I am so HAPPY! I got to wake up in SUNSHINE!!! And I woke up with enough time to walk the dog and make coffee and get dressed before work! It is the loveliest happiest day EVER!
Continue readingHappy Saturday! I’m at my parents’ today, planning to do a Costco run first thing this morning, and then make them play Trivial Pursuit this afternoon, the NEW game, where they can’t win just because all the questions were written before I was born.
Continue readingThis is really an unbelievable performance. As in, you watch the movie, enjoy the movie, then look it up and discover that it was Sridevi’s first adult role and she was only 13 and go “I don’t believe it”.
Continue readingWell, this movie was a kick! Definitely a fun Sippy, an Andaz-Seeta Aur Geeta-Shaan Sippy, not a Sholay-Shakti Sippy. If you have been politely ignoring all my Sippy movie posts because they seem way too deep and serious, you can swing back now and watch this movie because it is fun fun FUN! And a little melodramatic and romantic, but that’s just a different kind of fun.
Continue readingHappy Halloween! Albie Dog is in his bee costume and will be staying in it for the rest of the day, no matter how pitiful he looks. And I am wearing skull earrings. It’s all very festive.
Continue readingWell, I did it! I finally finished my Rajinikanth biography! Now I just have the Savitri, Hema Malini, and Shashi Kapoor biography on my to do pile. Plus various other film books that aren’t star memoirs. Anyway, now I am ready to very tentatively try to put together some kind of narrative of Rajinikanth’s life, based on the movies I have watched (far more than I realized!), and this book, and information I gathered elsewhere
As you may have picked up from my Aval Shanmughi and Ambe Sivam posts, I have a hard time with Kamal Haasan. Yes, he is a brilliant actor. Yes, he has movie star charisma. But it just seems like his characters have to be so perfect and so wonderful, that no one else is allowed to do anything. But this Kamal Haasan movie, this one I liked!
This is a continuation of a post I put up on Wednesday. Turns out, almost every day of the month in September has a food attached to it (food lobbyists/publicists have way too much time and money). So then all I had to do was figure out which actor matches the food. I was a wee bit mean on Wednesday, I am feeling less mean today, but we will see if the meanness rises up in me again.
Well, I did it! I finally finished my Rajinikanth biography! Now I just have the Savitri, Hema Malini, and Shashi Kapoor biography on my to do pile. Plus various other film books that aren’t star memoirs. Anyway, now I am ready to very tentatively try to put together some kind of narrative of Rajinikanth’s life, based on the movies I have watched (far more than I realized!), and this book, and information I gathered elsewhere
Quick news report for you all. Not much for me to analyze, but hopefully lots for you to chew over as I spend the day with family/nursing my poor car along.
My sister’s visiting, I’m feeling lazy, and it’s World Elephant Day on Sunday. So that’s as good a reason as any to look at people with elephants, right?
I have been avoiding this movie because I have a complicated relationship with Kamal (like him as an actor, don’t like him as a writer), and I was afraid I would hate it and then you would all be mad at me. But turns out, I liked it!
More trailers! I tell you, Eid is exhausting. Plus there’ve been fireworks on my street the past couple of nights, which is also exhausting. But it’s all worth it, because THANK GOODNESS Zero is looking a little better.
Happy Tuesday! Did not mean to make this another Sridevi week, I was looking for something intelligent and intense and on youtube with subtitles, and I landed on this film. And then later learned it was Sridevi’s second major role.
Moondram Pillai, so far as I can tell, does not exist with subtitles. So instead I ended up with Sadma with poor subtitles. A challenge for my Hindi skills! Luckily, most of the performance brilliance was in the non-verbal parts.
And now the tweets have started. Which is expected. Always the first reaction after a death. In this case, they are interestingly similar and interestingly wide-ranging.
This movie is so good that it tricked me into thinking it was a Balachander. But no, apparently this was the level of camerawork, characters, and acting that was just standard back then!!! Oh, and Kamal Haasan and Rajni Sir are super fun to watch opposite each other in their youth, that’s another plus. The plot is not quite perfect, but it’s still pretty darn good. No Moodru Mudichu, but that’s a very high level to set.
I just went ahead and ordered every R. Balachander movie on Netflix with subtitles. Which means I ended up watching the remake of Apoorva Raagangal instead of the original. I hate it when I do that! Oh well, at least I’ve seen some version of it now, even if it isn’t the “good” version.
Second week that I am managing a Tamil Tuesday! And an actual good film this time, another R. Balachander. If I were still watching movies in a wild and unplanned manner, I would be zipping through all his films on youtube and probably getting super confused as to what happened in which. But with my new alliterative schedule theory, I have to hold off. Or else zip through and then schedule all my posts out for the next several Tuesdays. We’ll see what I end up doing.
Is that right? That’s what Wikipedia says, that they had both acted before (in child roles for Sridevi, and in smaller parts for Rajnikanth), but this was the first movie for both in which they were lead characters. Which is UNBELIEVABLE!!! Not just because they are so good, but because they are already so uniquely themselves, the personalities and personas familiar to me now, 40 years later.
As you may have picked up from my Aval Shanmughi and Ambe Sivam posts, I have a hard time with Kamal Haasan. Yes, he is a brilliant actor. Yes, he has movie star charisma. But it just seems like his characters have to be so perfect and so wonderful, that no one else is allowed to do anything. But this Kamal Haasan movie, this one I liked!
I am trying SO HARD not to call this Chachi 420! Not that I ever saw Chachi 420, it was just so heavily promoted, and the title is so catchy, it’s hard not to use it instead of the original. On the other hand, not hard at all to avoid calling this Mrs. Doubtfire, because it changed the biggest message of Mrs. Doubtfire when it translated it to a Kamal Haasan film.
I watched Ambe Sivam! Another Kamal Haasan movie! And, I don’t know, I had issues. Mostly with the way they handled the ending. I could see a cool idea in there, but I think it got messed up a little bit by the need to make Kamal Haasan just the coolest dude ever.
I just had two separate commentators point out that I haven’t mentioned anything about Kabali yet. And, unrelated to that, I just discovered I will have to drive an extra half an hour next time I want to see Sultan, because all SIX screens at my local Indian multiplex are playing Kabali and nothing else for the next week. So, I guess it’s time for a post!
dontcallitbollywood 