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 principal will either be a psychotic character bordering on perverse or a buffoon who will always be at the mercy of the lead character only to utter a word or two motivational quote towards the climax which will immediately reform the hero. They showed drug addiction as common traits in colleges, having bar or liquor cabinet at homes rivalling tasmac as mandatory house setup even for middle class characters, ridiculing goodness in people either by elevating them as one in a million divine beings or as clowns, destroying every institutions held holy - be it marriage or any relationship, any and every law agency and the concept of god. Now the same virus is spreading into school genre as well. There has been a million movies even worse and has shown school life in such a pitiable manner, portraying co-ed schools as nothing but breeding grounds for ogling and revulsion inducing characters in the name of students. But not many tasted success. With this movie, titled "Youth", becoming a hit, it has sown the concept in a winning mold and there are soon going to be several abominable mutations each rivalling other on crassness.
The other movie, even though it talks against, body shaming (for about 5 mins towards the end), does promote every other evil in the list of seven and more. It involves a scene where in the mother of the hero invites his ex-girlfriend to their house, when the girlfriend along with her gang wouldn't be able to find any pub to drink. In fact she arranges for them to have drinks at their home and even takes part happily along with them. Point to be noted again here is that, this is not the first scene or first ever movie to depict women drinking. But the character who is shown as drinking is depicted as if drinking is the defacto thing and she has been eager to try it and the girls have no qualms or shame in competing with the boys for hogging the contents of tasmac! There is a desperate attempt to make drinking as an unavoidable part of our daily life and pretty soon we may see coffee/tea shops becoming extinct only to be replaced by bars and pubs!! There was a time when people used to see me weird for not drinking coffee or tea outside. Nowadays the same reaction may be reserved for people who do when they refuse to take part in any "partying".
Gils verdict - Storywise Youth is about a reformed student who puts his heart into study to make his parents happy and Happy Raj is about a guy who learns about the greatness of his father from his haughty father-in-law and breaks the taboo about the defaming nickname associated with him. But treatment wise, it scares me very much as to the portions that were shown elevated and once that were ridiculed. No wonder we see perversion on the rise even in society. Whether it is Art showing the mirror back to society or vice versa the image is sagikkalai to say the least.
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