Rann

Clearly, Ram Gopal Varma thinks Sarkar is the best film he has made in recent times. So he goes ahead and shoots Rann, his take on contemporary media, in exactly the same mode. You have extreme close-ups which reveal every pore on the skin irrespective of whether you want to see it or not, a dizzy camera keeps swinging from one face to the next, leaving the viewer with a migraine, and every character and dialogue gets underlined with an overamplified, doom-filled background score that seems heavily borrowed from Omen. All right, RGV doesn’t make a mockery of the media, but he doesn’t tell you anything more than what a common man (forget us media types) didn’t already know. Basically, it’s about two media groups and their alignments with the political thugs in the race for TRPs. For a film that pitches itself as a realistic and incisive critique of the media, it’s quite facile. A Ritesh Deshmukh looks glum, sports a beard and a backpack, rides a bike and talks in a sullen way to give the feel of a serious journo. The biggest flaw is the character of the media big daddy Amitabh Bachchan who is grounded in melodramatic excess. But Suchitra Krishnamoorthy as the COO does look and act the part.