Thamizh padam
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On the WTFiness of my experience of watching Spyder
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While I was watching Vikram Vedha, the author whose work kept coming to mind was Ed McBain. The film is structurally interesting — the cop and the gangster are cast as Vikramadityan and the Vedalam, and the latter narrates his story to the former as a series of moral conundrums. Each story peels off a
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Baradwaj Rangan’s series of interactions with contemporary Thamizh directors on Film Companion reminds me of nothing so much as Sidney Lumet’s Making Movies. When Al Pacino introduced Lumet as he was awarded the Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement, he said, “The director directs.” But what does that entail, exactly? This is the question that drives
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There is a scene at the beginning of the third act of Kodi when Dhanush’s mother, played by Saranya (she must, by now, consider this role about as routine as brushing her teeth) has a conversation with a major character. She starts off saying that she is not happy with what her son has become,
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Warning: Here be spoilers After a more-or-less obligatory, yet absolutely rousing introduction to its eponymous hero (Rajni pretty much defines the word ‘swag’), Kabali parachutes us into the middle of a plot that has been unfolding for over twenty five years. We hear names of characters, get snatches of dialogue and flashback scenes that tell
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After an intriguing opening sequence, Thani Oruvan settles down to the serious business of making us want to throw up. There is only so much hero glorification nonsense that I can take, and this film reaches that quota in fifteen minutes. It’s not that the guy isn’t smart, or that the tricks he uses to
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Now, it’s no secret that this is one of my least favourite Mani Ratnam films. He got some things gloriously right, but I found it a touch too melodramatic, the kids a touch too annoying (and I wasn’t much older when it came out), the Revathy character a touch too whiny… I didn’t walk away
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Let’s start with the meet cute at a church wedding — it is a rom-com after all. They recognize each other from a brief glimpse at the railway station some days ago. They’re sitting on opposite sides of the aisle, so their initial few lines are whispered and mimed. He asks her for her phone
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There is a lovely line in Anushka’s inner monologue right at the beginning, when she finds herself meeting, in her own words, the most handsome man she’s ever seen, while vomiting on a plane. Love and nausea, she says to herself. She likes the sound of that. It doesn’t quite have that ring in Thamizh, she
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Writing a good screwball comedy sequence is like solving an n-body problem in Newtonian mechanics. But tougher — physics doesn’t have to worry about making you laugh. My favourite by far is the one towards the end in Michael Madana Kama Rajan where pretty much every other Kamal Hassan character is pretending to be Madan. But a more
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