indian popular cinema

[...]

i genuinely find his raavan performance fascinating.

Oh, I totally forgot about that one. It was probably the first think I saw him in and didn't connect who he was at the time. Thinking about it, it's possibly more the case that he just doesn't care much for the "star" big name roles all that much, after having been around the business, and prefers the character stuff more. He seems to have more fun with the odd stuff at least.

[nrh]

omg that guy is the son of the other sholay character!! i didnt know this

ofc i recognized amitabh immediately but got from imdb that the star was his son

poor bobby was the middle child sunny his older brother was the great action star of the '80s and early '90s, younger brother abhay did arty small films and never tried to be a star. bobby started out as heart throb with curly locks and then his career totally fell apart. very sad career updates recently

https://www.huffingtonpost.in/2017/01/2 ... _21662378/

he is just so charming in jhoom barabar jhoom (but then that movie was an enormous flop at the time, despite a passionate croup of critics and fans arguing for it)...

[thoxans]

Mouna Ragam

thx for the heads up on this! just finished it, and wow. mani is the man. a deliriously romantic tug of war between heartstrings. and oh those compositions! strikingly directed in every respect. also, bonus points for featuring one of the all-time great houses in cinema. really really dug on this one in so many ways...

[rischka]

ok rajinikanth is my new hero

[thoxans]

thinking about going on a mani tear, after lovvving mouna ragam so much. prime also has alaipayuthey, bombay, cheliya, dalapathi, idhayathai thirudathe, iruvar, kaatru veliyidai, kannathil muthamittal, nayakan, pagal nilavu, a peck on the cheek, raavan, roja, and thiruda thiruda. any recs? dalapathi might be good cuz it's got rajinikanth...

[nrh]

dalapathi is the dubbed telugu version of thalapathi, so you might want to skip that on prime, i'll try and see if i can upload the tamil version though. and idhayathai thirudathe is tamil dubbed version of the originally telugu gitanjali, so i'll see if i can upload that one as well. cheliya is telugu dubbed version of kaatru veliyadai, so skip that in favor of the tamil original.

raavan was shot in two different versions simultaneously - raavanan in tamil with vikram in the title role, raavan in hindi with abhishek; i think they're both pretty great but strongly suggest seeing the tamil version first, which might be the best intro to his current style.

nayakan would be a good next choice - a meticulously designed gangster film that was what pretty much made him a household name. iruvar might be his best movie but i would suggest reading at least the wikipedia entries on MGR before watching it, since that one kind of needs a lot of context.

[therouxxx]

thx for the heads up on this! just finished it, and wow. mani is the man. a deliriously romantic tug of war between heartstrings. and oh those compositions! strikingly directed in every respect. also, bonus points for featuring one of the all-time great houses in cinema. really really dug on this one in so many ways...

Yes I love that house! I like what the budget constraints and the Ilaiyaraaja score create here; it lacks the visual dynamism that Mani is known for, but compensates with a certain tenderness that is rarely matched in his later work. It's maybe my favorite of his, along with Bombay and Geethanjali.

[thoxans]

context

yeah, i figured a few that i listed woulda been the 'off-brand' versions. prime def has the oddest (sometimes in a really good way) assortment of content of all the streaming services. iruvar and nayakan both sound (and look) pretty great, so i'll def check those out. it wasn't until i logged mouna ragam on boxd and saw the poster for the film that i realized 'oh so this is one of those movies that nrh has had listed as one of his four favs on his boxd profile for the past however many years now.' two down, two to go

the Ilaiyaraaja score

the score was brilliant! almost becomes a third character in and of itself, omnipresent, if unseen. the songs were also terrific. at least two or three greatest hits there. i'll def watch bombay

[thoxans]

nayakan (mani ratnam) great stuff! it's not so much like the godfather, as it's all three of the godfathers distilled down to one epic gangster biopic. the main character might as well be brando, de niro, and pacino's characters all rolled into one. the moral center though is where this far surpasses the godfather films (and i actually really enjoy the first godfather; it just feels like a highly stylized mafia procedural in comparison tbh). michael corleone becomes his father, and kinda spurns his wife (boohoo no one likes you anyways, diane keaton). in this flick, however, you have actual cause and effect, actions with (far-reaching, generational) consequences, and an inevitable questioning of right and wrong in the face of exceedingly complex ethical dilemmas. the protagonist starts off almost as a robin hood-type figure, no mere hood. he's someone who wants to make things better for those around him, even if that means doing wrong. pure consequentialism. kamal hassan does an awesome job carrying the narrative beginning to end. can't help but think srk's acting style has been really influenced by hassan's perf here. there are many glimmers of srk's various little physical tics and verbal deliveries throughout. was also kinda taken aback by the violence and sexuality. not something i've really come across in most of the indian flicks i've watched. oh, and those pigeons! lovely, lovely pigeons...

[nrh]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsN_9uXAoNE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDqBip6e0Us

sp balasubrahmanyam died after a long battle with covid he was probably the male singer of south cinema in the 70s-90s; when you think of kamal and rajni you think of his voice even more than their real voices. and he was very close to ilayaraaja so a huge percentage of the thousands upon thousands of songs he sang were legitimately great.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHm8Vhg ... e=emb_logo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kKP93fxO1E
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Urr36-p9e5s

[thoxans]

psycho (mysskin) watched as part of halloseen (trademarking that now). while not strict horror, mysskin does work within the genre to upend its trappings, capturing an unheard of humanism to counterbalance the normally senseless violence that pervades the form. not totally successful (cuz it's kinda hard to humanize someone depicted for 2hrs as merely a mechanical monster), but it's final 30min does push for something almost startlingly provocative, sad, and unique. seems a love-it-or-hate-it thing from what i briefly saw on boxd after i watched and logged it (aside from nrh's nod to it in this thread, prior to watching it on my own), which is understandable, but should say most of the detractors i've read thus far don't have many interesting perspectives to criticize the film

[nrh]

i actually rewatched psycho a few weeks ago and kind of think i really undervalued it. but i think mysskin is really courting rejection here, it's not just a act of humanism but he's making what amounts to a full buddhist parable - like he announced that the movie was going to be based on the angulimala story but i don't think anyone expected him to be so literal (stalin's main character is actually named gautham and sits under a banyan tree print in his house! dagini is name of a tibetan buddhist diety! the killer is just straight up named angulimaala!). i think there's even an interview where he's like with this film i could have taken the sublime route but i went with the direct approach (and admits that the whole film rests on a trick or a lie, since in real life that kind of serial killer will not be capable of that kid of character arc).

it's just fascinating to me that at this point he's creating these totally hermetic, fable-like world of repeating, private symbols, all within these popular genre forms. and so much of how achieves that is just in the rhythm, the way the shots fit together, the extreme precision of the performers (like pay attention to the way the killer moves his cart full of knives to the table, it's nearly identical every single time and then starts to change only slightly towards the end, it's like some jeanne dielman shit)...

[thoxans]

that coda is the equivalent of every other horror film's twist ending, except strangely more jarring and even disconcerting. its unpredictability pushes against everything we expect (demand?) from this sort of film. can't even fathom western audiences, and primarily american audiences, ever accepting, let alone understanding, such a conclusion. kinda brave, really

[nrh]

i mean even mysskin estimated that half of his audience hated psycho. but that's not really true - it was less "this is a bad movie" than "oh that's our mysskin being mysskin." not sure how long this beloved weird uncle phase of career will last but he is making the most of it, after pisasu and thuppraivalan were both hits and his performance in super deluxe.



truly don't know how to approach shankar's sivaji, except that it's like if jerry lewis needed someone to make the family jewels for him but wasn't necessarily in on the joke? totally fascinating, often grotesque, and mostly exhausting movie. the budget is still disputed but i think it was the most expensive indian film made to that point...


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSCBx07ENGQ

[nrh]

thinking about going on a mani tear, after lovvving mouna ragam so much. prime also has alaipayuthey, bombay, cheliya, dalapathi, idhayathai thirudathe, iruvar, kaatru veliyidai, kannathil muthamittal, nayakan, pagal nilavu, a peck on the cheek, raavan, roja, and thiruda thiruda. any recs? dalapathi might be good cuz it's got rajinikanth...

thalapathi & geethanjali are in shares

[thoxans]

thalapathi & geethanjali are in shares

thx! will grab tomorrow when i have access to good internet again

[thoxans]

will grab tomorrow

dammit! missed them. did not get back to good internet until this week, it turned out

[nrh]

will grab tomorrow

dammit! missed them. did not get back to good internet until this week, it turned out

will you have decent internet over the weekend? i can try to re-up them then.

[thoxans]

i will tomorrow from 9AM-1PM, then again monday. sorry about that! country livin at its finest...

[nrh]

i will tomorrow from 9AM-1PM, then again monday. sorry about that! country livin at its finest...

thalapathi is up

[thoxans]

up

got it!

[nrh]

soorarai pottru, this year's only real big movie to release over the deepavali weekend which is traditionally the time to do these huge event films, is just pretty good in a lot of ways, it's a biopic about an ex army captain who pioneered a kind of low cost domestic airline, and has some fuzzy thinking (is ethical capitalism really a method of class liberation?) and greater script frustrations (if a movie is going to be this based on deals, wagers and putting up livelihoods for sale i think i need to have at least a soderbergh level of attention to the flow of money; here i kind of lose track of all of that at multiple key points).

but man i don't know. this has all of the joy of sudha kangara's very underrated last film iruddhi suttru, low key the best boxing movie of the decade, and she really shines when she's dealing not with the big biopic plotlines but with the fractious, egalitarian marriage at the heart of the movie. these big tamil release movies are genuinely meant to be social events as much as they are movies, to their credit in some ways, but watching this at home rather than cheering with a bunch of middle aged suriya fans when the movie shouted out madurai dialect while some portly children wandered up and down the aisles and some uncle gave me and seema dirty looks during interval cigarette break and talking over the movie at the chilli's at the edison new jersey strip mall...it's just not the same

[brian d]

just finishing up andhaghaaram (v. vignarajan). looks like no one's logged it on lboxd. pacing is fine, it keeps things moving, but the supernatural plot just really doesn't work well for me. so i wasn't bored, i was just... unengaged. but some people are saying it's the best tamil film of 2020, so maybe it's just me. whole lotta telephones in this movie.

[nrh]

hm reviews i read on the indian sites seemed to be more along the lines of interesting debut, too reliant on mysskin influences, and way too long at 3 hours. should maybe check it out, the theater shut downs have made this a pretty bad year for tamil film overall, with all the intriguing projects getting pushed to next year and not much interesting on streaming.

[thoxans]

ya know, last time i got burnt out on movies, i turned to indian flicks, and found my second wind... and now that i think about it, i haven't gotten in my srk fix for quite a while

[thoxans]

i see anurag basu has a new one out. ludo. anyone heard anything? quite like basu. a really lovely stylist from what i've seen. also, has anyone else noticed a semi-recent trend of indian flicks with multistoried narratives? c/o kancharapalem, super deluxe, now this. has that become like a thing, or have i just cherrypicked a few examples to make a mountain out of a molehill...?

[nrh]

have heard ludo is a mixed bag but worth seeing (fwiw i just rewatched the almost universally derided jagga jasoos a few weeks ago and thought it held up really well).

basu was one of the first to play with the mutli narrative thing in life in a metro back in 2009. and dibakar bannerjee's lsd came out in 2010 and was a pretty big deal. onir's anthology i am also was 2010.

other than that the only other one i can think of is...bejoy nambiar's solo? there definitely have been network narrative type films were a splintered cast is connected by various incidents (kurangu bommai and maanagaram in tamil, something like aami ashbo phirey in bengali) but that's a slightly different thing i think. i guess prasanth varma's awe in telugu might count? and of course lots of big layered multi-character narratives like dasavarathan but that's a whole different thing.

[thoxans]

still need to see jagga jasoos. i know it's one of scfz's most hated film titles but barfi! was exceptionally beautiful, not to mention delightful and touching. it's a film i shoulda hated on spec, what with the overly actorly deaf-mute guy and the sensitive, shy autistic girl, but i'll be damned if kapoor and chopra didn't both pull it off; and again, basu's (and ravi varman's) work was magical

[nrh]

i may end up feeling hotter or colder on the film in a few days but motwane's ak vs ak felt like a genuine christmas gift in a shitty year. anurag kashyap, playing a wonderful parody of his public image, and anil kapoor get into a spat and kashyap kidnaps kapoor's daughter and challenges him to find her within one night and films him the whole time. so it's a kind of found footage thing and a pulp thriller (they keep bringing up how it's kind of like taken) and an industry satire and a "it all happens in one night!" movie and a love letter to bombay. it is also a christmas film, because anil kapoor's birthday is the 24th of december and that's when it's set.

i don't like it anywhere near as much as trapped and bhavesh joshi:superhero, motwane's last two very underrated and misunderstood movies. but it's a wonderful strange lark, the whole arc and twists are expected but it's the weird details that land beautifully.

there is a very good indian film theater not far from my grandfather's house, and for a few years it's been a kind of ritual to go see movies there the day or two after christmas; last two years we were able to drag my bemused parents to see andhadhun and enai noki paayum thota. in a different world this would have been the movie we all went to see. oh well. hope everyone is having a decent christmass, no matter how strange it is.

[kanafani]

I watched two mani Ratnam movies in the past two weeks: iruvar and nayakan. This brings my ratnam tally to 4- I’ve previously seen dil se and Bombay ages ago, and naturally remember nothing, expect that I loved dil se, and probably bailed out on Bombay early on.

Iruvar is wonderful. Very nice song numbers, two strong performances from the lead actors, Prakash ran and Mohanlal, especially Mohanlal. Love this guy, definitely a mononym-worthy talent. One of the great portrayals of a complicated friendship. This Tamil cinema/politics nexus is something I know nothing about, but I found it fascinating nonetheless. And the miss universe girl playing two roles, which I originally did not notice, because I watched the movie over three days. So many great touches in this movie!

Nayakan is good too, but it treads more familiar ground (in its rise and demise of a great man structure at least) so a certain staleness settles in eventually, especially at the end, where I was bemused by a couple of touches. What is up with the balls of cotton or whatever the hell it was in the guy’s mouth? Were they going for a Brando effect? And it kind of jumps the shark with the twist regarding who the daughter ends up marrying. Fine, it symbolizes her divided allegiances and so on, but it felt like rising the melodramatic volume to 11. 10 is high enough.

Next week: Roja!