Thamizh padam
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Assorted musings on Mahaan, a very interesting film that unfortunately doesn’t work as well as one wishes it had. This piece is likely to contain some spoilers, so don’t read it unless you’ve watched the film, or don’t plan to, or don’t care if someone puts out spoilers. Karthik Subbaraj seems to have made a
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Two viewings and a lot of thinking about Super Deluxe later, all I know for sure are two things: a. Thyagarajan Kumararaja has made a great film, and b. He’s definitely messing with us.
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On the choices made in telling stories about characters with baggage, in Vada Chennai and Chekka Chivantha Vaanam
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Petta functions wonderfully as a supercut of Rajni’s filmography, set to old தமிழ் film music. The Mullum Malarum references abound, obviously – with a name like Kaali, that’s almost a given. One of them comes right at the end and is an absolute beauty. But there are so many others that much of the pleasure
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One of the now-inevitable sideshows that accompany most big releases is the group of people objecting to something in the film and taking their grievance to court. Sometimes it’s religion (Kevin Smith’s irreverent religious comedy Dogma comes to mind), sometimes it’s the depiction of real life personalities (too many to count), sometimes it’s the misrepresentation of government
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Please, please go watch this film before reading my blog post. What an amazing, amazing film this is! I didn’t get to see it during its theatrical release, and I had the dubious fortune of being laid up with an infection on Deepavali evening, so it was just me and the TV at home. (Not
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Consider the prefix “Once upon a time in” that is affixed in the English subtitle that appears during the opening credits. Here’s a director who has pretty much announced, right at the start, that he’s attempting to do to the bylanes of a fisherman’s slum in North Chennai, what Sergio Leone did to Manhattan’s Lower East
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There is a long, unbroken take early in Kaala that serves to introduce the eponymous character’s family. It ends with some playful banter between a few characters, after which you get The Song. (You know, the one that’s a paean to The Hero and has been such a staple of big-budget hero-centric Thamizh cinema that,
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Okay, let me get this out of the way: I went to see Mersal because I had heard that Vadivelu was in it. Thirty seconds into the film, I felt like I had received my money’s worth. He doesn’t get a full fledged comic role or a parallel track, just a regular supporting role with
24 frames per second 