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Just click for film reviews
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Get a taste of films on the Internet before you decide to watch them
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STYLE AND SUBSTANCE Many Net surfers 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.
Elsewhere a reviewer on another popular film site www.mouthshut.com writes “The plot of ‘Unnale’ is predictable….lots of scenes are lifted from movies such as ‘Hum Tum’ (which is lifted from ‘When Harry met Sally’) and ‘Dil Chahta Hai.’
Shimit Amin’s ‘Chak De India,’ raises this comment: “The patriotism dose is just about right….a brilliant effort.”
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.
Specialised knowledge
“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. Today, the film buff can read a review of almost any foreign film worth watching on the Net. Also, one’s taste for films is influenced by the Internet.
But, it is still a long way before the Net becomes a one-stop destination for Indian films that reviews both Bollywood and regional movies.
But one has to be discerning. 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. “Thanks to the Internet I was introduced to legendary European film makers such as Jacques Tati, Bela Tarr, Chris Marker and Manoel de Oliveira,” says S. Anand, a film lover.
For film societies, the Internet is the one stop shop for building their database. Be it ‘Battle of Algiers’ (French), ‘Road Home’ (Korean), or ‘Born into Brothels’ (a documentary), they source the information from the Net.
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.
K. JESHI
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Metro Plus
Bangalore
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