Onaayum Aattukkuttiyum (The wolf and the lamb) - Mysskin

CK - No  
I am not even reading much in the forum these days...

Re: BRangar, I happened to browse through a few of his reviews and it is clear that he is either playing the politically correct game of trying to please everyone or he is ONE overrated phlow.

http://baradwajrangan.wordpress.com/2012/12/16/bitty-ruminations-72/

"Adiye is a reminder that no one arranges harmonies better than this composer. Harmonies aren’t just about clean voices and coordination but also the recording, the spotlessness of which should blow away the murk around commingling pitches — the results are stunning. Why don’t our composers dip into gospel music more often? That surge of emotion is so suited to our drama and for staging song sequences."


Did I read that right? So here is the revered BRangan, the music connoisseur and darling of the intellectual cine-goers using Adiye to promote ARR as the foremost master of harmony.    Edit: I must also add I don't really understand what he is trying to convey with 'aren't just about blah blah....spotlessness blah blah...commingling blah blah..' Why use such convoluted language ? Harmony has nothing to do with recording. Period. Sigh,  he is allowed to get away with such tripe because he uses eloquent language.


"PS: Is there anything as gooseflesh-inducing as a scale or upward octave shift in a dramatically charged composition. Again, a mystery why this technique doesn’t find more favour with our composers. Then again, if we heard it too much, we’d be complaining about its ubiquity."


A hilarious Freudian slip there. He's probably a big fan of the Backstreet boys, Boyzone and all those other 90s boy and girl bands that routinely use the "gooseflesh-inducing scale or upward octave shift " and which IR shuns like the plague. Rangaaaa, I can't take your music reviews seriously any more. 

On Deepavali day, I saw Onnaiyum Aatukkutiyum (OAK) on Vijay TV and many thanks to Vijay TV as this movie was not released in theaters here or on video.
 
This is a thriller that happens in one night in Chennai and is a different kind of movie. Without any silly comedy tracks or stupid stunts, heroism, or meaningless songs, Myshkin has shot a good movie. I will not bring Ilayaraja into this as I have already written about his background score. I do not have any knowledge of biblical characters and may have missed some points. This is a movie that is raw and has no routine melodrama that a typical Indian audience is used to.  As Myshkin says that he is a professional cinema person, I will try to view this from a cinema perspective. Needless to day, I was hoping for a movie that is world class that lives up to the hype and Raja's background music.
 
Goodies
-----------
1.  It is commendable to take up something that will constitute a short film and extend the new theme to mainstream cinema. It calls for a lot of courage to do a film that has no love angle to it (boy-girl, father-son, father-daughter, mother-daughter) nor any revenge and the usual cinematic non sense
2.  Some parts of the film have been done technically very well. There is a brief shot of Chandru and his brother being imprisoned and the way the lighting is done on that prison cell and the loud noise of the table being dragged in front of the detainees is nicely done
3. The entire sequence before the temple involving a lot of characters is very nicely executed
4. There is a scene with the henchman arriving at the villain's den - the dissolved shots of the bikes appearing and disappearing in the night light  is pretty cool
5. The shots inside the parking lot  is very well shot and the sequence lasts about 10 minutes or so.
6. The editing of the train sequence is brilliant and the 5 minutes has been very nicely put together
 
Baddies
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1. The villain says to the cop, 'I will double the bounty to 1 crore from 50 lakhs in order to get Wolf". You too Myshkin - could you not get a better dialog than that? There are a thousand movies with such stupid dialogs
2. While the CBCID search sequence begins as though it is a professional one, when the other officers walk into the room, I was shifted to Naradha Gana Sabha. It look so amateurish.
3. The discussions among the police in the control room - that's where better editing could have helped
4. The cops ask Chandru to kill Wolf and they also give him a gun - can you get more stupid than that? It makes a mockery of the police force
5. Almost all the supporting actors have performed poorly and they do their parts very mechanically. The women, the blind men and some cops, they all ambulate through their parts. This is Myskin's biggest slip
6. Sree has performed very inconsistently through the movie. While I liked the part where he holds a child as ransom and gets the woman to tie Wolf's hands, he stares, mouths some dialogs in a very amateurish way
6, Some of the cops logic about why Wolf would get to the cemetery is non sense
7. The scenes in the cemetery were a drag, Where was the need to drop the matches and Myskin picking up those matches and let the candles burn? It was a test of the viewers patience
8. I still do not get why Wolf makes those Hindi phone calls from the  cemetery? I thought that was unnecessary
 
Overall, the movie is a good, dark thriller and is definitely worth a watch. Perhaps, a second watch will make things better. 
 
  Overall, this is a Ilayaraja movie directed by Myskin. Myskin has a lot to catch up. To be beaten by someone, who spent 3 days on his movie means a lot. He has a friendly "score" to settle in his next movie with Raja. I only hope to see a movie someday, that can be described as a Myskin movie powered by Ilayaraja.

Even I did not like the acting. I am pretty sure most of the sidekicks including cops were just roadside fellows randomly picked by Mysskin. To me, it is very difficult to take a movie seriously unless the overall acting is consistent. This is another area where the really good Hollywood movies distinguish themselves. I equally get distressed about violations of Newton's laws and logical fallacies and don't even want to get into those aspects as others have already done so.

I think he, like typical Indians, meant vocal harmonies when he said 'harmonies'.  I don't know why they do that.  Anyhow, I would not agree even then.  What about Adi Aathadi or Yetho Mokam?  And I did not really find the Adiye vocal harmonies so striking, just run of the mill R&B stuff.    Yeah, what to say if somebody still finds the money note gooseflesh inducing.   He has actually called Tu Aashiqui Hai a gospel based song.  I don't see how after listening to it again now as it doesn't have call-response throughout. Everything with a chorus is not gospel.
Maybe the fact that song is picturised in a church made him say that?  Because the song sounds more like Crowded House to me.

As for logical fallacies in OAK, there are plenty of them in Hollywood films (Dark Knight Rises ending for instance was simply ridiculous) but we are conditioned to cut them loads of slack.  I personally believe Hollywood as in the mega budget mega star kind of Holly is overrated and has plenty of forced cliche moments just like Bolly/Kolly.  I prefer the more low key productions or European films which don't project it as if the films are depicting the be all and end all of the world.

I think, contrary to what his acolytes say, Rangan is better at reviewing films, especially the bad ones where his sarcasm comes through, rather than music.  This passage from his Krrish 3 review was just too much:

"The simplest dialogue, thus, comes off sounding like a florid aria. In an early scene (involving a Flair pen-cum prism), Rohit tells Krishna that his experiment needs the sun. It’s night, so they wait – and then, when the sun comes up, Krishna looks at the sky and says “Papa… suraj” with such tremulous awe that you think he was some kind of cave creature who has set eyes, for the first time, on this fiery orb in the heavens."


   



In music, he just seems to consume pop culture rather than appreciate it independent of the film.

crimson king wrote: rather than music

In music reviews, BRangan now stands equal to milliblogs of the world - except that his English is far better

Well, in fairness to him, he does say upfront that he is biased unlike milli who says he is striving to be neutral and all that.  The problem is not with his style per se - there are lots of internet reviewers who declare that they are biased and are simply presenting their views - but with Hindu carrying his opinions for public consumption.  A professional review on a newspaper should have a modicum of detachment because the review is sought after by readers to decide whether or not they want to see the film.

crimson king wrote:As for logical fallacies in OAK, there are plenty of them in Hollywood films (Dark Knight Rises ending for instance was simply ridiculous) but we are conditioned to cut them loads of slack.  I personally believe Hollywood as in the mega budget mega star kind of Holly is overrated and has plenty of forced cliche moments just like Bolly/Kolly.  I prefer the more low key productions or European films which don't project it as if the films are depicting the be all and end all of the world.

Well aware, CK well aware  . I didn't mean big budget movies at all. I was thinking about say the classic Hitchcock movies like Vertigo or even a recent series like Breaking Bad  . There is no parallel in terms of storylines or genre, but these movies/series have equally incredulous moments in them, but the difference is that the script acknowledges this, and there is a certain consistency in the writing, an attempt to tie loose ends and an assuredness in the acting that covers these minor foibles . Probability dictates that the odds of something like the random way Karthik dies in Mouna RAgam is practically zero, but MR, the intellectual writes that scene like it is the most normal way to die. 

crimson king wrote:I think, contrary to what his acolytes say, Rangan is better at reviewing films, especially the bad ones where his sarcasm comes through, rather than music.  This passage from his Krrish 3 review was just too much:

"The simplest dialogue, thus, comes off sounding like a florid aria. In an early scene (involving a Flair pen-cum prism), Rohit tells Krishna that his experiment needs the sun. It’s night, so they wait – and then, when the sun comes up, Krishna looks at the sky and says “Papa… suraj” with such tremulous awe that you think he was some kind of cave creature who has set eyes, for the first time, on this fiery orb in the heavens."


   



In music, he just seems to consume pop culture rather than appreciate it independent of the film.

Lol. That was truly imaginative - read the full review on his blog - must be one unwatchable movie. Ya, I like his snarky reviews. I think he does some politically correct ones and occasionally lets loose and vents with these snarky ones.   I remember committing the crime of watching  'Ayan' in the theatre in my college days. Loled like anything on reading this:

"IF THERE’S ONE THING YOU WON’T FIND in Ayan, it’s dead air. KV Anand’s unpretentious entertainer zips by like a rocket on steroids, propelled by a can’t-do-no-wrong Suriya dropped into a series of international smuggling scenarios that, at least on the Tamil screen, seem utterly new. What’s old, however, is the insistence on virtue. The hero stumbles into a den of flirty prostitutes, and to see him flap around like a flustered rooster, you’d think the worst fate that could befall a man who can single-handedly dispatch scores of villains is to have his privates groped. We’re still in an era where it isn’t just the heroine who needs to stay pure, but also the hero, who’s such an innocent, he appears unaware of the purpose of sanitary napkins. But to be fair, these scenes are played for laughs, and more importantly (and despite a doddering latter half), there’s little opportunity for these ruminations during the running time. That, really, is the success of Ayan."

I think that - the MR Karthik death scene - is just an exploitation of unfortunate coincidence.  And the problem is not that that these kind of things don't happen at all.   Barely a month after her marriage, one of my aunts was riding pillion with her husband (who was, aptly, not wearing a helmet) and a van rammed into them.  He died almost instantly in the crash.  In a different case, the daughter of one of my mother's acquaintances eloped with her lover on the day of her engagement ceremony (with the 'official' groom).   These kind of strange things do happen.  The problem is the tendency of our filmmakers to over-exploit these and reduce them to cliches.  

I somehow found the amateurish tone of the acting in OAK very appropriate.  I think the whole problem is the way OAK got projected as a thriller.  I see ravi nat sir also referring to it as a thriller.  It is not.  And this projection has cast expectations in a certain light (because we expect some measure of technical finesse in a thriller of all genres).   Read the conversation between myself and DM and watch the film again, maybe with good print.  It's much deeper than a typical thriller film and imo the thriller aspect is incidental.   That makes me personally want to overlook the flaws because such films are not usually made in Kolly/Bolly and even in Holly, such 'grey' films are rare to come across.  I also don't think it's a Raja film made by Mysskin at all.  For all his fandom, Mysskin has actually given IR very little scope for experimenting in BGM compared to say Kaaki Chatthai or Nooravuthu Naal.

That Ayyan review is still a bit more politically correct.  He has tried to argue that it is at least engrossing.  It was extremely headache inducing, that much I know.   He just explained to me on the Krissh review comments that he generally tries to find whether there is some context in which the movie works.   Fair enough, then....though I'd much rather reviewers cut slack for small films than these overrated, expensive masala bores singing the same notes again.

crimson king wrote:I think that - the MR Karthik death scene - is just an exploitation of unfortunate coincidence.  And the problem is not that that these kind of things don't happen at all. 

True. I agree, but there is something about that particular scene which irks me , also probably because I have not heard anyone else complain about the bizarreness of the whole scenario. To dissect this a bit more, Karthik being killed outside the (court?) where Revathi is waiting for him is...ok....somewhat believable. Karthik being shot by a policeman in the same location in front of Revathi...Okkkk...shit happens. But Karthik getting killed by a random bullet fired as the cop accidentally pulls the trigger as he is falling from his jeep due to a random van colliding into his vehicle just as he has almost caught up with Karthik outside the court where Revathi is waiting for him...you get the point. That's shameless exploitation of coincidence and betrays a lack of imagination. Mouna rAgam works well in patches for me, but certain scenes and sequences are just too contrived and amateurish... also MR's now well documented epic fail at humour. 

The MR movie I've enjoyed most so far has been AlaipAyuthey which was a well-made movie overall.

crimson king wrote:I somehow found the amateurish tone of the acting in OAK very appropriate.  I think the whole problem is the way OAK got projected as a thriller.  I see ravi nat sir also referring to it as a thriller.  It is not.  And this projection has cast expectations in a certain light (because we expect some measure of technical finesse in a thriller of all genres).   Read the conversation between myself and DM and watch the film again, maybe with good print.  It's much deeper than a typical thriller film and imo the thriller aspect is incidental.   That makes me personally want to overlook the flaws because such films are not usually made in Kolly/Bolly and even in Holly, such 'grey' films are rare to come across.  I also don't think it's a Raja film made by Mysskin at all.  For all his fandom, Mysskin has actually given IR very little scope for experimenting in BGM compared to say Kaaki Chatthai or Nooravuthu Naal.

I did watch the movie in a not-so-great print, so I might very well have missed a lot of things. Will catch the vijaytv print after it is (hopefully) up on youtube.

Re Ayan, that was the movie which made me decide not to watch a Tamil movie again unless it comes strongly recommended by folks whose judgement I trust. And ya, that wasn't Rangan's snarkiest, though he concedes it's engrossing in an obviously condescending way and the discerning reader wouldn't have missed the sarcastic undertone. 

I mean that he generally does make concessions for masala films and I think he genuinely enjoys at least parts of them unless they are Krissh-bad.   He still believes in the old masala-art divide and I am not sure how much he has recognized the way multiplexes have opened up space for middle-of-the-road films.  This came out in his comparison of GVM working with IR to MR approaching MSV for Agni Natchathram (for which he got flak).  The spread of multiplexes and also digital bringing out printing costs have allowed filmmakers like Bala, Thangarbacchan, Mysskin, Prakash Raj more space (all of whom have worked with IR).  Likewise, Balki's films may not be hip but they are also not 'outdated' and he again worked with IR.  This kind of thing may not have happened in the 80s where it was either commercial or parallel cinema but things are more complex now and there is more space for directors trying something different to survive.  IR doesn't need to work with Thala Ajith or Ilayathalapathi anymore to remain in the business.

Just pasting a couple of twitlongers from equanimus:

http://t.co/PEfcwmv0lG

http://t.co/Wn21kU2OhJ

Quite clearly, there is lot more to it than meets the eye. I myself need to view it another time. Vijatv's youtube account officially uploads all the films a few days after they telecast them in good quality.

Very interesting tweets.  This is my own entry on how OAK differs significantly from typical filmmaking styles in Tamil cinema, with no disrespect to those.  The fact that a lot of the 'loaded' content is implied through non verbal cues is what makes this film both tricky and intriguing. If you miss the implications of non verbal cues - like the question the angel asks of the lamb without even saying a word, when she's shot - you miss the very gist of the film.   Hats off to Mysskin for his guts, is all I can say.

http://rothrocks.wordpress.com/2013/11/03/onaayum-aatukuttiyum-and-the-classification-fix/

Onaayum Aatukuttiyum and the classification fix

Very interesting takes by CK and equanimus. I will definitely watch it again if/when vijaytv uploads it on youtube and comment on your review after that 

I don't think the acting in Mysskin films (I have seen all) could be termed 'amateurish'. It is intentionally loud and animated like some of the Jap films (Read Kurosawa's). Most of his protaganists channel Toshiro Miffune. And that is why you see the acting so different from other mainstream Indian films.

Maybe it's that touch of rawness in the acting.  This film, that is, I haven't seen any of his other films but say the way Mysskin himself enacted the monologue in the 'crux' scene, is kind of raw (actually I found it believable that way) and not necessarily sticking to dramatic conventions.

Great reviews Ravi and CK. I still need to grasp the film in its entirety, having watched just once. The music was revolving around me even after hours I watched the movie. I had lot of questions/doubts even regarding the story. I kind of even thought the questions posted by rozavasanth are very valid in the first link below, till I read the story in detail from writercsk's link, which also makes much sense. That cleared many of my doubts about the story and the questions I had in my mind. In any case, their views are not to be missed. These links are not for those who are yet to watch the film, as it reveals the entire story which would kill the suspense.

http://rozavasanth.blogspot.com/2013/10/blog-post.html
http://rozavasanth.blogspot.com/2013_10_01_archive.html (still need to read the refined version)

http://www.writercsk.com/2013/10/blog-post_14.html

Suresh ji, 
Wonderful take on OAK music.  I too concur with your views that this film cannot be just classified as a thriller (or having just one genre). Like Maestro's music which always has that multi-dimension, this film also has that nature. Very few films belong to this category. Scoring for this kind of movie is not that easy. Still I will have to watch again.

rozavasanth blog post on a facebook critic named Chakravarthy

ஓநாயும் ஆட்டுகுட்டியும் படத்தின்  கதாபாத்திரங்கள் அதன் குணம் சார்ந்த தன்மைகளை கணக்கில் கொண்டு அதை தீம் இசையாக வெளிப்படுத்தி இளையராஜா அளித்திருப்பதை புரிந்து கொள்ளமல் சக்ஸ் உளறினார்( "there is no thematic design in the music...I mean something like a leitmotif "). ராஜாவின் இசை இவர் எட்டமுடியாத உயரத்தில் உள்ளது; ஒருமுறை படம் பார்த்து புரியாததில் நியாயம் உண்டு. ராஜன்குறை சாதரண தமிழில் எழுதியது கூடவா புரியவில்லை. 

edhir(i)kkatchi using rozavasanth

மூவருக்கும் ‘மூக்கு’ புடைப்பாக இருக்கக்கூடும் என்பது என்னுடைய ஆகச்சிறந்த அவதானிப்பு. ஏன் சொல்கிறேன் என்றால் மூன்றுமே நல்ல கட்டுரைகள் என்றாலும் படித்ததும் சட்டென புரிந்துக்கொள்ள முடியாத அளவிற்கு ‘சொயட்டி சொயட்டி’ எழுதியிருக்கிறார்கள். யாருக்குமே புரியாம எழுதி அப்படி என்னடாப்பா சாதிக்க போறீங்க ? சுரேஷ் கண்ணன் நம்மாளு தான். முன்பெல்லாம் நல்லாத்தான் எழுதிக்கொண்டிருந்தார். யாரோ அவரை உயிர்மை, தயிர்மை’ன்னு செமயா ஏத்தி விட்டிருக்காங்க. இப்பல்லாம் மனிதர் புல்ஸ்டாப் வைக்காம ஒரே வாக்கியத்துல ஒரு நான்கு பக்க கட்டுரையை கட்டமைக்க முயன்றுக்கொண்டிருக்கிறார்.