India trip movies reviews - Part II

Rang De Basanti - Me did not think it was an excellent movie, as everyone has portrayed it to be. For some reason, I wasn't able to relate to the movie at all. The director has to be commended to have treaded upon such a novel concept wherein he intelligently relates the struggles of our freedom fighters to struggles that we face in the concurrent world. But somehow I thought he ended up giving a half-baked product, with nothing about both the freedom fighters of the old and the transformation of the 5 member gang getting registered in my mind. And the final few scenes were plain hard to sit through, with all the justification they were doing on radio, though very noble & ambitious, just getting on my nerves. As my friend said, emotional dramatization would be the correct word to describe their response one gets to see in the climax. Though anything remotely patriotic usually stirs me up easily, this failed to evoke the same kind of excitement in me like other movies have done before. This, being a supposedly patriotic movie, I have to make this comparison with my other favorite movie, Lakshya. But it was an easy decision for me to say that Lakshya is far better than RDB. Somehow, the scenes which portrayed the transition of the guys from carefree guys to resolute youngsters emulating our freedom fighters didn't impress one. There have been better movies which have shown our freedom fighters in a more detailed & effective way than what was shown here.

Though ARR's songs sounded fresh, he was as always disappointing in the background score. But that was only in the first half. The second half was a wholly different story and one got to see ARR at his re-recording best. As far as performances go - though everyone is raving about Sidharth's and Aamir Khan's performances, I wasn't really impressed that much with both of them. There were atleast a handful of scenes where Sidharth did not do all that well in the acting department (And no matter how much they tried to show off Aamir as a 20 something, he looked plain ridiculous). It was actually Kunal Kapoor as Aslam who impressed me the most.

Finally, I do not agree with many when they say that given the crappy movies that Bollywood is dishing out these days, RDB is a commendable effort. Though it is indeed true, just bcos RDB is marginally than the crappy movies, it should be not praised to the sky, like many have been doing. Its like giving RDB 60 marks out of 100, and then praising it as though it is a 90 mark movie just bcos it is better than 40 mark movies. It is a good movie. Nothing more than that. Period.

Idhaya Thirudan - A typical Charan movie with all the essential ingredients of a good masala movie. The movie has no great storyline per se but Charan (as always) intelligently mixes everything - a miniscule storyline, item number with a catchy song and very attractive dance steps, comedy, a beautiful heroine - in the right proportions and gets it right in the end. Songs which are usually the highlight of Charan - Bharadwaj combo movies were kind of a disappointment. Jeyam Ravi has definitely improved from his pervious films and the one area - voice modulation - in which he sucked in his first 2 movies, he has improved in that too. Shows off his body unnecessarily in many scenes, emulating Salman. Only that, he does not have as good a body as Salman. I wonder why is it that none of our Tamil heroes have a neatly trimmed body with six pack abs and all while at the same time many in the Hindi film industry have well sculpted bodies. Though Surya and Jeyam Ravi are better than the Tamil heroes of yesteryears, we still have a long way to go in catching up with the Bollywood heroes.

In spite of this movie turning out to be good time-pass, I have the strong feeling that Charan should do serious movies more often. In my opinion, his best movie has been Alli Arjuna, which was probably the worst as far as BO rankings among his movies are concerned. It was easily Manoj's best suited role and Charan deserves credit for that. His last 3 movies - Vasoolraja MBBS, Jay Jay & this one - have all been just light-hearted stuff. Time for him to make a serious movie, which is something he is very much capable of making. Overall, an enjoyable & Agmark Charan film but I still can't understand why this movie was a complete disaster at the BO.

Dishyum - I had no clue as to what this movie was about when I entered the movie hall (except for the fact that it is a movie directed Sasi who had given us Sollaamale and Roja Koottam earlier) and this movie turned out to be a very pleasant surprise. I haven’t seen Sollaamale yet but Roja Koottam was a really decent movie which had all the sentiments & emotions of the characters in the right place. Dishyum goes one step further and ends up being close to a perfect product. The one thing I liked about this movie is that this being a movie about the love in the life of a stuntman, the director does not go overboard when it comes to dealing with stuntmen and their lives. By overboard, I mean he did not dedicate some scenes just to show off how tough a profession theirs is. Even in the few scenes that do that, he has made sure that those scenes gel with the overall flow of the story. Though the story as such is nothing to rave about, the way Sasi has handled it deserves a lot of appreciation. Equally interesting is how Sasi has shaped up Jeeva's character. As every scene unfolded, I was looking forward to what Risk Bhaskar had in store for us..

This guy Jeeva needs special credit for the kind of characters he is choosing. After Raam where he played an autistic kid, here he is as a stuntman with the now-famous nickname Risk Bhaskar. Everything about him – be it his body language, or his dialogue delivery, or doing comedy – was just so natural & cool and he fit the role to the T. Sandhya too was pretty good, a bit over-acting at some places but more than decent on the whole. I even liked the comedy track of the movie. Though it kind of borders on ridiculing someone’s physical weakness of not having proper growth, almost all the comedy scenes made me laugh. Couple of songs are worth listening many a time (this was what I wrote after watching the movie once). But now after watching the movie again in DVD, I guess almost all the songs are pretty good, the item number included. So, it is only natural that the 'Nenjaankoottil' song is already topping the charts back in India. The other thing that is hard to miss is the choice of singers for all the songs in the movie. Looks like Vijay Anthony had made a vow to use completely different sounding voices, which didn’t go all too well. Many reviewers have pointed out that the climax of the movie is what let the movie down. But I felt that the climax wasn't that bad. Except for the fact that it reminds you of the Alaipayudhe climax. On the whole, this was the second best movie that I saw during the trip (next to RDB).