My favorite clips from the movies

Been ages since I did one of those movie-music-list posts. So here we go again.

There are many times when I’ve been totally floored by just one tiny scene in an entire movie, even if the rest of the movie is quite sucky. Some scenes are very poignant, the sort of ‘defining moment’, the sort that make their point very well. Basically these scenes are the ones responsible for dramatic changes in your emotional state, the ones that make your heart stop, or race, or put a smile on your face, or make you wince and squirm, or left you speechless for the rest of the movie and gave you something to talk about to the rest of the world.

• The climax of Siraichaalai/Kalapani: Amrish Puri is the dreaded Afghan jailor in the Andamans who inflicts untold misery on the prisoners. Mohanlal has been wrongly convicted and has to serve a sentence in Kalapani. Prabhu is the revolutionary who tries to escape (and fails) multiple times and so gets the worst of Amrish Puri. Tabu is Mohanlal’s wife, who has contacted a friendly British officer who manages to get a release order for Mohanlal. Prabhu has been shot in an ‘encounter’. Mohanlal is infuriated, and wants to put an end to the brutality inflicted upon all the prisoners. The officer runs in to the prison with the release order. Just then he sees Mohanlal ram an iron rod into Amrish Puri’s throat. He screams a ‘No….’, and crushes the release order he’s holding in his hand.
• The escape scene in Siraichaalai/Kalapani: Elaborate plans have been made and executed by a band of prisoners led by Delhi Ganesh, to escape on a German steamer after blowing up the jail. Everything’s going according to plan. The sticks of dynamite are in place. When they strike matches to light them, it begins to rain.
• The scenes after Aparna and Apu are back home after their wedding in Apur Sansar. It just showed them going about their daily routine. But there was something about the way it was executed that was so poignant, that made their chemistry so palpable. There were no sweet nothings exchanged, there’s hardly any dialogue even. But you still sense the newlyweds-in-bliss feeling, something Mani Ratnam tries hard to achieve, but doesn’t quite get there. Sample: the scenes in Bombay where Manisha Koirala and Arvind Swamy can’t get their hands off each other and at the same time look so ill at ease with each other.
• The scene in Cyanide where all the LTTE militants are seeing their life flash before their eyes while biting the cyanide capsules.  That is one point when you actually feel some semblance of pity towards them.
• The one in The Prestige where you see the duplicate drowning, and then you understand how the trick is done.
• In Alaipaayuthey, where you see the opening scenes repeated near the end, after you know Shalini’s suffered an accident, and Madhavan is still unaware of that fact, and he’s teasing, joking, unaware of what is to come…
• The song Kaadhal Sadugudu in Alaipaayuthey. Seems so common, everyday, but the little details are well taken care of, leaving the larger picture to the imagination.
• The last scene in Thiruda Thiruda, where Prashant and Rehman, mercenaries to the core, are each ‘sacrificing’ the girl (Heera Rajagopal) for the other and taking the money as consolation… until she begins to yell at them, asking if they think she is something to be bargained about… and chases them out of the frame. What makes this scene all the more better is that throughout the movie, you are kept guessing as to who likes Heera, and who she likes.
• Panchathanthiram‘s penultimate scene, when all of Kamal’s friends denounce him and leave him, out of fear of their wives, and the doctor telling him right after that his wife might not live. A couple of minutes of torment, when he realizes he’s got it all wrong giving his friends priority over his wife… and then everything resolves itself in true Crazy Mohan style.
• Last scene of Aayutha Ezhuthu where the evil politician Bharathiraja congratulates Surya and his party members on making it to the Legislative Assembly. Now there’s politics, you feel like saying.
• The scene in Anbe Sivam where Madhavan says he’s scared of blood, and almost confesses as to why. He loosens his guard a bit to tell Kamal Haasan that his brother at age ten was hit by a cricket ball and bled to death before they could reach a hospital… he just about lets it slip that it was he who hurled the fatal cork ball, before his guard comes back on and he slips into denial again. Just a brief glimpse of the kid he still is, and then he’s back to being the always-unsatisfied ad-filmmaker.
• The one in Hey Ram after the riots when Kamal Haasan sees his now-dead wife’s (Rani Mukherjee’s) painting on someone else’s wall.
• Hey Ram when Vasundhara Das is singing Vaishnav Jan To when Kamal Haasan comes for the bride-seeing. She chooses a very high pitch, and her mother (played by Hema Malini) is worried whether she’ll go off key when she hits the high notes. She hits the high notes, doesn’t go offkey. Hema Malini sighs. Vasundhara looks back and gives a smile of achievement while continuing to sing. What I liked about this scene was the very perfect Iyengarish touch to it. Guess that would have to have been achieved, considering most if not all of those cast in that scene, and in the following scene of Kamal’s and Vasundhara’s wedding, were Iyengar – Hema Malini, Vasundhara Das, Vaali, Kamal Haasan, YG Mahendran.. and a few others whose names I’ve forgotten. The best touch was when a wedding guest scolds the naadaswaram player – ‘Seevadi-ya chappindirukkadaeL’… the total busybody touch.
• In The Holiday, when Kate Winslet realizes that she’s recently acquired some… gumption.
• In Keladi Kanmani, when Ramesh Arvind is rather dissed with his girlfriend for not turning up for their date on his birthday, and vents out his frustrations. She patiently hears him out, before calmly telling him that that was when she fainted, and found out after a doctor’s visit that she’s not going to live much longer.
• Balram Naidu’s intro scene in Dasaavatharam. He exudes Gultness with every atom of his being – right from accent to ringtone.
• The ‘Ek gaon mein ek kisan rehta tha’ scene from Indru pei naalai vaa. I don’t think I need to elaborate any more, because words won’t bring the magic of the scene to those who haven’t watched it, and for those who have, I don’t need to say anything further.
• I forget the name of this movie, but remember everything else about it rather well. It was produced by Sun TV, and it starred Radhika. She played a very Indian not-very-educated housewife in UK, whose husband left her for someone else, and she is left all alone, with two daughters to take care of. Vikram (of Anniyan fame) was her Indian neighbor who gave her moral support. She tells hims she doesn’t understand why her younger daughter has resumed bedwetting. He appears to share her perplexity, but just as soon as the child is fast asleep in another room, he gently asks her if she cries in front of her children. When she nods, he very politely, caringly says not to, because her children would lose their courage and begin to feel insecure. And casts a lingering look before he leaves. [Aside: This one was where Vikram looked and sounded his best IMO. Yuppie glasses, polite demeanor, formal clothes, guy-next-door appeal, and being the soothing foil to Radhika's helplessness... where the hell is this part of him gone? All he does now is some shite porikki role.]
• Madhavan and Geetu Mohandas in Nala Damayanti, in the third-to-last scene where they are telling the folks at the immigration office why they are in love and want to get married. Maybe this is not what happens in an interview for Australian citizenship, but who cares when they are spouting such sweet dialogues.
• The entire movie Avvai Shanmughi aka Chachi 420. Where do I start? Where do I end? The Hindi version wasn’t so awesome, but the Tamil one is IMO Crazy Mohan’s magnum opus. Such a well-crafted script, appealing to different people at different levels… And I haven’t seen another flick with the Iyer aspect so well-portrayed without the slightest hint of stereotyping or disdain. I can only put a few samples here.
  • Manivannan’s love-at-first-sight on seeing Kamal in disguise. The otherwise roughshod man turning into a lovesick guy who reads between the lines when a flower falls on him, or when (s)he holds his hand
  • Kamal’s deft gestures – One second he’s gesturing to his daughter on how to tune the video, and when he senses other eyes on him, he switches so deftly to gesturing his daughter to come to him. And when he’s instructing Nasser on what to say, he makes his fierce nods so impossible to tell from an innocent turn of the body when he’s feeding his daughter.
  • The scene where Gemini Ganesan is giving wads of cash to Nagesh, supposing he’s Shanmughi’s husband. So rife with pun and double entendre.. it needs to be watched to be appreciated.
  • Basically, the whole absurdity of so many men vying for an aged lady well past her prime, and so many women doubting her character being one of the underlying themes, and how well this has been treated by the scriptwriter, so well that you’ll believe it… this is what makes the movie what it is.

You might have noticed bulk of the movies here are Tamil. Understandable, considering it’s my mother tongue, and that I frequent Tamil movie channels more than others. But virtually no Bollywood movie makes it here. That was one thing that surprised me, too, considering I watch a good number of Bollywood movies too. Guess it is because most of those I’ve watched are from the ’90s, when thoughtful movies had become totally nonexistent. No single scene in a Hindi movie has warmed the cockles of my heart or made my brain cells go ‘Aha!’, or showed me a new emotion – which I’d not already seen in Tamil or Kannada or English movies, or least of all made me marvel at the well-made-ness of the scene. They might be entertaining, but thought-provoking… naaaaaah, not unless you count thoughts like “Why the hell am I even watching this?”.

Dasaavatharam – My impressions

This is coming much later than it should have. I don’t see the point of writing a review now, coz every possible point of view has been said a hundred times already on one blog or the other.

Now if you want plot and other things, you might want to peruse this, and this. Much of this might seem alien to you if you have little or no interest in the movie. If you are interested in watching the movie, this post might contain spoilers… but everyone and his brother seems to have watched this one, so I’ll give short shrift to the possibility you haven’t yet watched it. Here go my impressions on this flick.

• Don’t don’t don’t read a hundred reviews of a movie you’re planning to watch, irrespective of how high your curiosity levels are. It affects how you view the movie. In my case, I already knew about all the 10 roles, and what to look out for in each; part of the WOW effect was lost. And… you already know which avatar each Kamal is, so you don’t anymore have the joy of it all dawning on you.
• I despise the mall culture even more now, and believe these islands of high pricing should be done away with as soon as possible; Rs. 300/- per person is simply not done, so what if it’s a weekend.
• Now to the movie – it comes close to perfection. Well-made, definitely. Flaws, yes it does have them. But the plot.. ah, now that’s what is called seamless. No loose ends at all!
• The pace is real fast, especially in the first half – you turn to explain something to your cousin next to you, and snap! you’ve missed a good deal of what happened.
• The performances. First let’s see the non-Kamal ones – Asin’s okay except for the hysterics in the first half. Mallika Sherawat… ironically, the lady is totally unnecessary in this plot about how everything-is-connected-to-everything-else. Nagesh and KR Vijaya are their usual selves. Rekha (no, not Gemini Ganesan’s daughter, better known as Umrao Jaan or Mother ’98) sheds tears well in her bit role. Jayapradha looks good, shakes a leg, but doesn’t have too much to do. The Japanese lady simply captivates you with her calmness, poise, loyalty and grit to fight till the end. Napoleon as Kulothunga Chola is believable, and when Asin throws her Mangalsutra at him and he laughingly dodges it, you’ve never hated anyone else more. Heck… only this many non-Kamal characters???
• Now for Kamal. Rangaraja Nambi is slightly over the top, but a powerful performance nevetheless. Govind is stock guy-next-door Kamal. George Bush has nothing much to do. Fletcher needed more punch I felt. I didn’t like Avtaar Singh that much. Khalifulla Khan was well-etched as the dutiful son. Shingen Narahasi’s stunts are great, apart from the bits where (cliched though it might sound) his silence speaks volumes, and his Japanese is flawless. Vincent Poovaragam is a strong performance. Krishnaveni Paati was awesome. And Balram Naidu… if a role came close to being perfectly researched, perfectly executed, or just Perfect, it was this one. The accent (he speaks five languages in Telugu) was so Gulty you can’t help but marvel, and the CrazyMohan-ish dialogues have everyone in splits.
• My status message now says “In Dasaavatharam, Kamal does 10 kinds of roles – good, and godawesome“.
• Himesh sucks. He really does. Why couldn’t it be Karthik Raja or Charan or even Yuvan Shankar Raja?
• The plot, like I said before, was flawless. Kamal really deserves a pat on the back for this effort at writing a plausible storyline with so many constraints – ten characters of varying makeup requirements, ten connected stories which should all make sense together as well as have some paisa-vasool sequences… heck, nothing appears forced in this, except for ten characters played by Kamal.
• Talking of which, if the ten characters had been played by ten other people, it still would have been an awesome plot. This one beats all the other unconnected-stories-linked-up flicks hollow, including Babel and Crash. And is more believable than both put together. I’m not going to talk about the interconnectedness here, but if you disagree with that bit, do feel free to start a discussion about the same on the comments section.
• I do have a few gripes though. Asin’s “PerumaaLae!” is too screechy at times. The song in the opening sequence totally diluted the whole seriousness of the scene. The make-up is too caky for Bush, Fletcher, Paati and Narahasi. And whatever the infinite monkey theorem might state, it was still a bit too much to believe the monkey could type in the password on first try. NaCl *sigh*. And why did Naidu have to be called a R&AW official and be portrayed as a bumbling bureaucrat in the first half? Wouldn’t the CBI have been sufficient?
• The bullet taking the cancer away was portrayed more plausibly than in a Mithunda flick of yesteryear… and if it wasn’t for the popularity of that scene in extremely derogatory ways, I don’t think it would have been taken so negatively. Still, it’s one of those “Ohh.. *sigh*” scenes, along with the one where the ice boxes get exchanged.
• Some trivia: I read somewhere that the Bay of Bengal in the 12th century was home to sharks, locally known as suran. So the shark in the scene where Nambi is drowned is not just some jingchak special effect. Lazy Geek draws parallels between Sin City’s Marv and Fletcher here.
• The bits about Ramasamy Naicker and Kalaignar from Asin invoked nothing but empathy, and I suppose I’m not alone in wishing it wasn’t censored away. Various other little things… theetu, Asin singing the idol to sleep, Asin getting the shivers when she hears a wolf howl… everything about Naidu’s intro scene including the Gulty ringtone, his asking the guy named Narasimha Rao whether he’s Gult too… these are the little details that add life to the characters.
• KS Ravikumar…  heck, how can he manage to actually look not-at-all-out-of-place in a song sequence?
• You see so many flicks about love across faiths, but this is the first I’ve seen about a relationship between a believer and an agnostic.
• Someday I’d like to see a sequel.

I’d say go watch it. And if you already have, watch it again.

Of flicking cigarettes and flying bullets

I haven’t yet watched Dasaavathaaram; but I’m simply dying to… the reviews have more than whetted my curiosity. Then there’s one scene that I am very eager to watch. Apparently Kamal Haasan in one of his many roles (for the uninitiated, he plays ten roles in the movie, and no two of them are related by blood, let alone be twins, and they aren’t even doppelgangers. Why then, should one do the work of ten, you ask? Because he can… remember “yeh kitne ka baraabar hai?“?), has throat cancer, and when someone fires a gun at him, the bullet goes through his throat taking the cancer away with it. I want to see for myself how such a scene is handled with style. And if not, I would like to think about what Kamal was thinking right from conceptualizing this shot to actually filming it and canning it, KS Ravikumar notwithstanding.

Now I’m not one of those who dismiss these gimmicks; I don’t mind them too much. Quite unlike most of the general populace who do dismiss these actions for being too populist and reaching out to the lowest common denominator of the audience.

And who send email forwards saying Newton got a heart attack watching a Rajnikanth movie.

In some versions, it is Mithun-da. And there are also endless Chuck Norris facts turned into facts about Superstar. In fact, it is these forwards that make Thalaivar larger than life than his on-screen persona.

And for the veracity behind these claims… I am yet to find a YouTube video showing Rajnikanth or Mithun with two guns and an enemy on the other side of a high wall, when they throw one gun up and shoot it so that it goes off and the enemy is killed. You would imagine when folks can be jobless enough to clip videos of Gaptain Vijaykanth shock the electricity out of a generator, they would atleast upload these legendary videos which everyone talks about in disparaging, superior tones, but no one has viewed.

And these superior, cynical tones from the supposed elite… that’s the reason I’m really surprised as to why Kamal Haasan put in that bit. Because Kamal starting from the ’90s has packaged himself to be sold to the urban elite. He makes ‘thinking’ movies, or so they say, and lives his characters, and you need a classy mind to really appreciate his films, or so it is publicized. Rajnikanth on the other hand, is projected as appealing to the masses (mainly by virtue of the aforementioned gimmicks), not take pains in getting into character, plays the same roles again and again, and delivers hits mainly due to the profusion of his fan clubs.

But when you rewind to fifteen years back or more, you’ll find this is just not the case.

In the initial decades of their careers, you’ll find Rajni did a larger variety of roles, while Kamal simply played the same loverboy character over and over again. Now getting into a debate over who is better is futile, as I’ve seen in the past; but I’ll say this generalization to “actor” and “superstar” are too generic to be taken at face value.

When you take a closer look at Kamal’s recent classy movies, you’ll find that the ones that were hits were mostly comedies, and penned by Crazy Mohan (whose absurdist comedy that was the main feature of his multilayered scripts that appeal at different levels to different people, and who deserves a whole post to himself). Whenever he deviated, his films have been commercial as well as critical failures – Aalavandhan, Hey Ram are examples. A notable exception is Anbe Sivam.. though I would say the story gets predictable, the characters of Kamal and Madhavan are exceedingly endearing, and along with the situations portrayed and simple dialogues, make it worth more than a watch.

But I guess selling Rajni-saar as the darling of the masses is a money-minting exercise, because that packaging chooses not to alienate the masses while not really turning away the ‘classes’, most of who have grown up watching Thalaivar in myriad roles right from their childhood, be it the rip-roaring Thillu Mullu (remake of Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Golmaal, with a guest appearance by Kamal), Billa, Johnny, Gayathri or Netrikan. Ask these same people to name earlier films of Kamal that stand out, I’m sure you won’t get much beyond Kalathur Kannama, 16 Vayadhinile (with Rajni playing villain), Sigappu Rojakkal, Moondram Pirai (Sadma), or Raja Paarvai. Rajni sells for this nostagia, as well as for his movies (They really aren’t as bad as they are made out to be… entertainers, yes, but not lame ones). Kamal on the other hand sells for his current repertoire, as well as for his air of being a ‘thinking’ man’s filmmaker/actor, of which the latter has been tried successfully by Aamir Khan (who however is the non-thinking, non-critical, pseud (wo)man’s favorite filmmaker).

Habitual Rajni-bashers choose to ignore his large repertoire of good work, and choose to highlight only his cigarette-flicking (of late, coin-flicking), villain-thrashing ways, all of which have only that much importance in his career as “Aati Kya Khandala” or the train scene in Ghulam had for Aamir Khan.

And these people who scoff at the sheer unbelievability of his plots and scenes are the same people who wouldn’t mind a whirlwind tour of three countries in a 24-hour period from Dan Brown who churns out the same crap book after book, or Chetan Bhagat for who much of the same can be said. Or for that matter, Sidney Sheldon or Jeffrey Archer who can write about Czechs with nubbins and bracelets and get away with it.

Or watch SRK with his little mannerisms, RGV’s implausible plotlines, and applaud.

Or for that matter, even Tarantino and Disney flicks.

One of the main reasons why Rajni films succeed so well is because they are made for a family audience (like the movies Crazy Mohan pens for Kamal). When his scriptwriters lack the finesse of Crazy Mohan in tackling complex issues in such a way that it wouldn’t alienate any age-group, they would rather compromise on the issue. Unlike Kamal, who comes up with an Aalavandhan, about a psycho killer, or a Hey Ram (Which had viewers going Aiyo Rama). Rajnikanth takes great care to portray qualities that are valued in society – respect for elders, honesty, hard work and the like. His films, of course, are well-known for misogyny, but that isn’t his sole preserve.

I, like the average Tamil moviegoer choose to have it both ways – I’ll watch a Thalaivar movie with all the usual ingredients, whistle at the punch-dialogues, and tolerate the few references to him/his character being the superstar/perfectMan. I would enjoy a good Kamal movie by paying attention to his plot, characterization and script, apart from his makeovers, and choose to ignore those forced scenes of intimacy, over-the-top accents, and his general overdoing everything.

For they are doing it all just to entertain us. It is not everyday that they make movies, and their little idiosyncrasies are worth tolerating for the entertainment value of the finished product, and heck, their swelling with self-importance is what makes them larger than life.

PS: I intended to make this a post that doesn’t take itself very seriously… but somewhere down the line, it turned into a biased Doordarshan newsreader’s report, with none of the associated feeling of well-researchedness or newness about it. I suppose the bottomline would be that at the end of the day, Kamal and Rajni both are actors, out to make money and fulfill the expectations of the audience… and everything they do would be better understood if it was viewed first in the light of that.