Life in a metro

I donno how I missed this film. For quite some time I have been trying to see it and finally managed to get a CD from one of my colleague.

After quite some time, this was a film where adultery did not mean sleazy scenes or quarter dress wearing and boldly love making heroines. This is a dark movie with dark characters where every character is guilty of his/her acts in one way or other. And the point is that they continue to do that as they find a guilty pleasure in doing it.

This film is a fine take on the ruthless city life and how it dilutes the moral of the humans and turns them savage, demanding, fighting and mere mortals who care about nothing but themselves. It has got some of the best actors of the present generation (most of whom of course dont have the star presence of the khans, kumars and Roshans) like Kay Kay Menon, Irfan Khan, Shiney Ahuja, Konkona.

But yeah the surprise package was the performance of Shilpa Shetty and Dharam paaji. While Shilpa shetty effortlessly slips into the desperate housewife role, Dharam ji stops grunting and instead broods of his one act which changes the course of his life. Nafisa Ali is adequate as his long lost lover while Shiney Ahuja does a decent job as the frustrated and love searching theatre guy.

The characters are intertwined very well in the story and it follows the parallel story mode quite well. While we are used to Kay Kay Menon playing the bad menacing guy, its quite refreshing to play Irfan play the middle aged-bride searching average indian male. Sharman Joshi and Kangana do their job quite well.

Another nice aspect of the film is the music. Pritam's rock band appear out of nowhere and start singing (which of course can irritate you towards the end), but the songs are really good. In particular, I have been listening to the song below for quite a long time.



The only sad part is that I read somewhere that some part of the film is a direct rip-off of the english film 'The Apartment'. I hope someday our makers would buy the rights legally and credit the original story and film writers.

Overall this film is recommended to you ONLY if you prefer some different real cinema instead of the usual masala and bindaas fare.

Pesugiren

Vasanth is one of the mature directors in tamil cinema. Although his story telling has been very simple and sweet since his first movie "Keladi Kanmani" then 'Aasai', 'Rhythm', it is also amazing that his music sense is amazing.

Every movie of his whether rocked the box office or not, atleast the songs did. Ever Nerukku Ner (which i personally believe was the worse film he made) had awesome songs.




This song in Saththam Podaade is different. Usually heroine oriented songs have hundreds of girls dancing around her and the hero, irritating with thumkas and jhatkas. In real life we dont dance around the trees and certainly the rest of the lot certainly dont join us.

The song is melodious with the saxophone filling it so beautifully with minimum orchestration. And yeah, Padmapriya looks very elegant :-)

Tumse hi

I dont know why, but I am unable to take this song out of my head for quite sometime.

Obviously I loved this song the first time I saw it in the movie, although I had not heard it before. Not only it has been amazingly sung, but nicely and neatly picturized.



For once Pritam seems to have struck something melodious and original. At first I thought that it was sung by Kunal Ganjawala, but recently found that it was sung by Mohit Chauhan of the band Silk Route.

Wish they churn more songs as such instead of the remix crap :-)