Long time, no write

What a week!

I’ve finally settled into a rhythm at Salt Lake City. Had a very busy week working and settling down. Got a TV and Comcast digital connection and it gave me a sense of being born again watching all my favorite shows including the Daily show with Jon Stewart.

Comcast’s on-demand service rocks!! They have bunch of free shows and movies that I can watch at any time. I can even pause them and rewind and FF like it’s a VCR. I’m loving it.

I’ll tell you about 2 letdowns but let me begin with a pleasant surprise.

Sudesi

Vijaykanth movies are pure escapist entertainers. The more serious he tries to get about making a movie, the more comical it turns out and the happier I am about it.

Sudesi is Vijaykanth’s attempt at making a movie that will serve as his election manifesto. It’s been done before and successfully so by MGR when he cracked the whip with 'Naan Aanai Ittaal' and a whole state voted for him later.

I was expecting Sudesi to be another one in a line of gems like Narasimma (India’s top most secret agent), Gajendra (Why are they calling our Gajendra as ‘Gaja Anna’)? But it turned to be something else.

Sudesi is a young (?) college graduate with a lot of inheritance that basically makes it unnecessary for him to go to work. He keeps himself busy by updating himself on the state of affairs of the country using a computer and some powerpoint presentations (as usual). This time they never really zoom into the screen to show where from he gets all the information or what he does. As usual, there is the girl (‘mora ponnu’) who pines over him. He won’t give her a second look, except when he is dancing with her in her dream sequence (so that doesn’t count).

Now to the plot: A ‘good’ CM is killed on his hospital bed by Narayanan, who is next in line. This is recorded by a hidden camera by Narisimachari, the brains behind Narayanan. He calls himself the Chanakya and Narayanan is supposed to be the Kshatriya, which is a gigantic insult to both titles. The video lands in captain’s lap. Instead of doing an expose, he uses it to blackmail the CM into doing good things for the people.

This ‘different’ story is punctuated with the usual routine of needless song 'n' dance sequences and fights (but not with 'theeviravaadhees')

What spoils the complete Vijayakanth experience is a genuinely different climax from the ones we are used to. This of course, does not indicate that you will be satisfied. I just said different, not good.

Now to the 2 disappointments.

I watched Sex, Lies and Videotape, the movie that launched Steven Soderbergh and couldn’t understand what the fuss was all about. True, the characters were well written and the dialogue very interesting at places, but I didn’t feel for any of the characters in particular and certainly didn’t care at all about what would happen to them.

The other disappointment was watching ‘Born on the fourth of July’. This was actually a decent movie about war veterans and what the experience of Vietnam has done to the country, especially to the minds of the youth at that time. Tom Cruise was brilliant as Ron Kovic, the disabled veteran from the Vietnam War. Willem Defoe hardly had anything to do. But to think that Oliver Stone got an academy award for it was something I could not agree with. There have been far more brilliant movies on war and Vietnam in particular that have gone unnoticed by the academy. The most notable of them would be ‘Full Metal Jacket’. Sometimes the academy’s choices are very hard to understand.