Harish Film views

Director; Lokesh Kanagaraj No movie is perfect when looked through a magnifying lens. As we sit in front of the screen, the mind fights with the film-maker to avoid suspending disbelief. The struggle settles the minute when there is something interesting/ unseen/ or fresh on the silver screen. With the audience in a trance, the filmmaker only has to keep supplying those 'spikes' at regular intervals. Did this happen to me while watching Vikram? Unfortunately, no. It was an inconsistent film, IMO, that kept on breaking the invisible connection between my eyes and the screen. The film begins on a high with the signature step of Kamal. After the dishonest Vishwaroopam-2, it was gratifying to see Kamal enjoying on screen. When the film went into investigative mode, I sat up at the ingenious way the generic investigative procedural was flipped on its head as the past & present walked together. Soon enough the film shifted gear to an action thriller, which is when I started losin...

Director: Gautham Vasudev Menon It all starts with Karthik struggling with writer's block. As his mind longs for Jessi's presence, his hand dials her number, hoping she would bring him out of this abyss. What should have followed is an epilogue to the original film or a prelude to a sequel. However, what I saw was a procedural event. To begin with, the writer's block was treated at surface level without any heft. Just because you write heroine intro scene as her brushing her teeth (Raja Rani) you cannot lose hope in life and take drastic decisions. Once the phone conversation begins, it goes into confession mode listing out every detail the audience needs to know about the life of this couple in the past 10 years. It is of course interlaced with the GVM must-haves such as self-deprecating humour, throwbacks to his successful films, and Mani Ratnam; all in now-intolerable staccato.  When I took a step back, recounting events in the form of confessions inherently is a highly ...

Director: Kamal Haasan When Wissam (Kamal) and his wife Nirupama (Pooja) enter the elderly care to meet Wissam's mother, an Alzheimer's patient, we see that her world of four walls is adorned only by her son's images. It reminded me of another member of the extended Haasan family's film, OK Kanmani.  There too a key character, suffering from Alzheimer's, had a loved one as an anchor. But Kamal the director pushes this trope further. Through a twist of fate, she isn't able to recognise her son standing in front of her. Akin to how Wissam is hit by flashes of images from the past throughout the film, this plot point took me back to the various moments prior to this scene in the series where Wissam is alienated. Wissam's alienation starts when his father leaves him as an illegitimate baby; the Indian Army disavows him so that he can be an espionage agent; his colleagues want to get rid of him at the drop of a hat; his jihadi brethren feel he has betraye...

Director Pa Ranjith By the time the first song in Kaala comes on screen, Pa Ranjith skillfully establishes the conflict in the film. While on surface the conflict is about the right to property, as one digs deeper, Ranjith taking a leaf from Godfather, sets up a world where the aging don, Kaala, guards Dharavi against upper-class politicians with his righthand man-cum-elder son, while his younger son attacks the same problem through a liberal framework with his more efficient girlfriend. To further drive the point home for the Tamil audience, Ranjith names the relatively subdued younger son, the name of a Soviet Revolutionist and his elder son a Tamil name. Ranjith thus establishes early on that the film is going to talk not just about land politics with race and colour as extensions, but also an inner conflict as to how to approach the common problem. As the film progresses with class conflicts on one end and a subtle and effervescent love triangle at the other end, it’s...

Director: Mani Ratnam In the poem ‘Kaatru Veliyidai Kannama’, the poet describes the beauty of kannama, how it mesmerizes the lover, captivates him to his core and becomes the torch for the darkness within and around him. VC, the protagonist of the film, Kaatru Veliyidai, takes off from the poem in spirit. He is mesmerized by the mere presence of Leela. Such is the power of Leela that the moment she lights a torch into the eyes of VC, the player gets play ed by the ethereal aura of the rightfully named Leela. Mani Ratnam, here seems to be more interested in interpreting the poem in its various facades. He starts off this ambitious vision with self-indulgence.  Thus, VC, who gets mesmerized by the beauty of Leela, wants her to be his anchor, the human embodiment of his poetry, the breeze that comes along with the air that surrounds him and ultimately the light to the darkness within. No wonder Mani makes the protagonist apologize through a poem, reminisce her through the ...

He made a furtive glance; she gave an approving smile. Love spread as elegantly as the widening smile of her lips.  He would say I am not a fool to wait for you for hours together; she would say sorry for making you wait. Love knows the words between the pauses. She would say I am staying away from you for some days; he wouldn't say anything; but goes away with a smile, enjoying the pain that he is getting due to the separation. Love truly went mad.   If you got bored just imagining what that would look like on screen, the movie OK Kanmani and this opinion piece is not the place for you to be in. OK Kanmani, as you sensed from the treatment above, is a typical Mani Ratnam film, filled with his patented strokes of artistry on a  bright canvas setup by PC Sreeram, Rahman and others. It isn't a film that is cluttered with novel ideas or an unique treatment. But what sets it apart is the ingenuity it poses in saying differently what was already said in...

Director: Soundarya Writers & Supervisors: K.S.Ravikumar / R. Madesh Kochadaiiyaan is an unique attempt from Rajni. Not because of the computer-generated-photorealistic-animation (phew that’s a very big word with zero meaning and negative output!), but because it dabbles with the unwritten philosophy of life. Beyond the huge kingdoms and epic wars, Kochadaiiyaan is a battle between people with myopic views and it’s opposite. While this in itself is a giant leap for Rajni, the script proudly goes one step further and teases us at times by swapping people from the either side of ideology and at times by depicting a guy with both ways of life. The last time Rajni tried something on these lines in Baba, he got a heavy beating in box office and rightfully so. But this time the stark difference comes in the form of the organic flow in the narration. While many writers are happy to just mount scene after scene primarily to fill-up the timeline and at times to convey the st...

Director Vishnuvardhan could take a lesson or two from Director Siva (who has made the recent Veeram) on how to showcase the charisma surrounding Ajith. While Vishnuvardhan in his two films with Ajith was only able to exhibit the style quotient of the star, Siva here pulls of a spectacular show surrounding the magnetic personality of the star. In ground reality, it is very difficult to weave a mass entertainer depending only on Ajith. Beyond his handsomeness, unlike his contemporaries, Ajith doesn't have a convincing physique to pull of an action hero. When he punches bad guys, more than the wobble in their abdomens, the wiggle in the triceps, biceps and even the paunch of Ajith is more pronounced. The sluggish movements in the action sequences extends to the dance numbers as well. The only area that attracts attention is his elan to breeze through the anti-hero roles that he has been enacting off-late. Yet, the larger than life type films he chose haven't allowed the...

Director: Selvaraghavan Selvaraghavan's films post Pudhupettai, for reasons best known to him, traverse between goose bumps inducing and vein popping moments. While the ingenious plot in the second half of Aayirathil Oruvan overshadows its shortcomings, Mayakkam Ena disorients me by juxtaposing between nerve wrenching silly moments and heart drenching emotional sequences.  Over the period of these two movies, having observed the inconsistency of Selva's narrative grammar, I became prepared not to be bogged down by the leads' forced comic moments with their supporting casts. Accepting his narrow minded approach to acting for what it is, that which can be convincingly portrayed only by Danush, this time around I also didn't bother about the uniformly terrible acting his casts were going to display. Also, the incomplete backdrops, blind eye to details or shallow grandeur that goes in vain weren’t my concern. Because, I realised, in a Selva movie, the tools for...

Director: Atlee Formulaic films have always been the safe-bet for our filmmakers ensuring a breather for struggling stars and gateway for new entrants. Is it mainly because of the abundance of successful reference material to source from for formulaic masala film, or because of the difficulty to create formulaic structures in other genres, anything done besides action or comedy in films have always been termed novel attempt. While many feel-good films have attempted to serve a commercial potboiler, only few were able to please the audience, of which Cinematographer turned Director Jeeva’s films contributed a lot. After a long lull created by his demise, debutante Atlee, with his rom-com Raja Rani, has successfully filled the gap. Adding himself to the list of new age filmmakers with great taste for visuals, Atlee creates pitch perfect backdrop for the film’s riches and lower-middle class portions. Moving further in, besides fleetingly touching the sensibilities of the well-o...

Director: A L Vijay A movie is often considered a symphony of the audio & visual medium; and sure enough the auteurs have always striven to tread on a path between the said & the unsaid in order to keep us in a trance. To achieve that feat in Thandavam, a self-proclaimed unusual revenge saga of a blind man, A L Vijay employs everything in the rule book & that could precisely be the reason for its inability to interest us. Looking at Thandavam on the whole, the crucial problem with the film clearly lies in its immature treatment. Sure the premise of the action thriller is something even an infrequent film viewer would appreciate of. But when the film sets out to express itself, what clearly could be and had been registered through the visuals gets re-registered again and again till one feels nauseated by the events. As this redundancy gradually distances the audience for the silver screen, the age old formulas to invoke emotions becomes too tiresome & juvenil...

Director: Myskkin On surface level, Mugamoodi (Mask), from the acclaimed director Myskkin, sure poses as a bland name for a superhero movie. Anand (a) Lee (Jiiva) the man, who would adorn the coveted mask in the movie, is a loafer to his father’s eyes & the world which consists of his eye candy girl. But according to him, he is a dreamer who wants to make it big in the world by doing something that would require his complete soul to be involved & not just 9~5 of his time. Ironically his only defense against the society is his love for Kung Fu. When his Master, who he reveres, abstains him from showcasing his talents, all he could do is wear a scarf around his face and break the knuckles of his unworthy opponents. These righteous acts lead him to Gaurav (Nasser) a police officer , one among the many perplex characters in the film. O n his trial for safecrackers , Gaurav fills the screen with seriousness and it does feels right when people fear him. Yet, the veteran,...

Director: Narayan Nagendra Rao In the very beginning of the movie, an aspiring filmmaker gets money from a big-shot under one condition that he makes his aide (an old hefty guy) the hero of the film. Rejecting the offer, the protagonist comes to a coffee shop from where the story kicks off. At the end of the 2 hours long movie, I felt, with great potential to be the decade’s best unintentional comedy, had the film-maker went on to make the film with that aide, the director of Maali Pozhuthin Mayakathile would have spared us from the insipid tale of romance. For a film that is set in CCD where one would at least expect a cappuccino, the director takes a bean that is neither roasted nor dried out, brews it with rain water that floods the screen and serves with a teaspoon of salt. Sometimes we make few decisions based on certain information. Many a times, they backfire; one such being my decision to watch Maalai Pozhudin Mayakathiley. I could go on blotting this pa...

Director: Chakri Toleti When you have a successful franchise in your hand that had survived three decades of viewership, any maker would want to expand the frontiers. While his counterpart in the Don series moved forward with the story, the Ultimate Star of tamil films decided to tread on a different path, that of going back in time to tell the genesis story of David Billa (the tamil version of Don).  While an origin story usually stresses on the formative days of the titular character, with Billa, the urge to see the history of the much revered Don surmounts thanks to the insufficient material available on the reclusive gangster. But five minutes into the movie, with the best dialogue of the trailer wasted terribly, I suspected dreadful times await me. As it happened, after 2 long hours, Billa-2 stood as a testament that any film, no matter how good a star you have in it, how tech-savvy & creative technicians you involve in it, will only be as good as the creati...

In the film world or in any writing industry, anything that needs to be conveyed starts off with an idea. This idea creates a spark which makes it to grow into a full-fledged story. When this story captures the imagination of the people involved, the plot and the characters that are driving them are subsequently developed and enhanced to magnify the impact that the one liner had on the creator.  Coming out after watching Vazaku En:18/9, I realized how miserably the movie has failed to rise above the synopsis  that it started out with. With a plot line similar to that of the movie ‘Ram’, VE18/9 opens up as a crime thriller with a boy being the prime accused. As he gets prodded by the interrogating officer about his life, the boy begins to recount his trials and tribulations up till the day he is brought for interrogation. Like any scared boy would tremble before a police officer and plead for innocence, the protagonist keeps reminding the audience through the vo...

As the powerful role of Zoya (Ishaqzaade) is becoming the talk of the town, a brief analogy between Zoya & Muthazhagu (Paruthiveeran). Ishaqzaade is probably the most women centric film to have come out from the commercial stable.  Similar to how people associate good cinematography with flashy - oscillating shots that stands outside of the film rather than be integrated to it, women centric roles are recognized only when the protagonist bring about violence is screen. Muthazhagu (in Paruthiveeran) was recognized as a great women centric role not because that the character stood up to Paruthi in the aftermath of the interval block, but for the climactic battle & the vehement tenaciousness it portrayed to signify the love for Paruthi in the confrontation scene between Muthazhagu & her parents. Yet here is a film (and a role) which doesn’t go over the top to emphasize the stubbornness of Zoya. Baring the opening block that acts merely as a gimmick, Zoya lik...

In a scene in OK OK, the latest blockbuster from Rajesh & Santhanam combo, the heroine driven by the insults that her ex showers her with throughout the film, calls upon him to a restaurant where she is going to meet a guy fixed by her parents. But the guy turns out to be an even worse douche bag who pounces at every chance to insult her for her overweight. As expected, she tears him apart only to be mocked again by her ex for her pathetic state. It isn’t a one off scene. In another scene later in the film, the hero along with his guy-soul mate trashes her beyond any permissible limit inside an airplane where she is an airhostess. Am not going to lie here that I didn’t laugh for few of the gags they pulled off. But while I was squirming in my seats seeing how the girl was treated by her ex, all in the name of humour, I was feeling that the other douche bag was way better. At least he had the guts to call a stick a stick (read log), instead of sneaking in insults after insult...

Director: A.R.Murugadoss With a title like 7aum Arivu (7 th  sense) if you thought the movie is going to be insanely smart. You are partly correct: it is insane, although it is not bad. A film is a piece of art that captures your imagination and holds you in its control till you are watching it and even beyond it at times. It need not have logic to convince you, but it should create a perception of having logic. In plan words, the film should make sense even in its craziest moments. But in order to make sense some writers forgo the novelty and freshness in approach that is needed to grab the attention of the audience. If a film can do away with these two perils any movie can connect with its target audience regardless of what the writer tries to convey. 7aum arivu is one such movie that was marketed to be made with the same intent, that of creating a perception of logic without forgoing the novelty and fun part. But till intermission one couldn’t find enough interesting materi...

Director: Venkat Prabhu Probably the biggest star to have a worst success ratio, Ajith has always been at the farther ends of the needle: success & failure. He could give the biggest hit of the year and the biggest flop of the year, (which he attributes to the intelligence of his fans to like only his good films) yet his star status always rests on the positive side of the needle. The problem with any Ajith film is it needs to cater to a wider range of audience, regardless of its content, to become a hit. I could easily get away with saying that he didn’t select proper scripts but some of his films would eventually prove me wrong. Because, when he played to the ‘gallery’ with films like ‘Attagasam’ it wasn’t well received by his ‘style requisite’ fans & the ‘thinker’ fans; and when he came up with ‘Kreedom’ his ‘gallery’ & ‘style requisite’ fans let him down. Both were equally tolerable films but unfortunately his reach is too large to be constricted to a particular sec...