Vaadu leftlo Veedu rightlo

I’m not com­fort­able with remake or remix or any tin­ker­ing to an orig­i­nal piece of art — even though it’s mostly done based on the busi­ness aspects. Good or bad or ugly — once the piece is done, it’s done. There’s no point in redo­ing the entire stuff — waste of time, energy and money. Espe­cially when it comes to good films/songs. Could you imag­ine a remix of Kanne Kalaimane song or remake of Naya­gan / Mul­lum malarum / Mag­a­d­heera. Once Mahen­dran said, even he him­self can­not remake the movie Udhiri pookkall. Those beau­ti­ful cre­ations hap­pened and were not made. IR once said Janani Janani song hap­pened and it was not created.

What’s the point in remak­ing Mam­bat­tiyaan, 3 Idiots, Gajini. Get­ting the story rights and mak­ing it in dif­fer­ent form is another vari­a­tion of this. Most of the works aim the col­letion the pre­vi­ous movie made and not the story/the essence of it. Drohkaal — Kurud­hip­punal was an excep­tion which took the essence of the orig­i­nal movie — Adding songs to Drohkaal would have spoiled the entire movie. The mod­ern remakes are made shot by shot. Once Prathap Bothan did a remake of Yamaleela in Tamil as Lucky man. The tel­ugu pro­ducer worked along with him in the movie ask­ing for the same silly details as it was in Tel­ugu. As per Prathap, in a chas­ing scene, pro­ducer started shout­ing “Vaadu leftlo veedu rightlo” to rein­state the sequence as made in Tel­ugu film :) We do not want those kinds of remakes !

Pre­mji ama­ran told in an inter­view that he favours remix songs as it reduces his time to search(?!) for a new tune. On the oth­er­hand, when ARR was told that Roja is get­ting dubbed in Hindi, he vol­un­teered for enhance­ments in the re-recording to make it better.

Kaalaiyan

If I can select one best sup­port­ing actor of 2011, I will select Guru Soma­sun­daram, who acted as Kaalaiyan in Aranya Kaan­dam [ the other actor came in mind was VIS.Jayabalan — Pet­taikaran in Aadukallam ]. Such a fab­u­lous per­for­mance he did. As every­body thinks/wishes, he should have got many good roles in Tamil films [ Gana Ula­ganathan was booked in 12 films simul­ta­ne­ously after Chithi­ram pesud­hadhi ! ]. Sur­pris­ingly, Guru didn’t get a sin­gle chance because of his appear­ance and hard­work. He doesn’t look like what he was on screen. Even peo­ple didn’t recog­nise him in the the­atres, where he watched aaranya gaan­dam along with the pub­lic. Other direc­tors don’t know what do with him or what sort of char­ac­ters they can offer him !

Though it was sad, the actor is still happy that nobody recog­nises him in the real world. I came to know that VKRamaswamy’s dia­logue deliv­ery and mous­tache of Ma.Po.Si, were the base ele­ments of his char­ac­ter sketch [ sim­i­larly Balaiya’s tone was used for Bal­ram Naidu !]. Think how many such scripts we have which has some char­ac­ter sketch. [ San­thanam sir.. neenga friend role pan­dreenga.. ellariyum kalaika­reenga. avlo dhaan ! ]

Mar­ket­ing

I would not won­der even if Dhanush takes the acad­emy awards podium with 2 Oscar awards for writ­ing [?! ] and singing [?!] Kolaveri song. The rea­son is that we live in such an extra­or­di­nary mar­ket­ing mania[c] world. The recent exam­ple is RAAJAPAATAI — any reg­u­lar cin­ema fan can eas­ily say it was a crap. But the team has done enough mar­ket­ing by the fol­low­ing ways.

- Team inter­views in dif­fer­ent TV/FM chan­nels. [ Oru tea kadai shot rom­bave time eduthuduchu.. crowd dis­tur­bance ! Cam­era­man Mad­hieku annaiku sema juram ]. 

- Songs/movies were tele­casted based on the tech­ni­cians involved. Vikram hits, Suseendhran hits, Ven­nila kabadi kuzhu,. It’s an indi­rect mar­ket­ing attack !.

- Repeat­ing songs in the inter­mis­sion time of any movie. Even Mouna guru inter­val time was filled with Raa­japaatai songs. [ Pudhu paiyan polave song sounds just like a pan parak advt song ! ]

- Poster designs. This is the only movie I saw with just Vikram in the posters / ban­ners. The mut­li­ple getups were given high impor­tance. [ sim­i­lar to Vadi­vel [Body soda] of Pokiri what­ever he does, even a kid iden­ti­fies who he is by his nose  :)]. I recall a good film Kazhugu­malaik Kallan [ 1988 ] which had great get-ups of that time !

- Of course, our media. The dif­fer­ence between a good film and a bad film is judged with mea­ger dif­fer­ence in rat­ing or stars or marks.

- Occu­py­ing the major the­atres pos­si­ble may be con­sid­ered as one more catalyst.

- Media gos­sips — If watched closely the gos­sips come right before &  dur­ing the release of the movie [ Dhanush — Sruthi Datin­gaa - Seerum Rajini Kudum­bam !!! Kumu­rum Kamal kudum­bam !!  ] and then dis­ap­pears exactly after the movie release. By the time, we get another one. [ Karthi & Pranitha chem­istry — Saguni-yin Sallaabam !! ]

- Tel­ugu rights !! You know. Ayi­rathil oru­van, KO, 7am arivu were as suc­cess­ful as orig­i­nal movies in Tel­ugu. I would not worry if VEEDINTHE  [ dubbed ver­sion of Raa­japaatai ] movie becomes a suc­cess in Telugu ! 

Happy think­ing !

–Toto.

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