Naan Sigappu Manithan Movie Review

Staring : Vishal, Lakshmi Menon, Saranya Ponvannan, Sunder Ramu

Director : Thiru

Music : GV Prakash Kumar

Production : UTV, VFF, Vendhar Movies

Come to think of it, Thiru’s Naan Sigappu Manithan (NSM) is a simple revenge saga that gets interesting because of the inclusion of a rare sleeping disorder called Narcolepsy into the narrative. This also proves that there are several ways to narrate a story that has been milked dry for decades now. NSM becomes a fine example of presenting a simple story just the way you and I would have never imagined and yet feature elements that will appeal to the masses.

How does Indran (Vishal) suffering from a sleep disorder called Narcolepsy, which sends a patient to deep sleep whenever extreme emotion is experienced, take revenge against those responsible for something extremely painful in his life?

Director Thiru deserves to be lauded for a spinning an engaging thriller in which you don’t have anyone to root for. Of course, we have the hero, played by Vishal, but he keeps falling asleep every time he experiences extreme emotion. This being the case, audiences don’t even get an opportunity to cheer for a hero or their star. Nevertheless, you connect with film more on an emotional level and that is one of the reasons you won’t NSM even though it has very weird twist in the second half.

While the twist does have strong reasons that are neatly justified in the narrative, you’re still not convinced with it. This could be one of the factors many may dislike or even love the film. I, for a reason, didn’t quite like the twist and was left a little disappointed. Nevertheless, it’s a film that you would enjoy mostly, thanks to an engaging narrative and Vishal’s subtle performance.

After Pandiya Nadu, good luck continues for Vishal with NSM, in which he plays the role quite convincingly. Let’s not forget that he’s a six-footer and for someone of his height to keep falling off at regular intervals, is not easy, as each fall should also look authentic.

Naan Sigappu Manithan is not an exception thriller, but it definitely has the potential to keep you hooked for over two and a half hours.

Verdict : Not an exception thriller, but it definitely has the potential to keep you hooked for over two and a half hours

A Special Camera for Thala vs Thala

 

Fans one the leading dailies has reported that Thala is indeed playing a dual role in the upcoming Gautham Menon film. According to the report Dan Macarthur the cinematographer of Thala55 has brought in some new technologies innovations in terms of camera lens to shoot the dual role specially the acting scenes between two Ajiths.

Thala 55 shooting began officially yesterday near VGP Golden Beach in ECR where Ajith was seen sporting White shirt and blue jeans and sported a black dyed hair. The film also stars Trisha and Anushka Shetty while Arun Vijay and Aadhi play the antagonist role in the film.

Simbu(STR) Sung a song for Mahabalipuram Movie

Simbu(STR) Sung a song for Mahabalipuram Movie

STR sung a song for the movie Mahabalipuram, produced by Vinayak in which he himself plays a role.. Mahabalipuram is being directed by Don Sandy who earlier assisted Director Boopathy Pandian…

The Film has music composed by “K” of Mugamoodi and Yudham Sei fame and Lyrics penned by Yugabarathi…

The Specialty of this song is that it’s a New Year Song and expected to release for this New Year…

Biriyani Movie Review

Staring : Karthi, Hansika, Premgi

Director : Venkat Prabhu

Music : Yuvan Shankar Raja

Production : Studio Green

Director Venkat Prabhu has a rare distinction as a non-linear story-teller. Be it Saroja or Mankatha, he induced his trademark style in the narrative. In Biriyani, he took a linear route with some sparks of connecting the dots game during the climax. In all his previous outings, the master-stroke lies in the black comedy he manages to generate without going overboard. Here too, backed by some fine performances, he pulled it off with finesse. The movie is also a litmus test for Karthi after going through a lean patch in this year, and comes out with flying colors in this spicy offering.

The film explodes with a ‘Men at Work – Take Diversion’ board and the smoke trail leads to a flashback that paved way for all the comic elements in the film. The creative touch of the director is seen right from the first frame when he gives credit to himself – a Venkat Prabhu diet – on a traffic police barricade. This one is followed by a chase involving Karthi and his friend Premji Amaran. The latter narrates the story in a flashback mode. Get ready for more of ‘Flashback’ and ‘Live’ cards on screen.

Karthi is cool and goes easy on girls. It takes him few seconds to woo someone. Not only that, girls give him a rating of 12/10! Moving with him Premji sees no chance to find love as he plays spoilsport always. This attitude becomes the causative factor for a strained relationship with his girlfriend played by Hansika. On the other side, he goes to a town to help his would-be brother-in-law in his business (Heavy product placement of Mahindra can be seen here). The follow of events and his fetish for biriyani puts him in deep soup. The rest of the story revolves around how Karthi sets things right.

The first half of the film never gives an inkling of a thriller. It fills the air with comedy and romance and just when the film is inching towards the interval the film shifts gears and slips into a thriller zone. The second half is where the entire core lies in. Many creative ‘black comedy’ elements hit you in the face. Even a sad situation was not spared to tickle the funny bone. The director rewrites an unwritten rule that comic episodes can be built with many characters. Here, he uses only two characters in problematic surroundings to bring the house down.

Venkat Prabhu packs a lot of concepts in the songs. He effortlessly laces them with extra gloss to make them more appealing. In one song you can see freeze frames, underwater singing, and in the other you can feel the retro vibe. One is targeted at the front benchers and the others act as catalysts for the narration. Yuvan Shankar Raja hits a century with Biriyani, and he is credited for this at the beginning. He becomes a pivotal cog in the film’s wheel and his background score knew no bounds and blends with the proceedings. The way he conjures myriad pieces is laudable.

A few surprises come in late and you would be eager to see where the story is headed. Though the movie is replete with creative treatment, the masala staples become unavoidable. A fight sequence becomes mandatory for the hero – even in the climax when the suspense unfolds. Even some unwarranted scenes bring down the pace. The assassin / hit woman is a faint reference to many Hollywood films and some are archetypal Guy Ritchie.

Karthi has a worldly charm. He takes you through a wide array of emotions and expressions. He is playful at the start, moves into a confused zone when the film hits the midpoint; his true grit and intensity surfaces towards the end. Premji does what he is good at – make a mockery of him, and try to break the barrier of tolerance. In a finely crafted role, he complements Karthi in every act. Hansika has little to offer and lightens the screen only in a couple of songs. Nasser gets to do a comic act in the climax.

Biriyani is a taut thriller with some loose ends. The way the suspense unfolds in a simplistic way may be unpalatable. Even most of the scenes give a feeling of déjà vu. While it’s refreshing to see a film-maker refine a format, on the other side it’s painstaking that he can’t do away with force-fit commercial elements. But Venkat Prabhu must be applauded for the way he has embedded a wafer-thin story line in multiple layers of entertainment. He climbs a few notches in the ‘black comedy’ thriller genre.

Verdict : Spicy offering in a linear mode!!

Endrendrum Punnagai Movie Review

Staring : Jiiva,Trisha, Andrea, Vinay, Santhanam

Director : Ahmed

Music : Harris Jayaraj

Production : Red Giant Movies

“Endrendrum Punnagai” is not a film about the lives of three friends; it is about one despicable, self-centered and maddeningly unreasonable man who happens to have two friends. Gowtham, Sri and Baby are inseparable chaddi-buddies who run an advertising agency together. Due to his Mommy issues, Gowtham has a strong aversion towards womankind and, for some reason, expects his friends to remain bachelors for their life. Due to his Daddy issues, Gowtham is not on speaking terms anymore with his Father. Time decides to test their friendship.

Gowtham is a self-entitled prick who wouldn’t talk to his Father but continues to live in his bungalow and shamelessly drives around in a BMW which he could not have earned. I have seriously begun to wonder why Jiiva is so open to playing characters with a tendency to often be a complete asshole. I had same issues with how his character treated the girl he fancied in “Siva Manasula Sakthi”. Most people who watched theat film for just its comedy didn’t take offense because, to them, SMS stood for “Siva Manasula Santhanam”. The way his Gowtham casually disposes his lifelong friends for something so petty, “Endrendrum Punnagai” only keeps giving you more and more reasons to hate him. Blaming his Mommy issues for his unreasonable and pathetic attitude is such a convenient excuse. I sort of know what it feels like to lose a close friend, but the film offered me no reason to relate to it.

With Andrea’s Soniya and Trisha’s Priya, “Endrendrum Punnagai” glorifies the preexisting Virgin-Whore dichotomy in female characterizations in our films. While one is an absurdly promiscuous woman who hornily bites the ear of the man she met for the first time a few minutes ago, the other is a pushover in Salwar Kameez who cries for something that’s not her fault. Even within the context of its casual slut-shaming, the character of Soniya, besides being completely irrelevant to the plot, is made out to be a total bitch who halts a shooting of an ad-film in Europe for bafflingly random power trips.

In order to please the lowest common denominator, and because the male point of view is all that matters, the film continues to bash the wives for turning marriages into a living hell. One friend of Gowtham who was very much in love and hopeful before his wedding is now saying, “phone eh vai di, tortue pannatha!” to his wife of few months. Even Gowtham’s Mother is referred to as the Odi Pona Amma by everyone in the film, including his Father. Who even knows what happened there? Sri and Baby reveal to Gowtham that they got married because that was his father’s last wish. Then what about the lives of the women they are married to? They didn’t sign up for a lifetime with sexist alcoholics. Why is Director Ahmed so deeply misogynistic?

At the end, Gowtham doesn’t tell Priya that she makes him want to be a better person. Instead, he thanks her for changing him into a “nalla manushan”. It’s done and dusted, apparently. After all that he has done to the people around him, Gowtham is completely undeserving of happiness- not so soon, anyway. But because he is the “hero”, the film lets him off the hook way too easily. He makes up with his Father and even gets the girl he so doesn’t deserve. Besides awful product placements and useless America mapillais, it is the shoehorned character transformation that’s keeping this love story from rising above clichés.

Verdict – Endrendrum Punnagai is a predictable, under-achieving RomCom with a very unlikable lead character.

Vidiyum Munn Movie Review

Starring : Pooja, Amarendran, John Vijay

Direction : Balajee Kumar

Music : Girish Gopalakrishnan

Production : Javeed Khayum

Although inspired by British thriller ‘London to Brighton’, debutant Balaji K Kumar’s Vidiyum Munn is a cut above the rest of the Tamil films of the recent past. It’s bold, daring and treads a path very few films would ever attempt to walk on. Unlike several films in the same genre, VM stands out because its treatment is distinctly unique, be it the color tones or the constant use of VFX, it uses it effectively in its favour.

A hooker named Rekha (Pooja) while trying to save a 12-year old Nandini (Malavika) commits the biggest mistake of her life and flees the town. She is chased down by her pimp and his close friend, who have to produce her along with the girl in the next 24 hours to avoid being killed. What mistake has Rekha committed? Who has given the pimp an ultimatum to capture Rekha and Nandini? All this forms the rest of the story.

The film’s narrative is slow but the suspense which I think was brilliantly managed throughout the film keeps you hooked from start to finish. While most thrillers across any language tend to break the suspense right before the interval bang, VM steers away from such clichés and unveils the suspense only at the later stage of the film.

The film isn’t a frame-to-frame copy but does feature scenes that look similar for all those who may have watched the original. It’s also probably the film’s title cards doesn’t even include story, while screenplay and direction was done by Balaji. Thankfully, VM has a strong cast that holds the film together and never let its narrative pace cause much of a problem. Balaji deserves special mention for choosing actors who just didn’t act but lived in their roles.

Pooja and Malavika shine in their respective roles. While I had some issue with the dialogue delivery of Pooja, I think she made a very strong comeback. Malavika, the child artist, can indeed act and will leave you stunned with her performance.

Vinoth Kishan plays the baddie but I liked him more in ‘Naan Mahan Alla”, in which he was meaner. John Vijay evokes sporadic laughter but kind of mouths the same dialogues over and over again, and therefore, gets boring to watch after a while.

The film’s music elevates the overall visual experience of VM, which is further heightened by the fitting background score. Composer Girishh’s tunes are apt and are place at the right junctures in the film never breaking the flow of the narrative.

If Tamil industry ever aspires to make parallel films not with the intention of entertaining audiences, it should probably use VM as an example. Balaji Kumar takes a baby step film towards parallel cinema with VM, which needs audience with some intellect to watch and appreciate.

Verdict – VM is a baby step towards parallel cinema in Tamil

Kalyana Samayal Saadham Movie Review

Starring : Lekha Washington, Prasanna, Delhi Ganesh, Uma Padmanaban

Direction : RS Prasanna

Music : Arrora

Production : Ananth Govindan, Arun Vaidyanathan

Arranged Marriages are like dark clouds looming over the heads of self-respecting single people in their mid to late 20s. There’s a degree of helplessness about letting parents find the “right” partner, but there’s also this sense of inevitability attached to it. Spending a lifetime with someone you know well is itself a frightful prospect; doing the same with a total stranger is most likely to be worse. But it has been happening all around us and most marriages seem to tick. “Kalyana Samayal Saadham” is the story of a girl of “marriageable age” and a boy with a sick grandparent, who are gently nudged into matrimony by their parents.

This is not a film where the man and the woman discover their platinum day of love a year after the wedding. Here are two people who have been hitched by the family, trying to find reasons to fall for each other. Meera Chandrasekaran (Lekha Washington) and Raghu Vishwanathan (Prasanna) start “dating” after getting engaged, but it’s not until Raghu’s kind, albeit overly dramatic, gesture to help his would-be father-in-law from a sticky situation that he wins Meera’s heart. They’re just a couple of months away from the wedding and they couldn’t be happier. Right on cue, we learn about Raghu’s inability to perform in bed.

Thankfully, the film is not too uptight about dealing with a problem which is inarguably delicate. It finds the right balance between humor and earnestness. Besides helping him find a solution to the problem, Raghu’s friends (who are all very memorable) continue to pull his leg because that’s what friends do. From dubious quacks, sleazeball gemologists to reputed sexologists, they leave no options unchecked. The film creates this problem to see how it impacts Raghu and Meera’s relationship. It surely hurts them but the characters are so matured about it that it makes the film all the more fascinating.

In a scene where the film reaches its emotional peak, a dozen negligible resentments build up and come to the fore ensuing an argument. A seemingly broad-minded Raghu plays the ‘we-didn’t-make-any-demands’ card in the middle of an argument, accusing Meera of being ungrateful and thankless. She calls him a mama’s boy who is unable to stand up for her and himself, going on to call him something truly hurtful. It’s striking how the argument slowly keeps blowing bigger and bigger before things get said in the heat of the moment which cannot be taken back. At that moment, I asked myself if I wanted these two to make up and be happy. The answer was a yes, and I think that is exactly what this film was going for.

If there is one movie that gets the upper middle class Tambrahm family setting right, it is “Kalyana Samayal Saadham”. Instead of stereotypical caricatures who eat vadu-maanga/thayir-saadham and say stuff like “Aathuku varela?”, characters, here, are given these tiny traits which you instantly recognize. Like that one scene where you can clearly see inner vest sticking out from under Meera’s brother’s tee shirt. I mean, damn! I have Iyer friends who are just like that. In another scene, at a party, Raghu’s friend asks Meera whether her friend went to the KK Nagar branch of PSBB or to the Main School. It’s so heartening to such a pakka Chennai film with these esoteric jokes which someone like me can privately relish.

One of my few gripes with the film is the presence of a few vile aunties who are too intent to spread malice. They leave a bad taste in the mouth and the film could have done without those conspicuously negative elements. But on the other hand, it does good Raghav’s NRI character. There are minor structural issues near the end as the film, which was mostly rooted in reality, took a rather filmy turn. It might work for you, but I found it a bit too syrupy. Call me old fashioned but the traditional wedding was infinitely more beautiful compared to the one in the middle of nowhere.

Verdict – Kalyana Samayal Saadham is a lovely little film featuring some matured writing and performances.