THE ARJUN SANTOSH BLOG: October 2011

Thursday 27 October 2011

VELAYUTHAM, a copy of assasins creed????

http://www.facebook.com/Velayutham.CopycatMovie

VELAYUTHAM proves to be a blockbuster

Finally the most expected Vijay’s ‘Velayutham’ set the screens on fire today. It is an action masala entertainer. Velayutham is a remake of 2000 Telugu film “Azad” starring Nagarjuna and Soundarya in the lead roles.

CAST & CREW:

Star Cast : Vijay, Genelia, Hansika Motwani, Saranya Mohan
Direction : Jayam Raja
Music : Vijay Antony
Screenplay : Jayam Raja
Cinematography : Priyan
Editing : V. T. Vijayan
Producer : Venu Ravichandran

STORY:

Velu (Vijay) is a village milkman who stays with his widowed mother, a beautiful sister Kaveri(Saranya Mohan) and a cute Murai Ponnu Vaidhiyalakshmi (Hansikha). He is liked by one and all in the village. He loves to help the needy.

Genelia D`Souza is a TV reporter who comes to village to do coverage of her viewers where she happens to fall in love with Vijay.

Genelia was earlier harassed by the misdeeds of Villain Abhimanyu Singh. He is the most influential person in the city and an underworld mafia don. One fine day Genelia happens to witness an accident where bunch of goons die. She uses this incident and she creates a fictional character ‘Velayutham’. When Vijay visits Chennai there are few bomb blasts planned but he prevents all the bomb blasts without his knowledge. So people start to think that he is Velayutham.

Genelia meets Vijay & tells him about the fictional character & Villain. Vijay initially hesitates to continue this fictional character but it so happens that he continues this character to panel the evil minds and save his villagers.

And rest of the film speaks about how Vijay takes over villain and his gang.

PERFORMANCE:

Vijay has entertained all classes of the audience who has followed the success path of the Kollywood Superstar Rajinikanth. Vijay too has set his own style to entertain the fan club. His style steals millions of hearts.

Hansika creates an impact on the audience.

Genelia gives a neat image of next door girl.

Santhanam’s comedy is another highlight of the movie.

Saranya Mohan as sister to Vijay has done justice to her character giving a neat performance from her part.

Shayali Shinde comes as a Villain.

The film also has MS Bhaskar, Sathyan, Illavarasu, Vincent Ashokan and Raaghav playing their roles perfectly.

Vijay Anthony tops the musical charts.

VT Vijayan’s editing plays a major part in the film.

Priyan’s camera showed different angels on the big screen.

Director Jayam Raja who is famous for successful remakes can now go for any number of big remakes with more Kollywood stars.

COMMENTS:

Velayutham a full length action masala entertainer promises to take Vijay’s career to another level of stardom. On the whole, ‘Velayudham’ marks the comeback of actor Vijay, who had most of his previous films not so good in its places.

A. R. Murugadoss Surya team makes 7am Arivu a dream movie

AR Murugadoss' latest epic, 7aam Arivu, brings satisfaction in waves, but not consistently enough to be considered a complete success. I can satisfactorily say that the film and its ideas are very interesting, and that it attempts to explore those ideas in a novel way. However, in between the truly refreshing and exciting stuff, 7aam Arivu is padded with typically masala styled fluff that does nothing to move the film forward and at times even opens up sub-plots that never get any closure. Despite his intention to open up Tamil cinema to new international audiences, Murugadoss becomes so bogged down in masala conventions that it can become hard to appreciate the special things about this film.

One of the film's great strengths is the beautifully shot and wonderfully evocative prologue. We are immediately spun back to 500 A.D. and to the life of Bodhidharma, the Tamil prince of antiquity who brought both Buddhism and, according to legend, the martial arts to China. This 20 minute sequence is astonishingly beautiful and heartfelt. Suriya as Bodhidharma is a powerful and benevolent force for pure good, even when the strangers in his new Chinese home are wary of him. This flashback also brings the first major action sequence which is among the best I've seen in Indian cinema. It is relatively brief, but the action is fast and heavy, and takes some turns you wouldn't expect. Unfortunately, once this sequence ends we spend a lot of time learning things we don't need to know.

Suriya next appears to us as a circus performer, a part of a traveling show which has found a temporary home in Chennai. He juggles, he performs on a unicycle, stuff like that. This sequence lasts for almost an hour, and we come to find out that all of this stuff is entirely unnecessary. All it does is set up an elaborate relationship between Suriya's character, Arvind, and his co-star, Shruti Hassan's Subha Srinavasan. Their relationship is complex, however, the romantic complications that are woven into the plot serve no purpose other than to pad the film and provide a romantic interest story. I have yet to see an Indian film, even a pure action film, without a romance, and I think if ever there was a need to skip it, 7aam Arivu would be a prime example. Arvind and Subha's relationship is played for cheap laughs until it goes horribly awry in a miraculously coincidental way. Needless to say, I wasn't a fan of this part of the film, and it wasn't a fault of the performers involved, it was the plotting that was just like a lead weight holding the film back.

To antagonize the not-so-happy couple, the film employs some particularly evil Chinese villains, led by Vietnamese actor Johnny Tri Nguyen as Dong Lee. Tension between India and China is always high, largely due to territorial disputes as well as India's support of the Dalai Lama. 7aum Arivu exploits that tension and creates a Chinese villainy that is cartoonishly evil. I don't mind the over-the-top nature of the villains, though, that is a staple of Indian cinema. It is the implication of the film that the nation of China is bent on the subjugation of India as a whole that seems a bit over the line. It isn't a subtle allegation, and it isn't some shadowy terrorist group making the threat, it is the government, and that seems a bit dodgy to me.

On the positive side, Nguyen's got the villain thing down pat after Tom Yum Goong, Power Kids, Cradle 2 the Grave, etc. He gets a few decent action sequences to flex his martial arts muscle, but the majority of his evil performance relies on him using his eyes to communicate his particular kind of power. It works, too, Nguyen's performance as Dong Lee is one of the highlights of the film. Apart from Suriya, Nguyen seems to be the only performer in his sequences with any kind of formal fight training. Anyone who gets in his way just becomes meat for the grinder, but not in a way that is boring, Murugadoss has written in a few neat tricks for Dong Lee, and they keep the film interesting.

One of the film's great strengths is a creative flair during its action sequences. As I mentioned above, the prologue features just such an action sequence, and it is among the finest I've seen in Indian cinema to date. There are a few more, mostly featuring Dong Lee plowing through some random jobbers on his way to Arvind, that also work really well. The action choreography was nominally done by Peter Hein, the go to guy for Indian fights, but several of the sequences look as though they probably had heavy input from Nguyen, and that's a very good thing. The film's most spectacular set piece doesn't involve any fighting at all, but as an action sequence it is breathtaking, even if there are a few less than perfect CG shots thrown in. This sequence comes in late in the film, and it involves zombified/hypnotized Tamilian civilians, flying cars, an overturned 18-wheeler, and a mysteriously strong kung fu lady fighter. Really great stuff.

As I mentioned above, the pacing of the film and the padding included seems pretty haphazard. The most blatant example comes at the end, where the film seems to attempt to wrap everything up in the last 25 minutes, when they should have cut out a lot of the fluff in the beginning and expanded on the final sequences, since they were the really interesting stuff. I would probably have had a different opinion toward the romance if it actually went anywhere, but it doesn't, it's a thread that is left untied as the credits roll, and that is a real irritant to me.

7aam Arivu is a good film with flashes of greatness. It is bogged down with commercial elements that do a grave disservice to the film we could have seen. Will I watch it again? Sure, there is plenty to like, but I was really hoping to see something exceptional all around. In that regard I was disappointed. However, I don't regret my time in the theater one bit. I saw some great action, a novel theme, and a film that at times reached for something beyond that which Tamil cinema has attempted. Now, if we can just get a better editor in there, I think they could have something really special.

RA-ONE not giving a blast as expected

Shah Rukh Khan's superhero character takes too long to boot in this science fiction flick. G.One arrives just five minutes before the interval point by when you have already restarted your system several times, which has been hanging into nothingness. And the film's title character Ra.One, a skeletal villain, gets a face (Arjun Rampal) even later in the second half. Is it worth the wait? Only intermittently and inconsistently!

So what happens before the advent of the superhero? You are introduced to a nerdy South Indian stereotype Shekhar (Shah Rukh Khan), his wife Sonia (Kareena Kapoor) and their apathetic son Prateek (Armaan Verma). The father hopelessly imitates Michael Jackson, the mother is doing a Phd on Indian abuses and you don't blame the son to be uninterested by their goofy gimmickry.

The son wishes to see his diffident daddy as 'Papa - The Great'. So the father designs a virtual reality game and after detailed tutorials on nomenclature and direction-to-use, the video game's protagonist and antagonist come to the fore. So much that they step out of the gaming console to battle it out in the real world as G.One and Ra.One. What follows is a 'Robot- meets-Terminator' plotline with Ra.One in hot pursuit of Prateek while G.One trying to save him.

It's certainly not a 'dream' start for the film with a tacky video game prologue merely to accommodate starry cameos of Sanjay Dutt and Priyanka Chopra. Not only does director Anubhav Sinha take too long to arrive, the initial proceedings don't contribute much to the film either. Too much of screen-time is expended on vulgar jokes and tomfoolery. The actual thrill initiates only after the superhero comes into picture and the graph of the narrative soars considerably in the second half.

Though the sci-fi concept seems too far-fetched, the director is able to pull it off with visual dazzlery and fast-paced storytelling that the genre demands. The action sequences are thrillingly and credibly choreographed and esp. outstanding is a freeway chase which leads to car-catapulting sequence in a junkyard at the interval point. The local train sequence in the pre-climax evidently brings back memories of Rajinikanth's Robot. However, the climactic mortal combat in a simulation setup isn't as much awe-inspiring and reminds of the climax of Ajay Devgn's Toonpur Ka Superhero.

Another factor that works against the film is that its title character Ra.One is not half as menacing as it claims to be. Not only is Arjun Rampal inducted pretty late in the plot, being an 'outcome' of virtual reality he is too shallow and ineffective as the main villain. And while G.One is delightful, it could have been a lot more endearing. While it's mechanized avatar and emotionless conduct is again reminiscent of Rajinikanth's Robot, the South sci-fi packed in much more punch thanks to an eventful screenplay as compared to the Bollywood counterpart which relies too much on SRK's stardom than the script. No doubt then that Rajinikanth's one-scene cameo as 'Chitti' garners more applause than Shah Rukh wins in the whole film.

The film has a very crude sense of humour and surprisingly the dialogues are more vulgar than witty for a film largely targeted at the family audience. With the theory that anything sells in the name of Shah Rukh, you are served with butt-spanking, crotch-grabbing, cleavage-popping, nose-picking, condom innuendoes, gayish and garish gags. While any other actor doing that would have been tagged as 'cheap', girls going gaga over SRK would still like to call it 'charming' over here. Kareena Kapoor takes her Golmaal gibberish-abusive legacy ahead. Moreover a SRK film seems incomplete without a karva chauth scene or a K2H2 track playing in the backdrop.