Tuesday, September 8, 2009

The polar bear song

I want to go there
To the snow and the ice
I want to be a polar bear
Its no great sacrifice

Inspired by these pictures

Monday, September 7, 2009

Quick Gun but Poor Shot

Sigh. I had such hopes for this one. The movie version of Quick Gun Murugan. Five minutes into the movie and it all became clear: what was a funny and rather wacky two-minute Channel V sketch character had been put on some medieval rack and stretched to nearly two hours, with the result that poor Quick Gun was a thin as paper.
To give him credit Rajendra Prasad is quite good, but everyone else hams it up in a way thats painfully unfunny. Nassar stomps around chewing the scenery and playing a caricature villain. My classmate Anu Menon does what she can, but being trapped inside a locket does pose some limitations. Rambha plays the usual bad-girl-with-heart-of-gold-redeemed-by-love. Prabhu Deva's brother is another one for shouting at the top of his voice and generally overdoing everything.
I think the main problem was the plot, which starts off sounding very promising: cow protecting cowboy tries to save vegetarian tamil villages from being forced into becoming meat-eaters; but then there's death and rebirth and all manner of rambling and the plot loses any vestige of sense it ever possessed: cowboy takes revenge on evil meat-only dish purveyor who wants total world domination through dosas (arent dosas veggie food? its quite confusing). So the first half is set mostly in the south, with english subtitles for the tamil dialogue and the second, fully in bombay, with no english subtitles for the hindi dialogue. How's that for North-South prejudice?
The period and genre details were pretty good. Some of the dialogue was rather funny. And Rajendra Prasad says 'My name is Murugan. Quick Gun Murugan. Mind it' with surpiring verve and style. But I'm really struggling to find something positive to say about this movie. I suppose the problem is that it was meant to be a spoof of the 'curry westerns' of the 70s but one of the prerequisites of spoofs is that they be funny. And this movie was only fitfully so. Thats why it was about as appetising as warmed up leftovers. Or in this case, yesterday's dosa and sambhar. Now that is surely something I do mind!