etcetera

Bhavna clutch­ing an umbrella, Sunil clutch­ing an underarm.

The boy: toughie, hired goon, bearded brute, all rough edges and bad act­ing, tall and dark and not so handsome.

The girl: heart that bleeds for all, assists help­less peo­ple cross roads, smooth and pretty and volup­tuous and rich and pretty and smooth. Sigh. I mean, scratch the sigh.

How could they not fall in love? And how could he not turn over a new leaf, bring­ing a few odd­ball leaves along with him to keep him enter­tained at new­dom? And how could their wed­ding plans not be rudely inter­rupted by her see­ing him visit some­place not nice? And how could they not… well, no spoil­ers on this blog folks. By the way, for the record, this post is about a movie called Chithi­ram Pesudhadi.

“Ordi­nary plot,” you want to say, “hack­neyed and trite, tried and tested (and failed).” True, we say, the movie is all that, but it has a lit­tle bit more going for it — it is dis­arm­ingly unpre­ten­tious and heart­warm­ingly earnest. The earnest­ness of a first time direc­tor striv­ing hard — very hard — within his con­traints to sal­vage some­thing out of a mediocre script shines through every frame, draw­ing empa­thy from his view­ers, and Chithi­ram man­ages to get off with sym­pa­thetic winces where another movie would’ve got­ten a groan or two.
Con­tinue reading »

My favorite pas­time is talk­ing to myself. Not many peo­ple know this, but I am actu­ally two per­sons in one: There lurks inside me this crass dude called Smith who thinks this blog is truck­loads of bull and peri­od­i­cally tries to con­vince me to loosen up and go check out Kirsten Dunst pic­tures instead of writ­ing stuff that no one cares about.

Last night, Smith wanted me to go to The Myth. It is a Jackie Chan movie star­ring Mallika Sher­awat and Smith had read some­where that Ms. Sher­awat con­trives to lose a strate­gic piece of her cloth­ing in the movie for a split sec­ond. I wanted to go to Thava­mai Thavamirun­thu instead, because it is my strong opin­ion that movies like The Myth are best left to DVD play­ers with pause buttons.

So I won, and we ended up going to Thava­mai Thavamirun­thu, directed by Cheran - the guy that made Auto­graph - and star­ring him­self and a new girl called Padmapriya. After the movie, I had a pretty long con­ver­sa­tion with Smith about what I was going to write in my review of the movie, and as we were wrap­ping up, he begged me to pub­lish the con­ver­sa­tion on this blog to pro­vide peo­ple a win­dow into his soul. He also wanted me to tell peo­ple that Xaviera Hol­lan­der is so much bet­ter than Ray­mond Carver.

Me: In fic­tion — both writ­ten and on film — details can mean the dif­fer­ence between good and great; between corny sen­ti­men­tal­ism and touch­ing poignancy. Descrip­tive details — she was beau­ti­ful, wide for­head, strong chin, pretty clothes, unsightly mole — are much eas­ier on film than paper, a good direc­tor can reduce ten pages of Tolkien to a sin­gle shot. Nar­ra­tive detail, on the other hand…

Mr. Smith: There you go again. Descrip­tive detail, Nar­ra­tive detail. You bore me to death.

Me: Please, I hate being inter­rupted. Let me con­tinue here. Nar­ra­tive detail, on the other hand, is dif­fer­ent. The read­ing audi­ence has more patience than movie­go­ers, and will tol­er­ate even digres­sive, detailed nar­ra­tives bet­ter. The movie­goer has a lim­ited atten­tion span, and too much detail — man wak­ing up, stretch­ing, brush­ing, show­er­ing — usu­ally does not go down well.

Mr. Smith: That’s coz peo­ple that read are fools. And yes, too much detail stinks unless it is a girl bathing. There is this movie in Malay­alam where they show a girl tak­ing a shower, and man it was very detailed and I liked it. There­fore, it is not like all details are bad. So,there you go.

Me: What’s your point?

Mr. Smith: My point is, the movie sucked. It was long, and the dude that acted in it kept cry­ing. The girl was fully clothed through­out, and she was cry­ing when­ever he didn’t. So why don’t you just tell peo­ple that instead of going on and on about details?

Me: Aw, come on. A twenty word review on this blog? Scandalous.

Mr. Smith: What­ever. Go on and wake me up when you are done talking.

Me: Cheran’s Thava­mai Thavamirun­thu is a son’s trib­ute to his father. Rajki­ran does an out­stand­ing job as his dad that puts the wel­fare of his kids above his needs, and Cheran is the kid that never for­gets how much his dad did for him. Once Cheran decided that this was going to be his premise, he look no fur­ther than Auto­graph: he took the movie and retooled it, using the same tech­nique of a guy rem­i­nisc­ing about the past inter­cut with sequences from the present. The prob­lem with the movie here is that it lacked the fresh­ness of Autograph…

Mr. Smith: Wait, you mean you liked Auto­graph? Fresh­ness? You are a mushy piece of…

Me:: Will you let me fin­ish my sen­tences? I was going to say Auto­graph was corny, but it was the first attempt in Tamil cin­ema to move away from the tra­di­tional premise based for­mat to some­thing more informal.

Mr. Smith: Funny how you always use thirty words when all you needed was two. It was a Bad Movie.

Me: The prob­lem with the movie was the length. It is obvi­ous that Cheran wanted to make some­thing that was delib­er­ately paced, but delib­er­ate pac­ing does not mean show­ing every sin­gle event in a sequence. When his wife deliv­ers a baby in a hos­pi­tal, the view­ers know that the hero is broke. Yet Cheran has scenes of him not being able to pay the hos­pi­tal, not hav­ing money to buy med­i­cines, a scene of him rid­ing a bicy­cle to try and bor­row money and a scene of him com­ing back on the same bicy­cle with­out money.

Mr. Smith: That was ter­ri­ble! How can some­one watch a guy rid­ing a bike for five min­utes? Although I am pleased he didn’t wear Span­dex. In fact, the movie was so bor­ing, I’d rather have read your blog for three hours. Ha Ha!

Me: What else, smartass?

Mr. Smith: Why don’t you tell them how the dude man­aged to make his class­mate preg­nant? Or how she cries and cries for half the movie because of this? About how he tells his dad he could not face him after “defil­ing” a girl? Now, what the heck is that sup­posed to mean?

Me: Yeah, true. That was bad. Now please, get off the girl, and say some­thing else.

Mr. Smith: Oh, I see. Let’s talk music.

Me: Sure. The music was pretty average…

Mr. Smith: Shut up, let me take over. The music was hideous, hor­rid and unpalat­able. Some peo­ple can­not do slow songs ever. It was like read­ing Joyce while watch­ing Will and Grace. Torture.

Me: Yeah, I think I’ll agree with you there.

Mr. Smith: Cool. So there you have it folks, Sucky movie. Too long. Too much cry­ing. Bad music.

Me: In the inter­est of bal­ance, I should say that the good things about the movie were, Rajkiran’s per­for­mance and well… At least I tried.

Mr. Smith: And when the crit­ics try to tell you the movie was well-made and touch­ing, please laugh.

I’d like to go on record that this review is not totally mine, and please don’t accuse me of snob­bery. I love you all.

Cross-posted at teakada.

I have been called a DUMD ASS(sic) on this very blog by an irate com­men­tor that thought I was being snotty when talk­ing about Indian movies. Now to be hon­est with you, one part of my brain would like me to think the com­men­tor was a nubile young lady who had very, very strong feel­ings for me. But y’all know this quite well: I am a real­ist and such balder­dash can­not delude me that eas­ily. I will read­ily con­cede that her feel­ings for me weren’t very, very strong.

So any­ways, in def­er­ence to my secret (but not very strong) admirer, I will restrict myself to a strictly objec­tive, fac­tual reportage about this movie called Sivakasi. It is in Tamil, and it stars an actor called Vijay. What? Ok, sure. I will defer to the spirit of this report (objec­tive, fac­tual) and revise the last sen­tence. It is in Tamil, and it stars a per­son called Vijay.

Close Shaves:

A group of peo­ple headed by a guy called Palan­quin Pandi sur­round another group of peo­ple. After a series of scuf­fles, Palan­quin Pandi’s group reveals their motive — they want to know who heads the other group of peo­ple. “Fairly easy ques­tion,” I thought to myself. Reg­u­lar movie watch­ers know what would hap­pen next: The hero will come up to Palan­quin and punch him a few times, and then look at the cam­era­man and inform him that he heads the group, and owns their hearts. Cue a song.

Now imag­ine my hor­ror when the scene unfolded dif­fer­ently — some­one that did not look like Vijay at all duly stepped for­ward, applied gen­er­ous amounts of ash on his head and moved his hands up and down. “This guy, hero?”, “Oh no!”, “What the ..” were the thoughts that ran through my mind. The guy then used sev­eral long sen­tences and clever place­ment of a title card to inform the cam­era­man that the hero was wise and strong and that he was the direc­tor of the movie. I am not sure Palan­quin got the point, but I heaved a sigh of relief. Phew.

What hap­pens to the losers on Jeopardy?

Dad A com­plains to Dad B that Dad B’s son tried to rape his daugh­ter. Dad B is very angry, and tries to beat up his son with a stout object. After a cou­ple of blows that didn’t land that well, Dad B asks his son if he is indeed his son. The bemused son asks the dad to check with his mom. Unable to stand this ques­tion, dad promptly dies. Hard ques­tions can kill.

What a total waist?

Music Direc­tor Srikanth Deva in a cameo appear­ance shakes his enor­mous waist to the beats of Maama Un Pon­nai Kodu, an old Illa­yaraja number.

Actress Nayan­thara in a cameo appear­ance shakes her enor­mous waist to the beats of a song I can’t remem­ber. Com­ing to think of it, I am not even sure it was a song, but the waist was enor­mous. She is now a cabalite.

Best Song in the Movie:

Music Direc­tor Srikanth Deva in a cameo appear­ance shakes his enor­mous waist to the beats of Maama Un Pon­nai Kodu, an old Illa­yaraja number.

The rap-like song (wanna, shake it, s to the i to the blah) that plays in the back­ground. Music can be mirth­ful too.

Movies can edu­cate too:

A male human being is defined as some­one that:

a. Falls in Love with a girl.
b. Mar­ries the girl.
c. Sleeps with the girl.

Any change in the order of events is not accept­able. What will hap­pen to such peo­ple though? I want to ask some­one, but I am afraid it might be a hard question.

Chicks will dig this:

Sev­eral (male) actors show off their thighs dur­ing fight sequences. I even detected a glimpse (or three) of under­gar­ments. Sorry, no thongs though.

Biggest expense item:

The amount of ash pur­chased for the movie. The good guys show their good­ness by apply­ing gen­er­ous amounts of it on their foreheads.

Sec­ond biggest expense item:

The amount of kum-kum pur­chased for the movie. The good guys show their good­ness by apply­ing gen­er­ous amounts of it on their foreheads.

Dia­logues heard the most:

“Start the car!”

“Beat that guy!”

Decrease most noticeable:

Quan­tity of clothes worn by Asin over the last few movies.

Increase most noticeable:

The num­ber of times Vijay speaks to the cam­era­man. They must be close friends.

Opti­mism:

Majaa will be bet­ter. Surely.

Impos­si­ble:

The opin­ion of my dad — reli­able critic, born, brought up and liv­ing in India still. Both movies are bad, Majaa is a tad worse. Such depths exist?

Cross-posted on teakada.

Let’s call this guy Krishna, because I don’t know what his real name is. He is an assis­tant direc­tor in Tamil movies, and like every­one else employed thus, his life is

a) cur­rently very mis­er­able.
b) cen­tered around dreams of mak­ing it big some day.

One day, Krishna says, he got to meet the head of a large pro­duc­tion house. After com­pli­ment­ing the head of the large pro­duc­tion house on his mag­nif­i­cent pecs (you can be a hero saar!), Krishna went on to nar­rate the screen­play of his dream movie to the guy. The nar­ra­tion went well, Krishna says, and the head thanked him and told him he would keep him in mind for his next movie.

A few months on, the large pro­duc­tion house announces a big bud­get movie. And won­der of won­ders, Krishna says, it is based on his screen­play. So he approaches an arbi­tra­tion body. The hear­ing went like this:

“Mr. Krishna, you claim that this movie is based on your screenplay.”

“Sir, yes, sir.”

“Can you prove it?”

“Of course sir. I will nar­rate the screen­play line by line right here.”

Pro­ceeds to nar­rate it.

“That’s pretty good. But you could’ve just sneaked a peek at it when it was lying around some­where. Got more proof?”

“Sir, yes sir. I will now tell you exactly when and where I nar­rated the screen­play to the head of the large pro­duc­tion house.”

Pro­ceeds to tell them exactly when and where he nar­rated the screen­play to the head of the large pro­duc­tion house.

“And that’s proof? Give us some­thing more con­crete man.”

“I will go to the tem­ple of your choice, light some cam­phor and swear in front of the deity of your choice that it is my story. I dare you to ask the head of the large pro­duc­tion house to do the same thing sir.”

“Holy cow, that is irrefutable proof. Let me call the head of the large pro­duc­tion house and set up the showdown.”

Other mem­bers of the arbi­tra­tion com­mit­tee nod sagely.

No not 55-word story that ran over, though I wish it was. This came straight out of this story from an online news­magazine. Link (in Tamil). The only part I made up was the line about the arbi­tra­tion com­mit­tee mem­bers nod­ding sagely.

I believe this legal strat­egy has a lot of poten­tial. For starters, I sent an email to Mr. Banville today claim­ing that The Sea was my work. I’ll even go to a church if he wants me to.