Saturday, April 30, 2011

Indian film gains international distributor

TVF International has taken the worldwide distribution rights of Shrenik Rao’s 54-minute documentary Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, a path-breaking film on Robert Mugabe’s rule in Zimbabwe. The film has been featured as a hot pick of the year in the Factual Entertainment Section of the Cannes Film Festival.

Mugabe’s Zimbabwe narrates a terrifying story, plotting Robert Mugabe’s three decades of bloodshed, terror and corruption and documents and how he turned hope into desolation. The documentary, made in English, will now be adapted in various languages across the world and be featured on multiple media platforms.

The film is thoroughly researched, with unprecedented access to Zimbabwe’s deputy prime minister, vice presidents, governor of Reserve Bank, former Archbishop of Bulawayo and UK’s former secretary of state for international development etc. Commenting on taking up the film for worldwide distribution, TVF International Director Leila Monks said, "TVF International is really pleased to be working with Dolsun Media distributing their film Mugabe's Zimbabwe."

Shot on location in Zimbabwe, England, Scotland and India, the film is an enquiry into how Zimbabwe collapsed dramatically after it gained independence 30 years ago.

Wednesday, April 13, 2011

More meta than ever in Scream 4 which is almost as much as fun

Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox and Ghostface are back in a dizzyingly self-aware fourth entry to the horror franchise

Wes Craven totally gave at the office, when it comes to reinventing the horror genre. He's done it three times -- with the drive-in classics "The Hills Have Eyes" and "Last House on the Left" in the '70s, with the original "Nightmare on Elm Street" franchise in the '80s (and wasn't he smart to avoid the abysmal 2010 reboot?) and with the "Scream" trilogy in the '90s. Asking him to do it all over again, at age 71, in a movie that's a sequel to a sequel to a sequel and that's an exercise in not just postmodern nostalgia but nostalgia for postmodernism, well, that's just asking too much. I mean, isn't it?

The fact that Craven almost pulls it off in "Scream 4," a movie that's somewhat entertaining, occasionally scary and only sporadically migraine-inducing in its level of Jesuitical, self-referential cleverness is -- OK, no, not miraculous. That's a cliché. It's almost really cool, without quite being really cool. If you viewed the laffs and thrills of the original "Scream" series through a delighted scrim of adolescent self-awareness, then "Scream 4" will probably provide an enjoyable return visit to Woodsboro High, whose student body metastatically feeds on horror movies (thereby justifying all the clueless culture-trolls' concerns about their pernicious effects).

If, like me, you were not merely old enough to shave during the first round of "Scream" but old enough to date divorced people, then "Scream 4" is pretty much a minor diversion. Thing is, you can't push postmodern horror any further than Craven has pushed it already; the characters in "Scream 2" and "Scream 3" were as conscious of horror-movie conventions (and their reverses, twists and turns) as you can get, and Craven's 1994 "New Nightmare" capped the Freddy series triumphantly by melting the boundaries between fiction and reality and having Craven, Robert Englund, Heather Langenkamp, studio head Bob Shaye appear as "themselves."

Sunday, April 3, 2011

Afridi – the diehard fan of Shah Rukh Khan

While the Indian team was playing against the Pakistan team on Wednesday at the World Cup semi – final, Pak captain Shahid Afridi's younger brother Javed Afridi was commentating live on a radio station in India.

As the two teams battled to reach the finals, Javed revealed some lesser known facts about brother Shahid. He said, "Shahid is a huge fan of Shah Rukh Khan. He never misses out on his films and has seen My Name Is Khan at least a dozen times."

Javed also revealed that Shahid's mood dropped when he learnt that SRK won't be making it to the stadium in Mohali. "Shahid was upset that he missed a chance of meeting SRK. They have met a couple of times before though and he becomes like a star-struck kid every time."

The two hot Pathans - Shahid Afridi and Shah Rukh have interacted at an event in Mumbai back in 2009. Back then, SRK had said, "No matter how big a star I become, all the girls keep telling me 'You are not like Shahid Afridi'."