Variety is the spice of life

Happened to see two movies - Youth and Happy Raj - over the weekend. Both were widely reviewed and supposedly box office hits. Especially Youth seems to be a bigger hit of all tamil movies released this year. It is directed by Ken, the son of actor Karunas and is based on the school life of a guy, whose only aim is to fall in love before finishing twelth!!! And he manages to fall in love not once or twice but thrice with the third one being the final one before he takes a different decision in the end. Even by the one liner about the story, you could've easily made out the kind of scenes or about the character of that boy and the school environment. It has become a norm nowadays that, rouges and ruffians who have mastered indiscipline and excel in it, are the defacto heroes in movies and they've started pushing the limit within school. Anyone who is shown as a studious person will almost always have something shady are caricaturist about that character. The head master or the p...

Michael Crichton along with Arthur Hailey is my favorite author. It gives immense thrill to read their books and their storylines are full of insights on the industry or genre or the institution about which the premise may be based, almost like reading a subject matter book but interestingly written in simple language which can be followed by laymen. I remember reading this book sometime around my college first year or may be bit earlier around that time. It was obviously a hard copy and was shared with me by a school mate of mine, who was also the one who introduced me to Asimov. He gave me "Prelude to Foundation" that i read for almost an year. "Timeline" was intriguing and kept me interested sheerly by its concept of time travel and i was smitten by the thought process when i read it first. This time, co-incidentally, i was also watching the movie based on the same story in parallel and somehow both the book and the adaptation were disappointing! I can understand...

Despite this coming up on the "Next to watch" timeline, i kept skipping it for no reason. When i felt really bored last week, started watching it and after a slight binge watch, i am into season 4 in no time!!! Not that it is that interesting or racy for that matter. But there is something earthy and grounded about the whole premise which keeps you entertained!! The story is about a real time oldie who joins the LAPD as a Rookie cop, having only a decade or so for his retirement. How he comes up in grade and his team's exploits form the storyline so far. The way they've set the storyline, it makes Los Angeles seems to be the bed rock of criminals and illegal activity!! Every episode has at least one gun fight or a drug bust or a kidnapping or murder!! Of course, with the premise being based on police activities, you can't show anything else. It is like having a drama series on doctors and complaining that all episodes deals with diseases and death!! I agree! But c...

Kudos to Malluwood for having owned the sci-fi and other fantasy genres from Hollywood. They've managed to create hits on the most difficult genres to succeed in India. Be it Minnal Murali or Lokah chapter 1 and several other horror/thriller genres as well, Malayalam story writers have aced the art of coming up with mind boggling scripts rivalling their Hollywood counterparts. Even for those that are lift offs from Japanese Korean movies, when the same is available for every other director, the best work comes from their industry and credit should be given where its due. I am not sure if this movie is an inspiration from any other European/Asian or American version, but the presentation, picturisation everything keeps you spell bound and is quite engaging as well. Storywise, it is about time loop concept, possibly the most interesting yet potentially confusing of plot lines. A police officer gets transferred from city to a remote village. He sees an accident on his way to the stati...

What makes a drama series tick, in OTT, that too in Tamil? The question should've been pretty straight forward and not as difficult as it is for making a successful movie, for drama series are dime a dozen across scores of TV channels and none of them are found wanting for audience. The more the cry the merrier the TRP. In that context, the only challenge that OTT platforms might've had while streaming tamil series must've been to choose the path - either the well trodden and worn out cryathons aligning with Satellite channels or try for something genre specific like how they do across English and other foreign languages. This is where Heartbeat series in Hotstar finds the fine balance between being a soap oppaari (no pun intended) in tv and carving a niche OTT audience.  While the setup might've been familiar one for Hindi audience with so many series happening on hospital based storyline, i guess this is a first for tamil. The first season was more on establishing the...