Ram Gopal Varma insults female journalist over her ‘Veerappan’ review

Ram Gopal Varma and his Twitter post (inset)

Local Press Co 5-point Snippet

1. There was a time when Ram Gopal Varma’s films on the underworld made news for their realism and disconcerted story lines. But, that was a decade ago. Now the filmmaker primarily makes news for his ever so often Twitter wars with anyone who catches his fancy at the time.

2. After a very long time, RGV finally released a Bollywood movie that, at least on the face of it, reminded us of the director’s capability of weaving magic when he wanted to pen a story on celluloid. Unfortunately though, ‘Veerappan’, which released this Friday, turned out to be a disaster and failed to live up to audiences and critics’ expectations.

3. A majority of critics found the movie mediocre at best and slammed the director for his disappointing act, including Shilpa Jamkhandekar, a film journalist with Reuters India. In her review, she wrote, “Ram Gopal Varma, whose skill sets as a director have plummeted drastically in the last few years, falls further into the abyss by bringing together a bunch of bad actors in “Veerappan” and egging them on towards even more mediocrity.”

4. But, while RGV continued to frantically retweet every positive review he laid his eyes on and blatantly ignore all other journalists for their unflattering reviews, the director chose to single out the Reuters journalist and posted a picture of her on his micro-blogging account captioning it, “So as per your review “Veerappan” the film is as beautiful as your face”.

5. Later, he posted another tweet that read, “I am sorry for the content packaged in the intent but will not apologize for the intent behind the content”. But, realization of what he had done dawned upon him soon after and he decided to delete both the tweets. After a few hours of rambling, better sense prevailed and the director finally issued an apology to the journalist.

If someone becomes personal in bitching the film maker beyond the film,the film maker also in return can bitch the person beyond the film

— Ram Gopal Varma (@RGVzoomin) May 28, 2016

I never apologise but for the first time I sincerely am apologising…I just got carried away..Sorry Shilpa pic.twitter.com/YC7p5iUVmO

— Ram Gopal Varma (@RGVzoomin) May 28, 2016