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Washington DC: Stars from the popular comedy series The Office, John Krasinski and Steve Carell reunited virtually over video chat amid the coronavirus pandemic to celebrate the show's 15th anniversary.
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On Sunday, in a segment on Krasinski's YouTube show Some Good News the two reminisced about some of their favorite scenes, iconic jokes and moments from the workplace mockumentary series.
The hugely-popular comedy debuted on NBC in March 2005 and ran for nine seasons before ending in 2013.
Recalling how he'd been a 23-year-old waiter when they shot the pilot, Krasinski said: "So Steve, this week marked a huge anniversary for you and I. We were on a little show called The Office and it turned 15 years old this week."
"After the pilot, I went back to waiting tables because I was sure nothing was going to happen with it. We all kind of came into it with that vibe. I remember none of us had done anything huge," Krasinski added with a laugh.
"It's such a happy surprise that after all these years people are still tuning in and finding it today, it's pretty cool," Carell said.
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Showing few bloopers and memories from the season, Carell further mentioned that, "I think most of the memories have to do with things that we shared as a cast. When we were doing Fun Run and it was about 105 degrees outside."
Looking back at their time together, Carell added, "some of the most fun memories, personally or professionally, are intertwined and connected with that show." to which Krasinski also agreed.
In debutante director Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia’s Netflix film The Platform, the world is nothing, and the world is everything.
An ingenious setup - perfectly in tune with the current times of pandemic and social distancing - propels a thriller that comments on everything wrong with human society in its approximately 90-minute runtime.
The questions raised by the film are of the existential kind that everyone has asked themselves at some point in their life; but there’s nothing like watching and vicariously experiencing this confined dystopia during an extended period of self-isolation, to make you deeply ponder over the sheer simplicity and obviousness of the solutions to the most complex capitalism-inflicted problems facing our world.
Entirely set within a mysterious building that seems to be part-prison, part-microcosm of humankind, the world of The Platform is both, its story and its core message. Every level of the ‘hole’, as the inmates of the structure call it, is a sparse space shared by two people. Everyone occupying a level in this structure is at the mercy of this system, yet the ones at the top are privileged in the most basic way imaginable.
Once a day, every day, a platform loaded with piles of delicious food begins its journey from the top, through an open central duct, lowering itself from level to level. As one can imagine, the ones at the top indiscriminately consume as much as they can, with scant regard for the needs of those below. At every level, you can see who’s above you and who’s below. Interestingly, inmates spends exactly one month at any particular level. The next month, they randomly find themselves on another level. If you’re lucky, you wake up at a higher level, with more food to choose from for that month.
This intriguing world is thus the stage for a grotesque story of a wannabe saviour and his attempt to fight and break this system run by a faceless, omnipotent Administration during his time there. Make no mistake, the commentary in the film is rudimentary. It has the same message at its heart that Bong Joon-Ho has gloriously packaged for us with high quality cinema over multiple films, including The Host, Snowpiercer and Parasite. In The Platform, the messaging is bit more ‘obvious’ (a word you’ll encounter multiple times in the film), and a lot more grotesque.
The characters that our protagonist Goreng meets all fill in a little bit of the jigsaw puzzle. So, there’s his first partner, an old man who, in many ways, seems like an older version of Goreng or the kind of man he’s likely to turn into. There’s the woman who was once a part of the Administration, sending people to the Hole. Now, though, she’s herself in there because her life took a turn that led to a profound sense of guilt. And there’s the black man who finds himself at a sufficiently high level one day but is still shit on - literally - by those ‘above’ him.
What it lacks in nuance, The Platformˆ more than makes up for with a relentless barrage of social commentary, obvious symbolism and gruesome visuals of what happens when the humanity in a human is broken down by a system that’s designed to make us constantly aspire to get to a better place, but is also designed to make most of us fail. In these times of enforced solitude, The Platform would make for a great ‘spot the message’ drinking game, with various rules of the construct and frequent lines in the film attempting to make a biting statement.
Take for instance, the fact that the ones at the top, after satisfying their gluttony every day, have nothing to look forward to or think about, often driving them insane enough to just jump off from their level. Or for that matter, when another character tells Goreng that the only way to survive a lower level is to eat or be eaten. It’s a truth of life that would make one shudder, if one were to ever experience this reality at its barest.
The symbolism in the film is often in your face. For example, with every inmate of the hole allowed exactly one personal belonging to carry into the hole with them, Goreng, who fancies himself a saviour, carries with him a copy of Miguel de Cervantes’ The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha. It’s obvious why.
Perhaps the great victory of the film is how it manages to make you almost feel the time that the characters spend in the hole. Goreng, played with sincerity by Iván Massagué channeling his inner Machinist-era Christian Bale, spends six months turning up at higher and lower levels in the hellhole. Through a series of sharp montages, combined with the dreary monotony in the design of every level, you almost feel like you’ve spent as much time in there as Goreng.
Every once in a while, the film cuts to stunning close-ups of culinary delights being prepared, to remind you of the sensory pleasures the world has to offer, only to be rudely snatched away, bringing you back to confront the increasing oppression the lower down the food chain you go.
What would you do if you’ve been starving for days or even weeks, and a dead human body was around, its flesh tempting you? What if a person around you is alive, but you know you’re strong enough to take that person on and kill them? These are questions that we can never truthfully answer in the comfort of our own homes, with access to most of what we need. What we do know is that human depravity can make people desperate enough to do unthinkable. And the more oppressed you are, the more desperate you get.
There’s a lot to unpack in the film, and luckily, almost everything to unpack can be done in real time, as you watch the film. It’s only towards the end, when the story starts moving towards its climax, that things get a little muddled, when you start wondering what, really, is the message of the film. Indeed, the characters themselves start discussing the ‘message’ they want to send the Administration, when they finally decide that some action must be taken to break the oppressive system.
What you must not do is expect a clear resolution to the story. Instead, it’s the journey towards the almost abrupt end that contains the meat of the film, pun completely unintended. There’s a certain urgency to proceedings, a certain perverse engagement you’ll find with the film, because the questions The Platform raises are those that need to be addressed in the real world as soon as we can. As far as the point of the film is concerned, like life itself, the real message of the story is hope and the possibility of a better world for those that will come to inhabit it in the future.
A tweet from Prakash Javadekar, the Union Minister for Information & Broadcasting (I&B), announcing that the state-run Doordarshan will re-telecast the iconic television series Ramayan saw twitter and other social media platforms erupt. The announcement left people divided, and reactions ranged from sheer elation to pure anger. Some felt the government’s decision to telecast a show that brought the entire nation to a stand-still during its run between January 1987 and July 1988 was nothing less than an ode to nostalgia, while some claimed the show laid ground for the Babri Masjid riots in 1993.
For some, watching one of the most beloved television during a 21-day Lockdown where the nation is battling with one of the worst pandemics known to humanity, the Coronavirus, isn’t all that bad an idea. At the same time, it wasn’t surprising that few found the decision to rerun Ramayan politically motivated considering how in the past, the show was held liable for reviving the Ram Mandir movement in northern India. Twitterati also pitched in names of all the other shows that they would love to relive. It was a wish fulfilled for some, with the announcement that DD was going to bring back two more yesteryear favourites, namely, the Shah Rukh Khan-starrer Circus, and the detective series Byomkesh Bakshi.
Ramanand Sagar’s Ramayan enthralled audiences across the country between January 1987 and July 1988. During its run, people would treat Sunday mornings as a pilgrimage of kinds where the entire family, sometimes the neighbourhood, would congregate in front of television sets to pay obeisance to actors portraying gods. The epoch-making show set its own standards, and things were never the same.
In the same way, Circus directed by Aziz Mirza and Kundan Shah was one of the biggest successes that Shah Rukh Khan enjoyed after his debut in Fauji (1988). Set in a circus troupe, Circus followed the trials of Shekharan Rai (Shah Rukh Khan), who struggles to manage his father’s circus, and had an ensemble cast that included Renuka Shahane, Pavan Malhotra, Sudhir Kakkar, along with Ashutosh Gowariker, Makrand Deshpande and Neeraj Vohra amongst others. While Fauji established Khan’s status as a television star, Circus cemented his reputation and also paved the path for the foray into films.
At a time when television in India appeared to get stuck in a rut, Basu Chatterjee’s Byomkesh Bakshi revitalised the medium with the first television adaptation of sleuth created by Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay. The series also marked the first significant appearance of Rajit Kapur as the eponymous character across the 34 episodes, 14 in the first season (1993) and 20 in the second that was telecast in 1997. The series soon become one of the most enduring memories of those growing up in the 1990s. If Kapur got the nuances of the Indian Sherlock Holmes-like detective right, his sidekick, Ajit Banerji, played by K.K. Raina, uniquely reinterpreted Dr. Watson. The episodic mysteries also featured few of the well-known names in Indian films such as Sadhu Meher, Milind Gunaji, Govind Namdeo, and the legendary Utpal Dutt.
Much like the shows' impact on the audiences' psyche and the format, their origins, too, were surprising. Legend has it that the then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi tried to watch Doordarshan one day but found nothing on that caught his attention. As a result, he called V.N. Gadgil, the then I&B Minister, and complained to him that Doordarshan ought to show something that enshrined in Indian values and ethos. One thing led to another, and down the chain officials contacted Ramanand Sagar and B.R Chopra to produce shows such as Ramayan and Mahabharat.
Irrespective of how one stands on the political spectrum, one shouldn’t be surprised at DD’s decision to re-telecast Ramayan thirty-three years after it debuted. In the age of Netflix and Amazon Prime, where reruns of older television series such as Friends and all-time classic Seinfeld, constitute a major chunk of the online streaming platforms, it’s only normal for a television channel to indulge in reruns of some of its most recognised shows.
A few days ago, when Arun Govil, Deepika Chikhalia, and Sunil Lahiri better known as Lord Rama, Goddess Sita and Lakshman from the iconic television show Ramayana appeared on The Kapil Sharma Show, they wouldn’t have imagined in their wildest dreams that Ramayana would return in 2020. Back in the 1980s and the 1990s, when shows such as Ramayan, Circus and Byomkesh Bakshi were first aired, there was no competition. The onslaught of satellite television in the early 1990s gave Doordarshan a run for its money, and by the late 1990s, the landscape might have changed. That said, there is no denying that that DD’s backlist is worth its weight in gold.
For years, DD’s popular shows such as Nukkad, Malgudi Days, Bharat Ek Khoj, Chanakaya, Chandrakanta and many more, have enjoyed patronage on websites such as YouTube while a few such as Yeh Jo Hai Zindagi have had a fanatic second-innings on streaming platforms such as Amazon Prime. If Netflix and its ilk can pay top money for golden oldies, then why would Doordarshan not do the same? Besides, back in the 80s and 90s, most people didn’t have a choice when it came to watching television. Today, you have a hundreds of channels and platforms offering thousands of shows to pick and choose. If you don’t like anything, simply flip the channel.
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