TV movies

I watched Mississippi Burning last night. I hadn't realised it was on but, hopping through the channels, suddenly there were Willem Dafoe and Gene Hackman waging war with racists in 1960s America. So I watched the film through again.

It can be a gamble watching films on TV in India. Power cuts, censorship, and incessant advertising can all contribute to ruining an evening's viewing. I got away with it last night but I was lucky. It normally doesn't flow so smoothly.

Take, as an example, the film that was showing the other day - Premonition I think it was. It wasn't a particularly great film but we'd watched it long enough to be engrossed. Just at the point where Sandra Bullock - who has the ability to see into the future and spends most of the film jumping between her present reality and future reality- was rushing out of the house to save her husband from messily killing himself, we had a power cut. There was only about ten minutes left of the film, but the outage lasted for fifteen minutes and so we missed the end. I'm assuming that Sandra Bullock did save her husband but it would have been nice to see how she did it. We contemplated buying the DVD but as I said to Shilpi, the film will probably be repeated several dozen times over the next few weeks so we can tune in again and hopefully catch the end of it - current permitting of course.

Some channels also seem to show more adverts than others. The Pogo channel can be a nightmare and it is not at all unusual to have five minutes of film followed by five minutes of ads. That's not an exaggeration because I timed the sequences on one occasion. If you can believe this, those five minute Tom and Jerry cartoons are sometimes broken with ads. Tom's just about to have an iron rammed into his face or all his teeth knocked out by a golf ball and suddenly you're looking at a grinning Bollywood actor trying to sell you cable, or coke, or chocolate.

And if the power cuts and the ads don't get you, the censorship might. No nudity (full or partial) and no swearing (unless it's a word like WANKER which the Indian censors don't seem to have picked up on and so let go. It actually amuses me to think that somebody in an airless room in Mumbai took the trouble to edit a Guy Ritchie character's dialogue so that he ended up miming to the word "F***ing" but was allowed to say the word that immediately followed it: "wanker". Swearing aside, risque scenes are also cut. Thus in the classic When Harry Met Sally scene, when Sally is in a crowded cafe simulating an orgasm for Harry's benefit, the Indian made-for-TV version takes you from Sally starting with a slight moan to a none too subtle leap forward to the elderly lady on a neighbouring table calling the waiter over and -as she points towards Meg Ryan - saying, "I'll have whatever she's just had."

Taking all the above into consideration therefore, you can imagine how surprised I was a couple of nights ago to switch on the TV and, hopping through the channels, find Ben Kingsley and Penelope Cruz starring opposite each other in - what I learn today - is a film called Elegy. I have favourite actors and Ben Kingsley is one of those. Just as you would normally expect a Sandra Bullock film to be average/mediocre, so you'd expect a Ben Kingsley film to be good+. And it was. Again, we came to it half way through but I sat there pretty much hooked and noticed also that there appeared to be no censorship (what minimal swearing there was had not been edited) and - marvel of marvels - no adverts. I was just thinking that it couldn't get much better when Penelope Cruz, reunited with her old lover (Sir Ben), but by now suffering from breast cancer, sat down in front of him and took her top off. No censorship, not a blurred image in sight, just Penelope Cruz's chest and Ben Kingsley taking her photograph. Marvellous. I almost choked.

And that was as far as I got. I think I probably walked out of the room to attend to Niharika and when I came back, Shilpi had switched channels (probably in protest against Ms Cruz's lascivious behaviour). And you know, I just could not find that wretched channel afterwards. I think I surfed up and down the eighty-odd channels a couple of times after that but there was no Ben and no Penelope to be seen. If Shilpi hadn't witnessed the whole thing as well, I might have thought I'd imagined it all.

So that's another film that I need to complete, and if you're wondering why I don't just go and buy the DVDs, here's the postscript. A little while ago I bought a number of DVDs from one of those dodgy shops near Commercial Street. I happily watched No Country For Old Men, Atonement and a number of others until it came to 3.10 to Yuma. It was just reaching the climax when the DVD froze and that was that. So that's the third film I need to complete; serves me right for buying a pirate DVD.

Originally published on Blogger on 10th October 2008.