Raja's read only memories

This review can also be read at: http://expressbuzz.com/entertainment/news/kollywood%E2%80%99s-usual-suspects/309554.html Multi-starrer Tamil movies are a rarity. Even rarer are movies comprising ‘solo’ heroes pitted against each other. Combine this factor with the backdrop of IPL, the Mumbai mafia, glamour and action, and you have Mankatha (U/A), an entertainer that can be fairly approximated between Hollywood’s Usual Suspects and the director’s earlier venture, Saroja. Vinayak Mahadev (Ajith, was the name intended to be an obeisance to the lord on the eve of Ganesh Chaturthi?) is a suspended police officer residing in Mumbai. He dates Sanjana (Trisha), the daughter of Arumugam Chettiar (Jayaprakash), a smuggler. Vinayak has secret flings with women, unknown to Sanjana, and makes no bones about having crossed 40 years of age. Chettiar makes arrangements to launder `500 crore into the nation, which a gang led by his henchman (Vaibhav), and including a police inspector (Ganesh Kakumanu)...

Bangaloreans may not have noticed it, but net cafes, or internet browsing centres, are to India’s IT capital as the tiger is to a cell phone service provider – a twist in the catchphrase that featured in its recent advertisements makes for an apt description; few such centres are in vogue, save them. From the days of obsession, similar to what the Dutch had for tulips, to the near disillusionment of browsing centres, the IT capital has had its own Roman Empire; the market scenario prior to the entry of broadband internet can be approximated to the reign of Julius Caesar. Obsession? That too with the internet? Anybody growing up in the late 90s would extoll at length on the city’s then new-found obsession. For, inviting wide stares and fascinated looks on anything remotely associated to the internet – then in its infancy in the nation – be it on a TV channel, tabloid, newspaper, magazine, or heck, even a porno mag, was not unusual. Understandably, Sabeer Bhatia, the creator of Hotmail...

Not too long ago, Sir V S Naipaul stirred a hornet’s nest in the literary world and the media in particular with his sexist remark that women writers “were different” and “can never be a match to him”. The works of Jane Austen, according to the Nobel laureate, were “too sentimental”, and that this was because women are never the masters of the house. That his comments generated hot air can be conveniently termed as the understatement of the century. Whether he chose to do so to invite attention –which also meant inviting a fierce backlash from a wide range of personalities, including his former editor, Diana Athill – or was he in his right frame of mind while making the remarks are the stuff of debates, not this blogpost. I have not read his works and do not know him personally; I am of the firm opinion that his statements were definitely reprehensible, and not keeping in with someone of his stature. So there. But we digress. However, one thing’s for certain. That he chose to rema...

T here are movies that astonish us with their finesse as there are those that do so with their HQ or humbug quotient. Bodinayakkanur Ganesan falls in the latter category. A protracted and a hopelessly predictable plot, over-the-top melodramatic sequences, dialogues that lack brevity and gaping holes in the screenplay’s logic are some of Bodi... ’s minuses. A voiceover at the beginning of the movie, probably that of the director’s, asks the viewer not to confuse the film they are about to see with a Bharathirajaa movie. He need not, the viewer would have found that out minutes inside the movie. Bodi... simply fails to make any effort to engage its audience. After all, how would it if it comprises scenes where the hero, Ganesan (Harikumar), suffers a series of epileptic attacks, but recovers the very next instant (even Maggi noodles takes 2 minutes to prepare!); the villain, Thiruvachi (Ravishankar), a local don chases and hunts hogs in sewers for food, but kills a municipality off...