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I’m not into romances and love stories. They usually make my eyes roll far back into my head or cringe. I can’t remember the last time I read or enjoyed a romance novel that wasn’t literary or had some other plot going on apart from the boy-meets-girl and-romance-ensues bit. I wouldn’t have read ‘Get a Life, Chloe Brown’ by Talia Hibbert if my absolutely favorite booktuber (@paperbackdreams) and some friends whose reading tastes I like hadn’t been going gaga over it.

‘Get a Life, Chloe Brown’ is the first part in a trilogy of sorts but it works well as a standalone novel too. Hibbert has written three books and each tells the story of a different Brown sister. The second book is ‘Take a Hint, Dani Brown’, and the final one is ‘Act Your Age, Eve Brown’. Dani and Eve both make appearances in Chloe’s book and are interesting characters that you want to know more about. The little of what you get to see of them in Get a Life, Chloe Brown leaves you wanting more and it only seems fair that they each have a book of their own.

Chloe Brown suffers from fibromyalgia, a condition that leaves her in pain, accompanied by fatigue, and sleep and mood problems. Her fiancé dumps her because he can’t deal with her issues and slowly her friends too disappear from her life. She lives in a mansion with her grandmother where everything is taken care of for her. One day, after a near death experience, she decides to take charge of things. The extremely organized and meticulous Chloe makes a list. It includes things like moving out of her family home, going camping, getting drunk, having meaningless sex and other random things.

Then she meets Redford Morgan. He is the superintendent of the building she moves into. Both feel a visceral attraction to each other that they initially try to deny and suppress. But as Redford helps Chloe tick items off her list, they end up giving in to their emotions. What follows is a lot of sweet gestures, hot moments, and ultimately a misunderstanding that eventually leads to a heartwarming ending.

As far as love stories go, it’s an out and out cliché. But what makes Get a Life, Chloe Brown different is Hibbert’s sense of humor that gives Chloe a fun, distinctive and interesting voice and the sensitivity with which the story addresses the issue of abusive relationships. Hibbert also sends out a message of body positivity through her main character who is beautiful and chubby, two traits that are often considered antonyms. It’s a feel-good book that leaves you sighing, giggling, and happy.

Three stars
Get a Life, Chloe Brown
Talia Hibbert
Published: 2019
Publisher: Avon
Pages: 384, paperback

We Nepalis just love sequels, don’t we? At least our filmmakers seem to think so. Because for almost every Nepali movie that has made an inkling of profit in the past few years, there’s been (or have been) sequel/s. There’s one particular thematically romantic Nepali movie which is set to reach the half-dozen milestone in sequels.

Not that we’re complaining, but when you just put in numbers after names and repeat the same motif film after film, your lack of ingenuity starts to bore the audience, and the credibility you earned from the first film is overshadowed. Only a limited few can become Francis Ford Coppola and dish one after another “Godfather”—but even so the latter films got their fair share of criticism.

So, our YouTube selection for the week “Jatrai Jatra” (2019), a remake of the 2016 hit film “Jatra”, falls under the category of sequels gone bad. The original Jatra was a well written, well executed heist comedy that left the audience in fits of laughter in theaters and later at home via YouTube. It was an original movie with a rather unoriginal plot but with so much imagination put into it that the audience couldn’t exactly put a finger on what was wrong with the film. But the sequel—Jatrai Jatra—although staying true to its comic spirit and attempting to recreate the hilarity of the first, tarnishes its legacy.

Our lead trio—Fanindra (Bipin Karki), Munna (Rabindra Jha) and Joyes (Rabindra Singh Baniya)—are released from jail three years after their Rs 30-million incident in the first part. Having learnt a valuable lesson, they try to resurrect their lives but find themselves in shambles. The trio, united by greed and opportunity, thus part ways to try and live a normal life and get back what they have lost.

But fate has other plans. After trying a host of other jobs, when Fanindra finally ends up as a taxi driver for Taxi Sahu (Rajaram Paudel), a mishap involving his passenger for the day, Dawa (Daya Hang Rai), leaves him in possession of 10 kilos of gold. Once bitten twice shy, Fanindra wants to get rid of the gold but then his greed and the recollection of his financial and family situation gets the better of him. He decides to keep the gold and thus begins another set of comedy of errors that entrench his friends, family and a bunch of goons.

Written and directed by Pradip Bhattarai, Jatrai Jatra banks on the acting skills of its three lead characters and makes them run through confusing situations and conflicting moments to recreate the chaotic coherence presented by Jatra. But coherent, this movie is definitely not. Jatrai Jatrai feels like the makers hurried a bit too much to recreate the success of the original Jatra and in doing so, left too many loose ends

My biggest complaint with the movie is regarding how the continuity breaks and lapses, which could have been easily avoided, passed the final cut. How could a bunch of industry veterans make so many novice errors unless they were deliberate, which is clearly not the case. It feels like the makers got so cocky with the success of Jatra, they forgot that the audience should not be taken for granted.

Acting-wise, there’s not much to complain about. The trio of Karki, Jha and Baniya recreate the roles of simpletons-turned-criminals with the same sincerity. One noticeable change is that their characters have become more cunning after the jail term and it reflects in their acting. How we wish filmmakers showed more conviction to character development and not just let their principal characters enact the same tomfoolery even after so much experience. This is the problem with Nepali sequels. Once they’ve established a character, they never let them grow, which with time gets boring and repetitive.

Who should watch it?

The harsh criticism of Jatrai Jatra is the result of its comparison to the original. As a stand-alone movie, it is definitely more entertaining than most films released around the same time. Much more entertaining than let’s say 70 percent Nepali movies we’ve reviewed so far. If you like Nepali comedy movies, there's a high possibility you will enjoy Jatrai Jatra.

Genre: Comedy
Rating: 2.5 stars
Actors: Bipin Karki, Rabindra Singh Baniya, Rabindra Jha
Director: Pradip Bhattarai
Run time: 2hr 17mins

While I’ve always enjoyed good thrillers, horrors and bloodbaths weren’t really my thing. The pandemic changed that. I turned to spooky stuff to get my mind off the very real threat out there. It worked. Now, I no longer need that distraction but I find I’ve sort of developed a taste for it. Readers recommending books that made their skin crawl makes mine tingle in anticipation.

I’d heard a lot about ‘No Exit’ by Taylor Adams. Some friends said it left them traumatized and booktubers would shut their eyes, shake their heads and squeal when reviewing this book. I couldn’t find it at any bookstore in Kathmandu but I finally got the e-book. Twenty pages in, I wasn’t very enthused. I didn’t like the writing style and the setting felt a bit off but things escalated pretty quickly and left me stunned. No Exit is, hands-down, the best edge-of-the-seat thriller I’ve read in a long time.

On her way home to see her sick mother, college student Darby Throne gets stranded at a highway rest stop in Colorado because of a blizzard. There’s no cellphone signal. At the rest stop, there are four other people waiting out the storm with her. Then, Darby sees a little girl locked in an animal crate at the back of a van parked next to her car. She quickly finds out who, out of the four people, the van belongs to and everything from then on is about saving the child and ultimately herself too when the kidnapper finds out she has seen the girl.

The premise feels like that of any other thriller. But what goes down is insane. It’s creepy. The scenes are so vivid. It makes you jump, gasp, and shudder. There were multiple times when I had to put the kindle down and cover my eyes and ears to shake off the images that were forming in my head. I was visibly rattled and my husband, more than once, commented on why I was reading a book that was driving me crazy and making me shriek. Thinking about it now, two weeks after finishing the book, still makes my heart race.

It was so good (if this were a post on Instagram instead of a review in a national newspaper, I’d have put 10, no 20, o’s behind that so.) It’s definitely not for the faint of heart but if you enjoy an eerie, nightmarish read, you’re doing yourself a great disservice if you don’t pick this one up right away.

Fiction
No Exit
Taylor Adams
Published: 2019
Publisher: William Morrow
File size: 1747 KB
Print length: 371 pages

Ever had one of those journeys when you’ve planned everything perfectly but still end up being miserable? You’re going to an amazing destination, you have a safe ride to take you, your travel companions are the best you can get and you have everything to make you comfortable. But then something goes wrong mid-way and you have no idea what it is. But it still affects you and your travel is ruined.

This is what happens to Netflix’s freshly released “Mimi.” The Hindi-language film has an amazing cast, a decent production budget and an intriguing subject. But it fails to capitalize on its strengths and goes awry in storytelling.

Written and directed by Laxman Utekar, the drama initially disguises itself as a retrospective on commercial surrogacy. It is thus cleverly placed in 2013, around six years before India’s Surrogacy (Regulation) Bill came into effect, to give the audience a glimpse of what surrogate pregnancy looked like for India’s poor who were doing it for money.

An American couple—John (Aidan Whytock) and Summer (Evelyn Edwards)—have failed to conceive naturally and are searching for a surrogate mother in Rajasthan, India. They are looking for a “young and healthy female” to bear their child when they come across Mimi (Kriti Sanon), a local dancer. Bhanu (Pankaj Tripathi), their taxi driver and guide, then takes on the difficult task of convincing Mimi to become a surrogate mother for the American couple. With dreams of becoming a Bollywood actor but no means of getting there because of her humble background, Mimi takes up the offer for INRs 2 million.

The couple then leaves for the US and Mimi, lying to her parents—Mansingh (Manoj Pahwa) and Shobha Rathore (Supriya Pathak)—that she has a shoot for nine months, goes to live in her friend’s house. All is going well for the parties involved when at almost the end of the nine months a routine checkup reveals the child Mimi is bearing might have Down Syndrome. This scares the American parents who refuse to own up the child and run away, leaving Mimi to her fate. Now Mimi not only has to decide on the fate of the unborn child but also face her unassuming family and a conservative society. What she chooses to do and the effects of her decisions form the rest of the movie.

The tragedy with Mimi is, despite having a strong subject like pregnancy and motherhood as its central theme, it never connects its audience to the characters emphatically. Albeit using up around 2hrs 12mins of screen time, the film treats all the conflicts and confrontations it raises only superficially. Everything is happening too easily. The sense of acceptance of all situations by everyone makes it unrealistically altruistic, thus never invoking much emotion in the audience. 

Humor and comic timing of the actors make Mimi an enjoyable affair nonetheless. Where the writer/s have failed to address the gravity of certain situations, they have at other times inserted some really witty dialogues and situations that in turn are performed well—especially by lead actors Sanon and Tripathi. Sanon, as Mimi—the center of attention—has a coming-of-age story to tell and the actor does manage to deliver one of her best performances. And Tripathi, with the legacy he has built over the past few years, does what he is expected to—manifest a character that blends into the story and setting so well that you forget you’ve seen him as an entirely different person in the past. We wish Mimi’s family—the parents played by the talented Pahwa and Pathak—had got a more defining role. Had their characters been written a bit stronger, their presence would have added more value to the film.

Who should watch it?

Even with all its flaws in storytelling, the acting and elements of writing/filmmaking in Mimi make it worth a watch for any OTT viewer who is into comedy, drama, and family films. But if you’re someone who looks for strong social messaging and life-changing ideas, you might want to take a pass on this one.

Rating: 2.5 stars
Genre: Comedy, drama
Actors: Kriti Sanon, Pankaj Tripathi
Director: Laxman Utekar
Run time: 2hrs 12mins