Tamil Movies

One of the more amusing things about traveling from Chennai to Bangalore by bus was the fact that during the bus ride, Tamil movies were being shown. Some guy, not the driver, had a few DVDs and an old TV was mounted above the driver. So, while we travel, we get the "benefit" of watching Tamil movies.

Oh my...

I was reminded of a line from Napolean Dynamite
"This is like the worst movie ever."
"Napolean, like anyone could even know that."

I felt like pronouncing Napolean's words on the second movie shown. I slept through most of the first movie, so I can't make a clean comparison, but oh man, the second movie shown, was horrible. I can't even really tell what was happening, but I can mention these few things:

Every few minutes there was a long (entirely too long) fight scene which was extremely badly cut and edited. The overall production of the movie was cheap and looked like it had been shot from a small hand held camcorder. The only reasonably good thing was the set of dance sequences. Of course, they were the same as most bollywood sequences. Apparently bollywood and kollywood makes no difference when it comes to the long dance sequence which is a responsorial song. Man says how much he wants a woman, woman responds "you can't have me" or "I want you too, but we can't be together", man tries again, woman demurs again, etc...

Well, aside from the dance sequences which were OK at best, the rest of the movie was bizarre and too long. The bus ride as I'd mentioned was nearly 7 hours, and we didn't even make it through the second movie. I'm not sure there was a point. My sister even remarked at one point, that she couldn't tell if the main male character was the good guy or the bad guy. We decided he was the good guy because he won all the fights and got to dance with the girl. Otherwise, he didn't seem to have any good qualities. In fact he got some girl's uncle to buy him a rickshaw and was trying to pick up the main female character in his rickshaw. Meanwhile he was courting her aunt so that he could hang out at her house. I didn't understand it, because my Tamil is embarrassingly bad, but then again, so was this movie.

I figured it was a case of a bad movie that was long enough for a bus ride until I got to Bangalore and met with my host. He had lived in Chennai for several years and when we mentioned watching Tamil movies he laughed. He asked about the fight scenes, and the weird editing. He told me he'd seen about a dozen films and this sounded exactly like the one we were describing.

So as it stands, this probably WASN'T the worst movie ever, but I didn't enjoy it very much. If this is the usual quality of Tamil movies, I think I might not spend too much money or time on them in the future... I'd like to believe there are other different genres available in the Tamil movie repertoire.