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Just click for reviews

Get a taste of films on the Internet before you decide to watch them



WIDELY APPRECIATED Chak De India”

“At the centre of Unnale Unnale lies a fundamental problem. There is no story,” writes a film buff on his blog. “ …Movies like this do the worst damage when it comes to reinforcing gender stereotypes….does ‘candyfloss entertainer’ mean a ‘hare-brained film’?” he asks.

These are the new age film lovers. They are a demanding lot. Style and substance matter to them. Access to an incredible amount of information on the Internet has helped them acquire a new taste for films. And, it is the meaty content that is getting the thumbs up.

“What the Internet has done is that it has made specialised knowledge, that once only film critics had, open to all. I don’t have to remember every movie of John Wayne anymore. It’s available to me at IMDB.com,” says Nandhu, a film buff. Be it world or regional cinema, information about movies, their background, history and directors helps people appreciate them better. There are several discussion groups available online on cinema. One of them is http://movies.groups.yahoo.com/group/a_film_by/. This website’s primary focus is films as art, from an auteurist perspective.

Forums such as http://groups.google.com/group/rec.arts.movies.past-films/topics and http://groups.google.com

/group/rec.arts.movies.

current-films?lnk=sg give film lovers an opportunity to participate in discussions, polls and debates.

Lovers of good cinema of the late 1970s, including French new wave and masters such as Ingmar Bergman and Akira Kurosawa, say that till recently it was not easy to get access to adequate reading material and classic films. Today, the Internet has opened up innumerable possibilities. Access to rare film scripts is made easy now. For students and film connoisseurs, websites such http://www.dailyscript.com/movie.html, and http://www.weeklyscript.com/ allow them access to rare film scripts, arranged in alphabetical order.

Film lovers say people rely more on the Web for cinema based news and reviews. The news is fast and there are no geographic boundaries. So, a person wanting to read about Sivaji in Kerala can read about it at the same time as someone in Chennai. With web-based reviews, the final opinion does not belong to any one reviewer. People have a collection of websites or discussion groups that offer reviews that help them decide whether they should watch a particular movie or not.

“The Internet has great potential to instil a taste for good, serious cinema in the masses, who are otherwise stuck with usually escapist fare,” they say.

K. JESHI

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