Raavanan

First came the hype, then the Cannes fiasco - where Deepika outshone Ash and Ash was compared with Mallika Sherawat for speaking with an interesting accent. This was followed by the audio release, and then finally the release of the movie in two languages - Hindi and Tamil. The moment the movie was released, we were bombarded with quite a few bad reviews, surprisingly nasty reviews, and a few good reviews. With soo much going on, we decided not to catch the movie the weekend following the Friday when the movie released. So it was a week later, that we finally caught the movie.

The senior Arien was on a visit to Chennai to attend 1 wedding, 1 shashtiyapthapurthi, and 1 Upanayanam. Both the Taurean and self were not accompanying him because he was on a four-day break starting on a Wednesday. The weekend dawned bright and sunny and for the first time, the Taurean agreed to join us for Raavanan. Ya.. in the last week, we had decided tht Vikram was a safer bet in comparison to Aby baby.

Without further ado - I liked the movie. Vikram was the perfect choice for the role of Raavanan. As you probably know by now, the movie is based on the Ramayan. However, the interpretation of the story by Maniratnam was different and more believable. The cinematography was spectacular. Prithviraj was amazingly good-looking with a cool pair of shades and without his moustache. Priya Mani was good. Almost everyone except Beera (Raavanan) had a small role but their roles though small were meaningful and each actor did their bit well. Ranjita who was in the news for all the wrong reasons (Nityananda scandal) played the role of the wife of Khumbakarnan (Prabhu).

The first half was a chase - that seemed to go on forever. After the chase, the story was slower but not uninteresting. The falling off the cliff scene was well-done and for an Indian film, it was superb. However, considering tht most of us catch a lot of hollywood movies, you feel we still have a loong way to go. Case in point being the jumps performed by Karthik as Hanuman. Aishwarya is beautiful and manages to mouth some meaningful dialogues and honestly this is one of her better efforts. In some places, she lets out a few high-pitched shrieks or yells which is slightly painful on the ears :) All in all - worth a watch once - if only to blog 'bout it - but hey its really not tht baad as most of the reviewers are saying but its not an amazing piece of Art either as the director believes it is. Paisa-vasool.

PS: A R Rahman has done a fantastic job, again. As usual, it takes a while to like his songs but I liked Kedakkari and Usure Pogudhey a lot. Khalvare was awful and totally unnecessary. And instead of being beautiful - everything 'bout Khalvare or Kilire seemed forced.