It’s a Mani Ratnam movie, so the directing is just all around excellent. But more importantly, Rajnikanth! It’s my first Rajnikanth movie (not counting Ra.ONE, because why would you?) and I have to say, he does impress!
Well, that was a bad movie! But absolutely worth the $30 it took to buy the last DVD copy available in the world. It was definitely an interesting experience and now I can tell you all about it, so you don’t have to waste time tracking down your own DVDs.
I already put up my part 1, which I am sure was not fully accurate and certainly not complete. But it is my stab at somehow pulling together what little I know into a cohesive whole, in the hopes that it starts a conversation and I can learn more from you all.
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
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 already put up the No Spoilers review. You can read that if you want to avoid spoilers, this is the place to come if you have already seen the movie and couldn’t follow the plot, or want to talk about it, or just want to read what I thought. This is also the place to come if you read the no spoilers review and don’t think you will ever want to watch this movie but still want to know what happened. It’s not the greatest film, so that is a decent possibility and I won’t judge you if that is your decision.
I made a big fuss (okay, a modest fuss) about how Carol should see the Tamil version not the dubbed, and then I ended up at the dubbed. Oh well, it was either that or wait until Saturday. So instead I did a dubbed version at a midweek show which means I will be yawning and fussing through work tomorrow.
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.
Greetings from the airport! Where I am all energized from the Kaala teaser! If Rajinikanth can still do fight scenes at 60, I can definitely handle dragging a suitcase through the airport.
This is the last Sridevi daily review. Not the last review, I am sure I will continue watching her movies, but the last special review. As I said in my earlier post, I don’t want to feel that I am dragging this out, that her death is over-shadowing her life, and so it’s time to move back to a regular blog schedule. But first, ChaalBaaz!
I put up a post yesterday related to Sridevi’s death about how there is a recent association in Indian popular culture between “skinny” and “healthy” and also “beautiful”. And then the comments section just went wild with people talking. Mostly people from the west, where the weight issue has been the dominant issue in appearance for years. But I started to feel odd talking about this on an Indian film blog without acknowledging the fact that in India it is in fact skin tone that is the dominant issue.
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.
Lots of first looks! Which are always kind of “how is this news?” but sometimes slightly interesting. These were slightly interesting ones.
I saw Kabali! It was SO GOOD! Okay, the second half lost track of itself a little bit, and there were some character bits that could have been better, but overall it just had so much more depth and excitement and energy than the other movies I have seen lately!
