Five Revelations at Amma Unavagam

    
        Dining for many is an act to fill one's stomach and get going to carry on with their other daily chores. However it is more so an experience that is lived through each time for a few. A recent dining experience at Amma Unavagam (The state-run catering service) made a long lasting never-felt-before experience.

• #5 - The only place where people from all walks of life can 'technically' dine under one roof.
• #4 - No one ever serves food or water for 'that extra' tip.
• #3 -The sanctity of food being a necessity is felt higher and very minimal to none is wasted.
• #2 - One can come alone and still be able to make up a community dinner of the sorts out of it!
• #1 - There are no fine prints on the pricing which would unknowingly rob you of your money in the name of taxes and charges. 

       It is surprisingly true that very little to none as stated above are possible even in the wildest of dreams in any of umpteen 'classy' restaurants that exists in the city.

        It is indeed true that there are questions raised on the loss incurred to the government in the long run. Well what's there if the government loses some of its budget in the noble of providing cost effective meal to the needy?

The Lunch Box Review

 

           There are times where the movies are enjoyed just because the popcorn turns out to have extra butter. There are a few other times where the movie has a lot of food for thought that one never gets hungry down under. The Lunch Box truly befits the latter. For a Hindi illiterate person this was my first Hindi movie in a theater in more than a decade and must admit that the trailer won me over in first place.

• Firstly, one must appreciate the director for having showcased a six sigma organization's THAT ONE fault in all of a million transactions. 
• Secondly, reality neither has a specific hero introduction and nor typically a climax sequence and that is precisely what you can expect.
• This movie is about relationships and its issues, of those with some grey on their heads.
• A non-cliche at-home wife, who handles emotional blows with believable contemplations and level headed approach.
• A story having those who started as orphans to those who became orphans.
• Characters are cast sparingly and all that is unnecessary has been trimmed down including one who does not a voice as well as a voice which did not need a face.
• Lastly, the movie closes and not ends in a sense leaving it wide open for the audience to contemplate!

Bottomline:

      It's a three course carrier meal in a fine dining experience sans the need for extra spice or the digestive mouth-fresheners!

Thanga Meengal Review

    
              The expectations were that this would be a kind of genre already explored in 'Abhiyum Naanum'.  This movie did that precisely just we have to assume that Prakash Raj was poor and Trisha never grew up! 

The PROs

• The story line is the biggest plus for the movie and highly needed for this 'lost-track-of-what-education-really-is' society.
• The ensemble cast of fresh faces execute with deftness & conviction.
• The childish dialogues or conversations that gets nostalgic (at least for some).
• The background score is laudable, great to see Yuvan befitting the Maestro's calibre for once.
• The visuals are breathtaking & 'Anandha Yaazhai' is a must watch not-be-missed song.

The CONs

• The protagonist seems to be just another version of Kattradhu Thamizh Jeeva, right from looks to mannerism and character, unless it is a deliberate decision. 
• The second half of the movie was quite a stretch with respect to the screenplay and I had to resort to a time check.

Bottomline:

      The movie is a hard nail on the head & serves as a wake up call for those who really watches the movie to take back in their lives than just being just another movie of entertainment value.

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!

Settai Review

           When it comes to remake there are many good directors (read CON Review), however there are only a few with great talent because it only takes a great talent to make a sensational hit out of remaking a flop as well as making a fantastic flop out of a box office breaker & those who had seen or even heard of the original would know it!

Here's an attempt to reconstruct what (probably) went in the minds of the producers of this feature film.

1. Buy the rights of the original.
2. Check with Aamir Khan on his budget for producing the original and fix half of it or even less for the remake.
3. Also ask them if they still have the set they used for the original and preserve whatever is left of that and use it.
4. Make sure the movie is made in front of the eyes of the producers (hence shot in Mumbai).
5. Replace just the main cast of the original.
6. Assume that the Tamil audience are grown up 'kids' and henceforth remove the adult-content aspects ( a.k.a the reasons why the original was a resounding success). Its like remaking a Shakila movie and without her so that the movie would henceforth be a 'family entertainer' and of course the CBFC would silence certain mouthing here too.

Bottomline: 

      This movie could have reaped similar resounding success had it retained the selling point of the original. It ends up as a cheap 'adulterated' shitty (literally) movie with Santhanam bringing a little respite here and there.