Billa was painful. Excruciatingly. Even the best guy to do this remake job, Vishnuvardhan, failed, big time. With Billa, Ajith has exhausted all his options. What’s left ?

Go back to the drawing board(if there is one), and he should rethink his options. He should be looking at his career and verify his career highs. Aasai, Kathal Kottai, Kadhal Mannan, Vaali and Dheena. The rest of his films are pure crap or moderately interesting films. All the above films are major hits, with due credits to the director/story/screenplay. Isn’t it time to get a class in acting(the one that includes dialogue delivery) ? Seriously, no jokes.

The only other way, Ajith can pick up his career is comparing himself to Vijay, which is invariably happening, thanks to the fan clubs. But this wouldn’t be fruitful to him. Why ?

Vijay’s major success stems from the fact that he has accepted his limitations and started to tread on the path that has been laid by yester year heroes with similar limitations. Vijay should thank Rajini for being a veteran on this route. And he does.

Can Ajith pick-up the heroic path of Vijay. NO. Why ? Because heroism doesn’t happen. One has to create it. Not a single scene of Billa, Ajith was trying to be heroic, including the scene where Ajith escapes from the bridge by diving down. There isn’t a movie where I’ve seen Ajith as heroic as Vijay. And that’s why he shouldn’t be compared to Vijay.

Part of Ajith’s success comes from his cool personality, lover-boy image, a typical middle-class south indian boy. A good family drama, a neat down-to earth comedy film can do the magic. There are hundreds of stories and tons of directors waiting for Ajith to make this happen. And Ajith has been quite successful to pick up fresh talent. It’s just that he has shunned them for some time now.

There are two directors whom I really think can give Ajith a break provided Ajith changes his mindset and starts to concentrate on his areas of improvement. Not Mani Ratnam. Not Shankar. Go Figure.

Previous Ajith Kumar Rant.

You Tube took the opportunity of the World Economic Forum which happened at Davos from Jan 23-27. They installed the YouTube Room where a question called The Davos Question, was posted and the world leaders could come in, face a camera and answer the question. The answers were later posted to You Tube.

“What one thing do you think that countries, companies or individuals must do to make the world a better place in 2008?”

That was the question. And here are the answers. Some were exciting and some were not so exciting. Nevertheless a must watch to see how different the reactions are from the leaders/CEOs around the world.

I did. For the last three years. And it sucks.

Looks like this Saarang’s Pro Show was the largest crowd puller, ever. Hindu reports that the singer Karthik gave a rocking performance. I know how the stadium would have yelled for Engeyum Epothum.

Karthik returned to his rockish best with “Enakku Oru Girlfriend Venumada” sending fans into a frenzy before his hand lent a nice Elvis-y touch to “Baar Baar Dekho,” a surprise for retro-lovers.

Though what he sings mostly is in the realm of boy-band songs and love ballads, while performing, he does it with the attitude of a rockstar with plenty of scope for audience participation. Yes, it helps that Bennett is quite something with the lead guitar.

Calling the IIT Core members to the stage, he launched into what’s considered an anthem for the youth, “Mustafa Mustafa” for a finale.

Sensing they wanted more, he captured the mood with “Engeyum Epothum Sangeetham Santhosham”.

And, junta was on cloud nine: “ARaaa-raaaa-reee-reeee Yo!”

That was a glowing review. After posting this, I went back and found that the author of the article was Sudhish Kamath. That explains !!

BTW, Did you miss it too ?

It is almost certain that India’s most sought after actress Aishwarya Rai Bachchan has signed the mega movie ‘Robot’ directed by Shankar. Aishwarya Rai will play the lead role as the pair to India’s biggest superstar Rajinikanth.

As we have mentioned earlier, Rajinikanth has been trying to cast the beauty queen in his film right from the days of ‘Padayappa’. His dream to cast her has finally come true in the biggest movie of his career.

Just the last paragraph is enough to put down the fame of Super Star. Rajini should sue Indiaglitz for this. Read some more juice here. It’s funny !!

WordPress.com has been hosting free blogs for more than 2 years now. With their sheer development effort and bringing the best features out to the users, I think they have already taken over the blogging scene.

They aren’t the largest blogging network yet. But they seem to understand the cutting edge of this technology and its going to only a span of few years for them to snatch the best content management tool award from Movable Type. Blogger ? Those guys are now history.

When Google took over Blogger, we were all certainly excited but nothing big has happened since then. Its a pity that they don’t even have a tool to import content from other blogging softwares. And people have been asking about this since 2004. I’m not sure why Google hasn’t been concentrating on Blogger as much as it has done to its Feed Reader.

WordPress.com started offering free uploads upto 3GB per account from this week. But that isn’t the big news. Check out WP site to see the blogging community that they are building. Even Tamil WP Bloggers are a strong community there. Just when Blogger.com is filled with spam blogs, I think these WP blogging communities are going to be WP’s lifeline in the days to come.

From WP blog -

Today, one of those developments comes to fruition — everyone’s free upload space has been increased 60x from 50mb to 3,000mb. To get the same amount of space at our nearest competitor, Typepad, you’d pay at least $300 a year. Blogger only gives you 1GB. We’re doing the same thing for free.

Our hope is that much in the same way Gmail transformed the way people think about email, we’ll give people the freedom to blog rich media without having to worry about how many kilobytes are left in their upload space.

India Glitz is reporting that someone has unearthed a trailer of Kamal’s dream project Marudhanayagam. And doesn’t that seem like a joke. Yes, because the you tube generation found the trailer, more than a year back and it has been written and talked about in every single cinema blog. Suresh even went one step ahead of scoring a BGM for this muted trailer.

Now, read the joke, again -

When everyone is talking about Kamal Haasan’s upcoming project, someone has unearthed the trailer of Kamal’s dream project ‘Marudanayagam’ and put it in a website that provides free video shows.

The trailer is amazing, to say the least. The two minute video shows what is in store for us if the dream movie of Kamal gets a chance to take off. It shows a thrilling action scene set in the period of British rule in India. Another scene, in which an eagle tries to eat the flesh of the protagonist, is incredible. The scenes have the grandeur that stuns you instantly. The visuals are astonishing.

The film, if you go by the trailer, has the potential to become a real treat to those who love to see the movies with substance. The awesome visuals promise you that the movie would come out as an entertainer with an outstanding content.

Yeah !! right.

Outsiders to Indian Films are astonished at the number of group artists used in songs, dances and stunts. That is something, even we are unable to comprehend ourselves.

If you are watch Tamil film songs/stunts closely, here’s a simpe one for you, Find the song/movie of this picture.

The Pongal special interview with Director Shankar on Vijay TV was classy. Infact, its the best ever Shankar interview on any media. Shankar as usual was down-to-earth, straight and honest in replying to Gopinath’s questions. Gopinath known for his well researched questions, did a fine job of bringing Shankar to a comfortable state where the interview just rushed through like well crafted flick.

Though it was rehash of what Shankar had already written his auto-biography, Sankar Muthal Shankar Varai(in Kumudam), it was good to see him elaborate on the films he worked before making his first film, Gentleman.

The interview brought out the best from Shankar, his humor, his approach to films and surprisingly, his (non-existetent) views on Tamil Cinema. Shankar did agree that Sujatha’s dialogue(s) added to the success of his films and also gave distinct voices for his characters.

I’ve enjoyed most of Shankar’s films except the recent ones like Sivaji and Anniyan. And I’ve always seen Shankar as a director who makes films for his audience and not just for himself. They have mostly been pedestrian fantasy flicks but sometimes end as a nonsensical film like Sivaji, where the screenplay went off-track and wasn’t in his control.

BTW, if you can get a hand on the video of this interview, its a must watch.

I wasn’t even motivated to comment here due to reCaptcha service requesting to enter two wierd words to ensure it wasn’t a bot trying to sumit a comment. Instead, I’ve enabled the Akismet Anti-Spam Plugin to check if its a better solution.

I did read on Akismet’s site that nearly 90% of comments are spam. And that’s quite a number considering the growing awareness about spam and it’s control.

Now keeping fingers crossed.

One day later - Its working !! Akismet has identified atleast 50 spam comments since yesterday but one of thos 50 was a legitimate one. Akismet (MT-Plugin) works, as of now. The usual number of spam comments on this blog runs into couple of hundreds for a day. I am still waiting for more evidence of spam catching.

I missed the news(on Nov 6, 2007…thats way too long to miss) but it isn’t too late, even now. Live.com, part of Microsoft Windows Live network is offering email IDs for its live.com domain.

That means, 3 or 4 letter email ids are still available to be taken. If you are already settled on a hotmail, yahoo or gmail ID, you can stay put but if you are an email junkie and manage three/four handles at the same time, you’ve got to rush.

I was checking out the site and I got robots@live.com. Can you beat that ? Certainly nothing to do with Rajini’s Robot. I promise that my love for robots have existed back from my comics days.