Harish Film views

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 creative v

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

Director:  Thiagarajan Kumararaja “I wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high o'er vales and hills, When all at once I saw a crowd, A host, of golden daffodils; Beside the lake, beneath the trees, Fluttering and dancing in the breeze…” A cloud moves with the wind over picturesque locations and ends up seeing a lot of daffodils. But as we all know Daffodils is not just that. It is the experience of seeing/reading about the natural beauty which fills our heart. That being a poem, Aaranya Kandam is nothing short of a cinematic Daffodil to me. The movie sweeps the screen of any frill that is attached to our usual cinema and concentrates completely to let us experience the vision of the director. That is why a scene when a principal character jumps out of a police jeep, you get the high of watching a quality film – not because of the twist in the tale but because of the way the scene was handled (& pictured as well). When we say arty film, people might think the fi

Director: Venkat Prabhu A melancholic hero perplexed as to accept that he indeed has fallen in love, and the aesthetically handled tension that the scenario brings with; a gullible hero (who hasn’t bored you yet with his now clichéd mannerism) standing in the backdrop deeply in love with a foreigner (so much he has done, wont he do this also) and coming often with fake buildup but rarely to entertain us genuinely; a colourful hero (note the allegory through the name too) evoking laughter through his mischievous smile (in sync with the cult bgm); a gay couple of which one is detested by infidelity of his partner; as different as characterization could get but the motive remained the same – to entertain us with a serious comedy. But did the team end up succeeding? Oh yes largely. Then what went lacking? Was it because Venkat took the tagline “Venkat Prabhu holiday”, seriously and went vacationing in the sets of “Nanayam”? That could explain the sore throat of sorts twists that comes in t