The Long Take with Akhil, Rohan & Devika

Heart of Stone, Netflix’s latest franchise-starter, is a step up from the likes of Red Notice and The Gray Man. But it’s far too generic to recommend.

We discuss the film’s rudimentary representation of something as complex as artificial intelligence, the thinly-written characters, and Alia Bhatt’s thankless role.

We also talk about the action set pieces, the overly serious tone, and Netflix’s plans for global domination.

—

Hosted by Akhil Arora and Rohan Naahar, The Long Take is fully bootstrapped. Please consider donating if you enjoy our work.

The Long Take is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Gaana, JioSaavn, Overcast, Stitcher, RadioPublic, Google Podcasts, and wherever you get your podcasts.

Follow The Long Take on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Threads, and YouTube. Write to us at [email protected].

The Long Take is doing its first ever retrospective episode! Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro turns 40 this week, and we rewatched the cult classic and discovered that it still holds up.

We discuss our favourite scenes, the simmering anger under the film’s goofy surface, and appreciate the skill required to play a dead body on screen.

We also talk about how difficult it is for a film to rewire the audience’s brains, how impossible Naseeruddin Shah found this on set, and why it’s a good thing that a planned sequel was never made.

—

Hosted by Akhil Arora and Rohan Naahar, The Long Take is fully bootstrapped. Please consider donating if you enjoy our work.

The Long Take is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Gaana, JioSaavn, Overcast, Stitcher, RadioPublic, Google Podcasts, and wherever you get your podcasts.

Follow The Long Take on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Threads, and YouTube. Write to us at [email protected].

Greta Gerwig’s Barbie divided us like no movie ever has on this podcast.

Is it a sharp satire of patriarchy, or is it simply making the most obvious points about how unfair the world is for half the population?

Is it an imaginative skewering of consumerism, or is a particularly annoying attempt at covert marketing?

Is it another win for Gerwig, or a shockingly tone-deaf misstep? We discuss all this and more in our latest episode.

—

Hosted by Akhil Arora and Rohan Naahar, The Long Take is fully bootstrapped. Please consider donating if you enjoy our work.

The Long Take is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Gaana, JioSaavn, Overcast, Stitcher, RadioPublic, Google Podcasts, and wherever you get your podcasts.

Follow The Long Take on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Threads, and YouTube. Write to us at [email protected].

Oppenheimer is Christopher Nolan’s most political movie yet, and in many ways, among his most sobering.

We discuss the film’s dialogue-heavy storytelling, the epic Trinity test sequence, the moral dilemma at its core, and Nolan’s deliberate artistic deviations from his past work.

We also talk about the hourlong final act, which turns Oppenheimer into a wholly different experience, and make a feeble attempt to rank where the movie stands in Nolan’s filmography.

—

Hosted by Akhil Arora and Rohan Naahar, The Long Take is fully bootstrapped. Please consider donating if you enjoy our work.

The Long Take is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Gaana, JioSaavn, Overcast, Stitcher, RadioPublic, Google Podcasts, and wherever you get your podcasts.

Follow The Long Take on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Threads, and YouTube. Write to us at [email protected].

Kohrra, the new Netflix crime drama series co-created by Paatal Lok’s Sudip Sharma, is a grim experience that takes a character-first approach to its complex storytelling.

We discuss the performances of Suvinder Vicky and Barun Sobti, the rich and textured world that the show is able to create, and the social commentary about Punjab that it offers in an unusually subtle way.

We also talk about Sharma’s evolution from the Udta Punjab days, and our shared admiration for some of the show’s best scenes.

—

Hosted by Akhil Arora and Rohan Naahar, The Long Take is fully bootstrapped. Please consider donating if you enjoy our work.

The Long Take is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Gaana, JioSaavn, Overcast, Stitcher, RadioPublic, Google Podcasts, and wherever you get your podcasts.

Follow The Long Take on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Threads, and YouTube. Write to us at [email protected].

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, the fifth film in the long-running franchise, is a bloated, overlong and ultimately empty experience.

We discuss the film’s action-first plotting, abundance of cameos and references, and unsatisfying attempt at giving Harrison Ford an emotional send-off.

We also talk about that ambitious ending, and unpack the film’s tendency to repeatedly undermine its most heartfelt moments with Marvel-like humour.

—

Hosted by Akhil Arora and Rohan Naahar, The Long Take is fully bootstrapped. Please consider donating if you enjoy our work.

The Long Take is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Gaana, JioSaavn, Overcast, Stitcher, RadioPublic, Google Podcasts, and wherever you get your podcasts.

Follow The Long Take on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. Write to us at [email protected].

Sudhir Mishra’s Afwaah—now out on Netflix after a negligible theatrical run—feels like watching someone engage in a primetime TV “news debate” with themselves.

We discuss Nawazuddin Siddiqui’s miscasting, Mishra’s convoluted approach to several important themes and ideas, and the movie’s complete failure as a genre exercise.

We also do a post-mortem on the four films directed this year by like-minded filmmakers Mishra, Anubhav Sinha, Anurag Kashyap and Hansal Mehta, and discuss the common problems with each of them.

—

Hosted by Akhil Arora and Rohan Naahar, The Long Take is fully bootstrapped. Please consider donating if you enjoy our work.

The Long Take is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Gaana, JioSaavn, Overcast, Stitcher, RadioPublic, Google Podcasts, and wherever you get your podcasts.

Follow The Long Take on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. Write to us at [email protected].

Tiku Weds Sheru, the new rom-com/crime drama starring Nawazuddin Siddiqui and Avneet Kaur, sent us into an existential spiral.

We wonder how Kangana Ranaut could make her film production debut with something as pedestrian as this, and come up with conspiracy theories for how Siddiqui and Prime Video would agree to associate themselves with this movie.

We also talk about its jarring tonal shifts, its complete inauthenticity, and its refusal to be sincere about what it wants to be.

—

Hosted by Akhil Arora and Rohan Naahar, The Long Take is fully bootstrapped. Please consider donating if you enjoy our work.

The Long Take is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Gaana, JioSaavn, Overcast, Stitcher, RadioPublic, Google Podcasts, and wherever you get your podcasts.

Follow The Long Take on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. Write to us at [email protected].

Extraction 2, the sequel to Netflix’s hit pandemic-era action movie Extraction, resurrects Chris Hemsworth’s black ops mercenary Tyler Rake for some more high-stakes action.

We discuss the film’s by-the-numbers plot, but also praise its central extraction sequence, edited to appear as one 21-minute sequence.

We also talk about the Russo brothers’ franchise-minded approach to everything they touch, and analyse why that’s a bad idea for this series.

—

Hosted by Akhil Arora and Rohan Naahar, The Long Take is fully bootstrapped. Please consider donating if you enjoy our work.

The Long Take is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Gaana, JioSaavn, Overcast, Stitcher, RadioPublic, Google Podcasts, and wherever you get your podcasts.

Follow The Long Take on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. Write to us at [email protected].

Bloody Daddy, the new action thriller film directed by Ali Abbas Zafar and starring Shahid Kapoor, marks a new low for them both. It’s streaming for free on JioCinema, but audiences should demand money for surviving it.

We discuss the film’s laughable John Wick and Jason Bourne ambitions, given Zafar and Kapoor’s sheer disinterest in doing the actual hard work to achieve good results.

The action is choppily edited, the storytelling is confusing, and the background score is an assault on the senses. For a wall-to-wall action movie, you never actually get the sense that the main character is the one doing the fighting, but at least Ronit Roy and Sanjay Kapoor understood the assignment.

—

Hosted by Akhil Arora and Rohan Naahar, The Long Take is fully bootstrapped. Please consider donating if you enjoy our work.

The Long Take is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Gaana, JioSaavn, Overcast, Stitcher, RadioPublic, Google Podcasts, and wherever you get your podcasts.

Follow The Long Take on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. Write to us at [email protected].