Balaji's Thots

While popular actor-director combinations can raise a movie’s expectations, the coming together of a debutant director and a relatively new actress will barely make news. But when the director is Rajnikanth’s daughter Aishwarya and the actress is Kamalhassan’s daughter Shruti Hassan, things are different. That’s why 3, the film that sees Aishwarya direct her husband […]

Our heroes’ professions rarely matter in our movies(Virumbukiren was one movie where it did) and making the hero do a different job would lead to very small changes in the storyline. Kazhugu‘s hero does a job that is tied closely to the story and gives the film a very different premise. Unfortunately the film fails […]

As an actor, Kamalhassan has been known to tackle characters and subjects that don’t always abide by the unwritten rules of Tamil cinema. So it should come as no surprise that in his role as producer, he has backed films that allow him to do that. Evidence of this can be seen in his very […]

A big thanks to those who took the time to enter their picks. There were 17 voters though not everyone voted in all the categories and it was fun tallying the votes. All comments have now been enabled in the Nominations post. To start off, the following were my picks in the categories: Best Picture […]

Tamil cinema didn’t do very well in the recently-announced National Awards for 2011. To make matters worse, there is no other platform that awards the genuinely best in Tamil cinema since the State awards are usually highly politicized and  other award shows like the Filmfare awards are concerned more with glamor, glitz, roping in the […]

Considering Tamil cinema’s spectacular showing at last year’s awards, where both our actors and technical crew picked up a slew of awards, there was nowhere for it to go but down. And down it went at the 59th National Film Awards which were announced yesterday, with barely a handful of awards. Tamil cinema didn’t bag […]

It is always interesting when directors identified with a certain kind of movie, decide to explore a new genre. In recent times, directors like Selvaraghavan and Radhamohan surprised us by moving away from their comfort zones and delivering movies very different from what we’d been used to. Director Vasanta Balan attempts a similar change with […]