Last Saturday, I found myself free enough to accompany a couple of friends to watch Lokesh Kanagaraj & Kamal Hassan’s latest action-thriller and by now, a blockbuster – Vikram. While I wasn’t very active on social media to know much of the details around the movie (and not knowing particularly One of the details made it so much more enjoyable a watch for me). People had told me one thing though – that Kaithi, also directed by Lokesh had something to do with Vikram, so it was fortuitous that I had only watched it recently and the details were still fresh in my mind.

So, at 6 PM on Saturday, I reached Urvashi theater and took my seat to face an already dancing Kamal Hassan in his “Patthala Patthala” song. The movie took a few minutes to start making sense for me and it’s only when Fahad Faasil appeared on screen that things really began to take shape. FF and his group of government-appointed-nameless-spies were to unveil the identities of a masked group of “terrorists”. FF’s character has had a history of successful operations to his name and that’s why his team was chosen for this job as well. And we soon see why. The action scenes are brilliantly shot with nothing being thrown in for mere effect or generously. The details that you will see flying all over the internet now are woven beautifully through the movie and some of them you only spot retrospectively. The movie was brilliant for multiple reasons, not the least of which was Anirudh’s music in all his songs – the Vikram theme, the “Once upon a time, there was a Ghost” song and pretty much throughout the movie. This is a man who knows his craft inside and out.

Towards the 70% mark, there are some characters important to the overall plot are given a few minutes of importance but those minutes are worth a lot of importance and the audience roared for all the right reasons.

Apart from the mini-special characters, there were multiple film stars – Kamal, Vijay Sethupathi, Arjun Das, FaFa etc in the movie but all of them get just the right amount of screen space. And that brings me to what I thankfully didn’t know because of my absence of attentiveness on social media – the identity of the druglord whose name is uttered multiple times in the movie but is revealed only towards the end – Who is the infamous Rolex?

One of the last scenes is also how you understand the relevance of Kaithi to Vikam.

Overall time well spent. I wish I could say this of Beast as well. But I can’t.

Vikram movie Rating – 4.9/5.0

There are no spoilers here but I have thoughts about the journey I’ve been a part of as a viewer aboard this Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) rollercoaster and I’m going to share a little bit of that here.

Movies are churned out by the hundreds every year. So what makes superhero movies so special? What makes Superheroes special? There is definitely a faction out there that will say “Nothing”, but the vast majority of us, superheroes are a symbol of hope and wonder, the fact that acts are being done by individuals that the rest of us can only…marvel..over. For all the hypocritical beings that we are, we still yearn for personal justice and superheroes seem to provide us that.

For the past 11 years, over 22 movies, the MCU has been giving us just that, perhaps not meeting expectations every time but always leaving us with something to talk about and the characters themselves to visualise as perfect images in our own minds, either in agreement or in criticism of their works.

This movie, Avengers : End Game, is special in that sense, if not for anything else (even though it IS for more reasons) . It marks the end of an era and in an extremely satisfying way. Iron Man both, as a character and as the first movie that started this train off in 2008, has been one of my absolute favourites partly because of our shared affinity to everything tech. Add to that Robert Downey Jr’s charisma and his chemistry with the (again) perfectly-cast Gwyneth Paltrow as Pepper Potts and you get one brilliant character. Every scene that they’ve been in since then has been my favourite throughout the years and this movie is no exception.

The mind works in mysterious ways and we as humans have evolved over time to embrace cliffhangers very well – Chris Nolan has left no dearth of training us to accept those as brilliant ends for movies. But what the mind also desires, and subjectively, is happier obtaining, on a parallel vein, is Closure. And Endgame gives us that. When the movie ended after 3 hours, a duration that is long on its face but seemed to fly away in this context, I remember feeling exactly how I’d felt when Logan ended. Like there was a knot in my chest that didn’t seem to want to untie itself.

I’m not going to tell you anything specific about the movie. If you’ve been a fan of the franchise, you’ll watch it and you’ll form opinions about it. But I really hope you love it 🙂

And I guess it’s okay that it’s over. You know? Part of the journey Is the end, after all.

And if nothing else, we will always have Blu-Ray discs to watch and relive it all again.

I don’t watch many movies at home because I lack the patience and 20 minute “A Bit of Fry and Laurie” episodes are so much more fun. But I had some extra time on my hands today and a little more resilience, so I watched –

“Unbreakable” – by M Night Shyamalan – I watched this for the first time today, almost 18 years after it was released on 12 Jan 2001. And what a movie it was :O The pace was very slow without seeming like a drag, pausing carefully at every point where pause seemed necessary. It’s the first time I’ve seen Bruce Willis in a non-John McClane role and I am impressed. He’s his characteristic tough-guy self with very few emotions on his face, maybe a hint of a smile once in a while, but it worked. Samuel L Jackson – This guy played the “obsessed comic book nerd wishing for superheroes to be real” to perfection; I even got tired of him at some point, which is more to his credit than anything for playing the unnecessary Messiah brilliantly.

I’ve come to expect very little from M Night Shyamalan and the only reason I even watched this movie is because I found out that it was a precursor to Split after I watched it (I know). But it’s somewhat redeeming(?) in a sense to know that he has made some good movies in the past, Unbreakable being one of them. Right from the first train scene to tying in the stories of Elijah and David (Jewish lore connection?) and a stunning revelation at the end that takes it to that next level.

I loved this movie and I can’t wait for Glass (2019). Coz almost scene in this movie made me feel like there was a borderline horror movie – like there was something unexpected that would happen at …any…second – like someone was standing behind me with a hand on my shoulder, creeping up my neck and low-key choking me, but from inside.

Or maybe that’s the cough and cold I’m currently suffering.Oh well.