ramya krishnan – The Lowly Laureate

So we all know what FRS is right? Right?

“The FRS was supposed to be a weapon of limited use, it has been so faulty as a device that even multiple upgrades have failed to better it ( hi to Microsoft system update), but the FRS (having a mind and life of its own) seems to have overstayed its shelf life far exceeding the expectations of those founding fathers (no mothers) who first thought of this nonsense crazy concept. We thank all those film makers who keep the FRS alive.

Indha FRS ungalukku samarpanam <not translating>

-1008: too much self-importance, no one cares about the FRS. More points should be cut for the FRS team which hates narration to use narration to begin this piece.

-5: Ganavelraja credited when someone from background asks “Do you have money? (In tamil, here we are translating, earlier we didn’t ok) because he is producer. Oh so funny. Studio Green fans can unite.

-5: Director credited when same voice over says “you have very bright future” #yeppa

-9.07: The usual-unusual method of hero introduction of showing hero’s fingers, mouth etc before showing face; while showing face and while “GETONWITHIT” would have been best way, what will the first day fans do otherwise. Also first words spoken by our hero is “jeichiduvom” (translated to we will succeed, ofc)

+1: GETONWITHIT

+23: Hero is very positive attitude based; also he is quick to provide two line summaries of goals, life and leadership and destiny. Hero’s friend is normal but.

-42.56: Hero breaks policeman’s neck, then breaks into a song “Sodakku”, suddenly whole of Chennai is celebrating, no one knows why #IntroSongParidhabangal

-12: Hero blames system and their location for lack of jobs but doesn’t stop to address the issue of skills required for the job or the training. While opportunity (or lack of) is always the issue in such ‘hero saves his surroundings’ movies but we have always been asked to accept that the hero is skilled at face value, there is absolutely no learning curve established because mastery at anything comes with continuous…oh my god..GETONWITHIT…

-8: All rich people are not just bad but greasy palmed slave traders who profit off the spine of the bent labourer, while this may be true; again we have to accept this at a moment’s notice.

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Arthur C Clerk’s third law: any sufficiently underwritten Mass hero movie will be indistinguishable from the hero’s projected image in real life

Like here Suriya’s height is one major point to address, then how he avoid swear words but uses them only when the time comes, regular call backs to the hero’s other films etc.

All this exists in abundance

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-45: All songs whenever wherever

-32.5: Role of heroine is to make hero fall in love in <wait for it> 1….2…..3… oh my god they are cute couple now…seconds…

-62: Time and again we have fought for the rights of those who play the hero’s friend, very pitiable state

-5: Community of heroine or adopted community of heroine is explained in detail but to no real relevance to plot, oh I forgot hero gets to call her as maami. No other community is established anyways.

-89.42: Heroine knows classical dance means she will practice with children in balcony only, no other place, how else…i mean

+22: Hero sitting with kids dressed as bharatiyar means he is going to say something very uplifting

Number of kids dressed up as bharatiyar is tooo damn high!

-101: Ramyakrishnan says she has x number of daughters because in her days of youthful marriage there was no tv/radio and hence nothing much to do; this is delivered as a comic track

+12: Closely follows the adage that festival films should be colourful, Holi has been so highly adopted by Tamil heroes that entire temple floors are coloured with red colour powder.

+15: Some humour here and there

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Acting: a new dimension

The whole acting in this film is defined by how aggressive do actors put-on/ off their cooling glasses, this means that we have sit through 4600 shots of frustrated villains adjusting their sun glasses

#ColorKannadiParidhabangal

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-29: After sometime story doesn’t know where it is going so introduces one more villain, what is this da, demand based hiring?

-23.17: Movie is called Thaana Serndha Kootam but shows a lot of process of hiring thus telling that this is not a natural crowd but one that has been assembled, then how thaana serndha…seri namakku en

+75: Hero combats corruption with corruption (fighting fire with fire types)

+11: Audience made to digest that this movie is made in 80s because buses and dresses are colourful and TR movies are being released. #PeriodFilmParidhabangal

-67: Senthil still doing Petromax comedy is funny (in the filmmakers head)

-23: It is not a film shot in Hyderabad, if there is no shot of the hero walking around the Charminar

Something something happens, obviously even two villains are not as skilled as hero and after an outrageous climax all his well

But not before hero has time to tell his message.

+14: Movie predicts that movie ticket prices will increase, interesting foreshadowing but if we look at it from the point of ….well…GETONWITHIT….no one cares, this is supposed to by smartly written ‘festival’ film with roller coaster family audience magnetic heroic films with social angle in lighter tone

+189: Film believes that no one gives anyone an opportunity and you have to take it yourself: we still don’t know if this is the underlying philosophy of Tamil rockers, because like hero and co can adopt slightly shady methods to give justice but common people should watch films only in theatre etc…

Shubam

Ungal Naam

The FRS Team

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).

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.

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.

Jai Mahismati!!

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