Ship of Theseus Review

 First things first, this movie is a must watch and it should be done at the earliest, for two reasons

1. The movie is a brilliant piece of work.
2. It runs only a few shows in Satyam Cinemas, in the whole of Chennai.

  Now coming to the other details, its better for the 'mass crowd' to know what this movie is all about.

• This movie has no popular or even known names in its crew except for a dash of Kiran Rao reference.
• There are no cinematic fights.
• There are no songs.
• Most of the time there is no background score.
• This is not a cinematographic visual treat.
• The languages spoken by characters include Arabic, Sanskrit & Swedish and of course Hindi & mostly English.
• There are sub titles in English. 
• There are no duets or dream sequences.
• There are no flashbacks too.

Also there are certain other things which might interest a few or maybe add on to the previous list for some others.

• The movie is so real that one can venture out to find scores of such people | stories in real world.
• One will realize that vision does not necessarily have to result in glee for the blind.
• One waging a war against cruelty cannot survive to win the war without endorsing it some point if their life is at stake.
•  Life's fulfillment is just not about money or one's own self but something subtler and yet larger than life. 

 This movie has a lot of not-to-be-missed conversations that convey quite a number of hard this-is-how-one-has-to-be facts in different ways.

• The ones between Aliya Kamal & Vinay has a lot of subtle and yet valuable relationship related takeaways. 
• All of those conversations between Maitreya & Charvaka are absolute delight to listen to with each of it touching the highs of logic to philosophy and even spirituality.
• Lastly the single conversation between Navin Parnami and his grandma is soul stirring that changes purpose of the character of Navin altogether thereafter.

Bottomline

I would like to quote Anand Gandhi on this - "The three short stories evolved to fill in the three corners of the classical Indian trinity of Satyam-Shivam-Sunderam (The pursuit of truth, the pursuit of righteousness and the pursuit of beauty)" and the movie indeed serves an answer to the famous paradox.

Mariyaan Review

    Mariyaan (Tamil: மரியான் Mariyāņ; English: The Immortal) just as a title & poster gives the first set of clues about the movie.

• The hero is immortal ( to differ from other hero immortal movies tamil movies, guess they have titled it here explicitly).
• Since its a name less heard off its either the hero's name or he would be fondly called so.

Next the tech-crew of the movie created another palpable expectation

• Bharat Bala of Vande Mataram fame is the debut director of the movie.
• No doubt A.R Rahman being the music director for the movie, after many years of having worked with Bharat Bala.

For this script Bharat Bala wouldn't have needed to break his head on who the protagonist is but just decide when the dates of Dhanush are available because

• The script demanded a non-heroic commoner-like established actor.
• Dhanush has already pulled off umpteen such movies with ease and he is the safest bet for this.

Why the hero from a poor coastal village?

• Pity on Dhanush's character has sold easily many a time before.
• We already have going abroad for meagre jobs, terrorism & coastal hamlets based standalone movies as well and two of those three combined ones too and hence to make one as a first of its kind the director seems to have chosen a coastal poor boy taking up a job abroad being kidnapped by foreign terrorists.

The hallucinations

• The movie had quite a lot of it like the hero's friend dreaming of hero and heroin hugging each other to hero eating non existent food.
• Each time the hero thinks of his girl, she comes and even performs a duet with the hero.
• We get the drift that the hero is inspired by his love for his girl however the heroin recurrence in the movie has really spoilt the flow and pace of the movie.

The uncommonly common hero

• As stated earlier, the hero is pictured as a common gutsy local guy. However even at times of captivity, the hero does not show any fatigue & dehydration to the extent any normal guy would have shown.
• The villain kills anyone but the hero only to get killed by the hero later, an outright tradition right from James Bond movies to Tamil movies.

The ever-b[l]inding LOVE

• Off all the people in the entire village, the dusky heroin only falls for the skinny hero cos that's what her love is destined to be.
• The conversation with heroin's father, who quotes 'For every achiever there should be a girl involved with him' sparks the love in hero's mind and he reciprocates his love and the heroin of course gleefully gears up for duets.

The Sudan terrorists & the kidnap fiasco

• The depiction in the movie could be termed as one of the most imaginative portrayal of terrorists in any movie seen before. 
• The highlight of it was the scene where the terrorists ask Dhanush to dance and he does a gig which sways between reality and his hallucination. I just wonder why the director clings to such unimaginable stereotypes.

The GREAT escape

• The hero pulls off a great escape without any sense of portrayal in the movie of how he figured out which way he was heading and how he survived without food and water especially for so many days together in a region of inhuman desert terrain.
• The Cheetah part is a must watch and no clue why its place in the movie is justified.

The climax

• The villain finds an almost dead Dhanush however still he does not kill him instantly (just like how he did to the other captives)  because he is the hero remember?
• So its a typical bashing of the villain followed by his death and what was surprising was the 'king of the ocean' who survived the harsh desert, lose out his fatigue and is washed off lying like a dead meat.
• The following five minutes showcases incidents which an English movie would have taken an entire movie to showcase.

Bottomline:

    In his quest for keeping the hero immortal (மரியான்) the director stabbed the audience so many times that they are either dead or seriously injured.

God, Religion & CBC | An Opinion Poll

             It is always interesting to get to know viewpoints of people when it comes to opinions and thoughts about god or religion or anything related to that. Hence on this  context I decided to test waters with the 200+ folklore of the highly active Chennai Bloggers Club members. The challenge taken up was to post six question related to the topic at hand. 

Here's what unfolded...

Some simple stats to start off

Total respondents: 66

Total responses polled: 120

Highest polled question: 'Do you believe in God?' .

Least polled question: 'Do you vouch for / against the belief in god or religion, to people?'

Now the detailed question-wise stats

 

     One strong opinion noted was that many of those who believed in god did not believe in religion and I leave the other such complex stats that could be derived out of the permutations and combinations of these, to your imagination!