Balaji's Thots

Directors like Shankar and Murugadoss make movies about popular, easily relatable social issues like corruption or the plight of farmers whose lands are grabbed by MNC companies. They cast a popular star, construct a screenplay that incorporates all commercial elements and provide crowd-pleasing solutions. The resulting combination spells box-office success more often  than not. Director […]

David Baldacci remains one of the few authors whose novels I look forward to even though I’ve been reading him for several years. Right from his first book Absolute Power, most of Baldacci’s novels have dealt with Washington DC and American politics. The prolific author has launched several different series but almost all of them […]

Venkat Prabhu’s films have always featured a tag line that referred to the movie’s title/theme. Biriyani was ‘A Venkat Prabhu diet’, Mankatha was ‘A Venkat Prabhu game’, and so on. The tag line for his latest film Massu reads ‘A Venkat Prabhu Sixer’. But the director isn’t revisiting the cricketing theme of his fantastic first […]

Though the promotional material made it clear that Demonte Colony was a horror film, the film’s start keeps us wondering about the sub-genre it belongs to. As Raghav(Sanath), an aspiring director, narrates his story for a film titled Demonte Colony to a producer, the film seems to be entering into meta territory(the producer has a […]

In the 80s and early 90s, Mammootty and Mohanlal, with directors like Priyadarshan, Bharathan, Joshi and Sathyan Anthikad, created some enduring classics that perfectly bridged artistic and commercial cinema and made it a golden period of Malayalam cinema. But the quality of their cinema took a dive as the two actors started taking on larger-than-life […]

In the 90s Kamalhassan alternated between serious and light fare quite regularly as he served up full-length comedies as well as serious drama. Manmadhan Ambu, blended both drama and comedy as the film moved between broad comedy and emotional sequences before settling for comedy towards the end. Uttama Villain, directed by Ramesh Aravind, also does […]

Nobody does romance like Mani Rathnam. Even when it was weighed down by an underlying tragedy(as was the case in Idhayathai Thirudaathey, where both lovers were terminally ill) or accompanied more serious drama(as in Mouna Raagam, where an unhappy wife struggled to get over a past love, or Agni Natchathiram, with warring stepbrothers), the romance […]