Weekend movies - What About Bob & Naam

What About Bob - This is the movie Thenali is supposed to be inspired from and hence has been on my to-watch list for a while. As I finished watching it, I felt that the word inspired should probably not be used in this context of talking about the similarities between Thenali & What about Bob. Rather, the word I should be using is shameless rip-off. It is that pathetic. Kamal's input (& KSR's if any) in this movie is almost a big zero. This movie runs for 97 minutes and all Kamal & KSR have done is to add the 6 songs that ARR tuned in. Plus, fit in some extra scenes for Jyothika bcos the equivalent character in WAB merely comes for 2-3 scenes. The other thing that Kamal & KSR have done without inspiration is Kamal's flashback scenes in Sri Lanka which were done to justify Kamal's Sri Lankan accent. So, no wonder that those flashback scenes were the worst scenes in the movie. There are two types of getting inspired, borrowing an analogy from the Tamil film music field. One is the Deva-kind of inspiration where there is absolutely no input from the music director while the other is Ilaiyaraja/ ARR kind of inspiration where they would have brought in their unique flavor to the song, on top of the inspiration. Panchathanthiram definitely belonged to the IR style of inspiration whereas this is more of a Deva kind of inspiration. Bill Murray was awesome in this movie. Whenever we watch the original & remade versions of the same movie, usually we get impressed by what we see first and even if the second movie we watch is the original, we still love the copied version just bcos of the fact that we watched it first. But over here, even though it is Thenali that I have watched first, I loved Bill Murray in this one. Kamal's performance was very ordinary when you compare against this one by Bill. The problem in watching a movie like this is bcos all through the movie I was concentrating on how much Kamal has inspired from the movie rather than actually enjoying this movie. Like I said at the beginning, there is very little original in this one as even the famous bayam dialogue sequence by Kamal has been inspired from here where Bill Murray keeps saying something similar I feel good. I feel great. I feel wonderful. Looks like this movie is not that popular a movie too. And that is something we should appreciate Kamal for having identified this relatively obscure movie and Indianizing it. One only wishes he gives the creators of the original some credit. That is not asking too much. But Kamal somehow just refuses to do that.

Naam - Wanted to watch this movie, as I had missed this one out when it was released and remembered this one got some pretty decent reviews back then. The other reason was that this was Duet movies' first production effort and the movies that Prakash Raj has produced after that, was another of the main reasons for myself renting this movie out. This in fact turned out to be a very good watch. The movie had a very interesting storyline and even the way it was executed was neat with no major hitches. There weren’t too many songs which hampered the flow of the movie. The twist in the story took me by complete surprise and I was totally unprepared for that. The way each one in the group reacts & panics to the turn of events is all so natural. Did the director do any other movies after this one? Even one of the songs in the movie Dhinam dhinam kanavugal was pretty good and caught my attention the very first time I watched it on-screen. On the downside, couple of the newcomers were pretty bad and it did have an effect on what I felt about the movie at the end. The fact that Prakash Raj was constrained by cash limitations can be seen all over the movie and nothing else conveyed that better than the slide at the end of the movie - this movie sponsored by Gold Million Sunflower Oil :) I am really impressed on what Prakash Raj is doing with his Duet Movies. Overall, a very good movie and with a better known cast, could have been a huge hit bcos of the interesting & novel plot. Even with all its limitations, I liked it immensely and left a smile on my face as I finished watching it.