Tag: baahubali

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cinema Movie Notes Parking Lot Notes

Parking Lot Notes: N.T.R: Kathanayakudu

An enduring aspect of Indian mass movies owes a lot to NTR, the aspect where everyone sees their hero as a divine being.

Sample this: Asia Week’s posthumous story on MGR was titled pretty much the same, a song from Kuselan harps about how cinema was the first to ‘show’ God on screen, it persists even today in the eyes of the people of Mahismati when they see Mahendra Baahubali. (also see Maya Bazar climax)

While the others in the list crafted an image playing heroic characters, NTR played the Gods themselves.

NTR is still my favorite on-screen Krishna (sorry Nitish Bharadwaj), I can exactly pinpoint when the movie Karnan (sorry Sivaji fans)  turns into the fun epic that it is, the moment NTR literally walks into the screen as Krishna (a similar scene is recreated in this movie) and of course Maya Bazar; arguably the greatest Indian film ever made (sorry Sholay fans and also looool sholay).

Sadly, NTR’s movies are not the focus points in this biopic.

The movies are just occurrences which pinpoint how great NTR the person was. Most of the dialogue is either a prophecy (which we now recognize as true) or a set-up for the sequel Mahanayakudu, which promises to trace the political life of the screen icon.

Knowing myself, I have already lost interest in the sequel. I am more interested in the man who played God and want to know more about the mythological movies, like how Daana Veera Soora Karna was shot in 43 days.

Balakrishna eases into the life of his father and the performance betters with surprising restraint  as the character ages. In-a-only-in-the-cinema-of-India-kind there is a meta moment when baby Balakrishna is born to the real Balakrishna who is playing his father and ends up naming himself!

Vidya Balan makes her Telugu debut, in a nothing much to write about already over played pillar of a support wife that most bio pics have.

While Balakrishna gets to play his father, Sumanth gets to play his grandfather Akkineni Nageswara Rao (ANR); in some portions it does feel like it is a story of these two actors lighting cigarettes, exchanging notes, reworking their careers, and collecting relief together. These are the portions that have stayed with me.


Now that you are here, why not see NTR and ANR in Lahiri Lahiri and wonder along with me, why no one is making a movie about how Maya Bazar was made!

Extra Notes

NTR and ANR featured themselves in a late career film called Chanakya Chandragupta, in which one actor called Sivaji Ganesan played Alexander the Great! I mean, yes!

Jai Mahismathi! I mean….Jai Pathalabhairavi!

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cinema FRS

FRS: Seema Raja

So we all know what an FRS is right? Right? Let’s get on with it because this movie took seven hours to end.

 

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-300: The one millionth time when we see molten metal falling into the mould to create the movie title.

Here it comes with heraldry also. #MadeOfSteel types

 

-101: Some minor irritation happens and someone in the crowd shouts: “indha aniyayatha thatti ketka aale illaya?” and cue to SK introduction.

Yes this has been happening from Bhagavater times.

 

+12: SK has two horses named Alex and Telex #goodnames

SK also names his pigeons after Tom Cruise, Arnold, Obama etc

 

-10: Just when we thought director Ponram had done away with narration and ushered in a new age in commercial filmmaking, there is narration.

Damn narration.

 

FRS Mini Bytes

 

All narration about (insert regional language here) history is ultimately a glorified version of the (insert regional language here) past.

 

+21: SK breaks a wooden fence during introduction, uses pieces of the broken fence to continue action. We appreciate this reduce and reuse approach.

 

FRS Mini Bytes

98% of movies about villages will be about how one village is not able to get along with nearby village. Here it is Singampatty vs Puliampatti

 

+32: SK,Rajah of Singampatti is able to attract an audience of 11,000 people for his facebook live.

This is in a time when even Sunny Leone was able to get only just above 6K in a recent live stream. We will not speak about how we know about this Sunny Leone fact, matter ends there.

 

+101: Self referential movie is totally self referential

SK acknowledges this very fact in the opening song, when the oeuvre of director of Ponram is compared to “aracha maava araipoma” but even a talent is required for that.

Seema Raaja is essentially the SK-Soori combination and a lot of girl chasing thrown along the way; as usual getting the girl is the goal of the hero

 

-101: Even if hero is the rajah of Singampatti, goal of hero is: get the girl.

Here it is Samantha going under the name Sudhandhira Selvi (Daughter of Freedom?)

-54: Heroine says no means no, but hero tells story of phoenix bird which attempts to reach the sun at every possible attempt even after burning; heroine is amused and ultimately gives in to these ‘charms’. #ModernLove

-341: As usual, hero sings song in praise of farmers and how they never seek to gain profits

But never pauses to ask question what film producers seek to gain from such unabashedly profit making films.

-100: Ex-Lady Superstar Simran plays the baddie in this semi-rural film which means that audience need to understand that shouting will be a major character trait.

-29.8: At some point that movie becomes so boring that usually enthusiastic FRS writers themselves have stopped coming up with random FRS points and started to browse their mobile.

It was at this time that they could have seen the Sunny Leone instagram live stream, although we won’t talk about this anymore.

-54: That no one on-set had the courage to tell what Soori was doing is not funny.

-890.3: Movie suddenly tries to become Baahubali with an absolute force-fit for the ages with a story about Kadambavel Raja(also SK) who protected his land from invaders.

Since the present day story-line was not going anywhere, the story of Kadambavel Raja is echoed and Seema Raja also protects the land of his people etc from crony capitalists and middlemen etc

I mean… was this not boring while writing itself?

 

Seema Raja pushes the boundaries of boredom to such an extent that boredom is transformed into an irrepressible irritation, only very few movies are possible of doing such things. That itself is an achievement.

 

Also since most things are force fitted in the film, you can at least listen to what we have to say about pride and history in general.

 

If our pride should come from past glories, then we are failing in the present and will surely fall in the future as well.

 

Well, that is a depressing statement to finish an FRS with, so we will add some 20 marks for a CGI generated leopard which is there for laughs in this movie.

 

Regards

Team FRS

Vanakkam

Categories
cinema cinema: hindi cinema:tamil Essay genres

THE AGE OF EMPIRES

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There is an anecdote of how Queen Elizabeth went up a tree as a girl and came down a Queen, to put the story of Baahubali in a single line will be on similar lines, like say, the boy who went up the waterfalls and became a prince.

But stories are best told in their entirety with flourish and detail and the stories of kings and queen require something else, magnificence.

Magnificent as they may be in text, the trouble lies in the realisation of these visuals from the mind and this is where we come to the ‘is technology taking over our movies’ part of the discussion, in a film like Baahubali yes, a computer really does aid your/the director’s imagination.

From a country that routinely decries its films for not making movies with better graphics, we are very much left behind in the technology debate as well, especially in a time when StoryBrain came up with what he calls the Weta Effect last month; which is in other words that movies with better graphics do not really resonate well with the audiences.

Personally, the inability to make graphics seem seamless in only a temporary worry and can be overcome with training and investment and Baahubali is definitely a step in the right direction, the best graphics film is a film that you can sit and not worry about the graphics (remember Kochadaiiyan), also miraculous that we have moved so far away from Kochadaiiyan in a span of two years. And that is all I have to say about Baahubali’s graphics which went from non-troubling to quite spectacular, but let us first attack the mind/heart(don’t know which does which job, not a doc) of Raajamouli which I guess is filled with fascinations for the epics and long forgotten stories from Chandamama back issues.

Fifty and a half years back, we were making such movies, often large studio productions involving the matinee idols from the states below the Vindhyas, swashbuckling stories of slaves who become kings, banished princes, scheming uncles and whispering corridors, occult magicians, tender princesses and giggling harem girls and not to forget the scenes of war.

With the advent of the so-called realism and the Dravidian movement, these movies dwindled, but the spirit of the classic fantasy lived on but not quite so rightly on the shoulders of mega stars, the characterisations would only fit a mythical time: the masala film.

Somehow a hero jumping between cliffs sits well within a royal story rather than a modern entertainer. Rajamouli’s Baahubali is set in the mythical nation of Mahismathi covering diverse geographies (waterfalls, mountain avalanches, vast dry lands and imposing palaces) and populations ( tribes of different types, assassins, barbarians and royals of course) deserves mention because most of the time the mind limits, and these are how epic stories are built, it is never about one person, it is about all those who live and die in the space that you create and this is where the modern formulaic films go wrong.

Testimony to this is one scene which can also be called “the moment of realisation” , the ground is covered by all those who have shaped the hero’s life, direct and indirect, friend and foe.

While the effect of visuals has considerably increased since the times of Paathala Bhairavi, Mandirikumari and Uttama Puthiran, the excitement in telling these stories has been thankfully retained, which I think is the next greatest triumph of Baahubali (the first being the director’s bold imagination).

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Palaces made of sandstone or software are nothing without the people, here Mahismathi which resembles Minas Tirith from The Lord of the Rings is populated by a league of able actors  who mouth refreshingly well written lines.

“The empty throne of Mahismati resembles a widow’s forehead” a minor character says, enough to make me sit up, the fact really was that I was wide eyed straight from the beginning, even the initial dragging set up seems justified for what is to follow.

Patience in actors like Satyaraj is truly rewarding, one of the finest Indian actors alive, catching your eye even when bowing down to someone in deference; but the film truly belongs to Ramyakrishnan, the God Mother who breast feeds both the scions of her clan, it is said that Romulus and Remus; the founders of the Roman empire were nourished by the same wild wolf and that comparison here only seems right. A performance to savour.

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Baahubali is in no means a perfect film, making a film this scale is in a sense like building an empire, but is a start, a beginning as the title loudly says. Post Gladiator, there was an active public interest in the Roman classics and the sword and sandal genre itself, if only Baahubali could do the same; then we could have a cinematic age of empires ahead of us.

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Jai Mahismati!!