High-neken!

On the flight back from Singapore to Mumbai now, and one hour into the flight, intheresthingg!

For one, I tried out the in-flight audio ‘manoranjan’, and found to my pleasant surprise that they actually had a Tamil film music channel, a Carnatic/Hindustani classical channel and another Ghazal channel!

Thanks to some absolutely out-of-place slow Hindustani stuff and a prehistoric ghazal playing in those respective channels (the bollywood channel not being an option for me), I tuned into the tam film music channel and what do I get?

Vaigaasi nilave, vaigaasi nilave, mai poosi whatever….

ROFL, this was like god telling me “You never had the patience to listen to thalaivar Harris Jeyaraj, now you have no option!”. And ha-ha, I did manage to keep my fingers away from the remote control, and ended up listening to the whole bloody album! :-s

Must confess though, I felt IMMENSE moments of pride during Vaigaasi, where my thalai Haricharan has effortlessly outsung Sadhana Sargam, in all his nonchalant improvising glory! Some moments were truly brilliant, and all his efforts made me listen to the otherwise average song in rapt attention J

(Now the channel is playing Un paarvai mele pattaal.. Yuvan rocks!)

Then came the drinks. The guy asked me my preferences, with the options being Tomato juice, Apple juice and Orange juice, all 3 of which I passionately HATE.

I settled for my standard peanut order, but going overboard in a demonstration of obscene loyalty, I instinctively ordered 2 packets of peanuts… Did not take long for me to start thinking “Shit idiot, you did it again, over-enthu!”

Almost as if the heavens below had ordained it that way, the air-host (whatever happened to the attractive hostesses) intervened.

“Any hot drinks sir?”.

Adappadupaavi. SandaaLaa. Naa sivane-nu dhaane da okkaandhundu irundhen.

“What beer do you have?” said I, almost like it was beer to go with my twin packs of peanuts. Verkadalai-ku thottukka beer maadhiri ;)

“Sir we have tiger and Heineken” went the fellow.

Tiger sounded like tiger balm or some local baniyan brand, and I placed my first official voluntary order for Beer, somewhere I would not have expected to months back :)

The music channel started playing “Meendum palliku pogalaam” even as I opened the can of Heineken and let the fluid flow… Haha! If I did not exist, what would be the image of the guy be like, who orders beer coz he could not eat 2 packs of peanuts without something to go with it, then decides on Heineken coz it sounds pseud, and then has his gulps listening to Meendum pallikku pogalaam on his earphones? ROFL!

(Aargh. The entire playlist is over, and after some 15 songs, vaigaasi nilave is ACTUALLY repeating now!! NOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!)

Anyway, the thing is that I have discovered that I am an alarmingly fast beer drinker. Though my upper limit is 330 ml per week, when I do drink, I almost always manage to gulp it down in quick time. Either Heineken premium lager beer tastes pretty damn good, or it was the peanuts or just plain thirst, but I did manage to down the entire can in next to no time, when I had finished only one pack of peanuts. My principles were totally in place though, and 330 ml it was for me, the strict upper limit.

The point I have been trying to pen – in vain – is that I THINK I might have experienced what the world calls the “high” for the first time ever, thanks to sheer pace ~ 100 ml per minute.

I did feel faint for the next 5 minutes, and liked the feeling like my head was not attached to the rest of the body, like as if I had fewer bones, whatever! Might have been just the height and not so much the high, though :)

They started playing Jhoom barabar Jhoom on the TV screens, and just when I was looking for some mindless masala, the unruly (believe it or not!) crowd shouted out the movie in favor of a supposedly pseuder Ocean’s thirteen. Was totally not for me, and back to the Tam channel it was for me, though I had to patiently listen through Harish Raghavendra (b@$tard) singing “Nee dhaanadi en kaadhali”, as if I cared.

Hmmm, now that I have my laptop out, the choice of music is pretty obvious.

(btw, my Singapore protégé Payyaalu is head over heels about this song too, after we caught this movie yesterday night in a deserted Yishun theatre…)

Innum oar iravu… innum oar nilavu…

Innum oar ninaivu.. idho.. idho.. edhiril irundhu bayamuruthu…

Shit, when on some infinite loops, life IS good.

PS:: looks like the plan itself is going slightly crazy, we just had the longest phase of turbulence I have ever experienced, lasting a WHOLE THREE minutes! For a moment, I almost decided I was never going to see innum oar iravu…

Fingers crossed. Miles to go before I land.

So [that four letter word]ing BAD!

(deeply disturbed, bad enough to write a proper blog after ages!)

THAT FOUR LETTER WORD is a film I have been following the fortunes of, right from its conception i guess. I vividly remember the blog that Sudhish Kamath used to have on this brainchild of his, and also remember we used to use it as a sort of inspiration for the online publicity of our own child Man-gal-Y-a.m (btw, the movie did see light of day, not the online publicity though..).

No wonder when i saw it being listed here in Fun Cinemas Andheri, no second thoughts!! Booked an online ticket for myself, all alone, after i found no takers to come with me.
But little did i know that the "no takers" part was more than just a mere case of my mumbai mates being obviously offline on Gandhi Jayanthi holi-day.
I turned up at the counter and first reaction from the tickets guy was "Sir show mostly cancelled, you are the only one to ask for a ticket so far..".
What the ????

Determined to hang in there, I did, till 6 others chose this god forsaken cinema hall to live out their after-dark fantasies, and thus ensured that i did get in armed with my 70-rupee popcorn, albeit having to brook the incessant moans and groans emanating from the couple-cushions :)

There I was, popcorn in hand, valiantly fighting against all odds in the vain hope that Sudhish had done serious work in the 7 years (as he claims in the end credits) that he spent thinking this one up.
And then it started to roll.

and [THAT {that four letter word}ing FOUR LETTER WORD]!

What a MESS. Atrociously immature. Grossly unreal. Cheap, in more than one sense of the word.

I found new hope, though.
Ance Sitco's efforts thus far are not too bad after all. We might not have the studios, the cameras and all that jazz, but our grey cells are definitely in place.

If Sudhish earned a living reviewing and critiquing films, he most definitely runs a serious risk of losing his job, no joke!

I could see the youthful energy to create in front of oneself a dream well laid out in the mind. You know... the "Yeah, my name comes on the screen, my dialogues get spoken by those characters, look at the color correction dude, and there is a BACKGROUND SCORE in my movie man!" euphoria that a first time filmmaker goes through...
What disappointed though was the fact that a film critique was so eaten by his dream that he failed to see the plain mediocrity of his script, the looseness of it all, the NEEDLESS visual effects-cum-color correction, that was clearly like redefining the dosage of overdose.
The film - he says - is based on real people. Just my hunch that he might have ended up making a much better film had he made the story as it happened in real life. Good old tamil dialogues. Good old NORMAL people. the odd lifting song, written in TAMIL words.
Out of the 7 of us, 4 people walked out in the interval, and the other 2 were the couple who were more than delighted to see more and more people walking out. The words for them ranged from the monosyllabic to the longer lettered words and artistic phrases too ;)

For one, the english dialogues were a farce. Totally pseudo and mostly unreal, dialogues i guess are the weakest link in the film. Story being the next. Sudhish Kamath, in short.
Sindhu Rajaram had done a decent job on the sound design, though she didn't have any decent music to work with, save for a couple of short scores in the first scene in the second half and the chase sequence. Blaaze's song was a joke.
Madhavan carried of pseud very well. Totally wasted though, he must have been deeply indebted in some way to Sudhish, for I see no point in Maddy getting involved.

A wasted evening.
But one that made one thing very clear.

That Satyam Cinemas shall one day play my film.
Hello, World.