Thamizh padam
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To paraphrase a line from Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel in reverse, Coolie gets plenty right, but not where it counts. Less action, more drama would’ve made this a lovely action-drama.
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An entertaining morality tale that works off an uncommonly intelligent script. Capra and Hirani would be proud.
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A largely unnecessary film whose third act could’ve been subsumed into the first film and created a thing of beauty.
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A lovely premise and some great ideas are let down by writing that isn’t willing to follow these leads to the dark and wonderful places they could go to.
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My friend Praba Ram and I had a lovely discussion about Maharaja, and it brought up a number of interesting points, some of which I felt merited a separate blog post. VERY SPOILERIFIC, so don’t read this unless you’ve watched the film or don’t plan to. First, the dustbin. My first thought was that it
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Nithilan Swaminathan’s Maharaja is a curious film. It does a heck of a lot to earn your admiration, but very little to earn your emotional involvement. It is thanks to a magnificent Vijay Sethupathi performance that the latter quality is not to its detriment.
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A boy is brutally thrust into adulthood when his parents go missing and he has to care for two younger brothers and an infant sister. When you see him as an adult, he appears to be a man whose expends so much energy suppressing his rage against the universe and doing what is required for
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A few weeks ago , when my daughter asked me to tell her a bedtime story, I narrated Peter Bischel’s A table is a table to her. Bedtime isn’t exactly ideal to introduce a preteen to existential angst (2 pm on a Tuesday afternoon works better, FYI), so I tried to lighten the tone a
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Statutory warning: Here be spoilers. For more or less the entire first half of the film, I was transfixed by Leo. The writing is clean, the screenplay flows like water, the action is well shot, and Vijay finds another gear I didn’t know he had. The opening stretch involves a stunningly shot and edited encounter
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There is an exchange between Muthu, the protagonist and Paavai, the girl he is interested in sometime early in the second act of the film. She asks him where he is from; he replies with the name of his hamlet, and adds, by way of clarification, the name of a slightly larger place it is
24 frames per second 