"refill cadrige"

we managed to catch a tamil movie this weekend after a long time. wish we hadn’t.

ghajini, (apparently a remake of an english flick) was bearable during the first half and excruciating to “nails-on-chalkboard” levels during the latter). surya, asin and nayanthara make what could have been an entertaining thriller into an inane mindless-songs-and-mindless-fights filled ride through the experiences of a short-term memory loss (STML) patient.

enter the robot: ok, so you have STML. the director thinks “how do i convincingly let the audience know that this guy is afflicted with this syndrome?” and in a flash he gets it: let’s have him do the robot dance! surya, who always likes to do his roles with a lot of conviction gets into the dance groove a little too heartily and flicks his head around so much, i was afraid it would slide right off his shoulders.

the best parts of the movie are the flashback sequences leading upto his memory loss, where i was pleasantly surprised to see asin take up the role of “saving grace” of the movie. though she tends to shake her hands around a lot, she turns out to be a surprising natural in her acting areas. her comedy sequences in the early portions of the movie were a treat.

nayanthara, who is obese by any definition of the word, does a lot of shaking and running and i cannot describe it better than karthik does (that his post is 4 months old is a testimony to how out-of-touch i am with the tamil film scene):

[...] Nayanthara has a role that is peripheral enough that her performance doesn’t matter too much. Although, I must admit I was a little traumatized when I saw her dance to an item number – every part of her literally shook, and in a startling reminder of Newton’s first law, certain parts kept shaking even after she had stopped dancing.

harris jeyraj’s bone-jarring music (and “zulu-zulu” chants whenever “robot-dance” surya enters) made me want to mute the audio and switch to subtitles, but knowing what worse horrors that can entail, i resigned to lip-reading the dialogues. suttum vizhi sudare was the only listenable song.

and finally we come to the title of this post. our poor STML afflicted hero needs visual clues to make sure he doesn’t forget his daily chores and so his room walls are filled with friendly reminders like “breathe”, “pee now!” and finally the best of all: “refill cadrige” (sic) – for the polaroid that robot-dance carries with him at all times. apparently the director turned over spelling to the spot-boys.

the climactic fight with matrix-style cameras and twins to boot must have been difficult to shoot, but since i was already tone-deaf and couldn’t-care-less by then, vidhya had to shake me back to consciousness to watch it.

ghajini is eminently switchoffable after the flashback sequences.