Two funny boys are taking the Internet by storm, armed with just a DSLR camera and a whole bunch of terrible Bollywood films.
Familiar faces in the Bangalore stand-up comedy scene, Kanan Gill and Biswa Kalyan Rath have gained quite a few followers on YouTube for their rib tickling reviews of trashy old Bollywood films and they are called Pretentious Movie Reviews.
Just four films down (Gunda, Jani Dushman, Main Prem Ki Deewani Hoon and Aap Ka Suroor) and the request list in their YouTube comments section, spans a few hundreds with people requesting for movies like Dhoom 3, Neal and Nikki, Tashan, Haseena Maan Jayegi etc.
While they started off by reviewing Gunda, a 1998 Mithun Chakraborty film best avoided, the Jani Dushman review ricocheted off the charts and went viral.
"I was watching some movie on Star Gold at 2 am because that's what my life is like, and thought it would be funny to just make a review that no one gains from. There's no point to doing it at all and I think that's hilarious. I told Biswa about it, because we are both comedians and write jokes together. So a couple of months later, we decided to just go ahead and do it," explains Kanan, who quit his job last year to pursue stand-up comedy full time.
The videos have caught the eye of Bollywood folks themselves with Arshad Warsi sharing the videos on his Twitter timeline and praising the boys' work. And it's not simple work either. "We watch the film once and make notes. Then we work out a structure for the review and honestly the funniest parts are improvised. Then I have to watch the movie 10 more times while I'm editing it. That can get to you," says Kanan.
The videos are shot on a Canon 600D and the sound on Zoom H4N.
"I use a 50mm lens honestly because there’s not enough light in my room, that's where we shoot, but that has the added advantage of making us look better than we actually do. I edit the videos on an iMac using FCP 10.1," adds Kanan.
They're now trying to bring out at least one video a week but that hasn't happened so far because of Kanan's hectic travel schedules, with stand-up comedy gigs booked all over the country.
"It takes me quite a while to edit the videos, so I'm trying to figure out a way to do it better," he says.
While Kanan admits that they'd definitely take on Hollywood films in the future, their next film review happens to be a secret and they also maintain that they "genuinely" like the movies that they review. "I encourage everyone to watch them," says Kanan.
"We've got some plans but it's all up in the air right now. The pretentious movie reviews brand is pretty young so the first thing
we'll do is to see how subsequent videos fare. We've been talking about travelling with a show as well. Maybe in a month or so," says Kanan about their future plans.