Rediff has an interview with Prithviraj in which he asks “What have I done to deserve this”. By that he means the nasty comments created by Malayalis on him and his family. It seems that has reached a peak on the Internet.
I don’t know. I think the vehement attacks started happening much after that. This, I think, has started in the last two months and it seems well organised. I have nothing to say to them. It is very tempting to go and pursue a film career in another language.I am an actor but also a human being. At the end of the day, I live my life, I have my family and my privacy. It wouldn’t have affected me if I had actually done something wrong — at least I don’t think I’ve done anything wrong.
Eleven years in films is a long time. You start thinking that if this is what your 11 years have come to, it’s not worth it. But then, had this so-called character assassination been for professional reasons then Indian Rupee would not have done well.
So why is there such organized hatred of Prithviraj? Is it because he is opinionated? Or it is because of the insecurity of physically challenged Charlie Chaplins of Malayalam industry? Or is it simply the Jagathi Sreekumar mentality of Malayalis?
Leave a comment. If it has some substance to it, we will approve it.
Do you know what is the most important news from Malayalam cinema world? It is the last line in the Rediff article on the new Mohanlal-Priyadarshan movie.
The film was originally titled Arabiyum Ottakavum P Madhavan Nairum (Arab, Camel and P Madhavan Nair) and the addition (In Oru Maruboomikkadha–A desert tale) was added after certain groups raised objections to the word Arab.
What else was happening in Kerala at this time?
Every sector in Malayalam film industry is gunning for each other and in the process there is total deadlock.
The film industry organisations have various reasons to go on a strike.
First the Kerala Film Exhibitors Federation (KFEF), the powerful organisation which controls the theatres in the states ‘A’ class centres, refused to screen new Malayalam releases.
They wanted the Minister in charge of cinema Ganesh Kumar to withdraw his statement regarding the scrapping of service charge on cinema tickets.
The Kerala Film Distributors Association (KFDA) hit back and said that they will stop the release of OLF (other language films) from November 11. The move is in protest against the KFEF’s decision not to screen Malayalam films from November 1. KFEF had screened OLF Diwali films- 7aum Arivu, Velayudham and RA. 1 etc successfully in Kerala which irked the Malayalam film industry. Adding to that:
Production has also come to a standstill as films that were originally planned for Christmas like Mammootty’s King & Commissioner and Mohanlal’s Casanovva will now get pushed to January 2012.
And that is when we found the right terminology to explain what is happening in Malayalam cinema. It is called Dunning-Kruger effect. Wikipedia explains it as follows
The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which unskilled people make poor decisions and reach erroneous conclusions, but their incompetence denies them the metacognitive ability to recognize their mistakes.[1] The unskilled therefore suffer from illusory superiority, rating their ability as above average, much higher than it actually is, while the highly skilled underrate their own abilities, suffering from illusory inferiority.
If this does not explain Malayalam cinema we don’t know what does.
We hope the same groups which objected to the word ‘Arab’ are made the in charge of MACTA as soon as possible.
Trailer of Future of Malayalam Cinema
The Kerala theatres which used to screen mostly Malayalam films will be taken over by Other Language Films (OLF) from Diwali day (October 26). OLF means Tamil and Hindi films.
The two major Tamil films releasing for Diwali are Vijay’s Velayudham and Suriya’s7aum Arivu. Plus the Hindi film of Shah Rukh Khan RA One. Vijay, Suriya and Shah Rukh are very popular in Kerala, and all the three command an opening.
The OLF Diwali movies have taken over most of the screens in key towns. They are releasing big and as per trade sources Vijay’s Velayudham is opening in 111 screens, Suriya’s 7aum Arivu too is opening in 111 screens! SRK’s RA One at the last count is opening in 81 screens![OLF takes over Kerala box-office!]
It is like playing the same tape over and over again. The various alphabet soup organizations like MACTA, FEFKA, PEPSI, COKE etc need to stop banning people and get out of family feuds and prepare and five year vision for Malayalam Cinema. You know, do some kind of serious thinking. Can bringing back the studio system help? Will getting bigger movies with the involvement of UTV like money bags help? Will investing in more multiplexes help? That kind of thinking. You can find some such posts in our archives. But if you release movies like China Town, Christian Brothers or Arjunan Sakshi, people will seek refuge in OLF.
There has been a recent war of words between music director M Jayachandran and playback singer Gayathri. Gayathri recently asked why music directors are giving so much prominence to singers from outside the state. It seems she did not name any names, but as the news got transferred from one magazine to another, the name of Shreya Ghosal came up. The news morphed as if Gayathri was asking why Shreya is paid a lot while talented local singers struggle.
M Jayachandran, who has made Shreya sing in various films, retorted that Gayathri should go and listen to Shreya’s songs and learn from it. Gayathri responded back saying she is a big fan of Shreya and there is no need for someone like M Jayachandran to tell her what to do.
So who is right and who is wrong?
Some people have to take a black and white position, but in our opinion this issue is much more complex. The main crux of Gayathri’s point is not if Shreya is talented or not talented. The question is of chance and renumeration. According to her people like Adnan Sami, whose Malayalam would want to make you listen to Achyutanandan speeches over and over again, are paid quite a lot of money while Malayalee singers are not paid that much.
So there are two questions here. Lets look at renumeration first. Someone is paid more than others. That is always the truth. In fact there is no point in complaining about it. Mohanlal gets paid more than Asif Ali, but Mohanlal gets paid less than Rajnikanth. There is always a value chain and you have to make yourselves so valuable to get highly paid. So if Shreya and Adnan Sami are getting more zeroes in their paycheck, there is nothing anyone can do about it .
Now, the second question is about what should a music director do. Should he promote local talent or get people who can’t pronounce Malayalam. On this matter we have made our position very clear. We are sickened by the Malayalee obsession with other languages. Note that the word we used is obsession which borders on fanaticism. Many people have said, we Malayalees have an open mind. We agree with that. But if you watch our reality shows and stage programs, it goes beyond an open mind. It is as if we are sad we don’t speak Tamil or Hindi daily in our lives.
In this context we don’t understand why we get Udit Narayan or Adnan Sami or Shreya Ghosal to sing Malayalam songs. Yes, before Chitra, most female singers were from Tamil Nadu or Andhra, but you don’t feel that in their singing. But that is not true with modern singers. If you have heard a Udit Narayan or Adnan Sami singing in Malayalam, you will feel like throwing up. It speaks of the lack of talent current music directors have or the less amount of effort they put in training those singers[Having said that, Shreya Ghoshal’s diction is an exception].
To give an example, here is a video of Vairamuthu explaining how he trained Chitra(See from 4:23). When she started singing in Tamil, she spoke Tamil with the obvious Malayalam accent. Slowly and slowly, he said, he worked to remove that and now Chitra’s Tamil is as good as a Tamilian. Instead of this we have parachute singers who come in, have no clue of the language, butcher it in their songs, get their lakhs of rupees paycheque and fly back. Compared to this we would rather hear the winners of Star Singer and Gandharva Sangeetham sing for us.
[coauthored with Nikhi Menon]
In the finale of Munch Star Singer Junior Mr. Jagathi Sreekumar made a speech in which he came out against the anchor Ranjini Haridas. Mimicking her style of speaking, which is Malayalam with an English accent, he said that the anchor should just do anchoring and should not have any opinion on the singing. You can see the video to realize the scorn he has for this anchor.
We have watched many finale episodes of Idea Star Singer and Munch Star Singer and never have seen a guest speak like this. Usually people come and say a few mild words of encouragement, show some stardom and go away. Jagathi instead gave a speech in which he went on and on and defined how people should behave. He praised Sujatha and Venugopal and ranted on Renjini who was standing next to him. In her own words:
Just the other day I was the victim of an individual who took advantage of his right to freedom of speech to publicly embarrass and ridicule me. Moreover, all this happened on national television! The man in question, who from now I shall refer to as Mr Moon, clearly overstepped the limits of what to say when and where, and to my agravation, had no regard or respect for the event at hand or the people concerned
Now you may like or dislike Renjini’s style of compering or her way of talking or having her own opinions. She is a very competent compere very able to handle any situation thrown at her. When some singers stop singing or have trouble, she very ably handles it. She is very opinionated and if you have watched her retorts at Sharath and ‘Sree Kuttan’, you will know she can handle herself quite well. It this personality that makes her a memorable compere compared to others who just utter what is told or do the bare minimum as Jagathi wants.
What Jagathi wants is not her to stop such things, but to stop passing judgement on the songs. He says only judges can pass judgement. Why? As someone who does not know to sing and is not musically trained, she is just like us. She is the common man. Her opinion is from that side and so far we have not found it ‘arochakam’. It never felt odd to us. So why this outburst? Is there another story we are missing here?
Now if she wanted to retort, Renjini could have said that Jagathi should stop acting in all those semi-porn movies, but she did not. She in fact wrote a weak piece in Deccan Chronicle. It is not for her to suggest what Jagathi should do, but such basic courtesy was not extended to her. This is a new low for Jagathi in the past year. We saw this is a new low because this is a man who wallows in the depths of civil behavior. To give another example, last year he was on television talking about his marriage to Mallika Sukumaran. At some point they divorced and he explained that the divorce ‘may’ have been due to their caste.
So the anchor asked once more if she ever mentioned anything like that and he said she did not. So in reality, he still has no idea why she left, but by throwing a caste issue into the mix he muddied the water. You can say, he did a Thilakan at that moment.
So we have few options for analysis. We can do the whole ‘savarna-avarna’ thing. Or we can notice that Jagathi rants mostly against strong women and dump some anti-feminism on him. But then this would be like trying to write a review of ‘Pokkiri Raja’ or ‘Sagar Alias Jackie’ when in fact there is a simpler explanation.
Nelbin raises an interesting point:
It was absolutely a scandalous behaviour from Jagadhi to say scathing comments about Ms.Haridas and the program she is hosting at such a big ceremony watched all over the world .Jagdhi managed to pull in great crowd support for his outrageous remarks on Ms.Hardis as they booed and jeered at her with the every word he uttered. Sadly Jagathi and those guys represent the last generation of malayalees with parochial attitude who take pleasure in taunting others in public
Yes, Jagathi does have the right to express his views and no one can blame him if he believes that Renjini and co are abusing our mother tongue with her ‘manglish’ but is this the way to show his disapproval? Shouldn’t he had shown the courtesy to tell her his views in person?
At this point, let’s look how Ms Renjini reacted to this insult. She could have easily retorted to him in the same manner or could have even did a ‘Sreesanth’(remember the bhajji-slap-incident?) but the brave girl that she is,maintained her calm and carried on with the show as if nothing had happened..!(C’mmon,thats’ what we call dignity,isn’t it?.)Mr. Jagathy instead of blessing and enlightening the ‘junior star singer’ winners about the potential film offers that could come their way(whom in all probabilities will be forgotten by every one,including jagathy by the next season of the show) chose to play it to the galleries and win himself some cheap publicity by dissing Ms Haridas in national television.
Jagathi is one of the greatest actors of Malayalam cinema on par with Nedumudi Venu, Thilakan, Mohanlal and Mammotty. But that does not make him a great human being. During the time of Prem Nazir, Jayan and Sathyan we did not have this much media coverage and we did not know how they were in real life. Now thanks to the 24 hour media and due to the willingness of these stars to throw up whatever comes to their mind on TV, we know what kind of scumbags they really are.
Tags: Jagathi, Jagathy, Jagathy Sreekumar, Ranjini Haridas
Salt n’ Pepper rocks! The movie ushers in modernity into the stagnated landscape of Malayalam romantic comedies. And by “modernity”, I did not mean a six-packed hero and semi-nude heroine breaking out into a pelvic-thrusting fantasy song-and-dance sequence shot at some exotic locations in USA/Europe. Nor did I mean a campus or IT-company setting where script writers make us believe that almost anything can happen. The characters and premise of Salt n’ Pepper are very ordinary and very middle class. But they are not fighting the usual set of obstacles stacked against lovers portrayed ad-nauseam in Malayalam cinema: A hero struggling in finance/career or burdened with responsibility to marry-off his sisters, a heroine facing objections to her affair from family or some scorned man turned abusive. We have already seen umpteen number of movies covering such predicaments: time to move on! In Salt n’ Pepper, the protagonists are fighting against their own inhibitions, self-perceptions and mindsets.
Rough looking chronic-bachelor Kalidasan(Lal)is a government employee working as an archaeologist at the museum. And heavyset chronic-spinster Maya(Shweta Menon) is a dubbing artist in the movie industry. The younger generation is represented by Manu(Asif Ali) who is Kalidasan’s nephew staying with him while job-hunting in the city and Meenakshi(Mydhili) who is Maya’s rental roommate at the home-cum-beauty parlour owned by Mariya(Kalpana). Kalidasan is a food lover and is practically married to his dexterous resident cook Babu(Baburaj). Maya finds solace in her lonely life through cooking and savoring memories of her lost mother. A wrong cellphone order for “Thattil kutti Dosa” connects Kalidasan and Maya and the rest of the story unfolds in front of our eyes in the most hilarious way possible.
Few of the scenes that stand out for their innovation and/or boldness:
- Maya being a dubbing artist enables the movie to directly poke fun at the typical cliched romantic scenes found in Malayalam cinema. Maya herself is laughing at the outdated dialogues that she is told to dub. The question raised “Nammalenthaada ingane?” in the movie-within-movie is actually addressed to the whole Malayali community.
- Being a foodie, Kalidasan’s bride-seeing event at the girl’s house ends up with him instead falling in love with their resident male cook who had prepared unni-appam for the event. The cook elopes with the groom-to-be!
- I really liked the guts of the director to show a very realistic scene where Maya, Meenakshi and Mariya are celebrating new-year with booze. Maya eventually passes out drunk, lamenting about her life. Yes, we have seen intoxicated heroines in prior movies like Spadikam etc. but the intention there was solely comic relief.
- Did we witness the first ever romantic lip-to-lip kiss shown in a Malayalam mainstream movie? The director’s effort to innovatively use props like a tire-swing, a bridge across rivulet etc. to decently picturize a kissing scene that advances progressively from head to forehead to lips needs to be applauded. This historic first kiss executed in any other way probably could have be irked conservative family audience who are not used to such visuals in public. I am talking about picturization of the melodious duet “Kanamullal” composed by Bijilal and immortalised by Shreya Goshal and Ranjit.
- The audience were chuckling at the light-hearted purdah jokes that occur at the beauty parlour. Glad that it is coming from a Muslim director like Ashiq Abu himself.
The writer duo Syam Pushkaran & Dileesh Nair reminds us that script really is the king. Two movies old Ashiq Abu can now relax and enjoy the success of his path-breaking movie which is going to be heralded as a milestone in Kerala’s pop culture. In the acting department, Lal and Sweta Menon did a wonderful job, etching their characters to perfection. It felt like the character of Kalidasan was tailor made to suite Lal’s star persona. With Amina, Cheeru, Rathichechi and now Maya under her belt, Shweta Menon is becoming an irreplaceable asset to the Malayalam industry during her comeback innings. Asif Ali and Mydhili also did a convincing job portraying cupid-struck lovers who are attracted to each other but are also anxious because they are forced to hide their true identity. The surprise package of the movie is definitely Baburaj, who the audience is used to seeing only in villain roles. He was literally living as the skillful cook who is a perpetual bachelor practicing Hanuman-seva and body-building, and shares a very strong emotional bond with Kalidasan. There are gay undertones in the way in which the cook is presented and so is the case with Mariya’s assistant at her beauty parlour. It is truly a tribute to Bhagyalakshmi that the voice for Maya, the very first dubbing artist portrayed in a movie, is dubbed by the very first dubbing artist-cum-activist in the world. To Bhagyalakshmi’s credit, she has given a slightly different voice suiting Sweta’s character and body language.
National jury might have awarded the best film of India tag to ‘Adaminte Makan Abu’ which was released last month. But I would rate Salt n’ Pepper as the best movie that came out in 2011. The movie’s message put forward by Kalidasan & Maya is simple and straight forward: “Live to Eat, Live to Love”. Majority of Indians can not relate to hyper-religiousness and nearly suicidal spirituality of Adam’s son Abu. But Food and Love are two things that all of us, including Abu, can relate to. If you haven’t seen this gastronomic-romantic-comedy yet, go sprinkle this Salt n’ Pepper in your soul!
(The author, Kishor Kumar, is well known in Malayalam cyberspace through his RagaKairali web site. He can be reached @ http://ragakairali.blogspot.com )
Recent Comments