If you have watched that nearly 7 minutes long ‘trailer’ of his upcoming web series and the visuals of naked women and some of the dialogues focussed on female anatomy failed to titillate you enough to ignore sheer pedestrianism of his latest venture, you can only weep.
Coincidentally these visuals and probably dialogues have spurned many YouTube commenters to label this as “India’s Game Of Thrones”! And since many of our fellow country-people (see I am not saying ‘countrymen’, because gender-neutrality) believe that nudity and violence will make any thing GoT, is probably one of the reasons we will never ever have a series as captivating and as painstakingly crafted.
And the violence in the trailer is doesn’t even impact you like the violence in some of Varma’s movies. For that matter NOTHING in this trailer even seems to try to touch the bar his previous films have set. Or to be more precise, his films of last decade.
Yes, it was 2007 when his claim to infamy ‘Ram Gopal Varma ki Aag’ came. Before this he had hits and flops but even his failures were not due to lack of effort or mediocrity of his craft. The films that made us believe in him: starting with ‘Shiva’ and ‘Raat’, setting the pace with ‘Gaayam’ and ‘Rangeela’ and finally peaking with ‘Satya’ and ‘Company’. Even if you are not a cinema connoisseur or film buff, even if you have seen these movies just once there is a definite chance that you remember a character, a scene, a dialogue or one of the songs.
Now ask yourself how many of the 25 feature films he has made since 2007 you remember? Not all of these 25 films are worth forgetting. None of these 25 films can hold a candle to his better work.
If this trailer is anything to go by, this series is going to be worse than his worst film.
Where do I begin? The trailer which is laden with so many quotes that I both lost the count and the interest in reading these (seemingly made-up) quotes, starts with voice over of what seems like an old woman confiding to the viewers, the history of gangster-ridden years of Mumbai.
The narration tries too hard to make you sympathetic to the plight of the woman whose face we are shown once in a fleeting visual. However the narration (or is this internal monologue?) is so lame I could hardly care. And once the narration ends and story takes over, all hell breaks loose. One character speaks the same sentence which you have earlier heard during narration. I kid you not. And both the times this seemingly ‘hard-hitting’ statement falls flat on its face. The acting is uniformly terrible. A girl is made to sit in nude and talk to his boyfriend (who is fully clothed btw!) There are some close shots of women’s legs (‘Not A Love Story’ anyone?) and some amazingly terrible dialogues involving human anatomy because that is how the dialogue writers thought the gangsters speak.
This is Ram Gopal Varma we are talking about. The man who made Antara Mali, J D Chakravarti and Vivek Oberoi perform brilliantly on screen. The man who has given us quality acts from the likes of Amitabh Bachchan, Aamir Khan, Ajay Devgan, Manoj Vajpayee, Urmila Matondkar and several others. Now picture him dishing this drivel.
At the very beginning of the trailer Varma says that since for various reasons he could not show ‘the full story of Mumbai Mafia in its raw and real form’ in films, he is going to do it here. It is amply clear that the man is scraping the bottom of the barrels of his once-legendary craftsmanship. ‘Satya’ and ‘Company’ are classics and he is besmirching that legacy with cheap, lazy and titillating cinema.
As I said, if you admired his work then, now you can just weep.
(If you are tempted to watch the trailer to see naked woman, heed my advice and watch some porn instead. If you want to watch the trailer just to see how bad it is, please don’t watch it and save 7 minutes of your life. You will thank me!)
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