon miniTV)

A huge shout-out to Riteish Deshmukh for using his influence in the film industry to roast his dosts. The first episode with Varun Dhawan, who is known to take himself dead seriously, found young Dhawan loosening up for a change. Next up, Karan Johar , who resumed his own talk show in July, was savagely entertaining. We need more such shows to demystify the  stars. They are after all, humans. Case Toh Banta Hai reminds us that stars too use the bathroom, with tongue firmly lodged in shriek. This is an easy-breezy version of  Rajat Sharma’s self-important and uptight Aap Ki Adaalat.

_ Ghar Waapsi (_Disney+Hotstar)

Any series that dares to call itself by this dangerously political title had better watch its steps. Ghar Waapsi is not what you think. It’s about a guy Shekhar, played by Vishal Vashishtha, who resembles Ricky Gervais, who returns home to his family in Indore after losing his job. Although, there is nothing here that we have not seen in several series about small-town families (with  or without Jitendra Kumar), this one has its moments. During their morning walk, Shekhar’s mother, played by Vibha Chhibber,  teases her husband Atul Shrivastava that he has a distasteful paunch as he goes into an instant sulk. Wish there was more of these two actors and less of the Gervais lookalike hero, who is in almost every frame. On the plus side, director Ruchir Arun keeps it short, just sex episodes. Grateful.

Modern Love Hyderabad  (Amazon Prime Video)

The internationally acclaimed series came to us first with a Mumbai anthology. I think the Hyderabad anthology is better. It gives us a sense of contemporary relationships without going too deep into them. Nagesh Kukunooor’s stories rule the roost, probably because he is billed as the overall show-runner. The anthology conveys a feeling of being a clutter-breaker without really bending backwards to be unconventional. The boundaries of love and by extension, love stories, have extended to such an extent that in present times, love long ago ceased to be a man-woman thing on screen. In that sense, the newest, freshest edition of the Modern Love franchise from Amazon Prime video, set in the city of pearls Hyderabad, is the most democratic and wide-angled interpretation of love seen in the franchise. Several stories are more about the aftermath of  love, the lingering pain of indelible hurt wedged in ineradicable memories that love leaves behind.

Extraordinary Attorney Woo (Netflix)

Hugely savoured courtroom drama which likes to spend more time out of court, than in. This not-so-extraordinary ongoing series features an autistic heroine, Woo Young-woo (Park Eun-bin), who has a problem with her social manners. This doesn’t prevent her from mugging up book after book on criminology, even when she is a child. Do you find all this easy to believe? Then go right ahead and plunge into the skittish silliness of the series. Each episode  takes us into a different case that Woo Young-woo solves by using her intuition rather than intellect. The same is true for this court-in-the-act series with very little to offer except cuteness. What I did like about the series was the autistic heroine’s  relationship with her caring father. In one of  the episodes, he complains to his daughter about how lonely it is to be an autistic person’s parent. She isn’t listening. But we are. More such moments of insight and less of the outrageously improbable legal hijinks would have made this series more than just endearing.

_ Good Luck Jerry (_Disney+Hotstar)

It is not easy to fall for the amorphous charms of Jaya Kumar, a.k.a Jerry, a fatherless migrant from Bihar eking out  a living in Punjab with her mother and sister. It’s a hard life devoid of  bright spots and the eternal sunshine of the  jobless mind. This business of digging into the dirt of deprivation is never easy in our cinema. For one, the actors must believe in a life of indigence lived by their characters as opposed to the life of luxurious indulgence that they normally lead. If I had cast for this film, where the protagonist must not only look like a Bihari laborer’s daughter,  she must also have a look of desperate destitution in her eyes, I would not go for Janhvi Kapoor. Isn’t she the epitome of prince(ss)ly privilege? In his last production, Atrangi Re producer Aanand Rai had cast yet another pampered star-kid Sara Ali Khan as a rural Bihari. While Sara went over the top, Janhvi, as Jerry, is  remarkably lowkey. In Janhvi’s  hands, Jerry becomes a mildly mysterious, nervously wily character that gets mixed up with drug dealers in her desperation to collect money for her ailing mother. Thank God, it is  the extraordinarily talented and monstrously underused Mita Vashisht, as Jerry’s mother! I am sick and tired of seeing Seema Pahwa and Ayesha Raza as bucolic Mommys. They have become as clichéd in ruralized pseudo-realistic rom-coms as  Nirupa Roy’s CineMaa sobbing in the mainstream films of the 1970s and 80s. In the role of a dying, impoverished  mother, Mita is splendidly stripped of self-pity.  She screams at her two rebellious daughters, Jerry and Cherry (the latter played by a sweet, confident newcomer, Samta Sudiksha), beats them up with a broom. But the three ladies have so much fun together when in the mood for an ice-cream  after a screaming session. It’s a feminine household overseen by the officious landlord (Neeraj Sood), who insists on hovering protectively around the three women,  although they keep shooing him away. If  Janhvi Kapoor (who is  very good) is the  heroine of  Good Luck Jerry, it is casting director Mukesh Chhabra who is the show’s hero. The casting is not only impeccable but also unexpected. Jaswant Singh Dalal as the stiff-necked drug dealing crime-lord Timmy, is so outstanding, you want to stand and clap every time he winces while talking drug money. Yup, this guy can be quite a pain in the neck even for himself. But the scene-stealer is Deepak Dobriyal, as always. As Jerry’s volunteer suitor, Dobriyal brings so much to every  scene he features in. How does he  do it? Dobriyal is pure genius. And the film? A cut above the original Tamil, Kolamaavu Kokila, where the actors were not half as good as they are in the remake. Director Siddharth Sen doesn’t follow the original reverently. He gives the theme his own kinky spin and scheme .But why so much of scatological references? Filthy toilets figure frequently in the narration. We get the mood of dingy despair. But what was the need of saluting the poverty porn of Slumdog Millionaire?

Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based film critic who has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out. He tweets at @SubhashK_Jha.

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