Category Archives: Reviews

Aditi’s portrayal of Sameera in “Sammohanam” was effortless and graceful

Beautiful Aditi Rao Hydari from Sammohanam (Pic courtesy pinkvilla)

Let me start off with a confession, I haven’t watched any of Aditi Rao Hydari’s Hindi films except for Murder 3 few years ago. So, when I saw Mani Ratnam’s “Kaatru Veliyidai” last year, I started off with a clean slate. I was mesmerised with Aditi’s portrayal of Dr. Leela in Mani Ratnam’s rather confusing romantic tale between a fighter pilot and a MBBS doctor.

But watching Sammohanam last week further emphasised what a brilliant performer Aditi is. I don’t think anyone could have played the role of Sameera Rathod as brilliantly and gracefully as Aditi did in the film. I am not for once saying that Sammohanam is a classic, it was far from it. It was a feel-good entertainer which had a brilliant first half and a bizarre second half. The performances from the cast though cannot be faulted.

There were couple of scenes from the movie which lingers in my mind still, one where Sameera and Vijay have a conversation in the terrace and the other when Sameera hears Vijay say “I love you” in the climax and breaks down. Both those instances showed the range Aditi possesses as an actor and her ability to bring the right kind of emotion to every scene. Even in a space thriller like “Anthariksham”, which I watched yesterday only because Aditi was in it, he performance was brilliant and I really enjoyed her ability to speak through her eyes. Not many actors currently can do that.

Thanks to Mani Ratnam for bringing Aditi back to South Indian films. I am saying bringing back as she had begun her career down south in 2006 before moving to Hindi films. This is a fantastic time for female actors down south especially in Tamil. There are some strong characters being written for women by the young directors and the producers are now receptive to scripts with strong female leads. Even though Malayalam cinema has been doing this for a while, Tamil industry is finally catching up. Aditi Rao Hydari is a brilliant actor and I hope she gets more amazing characters to portray in the future. I also hope that she does more films down south as well as in a short career, she has managed to do some memorable roles here.

I haven’t still caught up Aditi’s Hindi films, and probably will do so in coming months. I just got done with her two Telugu films but her Hindi filmography is little longer, so will take a while for me to get to them. I also don’t normally write articles raving about actors on my blog but again Sameera Rathod of Sammohanam compelled me to write this and I am now a huge fan.

Vishal, producer’s council and YouTube reviews

Leave a reply

The recently concluded producer’s council elections in Kollywood was laced with lots of controversies. Like the Nadigar Sangam elections actor Vishal was in the midst of the action surrounding the election. This article is not about the elections and let me conclude by saying that Vishal was elected as the president at the end of it all. The topic I wanted to touch was the press conference the new members of the council had after the win. Vishal who is the president requested the online reviewers to postpone their reviews by few days to help the movie industry.

It was an odd request to be frank. In this day and age, asking few YouTube reviewers to postpone their reviews isn’t going to stop people from voicing their opinions on social media. If Vishal and the new members think that things can be returned back to the olden days with the reviews being postponed, they are living in a dreamland. Let us for example take 90’s as a case study. I am not a movie historian and don’t have statistics but from my experience (Since that’s the decade I am more aware of), there weren’t so many movies releasing every week. We used to wait for big festivals like Pongal, Tamil New Year and Diwali to see big star movies. Only during such big festivals we used to see multiple movies release at one go. Now coming back to the current decade, there are 3-4 movies release every week. It is even hard to keep track of what the movies are and who is acting in it.

The producer’s council should first regulate the amount of movies being made and make sure that the movie they are producing has decent content. Releasing 200+ movies in a year is not going to help the industry. Some movies which release are so amateurish that it is hard to sit through. New producers wanting to enter the industry need to be educated as to how to choose a script before investing a huge sum of money. It is always easy place a blame on a soft target such as YouTube reviewers and call them as a reason for decreasing audience in the theatres but the truth is far from it.

Reviews are personal opinions, people are free to express their opinion in any platform they want. They are the people who go and spend money to watch the film. It’s not like all films are ripped apart, movies like Managaram, 8 thottakal, Bahubali, Aandavan Kattalai, Power Pandi, Pizza, NPNK etc. all got overwhelmingly positive responses from the reviewers. This is the age of good content and if the industry is producing mediocre content, they cannot cry about decreasing audience. I am not talking about piracy here, which is for a completely different topic. People are going to look for review before watching films and that is going to continue. No one is going to stop that. Taking a family of four to the theatre is an expensive ordeal. People would want to make sure that the expense is worthwhile. When we go to a store, the first thing we do before buying a product is to look for reviews. If majority of the users of the product have given positive reviews people purchase that product. In the age of digital media, you are never going to fight that.

If the content is good most of the reviews are going to be favourable. People do look at multiple reviews before making a call and if a movie is good not everyone is going to bad mouth a film. The producers need to get together and think about what they are producing and what content is being screened to the public. If you want people to watch films, reduce the number of movies being produced, produce good content, educate new producers to invest smartly and give the films enough time to publicize their content before release. These would some of the solutions to get the audience to the theatres. By asking reviewers to postpone their reviews, you are basically saying that even if the movie is bad, since we invested, let the people spend the money like they did in the 80’s and 90’s before they found out that the content was horrible. Sorry Vishal, that is not a solution and audience are never going to fall for that.

It’s not an English writing contest

Leave a reply

My Thoughts

In recent times reading some movie reviews has become a tedious exercise. A normal movie buff looks only for certain things in a review, the positives and the negatives, performance of the lead actors and the music. Basically an outline as to whether the movie is to his/her liking or not. This information should as far as I am concerned be expressed in simple understandable language. In the recent times when I read reviews written by certain writers I feel that it’s an essay for an English literature class. The reviews are extremely complicated to understand and for sure is not in simple language.

View original post 151 more words

Great year for Tamil cinema

Leave a reply

This is not something we get to write that often. The Indian film industry is synonymous with Bollywood aka Hindi film industry and South films hardly get the recognition. 2011 in a way broke that trend and it will be fair to say that Southern Industries ruled this year. Not only did the south films (Malayalam and Tamil) dominate the National awards earlier this year but the Bollywood box office was dominated by southern remakes. It was a year when the Southern Industries got their day under the sun in India.

As far as Tamil cinema goes it was yet another great year. It was the continuation of the good work which started in 2010 and carried over to 2011. The year 2011 is when the Tamil cinema broke the language barriers and reached to nook and corner of the vast country. The year which began with Tamil cinema dominating the national awards along with Malayalam making it a very southern awards, ended with Dhanush’ s “Kolaveri Di” winning CNN international song of the year.

Dhanush was the year’s biggest star and he was part of couple of good movies this year. The biggest success of Tamil cinema this year has been the success of small movies such as “Engeyum Eppothum”. A movie which was Fox Star’s foray into Tamil cinema, sans top stars and with a new director at the helm was a super hit. Appreciation of good scripts and attempts by the audience has always been the success of Tamil cinema which was again in view in 2011.

This year had releases from Suriya, Dhanush, Ajith, Vikram and Vijay. This year also saw Ajith take over a bad guy role and pulling it off with great panache. Vijay shifted his path from masala genre and signed movies with big directors. Suriya and Dhanush once again confirmed their status as good actors. This year also marked some path breaking movies such as “Aaranya Kaandam”. A movie which received praise from all quarters was a great addition to the gangster genre. The movie did rounds in the International film festivals and won some awards.

Even though some great movies were made this year and some remakes were extremely successful in other languages, this year belonged to Kolaveri Di. The song broke the language barrier to be accepted by all the music lovers.

South cinema comprises of some of the best talents in the country and makes some wonderful movies and this year was really a testament to that fact. Hindi blockbusters like Bodyguard, ready, Singham and Force were all south remakes. The year 2012 promises to be a fine one for Tamil cinema and hopefully will have some great movies. As 2011 comes to an end, here is wishing a great 2012 for Tamil cinema and its audience.

It’s not an English writing contest

1 Reply

I sometimes cannot understand what writers are trying to prove by writing such complicated reviews. No one wants to break their head in trying to understand what is written and for sure none of the readers are here to appreciate your command over English. If your target audience is English professors and literature students then I can understand the logic behind such complex writing. I am not saying that all the reviewers are the same as there are a few who write extremely good reviews without using complex sentence formations.

It’s nice to have great command over the language but one should not lose the basic plot of the task in hand. We need to communicate things which are easily understandable even to someone who isn’t extremely proficient with the language. Writers should keep in mind as reviews are a mode of giving your opinion of a movie to an audience who just want to find out if this is something they want to watch or not. If you are writing these in your personal blogs then it is fine but when you write for a website the accomplishment of the task at hand takes the priority.