All Hail Hotstar!!! Greatest Website/App/Alternative media source in The World!!!! I picked this film basically at random out of the almost a thousand options available to me. Because I vaguely remembered hearing it was good plus, Manju Warrior!!! And it is good! And it is Manju Warrior, like ALL Manju Warrior! Her character is the whole film.
What a cute movie! Which charmed me so much that I had to put up a post yesterday describing the whole thing so that people could see how perfectly it could be remade as an SRKajol movie. Or really, in any industry with any star couple. There are so many talented mature actors, and so few scripts for them!
Earlier today, Claudia in the comments of my Silly Sunday post requested a mature Shahrukh-Kajol love story. And then I sat down to watch my weekly Malayalam film, Bhaskar the Rascal, and BOOM! That’s the romance!!! It’s PERFECT!!! And so I am about to spoil an entire film, just so you can see how right I am.
Well, that was okay. Definitely an okay movie, not a great movie, or even a terribly interesting one. But it was available to rent on googleplay, and it had Nivin and Nazriya, so a fair enough timepass. But I would still have enjoyed re-watching Ohm Shanti Oshaana for the thousandth time more.
Welp, I did it, I finally watched Narasimham. And it was pretty much as expected. Not exactly what I look for in my Malayalam films, but Mohanlal was there, and so was Mammootty for a bit, and now I have seen Most Successful Movie of All Time, or whatever the accurate superlative is.
Kind of odd watching a movie which hits so many familiar beats, even in the same time period, but it is about Malayalis fighting the British instead of Americans. But then, that’s the point, the British are the British wherever they are, and there is only one particular form of warfare that is effective against them. Well, at least in the 1700s.
Well, this was fascinating! Random pick from my Malayalam shelf, turns out to be the Malayalam version of an Independence film which is very very different from anywhere else. Which I am particularly aware of, having just written a bunch of Independence themed posts!
I watched this whole movie and I am still not sure who did it and why and all of that. But it was certainly entertaining! Although not as entertaining as the last CBI movie I watched, Jagratha CBI, where the twists were just BONKERS.
Well, I’m back to the classics! Because Bharatham starts with a “B” and therefore was next on my DVD shelf after ABCD. And also because I was in the mood for something thought provoking and good, and I knew this one would be.
Last night I went the North American Film Awards, which are essentially the Malayalam IIFAs. So, the IIFAs without any backup dancers or rehearsals, but with a lot of really detailed eloquent speeches and as much applause for the directors as their was for the stars. And in a theater which is about the same size as a high school auditorium, and wasn’t even sold out. But that’s not important, what’s important is I got stuck trying to get out of the parking lot because I was blocked in by NIVIN PAULY!!!!
Well that was an interesting movie! Took me a really really long time to figure it out. And then in the middle of the night I suddenly sat up and went “Of course! It’s all about the 3 chains!”
I am continuing my “well, it’s the DVD on top” decision making process for films as I unpack. After two good Malayalam choices and one so-so Telugu, I have landed on a really quite bad Malayalam film. It looks like it was a big of a box office hit, but most critics agree with me that it is generally no good.
I just cycled through a whole bunch of variations on that title, “unexpected”, “juxtapositions”, “breaking boundaries”, but really it’s just shock. That kind of “I can’t believe they went there!” shock. Which is why it is really too bad that I saw this film after having already seen a whole bunch of other movies that went to the same kind of shocking place. Since all the others were just imitating this one, it should have had the privilege of shocking me first.
I fell behind this weekend, and now I have to write my Monday post seconds after finishing the movie. Which is really too bad, because this is a film that really needs you to sit with it for a while before you are ready to talk about it.
Isn’t this amazing, that there is a whole Indian genre of “women escaping relationships that aren’t terrible, but aren’t what they deserve”? I watched this movie and could compare it with Queen, English/Vinglish, How Old Are You?, and plenty of others. But this film has a twist, this film ends with the “unthinkable” actually happening.
This was a kind of interesting film. Not a great film, maybe not even a good film? But an interesting one. Well, interesting in the last twenty minutes. The set-up for that was a bit of a drag. But most important (for me), this was a FREE film! It suddenly popped up at my library, while I was in the middle of the move (DVDs finally unpacked as of this morning, but books still in boxes), and I had to watch library DVDs. So it was perfect for me.
Well, this was a bit of an interesting downer! A movie about sex that was not at all sexy. Appropriately so, sex work is not sexy for the sex workers, it is just a job that they do from necessity. And it’s not necessarily sexy for their clients either, it is also something from desperation and misery. So, woo! An accurate depiction of life for a sex worker! Which means, depressing and grinding and tiring and dangerous and yet dull at the same time.
Well, I finally saw Oppam. Only 6 months late. Oh well, this is what happens when the theaters only give one screen to Malayalam films, and there are 4 (or 5?) major releases for Onam weekend. I saw Oozham, which was in a similar genre but not quite as good as this. Because Prithviraj is not quite as good as Mohanlal and Jeethu Joseph isn’t quite as good as Priyadarshan.
This is a nice small idea film. But it is a real gem of an idea, and one I very much appreciate, especially since it is following the highest ideals of communism and treating the world as a community by highlighting an issue totally unrelated to Kerala.
Happy Monday! I’m all-Bahubali, all the time, only I know I’ve got my nice faithful Malayalam readers too, and I don’t want you to feel left out. So I managed to take a break to watch a not-very-good, but very popular, Malayalam film.
I avoided this movie because it looked scary, and I don’t like scary movies! But it really wasn’t bad, because it was less about the “scary” parts, and more about the character parts. The specifics of the danger weren’t the point, it was the way our heroine rushed headline into the danger that was the point. Because young women are very very foolish!
What an interesting movie! It’s about stuttering, but not really. It’s about growing up, but not really that either. And it’s also a little bit about Mukesh being a really nice guy. It’s all of these things combined, it’s just sort of about life.
Baahubali!!!!! Instead of my regular Malayalam post yesterday, I put up the first half of this Baahubali review, because it was dubbed in Malayalam and a big hit there too. And now the second half is today’s Telugu/Tamil post, because obviously it was also a big hit in Telugu and Tamil versions. And also, I am putting so much work into going through the film scene by scene, I don’t have time to do any additional post yesterday or today.
BAAHUBALI!!!!! I saw it 7 times in 10 days in the theater (Sunday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday, Sunday again, and another Tuesday), and then pre-ordered the DVD and watched it 4 more times with the few friends who had missed it in theaters. But that was a couple months before I started the blog, so I’ve never actually written a review of it. But now that Baahubali 2 is about to come out (FINALLY!), it’s time. And since this is a looooooooooooooong one, I am splitting it in two days, Monday and Tuesday. Hey, it was released in both Malayalam and Telugu/Tamil, right?
I watched Double Barrel! Only one Pellissery left to see. And I think this might be my least favorite of all the Pellissery’s I have seen? Which doesn’t mean I didn’t like it, just means I didn’t like it as much.
dontcallitbollywood 