Better Late than Never

Quitters never win,

Winners never quit

I am 27 years and to be frank, I've wasted an enormous amount of time on things that I thought were vital for my life. But of late, I've become a fanatic of two geniuses, Ilayaraaja and Kamal Haasan sir, and I am ashamed at the amount of time in the past 6 months by doing nothing in life (and I mean absolutely nothing). It's actually very embarrassing. Hopefully, this is the last time, I will write something like this. The first step that I've done successfully is reviving my blog with this beautiful passage from Mahanadhi

பிறர் வாடப் பலசெயல்கள் செய்து - நரை கூடிக் கிழப்பருவ மெய்தி -

கொடுங் கூற்றுக் கிரையெனப்பின் மாயும் - பல வேடிக்கை மனிதரைப் போலே -

நான் வீழ்வே னென்று நினைத் தாயோ? நின்னைச் சில வரங்கள் கேட்பேன் - அவைநேரே இன்றெனக்குத் தருவாய் -

என்றன் முன்னைத் தீயவினைப் பயன்கள் - இன்னும்மூளாதழிந்திடுதல் வேண்டும் - இனி என்னைப் புதிய உயிராக்கி -

எனக்கேதுங் கவலையறச் செய்து - மதிதன்னை மிகத் தெளிவு செய்து - என்றும்சந்தோஷங் கொண்டிருக்கச் செய்வாய்!

My Review of That Girl in Yellow Boots

                                PREDICTABLE BUT WORTH WATCHING!

Entering into a movie, which is produced and directed by Anurag Kashyap, you attain that inevitable feeling of expecting something different right from the first frame. The movie is yet another feather in the hat for Anurag Kashyap who yet again pushes the barriers of contemporary Indian cinema and delivers yet another dark and disturbing tale of a girl searching her lost father.

That girl in the Yellow Boots revolves around Ruth (Kalki Koechlin), an illegal UK immigrant, living in Mumbai. She does not wish to leave the city until she finds her lost father, Arjun Patel. She works in a obscure massage parlour to meet her ends meet and also does “handshakes” to earn that extra bit of income. Having a dreadful drug addict as her boyfriend, her life is nothing but sorrowful and pitiable to say the least. How does Ruth overcome all the obstacles in her life and manage to find her father forms the rest of this 100 minute, dark cinema.

Casting is a major plus point of That Girl in Yellow Boots. Kalki as Ruth is the soul of That Girl in Yellow Boots. Her acting skills has improved by leaps and bounds, when compared to Shaitan. The movie also shows the dark side of India’s financial hub, Mumbai, where people are always trying to exploit a person’s weakness at any given instance. The other notable performance comes from Naseeruddin Shah, a loyal and caring customer of Ruth. All the other characters such as the owner of the massage parlour and Ruth’s boyfriend also deliver a commendable performance.

However, Ruth’s confrontation with the local, Telugu-speaking goons acts as a major drawback to the movie. Chitiappa as his associates do not bring anything to the movie other than prolong it by twenty minutes. With their broken English, they are infused into the screenplay just to provide some relaxation to the audience.

Despite its minor hiccups, That Girl in Yellow Boots will not disappoint people who are looking for a new kind of movie experience. Go watch it for Ruth and to encourage film makers like Anurag Kashyap who dare to take the less trodden path!

My Review of Aaranya Kaandam

Technorati Tags: Aaranya Kaandam

In a world where commercial cinema has and is ruling the roost, there are a miniscule amount of movie makers who dare to think beyond the obvious. Thiagarajan Kumararaja joins the elite list of trend setting directors who has managed to break the barriers of mundane cinema and deliver a gangster flick in a crisply packaged format. 

Aaranya Kaandam basically delves around the lives of gangsters in Northern Chennai.  Singaperumal (Jackie Shroff) is an ageing don who purportedly carries out various illegal businesses along with his gang for a living. One fine day Pasupathy (Sampath), a member of this gang happens to know about a drug deal that is going to take place between a broker and their rival gang run by Gajapathy and Gajendran. Pasupathy seeks permission from Singaperumal to illegal poach the drugs, since the broker was willing to sell the drugs at a much lesser cost. Singaperumal gives him the nod and this sets off a chain of enthralling events that takes the audience off-guard at several places. In the midst of all these events, enter two characters, Kaalaiyan and Kodungapuli, and how they get caught in the ensuing drug exchange fist-fight forms the rest of the story. 

Credit must be given to the director for penning down a very taut screenplay that manages to entertain the audience to the fullest. All the characters (except the girl) have delivered a commendable performance. The only drawback I found in the movie was the girl, Subbu, who was completely non-sync with the movie. Her actions, body language, her dialogue delivery, and the way she emotes were far too cinematic for this movie. 

The director also deserves praise for etching out each individual character with substance. Be it the police inspector, the josiyakaaran, the broker, or Singaperumal’s gang members, everybody would stay in the minds of the audiences while coming out of the theaters. 

Even though the movie has been made on a shoe-string budget, the technical aspects of the movie are top-notch. The camera work, by C.S. Vinod is riveting and when coupled with the crisp editing of Praveen K L and Shrikanth N B, it provides a wonderful viewing experience for the audience. The music, by Yuvan Shankar Raja, adds a new dimension to the already-enthralling screenplay. Silence employed during the title roll-out and the usage ilayaraja sir’s songs from the 80’s sync perfectly with the movie. And please have an acumen to note the dialogues rendered by all the characters. They are sharp and humorous and are just brilliant. (The first and the last dialogues in the film are the biggest highlights)! 

Overall, if you are looking out for refreshing cinema, then you definitely should not miss Aaranya Kaandam. It surpasses all the clichés that you would ought to witness in a regular Tamil gangster movie. No wonder, the movie won the Grand Jury Award for Best Film at the South Asian International Film Festival.            

My Review of Avan Ivan

COMPREHENSIVELY MISFIRES

Bala, one of the trendsetting directors, has always delivered emotional, heart-wrenching, and disturbing films. This has been his style of film making and he has seen a great amount of success in it. After winning a National Award for his previous directorial venture, Naan Kadavul, Bala has tried his hand at delivering a full-length comedy film. But sadly, the movie does not live up to the expectations and goes awry right from the first frame.

Vishal and Arya are step-brothers and are always at each other's throat in the first half of the movie. Their respective mothers (Ambika and Jayaprabha) are also at daggers, but they all incidentally live in the same house. An ex-king, named highness, plays the role of pacifying both Vishal and Arya. He has lost all his fame and wealth but is still respected by all the local people living in the region. Vishal starts to develop a soft corner for a lady constable (named Madhu Shalini) whereas Arya goes after a tutorial college-going student (sorry.. couldn't find her name)!

The whole movie plods around these characters for the most part and then in order to deliver the director's touch, he introduces an antagonist half an hour before the climax and leads us into a fist-fight conclusion. The whole problem of the movie is that it does not have even a wafer-thin plot. The director has penned the screenplay in order to say that he is capable of delivering a full-length comedy. The movie seems to be made for Vishal to help him break his commercial hero status. He has worked on his body language and his squint eyes and does a very good job. Frankly speaking, he is the only silver lining in the movie!

Bala also manages to extract decent performances from the other characters (Arya, Ambika, Highness, the small boy). Arya, for the whole movie, plays second fiddle to Vishal and tries to make the audiences laugh with his gimmicky body language and dialogue delivery. But the most irritating characters of the movie were the cops and I am wondering why Bala has reduced inspectors into comical machines in his last two movies. I feel very sad for the villain because he is not able to deliver anything substantial in his tenure as an actor (career shift?.. maybe)!

Technically, the movie has hardly anything to speak about. Except the Elangaathu Veesuthe-style song, there is nothing really to speak for Yuvan Shankar Raja. The audiences are treated to crisp editing in the last 20 minutes. On the whole, the movie lacks a solid plot and puts the audience in sleep-mode right from the first half. Mr.Bala, with all due respect, you are better off doing serious films with comedy sprayed in between rather than the other way round. Hoping to see you with a solid script next time around!

My Review of Udaan

 

BEAUTIFUL!

I have never been interested in watching Hindi films frankly because I just don't understand that language that fluently. But, I guess in May 2008, I watched a movie called "Black Friday”, a movie based on the 1993 Mumbai blasts and was completely bowled over it. The director of the movie was Mr Anurag Kashyap. The only reason for me watching “Udaan” was because it was from the production house of Anurag Kashyap.

The movie begins by showcasing four mischievous school students who escape from the hostel at night in order to watch a B-grade movie. They succeed in attaining their goal but end up getting caught by their hostel warden in a hilarious manner and results in them being expelled from the school.

One of the students, Rohan (played by Rajat Barmecha), after his expulsion, sets off to his native place Jamshedpur. He is welcomed to the city by a strict disciplinarian and an oppressive father Bhairav (Roy) and finds to his bewilderment, an young brother Arjun residing in his house (Rohan never knew off Arjun because he had not come to the city for eight years).

Rohan aspires to be a writer and a novelist but is forced to work in Bhairav’s factory and do his engineering course in correspondence.  Amidst all this chaos, Rohan manages to find some happiness by stealthily taking his dad’s car and having a booze in the city’s bars.

Slowly but surely, Rohan begins to look after Arjun with care and takes over the responsibility as an elder brother. The manner in which Rohan narrates stories to Arjun and the patients and doctors at a hospital needs a special mention.

Rohan’s anger against Bhairav reaches a high when he reveals his plans of tying the knot with yet another woman. What does Rohan do to attain his ambitions forms the rest of this well-written, beautifully-crafted movie.

The first thing that struck me while watching the movie was the music by Amit Trivedi. The songs and the BGM are extremely pleasant and do not slacken the pace of the movie. The BGM in the chasing sequence between Rohan and Bhairav is definitely the highlight of the movie.

The director, Vikramaditya Motwane really deserves a pat on his back for writing a humble script without inserting any commercial ingredients. This is a movie to be watched by movie buffs who yearn for high-quality Indian cinema.

What is Success?

My mind delivers a lot of fathomable and baffling answers.
Is it obtaining a substantial position in your career and taking care of your family (or) is it earning an exorbitant sum of money and enjoying life (party, booze, fag, girls)?
OR is it just having a mundane routine of finishing ur schooling at 18.. graduate at 22.. getting a job.. buy a house.. getting married at 26 and increase the population??
Why do all people succumb to this kind of routine pattern and spoil their happiness for social compulsions.. Or do all people enjoy doing the above listed circumstances?
I know a couple of friends who have asked me the same question and have had a long discussion and ended up finding no answers..
Does anyone have the answers???
But one thing is for sure.. I HATE doing any of the above mentioned routines but might end up doing it(Maybe five years down the line)!.

My Review of Enthiran (The Robot)

 

A movie that takes more than two years to be completed inevitably evokes curiosity to any avid movie-watcher. Added to that, a combo of our one-and-only Rajinikanth, director Shankar, Aishwarya Rai and A.R. Rahman pushes the expectations to unimaginable propositions.

Enthiran, touted to be the director’s dream project, relies heavily on the screen presence of the superstar and the visual  extravaganza. The baseline of the movie is very thin and simple. Vaseegaran (Rajinikanth) is a scientist whose desire is to develop a robot, which would help in serving the Indian army. Sana (Aishwarya Rai), a college student pioneering in medicine plays his love partner. 

After 10 years of hard work he successfully develops a robot, names it Chitti and unveils it at a robotic conference. Chitti is taken to the AIRD (Artificial Intelligence Research and Development) center for final evaluation that would enable it to be deployed in the Indian Army. But a member of the AIRD, Prof Bohra (Danny Denzongpa) rejects Chitti citing that it is dangerous to human life and does not know the difference between good and evil. Bohra, co-incidentally is also the mentor of Vaseegaran.

In order to realize human feelings, Vaseegaran teaches Chitti various kinds of emotions such as joy, sorrow, anger etc. But this spells disaster as Chitti falls in love with Sana, after she gives it a kiss. Chaos dooms as Chitti plays havoc at an evaluation center and in return, Vaseegaran dismantles it. The rest of the plot is how Chitti returns to torment Vaseegaran and his mayhem-creating activities.

The whole movie depends on two things – Rajinikanth and Visual effects. The charisma of the superstar is still intact even after such a long tenure in the cinema industry. Chitti’s mannerisms (especially the ‘black sheep’ scene) are sure to be lapped up by kids. Aishwarya Rai, though looks gorgeous, sets a new benchmark for bad acting. Danny Denzongpa as the cunning Prof, along with Karunas and Santhanam as assistant scientists, do not have a substantial role to play.

Technically, it is the best Rajinikanth ever taken with high-class visuals by Randy. The costumes of Aishwarya Rai needs a special mention. The money spent and the effort put in for the CG work shows off in the climax as the viewers are awestruck by the brilliance of the graphics.

POSITIVES:

• No punch dialogues and no intro songs (Considering the global audiences i guess)
• Robo Rajini
• Looks of Aishwarya Rai
• Terrific visuals and computer-graphics   
• Dialogues 

NEGATIVES:

• Movie might not cater to rural audiences as the concept of Artificial Intelligence, Robotics and Neural Schemas might be alien
• Poor Re-recording in the second half
• Languid screenplay
• Unnecessary scenes and bad build-ups to songs (Mosquito, one-day boyfriend scenes to mention a few)
• Bad Editing (Movie will definitely get chopped after 3 days)
• Predictable ending

Overall Enthiran, although having a wafer-thin script and a bland screenplay, is definitely worth watching for the visuals and the superstar. Well done Mr. Shankar!!