“Oru kadha sollatta” asks the cartoonized Vedha, breaking the three and a halfth wall before the movie begins, thereby making us question our own morality and judegement for the next 2.5 hours of mind blowing filmmaking. We get ready to listen to the story of a protagonist cop chasing the antagonist villian but Pushkar and Gayathri unexpectedly hit us with such an astonishing story that we also feel like one of the characters in it. We can see the amount of detailing that needs to have been taken care of for writing a screenplay like this and seemlessly integrating it with a mythological story that is used to teach moral lessons to kids. This film also teaches us moral lessons, but the only difference is that it doesn’t treat us like kids.
If you didn’t like the film and don’t like reading good things about it, I would suggest to stop here and head back. I loved it and I understand if you have a hard time agreeing to that. Not many films make us discuss about it the whole night after watching it. The emotions that Mani Ratnam makes us go through and the way he intrigues us to appreciate the intricacies in various aspects is phenomenal. And to top it off we even get ARR, Sreekar Prasad, Ravi Varman and some exceptional performances by Karthi(more on this later) and Aditi.
I know what you are thinking. Why? I’ve been asking myself this question ever since I decided to watch the movie. But I still went with it. After all, how will my trip to India be complete without watching a shitty movie in theater, right? And boy did I choose the perfect movie for that. Bairavaa was beyond repairable. How are we supposed to take it seriously after Vijay is compared with Sachin, Dhoni, Ricky ponting and the likes 5 minutes into it? Am I supposed to believe that everyone had a straight face while writing and filming scenes like these?
The debutant director Karthick Naren perfectly sums up the movie by making the characters who narrate the film speak out these lines. We are shown the incident based on which the whole story is going to revolve around at the very beginning and the details of those are revealed slowly. But are those details real? Is that how the incident actually happened? Are we being deceived or is the narrator deceived himself? All these questions are answered in the brilliantly structured and shot Dhuruvangal Pathinaaru, which makes it a clear contender for being the one of the best Tamil films to have come out recently.
I have so many questions. Firstly, why did a 2 hour portfolio video of Manjima Mohan face so many issues and take so long to shoot? If the other guy who keeps tagging along with her for no particular reason was the one creating all the problems, he could have been replaced with anyone else easily. Why did they spend so much time writing a story and a screenplay just to show how beautiful someone looks? It’s not like anyone is going to notice all these when people are too busy drooling at Manjima. The production value seemed a little over the top for a portfolio video, in my opinion.
Here, I try to talk about my interpretation of this scene in Thalapathi where the brilliance of it mesmerises me every time I watch it. Apart from the adrenaline rush Rajini gives us with his charisma and the to-go dialogue that every single person who has watched this film has used at least once in his life whenever he is being threatened by someone, this scene contains a lot more to look out for. This just a result of boredom and inspiration from various video essay channels out there in YouTube.
Don’t you hate it when you go to a movie to enjoy for a couple of hours but instead you come out rethinking your entire life decisions and cry yourself to sleep due to crippling depression and then later wake up to realise you were just glad to watch such a beautiful movie? Joker gave me such roller coaster of emotions before, during and after the movie. First you laugh at the protoginist, get angry at him and then later you laugh with him, cry with him, cry for him, get angry with him and in the end you feel sad because the movie is over. This was one of the movies where you know things aren’t going to end well and still feel bad when it eventually happens.
Jerry Seinfeld once said, in a Seinfeld round table, that he was afraid that the show would lose quality after it became successful and when they had more money to spend. Not many people can handle success and money well and Ranjith definitely doesn’t seem like one of them. There are a lot of people who could be at fault for Kabali to turn out to be such a disappointment. I’m sure Ranjth had a lot of pressure on him while making this movie and the result makes it quite evident that he is definitely not capable of handling those so early in his career. To be honest, I did not have much expectations for this film, or for any films nowadays (mainly because apathy has taken over all my emotions lately). This film had every element in it for it to be a whopping success and a colossal failure and we can all be glad that it fell somewhere in the middle.
Someone recently pointed out how reviews of anything are now titled ‘Thoughts on …’, in what is possibly an attempt to straddle the middle ground and emphasize that they’re just that, one’s thoughts. In that sense, this post is aptly titled, as Iraivi is a movie that will force you to think. And like the other meaning of the word, it will force you to chew the cud for quite a while, be it by watching it a second time in the theater, or multiple times in your mind.
