Balaji's Thots

[Pic Courtesy Sify]
High school and college reunions are always fun affairs as they give us a chance to meet some of our best friends and relive some of the best years of our lives. Suhasini and Lissy have taken that idea to Kollywood by hosting a party for stars who worked during the 80s. They [...]

Pudhiya Manidhaa… feels like a poetry recital for a while and its only SPB’s entry that gives the song a boost. Its amazing how smooth and youthful he sounds even now. Vairamuthu comes up with some interesting descriptions(aaN petravan aaNmagan, thandhai mozhi) and a sprinkling of philosophy(thandhira manidhan vaazhvadhillai, endhiran veezhvadhillai) as the first stanza [...]

During one phase, actor Murali became popular via a series of romance movies where he usually played the guy silently pining for the girl and never revealing his true feelings. His son Atharva, like most other star sons, follows in his father’s footsteps, debuting with a romance(even though he is a bit more vocal than [...]

Think of a Number, the debut novel from John Verdon, caught my eye because it received rapturous praise from many authors I’ve read like Baldacci, Gerritsen, Katzenbach and Connolly. An inventive and suspenseful thriller that is also written extremely well, the book turned out to be well-deserving of all that praise.
The book’s hero is Gurney, [...]

2010 has seen event movies – movies that come with a fair amount of hype and expectations attached to them – arriving with regularity. The next one in line is Naan Mahaan Alla, which is releasing tomorrow. The teaming of a director who is just 1 movie old and an actor who is just 3 [...]

Mother is a unique and absorbing Korean thriller that achieves the difficult task of blending thrills and sentiments and making both effective. It is a nice change of pace for its director Joon-ho Bong who previously directed the monster movie Host but he makes a smooth transition here.
The film’s protagonist, as the film’s name indicates, [...]

Last weekend, the kids were forced to spend their evenings indoors since dad was watching the Enthiran audio release function on Sun TV. While the speeches were boring to them, they found the dance performances(especially the Shaolin Monk show), the trailers and the robots walking around, quite interesting.
Ofcourse I pointed out to them the star [...]

Four times in a row, director Raja has given us Telugu remakes that were both entertaining and commercially successful. He was so consistently successful because he selected movies that had stories that were based on universal emotions and heroes whose roles played to his brother ‘Jayam’ Ravi’s strengths. But he has faltered on both counts [...]

Vijay is turning out to be quite a versatile director indeed. After dealing with sentiments in the star-driven drama Kireedam and comedy in the caper film Poi Solla Porom, he takes on romance in his latest film Madharasapattinam. The romance itself is yet another rich girl-poor boy romance and the film has many things in [...]

The audio launch of Enthiran, which took place in Malaysia on July 31, was telecast in two parts on Sun TV over the weekend. As befits the film, it was an expensive, elaborate function to officially kick off the Enthiran mania.
The show was hosted by Vivek while Geetha, who was apparently Miss Malaysia but did [...]