OK Kanmani..Conversations on Time

Spoilers ahead...

There are no goons chasing the hero, no conspiracies, no human devils, and no accidents in Maniratnam’s ‘OK Kanmani’. That’s perhaps how most of our lives are, well.. most of the time. Dulquer (Adhi) and Nithya (Tara) are free spirited. They seem to like each other at first sight. For similarities abound between them – both sophisticated, young, good-looking and liberal. They turn from strangers to two people who share a common world-view. A world view that sees the futility of the institution of marriage. Marriage, as the charming conversation between them in the Church goes, is an endless cycle of pointlessness from two people sharing a common roof, to finding their babies poop over them, to getting them married eventually – as a submission to the vicious cultural cycle.

'naetru enbadhu indru illai, naalai ninaippe oh thollai..'

But what’s interesting is that their world view isn’t an act of rebellion against the society. They are not revolutionaries trying to make a case against the institution of marriage. In the scene where Dulquer asks Nithya to ride with him in the bike for a cup of coffee, she is slightly surprised and pauses for a moment before deciding to ride with him. Being young and sophisticated doesn’t make her any more liberal than her gender instincts limits her to be. In a sense, they are just two young people who are tethered not to the society but to the self. Looking to have fun without being weighed down by institutional commitments; disenchanted with the idea of marriage, for its futility and more realistically for being an impediment to personal aspirations. 

Nithya is endearing. Her enthusiasm and jubilance seem to be perpetually on steroids. As Maniratnam said in one of his recent interviews “…she is somebody who has a mind of her own”. She is nonchalant when Dulquer says that she is no.16 in his girlfriend roll; apologetic to the point of screaming cuteness when she gives a running commentary of where she is in the elevator when she stands up Dulquer for Coffee. She is snarky when she asks Dulquer if he can come with her to Paris, in response to his request for her to come to the US. There are a lot of teasing moments between Nithya and Dulquer, which happens in a world of their own, with only the local trains and buses of Mumbai eavesdropping on them most of the time. 

The roles are reversed between the lead pairs from Alipayuthey to OK Kanmani.  Madhavan was the tormentor of romance in Alaipayuthey, Nithya takes the baton in OK Kanmani. She torments Dulquer by being casual about his brother’s unexpected appearance at their place, and calls him ‘Manja maakan’ when he doesn’t know to lie to his brother and anni (sister-in-law) when they ask for directions to their place. And she plays with his pulse by taking him to a hospital full of ladies who are expecting. 

Leela Samson’s tongue-in-cheek wit on several scenes is timed perfectly. When Prakash Raj refuses to entertain the idea of living-in, Leela Samson casually says that ‘he is old-fashioned’ without really participating in the conversation. Prakash Raj and Leela Samson pair, in a sense, embody a model of marriage that lights hope on the institution for Dulquer-Nithya. In one of the most beautiful conversations in the film, Prakash Raj asks Nithya if she would choose her career over Dulquer. And she says “I would have chosen my career had you asked me a week back. Now I want both. Koncham peraasaikaari ayiten…” This conversation is revealing because it shows how experiences can make priorities malleable and ideologies meaningless.  

For all the liberalism Nithya and Dulquer seem to embody, they are still products of their cultural environment. So when it comes to taking a final call on their relationship, they decide to walk into that cycle they once detested. This is where the movie fails to make a convincing case for marriage or for their decision. Nithya-Dulquer could still have maintained their relationship without having to get married. They don’t need a marriage certificate to take care of each other or grow old together.  Can not love and commitment coexist without submission to an institution? This cobweb of charm, romance, hope and jubilation without much complexities is what makes OK Kanmani both overwhelming and underwhelming at the same time.

Movies and Social Imagination

“Am all for artistic creativity and freedom of expression and speech, but I wonder whether a day will come when someone from Bollywood will have the guts to make a film on the plight of Kashmiri Pundits too!”

 – read a post on Facebook after the recent release of Vishal Bhardwaj’s Haider.  Similar sentiments (amidst the rave reviews for the movie) were expressed by several people across social media platforms. A slightly aggressive cohort called for a boycott of the movie for allegedly showing the Indian Army in poor light; some went further and called for a ban on the movie. Haider isn’t an outlier to be at the receiving end of such sentiments for a controversial movie; such sentiments have increasingly become the norm.

Shahid Kapoor in 'Haider'

In the specific case of Haider (and which also applies to most controversial movies), there are two important aspects to the critical response against it. Firstly, the expectation that it’s not just important what the filmmaker has chosen to show us, what’s equally or perhaps even more important is what he has chosen not to show us. The problem with such a response is the nature of responsibility that it levies on a filmmaker − to tell every conceivable version of an event or story. Even if the filmmaker chooses to propagate an idea that is seemingly false, it’s a choice that a filmmaker is well within his rights to execute. A filmmaker isn’t in the business of reporting news or developing high-school curriculum. S(h)e is not obligated to tailor her/his art to comfort popular (or minority) beliefs, whatever be the nature of validity of those beliefs. After all, one cannot expect the director of Harry Potter to show us all the patrons of magic, even if that means insulting the old and the new gods.

Secondly, the expectation that a movie that goes against the grain of majority or minority wisdom be boycotted or banned. Call for boycotts (without the elements of coercion and intimidation), though counterproductive, is a fair enough social response. Such responses spring under the guise of maintaining the social order. It is a form of social whip that eventually leads to self-censorship of content in movies. Case in point are movies with themes such as disability, incest, homosexuality, etc. which continue to remain largely uncharted in our movies. Boycott of movies, therefore, only trade our social imagination for the wisdom of the crowd.

The most primitive response of all is the call for ban of movies. Friedrich Hayek’s case for the importance of individual liberty offers a compelling counterargument to the case for ban of movies. Hayek, in ‘The Constitution of Liberty’, argues thus: 

“Liberty is essential in order to leave room for the unforeseeable and unpredictable…. every individual knows so little and, in particular, because we rarely know which of us knows best that we trust the independent and competitive efforts of many to induce the emergence of what we shall want when we see it. Humiliating to human pride as it may be, we must recognize that the advance and even the preservation of civilization are dependent upon a maximum of opportunity for accidents to happen”.  

In a democratic society, the majority or minority therefore cannot act as arbiters of truth in their pursuit for social stability or progress. Hence, there is no practical or moral case for ban of movies. 

Influence of Movies
All these above discussed responses to movies pivot on our belief of the extent of influence that movies have on our collective conscience and consequently our lives.  Movies serve as an important epistemic source of social reality, culture and beliefs; they act both as a mirror and as a flashlight for the future. And sometimes they just exhibit the degree of creative insanity prevailing in the society, without offering any window to the social reality. Our fears and insecurities about the influence of movies on our lives, however, revolve around them acting as mirrors and flashlights of future. Sometimes we are just uncomfortable of what we discover about ourselves in movies, individually and as a society. Censorship of swear words or sexually explicit scenes in even 'A rated' movies is an exhibition of our immaturity and collective insecurity about who we are. Institutions working actively to limit the degrees of freedom of movies need to understand that movies did not invent the novel and supposedly evil concepts of sex, violence or obscene language. 

The influence of movies on our collective conscience is rather more subtle (and sometimes insidious) than what the censor board or patrons of our culture would like to think. Movies are an incredible window to people, culture, norms, ideas, etc. that we are unaware of – consciously or subconsciously, about ourselves and about others. For example, to people in North India, given their limited direct access to people in the South, their only popular, seemingly authoritative source on the people and culture of the South are movies. Therefore when someone like Shahrukh Khan purports to describe the South in his movies, it becomes the stereotypical model of the South. As in statistics, a predictive societal model, constructed in our mind to understand an alien society, becomes robust only with the availability of large number of data points that are independent. Sadly, the data points arising out of our movies are fixated and dependent on existing, outdated beliefs; they simply refuse to engage with fresh ideas or participate in deeper investigation. Filmmakers are just happy, from their commercial standpoint, to amuse, dumb us down and limit our imagination to archaic stereotypes.

The other important influence of movies, at the subconscious level, are the cues that they offer us about the existing social structures; these cues serve to reinforce or shape our actions to fit the majoritarian norm. Hence something as mundane and trivial in a movie as a heroine finding the hero’s chest as a safe abode to rest − as an expression of love and intimacy, offers us cues about the distribution of power between genders and the kind of machismo that the society demands from a man. Similarly our conceptions of beauty, societal recognition, success, power, morals, etc. are all actively reinforced and shaped to some extent by the movies that we see.  Does this all entail that we censor or ban movies that we perceive to be harmful to the society? Certainly not. The solution lies in holding movies to a higher standard – for starters, supporting the ones that infuse fresh ideas, actively question prevailing order and assumptions; ignoring the ones that are obstinate to change and progress, and eventually dragging us down as a society – culturally and aesthetically. The invisible hand of the marketplace will take care of the rest.

Pizza…With double trap and closed doors

Oh, the Horror...
I am ­no fan of horror movies. Not because their job description reads “scaring people”. It’s because they create a sense of conflict between two reactive states ─ one which reasons and sees through the absurdity of the idea of blood stained, translucent weirdoes playing hide and seek; and the other reactive state desperate to unreason, wanting to experience a sense of death wish. It’s in a sense the same as how a neurotic Woody Allen, in the movie “To Rome with Love”, nervously responds to his wife when there is turbulence during their flight to Rome ─ “I can’t unclench (my fists) when there is turbulence. I am an atheist”.

Pizza…The Slices

Pizza

• I was left wondering at the end of the movie as to why the movie was named ‘Pizza’. I hope it’s not because the guy in the lead role delivers pizza. And do they not give tax exemptions to filmmakers anymore to think of creative names? “Kalaignar ─ Where art thou?”

• Several independent plots that work great in isolation have been interwoven seamlessly, which is what makes the movie tick. That’s interesting, in the context of this movie, because the characters in those sub-plots are not different and neither do they exist in a different time-space continuum as in say movies like Crash or Aayidha Ezhuthu. Like ‘Matryoshka’ ─ the Russian dolls─ the plots are nested on top of each other with the lead characters spanning across them.
• It is ridiculously easy to stage a Halloween party on screen and pretend to evoke horror; quite another feat to pose a death threat to the viewer and be taken seriously. Pizza sells its idea of fear to great effect. It constantly sets up a trap ─ first by reinforcing the skepticism on the notion of existence of ghosts, then by suspending that disbelief dramatically only to discover later that you are caught in a dangerously vicious cycle.
•  It is refreshing to see the lead couple rejecting traditionalism ─ by ‘living in’, exchanging…..bodily fluids without public assent, and marrying without an audience. In the same breadth, it is also off-putting to be reminded of revisiting their intimacy from earlier movies. The visceral desperation to display crudity and cuteness in episodes of romance is quite evident. For instance, post their marriage when Michael (the lead actor) says to Anu, holding her tight, “Eh pondatti” and she teases back saying “sollunga”, you are pissed off at yourself for having thought of Alaipayuthey and Aayidha Ezhuthu at the same time.
• Trivial question: “Pitstop ah ECR la vechutu, Anna nagar poi ethuku da tea aathura?”

• There is a morbid grace in how the movie relentlessly whispers in your ear ─ “Be careful what you wish for, you might just get it” 

3 : Much less could have been a lot more

• Is ‘Bi-polar disorder’ a metaphor for the medical condition the movie is suffering from – a tug of war between a whiff of fresh adolescent romance and a burst of stale bestial madness ?

• Dear Dhanush, we have seen enough of your comic facial contortions, to express frustration, anger and rage, in your previous works. Don’t you think it’s time to move on, perhaps slip into a character which is less inclined to self-destruct?

• I understand that Dhanush has this rare psychological condition, but how does that vest him inhuman physical strength – good enough to beat to pulp a group of thugs? The argument – “This is Tamil cinema boss, the hero can beat up as many thugs as he wants to” doesn’t hold water. This movie doesn’t pretend to operate on that formula. His psychological condition transforms him into a beast, if only momentarily. But even such a beast has to operate within the physical limits of an adult male. Having ‘Bipolar disorder’ doesn’t mean he can play Clark Kent, as and when he desires.

• Dhanush as a teenager looks the part perfectly, but he walks and modulates his voice more like a retard than as an adolescent. That aside, he  is honest to his age – extremely cautious about his external image that he would rather drench in the rain going to school than wear a rain coat, and rides the vintage RX100.

• Can Tamil cinema please do away with sidekicks to heroes and heroines? Even if it wants to be conservative, can it not reduce the sidekicks to pathetic caricatures, blurting out stupid jokes?

• Shruti Haassan, contrary to what my Facebook timeline was suggesting a week back, has been cast perfect for her role. She is coy, and charming in those striped, maroon school uniform and exhibits, profusely, the characteristic adolescent instability. That awkward, nervous walk to the gate as she finds Dhanush waiting in front of her house, that void that she feels when she misses Dhanush in the tuition after a period of self-denial, that first physical closeness - ‘venum, aana vendaam’ moment- she experiences with Dhanush at her apartment mottai maadi captures, vividly, the sensibilities of a teenager trapped into something she has never experienced before, something she believes to be ‘love’. That very brief moment in the hall as she re-enacts her intimacy with Dhanush, post his loss, is a melancholic snapshot of 'pain', no less than death.

• Isn’t the act of sniffing clothes to invoke nostalgia and eroticism too banal that our filmmakers now need to conjure up alternate imageries to provide such cues?  

• Taking a small detour from the movie, why are adolescent romantic episodes, in India, weighed down under the need for a long-term relationship? Such episodes, by definition, would be founded on infatuation, raging hormones and experimentation, and thereby should, most often, fail as a natural consequence. However, does the absence of sexual experiment to the equation deprive the relationship of its natural death and generate the need for a long term relationship- which is unnatural, unsustainable and a one way street?

• Isn’t five years of being in a relationship good enough for Shruti Haassan to have seen the ‘marupakkam’ of Dhanush? (Not to be taken literally, of course!) It is nutty to expect us to believe that such a psychological condition appears out of nowhere, like bread toasting in a toaster- popping out with the onset of an alarm. I suppose Aishwarya Dhanush was too busy searching for a rare psychological disorder from Wiki that she didn’t bother reading between the lines on the genesis of the medical condition that she had discovered.

• As a director who can venture to conceive the idea of a hippie couple marrying in a nightclub, why  is Aishwarya crippled to expand her imagination about her female lead- reducing Shruti to a mere “nalla ponnu, nalla samaipa” (as she is described by Dhanush to his father)? Why is she stripped of her ‘thaali’ after the demise of Dhanush? What is a girl- who was supposed to go to US to study- doing at home cooking all day and shopping out while her husband is a business man and a part-time maniac? Dear Aishwarya Dhanush, I understand that you were too preoccupied with making a hard-hitting psychological thriller that you weren’t bothered to do away with such hideous portrayal of a woman, but hey, then, we should have been saved of the hippie façade in the first place.     

• Syrio, in R.R.Martin’s ‘Game of Thrones’, educates Arya Stark– “There is only one god and his name is death and there is only one thing we say to death: ‘Not today’ ”. As the movie progresses into the second half and as Dhanush expresses maniacal tendencies with each passing day, you would desperately want to summon the gods of death and explode – “Today!…. Right now, Goddammit!”

The emperor of all social maladies

Pop culture and movies generally tend to be easy targets of the bullets of public criticism for having a bad influence on the society and in particular on children. So when a 14 year old kid stabbed his school teacher in Chennai a few days ago, there was much public outcry and anger, expectedly, and most of them were directed against the evil influence of movies and pop culture; absolving, seemingly, parents, teachers, administrators and the society at large of any responsibility for such untoward behavior. A popular Tamil critic on social issues blamed the movie critics for being too soft on violence in movies; “children are inspired from movies and they naturally carry what they see in celluloid to their lives”, many others say. 

Movies and Censorship 
All this aggressive posturing against movies, their content and their supposedly bad influence on children exposes patent misunderstanding of the medium. Excessive violence in our movies is symptomatic of the cultural milieu in which they are conceived. They are merely a reflection of the collective psyche of a society at a particular moment. Question arises, then what of movies detached from reality, overstating violence, with scant or no regard for bodily parts that are chopped like a meat facing the butchers axe? The answer to that lies in our limits of tolerance and acceptability for violence in movies. In the marketplace of movies, only those commodities (read ‘themes’) that find acceptance are sold;  except of course if the seller is stubborn and goes by the name LarsVon Trier, the laws of behavioral economics don’t apply.

It is for this reason that themes like child sexual abuse and homosexuality find no place in our movies because of the kind of moral revulsion and disgust they evoke in our collective psyche. It is hypocritical therefore to publicly ridicule violence in movies, when required, and to have a conscious or subconscious acceptance of them in the private space of the mind.
  
There is a larger threat that looms over the climate of voices that demand restraining portrayal of violence in movies. Dictating what should entail from a piece of art, by the self-appointed custodians of the society, is outrageous and outright contemptible. There is a legitimate forum- the Censor Board of India (CBFC)- to regulate movies and appropriate methods available, such as by means of granting Adult (A) rating to movies that are violent (say) to dissuade creators from entertaining violence in their movies. It is then left to the authorities and parents to limit access to such movies to children. 

It is only when the censor board overreaches, playing the judge, judging appropriateness of the content in a movie and censoring content they find undesirable, the problem arises.  The problem is two-fold. Firstly, it directly violates an individual’s right to free thought and expression, resulting in the production of only movies that reinforce norms & stereotypes and abstain from themes that don’t find popular acceptance. [I have argued elsewhere and more elaborately on the same in- ‘Muzzling the heretics’].  Secondly, the flexibility of choice granted by the censor board for a director to edit out a few unacceptable scenes, to gain a favorable rating for the movie, lets the director to sneak in content that is incompatible with the granted rating. Hence the easy access to sexual innuendos and double entendres to children in ‘U rated’ movies.

Misguided priorities  and Infantile fixations

The significance of mass media, internet, popular culture or movies apropos children is not clearly understood. Schools with their misguided sense of purpose in placing discipline over appropriate conduct, end result over process and arbitrariness over reason, suck the joy out of learning; parents, on the other hand, most often misplace priorities and expectations: holding marks, faith and societal acceptance over knowledge, ethics, and self realization.

In a 'Teacher-Centric' world of education

Parents and schools both foster, what I call- ‘commodification of conduct’, wherein every activity of a child is bargained for a price; hall of fame (read ‘Ranks’) for acing exams, rewards for proper conduct or completion of an activity, deeming one as a success or a failure based on the ability to meet targets. This engenders the quality of expecting tangible rewards for every activity, when an activity should actually be pursued for the inherent joy in pursuing it regardless of the rewards that would entail.


In such a climate of constant evaluation, with the threat of success or failure lurking behind constantly, pop culture or movies offer an easy frame of reference for children to cling on to and construct identities; acting as the only pathway to answers adults wouldn’t provide. And identities, for all we know, cannot be challenged or tackled merely by censorship. It is therefore absurd to expect a movie maker, for all his responsibility towards his society, to act as the owner of a child day care facility. Schools and parents, by passing the buck to mass media and movies to deconstruct myths and values in a society for their children, they are slowly but steadily building a very unpleasant world. 

A frail old man, walks cheerfully in the midst of huge assembly of people who are waiting anxiously to listen to what he has to say. A young man, out of nowhere, walks up to him and shoots him point-blank. The old man capitulates, instantly, to death. And this is how several Facebook walls reacted to the incident, several years after it took place: they were genuinely confused about the criminality of the murder, and the culpability of the man who pulled the trigger. The old man was Gandhi, and his killer Godse. This is how fuzzy our moral convictions have been reduced to.

And while we discuss more pertinent things like birthplace of lord Ram, permissible skirt size of young women, admissible sexual orientation, cosmic blasphemy, inter-clan rivalry of spaghetti monsters, etc, in the meantime, let’s ridicule movies- the emperor of all our social maladies!     

Snapshot: Mayakkam Enna

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• It has always been a romantic idea, in Tamil cinema, to have a group of guys and girls growing up together from childhood; Unaware, as they want us to believe, of their sexes in relation to each other as they grow together.  So when a supposedly sophisticated filmmaker like Selvaraghavan decides to place his protagonist in a similar milieu, you expect him to traverse beyond that liberal fantasy-in an Indian context- and add an extra dimension to the characters in the group. Sadly, he disappoints! It is merely used as a placeholder to reinforce the traits of his seemingly uncultured protagonist devoid of parental nurturing.

•  Selva’s obsession with gloom is telling throughout the movie. The tension between Dhanush and Richa, from the scene when they first meet and the subsequent scenes when the uneasiness plays out between the two are all set in dark; the darkness is beautifully used as a veil to hide the tension from everybody other than two vulnerable people. So even the conspicuous silence in the midst of their physical presence and the glances passed at each other without any fruitful conversation (other than the blatant insults traded between each other) helps build the tension. Clearly the tension isn’t sold as the commonly over abused feeling -“Love”. It isn’t sold as what it is-‘Sexual tension’- either. It is unwise to not play this tendency out visibly, I think. Showing restraint, surprisingly, Selva?(Perhaps!)

•  Looking at Richa, the female lead, you get the feeling that she has no more than a single expression in her stock of emotions. Often, she looks as though she stares; her pupils seem  lost in those huge eyeballs and aligned like the visual alignment of two horses tied to a cart; her nostrils flared up, and the upper and the lower halves of her lips glued together ,as if she is reluctant even to let a whisper sneak out of her mouth. However, that slackness in showing her emotions successfully conveys, for the most part, what it wants to convey-anger, envy, and her luring invitation to Dhanush.

• But, while you expect her to pass a smile or even a warm expression, when her conversation with Dhanush turns less than hostile, she becomes predictable. In one of the most beautiful scenes in the movie when Dhanush meets her in a bus stop you finally get to see the glue, holding her lips together, starting to thin out (But pity that the cinematographer disappoints with a side faced shot throughout the scene!). And a very unconvincing kiss is exchanged between the two in the same scene; a sort of ‘plastic kiss’ characteristic of Indian cinema in general. Restraint in all the wrong places!

•  Halfway through the movie, you sort of get the feeling that the director is suffering from 'attention deficit syndrome'. Episodes are picked and dropped at will. Like the conversation with a 5 year old, who while making an engaging conversation with an adult suddenly drops the topic and moves on to something else. For the conversation becomes too big for her capacity to not breach her concentration. When Dhanush’s friend, Sundar, discovers Dhanush’s interest towards his lady love and vice versa, you half expect the drama to wind up comically in few scenes- switching from their persisting bitterness between the two to Dhanush happily tying the knot around the girl. And just when you forebode a ‘happily ever after’ scenario, you are put through an excruciating episode of an alcoholic in self-destructive mode.

•  I wonder why Selva chose to caricaturize the ‘role model’ of Dhanush. Extrapolating the idea of fame and success (enjoyed by Dhanush’s role model, supposedly an internationally acclaimed photographer) to merely arrogance, greed and a sense of superiority exposes criminal laziness in charting the lead characters. Also, in the scene where we discover Dhanush’s sister’s interest for his friend Sundar, you tend to think that the director could have dropped subtle cues of such an interest earlier in the film (Or did I miss something?).

• In another revealing scene in the movie, Dhanush’s friend makes sexual advances towards Richa (Dhanush’s wife) under the pretext of helping her cope with her grief. While the sexual advance he makes towards her has an entirely logical premise (setting aside the question of morality), as even Richa explains very sensibly in the same scene, what is illogical is his vituperative remarks on his childhood friend Dhanush. Even if we are to believe that his animal instincts superseded his morality, that doesn’t explain why someone would want his friend-with whom he had practically grown up with from childhood, be thrown into a mental asylum for a fleeting moment of 'pleasure'.     

•  In one of the most poignant scenes Dhanush is told that photography is not his cup of tea from the very man he idolizes the most; like a sledgehammer beating him to pulp. The scene that follows captures beautifully the fragility of his self doubt. He seeks recognition of his talent from an old lady for a photograph he has taken of her. The lady has probably never seen a photograph in her life.  You cant help but empathize with the struggling photographer at that moment.

•  Why does a lady have to put up with an alcoholic, irresponsible husband to help him scale his dreams, while she endures in silence the physical and mental trauma inflicted on her? Is it that a woman should always play second fiddle to a man, forever picking the stones in his path to success? A microcosmic view of the deep seated male chauvinism in our society exposing its disgusting best!

•  In the scene where Dhanush wins the most coveted award in the field of Photography, while his friends erupt in joy back home, his pregnant wife sits silently  in the couch, like a dormant volcano, not showing visibly the erupting emotion brewing inside her.  It is that moment when you want to scream to yourself - “Why didn’t Selva just stick to what he does best- capture the intensity of emotion of a moment without words, sentences and conversation- instead of promulgating lofty ideas like passion and creativity ?”.  

• Selvaraghavan could have easily done justice to his original title – “Maalai Nerathu Mayakkam”.  Sadly, he doesn't!    

Deiva Thirumagal: ‘I am Krishna’, or so they say !

'I am Krishna'

• When you decide to base your entire movie on an English prototype, why not show some grace, and honor your source of inspiration with few seconds of screen space? Is it because of the deliberate urge, by the director, to pass off the movie to an overwhelming majority of people as a product of his cerebral torment? Or is it the larger Tamil or Indian culture to claim credit, wittingly or unwittingly, for what is not yours?
• I marvel at the freedom that directors take when they decide to script socially incompetent characters, stretching their limits of moral superiority - looking down at such characters (and the larger cohort they represent) as nothing more than objects of comic relief. Very much like the amusement derived out of watching animals in a zoo. A grown up, with a capability of a five year old, can be made to act out, very reasonably, like a five year old. But showing the protagonist in the opening shot lying on the floor, squirming, with the most awkward leg twist (a pose hard to enact for any sane person or so our subconscious has been trained or told to believe) should make any well meaning person climb the effing wall. And what’s with that incessant clapping every now and then! Five year old's do that, seriously?
• It’s quite obvious that when the makers set out to create this movie, they wanted to make an all out emotionally manipulative work. Why then distract the plot by charting austere, diabolically cunning villains working on a conspiracy to defeat the good, when you can simply weave a kitschy drama with just the goody normal characters? Google 'Karan Johar' for further details.
• Another reservation about the movie- a fact which the director has quite comfortably chosen to overlook in his quest for manipulative glory- is his unwillingness to put on screen, objectively, as to why the protagonist should or should not be deemed fit to parent his daughter. If the protagonist really is or isn’t capable of fathering the child, is for us (viewers) to decide for ourselves. The director may be thought, based on his whims, he could hold our hands firm and trudge the road of reason and pragmatism. Only that he was so subsumed in enacting a cop-chasing thief like action drama around the court, in the latter half, that he forgot to reason out, to the protagonists and to the court of law, the intricacies of the future of a complex father-daughter relationship.
• Were those supposedly adult jokes played on the protagonist really funny that they had to be used over and over again? And the “intha kaalathu ponunga elam apdithan. Yaaru ariva paakuraanga”-(brides these days are such that they don’t care about brains) - remark was misogynistic and in very cheap taste. 
• If you are trying to wax poetic on screen, why not prolong the shot to let the moment to sink in rather than indulge in a mad rush to move on to the next frame. Case in point is the scene where the protagonist and his friends walk down a chequered road, holding balloons up in the air, waving chaotically in a gentle breeze.
• Whatever the parallel they were suggesting between YG Mahendran-Anushka and Vikram-Nila, I just didn’t get the drift. What did I miss, anyone? Or, was there not any drift to miss in the first place ?
• A wealthy woman, with an extremely understanding father, chooses of all people a mentally challenged person to marry and procreate and the director thinks that is an episode not worth exploring. For people who have sat through internal assessments in colleges, copying verbatim from the god (at least for the duration of that test) behind them, this error of omission should be quite understandable. “Don’t ask, don’t talk, just copy” is the rule of the game there and with minor modifications, that rule can be retrofitted perfectly in the context of this movie, to make sense of this blatant error of omission. I wish not to expound further; the lesser said the better here.
• The protagonist offers money to the shop keeper for the shoe he’s bought for his daughter and finds himself short of cash and the shopkeeper-“aathifying tea in an empty shop”- is terribly pissed off and spouts abuses at a group of people mentally incapable of doing even simple math. Very plausible counter-reaction from the shopkeeper, innit? But not certainly in a planet I live in.  
•   'I am Krishna' ? Afraid not. 'I am doofus' ? Most certainly.

Avan Ivan: A few thoughts...

• Not many auteur's in Tamil cinema, I believe, can dictate the terms and conditions on the kind of armor that their fans must wear,as a measure of caution before a movie, to protect them from celluloid shrapnel skewering their equanimity, as BALA. So entering into the theatre, to watch a movie of his is tantamount, metaphorically, to savages (or audiences, as proclaimed to be) witnessing beasts and wild animals thrown to gladiators in an amphitheatre, fighting for death. The modalities of voyeurism, therefore, are worked out beforehand in mind to expect death as the inevitable outcome of this form of entertainment.
• Just when you thought, you had the characters and the general milieu of the Madurai genre movies figured out, after a barrage of them released in recent years, Bala sprouts like an artist from a distant planet, populating his art with grey men & women suffused over a social fabric that is not shy of transgressing the contours of morality, which most of us, I presume, may find hard to fathom.
• The film is non-metrical, very much like his other movies. There are no contraption of events, each triggering the next, to culminate at a climactic point. For the most part, the film traverses along a single fabric revealing its frayed threads, leaving a single knot halfway to make ends meet finally- to let the audience know when to leave the dank room and to carry with them what is popularly known as post-movie impact. How much of an impact- if there is any such thing- Bala has cast on us at the end of this movie is an open question !
• Vishal as Walter, a thief by descent and a Kalaignan (artist) by choice, is sketched with impeccable detail. His feminine physical language, accrued as a result of his longing for his artistic greatness has been interlaced beautifully, yet quite paradoxically, with a dormant beast inside him, brewing to swoop down on the predator at the mere sight of distress to his family.
• Arya, trying to enact the Surya of Pithamagan as a scruffy, degenerate thief and his accomplice - a pot bellied 12-year-old-looking pranskter (understatement perhaps ?)- make for great agent-provocateurs, mocking and irritating people at will; placing bravado above all else and enticing trouble wherever they are. No doubt, these two have carried the burden of humour,for the most part, that Bala was overtly suggesting to enact as the genre of this movie.
• ¨Highness¨, played by GM Kumar, as a jameendar stripped of all his paternal wealth, looks and plays his part of a spoiled drunk man, without a day job, quite well. Gautham Menon, could perhaps, take cue from the scripting of the character Highness- inspiring his two proteges undergoing mid-life crisis to wreck their life as bad as his- and ponder over on how he could have scripted a similar father inspiring son story, plausibly, in Vaaranam Aayiram.
• There is the sense that Bala, in his directorial career has reached a point, where the curve has started to straighten out, devoid of any sporadic spikes of the unexpected; like the cuisine of a well established eat out, where any new dish that you are going to experiment is obviously going to be great, but yet made by the same chef within his narrow confines of greatness. There isn't any avant garde plot sequence or genre in his movies, anymore. Though i don't think thats a bad thing per se.
• Vintage Bala is at work here, in Avan Ivan, with his characteristic undercurrent of dark humour, poking fun at evangelists, hugely paid actors and even Rajapakse !
• But i sensed a great degree of sychophancy in maketing Surya as a philanthropist with a saintly glow. Completely off mark and sadly there was no humility in Suryas defense of the allegations of self-promotion-while-engaging-in-philanthropy, even though his defense sounded close to convincing. But Bala stooping low to promote individual agendas in his movie, despite them being noble, is not quite expected from him !
• The fringe characters, like the inspector, the belligerent swear-words-spouting moms of Arya and Vishal, are sketched quite interestingly. Sample this : a newly appointed inspector, a soon to be a D.S.P, invites the criminals-past and present- in town for ´kari soru´ (feast) just to plead and request them to promise, before god, not to sabotage his career aspirations. All this happens in a premise of normality, without any comic overtones; like a group of people assembling to eat in a marriage. It is just that, here, drunk criminals and thugs are hosted to a feast by their very own predator to be. Yeah, only in a distant world, that we are so unaware and yet that is so real, populated with grey men and women by BALA !