Tag: TV Series

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Netflix OTT TV

Decoupled (Netflix, 2021)

What if you could really say what you think? As opposed to what if you could really say what you feel?

I avoided the word feel, because Arya Iyer in the new Netflix relationship series Decoupled doesn’t seem to care much about feelings.

He is an observer and a thinker and by virtue of being the second best selling Indian English author in the country (huh), he is able to achieve this special status.

In India, it must really be normal to say what you think, after all it is guaranteed in the Constitution, but as an earlier Manu Joseph (the same who created Decoupled) column would go on to say:  freedom of expression is always subordinate to someone’s freedom to take offense.

Netflix marketed Decoupled as a divorce comedy that looks at marriage in urban elite India, which it is, but it is also mostly not.

Arya Iyer, a stand-in for Manu uses Decoupled as a platform for social commentary. All evidence points that way that, starting from the Dravid vs Tendulkar argument, the constant state of being riled at Indian bullshit jobs, the users of certain words and the general dissing of economists and art films. It’s all from his columns.

In modern marketing (an upmarket term that marketers use to prevent themselves from being identified as digital marketers), seniors would often throw around the term ‘content repurposing’ which is shorthand for ‘we don’t have any new ideas.

There you learned something which you can use in your next marketing meeting. See here, I’m being meta about my day job while using a film blog as a platform to spell out my irritations. Decoupled does the same.

The observations from Manu’s mint column which are visualized, some of them prescient like an offhand comment on how like Israel everyone in India should have 2 years military training and many hilarious like literal Greta Thunberg costumes, Gurgaon working women’s book club and the concept of live-art.

But what’s the point?

People (mostly men) have a lot of irritations, but mouthing them would land us in trouble, increasingly so when each word has to be measured in the fear of offending anyone. So much so that it is often portrayed that expressing such observations (however superficial) is somehow insensitive to others.

The threat of being offended looms large and most opinions are not expressed. Be civil, agree to your mainstream, smile when you have to, salute when you have to, give for the causes everyone gives to etc. In a sense it is the freedom of collective expression that prevails over the freedom of expression.

While the better thing to do would have been to air the opinions however stupid or profound and be done with it. It’s an opinion for God’s sake, it can change and it should offend.

Arya Iyer is a creation of an irritated mind, he cannot exist in reality, he cannot exist in the sectors of Gurgaon or in any Indian gaon; but Manu goes beyond just creating an irritating character but allows him to pursue his irritation into actions of small pleasure; it is as though in this universe: the irritated must irritate, the annoyed must annoy back and therein lies the sweetness of small-time revenge.

And Madhavan is a revelation as Arya Iyer, offending everyone, he is self-assurance personified and when he does say these observations (The Indian way of having one gate closed- haha), it does come off as a person who wishes to be seen as smart.

Punching in all directions

There is an unwritten rule that farmers and poor people should not be made fun and the joke should always be on the rich and the famous. Decoupled boxes with this rule in some episodes. When the driver Ganesh tells Arya that the smell on his body is actually the smell of the land (the sweat from agriculture), in a usual film or series this would be an inspiring-emotional moment but here it is played for laughs.

I wish this season had gone into establishing that rich or poor, we all come with our quirks, malice and goodness and true representation is showing them as they are and not feigning respect or sympathy for sakes. Ganesh does get the best lines in the series after Arya, maybe a tad bit too late.

Decoupled also does not give me enough of Shruti, played by Surveen Chawla who displays a keen understanding for the character but has very little to do, again until the very end. The writing also becomes lite when the series tries to be an Indian version of Seinfeld (Arya and his friends pitch something like a show about nothing to Netflix) and suddenly the gravity of the lead characters decoupling takes over episode 7 and 8.

The series is important to me also because after a long time felt watching a show which did not try and appeal to everyone for the sake of distribution. The creation of the niche shows was what was promised in OTT land but even the good ones took the broad-based Bollywood approach to storytelling.

Decoupled is specific in its targeting and interesting in its premise, funny in its happenings and is a very easy watch.

All episodes now streaming on Netflix.

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TV

Just Watching Justified : Fire in the Hole (S01E01)

I have never read an Elmore Leonard, completely. 

Get Shorty , 21% on the kindle. Yet to watch the movie. 

Rum punch, same. 

Up in Honey’s Room, started this year, did not finish.

Of course I watched Out of Sight and 3:10 to Yuma. 

I also read those ten rules he framed for writers, which included the most famous “try to leave out all the parts readers tend to skip.” 

Sane advice, something I’m sure he must have followed. Although I cannot be completely sure because I have never read a Leonard novel. 

But for some reason I could never read a Leonard novel, 99% of that is only because of my motivation and it’s a shame. 

It’s a shame because I cannot accept that 100% is because of my lack of focus. 

But I’ll get there, because writing is all about honesty. Get honesty out of the way so that we can start telling stories.

While this lack of motivation and focus posed a serious threat to my reading abilities, another elitist mentality seemed to be creating flaming problems on the other side of the spectrum. 

When confronted with a media recommendation, namely a TV series or movie, I would brush it away with five fat fingers and with a smug look say, “ gotta read them books first” 

It’s the reason why I haven’t seen Game of Thrones, Sacred Games, you-name-it-the-trending-tv-series-of-the-time etc and for years I have felt some small pride in saying this.

Honestly, if I ever in my life say to you, “gotta read them books first”- I give you full permission to say, “stop lying you lying **** piece of ****”

Well, that’s true, I never got around to reading them, I never got around to seeing the TV series flavour of the day, It didn’t help my culture seeking mind and I was all the poorer for it. 

But from sometime last year, Leonard was in my collective consciousness, and he also added to my collective shame. Ah yes, the same shame that prevented from accepting my lack of reading skills. 

And that made me pick up, Up in Honey’s Room, and as you know, drop it, even when I found it engaging. 

To think of it, there needs to be no shame in not having read any author, but personally it’s best to read the masters before I call myself a fan of the crime fiction genre on my “about me” page. 

That’s the cause of the shame. 

And again today, the conscience was active like a schoolboy on the first day after holidays. First it was a ‘trailer from hell’ of 52-Pickup (another Leonard novel, I have never read)

Audience to me: Lying ****, you’ve already said you have not read any Leonard novel, why do you keep doing this? 

Okay, so it was the trailer to 52-Pickup, which interestingly enough, the screenplay was written by Leonard, complex from what the trailer narration suggested. 

The trailer narrator also suggested this TV series called “Justified”.

That rang a bell somewhere in the deep recesses of my brain, it was not very clear because the deep recesses of my brain were shrouded by shame. 

It took me back to the old days when torrenting was an exploration sport and we were all adventurers.

Someone said, “hey boy, why don’t you check out Justified, it’s the perfect mix for you, crime+western and good dialogue, based on the books of Elmore Leonard” 

Me, with five fingers moving to the side, “gotta read them books first” and finish with a winning smug smile. 

Someone said “ugh” and walked away.

10 years later. 

Someone is now a dean on crime writing and appearing on podcast special episodes discussing the chemistry between Clooney and Lopez in Out of Sight.

While me, sitting at home saying, “gotta read them books” 

Damn that felt cathartic. 

Cut to now, while I finished watching the trailer and immediately checked out Sony Liv (which is where the real gold is while I sell my organs to subscribe to Netflix) and lo and behold, it’s there.

Sitting right there, all six seasons. All six seasons of the series that New York Post called “a true male fantasy show complete with broads, bad guys, blow-ups, bullets and buckets of blood.” 

The one that the retro trailer voice over guy called the greatest thing to have happened to TV recently and this series came out in 2010. 

I could watch it or I could come back after ‘gotta read them books’. My brain tik-toked away, but I finally gave in to ‘broads, bad guys, blow-ups, bullets and buckets of blood.’

More B words in a sentence have not been found in the universe.

Hence this series, ‘Just Watching Justified’ or the story of me giving up my useless reasons for not watching stuff and actually watching them and…writing about them. 

So to make up for lost time and to beat this ‘Someone’ in life, I thought I’ll go one step ahead and start writing about them. 

Every one of the 78 episodes.So dive right in. 

These are not reviews, but these are recollections of the experiences that I undergo while seeing the series , so it won’t be could-have would-have film writing nor will it be a series of words that start with B and appreciate the show. 

It’s just a cool, casual collection of contemplations. 

Episode 1: Fire in the hole. 

We open with the close follow of the capped crusader (Timothy Olyphant in a ‘Timothy Olyphant is Raylan’ kind of role), our hero, Raylan Givens, it’s a rooftop pool restaurant, sunny and fun, the kind that does not exist in Chennai. Naturally I was interested. But this was Miami. 

Raylan goes to a waiting man at a corner table. 

“I give you two minutes” he says like Bhavani in Master and so it begins. 

These nervy two minutes are the perfect setup for the show and for the character, he is within the law, but willing to go beyond it and has the brains to make these things look lawful. But Raylan surely knows how to shoot in sequence. 

‘He pulled first. I shot him.’

The words that would put US Marshal Raylan from the streets of Miami back to Harlan County, his hometown. 

Yes, another sheriff coming back to town story.

Obviously, there is no look of happiness on Raylan’s face, he wanted to get away from this place all his life and within minutes of his arrival, he is handed a fat file of one Mr. Boyd (an amazing Walton Goggins) who is the local heel in western parlance but is actually an arsonist, gun crazed drug dealer, bank robbing tax evader and whose views on the Bible will get your eyes rolling. 

Oh also he leads the local Nazi tattooed white supremacist group and they go around town blowing churches. 

Oh also he is Raylan’s childhood buddy. 

Talk about set-up. Maybe that’s why they love you Leonard, maybe that’s why, I am definitely reading you more. 

(Stay tuned for a book exploration series called the Learning to write with Leonard, coming soon, hopefully)

Someone: Liar, don’t give unwanted hope you lying ****

Me: okay, okay

But Boyd has hots for his recently widowed sister-in-law,Ava, who has had a crush on Raylan since the time they were in school.

Talk about set-up.

There are lots of other characters, namely the passive aggressive local chief, Raylan’s ex-wife and an absentee father who remains an absentee but gets multiple mentions. 

Coming back to learning to identify good writing, two men sitting at a table with guns is the running theme but it’s different yet overlapping. 

Not spoiling anything, but Raylan is a bit quicker and there are 77 more to go! 

Remember to tune back in, because we are just watching justified.

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TV

Mondays with Mason: Chapter Six

And we are back. 

We mean from the sort of disappointment that episode five was, but this episode does not leave behind the sudden pick up of pace in the story telling. While we have stated that it could be because maybe the writers room just realized that there are not many episodes to go. 

Here we are with Perry Mason, finally taking center stage in a show that bears his name, if you would recall the last bits of chapter five where we see him get his license to law. Six begins directly at the courthouse and it promises to be a cracker. Except for our hero it is his first outing and all he outs are coughs and even the cameramen’s flash falls like lightning bolt.

It’s heartening to see the show come back to its root themes of how really tough it is to go against the system and how even justice is not about plain facts but about opinions, sentiment and circumstance. While Mason is trying his best to build up a face saving defense, he is also stuck with a client (Gayle Rankin is absolutely the best actress on the show) whose inability to be honest costs them a lot with the jury. 

The episode’s best moment comes when Perry gets to go against Matthew Dodson, now siding with the state, it makes a larger statement as to how society views differently the vices of men and women. But again, the case proceeds only around conjecture and that’s only because those who know the truth are too afraid to do so. And evidence…well that was sort of Perry’s trump card becomes futile. 

They only have two more episodes to go and what began as a single thread has now distributed into multiple strands and while old threads continue to provide more clues to Pete Strickland while he goes on a quest to connect the three brutal murders from episodes past. We of course know who did it, come on catch up soon, Mason & associates!

The scene of a frustrated Mason and his team reminded us of a similar scene from A Few Good Men. Keep at it guys, the truth presents itself to those who dig. 

It’s our job to do the recap right, so we tell you what are the questions that are still not close to being answered, 

A> We still don’t know who killed Baby Charlie and why

B> We don’t know what the Radiant Assembly of God is protecting

C> We don’t know for whom Innes is working for, but another dimension of his relationship with partner Holcomb came through

D> We don’t know if Sister Alice is doing the whole resurrection to divert the case away from its real interests

But what we do know is that Perry Mason will ultimately solve it for us. 

Categories
TV

Rasbhari (2020)

As The Swivel Chair Spins #10

Yes, blame it on the virus. 

We should have gotten the warning when there was narration from the protagonist, but we went along. 

Amazon Prime’s latest series is a Meerut-set tale of teenage troubles and libidinous louts, it is one thing to generalize based on stereotypes, but it is completely another thing to reduce the entire city of Meerut into this this village of villains who are waiting for any woman (other than their wives) to appear. 

We start with the city because the narration too begins with the city, Meerut, just like every other small town in India, the voice says, now the scope of generalisation has been extended from one small town to all small towns in India. 

Ok, playing along, let’s just say we bought this narrative. Umm let’s say it’s a bit like magical realism where the entire town goes blind(!), or let’s just say it is like all the old men from the village who come to look at the teacher in Mundhanai Mudichu. 

There’s a teacher here too, an English teacher, played by Swara Bhaskar. Teachers in Indian film join the list of maligned professions owing to the inability of our makers to put pen or pencil to paper and think about writing actual characters. Teachers are either the strict and morally upright ones who teach students a thing or two or it is the generously minded and controversially dressed lady teachers who too teach students a thing or two (umm).

Swara Bhasker plays the second type, her appearance in the class creates a flutter among high school kids and her appearance in town, as discussed above, makes the men of Meerut into wolves with tongues wagging. While all this is played for comedy, we couldn’t sit and not wonder, what item of interest would follow in the rest of the seven episodes. 

Let’s try and keep it short, just because a web series is eight episodes long doesn’t mean our write-up should be too, in the remainder of the seven episodes what was truly lacking is the contrast. Not in terms of colors in the cinematography but in the colors of the characters. 

Humor and its popular uncontrollable cousin, comedy, comes from opposites, like to use an often seen example of a really large man being afraid; so if two sides to the same character do not contain these extremes then there is very little to play around with.

While the central character of Shanu Ma’am, if we could use the phrase,leaves a lot to be desired, then the series kinda makes up with the surrounding characters of Nand, Priyanka and we wanted more about them. While none of them get any close to arc, how Nand (Ayushman Saxena) and Priyanka (Rashmi Agdekar) move from awkwardness to mutual respect is one of the best transitions we have seen in sometime. The actors too are comfortable and maybe waiting for the story to turn their way. 

But alas Rasbhari, wants us to be interested in english teacher Shanu Ma’am and her sex obessed alter ego courtesan. Which is where it gets really confusing- the point where the teacher student fantasy ends and the social commentary begins. Maybe we should just applaud the makers intention to “excite” as well as “educate” us. The fantasy too doesn’t go the whole way for it to be classified as bold, but is definitely pictured in a way to be called as vague. 

If it is this type of fantasy that you are looking for over the weekend, maybe Amazon Prime Video is not the right site. 

Nevermind. 

Rasbhari in its entirety is streaming on Amazon Prime Video

Categories
TV

The Medavaukian watches the Mandalorian : Chapter 1

Chapter 1: The Mandalorian

In a galaxy far far away, where everyone wants to talk, where everyone wants their opinion valued (but not corrected); there is a lot of comfort in a protagonist who doesn’t talk much. 

Maybe it is the expanse, the vast nothingness that makes them wordless; or it is the knowledge of having seen more than others make them shut up. Maybe it’s just the helmet- a great way to cut off the world while walking through it. The helmet also shields them from me making immediate impressions on their morals. 

Them being the space bounty hunters, those who trace their lineage from the Duke by way of Eastwood (who had hats and not helmets) ,now who hop-on and hop-off planets with only their mission under the helmets.

I meet Mandalorian in the middle of a mission. With wind pipes and the gentle guitar strumming giving him company in his quest. 

Someone needs to be caught and no one can come in between the Mandalorian and his quarry. 

While watching the first episode, my mind wandered about how I could put this whole thing in a sentence, something that could get me to watch- this is purely an imagined thought, because ever since the Mandalorian was announced I dreamed of watching it. Somewhere maybe even a western theme played within my head. 

I came up with “ a western TV series set in the Star Wars universe”- pretty lame right but then I quickly changed it into “ a Star Wars western starring Werner Herzog”. Now that would make sure that I sit through the entire series. 

Old Herzie’s turn as the villain in Jack Reacher is one of the most chilling performances in recent times and my top voice choice for any ebook narration. Actually, there is a lot more than Herzog to make me sit through. First- it looks amazing, unbelievable worlds made believable- (the pilot was shot by Grieg Fraser who did amazing work on Rogue One and won an Academy Award the same year)  so even if there are potential shortcomings in story, it would make it up in wallpaper material. 

They have kept it simple, just know the Mandalorian’s mission- yet keeping enough mystery to sustain interest. Maybe not knowing more about the main character would add to the charm of it all. 

Let’s see how this goes. TV series writing is something new. Let’s see how this goes too. 

Wait! Is that a Lawrence of Arabia nod?

Hmm. Interesting.