Women on display

In an ideal world, this week's column would be devoted and dedicated to The Interviews. You know the ones: in which one woman reveals her...

In an ideal world, this week8217;s column would be devoted and dedicated to The Interviews. You know the ones: in which one woman reveals herself to another woman on public television and a few days later, exposes herself to a man. Also on television. If it wasn8217;t, politically-speaking, absolutely the most incorrect statement to make, if she wasn8217;t a woman who might just have been exploited by two men, you8217;d have to think Monica was a born porn queen.

But this is not an ideal world and we in India don8217;t receive either ABC which carried the first interview or Channel 4 which carried the second. So we were not privileged or unfortunate enough depending on the level of your prurience to hear Lucky Lips Lewinsky describe how she bad-mouthed !, sorry, paid lip service to the President of the USA Alas.

Instead, turn your gaze to another woman, one not very different from Lewinsky. She, too, likes to exhibit. Her name, as you might have guessed, is Pamela Lee Anderson. The programme is called VIP and it8217;s now showing on AXN. Last week, the series began with her assets squeezing out of a white one-piece swimsuit with the sea behind her, the sun above, the sand below and sex written all over. Phew! Totally unrelated to the rest of the action which was to follow but then, people don8217;t watch Anderson for acting lessons.

Anderson runs a protection agency and her three female and one male colleagues set out to rescue a man they believe to be a popular actor but who is actually a KGB assassin formerly married to VIP Natasha and still intoxicated with her, hired by a mafiosi type to rid the world of a photographer who has inadvertently shot incriminating photos of him. Pamela ends up protecting the photographer: don8217;t cry on my couch, she scolds; so he cries on her shoulder instead and sneaks a palm around her breast bone whereupon she fetches him such a nasty blow on the nose he would rather sleep with the assassin. Assassin, meanwhile, is disguising himself as a VIP to infiltrate Anderson8217;s pad but before that he has a dream in which Natasha appears before him in a long black coat. She moves into his arms. Can we skip the foreplay, she asks, and drops the coat; now if his mouth had not been occupied with hers, it would have dropped open because without the coat there8217;s nothing but a bikini between them.

It all ends with a few gun shots, hand-to-hand combat and a fully dressed Anderson providing the knock-out blow. Watch this Very Idiotic Programme at your own loss.

What was missing from the serial was blood. India8217;s Most Wanted Zee sheds more than enough for both. In last week8217;s episode, men with swords in Dhar, MP, attack a vegetable vendor and then a police officer. We do know that the blood that covers them like a shroud, is only paint but it still looks like the real thing and to that extent it is pardon the pun bloody awful. It is not necessary, it is certainly not aesthetic and surely a waste of paint?

In Alpviram Sony we are still trying to discover the identity of the rapist of the comatose Pallavi Joshi. We are now studying photographs of her in the middle of you-know-what and the expert opinion was that the person who had taken these photographs was the foul animal who had molested her. It8217;s all very complicated and if you can understand what is going on, you deserve to watch it.

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Film India BBC has Victor Bannerjee playing himself as a film critic. It isn8217;t one of his better performances. He looks the part in the free-wheeling chair, casual-like even in a suit. He takes us through the latest releases in Hindi and regional cinema, giving us storyline in that charming, well bred voice. Last week, we learnt about Kaun, Janta Janardhan Marathi and Pathram Malayalam. Including regional cinema is a clever idea gone wrong. Like the programme. The script has been written by some very clever people who showcase their witticisms. Problem is that you can be too clever for words. And Bannerjee, therefore, treats the entire show as joke. He doesn8217;t seem to take the films seriously. Perhaps he doesn8217;t take Indian popular cinema, seriously. Nor, one imagines, do most of his audience which consists, primarily, of the English-speaking haw-jaws, who are unlikely to watch the films he previews. Is this mix and match or mismatch?