Snapshots
Wide angle excuse
Ekta Kapoor's "Kahani Hamaray Mahabharat Ki",
which opened this week with lots of expectations on
9X failed to excite. It appeared a hurried exercise full
of factual inaccuracies. Ved Vyasa is seen narrating
the biggest poem in prose, Shantanu, the king of
Hastinapur goes hunting in the barren Ladakh. The
characters have been dressed up like Greek gods, a
cheap copy of big budget Hollywood films like
"Troy". The makers seem to have forgotten that just
the frequent use of wide angle lens doesn't add
grandeur. The dialogues lack the punch and pronunciation
and the cast seems tired and is still in the
mould of Ekta's saas-bahu sagas. Sakshi (as Ganga)
continues to be Parvati and Anita's (as Draupdi) lip
movements are not in sync with dialogues. Even the
talented Makrand Deshpande is hamming. Silver
lining: Kiran Karmakar as Shantanu.
Counter culture!
From blockbusters to serious cinema,
World Movies continue to augment its
bank of meaningful cinema. Recently
the channel has acquired "Che", the
Golden Palm nominee at Cannes 2008
that won Del Toro the best actor award.
The four-hour-plus epic is the first full
cinematic rendition on the life of Latin
American revolutionary Ernesto `Che'
Guevara.
Bust the blockbuster
The way channels publicise their
products, every film is a blockbuster.
Recently, a channel sent the publicity
material of a reality show which said the
winner will get to work in a blockbuster
produced by a well known production
house. Height of wishful thinking! Similarly
duds like "Naach" and "Hum Tumhare
Hain Sanam" are publicised as
blockbusters. However, this week is different
as HBO is bringing the biggest
Hollywood blockbuster of 2007, "Spiderman
3" to out living rooms this Friday
at 9 pm.
Mythical news!
Taking a cue from entertainment channels, news
channels are also turning mythological. As if the
frequent stories on Sai Baba were not enough, last
week Aaj Tak in its programme "Vishesh" (Special)
talked about Ravan's mummy and hinted on its
presence. As always there were no hard facts just
speculation. For pictures they had the good old
pictures of the late Arvind Trivedi fighting it out
with Arun Govil. Talking of speculation, Arushi
murder cases continues to be the hotbed of gossip
on the basis of so-called sources. Zee News declared
Rajesh Talwar and his wife were not present in
their house on the night of murder and India TV
showed an hour long question answer session between
Rajesh and CBI. A reconstruction caption
appeared at the corner of the screen. Now India TV
is a Hindi news channel. Should it not put the
reconstruction caption in Hindi?
ANUJ KUMAR
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