Loved every bit of it. Reminds me of Siriya Rettaivaal Sundari in places. That apart, great team effort.

Another long weekend ahead but I’m probably going to be busy with a paper to finish and an important movie to watch.

Watched Angadi Theru last week and actually liked it. Candidly made. I’m usually the one who hates tear-jerkers but this one had some genunity to it. Thiru Thiru Thuru Thuru wasn’t all the great as I expected. Except for Mouli who just melts easily into a character. Probably the missed Morgan Freeman of kollywood.

And Paiyaa. Surprise, I liked it. It was cliched but nevertheless wasn’t all that boring. Atleast Karthi with his extra make-up pulled it very well. Plus the songs made it easy to watch.

Watching Avatar on DVD killed the spirit of the film that I enjoyed watching in IMAX. On the big screen, I couldn’t pick up the animation as much as I did on DVD.

Raavanan album was a bummer. Sometimes experimentation can go over-board as you could…hear. Maybe I’m disliking Mani’s films since Sujatha isn’t around to ground it to the Tamil senses. With very low expectations, anything more than that will be a bonus.

Reading: Poetry after a long long time.
Writing: Short Short Story.
Listening: Dylan’s Simple Twist of Fate

Busy week at work and a busy week at home too. Hopefully I will get some time to read a book next week. Spring is almost here and so the news is that the tulips are blooming but I’m bored to drive down 50 miles only to wait 30 minutes to move five inches. Crazy crowd.

Caught up listening to the latest episodes of This American Life. How I wish we had an Ira Glass for All India Radio.

Did someone realize, Idai Vazhi Oru Modhal Sei from Goa has some subtly written sleazy lyrics? The moral police of Chennai seems to have missed the whole point. I actually liked the way Vaali managed to sneak in the sleaze. BTW, as discussed elsewhere, Goa was terribly boring. Didn’t find anything interesting except a single situational comedy.

Pedro Almodóvar’s film noir flick, Bad Education was a disturbing watch but nevertheless very interesting. Just like the Ira Glass comparison, I only wish we get a Gael García Bernal for kollywood. I dont even think anyone comes closer to his acting caliber. Such a pity.

High: My feed reading activity has picked up offlate. Been reading some good ‘critical thinking’ feeds for the last few days. Do we need critical thinking is a different question for a different time. For now its just good food for thought. No, not the 140 character types.
Low: Lots of things to catch-up. Quite a bit of read/writing to do.
Also saw: Horton hears a Who and loved it. ‘A person is a person, no matter how small’ – how true. Now thats a good book to gift a kid with.

I actually didnt like the expression of AB at the end but who cares. Usually the first look of any Mani Ratnam movie has no resemblence to any other movies, other than his own. But this teaser reminds me of Omkara, don’t know why. Nevertheless, good hype so far.

I like some parts of Cheran’s work but I never thought I would look forward to a film in which he stars. If not for Myshkin, this still photograph from Yudham Sei wouldn’t have landed here. Its only films like these that I look forward these days and not the Yendhiran types. Maybe I’ve grown old but hype works only in your twenties.

I hope Myshkin’s previous unreleased film, Nandalala hits the screen very soon. If not, the producers should release it direct-to-DVD.

Myshkin is by far my biggest hope of tamil cinema followed by or preceded by, in some cases, Selvaraghavan. Oh yeah, there is Mani Ratnam, as always.

The leading scene to the song Mannippaaya is probably the only contribution of Vinnaithandi Varuvaaya to Tamil Cinema. And a very good one. It isn’t different but a very clichéd one. The way it was passionately shot made all the difference. With such a well rendered song from Rahman and Shreya, Gautam had only one choice, to build it up very well. The whole song was ecstatically sung and a major part of the song was picturized in the same way. Especially when Simbhu sings animatedly when driving a bike, been there done that.

The Alleppey night, the boat, the lyrics, the love struck Simbhu and Trisha, the choreography and even the graphically falling star all support Mannippaaya’s heat. One would wish if the whole song never moved from that place. As the song divulges into other dreamy sequences and montages, it looses the passion of the night where it starts. Nevertheless it was the only scene I loved in the film. And ofcourse, some parts of Aaromale.

Gautam sticking to Simbhu’s point of view and not showing an extra scene of Trisha when Simbhu not being present is good screen-writing but his biggest problem are the dialogues. He should probably take help from someone else or stop repeating the, “I want to make love to you” lines. Seems super artificial when squeezed into real-life situations.

P.S: The Thirukural harmony in Mannippaaya sounded unrefined.

Picked up a dozen packs of Milk Bikis from the local Indian store. It was in a new wrapper. I was shocked. While tripping in Chennai, I bought a Milk Bikis pack in a totally new packaging and found the design of biscuit completely changed. Instead of Britannia embossed in the middle and surrounded by flower patterns, it had squares all over the biscuit. That wasn’t the biscuit design thats imprinted in me. After all its probably the only biscuit of choice on any given day followed by Bourbon by the same company. Even though it had the same taste, it felt like a different biscuit.

So I was indeed shocked looking at the new pack today. When opened, to my relief, I found it had the same design. Somehow they haven’t changed the design, atleast yet, for the exports. So that’s good. And that’s how I got my biscuit back.

More Biki love, here and here.

Crude and Cheesy post ahead.

I get the internet democracy and all but reading everyone’s opinion on the new social networking overload seems like a complete waste of time. I know one wants to try everything thats new and free on the net but one doesn’t have to always start acting like a tech guru on each .x version release of a software.

Let me ask a question. When was the last time, you picked a piece of log aka dead wood book and read it start to finish including the blurb. I know you have Brown’s The Last Symbol hidden under your pillow for two weeks now. That paperback copy of Twlight saga is lying on your bookshelf for twelve days and 24 minutes and 16.5 seconds now. The first edition copy of recently passed away Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye is crying to be read for months now. The recently bought Agam Puram Anthapuram is enjoying some good shelf life in your bedroom. Last week’s Vikatan and India Today are folded and left unread on the couch. It doesnt matter that you dont like to read literary works of Jorge Luis Borges or Pablo Neruda. You like to read just ‘normal’ books. I get that. But when will you read them?

When can you actually close the browser, shut down your laptop and actually read the first page of Seth Godin’s latest best seller? When will you be free of not having to login to the social .coms, miss all the carefully created online personas’ effing status updates and not be nervous about it? Its not important to just have a shelf full of carefully selected coffee table books. To read without any interupptions is an act of freedom in the contemporary society. How about today ? Say yes to the Log. Now, Logout. Thanks.

If you havent watched the movie, no issues, go ahead and watch the video. It doesn’t give out anything and it can raise brows/curiosity. This song is interrupts the movie at a correct time. It couldn’t be placed any better. The lead to this song is impeccable and song actually goes out of the way to capture the direstraits of the film’s characters without compromising of the video.

Right from the release of the audio, this was indeed my favorite(1, 2, 3) number of the film. Vijay Yesudaas’ number was actually an achievement with vocal chords on tamil cinema but still, this stole the thunder with the mix of mysticism and pop music.

This one is more like a feverously shot and religiously edited music video. Watch it full screen and as said before, just don’t talk yet.

Fanboy version of Rahman’s Hosanna mixed with the dance sequence from the bubbly 500 days of Summer.

First, a pedestal for Selvaraghavan’s Aayirathil Oruvan just like the one put up here for Peter Jackson’s King Kong.

Fantasy genre is a very special one. Just like Harry Potter lineup, if you don’t get into the movie, your brain starts questioning how Harry Potter didn’t hit on the brick wall when trying to walk through a pillar in the train station. Not all of us are hardwired for such instant leap of faith. Cutting down such crap with which reviews usually begin and starts to bore us with such psychological theories that the reviewer referred to before writing the review, Aayirathil Oruvan is a kickass film that should be enjoyed in a full screen without uttering a single word to the next seater. All you might know, he might have already taken the leap of faith and immersed in the movie and you are just thinking, how the hell can lightning strike on karthi while being blessed.

In any case, AO has stupendous writing, great pace, wonderful camera, immaculate art and costumes and ofcourse an apt finish to the neat start. The movie hasnt been pulled off just by the different landscape or thoughtful subtexts in screenplay but by the actors who have made us believe that the movie could be a true story.

And yes, the critics say that it has tinges of Gladiator and every other historical fantasy they have seen so far. Sure. For that matter, King Kong had big influences from Titanic and Jurassic Park. It was still considered as a herculean effort. And Selvaraghavan needs to be lauded for pulling it off with limited resources.

Above all that the movie kept me glued to the screen throughout the length of the movie. It was paisa vasool and I felt I should have paid a few more bucks for entertaining me thoroughly. Not a single movie after Virumandi had me tied up so badly. If you are crazy enough, you would love Aayirathil Oruvan. I pity the ones who hated it. You just missed an interesting piece of Tamil Cinema for who knows how long you would have to wait for another movie as gripping as this. SORRY!

This was just brilliant. Dramatic and mythological in its narration and very east in its philosophy. I’m too tempted to lend my piece of detailing but will hold-off because of the lack of words that I can use to describe my daemon/genius. It may sound cocky to say that but inevitably we have all experienced this moment atleast once. My daemon/genius could very well be a lame one neverthless it exists, not in the form that Liz explained but differently. I tend to call it the self but sure, genius works as well.

If you haven’t, you should, atleast skim through the second 36 chapters of Liz’s Eat, Pray, Love which I thought was very well written despite the cheesiness in the title and the feminism that people thought existed in this book.

Why am I unable to write something elaborately these days ? Thanks to Twitter and its social counterparts, not only my reading has gone down, writing too. Every thing I want to write is now being crunched in the head, meaning every word goes through serious criticism if its actually necessary, replaced with synonymously shorter words or with similar SMS glossary, then typed as characters(instead of words).

I was prolific with blogging once before the info-overload hit. When it did, I was tracking 250+ blog feeds on my feed reader which drew me nuts. To take myself out of the over load was quite a task and I’m not overloaded any more. I track a handful of blogs and follow a dozen or so twitters, all of whom I know personally(@ravages, @chenthil, @mdeii, @anantha, @writerpara) or have read them(like @shashitharoor) or watched them(ok, i know its sinful to follow a celebrity but i do think @trisha_26 is slightly(very slightly) better than most of her k.wood peers).

In any case, Twitter has moved away from its initial state. Instead of ‘What are you doing now?’ its ‘What’s Happening?’ now. So I’m going to stop rambling about brushing, driving and/or sleeping. And I don’t believe in answering What’s Happening all the time. Pause.

What triggered this post was that I found this 1072 page novel of Stephen King at Costco(sort of Chennai’s big bazaar but with a big BIG). Totally a wrist breaker to the extent it shouldn’t have even be printed but only sold electronically. I even wonder how King wrote with so many distractions going on around the world. In his partly autobiographical, ‘On Writing‘ King reveals his secret of writing such absurdly thick and gripping novels is to lock himself every morning until his daily quota of 10 pages of words are typed.

P.S – This is an unfinished post from November 25, 2009 at 10:50 pm. Don’t exactly remember how I intended to finish this. So instead of this remaining in the draft section for a long time to come or get deleted, it sounded better to publish it. Sorry if this didnt make any sense, just like my other fully written posts. Take it easy!

In any case, Chennai and Airtel together, have made me ramble big time on twitter. So there is that.

In my hand is Amit Varma‘s My Friend Sancho that I was happy to pick from the best seller’s section in Landmark.

The book was priced at 195 rs and the ‘specially’ discounted price that landmark advertised it for was 165 rs. While I, to some extend, understand the pricing politics behind the books, I wished it was priced at 95 rs like the hotselling Chetan Bagat’s 2 states.

Beyond the story and the easy-to-read style of Chetan, I do think the 95 rs pricing of his books make him more affordable and approachable. Well its a Catch-22, one would say.

In any case, I loved the subtle design of the cover, the blurb, the author intro and acknowledgments. Now to the book.

Pathetic state of affairs. And this interesting-yet-not-so-surprising post on Times. Apocalypse now….run!

Link – Praveen.