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 ‘Stree’ takes a small town urban myth about a mysterious female ghoul to deliver a hor­ror comedy packaged with colorful characters, textured dialogues and good laughs that don’t let the movie down even when the material gets too trite and over the top.

Helmed by newcomer director Amar Kaushik, it is a comedy first and a horror film second. It may simmer a lot to find its footing in the first half, but when its narrative pad­dles finally kick in, it is successful in pulling off the rare feat of marrying horror with comedy.

Every year a weeklong festival is held in the village of Chanderi. For quite some time, this very festival has become the hunting ground for a strange creature that comes at night and abducts the village men. The village folks are so terrified with these mysterious disappear­ances that all houses feature a spell to ward off the evil spirit, who they have simply named Stree (‘The Lady’). Vicky (Rajkummar Rao), a local tailor, rubbishes them as mere superstition.

Even when his best buddies are spending their days speculating on the sightings of Stree, Vicky’s more concerned about the reappearance of an out-of-towner beauty (Shrad­dha Kapoor), who only visits Chan­deri during the festival.

Vicky is sure that this time he’ll muster up courage to express his real feelings for her when she approaches him to design a par­ticular dress for her. But Vicky’s romantic pursuits are cut short when one of his friends becomes the latest victim of Stree. He then seeks the help of Hindi pulp novel publisher Rudra (Pankaj Tripathi), a local expert on paranormal activi­ties, to find a way to permanently get rid of Stree.

For the most part, Stree relies on humor through comedic ban­ters. Rao and Tripathi, who shared a terrific chemistry in the dark comedy ‘Newton’, are in top form. Rao is lovable and easily switches back and forth between a gooey eyed lover boy and a terrified ghost buster. Tripathi is the arche­typical wise old guy who has all the answers.

His character has the expositional function of spelling out the finer narrative details about the ghost. A less capable actor may have made the character sound bland and information heavy, but not Trip­athi. He brings a spirited novelty with his conversational delivery that uses Hindi peppered with funnily pronounced English words, a line of tacky old Bollywood song on the ready for any odd situation. Equally effective is Shraddha Kapoor in her role that keeps you guessing about her character’s background and motives.

The film has so much to rave about but it also has many things not going for itself. The initial thirty to forty minutes are marred by pointless songs and lack of narra­tive direction. Some scenes where the tension could’ve been milked for greater comedic effects don’t land properly. But because the film doesn’t take itself too seriously and keeps the affair breezy and light hearted, it’s easy to follow. It right­fully finds rhythm as it goes along and delivers on the promise of the premise.

Stree is a broad comedy but doesn’t take its cinematic liberties for granted to display VFX mayhem to whisk cheap humor and ham-fisted horror thrills. It’s genuinely smart and effectively amiable horror comedy that will certainly inspire more movies in this genre.

 Newly opened in the quaint area of Baluwatar (100 meters on the left towards Maharajgunj from Shivapuri School), the Delish Opera Restro & Banquet is one of the biggest properties in the area. With ample seating space in the restaurant area for more than 100 guests at a time, Opera also has separate family or meeting rooms and a banquet hall that can host 500 people. The dedicated park­ing lot right next to the restaurant is also relieving considering Kathmandu’s parking problems. Opera offers a multi-cuisine menu including Continental, Indian, Thai and Nepali dishes, as well as a wide collection of alcoholic and non-alco­holic beverages. The restaurant opens its doors for lunch, drinks and dinners as well as private parties ranging from small get-togethers to corporate meet­ings and even weddings. The place to organize Teej celebrations this season?

Photos by Pritam Chhetri

 Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, Gail Honeyman’s debut novel, is a joy because, even though she’s an oddball, there’s something about 30-year-old Eleanor that makes you relate to her and instantly like her. Honey­man’s writing style is witty and it’s a delight to get to know Eleanor through her narration as she comes alive in the pages. No wonder while Honeyman was writing Eleanor Oli­phant is Completely Fine, it was shortlisted for the Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize as a work in progress. It later won the 2018 Costa Debut Novel Award.

In the book, you will meet Elea­nor, a clerk at a graphic design office, whose existence is orderly even though completely devoid of good relationships. She works all week long and on Friday nights buys herself two bottles of cheap vodka to last her the weekend and eats pizza for dinner and doesn’t speak to anybody till Monday comes around. All this is fine with her. Her job doesn’t remotely interest her but that doesn’t matter so long it pays the bills. Her existence is unre­markable. But Eleanor also feels there’s nothing remarkable about her either, especially not when you factor in the scars that make up more than half her face.

Then Eleanor develops an obsessive teenage-style crush on a handsome and arrogant singer of a band, and she finally buys herself a mobile phone and laptop, and even opens an account on Twitter to follow and keep track of his where­abouts. She also feels the need to kind of reinvent herself if she is to grab his attention.

Also, one day, she and her col­league, Raymond, witness an old man collapse in the street. They help him and in the process Elea­nor, unwittingly, ends up forging ties with him and his entire fam­ily. There’s also the matter of her disturbing relationship with her mother whose only contact with Eleanor seems to be through once-a-week phone calls. It is all these interconnected events, and seem­ingly harmless situations, that force Eleanor to reexamine her life.

Eleanor’s experiences as a woman not used to the world yet attempting to navigate it are poignant. They teach you a thing or two about the need to understand yourself bet­ter and come to terms with your faults and cracks, and to move on. Eleanor’s voice is sharp and it cuts through the hogwash that we, as human beings, are capable of tell­ing ourselves in order to overlook our weaknesses. She will, at times, feel like a much-needed inner voice reminding you that you can turn your life around by making the right choices, no matter how difficult those choices might be.

 Remember that one relative who, at every party and social gathering, thrusts the same dance moves even when the song has changed? ‘Happy Phirr Bhaag Jayegi’ is the movie version of that person. This ensemble broad com­edy is a dance of mindless slapstick foot chases, cross-dressings and run­ning jokes that one way or the other aim to mime comedy by poking fun at national stereotypes. The film is a sequel to the 2016’s ‘Happy Bhaag Jayegi’. The original film was about a run-away Indian bride Happy (Diana Penty) acciden­tally landing up in Pakistan. It was a breezy comedy of manners with small town aesthetics that also raked in a decent box office return. The follow up is set in China and writ­er-director Mudassar Aziz has been handed a bigger budget which he blows up in remolding the franchise into a template that makes it more like the ‘Hangover’ films.

Character-driven humor comes from characters being themselves, but Aziz’s script tries to milk humor by throwing these characters into situations that feel forced and out of context. What begins as a mistaken identity comedy treacherously nose­dives into a ridiculous cross-country road trip that also sees the char­acters trying to break through a high-security Chinese jail.

The plot runs on two Happys. The first Happy (Diana Penty) and her musician husband Guddu (Ali Fazal) are in Shanghai after Guddu is invited to perform at a musical concert. The second Happy (Sonakshi Sinha) is a horticulturist joining a Chinese university as a lecturer. They land in Shanghai from the same flight. Their identities get mixed up in the airport and soon the horti­culturist Happy finds herself in the den of Chinese gangsters. They mis­take her for the other Happy, who, meanwhile, is whisked to the university and asked about her thoughts on bonsai plants.

In the midst of all this, the Chinese gangsters are also quick to kidnap Bagga ( Jimmy Shergill), the groom who Happy left at the altar to marry Guddu, and Afridi (Piyush Mishra), the Pakistani cop who was Happy’s reluctant ally in the first film. The gangsters press Bagga and Afridi to connive Happy into carrying out their plan, which involves redeem­ing a China-Pakistan business deal that has gone wrong. But before Bagga and Afridi can meet Happy, she manages to run away from the den and meets another Indian named Khushwant ( Jassie Gill) at a karaoke bar.

Khushwant, we later learn, is an interpreter at the Indian Embassy, and has been recently dumped. One thing leads to another until the wrong Happy, Bagga, Afridi and Khushwant, all form a team to dodge the Chinese gangsters and to help the horticulturist Happy on a per­sonal quest that takes the four of them on a wild-goose chase from one Chinese city to another.

Of all the actors, Shergill and Mishra come across well with their tongue-in-cheek verbal duels. But the central character of Sonakshi Sinha leaves you unsatisfied. Her performance feels awkward and low in energy throughout, as if she did the movie only because she would get to do some sightseeing. Jassie Gill, who’s the lead opposite Sinha, is so uninspiring that he’s dwarfed by the supporting actors.

‘Happy Phirr Bhaag Jayegi’ feels excruciatingly exhaustive because it tries to march with juvenile and crass jokes. The villains of the movie are so weakly written and driven by so laughable a motive that they never pose a real threat to the pro­tagonists. Unfortunately, the film runs out of urgency, tension, humor and entertainment well before it hits the finish line O