Without the deliberate messaging towards the end & heroics, the film may have passed as a realistic take on family, values and money. With it, sadly, it doesn’t pass as a formulaic commercial entertainer either for want of a better villain to elevate its hero & ends up in no man’s land.
Ravi Arasu sculpts Eeti into a decent commercial film making sure of having something for every class of audience. However the well-conceived knot could have been made into a razor sharp film had the so-called ‘Commercial Considerations’ been done away with.
While the ambitious plot and its message (on the various stages in acceptance of something that’s extremely out of the norm in our parts) seem to be the highlight of this tale, the way it is told doesn’t play to the plot’s strength. The tone is too light & the dialogues that are stereotypical to fault make too much mockery of the ways of a particular sect the film’s characters represent to sell the core idea, as these fringe elements are let to dominate.
144 is an extremely funny movie to sink yourselves in for a couple of hours and laugh your heart out. Though the 'Soothu Kavvum meets Mundasupatti' seems an exaggeration, it has the right content to garner good support from all quarters as a laugh riot that no 144 curfew can control – a clean family entertainer!
The short film brings out a different angle about the socio economic issues surrounding the plight of farmers in our country and does it quite well. It also subtly highlights the politics, hypocrisy, the subconscious actions of the society that worsens their condition and the failure to get to the roots of the issue before embarking on protests.
The overall idea behind the short is something very contemporary & there are loads of folks who would be able to relate to it. It is generally a challenge to make a conversation based single-location short, with just 2 characters, engaging.
Uppu Karuvadu works primarily as it has the audacity to cast actors in unconventional roles putting them in unusual situations & letting them mouth dialogues that seem natural. All this set in the midst of a premise-conflict-resolution template means fun film overall!
A typically charismatic Bond, frenetic action, stylized villains – now that’s what we get to see in any other action movie nowadays. The surprises, the intensity and the unforgettable endings that separated the Bond legacy from the others to carve a niche are sorely missed as ‘Spectre’ looks more of an ordinary, uninspiring and jaded action flick!
That X: Past is Present is one a kind of film is undeniable, but for all its endeavour in arriving at a core idea that reveals itself through multiple segments, artistes & crews, it is an experiment that has failed in the prime purpose of every film which is a engaging the audience throughout the narrative.
An excerpt from the book, The Art of Movies, by Nicolae Sfetcu states, “In film, a Remake is a newer version of a previously released film or a newer version of the source (play, novel, story, etc.) of a previously made film. The term “remake” is generally used in reference to a movie which uses an earlier movie as the main source material, rather than in reference to a second, later movie based on the same source.” (P.S. Without delving in to adaptations of novels and comics here, let’s just restrict this to remakes of movies alone).
