Bhoomi Malayalam is good, fast, at times a little too ‘painkili’ emotional(that would be there, frickin women! ), but highly watchable. It is not much of a thought provoking movie, but one those ‘reminding’ movies which reminds us of things. Then, atleast the ten people who watched “Bhoomi Malayalam” wouldn’t go home complaining about the sorry state of Malayalam cinema.[T a l k i e s » T.V. Chandran’s Bhoomi Malayalam]

But 10 people is an insufficient number to stop the Death Watch.

Ram writes

The problem with Pachamarathanalil is its script- there is no cohesiveness to it and it meanders aimlessly between characters. The direction is equally lacklustre. Add to that, the kind of dialogues which you dont even hear in serials these days, you start cringing in your seat.Sreenivasan looks dull and disinterested. Padmapriya has been whitewashed to look good, but she ends up looking horrible. Lalu Alex repeats himself for the umpteenth time. Nazar is impressive. Lal and Meera Vasudevan in their cameos do not hold interest.The worst part of casting is in selecting the child actor who has a critical role to play. The kid overacts to its heart’s content and honestly, there is nothing attractive about the kid that would force someone to cast her in an ad film.

NowRunning.com writes

Pachamarathanalil might initially strike you as a kids’ flick, all loud and noisy. An odd half an hour later, it suddenly does a revamping of its background score into a spooky one and claims to be a thriller mystery. The unraveling of it doesn’t take up much time, and the latter half has a different story to tell. And before you realize it, you are in the midst of a riot and there’s religion and there are morals and there are victims.

For a moment I did wonder if Pachamarathanalil was inspired from the Ben Affleck directed Gone Baby Gone. Perhaps it isn’t, and Affleck wouldn’t look at it as a flattering inspiration either. Unlike the Hollywood flick, the missing-baby-mystery here refuses to gape at facts straight, and since it moves about with its eyes snapped shut, misses out on internal logic and a critical sense of judgment. The film’s major weakness lies in its transparency more than in its implementation.

It is hard to analyze Adoor Gopalakrishnan’s movies because it requires some perspective of the world and some familiarity with literature (stuff from Ma magazines and mediocre blog posts don’t qualify as literature). As we do a review roundup of Adoor’s Naalu Pennungal we see that there are just a few good reviewers around and lot of mediocre ones.

The first one is our copy cat friend at IndiaGlitz who has one again copied the Movie Mazaa review featured here at varnachitram. Let us first look at some lines from the Movie Mazaa review.

Adoor’s women remain engraved in conformist stones, never ever even marginally moving away from the firm frontiers that have been intricately drawn around them.

Back home, she starts life afresh, the marriage having passed off as an unpleasant interlude that never really took off.

Here is the review from IndiaGlitz and pay attention to the words in bold.

Even as the stories are set 60 years ago, Adoor’s women remain fixed with establishmentarian attitude, never trying marginally to move away from the firm boundaries that have been complicatedly drawn around them by the society.

Once left back to her home, Kumari starts life afresh, passing off her marriage as an unpleasant interlude that never did happened.

Paresh Palicha writes the story in detail in Rediff, but offers no perspective.

Unni Nair writes

The helplessness and vulnerability of the fairer sex, the inherent strength they have, and the vicissitudes of Fate to which women often fall prey in a male dominated society are some of the issues that get discussed in Naalu Pennungal. A very important aspect of the film is that even seemingly minor characters are portrayed with due importance given to them, for example the character played by Sona Nair in the first story and the character played by Ramya Nambeeshan in the fourth one.

Surprisingly, the film, which speaks volumes about women in general, doesn’t seem to have cut much ice with the womenfolk in Kerala (who obviously are trapped in the mesmerism of tear-jerkers on the small screen), whereas reports say that women constituted the majority of the viewers when the film was screened at the Toronto Festival. Can the makers not do something to get the film across to such an audience which ought to have been the prime target of the film?

Adoor Gopalakrishnan’s tribute to Thakazhy Shivasankara Pillai – Naalu Pennungal (Four Women) – chronicles a journey of womanhood across assorted backdrops; a classic amalgamation of source matter and technique that splendidly spans frames and times.

Of the four disjoined narrations The Prostitute is by far the best; Kunju Pennu, the street hustler (Padmapriya) and Pappukutty (Sreejith Ravi) who falls in love with her find themselves caught up in an ironic violation of civil laws that blandly brands them as having crossed the fragile borders of morality that leisurely vanish as they cautiously approach. The Spinster oddly resembles a telefilm of the 80’s in feel and form as it truly belongs to an age that had long back made its exit. Kamakshi (Nandita Das) can only watch as her younger siblings are married off; the apathy and desperation in her stagnates after a while into a cold recognition that helps her regain what she had lost a few years back. The Housewife has Chinnu Amma (Manju Pillai) lamenting over her inabilty to bear childeren to a lusty visitor Nara Pillai (Mukesh) who puts forward the only solution of taking him to bed with her. Geethu Mohandas plays The Virgin married off to a man who has an obsession with food and little liking for anything else including his wife. Back home, she starts life afresh, the marriage having passed off as an unpleasant interlude that never really took off.

Even as the tales are as dissimilar as they possibly could be, a streak of parallels that runs through can be identified that invariably point to a quizzical analysis of passions that underlie a relationship. The sexual undertones are muffled and hushed and forever behind closed doors; doors are slammed on your face as the younger sister (Kavya Madhavan) of Kamakshi enters matrimony or when Chinnu Amma finds out to her delight as to why her husband has returned home early from work. Sexual deprival stains are splashed over the composed Virgin portrait while the Prostitute has moved beyond a world of haphazard sex into a singular scenario where warmth and the sense of togetherness offers a fulfillment that she has been hitherto unaccustomed to.

At times sluggish, plain and edging on the melodramatic Naalu Pennungal does display magnificent directorial skills compounded with some fierce acting by at least a couple of its lead performers. I would pick Padma Priya and Nandita Das out of the lot, the former for a real squall of a performance that throws together a gamut of emotions ranging from the absurd to the abandoned, and the latter for a fierce struggle that she puts up with a character that monstrously has intentions of slipping into a chestnut. Adoor’s film has no dearth of stars this time around vying for screen time, with a few of them real out of place, looking discomfited and quite ill at ease.

Adoor’s women remain engraved in conformist stones, never ever even marginally moving away from the firm frontiers that have been intricately drawn around them. There are indeed a few clichés that paradoxically stand the test of time, and in the transactional process across media, quite a few of them have managed to scurry across. More than one tale among the four thus suddenly assume the garb of a moralist fable and starts babbling about issues that had long lost purpose or worth.

It’s well worth pondering if there exists an association between the women than what appears on the peripheral level; perhaps there is, which makes the film appealing on three zones – a devout one that holds fast to assumptions of morality, a mutinous vein that confronts steadfast conventions and beliefs and a passive discernment that views it all with an unconcerned inquisitiveness of a spectator. As such it emerges triumphantly offering a few vaguely brilliant insights but nevertheless remains a movie with utterly no raison d’être for being.

(Photo courtesy: sify.com)

The natives are not doing bad either. Remya Nambisan has two movies, Anthiponvettam and Shalabham while Padmapriya too has two movies, Suhruthu and Veeralipattu. The other heroines we will be seeing in the near future include Vimala Raman (Kolkotta News), Priyanka (Kichamani MBA), Mythili (Subhadram), Roma (Chocolate), Bhama (Nivedyam), Udayathara (Patham Udayam), Divya Vishvanath (Indrajith), Indraja( Indrajith), Urvasi (Suhruthu), Lakshmi Sharma (Ayur Rekha), and Samvritha (Kalchilambu).

Looks like Kavya’s plan of sticking only to Malayalam movies playing heroine to Dileep and Prithviraj did not work after all.

Average, Watchable, time pass etc are some of the words used by the reviewers to describe Shaji Kailas-Suresh Gopi’s latest offering.  Beating the same theme again and again, this duo’s movies are becoming indistinguishable from one another.  And Suresh Gopi must be on his way to Guinness Book for doing most number of cop roles.

NowRunning.com reviews:

 Cinematography, editing, art direction and music are in tune with the theme and jell perfectly with the story and the tempo. Rajesh Jayaraman, who had earlier done the script for Moonnamathoraal, has improved and is in full control of things here. But still, he fails to maintain the tempo that he successfully builds up in the first half of the movie. In the post-interval section the film meanders into new tracks and the climax, though unexpected is very much like many Shaji Kailas films you have seen before.

The climax doesn’t impress as much as it was intended to. You leave the theatres saying that the film is good only up to the interval. The post-interval section is too crammed-up and stretchy and the average audience won’t like it. And that would prove problematic to Time at the box office. But still, the lead player Suresh Gopi, the director Shaji Kailas and the scenarist Rajesh Jayaraman deserve to be appreciated for having been in control till the very end. The film may not negatively impact their career graphs. It might even do them good. The same may not be the case for the producer.

IndiaGlitz.com comments:

Rajesh Jayaraman in his second attempt in scripting has decided to explore ‘social issues’ for his new film titled Time directed by techno savvy Shaji Kailas. As usual with our fellow filmmakers who occasionally take up issue based plots, this too ends up en route limp story lines, forced issues, a larger than life approach to the problem. The scriptwriter who wanted to tell a lot about political scams behind special economic zones, harkened journalism, terrorist funding to NGO’s  and the follies behind the  practice of ahimsa, packed  a lot in  a single movie .  And the final result is that his good intentions are being ruined by overt sermonizing and clumsy execution.
 
The film makes an impressive opening with hotchpotch of Shaji Kailas’ic shots and presentations. As in ‘Don’ he separates every sequences with subtitles, which passes all through the film. The film opens with the brutal killing of Krishnan Nambiar, the former minister who was forced to resign following allegations. As the investigations made by Alexander Mekkadan goes in a smallish pace, the Chief Minister, plans to change the team and hand over the charge to Dr.Appan Menon IPS, presently working as Civil supplies M.D.

Sify.com says:

we can call all these their prerogative thanks to freedom of expression, the violence in the film is often beyond normal levels, to say the least. Some of the characters openly support violence and justifies it with lines as ‘attack is the best form of defense’. The film has some sub plots as well, which has been linked to the storyline pretty well. Shaji Kailas has crafted the film in style but it is heavily influenced by his last year hit ‘Chintamani Kolacase’. The cinematography by Rajaratnam make the frames look really good but the music disappoints.

Suresh Gopi does the role of the macho man with conviction, but haven’t we seen him in similar roles many times? Here, it is a dual role, the other one as Appan Menon’s autocratic father, which he performs nicely. Vimala Raman needs just to look stunning, which she does quite easily and Padmapriya comes good as the beauty with the brains. Manoj K Jayan has nothing much to do, but it is Siddique, who is at his best with his dialogue delivery and mannerisms

Rediff.com comments:

The only thing we take home from the latest Shaji Kailas-Suresh Gopi Malayalam film, Time, is that in order to scriptwrite something like it, one needs to memorise news reports and link major political events to suit the hero. One should also be well-versed in the sacred texts of every religion, so one can twist those texts and integrate them into the dialogue. This is what Time’s scriptwriter, Rajesh Jayaraman, has done.

Meet Dr Appan Menon IPS (Suresh Gopi), a PhD in criminology called to investigate the gruesome murder of an ex-MLA who had resigned on charges of corruption. Appan Menon has been relegated to a desk job as head of Civil Supplies because of his eccentricities, but has successfully introduced a certain amount of discipline into the department.

Photo courtesy: sify.com

Writing preview for a Shaji Kailas -Suresh Gopi movie is a very easy task. We can check our archives and copy paste from earlier previews and no one will note the difference. But to give our readers value for money we thought that we will do something different this time.We’ll try to find if Time is any different from this duo’s previous movies.

Time has two Suresh Gopis, we assume that one will be talking in English and other in Malayalam. Both the Suresh Gopi’s are policemen. The difference here is one is father and other is son. This is the first time Suresh Gopi has acted as his own father.

Appan Menon is an outstanding IPS officer with a doctorate in criminology. But when a new government comes to power, he is shuttled off as the MD of the Civil Supplies Corporation. Under certain special circumstances however, the Chief Minister himself puts him in charge of a special investigation to unravel the mystery behind the murder Minister Krishnan Nambiar. [Time preview]

Another movie of this duo, Tiger is quite different from this – State’s Vigilance Officer(Varma, played by Murali) is killed and Chief Minister asks Suresh Gopi to investigate. Rajesh Jayaraman(Wrote for Janmam, Moonnamathoral etc.) is the scenarist for this movie. Some other firsts in this movie include Vimala Raman as heroine and Rahul Raj (Chotta Mumbai) as Composer. Will this movie click? Only Time will tell.