My Review of Aaranya Kaandam

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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!!

My Review of 13 (Tzameti)

      

       HIGHLY UNDER-RATED CLASSIC

      Well, one director whom I can recall, who could make dark thrillers even in his sleep was Alfred Hitchcock. 13 (Tzameti), a first, full length feature film made by French educated, Georgian director Gela Babluani has lots of resemblances of several Hitchcockian dark movies (North by Northwest, Vertigo) where the movie starts off gently and midway through throws the viewers off-guard. 

      In a town along the French Atlantic coast, Twenty-two year old Sebastien, is a struggling wannabe young Georgian artisan (played by Babluani’s brother Georges). One day, he gets a  assignment, to make repairs on a house owned by an ageing morphine-drug addicted person named Jean-Francois. Sebastien eavesdrops a conversation Jean-Francois has with another man, talking about an opportunity where he can make a lot of money. He is also awaiting the arrival of an envelope which contains some clandestine instructions. Sebastien’s roofing assignment ends abruptly due to the death of Jean-Francois and with no hope of payment he steals a letter addressed to his former employer, which contains instructions regarding a mysterious and possibly dangerous money-making scheme. 

     Impersonating Jean-Francois, he follows the instructions and arrives at an isolated mansion outside Paris. To his horror, he finds that he is to be a player in a game of roulette where men bet on other people’s lives. He is assigned the number 13 in this ghastly game. Though, 13 is considered as unlucky, this is not about luck since it strips the protagonist of all humanity and reduces him to just a lottery surrounded by a cruel rule of chance. He is just number 13 with his thoughts limited to where the bullet is placed in the cylinder. What happens to Sebastien? Does he survive the roulette? All these are told in a nerve wrecking climax.

    13 (Tzameti) is just extraordinary. It’s a wonderful, taut thriller at a very viewer-friendly 95 minutes which starts off smoothly, gently builds up pace and from nowhere moves into another gear and that too when the viewer least expects it. Debutant George Babluani does an awesome job as Sébastien. The most powerful and intense scenes are those where he does not express a word but leaves the viewer chewing their nails in utter tension. The way he manages to express the character’s terror and hopelessness is just astounding.

   The film's black and white cinematography is both stunning and moody. The background score, too, is grim and helps in generating the tension to the audience. Though I first felt that the movie was a little slow, it  actually helps in piling the pressure on the audience. The director does a great job in exploring the dark and unpleasant side of human nature. 13 Tzameti is a smartly told, carefully paced thriller with a gripping screenplay and amazing visuals.

My Review of Shutter Island

      

    HAUNTING, RIVETING THRILLER

         Oscar winning director Martin Scorsese returns to the big screen after a hiatus with this chilling psychological thriller adapted from the best seller of Mystic River's Dennis Lehane. Any avid movie buff will tell you that Scorsese is a master in giving dark films with an awesome ending, be it The Departed or Cape Fear and many others. This too, is no different but Shutter Island will definitely make you awestruck for a while when you reminiscing about it.

       The main plot is set in Massachusetts in 1954 which has U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his partner Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo) venture into Shutter Island, a place where a mental institution, Ashecliffe Hospital is located. They go on an investigation spree to find out the inexplicable disappearance of a patient named Rachel Solondo. During their investigation, they are frequently obstructed by the hospital warden and their increasingly petulant Dr. Cawley (Sir Ben Kingsley) who boasts of creating a new revolutionary method for treating the criminal insane. As Daniels begins to suspect some internal hand in the disappearance of Rachel, he starts getting haunted by his late wife’s images Dolores (Michelle Williams) and the atrocities witnessed by him as an officer during World War II.

       The investigation gets marred by a  turbulent tropical storm but that does not stop Daniels from searching for Rachel with even more fervor. A series of twists occur in the tale whereby Daniels finds Rachel and his partner Chuck goes missing in the asylum. A search for Chuck by Daniels leads him into an abandoned lighthouse where his confrontation with Dr. Cawley leads into a even bigger and flummoxing twist which is sure to leave the audience baffled and gasping for breath.

      Shutter Island revolves around Leonardo DiCaprio. He seems to be getting better and better with each film he does with Scorsese. Like The Aviator and The Departed, Scorsese creates an impeccable plot and intensifies the pressure and psyches out the audience at the end. The rest of the cast is apt and rock solid. You will definitely become an instant fan of  Mark Ruffalo and Ben Kingsley after watching the movie. The scene where they try to appease DiCaprio in the lighthouse is definitely the highlight of the movie.

      The movie in itself is an awesome riddle. If you can recollect all the scenes and piece them together, you will find that all the riddles fit into the script perfectly. From the opening shot, Scorsese creates a sense of gloominess and murkiness which prevails throughout the film. The art direction is outstanding and the light house and the asylums are picturesque.

      On the whole, Shutter Island is a handsomely well-made psychological thriller which has semblances of Hitchcock’s yesteryear thrillers like Vertigo and North by Northwest. The movie is a definite watch just for the screenplay and some solid acting from the lead cast.