Today’s Times of India’s supplement announces a new Web series, Poacher by Amazon Prime, dealing with illegal poaching of elephants in Kerala for ivory.
That takes me to the Web series that the lady of the house and I watched last night - till the wee hours to be precise more because of its edge-of-the-seat nature. We were quite satisfied. It is in Spanish but we switched both the spoken medium and sub-titles to English. Thankfully, we found ourselves watching more the movie and reading less the subtitles. Crisp, short dialogues.
Bundled in just two Seasons, one of 14 episodes and the other of 10, it is on illegal organ transplant in Colombia, and how the Organization negotiates its way to get national recognition to its activities. Until now to me the country was synonymous with drug cartel.
Without robbing you of the edge-of-the-seat discomfiture that accompanies a thriller, I would just say it was fast-paced for a webseries; plenty of twists and turns; the screenplay focuses on thus-far-no-further to keep the audience guessing; the movement is fast still it takes you nowhere. All rolled in one. The series does full justice to its mandatory alert - gory, sex, violence… everything is mixed in equal proportion.
Each character plays his/her role to a T – overall, time well spent. One actor reminded me of American actor Edward Norton (remember the Academy award nominee for Primal Fear), and another, somewhat, of our Carnatic musician, T M Krishna.
In places we felt we were watching an Indian movie – the heroine leaves for an unknown destination, the chance arrival of the hero there, their chance meeting… Equally so, in the last episode all loose ends being fixed in an undue hurry, as though the Director was given a new directive – phata phat khatam kar.
Regardless, I shall sum it up taking a cue from Carnatic music. In my days when Ariyakudi, Chembangudi, Chembai, GNB and others ruled the roost. Some excelled in Ragam, some in Taanam, some in Pallavi; yet others in something else. But I found K V Narayanaswamy giving a decent fare of everything - like you had had a good meal where pachadi, avial, curry, kootu, sambar, rasam, payasam, curd rice, all fell in place, with no item claiming a special place, or something else doing below par. Fully satisfied, you step out for the last item - paan.
(Thank you Viswanathan for recommending to me this series)
