110. Web-series reviews – 4

These days I am a watching a lot of Spanish movies and web-series😊.  Badla, the one starring Amitabh and Taapsee, was also a screen-to-screen copy of a Spanish movie.  I have written about this earlier in one of my blogs.  In a future blog, I will share the other Spanish movies that I have seen and recommend that you also see it😊.  I have seen about 4-5 and there are around 4-5 more that I am yet to see.  All with original stories with lots of twist in the tale!!

Money Heist – A Spanish web-series.  This was also recommended to me by my cousin sister.  She said that she did not like it but my brother-in-law watched it diligently!!  It is available on Netflix.  So far, 3 seasons have been released.  The first 2 seasons are one story and the next 2 seasons takes the story forward with, you guessed it, another heist😊.  A totally riveting series that is a definite must-watch!!  I saw the first two seasons with English dubbing.  The third season in Spanish with English subtitles.  The 4^th season is being released in April 2020. The synopsis, although a lengthy one, is as below.

Money Heist (La casa de papel, translated as The House of Paper) is a Spanish television heist crime drama series.  The first two parts revolve around a long-prepared, multi-day assault on the Royal Mint of Spain in Madrid, in which a group of robbers take hostages as part of their plan to print and escape with €2.4 billion. It involves eight robbers, code-named after cities and led by the Professor from an external location. The story is primarily focused on one of the robbers, Tokyo, as they battle with hostages on the inside and the police on the outside. In the third part, the surviving robbers are forced out of hiding, and with the help of new members, they plan and perform an assault on the Bank of Spain,

The narrative is told in a real-time-like fashion and relies on flashbacks, time-jumps, hidden character motivations and an unreliable narrator for complexity. The series subverts the heist genre by being told from the perspective of a woman (Tokyo) and having a strong Spanidar identity, where emotional dynamics offset the perfect strategic crime.

Ghost Stories – This is not a web series, but a movie which has 4 different stories directed by 4 different directors, namely Zoya Akhtar, Anurag Kashyap, Dibakar Banerjee and Karan Johar.  As the name suggests, all of them deal with ghosts.  Unfortunately, none of them will give you the creeps that any decent horror flick should give😊.    The synopsis goes like this…

A young, attractive nurse (Janhvi Kapoor) walks into a once-well-appointed-now-neglected flat, to take care of a bed-ridden old woman (Surekha Sikri). The former is needy, clutching at a reluctant lover (Vijay Varma); the latter, a stunner in her time, looks as if she scythed through men back in the day. Now it’s night. Time for things to go bump.

Dolls are scary, especially when they sit in a row, and stare back at you with their beady eyes. A pregnant young woman (Sobhita Dhulipala), going up and down a steep set of stairs, a possessive little boy, and the harsh cowing of crows. The colours are leached out, the mother-to-be is constantly wary, all is ominous: what is going to happen?

A young man (Sukant Goel) gets off at a railhead and walks towards a village where he’s meant to join work. But things go south rapidly, as he runs into a boy and girl (Aditya Shetty and Eva Ameet Pardeshi) cowering in a corner, scared out of their wits. The desolate village feels like a place that time’s forgotten, and, wait a minute, who are those zombie-like figures clomping about outside, snarling and drooling?

A pretty young thing (Mrunal Thakur) agrees to have an ‘arranged marriage’ with a handsome, wealthy fellow (Avinash Tiwary) who lives in a house his granny built. She soon discovers that all is not as it seems in the stately mansion she comes to as a bride: the housekeeper glowers, the in-laws are strangely blank, and the spouse likes playing peekaboo. Ooh.

If you are a fan of the directors, you can watch it one time.  By the way Karan Johar, after the feedback came for his segment, has said that he will never make another ghost movie again, in his lifetime!!

Today’s Daffy Definition

Neighbour – One who knows more about your affairs than you do!!