By Joginder Tuteja
Unlike the week before when there were multiple offerings across various OTT channels; this weekend saw only two major releases - Bob Biswas and Inside Edge 3.
Bob Biswas found decent reception amongst the audience where response ranged from fair to good. An experimental affair where Sujoy Ghosh and his daughter Diya Annapurna Ghosh bright to fore a spin off from Kahani with the character of Bob Biswas, the film makes for an interesting watch with Abhishek Bachchan doing well in this part. Though the film hasn’t been termed as extraordinary per se, it does make for a decent watch and that’s what allowing the word of mouth to set in.
On the other hand Inside Edge 3 is yet another biggie by Farhan Akhtar and Ritesh Sidhwani where the key characters played by Vivek Oberoi, Richa Chadha, Tanuj Virwani and Aamir Bashir return. The core of cricket based drama has stayed intact in the third season as well and what makes it special is the fact production values are good as always, something that has been the USP since the very first season. Considering the fact that the cricket season is also on with India playing New Zealand, it is also nice to see the cricketers take on Pakistan on screen.
Coming soon
A couple of weeks back Lara Dutta, Nushrat Bharucha and Neha Sharma had arrived with Hiccups And Hookups, Chhorii and Illegal 2. Now this week would see yet another female centric web series arriving with each her, what with Sushmita Sen returning with the second season of Aarya and Raveena Tandon making a comeback in front of the camera with Aranyak.
On its release last year, Aarya had made a good impression and emerged as a good success with viewers liking the kind of drama that Ram Madhvani had spun for screen. Now that Sushmita Sen is returning in the second season to seek revenge, one can expect some high volatile drama with powerful performance from Sushmita. Shot during the pandemic, it is impressive to see how the second season has been put together in quick time and being released, especially since Ram Madhvani had also made another feature film Dhamaka during the same time.
It has been a while since Aranyak was announced and now that the web series is set to release, one wonders if it could have done better with some sort of promotion accompanying it. Though the promo of the Raveena Tandon starrer was released around 10 days back, somehow the follow through isn’t there. With Raveena Tandon in there as a cop who is out to hunt a killer in the jungle, one would have expected a lot more hype and hoopla around this suspense drama that would now depend entirely on audience word of mouth.
Release dates
Aarya 2 - 10th December - Disney + Hotstar
Aranyak - 10th December – Netflix
Stay tuned for more updates.