I review: Vikram is good but Shankar has lost his magic touch

January 15, 2015

Vikram Shankar

Chennai, Jan 15: He is considered India’s answer to James Cameron and his romantic thriller I has been touted as the movie of the year, even if it is only January now. His name is Shankar, he has a 90% hit rate, and his magnum opus has released for Pongal, worldwide, in over 15,000 screens. I is a story of love, revenge, jealousy and truth. Lingesan is a bodybuilder who dreams of model Diya (Amy Jackson) on one side and winning the Mr India title on the other. She is the educated, sophisticated rich girl. He is the exact opposite – a guy who lives in the housing board flat and whose Tamil is as local as it gets. But that doesn’t deter him from ‘loving’ her and he buys every product she models for - right from sanitary pads to bras.

Meanwhile, Diya is relentlessly pursued by model John (Upen Patel) whom she rejects time and again. Diya happens to meet Lingesan at a shoot and ropes him in place of John for an ad shoot in China. The twist in this tale takes place when Lingesan rejects an ad from Ramkumar, a wealthy businessman, and the advances of Ojas M Rajani, who plays a transgender stylist. Suresh Gopi, who plays a doctor, plays another key character in the film.

Vikram essays three characters in the film – the bodybuilder, the model and the hunchback. He has worked hard on the transformation for these characters and that is quite evident from the weight gain and loss, and make-up for each of these roles.

The role of the hunchback is perhaps the most difficult and defining in this film. Vikram has to be applauded for the effort and number of years he’s poured into this film as he is the backbone of the film.

Still, I doesn’t meet expectations – and this is a big disappointment for Shankar fans. Shankar has always made films that had not only technical brilliance, but also told a story that resonated and contained a message. Be it Gentleman, Mudhalvan, Anniyan, Sivaji or Enthiran, there was that distinctive Shankar magic to every film he directed. It was spectacular and entertaining. In I, however, Shankar's magic is missing.

In the past, the writing combination of Shankar and writer Sujatha was one of the best in the Tamil film industry. Sujatha, a pseudonym for writer S Rangarajan, penned the dialogues for many of Shankar’s previous films, including Anniyan, Indian and Enthiran. Unfortunately, his demise while working on Enthiran has created a huge void in Kollywood and perhaps in Shankar’s life too. Shankar worked on I with writer Subha for the first time, and the script just doesn’t measure up.

As for technical brilliance, I has it all – all the scenes in the songs are like picture-perfect postcards. Shankar has done justice to A R Rahman’s tunes and that’s a visual treat in the film. Watching Jackson turn into a mobile, a bike and sprout into a plant may be edgy, but it doesn’t give the movie any depth. As for the chemistry between Jackson and Vikram, the less said the better. Upen Patel, Suresh Gopi and Ojas Rajani end up to be just props and are quite forgettable.

Made with a budget of about Rs 90 crore, I has a running time of three hours and nine minutes. This is a too long, especially when the story is quite flat.The film is one-man show starring Vikram, but perhaps Shankar now needs to rediscover himself. The first step would be to look for a writer comparable to Sujatha.

Comments

Add new comment

  • Coastaldigest.com reserves the right to delete or block any comments.
  • Coastaldigset.com is not responsible for its readers’ comments.
  • Comments that are abusive, incendiary or irrelevant are strictly prohibited.
  • Please use a genuine email ID and provide your name to avoid reject.
News Network
February 12,2020

London, Feb 12: Oscar-winning British director Steve McQueen is returning to his art roots with a series of short films at London's Tate Modern art gallery, offering a sensory exploration of black identity.

McQueen, who became the first black director to win the best picture Academy Award in 2014 for "12 Years a Slave", is now based between London and Amsterdam and is focused on championing diversity in the film industry.

Visitors to his new exhibition will be greeted by "Static", a film of New York's Statue of Liberty, scrutinising the iconic symbol from every possible angle at very close range against a deafening backdrop of the helicopter from where the footage was filmed.

"What interests Steve is our view of the world, how humans are trying to represent Liberty," said Fiontan Moran, assistant curator of the exhibition.

"7th Nov, 2001" features a still shot of a body while McQueen's cousin Marcus tells of how he accidentally killed his brother, a particularly traumatic experience for the artist.

"Western Deep" is another visceral work, giving a sense through sights and sounds in an interactive installation of the experiences of miners in South Africa, following them to the bottom of the mine.

"Ashes", meanwhile, is a tribute to a young fisherman from Grenada, the island where McQueen's family originated.

The images of beauty and sweetness filmed from his boat are tragically reversed on the other side of the projection screen, which shows a grave commissioned by McQueen for the eponymous young fisherman, who was killed by drug traffickers.

African-American singer, actor and civil rights activist Paul Robeson (1898-1976) is honoured in "End Credits".

The film shows censored FBI documents detailing the agency's surveillance of Robeson, read by a voice-over artist, for five hours.

"He is... testing the limits of how people can be documented in an era of mass surveillance," said Moran.

In a similarly militant vein, the exhibition features the sculpture "Weight", which was first shown in the prison cell where the writer and playwright Oscar Wilde was imprisoned.

It depicts a golden mosquito net draped over a metal prison bed frame, addressing the theme of confinement and the power of the imagination to break free.

The show runs alongside an exhibition of McQueen's giant portraits of London school classes, many of which appeared on the streets of London last year.

"I remember my first school trip to Tate when I was an impressionable eight-year-old, which was really the moment I gained an understanding that anything is possible," said McQueen, adding it was "where in some ways my journey as an artist first began".

He recently told the Financial Times newspaper the difference between his art films and his feature films was that the former were poetry, the latter like a novel.

"Poetry is condensed, precise, fragmented," he said. "The novel is the yarn".

The exhibition opens on February 13 and runs until May 11.

Comments

Add new comment

  • Coastaldigest.com reserves the right to delete or block any comments.
  • Coastaldigset.com is not responsible for its readers’ comments.
  • Comments that are abusive, incendiary or irrelevant are strictly prohibited.
  • Please use a genuine email ID and provide your name to avoid reject.
May 24,2020

Los Angeles, May 24: Filmmaker Frank Marshall, one of the producers behind Jurassic World: Dominion, says the forthcoming film is not a conclusion of the franchise.

Colin Trevorrow, who rebooted Steven Spielberg's blockbuster Jurassic Park franchise with 2015's Jurassic World, is back on the director's chair after sitting out on second movie Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018).

Asked about the upcoming movie, Marshall told Collider: "It's the start of a new era."

Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard are coming back for the third film, which will also feature original stars of 1993's Jurassic Park -- Laura Dern, Jeff Goldblum and Sam Neill.

The producer also revealed how he sees the film franchise extending into the future.

"The dinosaurs are now on the mainland amongst us, and they will be for quite some time, I hope," Marshall said.

The film was three weeks into production when it was shut down over coronavirus concerns, but the producer said the team has the sets built in London and will be "back in business" once they have guidelines from the British government.

Dominion is still slated to be released on its scheduled date of June 11, 2021.

Comments

Add new comment

  • Coastaldigest.com reserves the right to delete or block any comments.
  • Coastaldigset.com is not responsible for its readers’ comments.
  • Comments that are abusive, incendiary or irrelevant are strictly prohibited.
  • Please use a genuine email ID and provide your name to avoid reject.
News Network
May 28,2020

Agartala, May 28: Tripura Police has registered a complaint against Bangladeshi singer Mainul Ahsan Nobel, who earned fame in the music reality show 'Sa Re Ga Ma Pa' in Kolkata, for allegedly humiliating Prime Minister Narendra Modi over social media.

The complaint was filed by a resident of Belonia town in South Tripura district who is a student of Pandit Deen Dayal Petroleum University at Gandhinagar in Gujarat.

The complaint was filed on May 25, the person who is called Suman Paul said.

Nobel is not yet a popular singer in Bangladesh and has always been rejected by the audience of that country. He participated in the TV music reality show called Sa Re Ga Ma Pa in Kolkata, earned money, gained fame and returned to Bangladesh. If the person insults our prime minister it cannot be accepted. So I filed the FIR, Paul told reporters.

Belonia superintendent of police Jal Singh Meena confirmed that the complaint was registered and forwarded to Tripura Polices cyber crime cell.

The complaint was registered the same day it was filed at Belonia police station under Indian Penal code sections 500 (punishment for defamation), 504 (intentional insult), 505 (public mischief) and the IT Act.

We have registered the complaint and forwarded it to the cybercrime cell because it is not in the Indian cyberspace. We have started an investigation into the issue, the SP said.

Rajib Dutta, the officer-in-charge of Belonia police station said that as per the complaint the Bangladeshi singer had abused Modi in a Facebook post calling him a "mere chaiwala (tea seller)'.

Comments

Add new comment

  • Coastaldigest.com reserves the right to delete or block any comments.
  • Coastaldigset.com is not responsible for its readers’ comments.
  • Comments that are abusive, incendiary or irrelevant are strictly prohibited.
  • Please use a genuine email ID and provide your name to avoid reject.