Two Line Reviews - #484

Movie: Aadhalaal Kaadhal Seiveer (Thamizh, 2013)

Plot: Two college-going teenagers fall in love and, at that stage of relationship, engage in their nuptial ritual. Unluckily for them, the girl becomes pregnant as well! With the help and tips from friends they try all ways of secretly wiping the trace off & in a revelation the parents get to know the story. The two families try to handle the situation differently & in the period of their discussions, the trust between the lovers is put to litmus test!

What Works?

• After a film like Raajapaatai, anything sensible would be a decent return to form for director Suseendhiran & in being sensibly handled, this film is exactly that!
• The sequences following the pregnancy have been handled quite refreshingly & the reminder of the film has a lot of interesting scenes.
• Performance-wise, the veterans lead the pack with Jayachandran & the woman who plays his wife performing very well. The Heroine, Manisha Yadav, is not far behind! The scene between the mother & daughter when the shock gets unravelled is highly applaudable.
• Yuvan Shankar Raja's music provides lively moments in the first half & the background song in the climax adds strength to the hard-hitting set of scenes.

What Doesn't?

• The hero of the film is quite bland in expressions & even his character is not very well defined.
• The first half might appeal to college going youth but there isn't much in it for the rest.

A decent take on an issue seldom attempted on celluloid!

Two Line Reviews - #454

Movie: Maattrraan (Thamizh, 2012)

Plot: The lives of a rich and happy conjoint twins duo get completely disrupted ending in the death of one when a group probes on the successful heath-drink product the twins' father's company makes. The other twin, with clues from what his brother had gathered, sets on a trip to a country of the erstwhile USSR and finds answers to the mystery shrouding the product - answers of the order he would not even have dreamt of!

What Works?

• The film has a tidy plot and the narrative doesn't reveal all the stuff in one go giving rise to a well-paced screenplay. K.V. Anand needs to be commended for this nice treatment which makes one feel like reading a solid thriller novel.
• Suriya hasn't had the scope for a strenuous performance but brings life to the bromance and one feels the impact when one of them dies. The energetic twin's antics are spontaneous and is a winner! Kajal Aggarwal is a definite eye-candy in songs!
• The technical team (comprising the men behind the lens, scissors & VFX) has done a pretty good job and efforts of the experimental digital head replacement and other VFX techniques are to be seen as things don't seem ugly when the twins are shown to fight,dance, talk and move together.
• Anand's signs of his future success as a commercial director are all there in the finely positioned comic one-liners and the visuals of the Rettai Kadhire title song.
• Harris's songs are foot-tapping but the flow-bothering Kaal Mulaitha Poove could have been avoided.

What Doesn't?
The film's climax where the father gets minutes to justify his act & the stretch the film takes to try in not giving a rough treatment to the age-old 'father-son sentiment' brings yawn near the finish-line.

Decent effort, nice treatment; Deserved a better run than what it got!