270. Web-series Reviews – 106

More web-series reviews…

Green Wing – Ran from 2004 to 2007. 2 season of 18 episodes. An offbeat comedy from the team behind 'Smack the Pony', set in a hospital, and is very much character-based, with storylines involving a staff liasion officer who hates people, a humourless consultant who thinks he's funny, and a handful of sexual predators and inadequates.

One of the reviews from IMDB...

Green Wing is, in my mind, one of a kind.

This show manages to successfully combine conventional elements of a drama/comedy (a compelling romance plot, likable characters, a seemingly grounded hospital setting) with wacky madcap slapstick, mind-bendingly surreal escapism and sketch comedy. Doing so is no mean feat.

Even after seeing the series multiple times, every time I watch the show I undergo the same process as a viewer. Initially I feel slightly weirded out by the unusual filming style (slow-mo and fast forwards are used an awful lot) and juxtaposition of comedy and occasional effective drama. It's so different from the standard TV fare even in 2019.

Then after a few episodes suddenly I once again feel totally at home with the style. By the end of the show I always feel a real final sense of sadness that there are no more episodes in this unique style and format with these great characters!

Perhaps my favourite aspect of the series is that despite it's insane surreal comedy and ridiculously over the top situations, it still manages to exactly nail the real feelings of social anxiety, social awkwardness, work stress and romantic failure that exist in real life. Somehow the show can be a completely mad melodramatic exaggeration of reality and yet still keep the bits of reality you most recognise and empathise with.

Caroline's house party is a notable example of this kind of blend; everyone's dressed oddly and behaving hilariously but at the same time the scene genuinely feels one hundred percent like every fun-but-sketchy-and-awkward house party I ever went to as a Uni student.

The cast is universally excellent, but my special shout out has to go to Mark Heap as Dr. Alan Statham. Heap has been a standout cast member in everything I've seen him in, from Jam to Spaced to Green Wing and the man possesses prodigious talent for both comedic acting and physical comedy.

I also really like Tamsin Greig as Caroline Todd, she brings a kooky humanity Todd that makes her a very compelling "everywoman" character. She's not as mad as everyone else (endearing her to the audience), but is still quirky enough to feel like one of the gang.

Perhaps my only disappointment with the show was the ending; personally, I feel like the series could have gone on a good deal longer and it's a shame it ended after only a couple of seasons. The latter half of Season 2 and the Special ending feels rushed in comparison to the rest of the series, as if the writers were simply told by the execs upstairs to make it a wrap.

Anyway, if you haven't seen it...see it!

My take – Absolutely Hilarious😊! I got hold of the DVD version that also had Alternate Ending, cast interviews, Deleted scenes (about 2.5 hours in total😊) and Goof-ups!  A must watch!

 

Anger Tales – Came out in 2023. A bald-headed young male, who suffers from low self-esteem, is constantly mocked. He is written off by people around him. Then there is a track involving a vegetarian family. A female character has been advised by the doctor to eat non-veg for health reasons. This is not to the liking of an orthodox male person. In the next track, a married couple has quarrels over the wife picking up arguments with an annoying woman in the neighborhood. In the final track, a rough youngster leads a cabal of movie fans, raising slogans and finally taking on another group of bullies.

One of the reviews from 123telugu.com...

OTT platform Disney Plus Hotstar has come up with an anthology series titled Anger Tales that features a notable cast. Directed by Prabhala Tilak, the show is currently available for streaming. Let’s see how it is.

Story :

Anger Tales is all about four characters who experience extreme anger due to the respective situations in their lives. The first story is about Ranga (Venkatesh Maha), a desperate fan of a star hero who is hell-bent on screening his favorite hero’s benefit show at 7 PM in a single screen. The second story is about a married woman Pooja Reddy (Madonna Sebastian), who is restricted by her vegan husband and mother-in-law from having food of her choice. The third story is about a housewife named Radha (Bindhu Madhavi), whose sleep gets disturbed by the constant loud chatter of her owner and the owner’s relatives. The final story is about a 32-year-old man Giridhar (Phani Acharya), who faces hardships both in his personal and professional life due to his bald head.

Plus Points :

The story featuring the recent sensation Venkatesh Maha has its soul in the right place. Every movie fanatic can relate to the character of Ranga played by Venkatesh Maha. It is known to all that fans go to any extent not to let their hero down, and the same has been shown convincingly. There is emotion, there is fun, and there is anger in this particular story. All these elements worked very nicely, and Venkatesh Maha and Suhas gave their best. Of late many incidents of damage to theatres while screening re-release movies were reported, and this aspect was also touched upon in this final story.

The story featuring Madonna and Tharun Bhascker has a simple and good message about one’s freedom regarding food choices. The same has been dealt in a decent manner. Madonna and Tharun Bhascker did well in their respective roles, and the story is kept short.

Performance-wise, Bindhu Madhavi, Phani Acharya, and Ravindra Vijay scored good marks in the other two stories. The background score was good and gave a nice feel to the proceedings. The idea of making an anthology series on the basic human emotion, anger is fine.

Minus Points :

The biggest drawback is the way things were concluded in the stories that featured Bindhu Madhavi and Phani Acharya. The stories aren’t that bad here, but it is the execution that actually hampered the whole impact. The story featuring Phani Acharya starts off well, and the characterization is nicely introduced. Though it is a bit similar to Bala (Hindi) movie, things begin on a decent note, but later the graph dips and the narrative moves in an inconsistent manner. This plot also ends in a silly manner. What exactly the makers wanted to convey through this story is unclear.

The next issue is with the narration in the story featuring Bindhu Madhavi. The point taken is okay, and it is understandable that one gets irritated heavily due to the nonstop loud chatter of others. But the story is dragged for no reason, and we are shown repetitive scenes throughout. This part hence is boring, and an even more disappointing thing is the climax of this tale which is ridiculous.

Had the above two stories been concluded in a neat manner, the series could have been a lot better. The show moves at a very slow pace for the most part, and the editing team could have chopped off many redundant scenes to eliminate the boredom.

Technical Aspects :

The music by Smaran Sai is good, and as mentioned earlier, it enhanced the impact of a few sequences. The cinematography is fine. The production values are fair. The dialogues in the first episode are neatly written, and the fun angle showcased here looks natural. The editing is below-par.

Coming to director Prabhala Tilak, he did just an okay job with the series. The narrative and emotions worked pretty well only in the first plot and to an extent in the second story. But the director’s work in the other stories is not so great, and these stories needed much caution regarding the presentation. The main point isn’t established properly in the last tale featuring Phani Acharya, whereas the narrative took the beating completely in the third episode.

Verdict :

On the whole, Anger Tales is an anthology show that works in parts. The show largely benefits from the performances of the lead cast and its first episode featuring Venkatesh Maha and Suhas. But the problem is the underwhelming presentation of other stories. Hence Anger Tales ends up being a strictly okay watch this weekend. Watch it with low expectations.

My Take – An ok watch!

 

Rocket Boys (Season 2) – Came out this week.  One of the reviews from NDTV…

Jim Sarbh and Ishwak Singh return as Dr Homi Bhabha and Dr Vikram Sarabhai respectively to take the serialised story of the life and times of the two legendary physicists forward. Sony LIV's Rocket Boys 2, assiduously crafted, solidly structured and unwaveringly focused on its principal subjects, has markedly more drama than its precursor. Its tone and tenor are, however, no less solemn and steadfast.

By virtue of its very nature, the wide-ranging biographical tale, which is as much about the two scientists and the epochal work that they did in independent India as about their newly-free nation looking for a footing in a fast-changing world, is selective in what it chooses to pinpoint and what it deigns to treat as mere footnotes. One might with good reason carp about this or that, but there can be no denying that the technical attributes of the show are first-rate.

Rocket Boys 2 employs recorded history - news footage presented in the old television aspect ratio (1.33: 1) - to create the context for a free dramatization of true events and policy decisions that shaped the nation's space and nuclear programmes under the leadership of Sarabhai and Bhabha and sparked long-term geopolitical ripples on the subcontinent.

The heroes of the show are always human, believably vulnerable to provocations and not impervious to moments of weakness. This isn't an all-boys show. Regina Cassandra as Mrinalini Sarabhai, embodying assertive womanhood at home and in the world, has a significant presence in the plot.

Parvana "Pipsy" Irani (Saba Azad), having moved out of Homi Bhabha's immediate orbit, has far less to do in Season 2 but, at an important juncture, the character serves as a reminder of what war means when it hits home.

Not all of the creative choices that Rocket Boys S2 makes are unblemished, but the Nikkhil Advani-created show is never short of being effective as a chronicle of a scientific establishment's collective resilience in the face of daunting odds and of individual genius and enterprise of men - and a woman, Indira Gandhi (played with steely gravitas by Charu Shankar) - carrying the hopes of a nation on their shoulders.

Produced by Siddharth Roy Kapur, Monisha Advani and Madhu Bhojwani and scripted and directed by Abhay Pannu, Rocket Boys S2 continues to focus on the two remarkable scientists who laid the foundation of India's space and nuclear programmes, occasionally opening out on its flanks to take in the political developments of the era and illustrate their ramifications.

In another key respect, the second season of Rocket Boys is no different from the first - it banks heavily on fiction to reimagine what might have gone on in and around the sphere of Bhabha and Sarabhai's activities as they went about their missions with single-minded dedication.

The depiction of the events leading up to the India's emergence as the world's sixth nuclear power lends dramatic power and suspense to the eight-episode series. The scientists scramble to achieve their goal as American surveillance, inclement weather conditions and technical glitches threaten to knock them off their path. As the crisis spirals and the narrative hurtles towards its climax, the show loses neither focus nor restraint.

The villains of Season 1 - forces within and outside India out to scuttle the nation's plans to develop the technology and weapons it needs - are given explicit play. Elements of an espionage thriller creep into the narrative - American spies and Indian traitors combine to throw a spanner in the works, generating tension and intrigue in a story that spends more time on studying the principal characters and their challenges, personal and professional.

While a young APJ Abdul Kalam (Arjun Radhakrishnan) is accorded a noteworthy degree of importance in the Bhabha and Sarabhai story, other scientists who played historically important roles in those crucial years are relegated to the sidelines, if not completely ignored.

The worst done by yet again is the character played by Dibyendu Bhattacharya, the misunderstood fictional scientist Mahdi Raza, who is thrown out into the cold for no fault of his own and denied a fair hearing. This is one true tragic figure in Rocket Boys that has the potential to drive home the fallout of rivalries pushed to absurd limits - a malaise that has plagued Indian science for decades.

Raza, however, remains a fringe entity, and his run-ins with the people who matter in the scientific establishment coming in handy only to lengthen the shadows. The fate that awaits the man is far worse than the one that nearly befell him in the previous outing.

Spotlighting the personal and the political more than the strictly scientific - Season 1 had struck a balance between the two - Rocket Boys probes the daunting odds that Bhabha and Sarabhai had to reckon with despite the unconditional support that they had from India's first Prime Minister Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru (Rajit Kapur).

Constant meddling by the CIA, internal acts of sabotage, lost battles, geopolitical pressures and the spectre of budget cuts stand in the way of the two scientists as they labour on in a fledgling, cash-strapped system grappling with the more pressing needs of a nation seeking to augment milk and grain production.

The two men do not budge from their belief that a newly-independent nation can secure its future only through progress made in the field of science, a position that is firmly supported by the political establishment until Nehru's demise.

The narrative spans from the 1960s to the mid-1970s, when India detonates its first atomic bomb, and banks upon dramatic events (mostly drawn from facts) and tragedies that deal massive blows to the nation's ambitions. The mission goes on because the spadework the pioneers did put strong mechanisms in place.

As Bhabha tells his lifelong friend Sarabhai in an epilogue, "a true leader prepares a nation for the day when he is not there." The reference is to Jawaharlal Nehru. But he could well have been speaking about himself and his fellow-physicist.

Rocket Boys, for all the blend of fact and fiction that its presents for the purpose of simplifying history, is essentially a tribute to the never-say-die approach of a generation of visionaries who set India on the path of progress, not just materially but also psychologically.

Rocket Boys 2 also touches upon a marriage under severe strain due to Sarabhai's long absences from home, on perfidy, guilt and forgiveness, on Mrinalini Sarabhai's assertion of her right to pursue her dreams as a classical dancer and on the succession war that erupted in the Indian National Congress in the aftermath of Nehru's passing. It covers a lot of ground with impressive control.

Jim Sarbh and Ishwak Singh deliver performances that are nuanced and potent. Regina Cassandra shines bright and steals many a scene. Charu Shankar, too, stands out although the bandwidth that she is called upon to capture is limited.

As for Rocket Boys Season 2 as a whole, as Sarabhai would have put it, the sky isn't the limit. It aims high and nearly gets there.

My take – Worthwhile watch! 

Cheers till next time😊!!