Movie Review

This piece was written in the last quarter of 2009, prior to the commencement of the periodic infliction I regularly make on this unfortunately captive audience, in the name of blogposts.  I chanced upon this now and wondered why this group and posterity should be deprived of yet another dose.  So, here it is.

In the past, my routine prattle had never included a commentary on or review of a movie.  But, there is always a first and I decided to add this genre to my repertoire, after seeing Kandasamy (Tamil).  If you wonder what was it about this movie which provoked me to wade into unchartered waters (i.e movie review), let me clarify it was definitely not any extreme emotion like agony or ecstasy – the film was not sensible enough to evoke anything but incredulity that there are producers who sink money into such ventures and also that there are dumb and docile lambs like us who are regularly led to slaughter on the altar of such cinema!

When I found out that some rabid Tamil movie buffs in the community, undoubtedly in the mood for self-flagellation, were intent on watching Quick Gun Murugan, I hastily read the reviews of the movie and found out that it was best left in the theatres which we have neither the desire nor hope of visiting.  But who can contend with fate??  I very casually suggested to the group that we may want to try Kandasamy.  Someone demonstrated unusual alacrity in getting tickets and lo and behold, we were herded into two cars and taken to the multiplex.  It began well (am not referring to the movie) with a visit for a good cuppa, but I was startled to see the hungry look on  the face of some members of the group.  They were ogling -  no, not what you think -  at the foodstuff on display in the cafeteria with greedy eyes and the mystery was solved when the disclosure was made that the hurried departure from homes had meant their foregoing that nourishing, nightly repast called dinner.  We should have taken the cue and fed them before going into the theatre.  We collectively lacked that kind of wisdom and ignored their pleas for anything consumable; and that was the second mistake we made (those perceptive readers among you would have, by now, deciphered  what the first one was!).  Feeding hungry mouths at that time would have resulted in two major benefits.  We would have avoided some 15 minutes of the movie - a major moral victory for us, with commensurate reduction in the pain absorbed by us.  Second, we could have eliminated all the disruptions that followed during the movie in our vicinity.  As it turned out, I felt very dejected by the time we were finished with the movie, because the entire show was punctuated by people on both flanks passing various eatables to and fro, despite muttered objections from some of us.  I dont know about the others, but I felt cheated, not because the movie was great  and we missed out on parts, but because these extraneous activities impinged on the visual treat the director was dishing out, concentrating entirely on the backsides of various cast members.

I confess I am given to hyperbole and there is a bit of that in this, but let me assure that the movie showed us more of the leading lady’s derriere (dont rush to book your tickets yet, that part of her anatomy was dressed adequately) than her face.  Then I recognized the diabolical intelligence of the director in this choice - one could not but agree with him that he had a reasonable chance of making her emote a little with her bum and none at all with her face.  I think he achieved his goal and that explains why there was so much of backsides in the movie.  But then the director erred, grievously in my opinion, when he chose to extend the experiment and included a host of other derrieres (the hero, the comedian and some others).  That soured the pitch for even the most avid bum-watchers because there was only so much of this activity you could take in one sitting.  We had to put up with a cross-dressed hero wiggling his and the comedian --------- oh, let me not get into the gory details! There could be two other major complaints about the movie - that it is very long at 3+ hours and that at times it gave us a distinct impression of being in a zoo, what with the hero preening like a cock half the time and the heroine singing `meow meow poonakutti' or something as enchanting as that.  The songs were eminently forgettable and the comedy track, terrible.  The hero tries to `act' a bit, but then the director would have none of that; he manages to pack his face in a mask half the time, to successfully thwart any serious attempt at histrionics. 

A few days later, while we were recovering from this onslaught of a movie, I read some other reviews and was shocked to find hat it was rated, ahem, a success/hit.  One review praised the director for using technology to create the super-hero movie effect.  We saw a couple of laptops, some mobile phones, a winch and a whole lot of rope (to help the hero with vertical and horizontal movement a few feet above ground) and some fireworks.  That was technology?  Someone wrote that it was a great treat for the `youth'.  That bit was on the coin.  Surely this critic was referring to the same feature that caught our attention in the movie!!   In balance, my sympathies were with those group members who had to see that movie without dinner. Some of us at least had a good meal to brace ourselves before we went thru the wringer!!  If the producer is looking to retitle the movie to be in line with those seedy, Malayalam movies in the 70s, he can run a competition and would get a load of very appropriate responses.