Stardust memories#2

The Return of the Pink Panther, aptly titled is the return of Peter Sellers in his most famous role on screen, Inspector Clouseau. Under the direction of Blake Edwards (who died quite recently) Peter Sellers made everlasting contribution to world cinema. The movie is mildly entertaining and at times very funny, but there is a nagging feeling in your head that this is one of those movies put together with random gags on the editor’s table, but I would still watch because of the fact that it has Sellers in it(sample the opening scene and his fights with Cato) who only seems to be getting better with his French.

Straight from The Return of the Pink Panther is lifted a scene into an unmentionable Hindi film called ‘Housefull’. Sajid Khan self proclaimed auteur and ‘comedian’ helms this Akshay Kumar film which has plot elements from almost every comedy movie ever made but specifically the Kamal Hassan film ‘Kadhala Kadhala’. Enough said, sensible people won’t even think about writing so much about a ‘Sajid Khan’ film.

Housefull and Break Ke Baad has one main thing in common, that being the pretty Ms. Padukone, in Housefull she plays the tourist Sandy Rao who seems to be travelling only to save the unlucky Mr. Akhsay Kumar. In Break Ke baad however she plays the ambitious Aaliya Khan, daughter of a yesteryear screen idol and the dominant half of the romantic pair which she makes up with Imran Khan. Break ke Baad is a movie which I actually liked, apart from the fact that like every other Hindi film, it was extensively shot outside India and the thought that ‘Break Ke Baad’ might have actually been made as a companion piece to ‘Love Aaj kal’ only without the flashbacks. 

Stardust Memories 1

WHEN MICE TURN TO MURDER

Or

Kinky old men

Yuddham sei(2011)

Dir: Mysskin

Wikipedia informs me that a pervert is a person who has forsaken the normal system or doctrine, the word however is used mostly in sexual parlance. In Mysskin’s Yuddham Sei perversion becomes not only the villain but also as the major force which drives the story ahead, a shade apart from the normal types of villainy which movie goers are quite familiar with, let us say goonda land grabber, politician’s brother and wayward student all of them during the course of the usual ‘potboiler’ engage in rape but only to emphasize to the audience how cruel they can be. In other words a rape is an expected and established character of the villain, and we generally assume that such an act is done as a mere whim.

JK is an officer with the CB CID, an officer who is searching for his lost sister is assigned to investigate the case of the mysterious severed hands in boxes left at various places in the city and of people who disappear even more mysteriously.

Although it is quite obvious as to who the killers might be and how the search for his sister will ultimate culminate with his present case the movie manages to cut a high notch on the small ladder known as ‘Tamil thriller’.

The insistence of style is seen throughout for example when JK battles goons on a bridge, the scenes where the body parts are found are also worth mention, the setup is very grim and keeping with the story and a supporting cast which ideally defines the term mentioned.

Director Cheran is brilliant as the ‘will only speak when required’ officer JK and brings a sense of non-filmi police righteousness and the movie also has great background score to boast about, Yuddham Sei is a very and I should say that again very serious film, it is serious because it is how the director expects it be; I’m satisfied with that. There aren’t many people who make movies the way they want to, at least not here.

Madurai-Noir

Aadukalam(2011)

Dir: Vetrimaran

I don’t think I’m right in saying that it all began with a small brilliant 1992 film called Devar Magan, but perhaps the statement is quite true, at least from the way I see it. Devar Magan can be seen as the father of this genre which can be called simply and sufficiently ‘Madurai’, the place of its origin. Devar Magan set in one of the villages around Madurai starred thespian Sivaji Ganeshan and Kamal Hassan, which again draws inspiration from Godfather and in some ways better than the renowned ‘Nayagan’. There might have been films before and there surely have been films shot extensively in the region, but this was special; the birth of a genre which can be claimed as Tamil Cinema’s own and be seen on parallels with the ‘Western’

But then there is never one single baby, population grows; sometimes we are left with undesirable children; there is also the case where the child wants to emulate the elder and there is the black sheep who goes on to create something on his own.

But we must not forget the underdog, the underappreciated middle son; who is not the younger black sheep or the elder traditionalist but something of a middle man. He takes the best of both and adds a new branch to his family and waits for the leaves to come.

Vetrimaran is one such, a rare middle son or taking the above comparison to a higher level, Aadukalam is one such rare film.

In age where every Friday there is a ‘Madurai’ film or an ‘City’ film releasing and these genres purely defined by the local slang in the former and superficial English and tightly attired models posing as ‘city’ girls/heroines.

Aadukalam, starting from the title; the film could have hoped for no better name and it perfectly fits is based on the rooster fights in the Madurai District being led by two parties Pettaikaran and a police officer Ratnaswamy, Dhanush plays karuppu who works on the side of veteran Pettaikaran along with brother -like Durai. The first half mainly deals with the preparation for the big fight and a love track between an Anglo Indian girl and Karuppu, somewhere towards the end of the first half the big fight happens.

This by itself is highly unusual for mainstream Tamil cinema, where normal and even certain divergent directors might have saved the big fight for the climax, Vetrimaran however chooses to go beyond the normal climax and explores into what really happens after an event, which gives more scope to explore the minds of the characters.

Full credit to all the actors especially Dhanush who not only gets every slang right but also every scene and so do the actors who played Pettaikaran(jayabalan), Durai(Kishore) and Ratnaswamy(Naren).

I did not like much of the music, which might because of my prejudices with the music director; the setting of the film is brilliant, after a few shots we are quite accustomed to the twists and turns in the alleyways or the space(or lack of) in Karuppu’s home.

Aadukalam is a luminary example of the Madurai genre, but it is not the typical one, the film works on two levels one being the actual rooster fight and that of the metaphor: life by itself is a rooster fight for its protagonist.

This film is perhaps Sun Pictures’ greatest contribution to Tamil Cinema and we can hope that this isn’t Vetrimaran’s last.

IN THE WINTER OF MY LOVE…..

       IN THE WINTER OF MY LOVE…..

        Being the further adventures of Hanuman Murali and friends

There will always be the girl in the shop I will never forget, she sold samosas for a living. Off Ramanujam St, the place our home was a small lane which catered to the domestic needs of the locality, provisions, soaps; chandeliers and internet centers etc.

Ross st, also had a small establishment which sold samosas, Siddhi Vinayak Samosa Shop Est 1996 existed between two cycle repair shops Balu Punctures and Ideal Cycle Repair, that’s how we boys from the local school got to make it a sort of regular haunt.

Just when I had finished school, she arrived. She was Kaka’s daughter, we called him Kaka because somebody before us had done so, typically he was the man with no name who used to cruise around in a cycle which was painted bright orange and on the top of the front light was a sticker which showed his allegiance to Hema Malini, the dream girl of yesteryears and the south Indian representation in a North Indian world of dreams.

Maybe she was younger, maybe she was older I didn’t know. Her name was Abhaya which meant fearless, I later found out using a newly purchased book at the district library called “Do you know what your name really means?” This was many years after Abhaya left and I wasn’t looking for it, so it was sort of a co-incidence when I narrated it to Murali who always read his daily papers at the local libraries.

He claimed that by buying newspapers he was paying to receive bad news, but I knew he bought every issue of Madras Jazz and read word by word of the adventures, then disowning them whenever we met.

“So you still remember her?”

Of course, people really lie when they say they have completely forgotten the existence of another person, names I can understand but entire lives is bullshit, but it was not that I was thinking about her on a daily basis, the exchanges between us were minor, and some might consider it redundant.

The maximum I could say to her “two samosas please”. Abhaya was an irritable girl, I could say now quite comfortably and fearlessly that I have never seen her face as being cheerful, mostly it would be the redness of her pointed nose which a little more sharper could be used to chop onions or the ‘U’ made by the knitting of her eyebrows. Thinking back now, if only she had smiled I could have completed the poem.

“You wrote a poem?”  The startled voice of Hanuman Murali came from between the City and the State pages of the Hindu, the answer being partially a yes. I did try to write a poem but I could never complete it, to say more of the truth I could never get past the first verse.

“Why does everybody write poetry when they are in love?” asked Murali, he then went on to say “why don’t write poems about people in angry mood, about terrorists attacks, elections etc, why is it always above love and lovers?”

“Look” I said quite sternly “I wasn’t in love, it was…”

“An attraction..?” he completed

The words attraction and infatuation are two words thrown at growing teenagers, if these words are thrown at you means that you are actually growing up, I picked up the words myself from the father of one of my friends. My friend tried to run away with his neighbor’s daughter, only to be espied by the dog Jackson (this Jackson was the neighbor’s dog, who had served in the military, I mean the dog). Later my friend was subjected to a three hour long lecture on ‘the perils of falling in love esp. with neighbors’ by his parents and I had gone to give him moral support.

They pooh-poohed his pleas of romance as mere attraction and infatuation and said he had many more years before he could choose a bride, later we used to call him Magnet, because of all this attraction, we never spoke after that. The boy later went on to join IIT Madras and married his research assistant in Mumbai in the years to come, the neighbor’s daughter too got married to a vet doctor who practiced in Botswana, Jackson however died of old age.

“So what was it that you wrote?” Murali asked

I didn’t take much of a minute to come up with the line; it was after all the first line of an unfinished poem.

“In the winter of my love…” I began with a raise in voice like a statesman in wartime and before I knew it was over. Hanuman Murali on the creaking wooden chair that the library provides for its regulars raised his eyebrows in anticipation; it took him a while to realize that the poem had ended.

“That’s it?”

“I couldn’t find many words that rhymed with love, at least at that time , I think wrote it sometime in December so hence the winter and It had quite a nice ring to it” I replied in silent protest, so convincing that Murali never spoke about my poetry or Abhaya ever again.

Feel good stories often have storylines such as the reminiscing of a lost love to instill interest in the audience, the main reason as to why these things are done is so that the audience themselves can look back at their nascent love just for a moment, and for that moment even think that how life would have changed if something had actually happened, it is storylines like these which might make people like my friend in Bombay to think how his life would have changed if they had successfully eloped. The girl in Botswana might also recall these things in secret amidst all those monkeys that her husband was to treat, as for me and as you can clearly see I’m only with a line in the poem.

But feel good stories only work in the theatre, never in real life; there is no such thing, for all I know life might have turned out worst in all the above cases. Everyone has these kinds of stories and one lost love is no different from another,it is only human nature that we tend to glorify the past. That reminds me of the day when Murali bought a cuckoo to introduce some ‘song’ in his life, but then that is a different story altogether.