It’s becoming increasingly evident that a lot of our new filmmakers have been raised on Western cinema. The visual treatment of the opening scene of Sawaari reminds you of the neo-noir visuals of Sin City. It’s all black and white, except for a burning cigarette. There are slo-mo shots of the smoke. There’s much darkness inside the car,…
Author: Sudhir Srinivasan
Go, going, gone
Considering how besotted we all are with cinema, it may seem a bit absurd to say this, but lately, I’m beginning to believe that Tamil films meant a lot more, say a couple of decades ago. Do you remember that time — when a trip to a cinema theatre was almost an exotic outing that…
Pokkiri Raja
An ineffective comedy that leaves you yawning It takes a while for you to grasp that Pokkiri Raja isn’t a serious film. It is even irreverential in parts: its villain has no problems smoking in a temple, its hero and heroine are in a gag that parodies divine possession… you get the idea. It all…
Chennai’s love for DiCaprio
Immediately after Leonardo DiCaprio won the Oscar, Twitter exploded. At the speed of about 440,000 tweets per minute, according to official reports. That’s just marginally lesser than the number of retweets I get: about one or two per day. Anyway, I’m convinced that a vast number of those tweets came from Indians who, no doubt,…
Miruthan
An inconsistent ‘zombie’ film with excessive melodrama From the director of Naaigal Jaakirathai comes Miruthan , or well, Peigal Jaakirathai . They are not really peigal , or for that matter zombies, as was mentioned during the promotions, but simply “patients”, as doctor Renu (Lakshmi Menon) puts it. You see, these are not undead people,…
Sudhir Srinivasan 