Tuesday, February 2, 2010

Goa Film Review

GOA !!! Maybe the name magic does it again. And yes, its Venkat Prabhu's Holiday.

Contains SPOILERS. Read at your own will.

Movie starts with a village panchayat (in Pannaipuram) gathering with our own Vijayakumar (vaibhav,s father role) as the Panchayat Leader. Vaibhav, Premji and Jai are the ones on whom the Panchayat has been called for. Reason ? They ran away from Pannaipuram to the next village for some entertainment .

And one fine day these three decide to run away for a week to Madurai and execute it too. And now the camera shifts to Madurai. Azhagar(character name) , frnd of Jai who marries a foreigner and gets a chance to settle down in london gives these 3 youngsters a clue that even if they can travel to Goa and meet a foreign girl and marry her, their life would be settled forever.

Now the camera shifts to Goa. Meanwhile, Premji steals some amman jewels back from pannaipuram before they left to Madurai. This is the knot Venkat prabhu uses to shoot the climax and the end card.

Sampath and Aravind Akash have done a fantastic job of being Dostana's Danny and Jack respectively own a resort beachside Goa where they Pia is a in-house singer. Jai, vaibhav and Premji join this tamil group and stay in their resort.

premji finds a foreigner for himself while Jai and Vaibhav find Pia and Sneha respectively. Lets not get into explaining how Their love scenes are framed but straight into the climax. let me mention that these love scenes are howvere shot in a nice way without any exaggeration.

Sneha owns India's bigges Casino ship inside which Vaibhav ends up locking the jewels which Premji had stolen from temple in Pannaipuram. By this time Sneha dn Vaibhas have mutually agreed on separation. reason shown for this is pretty loose just like how their loves starts too. So no regrets.

Climax shows how the whole gang of "good guys" get into the ship and recover the jewels. And once thats done, the camera goes back to pannaipuram with all parents and panchayat happily agreeing and approving of all these guys new pair and eventually their marraige.

Prasanna is shown as Sneha's first husband who recommends Vaibhav to get rid of Sneha as she is a Physco :P

Simbu comes in the final reel getting introduced to Sneha as her next husband and the movie ends with Sneha , Simbu hugging each other and the Manmadhan Simbu wiping away blood off his nose.

Yuvan has done a wonderful job , be it the album or the BGM .

Camerawork is excellent with Goa shown right inside your retina.

Overall, Venkat prabhu once again comes up with a NO STORY , mild spoof kinda screenplay which has been very well executed and presented by the whole Goa team.

Please do not encourage Piracy. Watch Goa only in theatres .

Monday, February 1, 2010

Tamizh padam Review

“Tamizh Padam” was promoted as one of its kind, a full length spoof movie first time in Tamil cinema. The posters where Shiva were seen donning the attire of the heroes of so many well known movies raised the expectations for the movie. I had my won apprehensions. Spoofs primarily work brilliantly well as a short or even as a series (Lollu Sabha) but as a movie it might be too stretched and would fizzle out (Quick Gun Murugan a classic example for this).

So how well does this movie turn out. Sadly the movie suffers the same problem of being too long for a spoof. Half an hour into the second half we slowly get a sense of restlessness. Another reason for that might be because of the fact that it has smashing first. The first half is a complete laugh riot. They have made fun of everyone and everything related to cinema. The absolute ridiculous self praising opening songs, gravity defying stunts, crappy punch dialogues, a nobody turning into a successful person just over a song, sentimental soppy sequences and we even have a ridiculous climax twist and the list is endless. All this and so many other clichés have been ridiculed. The first half is primarily several sequences lifted from many famous movies and it is a joy to any Tamil movie buff. The dialogues where so hilarious in these parts. The one involving Kandasamy cracked me the most. Absolutely brilliant.

As much as the first half is so full of industry in jokes and spoofs, the second half is filled with silly jokes and gags and not an imitation of any other famous movie. This was puzzling as it was a huge let down which turns the second half into a very boring stretch with few bright moments (like that English film song - top notch). As a result the movie looks really stretched and we end up exhausted when the film finally ends. For a team which has put it in so much efforts to be different and funny ( right from the title cards, end credits, song lyrics all seem to be carefully rolled out to mock our filmy clichés )they seem to have missed the trick in the second half.

But one trick where they hit the jackpot was in casting Shiva as the lead. He is so tailor made for the role, can’t imagine anyone else who could have suited this role better. It’s hard not to like him. Nevertheless the entire team has to be appreciated for trying out something like this in Tamil cinema even if they have only partially succeeded in what they had promised to deliver.