A MODERN EPIC: THE DASAVATHARAM REVIEW

BEYOND REELS

A MODERN EPIC: THE DASAVATHARAM REVIEW

It’s not everyday that you become speechless, and it’s not everyday you become speechless after a movie; no I am not trying to exaggerate. I confess I have been a Kamal Haasan fan from ever since I got into watching celluloid; it would be irritating for me to go into my history but then this movie certainly requires more introspection than what my co-so called critics have given, people have given the movie a rather hasty review I do not know why. Dasavatharam is a movie to be watched closely and enjoy it as it proceeds like poetry which should be given more after thought.

Coming back my personal history, I do not know why I was hooked to Kamal Haasan, of all the actors the Indian Panorama could offer I chose Kamal Haasan which is still a mystery to me, the man certainly has something and ever since I have been an avid watcher of his productions, my first interaction to Kamal cinema being the funny Singaravelan, quickly other acclaimed films like Indian, Nayagan, Thevar Magan, Anbe Sivam and lots more really funny movies barring the above mention and not mentioned serious capers.

Three movies that I could claim anywhere in this world would be Moondram Pirai (probably the best tamil movie ever made) and then the classic MichaelMadanaKamarajan(again possibly the greatest comedy ever made) and finally my very personal recommendation Pushpak/Pesum Padam( better than anything anybody has to offer, his intelligence continues to amaze me)

Coming to Dasavatharam, I will try to give the best shot at my review skills. I ask myself and my friends “Is this gimmick by kamal to play 10 roles?”

Kamal playing 10 roles is possibly the highlight of the movie and by which it is being marketed; but for an American/European or anybody for that matter watching the movie would definitely take time in relating to the ten characters and some of which are hardly recognizable which is a credit you have to give it to the man himself for the hard work and research and detail put into each and every character in the film (imagine 10 roles,10 body languages,10 different voices and 10 different costumes more importantly 10 different point of view and ideas, only Kamal could do pull it off)

I really don’t want to rush into the review, taking time to recollect the importance of every role. The movie begins spectacularly in the 12^th century where as Kamal says “people did not have different religions to fight about and hence fought among themselves” tells the story of Rangaraja Nambi(a contemporary of Sri Ramanujan, wrongly mistaken as Sri Ramanujan himself) who does not budge into the King’s wishes of praising the lord of the Saivities and continues his unparallel devotion to Lord Mahavishnu as a result to which he is drowned along with his lord, the story does not end there but takes a Herculean leap to the 21^st century United States where bio-scientist Govind (Kamal again role 2) who strives to convince people around him about the ill-effects of the bio-weapon which has just been developed.

Fate and time playing an important role in the movie take him to his homeland and on his tails is Christian Fletcher (no3) and his newly-wedded wife Mallika Sherawat (oh I forgot her character name-and it is not kamal doing her role) the ex-CIA agents, then comes one of the greatest comic acts of tamil filmdom Balram Naidu(no4) you really have to watch him to believe him(personally feel it’s a tribute to Peter Sellers)as a bumbling RAW agent,meet Avtar Singh(no5) the cancer-battling Pop star and Jayapradha as his wife(the pair being back again after a brilliant Salangai Oli).

When the bio-weapon makes it’s way to Chidambaram we come to the traditional Iyenger Brahmin household where we meet the heroine Andal (Asin-no2,laudable performance in both characters; no present heroine would have cared to do other than wear low-hip chiffon sarees and dance in some senseless duet in Switzerland or Germany) and Krishnaveni Paati (no6 at a 98 year old paati-this is indeed a revelation), the further adventures of Govind and Andal chances upon the tallest man Kalifulla Kahn(no7 do I have to mention it again) and his family including all time favorite Nagesh,the socially conscious Vincent Boovaragan(no8) and the Japanese martial art-trainer Shingen Narahasi and finally the cheeky George Bush himself taking a dig at present day political scenarios.

I don’t have to mention it, the performances have defined themselves and this is no old highway tale-believe me every scene counts back but a good screenplay. The dialogue again by Kamal Haasan has greatly improved compared to his previous box office dud Mumbai Express,kudos every character; everyone(kamal/non-kamal) have something special except perhaps the martial arts trainer but that too is well portrayed. Christian Fletcher is the one of best villains in recent times. Yes, the story movies in some supersonic speed and three hours moves like nothing. The graphics employed are far more superior to any other Indian movie and I hope others to follow suit.

Coming to the final part, is this really the greatest Kamal Haasan has to offer?

As the actor himself would agree this is not his best but come in my list of All-time enjoyable films but is it Pushpak?-i would say nah!

An open question Kamal, if you’re reading this (I hope you do, but seeing more truly you wouldn’t)

“You talking to me?” is this a Taxi-Driver tribute, yes or no I loved the film and honored to write the review.

As I stand up to praise your effort in giving a good movie for me to relish upon, thank you, you didn’t let me down.

Satyeki

WITH THE BEATLES

Nothing happened in the morning, as it does: now everyday i almost miss morning, reminding myself that i had a little more than 20 minutes of yesterday's movie "Chinatown" to watch, the beauty with China Town is the theme. The theme of the detective, so i spent hours in the night thinking if i could ever create a Private eye in the likes of Jake Kittes(Jack Nicholson) in the 1974, the only problem being i disliked Jack Nicholson, i do not know why but the sight of the guy makes me sick and it was two Jack Nicholson movies in the same week(the other being Batman, in which he played the Joker). But then batman was different;he did play Joker to near perfection and defined the role but some thing was missing to make me like the guy and my contempt continued in Roman Polanski's Chinatown, ill spare you the details so that you can watch it. I still haven't accustomed to writing about my daily activities and am myself bored, i really dunno why should blogs be wriiten about one's daily activities, because my activities have decreased to a near minimum in the past few days, the only thing that could be remembered about today is my increasing interest in the influence of The Beatles in my musical sense, i seem to be listening more The Beatles significantly after the "What is this a Beatles Tribute concert!!!!", now only when i start listening to songs which were previously heard/unheard i can say how bad the concert was. I never did like the Beatles before, but heard them anyway to sustain a stature among friends, this opinion has changed in the last few days and now i listen to the Beatles because i want to listen to them, if you know what i mean.
I seem so comfortable writing nonsense that writing about oneself has become an eerie experience, the only good thing being that my mind wishes me to stay true to what happened in the day. nothing significant happened barring a few conversations which too weren't worth the mention. I did make a dash to the British council to pick up a few books, i guess i'm with the Beatles now,


Satyeki

THE DAILY ALIEN#1

While leafing through the endless articles of Wikipedia I chanced upon something which might be of great importance to the people of Chennai or it might be discarded as another bit of useless amusement of the author but I have decided to write it down anyway complete with The Beatles playing through my ears.

As I was on the quest for the historical significance of the various districts and localities in and around Chennai which was once the Madras Presidency, to my amusement and to the common thinking which was wrong in all these years K.K.Nagar the locality which I happen to reside in was surprisingly one of the older localities and Wikipedia neutrally told me that Ashok Nagar was established in 1964 while K.K.Nagar came up in later in the seventies, all this while I had been thinking that I had been living in a locality which was more than 50 years old poor me, but then it hardly makes a difference, going by the other articles Vadapalani and Kodambakkam seem to have been here before the others arrived and Nungambakkam has been mention in the 1911 edition of Encyclopedia Britannica. The things our localities can teach us cannot be significant as the kind of science fiction that I try and put down but definitely significant than the pictures of actresses one sees in the back page of Chennai Times which has nothing to with the city considering any minute possibility which I am not willing to do.

Some of the localities are not provided with their backgrounds which makes it difficult for to imagine the correct chronological order about how the city expanded, yes I know I have written as if this article should be taken very seriously, some urban historians might find things interesting. Ans yes they have mentioned Sivan Park as the major getaway, the gods must surely be crazy.

Satyeki

2056:The Ultimate Beginning

2056

The year is 2056, as it is obvious from the title and if you still haven’t guessed that this happens in the future I have no interest in knowing about you. But then my kind and forgiving mind will forgive you as I, the narrator of this sad story posses the same bird brain as many of you shall be deemed to posses.

The year is 2056, the world is in peril, Gaya the spirit of the earth no longer exists, and as for the earth itself it exists only in bits and pieces. Only one known settlement of human are known in the galaxy which is the Republic Democratic Socialist State of Ranipet, all the other nations either have vanished to obscurity or have declared as forest reserves,86% of the world now is ruled by aliens and 13% of that 86% is ruled by the Marmusians, the inhabitants of the planet of Maramus, the rest of the 86% is ruled by aliens with tapering heads and who speak a language which might sound like a burp in the middle of the Red Sea but undoubtedly they are the most feared creatures on the Universe and call themselves The Blurps and Burps of Boguspur(T3B, this is also a tribute to now dead bollywood feel good director whose name the narrator doesn’t which to share).

Ranipet has become suddenly so crowded and about one million people per square inch that all the men ran away to a nearby secret land and named it Rajapet:The land of the revolutionaries, but fearing that they might be branded as terrorists, the rules of Rajapet quickly passed a law to change the name as Rajapet:We are very peaceful people, but still continued their underground activities, certain sections of the male population still visited Ranipet(for obvious reasons) thus leading to a moderate growth in population to about 0.09%, the scientific fact behind the phenomenal decrease in population economics compared to 2001 will be disclosed later. It was also a sad thing that cricket had ceased to exist and had replaced by new games called “Do you dare to survive?” and “Are you smarter than the nearest alien?” both hosted by a now very old star who used to collaborate with the bollywood director above mentioned.

Things were not much to the liking of the remaining humans, because there were not many humans remaining, the people where either killed to the quirky guns of the aliens in the first Alien-Human war or thrown into outerspace, none of them had comeback including a spy whose name the narrator wishes to present but cannot due to copyright issues which might further trouble the proceedings of the story. Though the love interest of the spy had to remain back in the earth, say shall we call her Madame Undress whose love angle will feature in this epic narration when I have nothing much to offer, but otherwise Ms. Undress is quite peaceful in her life entertaining the aliens.

The disillusioned youth of the remaining humans divided them into fifteen groups, since fifteen was quite a large number they came back to being two. One being “The waiting for God cult” and the other one “We don’t need a God no more cult” both being extremely popular and held their meetings in the Town Hall of Ranipet on alternate Sundays, since most of the members forgot which cult had to meet on which Sunday both of them merged together and decided that formation of a cult was quite unnecessary in these trying times. Later people who thought they were quite intelligent broke away from the cults to form a new cult called “Hey, we don’t need you anymore” and met at a small juice shop which had stopped selling juices because aliens were allergic to fruits which were in some way round in shape an possessed a characteristic smell. The group had very few members and the happenings were not as violent as it would be in the parent cults.

Now that aliens had intercepted the internet I shall have to stop writing my grand epic today, and will continue later when the time is ripe and when aliens sleep, till the from across the universe to all those human who disappeared.

“Let it be”

Satyeki

THE EXTRA-ORDINARY ADVENTURES OF TOMMY FELLINI

Chapter One: From the Moon to the Earth

It was never like the previous night, perhaps it would never be, and the plane had crashed into the Gardens of Huyt.
"This is tranquility base to major tom "
"Do you hear me major tom?"
Of course he could hear the base, but was in no condition to answer back, BTR-56 was badly damaged he could guess, and he was badly hurt too the prototype plane WEBo.0 was not exactly refined in the mooner sense of the word.

He knew where he was in, he never wanted to come back, nobody in the moon wanted to come back, they had forgotten their ancestors and had moved into become the mooners, in fact nobody cared about earth, now that moon was a planet on it's own in the centre of the butter-milk galaxy, it had been 56 moon years since moon broke away from the earth to be absorbed into another distant galaxy far far away from the sun.
Major Tommy Fellini had survived and so had some of the friends from earth and had escaped the green planet in the module which was named Al Gore-007 and landed on the moon some hundreds of years ago, now they had happily reproduced themselves and had formed a colony called the mooners they never wanted to comeback to the dying earth.
Some days ago, The Martian Daily a weekly which could not be circulated daily reported that earth had been taken over by Asunghuys, a villainous tribe mainly consisting of beastly women who were voted the most dominant force in the whole of the discovered universe and had rebuilt the ozone layer and started growing weird plants which usually sang "hound dog" in the afternoon and "baleilikka baleilikka" late in the night, this project overall was called the gardens of Huyt, it also reported that the present queen was Jedai Fister M.A. who was facing severe crisis, the earthlings were planning an uprising and they had to be stopped.
Now she had other problems which obviously is our swashbuckling hero Major Tommy Fellini.
We might have to wait a while since we resume conversation with our Major whose inspiration was Major Sundarrajan and hence the prefix (women usually fell for him thinking he spent six months in Afghanistan)
let's wait, he must get back to us in some time.

Satyeki