Rebellious Thoughts

The film opens up with a shot which looks like a still of the full moon. That’s just one of the few shots in the film which is tranquil and soothing. Every other shot/scene in the movie has tension building up. Even when there’s a romance track in the second half, we have this premonition that something bad is going to happen soon. Welcome to the world of Vetrimaran! What the story offers us is a revenge-drama flick layered with powerhouse performances from the likes of Dhanush, Manju Warrier, Pasupathy and almost every other character artiste in the movie. These are people who force you to cry when they wail their hearts out and laugh along with them at their sly attempts at countryside humor. After a point of time when we know the story, it is very interesting to see how the director takes this all-too-familiar story forward. Vetrimaran is known to have been someone whose stories are very unique. In his films, the storyline is almost revealed in the interval block. His

There are some movies which come as a breath of fresh air. Let’s be honest here. A majority of the films released in India appease only their target audience (Diehard fans). These movies make everyone happy. The director has a false sense of self that he/she is the next Scorsese or Nolan. The producers and distributors have raked in huge profits. Fans flock into the theatres more than twice to catch a glimpse of their favorite star smashing the villain while the ear-piercing score is running in the background. There are very few films which make you talk about the cinematography, art direction and the 22 other crafts involved in the making of a film. Super Deluxe, a Tamil film released in 2019, makes you talk about not just the 24 crafts but also micro-analyse each and every actor’s performance and laud their emoting abilities. Let’s talk about the opening shot of the film. The film goes from Vaembu’s house and pans into a TV set of the next house where we get the title

From a very long time, I’ve seen quite a few visuals of Bombay in Mani Ratnam’s films. From the vintage shots of Nayagan   to the medieval glimpses of the city in Bombay and the uber chic visuals in Ok Kanmani – this city has always fascinated me. Why does every don/gangster film have to be filmed in the city? Is it because of the presence of non-regulated businesses in the city? Is the police department so bad that commoners rely on gangsters for justice? An obvious answer would be that the infamous D-Company is based out of Mumbai. Let’s not get into that though. I wish to live a long life! After months of looking at the peninsular city on Google Maps, I finally expressed my desire of going to Mumbai to my parents. My dad warned me that the city is so densely populated that traversing through the city will be just like navigating through the famous Avenue Road in Bangalore (Not Bengaluru bro! It will always be Bangalore for me). After chalking out a half-baked plan

More than an hour into Abhishek Chaubey's  Udta Punjab , a Bihari girl (Alia Bhatt) and a Jatt boy (Shahid Kapoor) cross paths. They're running from someone: perhaps from themselves, he suspects. Both of them are at the crossroads, in danger of being swept away. They break down and confide in each other as perfect strangers. There's a fear for everybody, and nobody, in their eyes. And then they're torn apart, but not before falling in love. Love, for them, at that moment, was just being able to be heard. It isn't romantic; it's desperate, and needed, and far from horrible. Even her hard kiss on his lips, an organic extension of her meltdown, is because "those monsters did everything but *this* to me." This line, in Bhatt's quivering voice, suggests the kind of 'ugliness' that no living mainstream actress would dare to embody. He then becomes the knight in shining armour who must rescue her from an evil tower. She has become his drug i

‘You’re nothing without me Preethi. In the campus, you were called Kabir Singh’s girlfriend. Do you even have an identity of your own?’ This dialogue just put me off. I wasn’t able to concentrate on the titular character’s arc. Such misogynistic dialogues are what KS is made of. Arjun Reddy had a demeanour that you would actually respect. Even though he was seen performing questionable activities, he wasn’t bordering on toxic masculinity like KS. Even though it’s a remake, they just disrupted the soul of the original. Towards the end, I was instilled with some hope that the authenticity of the character will be restored (Maybe it was Arijit Singh’s voice in the pre-climax song). Alas, my expectations have been hardly fulfilled. The movie feels rushed even though it is over 172 minutes long. Even the single shot where Kabir smashes Amit’s nose in his college (Don’t ask me how Kabir entered a different college without an I-card), looked like it was filmed in haste. The

There is no hell. There is no heaven. There is no rebirth. Divine justice is non-existent, while human justice is imperfect, slow, and often ‘dead on arrival’. What goes around, does not always come around. Karma is just a concept - I want it to be true but I know it is not. Injustice has deep roots. Despite Bible’s claims, the meek shall not inherit the earth - they often just struggle. Life is unfair. If that is not depressing enough, let me add these: -Not every wrong gets punished. -Not everything punished is wrong. -Not every punishment will be to the victim’s satisfaction. -Not even justice will always make you whole - often the loss is permanent. But that is crazy! The world is such a terrible place! Why be good then? Why care to stand for the right? Why not be a selfish, sleazy, crook? Because being good is not a quid pro quo. It is not a transaction. It is not a deal. We are not to be good because we will get something in return. It is not a trade. A trade is

Super Deluxe  is that kind of a film which will have you bowled over by the fact that it doesn’t try hard. This film isn’t a wannabe and portrays whatever is deemed fit for the story. It doesn’t have the ear-piercing background score which most of the run-of-the-mill South Indian films have. It’s a movie which has an ulterior meaning in whatever is said by the actors. It doesn’t try to break a sweat to convey the other meaning in its dialogues. The audience should have the intellect to understand the deep-rooted meaning in every dialogue and even every shot (Red palette is used extensively in the first half which means that there’s conflict being created which will be solved in the second half). There is so much detailing in the movie that you need to visit the theater twice to understand it completely or even have a discussion about it. Red, Blue and Green palettes are majorly used to convey the different kinds of emotions each character undergoes. The  beeda -scene in the se

I remember during my first year, my friends showed me an article headlined, “AI to steal 60% engineering jobs by 2022.” My friends were shell-shocked and some were even contemplating opting out of the course to join B.Com or B.A Degree courses. We are in 2019 now. Just one year for the eventful decade to end. Artificial Intelligence has not only stolen(if I may use the word) engineering jobs but has also set its   foot in the marketing industry with the generous help of its comrade, Machine Learning. Modern marketing is fragmented. With so many disparate tools, data sources, metrics and customers, marketing teams are overwhelmed and finding it impossible to make sense of the volume and complexity of information available. To simplify all these complexities, AI is slowly being incorporated in the marketing domain. Since this is the era of the internet, companies cannot afford to lose out customers because their competitors are extracting maximum benefits of th

If you wanted to estimate the number of people watching a certain film, the most obvious way to go about the task is to count all the tickets sold in the box office. This can be done without any qualms for a stage show. Just add up the receipts and you have the exact estimate. But for a major motion picture release that is playing in 3000 screens all over the world, things get a bit complex. Here, the theatre owner calculates the cash he received and reports all this to the distributor. The distributor receives this information from all the theatres he has distributed the film. This distributor provides all the cumulative information to the studio which produced the said film. In accordance to the integrity of the film’s production house, the  moolah  is either inflated or told as it is.  Some online trackers are paid for this job. They’re paid to predict the box office numbers and post it through their twitter handles which generates an interest to watch the film. If a m