Aviyal

  Disclaimer: I walked into the movie biased against it. But MAN was I in for a pleasant surprise. Disclaimer 2: The review could be long. I’m not sure, I’m just starting to write. (I finished, yes it’s long) To be clear, let’s get one thing straight. This is NOT the book made into a movie. It’s the cinematic take on the story that is said in the book. Same story, different media. Said differently, by different people. But a good one at that. The movie shines in the manner of adaptation.  The plot is very intricate and twisted, but the premise is: a king, two princes, and scheming under-lords trying to overthrow the prince’s ascension. A swarm of deep and grey characters, stunning locations and great imagery. The difference between the book and the movie can be seen the moment the movie opens. Unlike the book, which opens to a wonderful and beautiful scenery of the Chola landscape, the movie opens in the middle of a battlefield, amidst fountains of blood and with men drunk on ...

Sometimes, sometimes you witness a movie that is perfectly written, perfectly directed, perfectly edited to the right length, with stellar acting, on-point characters, no bullshit, perfect background score and a wonderful climax. Cobra is not such a movie. In fact, it is the exact opposite of every point made above. The movie opens with an elaborate assassination scene. Right then it is obvious that the movie is going to be a drag. The entire sequence feels artificially inflated and made unnecessarily long. Not to mention the absurdity of the ‘science’ used. And after all that, the scene is not even satisfying. The entire movie is a sequence of such scenes. To be honest, the director was onto something cool or atleast curious before he tried to make it into a corporate villain / sentimental / romantic / superstitious drama. A schizophrenic assassin / maths teacher who gets info about his targets by solving coded sudoku puzzles in the newspaper. A father figure who posts said sudoku pu...

Hello there, it's been a long time since I spat out something negative about religion or society. So, here I am (of course, with some negativity). This time to say something negative about our beloved culture. Tamil culture is beautiful by nature. The art, the music, the dance, the women. The women. Ah, women. Maybe the Tamil culture is not so beautiful after all. I definitely forgot about the tradition and women part of the culture when I said it is beautiful.  Sure, the art side of our culture still is beautiful and great, but culture has a dark side. No, it can’t even be said as a dark side. It is a side that people often openly use to abuse women. It is a well-known side of the culture that is widely accepted by everyone. Culture is the reason why sexism is so normalised even in the modern world. Culture is the excuse people use to abuse women. Whenever a woman does something that disturbs the man, they come in with the "foolproof" argument, “ well, according to our ...

Society can be defined as a group of people who live in a particular area. Mostly a society will share the same interests and thoughts. A society thinks as one, they share the same ideas and interests. They will have a sense of what is wrong and what is right.  So How can someone be a victim of society? What makes someone a victim of society?.   When someone wants to deviate from these ideas, either the society will try to force you back into their way or it will push you away from their society.   The people who want to live their life differently but are forced into living how the society wants them to live are victims of society. We believe we have free will and we have rights to do whatever we want if it is legal, but do we really have free will? Can we really do whatever we want?. I personally think we have free will but not everyone has it. Those who don't have it are the victims of society. The saddest part is we are not acknowledging them, we refuse to accept...

We watched Beast yesterday evening. Sadly we couldn't afford the morning tickets so we had to switch to the evening show. Since we saw all the completely negative reviews our expectations were set to 0. Here's our thoughts on Beast coming from a guy who watched with 0 expectation. The story is pretty straight and simple. Veera Raghavan an Ex - RAW agent is stuck inside a mall which is hijacked by a group of terrorist and he plans to save the day. That's all. Nelson tells this story in his own way with some Vijay magic. After the mall hijack the movie starts to fire up with both action sequences and comedy. Most of the jokes landed pretty well, some missed. Vijay' highlight scenes were a treat to watch with Anirudh's music. Vijay as usual did his job and steals the show. He doesn't shout that much like in the previous movies which was refreshing to watch. Nelson did a good job with Vijay's character. Other than Vijay, Sathish did a really good job in the mov...

This universe - our universe - is 13.8 billion years old. And it is massive. It is so massive that the human brain which is programmed to deal with everyday objects cannot even hope to imagine how big it is. It is so big that no matter how long we live, no matter how advanced our technologies, we will never be able to see more than a very very tiny fraction of the universe. Our sun, our own star that is the source of all life - while being huge and important to us, is insignificantly tiny compared to the aforementioned size of the universe. The sun is in what we could call the outskirts of the milky way galaxy, in the edge of a spiral arm, orbiting a supermassive blackhole along with what we could only assume as billions of more stars, bigger and brighter than our sun. And there are billions of more galaxies, each having its own horde of a hundred billion suns. Our sun isn’t special. But it is old. Being a second (or possibly third) generation star, the sun is 4.6 billion years old, g...

  THE PROBLEM “Kevalam tea vikkiravan car vachirukan” “Paal vikkiravan bullet la varan” “Bathroom kaluvuravan Iphone vachurukan” You might have heard these kinds of comments at least once in your life and there is a fair chance you have laughed at it, well, there is even a chance you said it. But have you ever thought about why these kinds of comments exist and why it is normal and why they are deeply problematic? If a tea seller has a car, it means that person has the money to buy and maintain that car.  Even though they have the money, why do people still say these kinds of things? One obvious answer is their job. People are always rated according to their job. Some might call it internalized capitalism, but it is more than that even. A janitor job might pay no less than an engineering job (fact) but a janitor will never receive the same respect as the en...