I was watching (yes, guilty pleasure) Dil Hai Ke Manta Nahi a few days ago, courtesy the cable TV operator who removed all Indian channels as soon as Ramadan started, leaving us to watch the films of his choice. (That includes Hum Aapke Hain Kaun and other 90s drivel).
Now while Dil Hai Ke Manta Nahi isn’t an original film, I actually do enjoy watching it. In the ’90s, Tiku Talsania was one of my favourite comic actors, who also played the desperate-to-inaugurate-a-jail inspector in the best Indian film ever made, Andaz Apna Apna. His portrayal of a hassled editor is hilarious and Aamir’s desperation to sell him a story for 10,000 rupees is quite a moment.
It left me thinking – (no I don’t spend my time thinking about the film but the cable TV guy reran it thrice and frankly, there’s not much to do these days) – about recent films that have showcased journalists and journalism. Bad, good, pathetic, whatever – they’re all in the mix.
Madhur Bhandarkar’s Page 3 was a fairly decent attempt to showcase the life of a journalist writing about the social scene. Konkona Sen Sharma stars as the Page 3 writer who doesn’t take the scene too seriously until she discovers that behind the glitz lurks a child-abuse scandal. Her attempt to report on the scandal gets shot down by the editor (Boman Irani) but she turns her hand to crime reporting (aided by the underrated Atul Kulkarni, whose film Satta with Raveena Tandon is a must-watch) and that’s the end of her days reporting on the high flyers.
And then there was Nayak, starring Anil Kapoor and the late Amrish Puri. Kapoor plays a TV talk show host who gets challenged by the Chief Minister to run the state instead of harping on as a host. That one day is brilliant (Kapoor manages to deal with almost every civic problem known to mankind) and a friend of mine thinks its probably the film that inspired Punjab CM Shahbaz Sharif’s second run in office. With the amount of criticism talk show hosts in Pakistan dish out, the day they get challenged to just stop whining and take charge of affairs isn’t too far away.
Mission Istaanbul, which undoubtedly was one of the worst films to have been released in 2008, showcases a television channel who has become famous for their links to the Taliban in Afghanistan and their popularity, fuelled by their release of videos by terrorists. The channel then turns out to be an operation that merely produces these videos to keep their ratings up. On paper, it may have been a somewhat plausible story, but the bad acting, unbelievably bad script and the loopholes in the story made it a viewer’s nightmare. Not even worth the pirated CD.
In Guru, Mithun Chakraborty plays a newspaper editor who makes it his mission to cut Abhishek Bachchan down to size. R. Madhavan plays a reporter who makes it his mission to reveal Bachchan’s underhanded tactics.
Apparently there’s a film on NDTV journalist Barkha Dutt in the works, and I’m sure there are a considerable number of films I’ve missed out. Anyone who watches Bollywood films obsessively, please fill in the gaps by commenting.
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