Synopsis
A gifted teenage detective searches for his missing father with his ladylove assistant.
2017 ‘जग्गा जासूस’ Directed by Anurag Basu
A gifted teenage detective searches for his missing father with his ladylove assistant.
자가 자수스, Детектив Джагга
What happens when a Bengali director decides to bring his childhood world to life - filled with references to Tintin & Feluda, Bengal-centric historical events (Purulia Arms Drop, Netaji), a most amusing reference to Satyajit Ray - films it through a Wes Anderson lens and wants to be socially aware at the same time?
Jagga Jasoos happens.
Very early in the film, a character points out that there are two sides of the brain – the left and the right. While the left side fears the world that is constantly trying to mock anything that’s different, the right side embraces all the creativity that brims inside. Anurag Basu’s Jagga Jasoos with his child-like innocence and infectious energy does exactly that. Taking pages out of the textbooks of The Adventures of Tintin, framing them in the slapstick humor of Buster Keaton & Charlie Chaplin and donning the world that is part whimsical, part real and partly made out of magic realism and fairy dust (read: Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amelie & Delicatessen), Anurag Basu’s Jagga Jasoos is a coming of age film that sings its philosophy to you. It rejoices and embraces its flaws with a sugar rush that is in itself a beautiful thing to behold.
Bollywood & Indian cinema mini-challenge 2017: Comedy & the masala genre. (December theme)
This film is a slapstick comedy, a detective crime story, a Bollywood-style musical, a Western-style musical (first time I've seen this genre in a Bollywood film btw), a romance, an adventure film, a family film, a political drama about the illegal weapons trade, a family melodrama, an action film and probably a few other things I've forgotten to mention. Even in masala film terms it packs in a lot of stuff. And as much as trying to put in so much into one film is an interesting experiment, it doesn't result in a coherent film IMO.
I liked the second half a little more, particularly one of the sequences…
This was Indian Tin Tin with an overarching moral about the global arms trade and my wig is SNATCHED
Anurag Basu's imaginative vision has to be applauded.Like him or not he had the audacity to make such a film despite the numerous hurdles it faced.Think Tin Tin Meets Umbrellas of Cherbourgh. Exhaustive in length and over indulgent and yet i found it entertaining.The real surprise was to depict one of the most beautiful women in the world as a clumsy character and pull it off convincingly.This is probably the first time i feel a director was able to tap into the slapstick aspect of an actress who let's face it is not a very good actress on the surface level but here i was bewitched by whatever she did on screen. Ranbir Kapoor by default is bound to be…
Hindi films are not 'musicals' in the Hollywood sense of the term, and it is evident straightaway that Anurag Basu fails to make that distinction. What Basu lacks in thematic understanding he makes up with some vibrant richness of the film even if it feels cheap at times.
The narrative structure of rhyming everything gets tiring really quickly and it doesn't help that the plot itself is really stupid. Performances are quite poor and the dependable Ranbir Kapoor struggles to do a serviceable job with his character.
Sidenote - By principal I cannot and will not support anything that enables careers of terrible talentless actors like Katrina Kaif who could not speak (and to this day struggle to) the language…
This is 12 movies, tied into one, and told in song. I couldn't have loved it more, well, unless I had a sequel.
Sure, it’s kinda a movie for kids. But that’s the fun of it! It’s a cartoon brought to life. This really awakened the adolescent in me. The genius of Jagga Jasoos is that the childlike tone is completely necessary for the story. Whereas most live action family films have to dilute certain material to be more accessible for kids, this film uses the watered down parts as an advantage, making the silly bloodless action feel almost nostalgic. I think it works because it’s not hiding what it is; it wears the quirkiness on its sleeve.
This is the closest Bollywood got to Wes Anderson style of storytelling. It’s amazing tho don’t know why Bollywood discarded it . Though at places , it feels stretched and long and especially the last 28 mins were not as good as expected.
Clearing out the watchlist # 22 out of 252
A self proclaimed detective is raised by the man of many secrets he rescued after falling off a train. An adoptive father of sorts who imparts a worldly wisdom of espionage, thick coat of bad luck and severe kindness. Suddenly he leaves under highly suspicious circumstances and is later gone missing when, now grown Jagga (Ranbir Kapoor), puts himself on the case. After colliding with a beautiful journalist, Shruti (Katrina Kaif), hunting for hidden clues about secret arms shipments being dropped around India they team up to find answers to both their mysteries. Both, I might add, with a great deal in common.
It's light, even when its heavy. With lots of high stakes but little at risk with the…
I guess this is how a live action Adventures of Tintin made by a third rate Wes Anderson would be like.
I haven't seen much of Bollywood, but this is almost, almost a place I might start if I wanted to share it with someone else. It's a wonderful, light-hearted yet actiony adventure inspired strongly by TinTin and shot in a vibrant, popping comic book palette that just makes it a joy to sit and bask in.
It's framed as three stories combining to tell the main gun-runners conspiracy story. The first hour is dedicated to Jagga as a young boy, and while his friendship with his adoptive father who is forced to leave him an orphan again is necessary to both the story and the emotional weight of the movie, this hour feels overlong, and I was concerned about how…
While it's a disjointed story that feels pieced together, it's been some of the more entertaining music in a film and there are some fun artistic sequences.
Watch it for the visual delight that this movie is. Logics to be strictly kept aside
The essence of any good detective story is the presence of a remarkable protagonist - he need not necessarily be 'likeable', but he needs to have a characteristic that makes him stand out from the rest. Feluda, for instance, is a well-built young man who relied on brains more than brawn (even though he had brawn). Tintin represents the everyman with certain attributes of the stereotypical 'good boy' nature. Sherlock is not likeable, but his methods produce results more often than not - and he loves boasting about it. Hercule Poirot is the classic armchair detective who prefers using 'the grey cells', as he likes to call 'em.
Who then, is Jagga Jasoos? A boy with a speech impediment -…
I’m learning that these well over 2 hour runtimes are actually on the shorter side for Bollywood. Jagga Jasoos is so cheesy they should have just called it Paneer. The budding romance between the 25 year old journalist Shruti and the teenage schoolboy detective Jagga would have been creepier if Ranbir Kapoor wasn’t as convincing a teenager as an Andrew Garfield Spider-Man.
Goofy as it was, it was an entertaining action-comedy-mystery-musical. Though it’s drawn out second half comes to kind of a quickly tied up end.
This movie started off well, like a quirky mystery solver and at the end they rushed the climax and just didn’t make sense and I don’t even know what I watched...is this based on something? Are more suppose to come out? I’m confused.
Also, it was almost a musical but no Bollywood dancing.
Ridiculous: 2.5/5
Dance: 1/5
It's good, but it could've been great.
'Jagga Jasoos' has a lot of positives, but there's one big negative that affects everything else - the run time. There is simply no reason for this to be 155 minutes long, there's so much unnecessary faffing about. There's a fantastic spine to the film, but it's just flooded by lameness.
Ranbir Kapoor is entertaining in the lead, he very much commits to the role of Jagga - he's amusing but does have a few moments of heart also. Katrina Kaif (Shruti) and Saswata Chatterjee (Bagchi) support Kapoor extremely well. A few of the others, like Saurabh Shukla, are decent too.
The music is pretty good, the core premise has potential and the…
Upon second watching, Jagga Jasoos brought more colours, joy and happiness in my life. Say whatever you want, but Ranbir Kapoor is one brilliant actor. The beautiful soundtrack adds more acceleration to the script (for example: the song “khaana khaake” looks like it is useless and futile but it actually means a lot when added at that point in the movie). I wonder why Pritam is such a dickhead composer in other movies but just brilliant with Anurag Basu !!!
Also, brilliant references to Satyajit Ray, Steven Spielberg and Tintin!!
Movie Maestro 3,625 films
[after his parents have left, thinking he is ill] "They bought it. Incredible! One of the worst performances of my…
Gabe 1,350 films
Master list of every film I've seen from the entire Asian continent, from West to East to South.
SnowboardJunkie 192 films
Netflix is finally turning the corner with some polished top grade cinema. They churn out content at an exhausting rate.…
Michael 435 films
(Last Updated: 13 December 2020)
In early 1923, Kansas City, Missouri animator Walt Disney created a short film entitled Alice's…
nrh 954 films
concentrated effort started around early 2015, when i realized i'd only seen a small range of forum favorites. not being…
Anoop Sankar 3,455 films
This is a list of every movie available in Netflix India. I've tried to keep it as exhaustive as possible.…
oski99 5,897 films
Specialist_ 1,950 films
IN PROGRESS You can give suggestion if you want. The movies will limited film to language that that used in…
Kowther 3,720 films
The original list seems to have gone, so here's a replacement list which I'm sure many will find helpful. Please…