MANMADHAN AMBU

A romantic comedy with no romance and no comedy.

Best of 2010 - Tamil Movie World

My list of Best of 2010 in Tamil Movies. I have not counted the movies that are to be released after today.

Best Romantic Movie - Vinnaithaandi Varuvaayaa
Best Comedy Movie - Boss Engira Bhaskaran
Best Entertainer - Singam
Best Period film - Madrasapattinam
Best Sci-fi Movie - Enthiran

Best Song - Hosana from Vinnaithaandi Varuvaayaa
Best Lyricist - Karky for Irumbile Oru Idhayam in Endhiran
Best Music Director - G.V.Prakash for Madrasapattinam
Best Director - Vasantha Balan for Angaadi Theru
Best Actor: Male - Rajini for Endhiran
Best Actor: Female - Anjali for Angaadi Theru
Best Comedian - Santhanam for Boss Engira Bhaskaran (& many other movies)

Shocked

The fans in Tuticorin inaugurated the All India Thanga Padhumai Tamannah Fans’ Club and performed the Paal Abhishegam on 50-feet Tamannah cut-out during the release of Paiyaa.

My God!!! When I watched this movie, Paiyaa, on second day of its release in Bangalore forum - PVR cinemas, there was heavy clappings from audience during the title (only) when Tamannah's name was displayed. I got to know from my friend Alwa that the same reaction came from the audience in Chennai when Tamannah's name was displayed. hmmm...!!!

This was brought to the notice of the actress, who condemned such action.Tamannah said that she is not aware of the fans club and will not support such actions. The actress maintained that only Gods should be worshipped in this manner and this practice must be denounced.

The part 'will not support such actions' may not be totally true. I am a bit skeptic about it.
 
News courtesy: Behindwoods

Inglourious Basterds

If you like Quentin Tarantino's movies for the extra-ordinary & unexpectable dialogues, for taking the story with a stylish & unconventional way of screenplay, for the great & subtle way of opening of the movie and for the abrupt and making you feel oh-is-the-movie-already-over endings then you must watch Inglourious Basterds. I am sure you will enjoy.

Family Tree

Brad Pitt can trace his family tree back to Barack Obama and Angelina Jolie can follow hers to Hillary Clinton, according to a new study.

That reminded me that I am related to actress Sridevi. She is my athai (aunt) as per the family tree. A very distant relation. No one seemed to believe that whenever I say that.

Losing Touch

Me: I think I am losing touch. Frequency of my blog postings has reduced a lot. I am losing all my creativity to think and write. Guess it's time I called it a day & wound up my blog.

Myself: Whoa...whoa...hold on pal. That's a hasty decision. I know that you have been busy with both personal and professional life. Now that you have got the breathing time you can restart where you have left.

Me: No, I think I am losing the creativity. Last one week I have been thinking of what should I write next. In fact I did start writing a few posts but they were not so good that even I wont read them. I had to scratch

Myself: Buddy, you say that you are 'losing' not 'lost', there is still hope.

Me: Huh...you are playing with verbs, smarty pants. Bottomline is the same. At least I should work on improving the creativity. I must surf net for the ways to improve the creativity.

Myself: You are trying to attack the symptom rather than the problem.

Me: What do you mean?

Myself: Lately your reading habits have almost vanished. Not even news papers. (I know that you are even ignoring emails that have more than a few sentences). That's the problem that you should attack first. More you read more you think and more you think more you write.

Me: oh yeah...I realize now that it's been sometime since I read something. What is happening to me?

Myself: You and your stupid 'Home Video' rental membership and the plan of 'catching up' the missed hollywood movies. That's the problem. You are spending your life in front of the idiot box watching all those movies that you rent out. You must stop it and get a real life.

Me: You are right. Let me quickly watch the 'Scent of a Woman', 'Bommarillu' and 'Scar Face' and come back soon. Thanks for the help man. I will rethink about winding up.

Pottermania

I visited Odyssey last weekend just to check on the Pottermaniacs. By calling maniacs I don't mean any disgrace. Just that it sounds good. All pottermaniacs please take this as a compliment. We owe a lot to J.K.Rowling for making many of the kids these days to get the habit of reading. I could see lot of teen-agers and even smaller ones in the book shop buying the book or turning the pages curiously at the bookstore itself.

I have not read any of the Harry Potter books. I am planning to read along with my kid when he is ready to read that series. I read in some articles that there are people who locked themselves in a room with no water and food (of course strictly no cell phone) to complete reading the last version at a stretch. There was a huge hype around this release as it was the final one and Rowling had announced that an important character is murdered at the end. By the way who is that one?

Somehow the Potter movies did not interest me.

Version 4.0

I am a die hard fan of Die Hard.

John McClane is back. Haven't watched it yet. Targeted to watch this weekend.

John McClane is one of the 100 greatest movie characters all the time (ranked at 46) listed by Premiere magazine. Want to know who is ranked at #1? None other than Vito Corleone. He must have made an offer they(Premiere) could not refuse to rank him at #1.

Film Industry Stats

Year 2006 Statistics of Telugu, Tamil & Kannada Film industries. I don't have data for Malayalam.


Source: Business Today

What do you think?

Theatre Exp...

Right from my childhood, as early as I could recollect, I have always been a movie lover.

There was a local theatre near my home in my native place. When I was small, going to movie was always a well-ahead preparation with requirement of approvals from long chain of commands. First I would have to propose that to my sister, we both would take that to my mom, then to my dad, then to my grand-ma and at last to my chithappa (a tough one to get the approval). Once everyone approves it, my entire family would go to watch the movie.

On the day of going to theatre almost all day I would be very happy, enthusiastic and brisk. Just before the movie starts, that theatre usually plays some music (same music every time) in loud speaker aloud, that's the indication & final call to the people living around that theatre to rush in to the theatre to catch the movie from the beginning.

When I hear that music, I would feel very very happy that I am going to start watching the movie very shortly. I am not really able to portrait that feeling well in words now. I have watched so many black & white classic movies in that theatre from my childhood. Going to that theatre proportionately reduced with my increasing age, the last I visited was during the year 2004 to watch the movie ‘Gillie’.

I always think that the current state of mind, the theatre ambience and accompanying people each play a crucial role in making you like or dislike the movie. (Movie may be a best one or a bust one that matters a little). I have enjoyed watching many super duper flop movies (like Mafia Gang, Time etc) because of those influencing factors and hated real nice movies as well for the very same reason.

Last week I went to watch a movie in a Drive-in in Chennai (Prarthana). That was my first drive-in theatre experience. I was in a good mood, the ambience was pretty good – I was in my car, my own private place, I was accompanied by my wife, who became a movie lover because of me. I could talk to my wife & discuss the movie while it was playing without disturbing anyone nearby; I could talk over my cell phone; I had my dinner too. Totally, I enjoyed the movie very much.

The Code (that I liked most)

Long awaited movie version of 'The Da Vinci Code' is opening on 19-May worldwide. I am eagerly waiting to watch the movie. Even thinking of (re)reading the book before watching the movie. If just the readers of this novel watch the movie at least once, the movie will be a huge box office hit. This novel is not an easy one to make it as a movie. Fulfilling millions of readers' imaginations is a real challenge. Lets see how the movie has been filmed.

This is the first time ever that I am going to see a hollywood movie that's made out of a novel, which I had already read. Generally the readers who see the movie version of novels don't appreciate the movie much. Their usual comment is that the novel was better than the movie. I guess, somehow the movie versions fail to meet the readers' expectation or imagination. God Father is one great movie & still in number one of top 100 hollywood movies made so far. I know people who claim that the novel is much better than movie. One very common thing that I never heard of is movie version being better than the novel. If you know any such movie/novel do share it with me. I would love evaluate it myself.

The thing with Renee and Period films

What is the matter with Renee Zellweger and period films? In the recent past most of the movies which Renee portrayed were period movies.
On a Cold Mountain in Chicago Renee was Down with Love with a Cinderella Man.

Bolded green are period films, which casted Renee.

unclassical CLASSICs

Hithhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Catch-22
Gone With the Wind
David Copperfield
Midnight's Children

Above is a list of classic books, which made it to the top 100 great books in English. I bought these books with a curiosity to enjoy the literary values of these classics and to have a satisfactory feeling of classical readings. But my tiny brain is not yet tuned to enjoy the literary values or the classical contents of these books.

Review said H2G2 (Hithhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) as the funniest novel of the century. I read that book, it was funny, a non-sensical funny. I was not able to enjoy the non-sensical funny. It's true that I laughed out loud many times while reading. And the story was very creative too.
But I wouldn't put it at 4th place among top 100. Recently Hollywood made a movie based on this book, with same title. I think the movie did not go well in box office.

'Catch-22' is at 11th position in top 100. This is also one of the "funniest" novel of the century, as per the reviews. I am half way through reading this book. I am reading this book just because I started reading. I have to admit that this book has a unique way of story telling. Again my tiny brain is too tiny to appreciate and enjoy that style.
(Story runs during the Second World War time, and it goes to Bologna, Italy.....hmm?).

Remaining three books are at the 21,34 & 100th positions respectively. I have read at least 2 chapters from these three books and kept aside before continuing further. It was too difficult to toil over the pages. But still I have not given in yet. Waiting for a good moment to go back and enjoy the 'literary values' of these books.

Recently I saw a classic film 'Taxi Driver' (1976) directed by the great Martin Scorsese and acted (lead role) by Robert De Niro. I did not have patience to watch the movie without Fast FWDing it. Same with another classic 'Ben Hur' (1950's), which won 11 academy awards.

What is a classic? Generally anything's very old seems to be called as Classics. Books & movies, which were made long long ago were made for the target audiences of that period. Over the period definitely the taste have changed a lot. That is the reason why it was so difficult for me to read/watch those classics. I was wondering whether was it only me or other people also have the same kinda difficulties. I checked with two of my friends who, unlike me, are voracious readers. They also have similar opinion as me.

Let me wait till my tiny brain grows up some what big enough to enjoy those classics and come back again.

The 'thing' with Italy and the 'thing' with 3 major American Cities

I am reading 'The Broker' by John Grisham, got that from my friend's collection. I am glad that I did not buy. The novel is not so great to talk about.
Subject matter is the place where the major part of the story is running. It is Bologna, Italy. When the main character of the story lands in Italy, my eyebrows raised automatically.

In my recent reads 'The Da Vinci Code' and 'The Angels & Demons' of Dan Brown, the characters go to Italy at least for sometime. I remember vaguely that small part of the storyline of Sidney Sheldon's 'The Sands of Time' runs in Sicily, Italy.

What's the 'thing' with American authors and Italy?

Similary Hollywood movies, most of them have a thing for Los Angeles. If not Los Angeles it would be New York. If the story is a family drama, plot moves to San Fransisco at the maximum.
Poor Los Angeles; when aliens attack, they attack Los Angeles first, during natural calamity Los Angeles becomes an island ("Escape from L.A" - the stupidest movie I have ever seen).
Most of the movies have their plot only in these cities. If you have not observed this before start observing now, your eyebrows will also raise when you watch movies.

When America is so big with lot of big and interesting cities, what's the 'thing' with Hollywood movies and these cities?

War of the Worlds

I am a big fan of Spielberg and Tom Cruise. I was waiting eagerly for this movie to hit theaters and rushed to watch the movie on the opening day. Was it worth eagerly waiting for? No.
In a way this Movie was a big disappointment to me.

Idea of making an alien movie from the novel written (by H.G.Wells) almost a century ago itself wasn't appealing to me. But this movie isn't about Aliens. Then? This movie is about the feelings of a father (mainly) to guard his Child(ren). Tom Cruise is playing an ordinary man role, he is not a 'larger than life' in this movie. (hmmm....first disappointment. "Why Cruise? Why not some ordinary star"). Not that Tom Cruise did not suit the role. His performance was good in the movie. But the girl played as his daughter (Dankota Fanning) was stunning, her's was brilliant performance). Good thing about this movie is that Spielberg did not picturize as if the aliens destroy historical monuments and important places on earth (like Eiffel Tower, Taj Mahal etc).
Another good thing is that the movie jumps in to the main story line so fast. I sat straight and thought "okay that's it, it's gonna be a movie with lots of interesting stuffs". pooofff...!!!
Who the hell are those aliens, where did they come from, why are they destroying us? Is it only me that couldn't understand the movie or the movie itself was made like that? Steve, please help me.
I agree that for the opening scenes it was great and scary when the aliens came in all of a sudden and started destroying the earth. But I sure wanted to know a little more about their origin (is it Mars?) and purpose at least just before the movie ended. oh gosh, probably Steve would have thought that there were already a humpty number of alien subjects, which all had almost similar purpose to visit planet earth, so why to bother fans by telling the same old stuff again.
If the emphasis were more on the feelings of the father & daughter relationship, I would have accepted not showing the backgrounds of the aliens. But with the help of CGI aliens have occupied a considerable portion of the movie. It was kinda mixed.
hmmm....ending of the movie is another tragedy. Aliends start dying all of a sudden....oh come on gimme a break...!!!

Obsession....

"Biblioorphans" - a word invented by my friend to refer to the books sitting idle on the shelf, left unread.

I have a plethora of biblioorphans at home.

Yesterday, I went out with my wife for shopping dresses. My wife purchased a few dresses. I also had a plan to buy a cargo pant. But on a street with lots of clothing shops only an old book shop attracted me. I stopped at book shop...I badly wanted to buy books. I had decided to put a 'stop sign' myself for buying new books. I had decided to give a life to the '(biblio)orphans' sleeping at my house only then to buy new books to read.

I am becoming more and more obsessed with Books & Movies. Good or Bad?

Had a feeling that my writing skills are poor and have a lot of room for improvement.
Result: A New Beginning.