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 Spize—the authentic Nepali style food joint—is doing everything right to attract hungry Nepali and foreign foodies to its small and cozy prem­ises in Bhagwati Marga, Thamel. Spize is dedicated to providing cheap, deli­cious and hygienic food to its guests. It serves traditional Nepali as well as travelers’ food using Himalayan spices as flavor. The restaurant offers unique breakfast options. You can for instance choose to have Shalom Himalaya, iTraveller, Trek­kers’ Delight, Lost in Thamel or Full Everest (all set-breakfast options) to start your day. All served with fresh brewed coffee.

Momo, chowmein, sekuwa and other Newari snacks are an all-day affair and Spize also offers the very famous Thakali Set, a favorite among its customers.

THE MENU

Chef’s Special:

- Silver Dollar Pancakes

- Thakali food Set

- Grilled Chicken Satay

Opening hours: 8 am-9 pm

Location: Thamel

Cards: Not Accepted

Meal for 2: Rs 600

Reservations: 014413730

 It’s impossible to scavenge a single moment of originality in ‘Baazaar’. Director Gauravv K. Chawla tries to put on the big boots of Martin Scorsese and Oliver Stone to present an Indian twist to those iconic Hollywood Wall Street mov­ies about big-league stock market players. But Baazaar is a film made without gambling much on new ideas. Instead it sails on safe waters to head on a narrative journey that has been done to death. Small-town stock trader Rizwan (Rohan Mehra) thinks it’s time to leave behind his middle-class roots and his principled father, who val­ues honesty and simple living, for a high-stake life of stock trading in Mumbai. After reaching Mumbai, the gooey-eyed and determined Rizwan works hard to first get accepted at a top-tier stock brok­ing company and climb the ladder to ultimately work side-by-side his idol Sakun Kothari (Saif Ali Khan), a self-made business tycoon known for his questionable investment methods. Once our young rookie gets close to the seasoned player, it becomes pretty clear that swim­ming with sharks like Sakun comes with both perks and threats.

The screenplay doesn’t get too hard on the protagonist. Writers Aseem Arora and Parveez Sheikh pepper many mini-crises and close escapes at regular intervals. None of these land any empathetic effect or make us care for Rizwan.

We see him easily cruising out of these sticky situations because the writers give him too many lucky breaks and chances. Rohan Mehra, the spruced-up debutant, as Rizwan has an overbearing pres­ence, amplified by his average act­ing talent and his weakly written character who is arrogant, over­confident and stupid, but never very likable.

Saif Ali Khan’s Sakun Kothari is also pretty generic and one-di­mensional. From his first scene he’s established as a menacing and mean-spirited sociopath. But his mind games get tad too repetitive and lose steam as the story moves on. And the women of Baazaar, Radhika Apte and Chitrangda Singh, are wasted. They function as mere plot devices and are never given any character depth.

With an unoriginal story and less-than-inspiring performances, Baazaar lacks the ambitiousness to sell something interesting about the Indian stock market.

Just like Rizwan hero-wor­ships Sakun, director Gauravv K. Chawla bows to films like 2013’s ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’ and 1987’s ‘Wall Street’ as his holy grail. And in an attempt to recreate the arcs and themes of those films, Chawla is too boxed in by the glitz and glare of the Hollywood por­trayal of the stock market world that he deprives us of a uniquely Indian context.

Baazaar is the kind of movie that could’ve worked had it released five years ago. Today, due to our exposure to lot of Ameri­can TV series and films, it feels formulaic and isn’t clever enough to make us rave about it. To say the least, the film will be easily forgotten and wouldn’t increase the marketing values of the makers and actors involved O

 It’s impossible to scavenge a single moment of originality in ‘Baazaar’. Director Gauravv K. Chawla tries to put on the big boots of Martin Scorsese and Oliver Stone to present an Indian twist to those iconic Hollywood Wall Street mov­ies about big-league stock market players. But Baazaar is a film made without gambling much on new ideas. Instead it sails on safe waters to head on a narrative journey that has been done to death. Small-town stock trader Rizwan (Rohan Mehra) thinks it’s time to leave behind his middle-class roots and his principled father, who val­ues honesty and simple living, for a high-stake life of stock trading in Mumbai. After reaching Mumbai, the gooey-eyed and determined Rizwan works hard to first get accepted at a top-tier stock brok­ing company and climb the ladder to ultimately work side-by-side his idol Sakun Kothari (Saif Ali Khan), a self-made business tycoon known for his questionable investment methods. Once our young rookie gets close to the seasoned player, it becomes pretty clear that swim­ming with sharks like Sakun comes with both perks and threats.

The screenplay doesn’t get too hard on the protagonist. Writers Aseem Arora and Parveez Sheikh pepper many mini-crises and close escapes at regular intervals. None of these land any empathetic effect or make us care for Rizwan.

We see him easily cruising out of these sticky situations because the writers give him too many lucky breaks and chances. Rohan Mehra, the spruced-up debutant, as Rizwan has an overbearing pres­ence, amplified by his average act­ing talent and his weakly written character who is arrogant, over­confident and stupid, but never very likable.

Saif Ali Khan’s Sakun Kothari is also pretty generic and one-di­mensional. From his first scene he’s established as a menacing and mean-spirited sociopath. But his mind games get tad too repetitive and lose steam as the story moves on. And the women of Baazaar, Radhika Apte and Chitrangda Singh, are wasted. They function as mere plot devices and are never given any character depth.

With an unoriginal story and less-than-inspiring performances, Baazaar lacks the ambitiousness to sell something interesting about the Indian stock market.

Just like Rizwan hero-wor­ships Sakun, director Gauravv K. Chawla bows to films like 2013’s ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’ and 1987’s ‘Wall Street’ as his holy grail. And in an attempt to recreate the arcs and themes of those films, Chawla is too boxed in by the glitz and glare of the Hollywood por­trayal of the stock market world that he deprives us of a uniquely Indian context.

Baazaar is the kind of movie that could’ve worked had it released five years ago. Today, due to our exposure to lot of Ameri­can TV series and films, it feels formulaic and isn’t clever enough to make us rave about it. To say the least, the film will be easily forgotten and wouldn’t increase the marketing values of the makers and actors involved.

 There’s an expression in liter­ary circles called the “writ­ers’ writer”. This is someone whose work is highly admired/ talked about among other writers and yet he/she may be relatively unknown to the general public. The same expression can be bor­rowed in the case of films, and for directors in particular. Speak­ing of modern Hindi cinema, one director who deserves the label of “directors’ director” is Sriram Raghavan, the 55-year-old writer/ director of thrillers. His works enjoy cult following among aspir­ing filmmakers and film nerds but he has never been able to bask in global fame like Anurag Kashyap, nor is he much-talked about like Vishal Bhardhwaj, Dibakar Baner­jee or Neeraj Pandey. Raghavan’s limited appeal owes to his sticking to his niche of thriller/ suspense. With the exception of the spy-thriller ‘Agent Vinod’, all of his films seem to take place in the same world, where ordinary lives are thrown asunder by macabre crimes and moral decay. Two of his films —‘Ek Hasina Thi’ and ‘Bad­lapur’—are revenge flicks. And the cult favorite ‘Johnny Gaddaar’ is a racy pulp thriller about a man who digs himself a rabbit hole as he tries to conceal his crimes.

His latest film ‘Andhadhun’ (styl­ized as AndhaDhun) is filled with his trademark touches and I am happy to report that it’s a supe­rior companion piece to ‘Johnny Gaddaar’, in the sense that it’s a plot-driven film thriving on slow and naturally built taut moments. The film does not bother about fabricating suspense through mys­tery and the structure isn’t that of a whodunit. The audience is rather allowed to play God.

Raghavan understands that if viewers know everything about the characters while the characters know nothing about each other, it makes for a more participative viewing. We hold their secrets and have a larger context to feel amused or scared, even when these characters exhibit most ordi­nary of gestures.

The film’s title can be inter­preted in two ways. Literally, it translates as ‘reckless’ or ‘rash’, and figuratively it means a ‘blind tune’. It’s a clever title to a story that blends both these elements. We have a blind pianist (Ayush­mann Khurrana) whose talent makes him a novelty at a Mumbai bar. Things look bright for him: he has a budding romance with the bar-owner (Radhika Apte), and he hopes to put together enough money to strike it big in London. Then, one eventful day, in search of extra cash he knocks the door of an apartment belonging to a washed-up Bolly­wood actor of the 70s (Anil Dha­wan), who wants the pianist to play a private concert for him and his wife (Tabu) on their marriage anni­versary. But the day that promised a gentle, jazz-filled romantic cele­bration shifts to an uncomfortable and nervous frenzy.

Raghavan orchestrates the film like a seasoned music conductor. He begins at a leisurely pace, put­ting Khurrana’s reputation as the Hugh Grant of Hindi small-town romantic comedies to good use. The opening plays out like a fluffy, breezy romantic comedy. As the normalcy settles in, he instantly disrupts it with a gut-wrenching punch. This contrast escalates in intensity and events pile up and the director pumps his composition with a shot of nervous energy and unpredictability.

Khurrana’s performance helps the protagonist remain likeable even when he ventures into anti-hero territory. He softens and hardens believably, and keeps his morality intact. His transforma­tion is not as pessimistic as that of protagonists in Raghavan’s ear­lier films. Likewise, Tabu pulls off different shades of her character: as a noir-ish seductress, grieving wife and a master manipulator. She’s downright sympathetic and also genuinely scary. Radhika Apte is in a short but effective role. Other actors like Anil Dhawan, Manav Vij, Zakir Hussain, Chhaya Kadam and Ashwini Kalsekar are all given their own moments and dialogues to shine.

‘Andhadhun’ is proof that nobody knows how to spin the thriller genre better than Sriram Raghavan. The film not only has the marks of a mas­ter storyteller but also of a serious fanboy who injects 80s Bollywood nostalgia with the sensibilities of classic American and European films from Alfred Hitchcock and Louis Malle. I personally hope ‘Andhadhun’ succeeds in giving Sriram Raghavan the recognition he duly deserves.

It’s ironic how a film with an overarching title like ‘Katha Kathmandu’ turns out to be an anthology of loosely connected trivialities that is utterly unrepresentative of the spirit of Kathmandu. Author and TV producer Sangita Shrestha, who directs this film, tries to stitch together three stories with thematic fabrics of lust, love and life. But her lens is so shallow and detached from social consciousness that she ends up looking at Kathmandu and its people from a single dimension, inspired as she is, more by mainstream movies than real life.

These three stories feature a super-model (Priyanka Karki) exploited by her drug-dealer boyfriend (Pramod Agrahari), a teenage college romance between a college hottie (Sandhya KC) and a geek (Sanjog Koirala), and two terminally-ill heart patients (Prekshya Adhikari and Ayushman Joshi), who, at the cusp of death, don’t fail to cash in on little moments of joy.

All three are blends of broad-stroke characters and situations we’ve already seen in so many popular movies before. The darker side of the fashion world, filled with promiscuous models and lecherous men, made me feel as if I had walked into a Madhur Bhandarkar film. Also, the track of budding romance amid illness reeks of ‘The Fault in Our Stars’. Writer-director Shrestha never subverts these familiarities and plays them out predictably. She carries a very generalist assumption of drug addicts, making her actors rub their noses constantly. Other stereotypes are also played up. One character wears big frames and has a forced stammer just to look socially awkward and enough to make Rohit Mehra from ‘Koi Mil Gaya’ feel proud.

The film’s writing doesn’t do any favors to the actors. Characters are painted either black or white. Pramod Agrahari tears into his sadistic role with one-note intensity. Priyanka Karki is too zoned out in the role of a victim, who gets thrashed around by both Agrahari’s character and Sangita Shrestha’s conceited plot tricks, employed throughout to gain shock value. Shrestha fails to recognize that to land a good payoff you first need a good setup. The performances from young actors Sandhya KC, Sanjog Koirala, Ayushman Joshi and Prekshya Adhikari aren’t worthy enough to make viewers care about them.

At many points in ‘Katha Kathmandu’ characters will vent their anger at Kathmandu for crushing their dreams and thrusting their lives into a whirlwind of misery. These outbursts barely make us care about them or to relate their struggle to the contemporary mood and culture of modern Kathmandu. The film’s stilted in its glossy design and flat cinematic aesthetics. Lujaw Singh’s camerawork lacks the poignancy to capture the city’s texture. We stay mainly indoors: in brightly-lit clean apartments, expensive looking colleges and hospitals.

‘Katha Kathmandu’ has come one week after ‘Intu Mintu Londonma’, a film that also had a female director (Renesha Rai Bantawa). Although ‘Katha Kathmandu’ has slightly better performances, both films’ central shortcoming is the same: They are more produced than directed. They adhere strictly to the trendy filmmaking conventions. Money is poured to create lavish and rich looking production design, but what about the content? With their films, Rai and Shrestha have added no new dimension that could’ve questioned the status quo of Nepali films. Their initial efforts have turned out to be so bland that it will be difficult to keep a keen interest in what they have to offer in the coming days.