Kalabham: A Curious Case of Music After Death

A campaign is being run in Kerala now for the new film Kalabham making use of the reputation of late music director Raveendran. His photo is all over there in the posters of the film.
But the fact is that Raveendran might never have even heard of the film during his life time.
What that great man had actually done was doing music for a movie Minnale. But Minnale never reached the theaters.
Realizing the sudden jump in Raveendran's songs market value both because of his untimely departure and the huge success of Vadakkumnadhan's songs, the Kalabham people were deciding, very cleverly, to hijack the Minnale music.
Anyone who see the film can easily realize this. The story and the songs stand poles apart.
Tamil actor Bala is in the lead role. Navya Nair is his heroine. Director Anil (Anil Babu duo ).

The Chemistry of mediocrity

Let us put it straight: Rasathanthram is a mediocre film & Sathyan Anthikkad has no reason to be proud of it.
If this is where he has reached after all these years of writing & directing, it is better for him to throw the pen away - the earlier, the better.
A weak story line, immature creation of characters, shameless imitation of directors very junior to him and a predictable (and pathetic) ending- all join hands to make the film a total aesthetical failure.
When Sathyan makes the hero (Mohan Lal) to tell the girl (Meera Jasmine) that he could not marry her, viewers really become a puzzled lot. What it could be that unspeakable secret that prevents the hero from marrying the heroine? Could he be an AIDS patient ? ( Gone are the days of blood cancer). Or impotent? or something equally tragic?
No, no, no- Nothing. He had spent some years in jail. That is all.
Is it reason enough? Any way, Sathyan thought so and he tries in vain (and fails miserably) to make us too.
Even when the reason was this flimsy, the director could have saved the story, and thus the film, if the hero was presented as- from the beginning - such a character:someone who is perpetually haunted by the trauma of the jail days.
The pooja sequences in the end reminds us of Priyadarsan's typical running-and-hitting-down climax scenes. Sathyan, the favorite director of the middle class Malayalis in this film imitate the style of yet another director also. See the song scenes, "Aattin kara orathu " (Incidentally, it is the best song in the movie. Sung by Manjari). In Siddique's Vietnam Colony we had seen an identical effort by the heroine to seduce the man with a song "Pathiravayi Neram" (Minminy).
The father-son scenes in which the hero deliver the lengthy I-know-everything lectures, we clould not but think of Blessy. And it is evident that Sathyan too had thought much about Blessy's super hit "Thanmathra" (Molecule), during the making of "Rasathanthram" (Chemistry). Only that Chemistry ended up an average hit.

Some Girls in Some Dresses

Navya is at it again.
Her never ending obsession with dress (or absence of it) has landed her in yet another controversy. It was with amusement (though not with much surprise) that everyone at the set of Kalabham watched Navya Nair giving costume designer S.B. Satheeshan a piece of her mind.
Navya was sure that the dress designed for her character would be terrible for her image. And she flatly refused to adorn that pieces of cloths, designed by some one got a National award (Film: Daya; Director: Venu) for doing his job well. Satheeshan remained nonchalant. He simply told the state award winner to go to the director if she got any complaint.
He said he designed the dress to match the descriptions of the character (a poor Brahmin girl) as elaborated by Director Anil and Script Writer Biju Vattapara.
It is not clear how the crisis got defused at last. And it is not going to be the last one either. Though she is not that particular about the length or breadth of dresses if the film is Tamil, for Malayalam movies she could be very aggressive when it comes to dresses not covering the body well. That was how she fumed at Bhadran for making her to wear skimpy clothes in Vellithira.

Tail piece: Meera Jasmin too had once confronted SB Satheeshan. It was over her costume in Swapnakoodu. But she in the end had to tender an apology.

Suesh Gopi, the Terrorist?

We, Keralites at last got our own terrorist, it seems.
The Intelligence people believe Muhammod Bashir alias Abu Hassan, hailing from Kaprassey, a small village near Aluva, Kerala, was one of the brains behind the 7/11 Mumbai blasts. A former active member of SIMI, Abu Hassan is now believed to be a top commander of Lashkar-e-Toiba.
Yes- The time is ripe to pen a film script with terrorism as the main theme. And the terrorist must be a Malayali with typical Aluva accent.
In yester years the terrorists in Malayalam movies always looked like Kashmiris and as a rule they all spoke Hindi. The Producers had a tough time those days adding Malayalam sub-title for those lengthy dialogous in the Rashtra Bhasha.
But one Abu Hassan from Kaprassery is to change it all.
Suresh Gopi, who recently found out that negative characters were not that terrible for the career (Chinthamani Kolakkese), should all too willing to weild RDX and AK-47, spewing fiery (if not venomous) dialogues in Aluva dialect.