Madrasapattinam

I don’t feel like dissecting this movie and picking holes. This is a beautiful movie that you should sit back, relax, soak in, experience and enjoy. The background music is excellent and visuals are beautiful. More importantly this movie has all the things that ravanan lacked (couldn’t help taking a dig at Maniratnam). I don't think it is Arya's movie. It is the heroine who owns the movie and the movie revolves around her, which is a rarity in Tamil cinema. She is expressive, charming and a big plus to the movie. It reminded me of how Asin took over Ghajini's first half. Vijay and technicians have done great work and actors have done their part. Climax is neat without much melodrama. For the critical part, the running part could have been curtailed a bit and I am not sure if Arya's hair style is indicative of the 40's.

The German Surprise

Ok this will be my last post with respect to the Football world cup. The German team has been one of the surprise packages of this world cup. This is both in terms of their results and also their style of play. Not many including Germans expected a 3rd place finish. But for me their attractive style of play was a big surprise. Style and Flair were words you can hardly associate with German football. Efficiency, Industrious, Ruthless is what is German teams of the past are know for. I am not a big fan of their playing style earlier, but it has produced good results and you can always count on German teams to reach at least Semi-finals of any major tournament. Now this team is young is different. To start with nobody gave them chance to reach the Semi-finals. Without having seen them play, I was actually wishing that they get booted out in the first round along with Italy and France. Thankfully Italy and France deservedly got booted out and Germans were deservedly not. What happened in knockout stages was not something expected. They beat the over-hyped England 4-1 and favorite Argentina 4-0 and finally it took a strong Spain team to stop them. Though I was rooting for Spain from before the start of the tournament, I wouldn’t have been sad if Germany had played well that day and won the match. One thing I observed in this German team is that there were so many players from different ethnic backgrounds, something unheard of in past German teams. Klose, Podalski, Ozil, Sami Khadira, Boateng, Mario Gomez are not ethnic Germans. That makes me wonder may be this diversity in the team is the cause for the style and flair that is exhibited by this German team.

Looks like many people think this German team is different from earlier teams. An ESPN article says "Loew's 2010 World Cup side are the sexiest thing to come out of Germany since Claudia Schiffer became the supermodel face of Chanel”

Winning Ugly!

Arjen Robben of the Dutch team said before the world cup finals that he would not mind winning ugly. The Dutch did in fact try to win ugly knowing that they cannot compete with Spain at skill levels, but failed anyways. What they succeeded was to turn the finals into a ugly game that made for a painful watch for millions of fans. I am pretty sure that Dutch would not have got any new fans after this display. For a moment it looked like the Dutch may succeed in their endeavor when Robben went clear with only Casillas in front of him, but casillas saved the day for Spain. To me, more than Spain deserving to win this World Cup, Dutch did not deserve to win this World Cup. This is a sad situation because Dutch teams of the past were known for their flowing game, which made for attractive viewing. People still talk about the Johan Cryuff's 1974 Dutch team (Losing finalist) that played total football even after 9 world cups and 36 years later. I doubt if anybody remembers the boring 2006 World Cup winning Italy team. So is Winning the only thing?

Dishonourable Killings!

What is really honourable in honour killings, which seems to happen so frequently in the recent past. It could be that it was always there, but only recently it is in the news. To me it is a barbaric practice which has know place in any civilized society at any point of time. It just reflects people's narrow mindsets and intolerance of other point of views. To me, it is no use crowing about our culture when we have such inhuman practices like this and others amongst our midst. This actually brings our country, culture and people into disrepute and dishonour. It is sad that this practice often has the sanction of village leaders and shameful that even the government and major political parties are not speaking up and taking strong action to stop this because they may lose votes. This only goes to prove that we don’t have any leaders, but have only vote-seekers. The hallmark of a great leader is to take good decision if they are going to be unpopular!

The Sikkim Himalayan Trek - Coming up soon hopefully!

I really hate myself for writing about this trek so late.. long after the energy and enthusiasm generated from the trip had died down due the drudgery of the routine life. So I don’t think I would be able to do justice to experience we had in that trek, but I will write anyways. What a trip it was...

Viva Espana!

It was a well deserved victory for Spain over Germany. They were tactically superior and throughout the game they forced Germany to backfoot and into defending their goal post. German team was brought back to ground reality after their euphoric victories over England and Argentina, but this team is very young and they will become a really strong team by next world cup if they stick together. This Spain team has a real chance to win the first world cup ever for Spain and make history. The Spanish team of last two years are probably the strongest in their history. It rarely happens that so many good quality players like iniesta, xavi, alonso, villa, casillas, torres, ramos, pedro all arrive at the same generation of players in footballing terms. Better still is they seem to be playing as team, except on odd occasions like Pedro not passing to Torres in front of the goal in the semifinal. It is a great oppurtunity for Spain with a once in a generation set of players and it is up to them to take their chance and create history...

Ravanan

I watched Ravanan yesterday and I must say that I was not very impressed. First half was very disappointing and had a very shallow feel. Characters lacked depth and soul. Second half was better as the narration picked up speed. Last 30 minutes or so were the saving grace. Visuals were a treat as expected from Maniratnam movies. I felt the music (except the usire song) was not in sync with the context and circumstances... Also I think "Usire" song was wasted by bringing it prematurely without the allowing the Vikram’s feelings towards Aishwarya to build up. It was like Vikram wants to kill Aishwarya and she jumps into the water and suddenly this song plays out. When I heard the song in FM, it was so good, but it was disappointing to see on screen. This was the most disappointing part in the movie for me. I couldn’t feel for or sympathize with any of the characters in the movie. I could now understand why people are criticizing Abhishek Bachan’s performance in Hindi Ravan. If Vikram couldn’t make me feel for his character, I am pretty certain Abhishek could never do justice to the Ravan role. Maniratnam seems to have lost his touch nowadays... don't know who is he making movies for? Does he think by bringing big name artistes and technicians together and building hype around it, he could guarantee success of a movie!!!