Terror on silver screen

I’ve just been to the much awaited Tamil movie with family- Unnaipol Oruvan.
While this Kamal Hasan’s version of the Hindi original A Wednesday, stays faithful to it barring a few scenes, there are some differences as well…

Unnaipol Oruvan is taut and engaging and boasts of sterling performances by Kamal and Mohanlal, though I would think Naseeruddin Shah was more intense and plausible as the ‘common man’, than the underplaying Celebrity actor that Kamal is.
Yes, it is hard to believe Kamal Hasan who has been lighting up the silver screen for 5 decades now, as ‘just one of us’ , though he wears a non descript shirt and pants without makeup.( That’s quite a break from his routine, I mean the ‘make-up’ part!!).

As for the ‘stupid common man’ as he claims himself to be is concerned, you or me wouldn’t be a ‘Communications expert’ who can scramble Police networks, make our cell-phone locations untraceable and can match wits with a computer hacker…
Hell, I could shiver with fright, just imagining talking to the Police commissioner of my City!

Nor would I or you know how to make bombs merely by ‘googling’ nor park a bomb laden jeep right by the runway of an airstrip!
We would find this all quite uncommon to do, especially with a bag laden with tomatoes and drumsticks in the other hand.

So, he is then a very bright , net savvy common man, but that is still fine.. So was Naseeruddin Shah in the original, so that’s not a big change in the remake.

But I could never figure out why he had to plant bulky black bags slyly in trains and malls all over the City and we are simply told at the end that ‘they were all empty and none had bombs’ …Kind of self-defeating exercise , especially when no one finds them in the end either. And the Director keeps you confused by repeatedly showing the Train bogie with the cop’s wife and child as if there was some big peril right above their heads…Talk of Red herrings!

But it is really the stout Mohanlal here who really betters the bald-headed Anupam Kher of the Hindi one.. This man has wonderful screen presence and is a pleasure to watch in the expressions department…
Ganesh Venaktraman who plays toughie cop Arif is damned good find too.

Shruti Hasan in maiden outing as a music director goes ‘bang bang’ rock music throughout, apart from it there is a song that goes ‘allah jaane allah’ etc sung by Kamal.

Go watch it , for Kamal has given us , the common men, a two hour glory and heroism in the face of death dance of Terrorism ..

My rating : 3.5/ 5.

Kamal’s 10 or Perumal on the Run?

Kamal’s 10 or Perumal on the Run?

It is not often that I write Movie reviews on my blog, but then ‘Dasavatharam’ is not just another movie. Or for that matter none of Kamal’s movies ever is..

It was branded as the costliest film ever made in India (Nowadays this record breaks after every new release of the superstars…), maximum no. of prints exhibited internationally, those never-before distributor rights figures and all that…

Leave the hype aside, ‘Dasavatharam’ is certainly a watchable movie, worth every penny of your ticket and incidental expenses on the day of the show. But magnum OOPS (Opus)… no, it isn’t…

In fact Dasavatharam is not just about one actor playing 10 roles…There are plenty of messages here serving as food for thought…In fact beneath its sheen and glam and SFX, it is even an intelligent movie… But that hits you only long after you leave the theatre…

The whole movie is all about a deadly virus escaped from the germ lab in US of A
(Some cooked up Robin Cook–like novel, this?) which after a convoluted international chase, gets inside a Perumal statue in Tamil Nadu and everyone is after it.. Will Perumal survive, will he in fact save Himself and his devotees or will the bad guys have the last laugh?

It’s like a mad wild goose chase and I felt the movie should be called Perumal on the run in its English version

But everyone wanted to know about Kamal’s perfect 10…To be frank, only half those 10 characters , have really come out ‘above average to good’, while the others fail to impress……

The reasons are not far to seek…I am one of those old fashioned guys who has been watching his meteoric rise since 70’s till date, one who loves to watch this veteran actor’s facial histrionics and those realistic expressions that have long catapulted him as one of the best emoters in the celluloid business . Thus it is when he goes overboard trying do to a record of sorts with 10 disparate characters of all sizes and hues.., he makes a sad a sacrifice there…

As one in my back row in the theatre observed, many of his avatars in both gender and different ethnicities resemble “chapaathi maavu adiccha maadiri moonji’ ( A mound of chappathi flour pasted on the face)… His face is ‘static’, like a stuffed mask and that is not what we wanted to see Kamal as… Like Fletcher, George Bush, Japanese and Khalifullah…

In roles that he really shines are the ones essentially where he plays them with his USP – wit and sensitivity like a Balaram Naidu or an Iyengar paati or even with his own face as the scientist Govind. He is excellent as usual in those roles though he has started looking a bit jaded and puffed up…at his age it is acceptable and even likeable..

The rest of the movie is also a mixture of very good to mediocre…

The initial episode about the sad end of a proud 12th Century Vaisnavaite priest Rangarajan Nambi at the hands of a cruel Shaivite Chola King, sets the ball rolling for what has been discussed widely in the media as the Chaos theory and its butterfly effect… (The latter part of the movie too is about the a Perumal statue in the renowned shiva shrine of Chidambaram..the irony could have been easily missed..)

Whether the sinking of a huge stone monolith of a sleeping Vishnu in the sea will result in a monstrous ‘nature hits back’ kind of Tsunami eight centuries hence is not rational although the scientist Govind is very much so, to the extent of being a an atheist… But whoever said Chaos and Butterfly are logical theories, they try to explain the unexplained and prove that some effects are seemingly implausible to contemplate…As a faithful Hindu, one could even call it the Karmic principle of cause and effect…

But what is not acceptable even as ‘Chaos and butterfly’ is how a throat cancer patient Avatar (Kamal) gets cured by a bullet though the diseased part…The Cancer Institute here might even think of buying guns and bullets for its surgeons after this movie!!

The storyteller tries to balance his approach too catering both to the rigid orthodox believers and callous non-believers by showing the humanistic angle of blood donation, Muslims saved in a masjid, and the Iyengar heroine Asin who justifies that even a ‘Tsunami was a good thing after all, as only a few died instead of millions’..

Music by Himmesh is average with just a couple of hummable numbers, and rest of the crew (other than 10 Kamals) are OK in their roles.

If record number of roles is what Kamal wanted to prove to us that he can carry off so many of them, he could have even played the jaded looking Jayaprada or the screaming shrill Asin too himself!( Asin-who goes a little over the top with constant screams of ‘Perumaale’!)…

May be Kamal, given his penchant about disguises which started from the days of Kalyanaraman till now, will treat us to being his own heroine next time around…Villain, you asked?.. Oh, he has already played it right in this movie..!

In fact Kamal should have appeared as Lord Vishnu himself and blessed all of his 10 avatars in the last frame, instead of the Director KS Ravi Kumar dancing to ‘Ulaga naayakane’ number…
Is not Lord Vishnu, the true ‘Ulaga nayaka’ here?..

No? Again conflict between Shaivaite and Vaishnavaites, did you say?

Well…all that is left now is him playing the Trimurti- Brahma, Vishnu and Maheshwara…