Carrie (2013)

One of the biggest issues with Kimberley Peirce's film adaptation of Stephen King's "Carrie" is that it appears to be assuming that everyone watching the film has read the book or watched Brian De Palma's 1976 film. Right from the opening scene where Julianne Moore's Margaret is seen writhing in pain, oblivious to the fact that she is in labour, the film comes across as too eager to get to the parts which are now considered iconic. Often, when a major character is to be introduced, the camera slows down and some character off screen utters their full name loud and clear. Carry White. Sue Snell. Tommy Ross. Chris Hargensen. Yeah. That's the quality of writing you can expect from this film.

Veeram (2014)

How seriously can you take a film that tries to milk sentiment out of its star's salt and pepper look? The answer is: not very seriously. No matter how you see it, director Siva's "Veeram" is an awfully trite movie. It is absurdly predictable and throws cliches at us two at a time. I'd like to say there's a method to its madness but that would be far from true. Yet there's something about it that keeps it from being completely useless.

Jilla (2014)

Director R. T. Neason's "Jilla" reduces Mohanlal into being a narcissistic caricature with a God complex who converses only in punch dialogues. His Sivan is a feared Don in Madurai who makes his victims perform a version of seppuku where they are supposed to slit their throat instead. He adopts his driver's son after the boy's father gets killed by a policeman. The son Sakthi (Vijay) grows up into a classic porikki, becoming Sivan's right hand man. They are pretty much the same kind of unsympathetic people like Simmakkal Ravi, the villain in "Pandianadu". But the film glorifies them and tries to lend them some dignity when there is none to be deserved.

Madha Yaanai Koottam (2013)

"Madha Yaanai Koottam" has one of the most notably structured opening scenes in recent memory. If Francis Ford Coppola's "The Godfather" begins with a wedding and introduces us to the various members of the Family, "Madha Yaanai.." instead uses a funeral to similar effects. A patriarch is dead and the wake organized for him is so grand it could be mistaken for a wedding - if not for the long faced men and the wailing women. We get acquainted with the various members of the family - both immediate and extended - and slowly learn about the simmering differences prevailing in the household.

Biriyani (2013)

It's been six years since Venkat Prabhu wrote and directed "Chennai 6000028", and he has went on to release four more films in that time. Most have been a commercial success but none had the warmth and realism of his debut film. Some people just cannot handle the scale, and this his true in Venkat's case. The bigger his films got, the less relatable they became. They continued to have these minor touches that made them uniquely his, but they also became more and more indistinguishable. Anyone could have made a "Mankatha" or, yes, even a "Biriyani".

Endrendrum Punnagai (2013)

"Endrendrum Punnagai" is not a film about the lives of three friends; it is about one despicable, self-centered and maddeningly unreasonable man who happens to have two friends. Gowtham, Sri and Baby are inseparable chaddi-buddies who run an advertising agency together. Due to his Mommy issues, Gowtham has a strong aversion towards womankind and, for some reason, expects his friends to remain bachelors for their life. Due to his Daddy issues, Gowtham is not on speaking terms anymore with his Father. Time decides to test their friendship.

Ivan Vera Maathiri (2013)

In the opening scene of "Ivan Vera Maathiri", the horrific incident which took place in 2008 at Dr. Ambedkar Law College where young men brutally savaged their fellow students is recreated. But the reason, unlike in reality, is far more petty. A big politician with a bruised ego orders his men to riot inside the college premises after being refused a seat for someone he knows. With cameras capturing the raw act and cops refusing to intervene, the incident becomes a headline and captures everyone's imagination. The politician's involvement is a common knowledge yet he faces no repurcussions. There's disgust and anger in everyone's voice, but nobody does anything about it. Except one guy.

Notable films screening at Chennai International Film Festival - 2013

Foreign Language Film Submissions:

1. The Past (Iran)
2. The Great Beauty (Italy) 
3. The Hunt (Denmark) 
4. In Bloom (Georgia) 
5. The Missing Picture (Cambodia)
6. Wakolda (Argentina)
7. Back to 1942 (China) 
8. Disciple (Finland) 
9. Omar (Palestine) 
10. The Old Man (Khazak) 
11. Mother I Love You (Latvia) 
12. The Cleaner (Peru) 
13. Walesa: Man of Hope (Poland) 
14. Ilo Ilo (Singapore) 
15. No (Chile) - 2012
16. Fill the Void (Israel) - 2012

Kalyana Samayal Saadham (2013)

Arranged Marriages are like dark clouds looming over the heads of self-respecting single people in their mid to late 20s. There's a degree of helplessness about letting parents find the "right" partner, but there's also this sense of inevitability attached to it. Spending a lifetime with someone you know well is itself a frightful prospect; doing the same with a total stranger is most likely to be worse. But it has been happening all around us and most marriages seem to tick. "Kalyana Samayal Saadham" is the story of a girl and a boy of "marriageable age", who are gently nudged into matrimony by their parents.

Irandam Ulagam (2013)

Nearly a decade ago, Selvaraghavan made "7/G Rainbow Colony" which told us there is life after love and how suicide is not a solution for heartbreak. A decade later, he gives that message a fantastical twist, asking us to go a step further in reclaiming lost love - even if a step means traveling to a parallel reality. "Irandam Ulagam" is mostly a populist RomCom in the clothes of a high-concept sci-fi fantasy. It is the journey of a Vinod or a Kathir in search of his Divya or Anitha.

I cannot be entirely sure just how much Selva has fumbled here in relation to that one previous big-budget film of his. I haven't seen "Aayirathil Oruvan", but I massively respect the fact that a director took it upon himself to give the people a fantasy film about our absurdly rich history. The same cannot be said for "Irandam Ulagam"; what it lacks in originality, it also lacks in clarity. The end result is a messy compound of undercooked ideas wrapped inside an incoherent and bloated narrative. It's hard to believe someone like Selvaraghavan has made such a corny film about "pure love" and "all the Universe conspiring in helping a person achieve it."

I like how the film didn't resort to excessive spoon-feeding and jumps right into the narrative, expecting us to keep up. We are introduced to our two pairs of protagonists, living in two different worlds. Anushka is Ramya and Varna, and Arya is Madhu and Maruvan respectively on Planet Earth and Planet I-don't-know-where. Selva uses a modern-day setting just to ease audience into a world which is completely strange to them. The two love-stories, if we can call it that, run parallel before it's time for these worlds to collide. Here's where the abstraction begins to take its toll on us. There are long stretches of scenes which make very little sense. To make things worse, an abrupt and unconvincing tragedy is forced upon us.

We don't know if a portal opened on its own to let Madhu in or if this particular Oracle lady, played by a Kalki Koechlin lookalike, made it happen. The Oracle's role in the Kingdom and in Maruvan's family is never explained either. Then there is a subplot about an ongoing war with a neighboring kingdom that felt severely under-explained. It's also very hard to believe that a world, this world in particular, could exist without love. It's such an incredible idea which is so under-explored that it becomes maddening after a point. The film is only too happy to keep aside its ambitions in favor of love failure songs. I just hope Selva doesn't blame the film's failure on audience's inability to comprehend what he's trying to say. It's a poorly directed film and that's the only truth.

You are not in Koyambedu anymore. Myth building is perhaps not Selva's strong suit and his version of Pandora is a proof for that. The issue is not the quality of CG at all; it's just that there's no visual consistency throughout the film's runtime. The geography and its other defining aspects are confusing to say the least. The sky looks different in each scene, populated with distant stars and galaxies thrown together haphazardly. The flora and fauna looks heavily inspired, differing only due to unintentional discrepancies. The natives are all Caucasians with the exception of our protagonists. The derivative nature of the world is a problem especially because all these elements come together and create something improbable. Selva expects audience to take his creation seriously, but won't return the favor by offering a little more insight about the science. But I have to admit the work on one particular variant of a lion was pretty stunning. Sitting two rows from the screen, I found it deeply unsettling.

On the surface, it may be about a man's search for lost love, but beneath the layers of tacky visual effects, I have reasons to believe "Irandam Ulagam" dealt with one unifying theme: feminism. At the very beginning, we are told that the parallel world, the Irandam Ulagam, never prospered because their people never learned to love; a world where the thought of getting a woman's consent never crossed the mind of a man; a world where rape is the natural state of order. Selva gives primeval characteristics to the natives which sadly seem to exist even today in our "civilized" society.  Selva provokes us to think about the world we live in and how we treat our women by drawing parallels which should have ceased to exist long, long ago. He talks about dwindling sex ratio and how turning down a woman's proposal is the worst thing one could do in this day and age.

Maruvan conquers a feared beast to keep Varna from falling onto the bed of the King, but this understandably doesn't sweep her off her feet. It's still an agreement between two men, with no place for her consent.  She would even kill herself rather than be married to a man (why this world even has a system of marriage, we will never know.) Varna eventually has a change of heart towards her man. There's a crackling scene where Varna and Maruvan draw swords at each other in the middle of their fight with a common enemy. Perhaps that's the only way to solve the menace of inequality. Together. But the lines often get blurred and the subtext doesn't reflect coherently on the screen. Who are those people in black robes who want to create a world with one king, one religion and one God? What do they represent? How can a world that doesn't respect women be revering a female prophet? Is she a slave to them? It's questions like these that keep me up at night.

I cannot imagine any other actor besides Anushka to play the female lead. The character demands a big girl and big is what she is. In spite of being a fairly lengthy film, there are many scenes in the film which feel rushed. Maruvan goes from being a village bum into an invincible warrior of sorts in the blink of an eye. He becomes so good at fighting that the clashes at the end become pointless. The idea of a kingdom which is on the cusp of experiencing love for the first time is all good, but Selva does too little where there was scope for so much more. And he does it with utter lack of finesse. For all I know, thematically, the film might not even be as deep as I am willing to give it credit for.