Balaji's Thots

Reviews for Maathi Yosi, Yaathumaagi, Kacheri Aarambam, Angaadi Theru and Paiyaa are now online @ the reviews site.

It was another beautiful spring weekend and so we made 2010’s first trip to the beach on Saturday. We went to a new one this time – Seacliff State Beach in Aptos. It was a pretty beach and the weather was perfect beach weather.

The most interesting and unusual part of this beach was the concrete [...]

Made another trip to Golden Gate Park last weekend. With the weather finally resembling Spring weather for a change, we thought we’d look at some plant life and went to the Conservatory of Flowers and the Botanical Garden in Golden Gate Park.
The kids were thrilled as always to get out of the house and go [...]

Paa revolves around a boy afflicted with a tragic, terminal disease but manages to avoid most, if not all, cliches associated with the ‘disease movie’ genre. The lack of melodrama and the subtle sense of humor make the film entertaining, which is a rather surprising description considering its subject matter.
Amitabh Bachan plays Auro, who is [...]

Readers know by now that the biggest irritant for me at movie theaters is parents dragging their kids along to inappropriate movies. Running a close second is the phenomenon of people talking loudly in the theaters. While the annoyance over kids in theaters is in part due to what the kids are being put through, [...]

Looking back at the first 3 months of 2010, we could say that Tamil cinema is having its best year in quite some time. Both in variety and quality, the year’s offerings have made this a happy year so far for Tamil movie buffs.
Continuing the trend that was seen in 2009, the number of genres [...]

Though he debuted with a family drama Aanandham, Lingusamy made a successful transition to action and masala in his very next film Run and has since stuck to the same genre inspite of varying degrees of success. The action overwhelmed everything else in his last film Bheemaa but the problem with his latest film Paiyaa [...]

Director Vasanthabalan’s Veyyil was a realistic, emotional film about two brothers whose lives traversed radically different paths. Narrating a love story while at the same time laying bare the difficult lives of a particular group of exploited workers, the director turns up both the realism and the emotions a few notches in his latest film [...]