Category: Tamil Cinema

Richie: Review, of sorts.

Ulidavaru Kandanthe was a film that was deeply rooted in the culture and life in the coastal belt of Karnataka, in the vicinity of Udupi.From the painted tigers to Yakshagana to tales of Madhvacharya and sunken treasures, the Rakshit Shetty film had all the makings of a cult classic.Shetty himself has gone on record that he had Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction on his mind when he was writing the film, the glowing,mysterious content of the bag in Ulidavaru is an obvious reference apart from the non linear narrative and names of characters.Shetty delivered an inimitable performance as the central character too.So when Nivin Pauly announced a remake of UK he had a task cut out for him and was a bold decision too I’d say considering the fact that he chose to make the film in Tamil.Listening to him speak on air the day before the release i had the impression that he had no illusions whatsoever that he could beat or match Rakshit Shetty’s work.The Richie bashers are barking up the wrong tree too early, i have to say.

Nivin Pauly’s Richie is a diluted version of Rakshit Shetty’s UK but not a bad one at that as some of the opinions doing rounds online would have you believe.Though the teasers and trailers might have sent out wrong messages to a wider audience, those who had watched UK must have had their apprehensions early on about the kind of expectations they would generate amongst Nivin’s audience and this could be one reason why some of the viewers who went in looking for an out and out actioner ended up disappointed.If Pulp Fiction were to be released in theaters in our part of the world, how many of us would actually hail it and obsess over the tiny details that make it a film worthy of its cult status, except for the connoisseurs?In fact Ulidavaru Kandante was more of a critical success than a commercial one and found a following amongst film lovers beyond the barriers of boundaries and language.

Comparisons to the original apart, Richie as a standalone work of art is indeed noteworthy in terms of making and performances but then again the comparisons are inevitable and is something Nivin and crew would’ve to just live with.I’d go so far as to say that the Raghu bit here in Richie felt more realistic than the one in UIidavaru.UK, true to its Pulp Fiction roots offers no explanations for the incidents that unfold on screen and leaves it to the audience to figure it out for themselves unlike Richie which chooses to make it easier on the audience to follow the narrative and the fate of the characters.Nivin Pauly admitted beforehand that he had a tough time dubbing in Tamil and he has a done a pretty decent job here,considering.Diction and delivery is something he would want to work on, in the long run.Sraddha Srinath is in her elements here too. To compare Natraj Subramaniam to Kishore is as unfair as comparing Nivin Pauly with Rakshit Shetty but that’s not saying he’s not up to the task, just putting things in perspective here, for the benefit of the detractors.Democracy unfortunately is reduced to comic relief here.Richie might not be for you if you’re looking for a Nivin Pauly vehicle with all the ingredients of a regular Tamil action movie, but that’s not what the makers have intended here either.Uprooting UK from coastal Karnataka and bringing it over to Tuticorin is no mean task and Nivin Pauly and team I must say have been fairly successful at that.
#ആമാണ്ടാപേപയല്ലേ #richie

Solo: The Review.

Solo.Another experimental film by Bejoy Nambiar.Any of us who’s ever been inside a chemistry lab knows that the thing with experiments is that they tend to go wrong, even the most meticulously planned ones.Bejoy Nambiar has chosen to tread an unconventional path right from his debut film, Shaitan.I must admit i liked even the flawed Wazir in bits and pieces but mostly for the sheer presence of Big B.When Nambiar here joins hands with Dulquer Salman expectations were to skyrocket obviously.Here too you’re divided as a viewer between the actor you like and a director who doesn’t live up to his reputation.And it takes a special kind of buff to choose Solo over The Foreigner and the Blade Runner sequel.So I guess disappointment and delight were always looming on the horizon hand in hand and you had no other choice but to trust Nambiar to usher the right sentiment in.

Solo is an anthology of four shorts which are supposedly based on the four elements water, wind, fire and earth.Though I’m yet to figure out how the characters and the stories are linked to the elements, i think i have managed to figure out the title.Solo, i believe is about four stories where the protagonist ends up alone in life, hence Solo, unless I missed another cue.Nambiar starts off with what to me was weakest of the stories and what must have been the toughest of characters to tackle for DQ.He ends the anthology with something which is the most entertaining and the most senseless of the four stories, entertaining because that’s when the audience came back to life after being in suspended animation since the intro of Shekar with his dreadlock-ish hair. Again im confused here because I’m not sure if the laughs were intended or not.I can live with artistic licenses and cinematic liberties but when an army cadet barges into an army wedding where the groom is a police officer to challenge him for a fist fight just to check if he’s man enough for his ex girlfriend and you see the father of the bride cheering his son-in-law to be, you get this feeling that there are alternate realities in this world that you’re still not aware of.

DQ must have had a great learning experience as an actor doing four different roles and he does deliver an earnest performance in each of them.If you ask me to pick a favorite it would be Siva because its the most subtle yet intense turn by Dulquer.One gets a feeling that he’s the only one who has really gained from this movie as an actor though it might not do that star in him much good, Solo indeed i guess.
Bejoy Nambiar tried to hit out of the park but the ball misses his guru Mani Rathnam’s yard and lands in a lot which was just vacated by Ram Gopal Varma.Relax, thats just me exaggerating

Vikram Vedha : The Review.

Vikram Vedha gives the audience a hint early on about the shape of things to come when the statutory warnings starts rolling with Madhavan delivering in English and Vijay Sethupathi in Tamil.The slick trailer had spiked expectations but these are times when you can’t but help feel that some movies should’ve been released just as trailers, once you were done watching the movie in full.So it was with apprehensions that i sat down to watch the film because it had two great actors in roles tailor made for them and i most certainly did not want their collaboration to fail for any reason whatsoever.

The first few minutes of the movie looked like an extended tribute to the Gautam Menon “police story episodes” that we’ve all come to love replete with sophisticated police officers who were as much at ease gunning down bad guys as they were at sitting down with their families for a quiet dinner. The only thing missing was the voice over narration.The senior cop on crutches was a direct reference to GVMs cameo in Kakka Kakka if I’ve not got it all wrong.Madhavan’s cop character had shades of grey which are entirely absent in GVM’s leading men though the sense of purpose and clear conscience were evident.Shraddha Srinath who made quite an impression in U-Turn makes the turn here as the equally sophisticated leading lady to Madhavan’s cop, again reminiscent of GVM movies.Well the comparisons end there, thankfully i admit.I had had enough of self righteous cops who had a tendency to break into a soliloquies at the drop of a hat too.

Madhavan more than just holds himself well early on but Vijay Sethupathy soon swaggers on to the screen and gives him tough competition in a role that he almost sleepwalks through.Its nothing less than a casting coup to pit these stellar performers in roles that not just compliment their on screen personas but their images in popular culture as well.The director-writer duo have managed to engage the viewers successfully with a plot that has little or no loose ends and some smart and real witty dialogues too but its Madhavan and Vijay Sethupathy who carries the film on their able shoulders for its entire running time.The film even doesn’t stop from mocking itself either when it unwittingly slips into cliches, most evident when Vijay Sethupathy’s character asks if abandoned industrial complexes were built for people like his and Madhavan’s characters to stage showdowns, almost echoing the viewers thoughts.

AaranyaKandam is the only other gangster movie from Tamil film industry that i can think of, which could pose any serious competition to this movie when it comes to content and execution.The film plays out like a gansgter drama and a whodunnit in the same breath and is your money’s worth just for the performances delivered by the lead actors.A cult classic in the making if you ask me, though i wonder if the makers chose to play safe by swapping mutton curry for beef fry, given the times we live in or then again it could be the Malayali in me who just can’t accept the fact that porotta was paired with anything other than beef.

Kabali: The Review

Radhika Apte deserves nothing less than the National Film Award for that single scene in the second half of Kabali.Yes, it was a deliberate decision on my part to start with her and not The Superstar or Pa.Ranjith,but that’s not to take anything away from either of them.It’s not the first time that a female actor has held her own in a Rajnikanth film either.Remya Krishna did it aplomb in Padayappa.But then again Kabali is not the regular Rajni potboiler you have been used to.
Baradwaj Rangan of The Hindu went live on FB to speak about Kabali, i was a tad late to catch up and by the time i typed up my question he had wound up already.This was before i had watched the movie and i wasn’t hearing the best of things about it.I had intended to ask Mr.Rangan how Kabali compared to Sivaji, where a director of mass entertainers and a superstar came together as opposed to this movie where a new wave director just two films old, with a totally different style of filmmaking had to deal with the star,the actor and expectations of Himalayan proportions and to answer my own question,fairly well i would say.In fact i would go so far as to say that Kabali is the most significant Rajnikanth movie to have come out since Thalapathi.
Pa.Ranjith has bravely gone where no director has in recent times and has taken Rajni along too.Ranjith deserves a round just for accepting the challenge and unlike Shankar who aspired for long to make a movie with Rajni, Ranjith as he clearly states in his interview with The Hindu, never in his wildest dreams had any such desires simply because of the fact that his style of film making was rooted in reality and in stark contrast to the kind of films Rajni had associated himself with,for the later part of his career.
A few of the initial reports about the movie went on to say that it was a typical gangster movie ,a run of the mill revenge saga.
I for one felt that the movie is anything but typical considering the popular notion of what a Rajnikanth movie should be like of late,post the Baasha years to be specific.
We get to see Rajnikanth the actor after a long time in Kabali and Ranjith has tried to marry the elements of a commercial entertainer with his kind of serious cinema without compromising his core sensibilities as a film maker.There are quite a few metaphors too,the most significant one being the shot of the flock of birds flying across the sky in the scene where Kabali steps out of the Jail door, on his release after 25 years.The movie is not without flaws, most evident in the climactic showdown between Kabali and his villains and it played out like something reluctantly written for the masses and the fans.But Pa.Ranjith had to go ahead with the sequence i believe so that he could pull off his originally intended climax, which turned out to be his riskiest and bravest move as a writer and director,something as the urban legend goes, even Maniratnam did not dare to do.Ranjith has essentially shown us that there is more to Rajnikanth than a “Lakalaka” or a “Mwehhhh” and Kabali is nothing less than a rebirth for Rajni the actor.He reminds us that filmmaking is a director’s craft at the end of the day and star power and the audience doesn’t get to dictate the rules, all the time.#Magizhchi

Visaranai: The Review.

Visaaranai is the movie you should go watch right after Action Hero Biju.Its the perfect antidote from a moviegoer’s point of view.Visaaranai is Hyde to Biju’s Jekyll,so to speak.While Biju turned the camera to the very real humane side of the police force,this movie shows that monstrous side of the system in general which mercilessly grinds everything and everyone that gets in its way to rubble ,status and stature notwithstanding.You could only be with it, against is not even an option.In fact you do not even need to be against it,as the movie based on a novel by an auto driver, drawing inspiration from his own life shows.It grabs you at will ,uses you, and then throws you away into those dark dungeons where you cease to exist as an individual,as a citizen.It is essentially a horror movie where Vetrimaran, the director will have your heart beating to the tempo of the tension that he builds on screen right from the opening scene, which rises to a crescendo at the end credits.Dinesh delivers an endearing performance along with the rest of the cast.Speaking of reality, film making and themes does not get any more real than it gets here.Not to be missed.