Top 10 malayalam film dialogues

Sabari’s top 10 Malayalam film dialogues

The American Film Institute has a list of 100 most famous film quotes. It ranges from complex dialogues like “I love the smell of napalm…” from Apocalypse Now to simple words like “Rosebud” from Citizen Kane. I aint no Superman when it comes to movies but this is a list of famous dialogues which struck me when I thought of the above topic.

The following list is my choice. No one dare question me.

1. “Davidetta….Kingfisher unda, chilled?” (Thuvanathumpikal, 1987)
This tops my list as these words effectively convey the intricacies of Mannarthodiyil Jayakrishnan. Shot at the Sharabi bar in Casino hotel, Trichur this scene is also famous for Mohanlal gulping down a bottle of beer in a single shot.

Kingfisher could have quadrupled its sales by using this dialogue but alas, those weren’t the days of surrogate ads and brand placements.

2. “Bha…Pulle” (Commisoner, 1993)
These words gave birth to a new superstar in Malayalam who subsequently mouthed obscenities on the screen for a long time to come. A generation was swayed by these two words.

3. “Nee po, mone Dinesha” (Narasimham, 2000)
Kerala witnessed clones of Induchoodan wearing blue/ black lungis, white kurtas and sporting the twirled moustache. Dineshan became synomous with mediocrity and inferiority.

4. “Thomaskutty, vittoda” (In harihar Nagar)
The perfect escape.

I’m a lazy fucker, so can’t write anymore as of now. Blog will be updated when the author feels motivated to do so. So I am just jotting down the quotes here

5. “Vidamatte..Nee enne vidamatte?” (Manichitrathazhu)

6. “Ramji Rao speaking” (Ramji Rao speaking)

7. “ Kochumuthalali….” (Chemmen)

8. “ Poyi taaski viliyada” (Thenmavin Kombathu)

9. “Pavanayi Shavamayi” (Naadodikattu)

10. “Thalle, Kalippukalu theeranillallo” (Rajamanickam)

Trivandrum...7 years back

to be written soon. Im just motivating myself to write :-)

Sabari

Night life at MDI

“At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom.” Pandit Nehru declared to the world when Indian became a free nation on the 15^th of August of 1947. He would have never realized that the holy fraternity of B School students would take his words too seriously.

If you are finding my thought process too arbit, I can reframe the famous words for you. “At the stroke of the midnight hour when the world sleeps, B skoolers awake to life and freedom and start their daily chores.” Any one who has been in a residential B school will have indelible memories of friends who wake up in the wee hours of the night, brush their teeth and log on to the internet to catch up with the day’s(oops.. the previous day’s) news.

My life is a perfect testimony to the above statement. Before coming to MDI, I was one of those disciplined (?) students who couldn’t stay awake after midnight even if Scarlet Johansson invited me to her place for the night. MDI, in a short span of around two years has had a disruptive effect on my biological clock to the extend that I sleep at around 5 am only after ensuring that I read the online edition of the local Mallu paper as soon as it gets uploaded!!!

This would be the case with most people who come into a B school. B School life is surely hectic but the very motivation for people to stay up in the night and sleep throughout the early hours should be taken up by research by our fellow FPM students. The interesting fact is that it is not just the academic rigor that makes us stay up all night. Just take a walk through the hostel corridor at around 2 am: you will find 20% of the students working on PPT/ Excel, around 50% glued on to their laptops watching a movie/ sitcoms, 20% doing “bakar” and the rest 10% sleeping peacefully.

This midnight life has its on economic and commercial effects. Prayas, our very own kirana store is jam-packed with customers lined up to buy eatables. Our own lazy “Jhaji” after fifteen plus years of experience in MDI recently came out of his claustrophobic den in the academic block to setup an eating joint that caters to the ‘midnight oil burners’. Arcus makes shitloads of money that would put our average salary packages to shame. Sharmaji has improved his night operations after seeking help from an internal consultant. This comes with its own “subprimal” effect on our pockets too. A student on an average spends around 40 rupees a day on night food (this is under the assumption that an average Mandevian is a non smoker). Simple calculation tells that we spend around 1200 rupees on night food only per month and if you calculate the annual rates, we will get a shock of our life.

Whatever maybe the financial impacts, these night jaunts definitely give you the experience of a lifetime. It gives us innumerable memories and sheds all barriers of time that is in our body system. For the more fortunate ones, night life in MDI has given experiences of a life time which is best explained by Frank Sinatra’s famous song

“Strangers in the night exchanging glances
Wandering in the night
What were the chances we’d be sharing love
Before the night was through.”

AKALE

AKALE was released in 2004. I still remember watching this movie along with just four other people in Trivandrum's Sree theatre I am in the process of digging my old movie reviews and publishing it here.

Cheers

Sabari

AKALE- REVIEW

I am not any kind of conventional film analyst,but after watchin syamaprasads "akale"i can swear tht i would hav made a better film ....
The film is based on tenesse williams"the glass menagerie"(which i havnt read) but from the mood of the movie its sure that syamprasad hasnt tampered with the original.the gr8tst flaw of the movie is tht sprasad harps on the original without introducin any other element in the movie.
The movie starts off in calcutta(any art film directors delite),camera runs thru the hoogly river and the tram way(best place for an aged pritviraj to retrospect) and soon v land @ someplace in kannur/thaleserry where anglo indians and portugese reside in plenty.rose(geethu mohandas) is neil(pritvi) sister- a cripple who has lost interest in life and who confines herself to the four walls of her room and plays with her glass animals.pritvi is a typical 1975 angry young man- a frustrated youth who is ambitious ,reads dh lawrence and more than anythn else wants to xtricate himself from the problems in his house.sheela is their mom who somehow wants 2 get geethu 2 get married off to any " good lookin,non alcoholic" anglo indian youth.
then enters freddy ewans(the producer himself) who brings in a ray of hope into geethus life but finally deserts her.she is grief stricken and never returns from tht dilemma and finally dies.in between this pritvi walks out from his house in serch of greener pastures and finally becomes a bearded buji story writer....how pritvi feels for his sister geethu after her death is the crux of the story.

the main prob with akale is the approach to the story.the life of geethu makes us sad but never haunts us after v leave the theatre.the relation and break up of freddy and geethu is also half baked....W
hat makes me really angry is tht the film gets over in barely 1 and quarter hr.he could atlest worked on the relation bw pritvi and geethu instead of shrinkin it to a scene or two.i herd syamaprasad say somewhere tht only films based on novels can help malayalam cinema revive, but i think thers no point in makin films like this.his erlier work "agnisakshi "was commendable only becos of rajat kapurs acting and the dialogues(taken ditto from the novel "agnisakshi")...i think syamaprasad has 2 realize tht film making is somethin much more complex than serial n documentary making....

about the acting,geethu mohandas does a really good job.she emotes really well and never looks strained....sheela is just ok.the young pritvi looks good,acts well but the aged pritvi fails to impress just because of his makeup.his dialogues also seems strained...he really has 2 go a far way to reach the league of mohanlal n mammoty...the producer as freddy ewans deserves some words because he scores well as a sober,romantic person.

on the whole "akale" has its good bits but on the whole syamaprasad and co could hav made a far far better movie....the promos on tv are really good but i think thtz not enough to woo mallu audiences.they still remain "akale" from sree theatre, because on a saturday noon i could find only about 25 people in the theatre,most of them hapless people like me who desperately want to see good malayalam cinema.

This is something I had written around 3 years back when SWADES released. Recently digged it out from my Yahoo account. Enjoi maadi :-)



The story is quite obvious from the promos shown on tv.Shah rukh(Mohan bargava) is a Project manager at NASA( thankfully shot really at NASA hq,not at mumbai filmcity or ramoji filmworld).He returns to India to see his nanny Kaveriamma and then many incidents take place which cause a drastic transition in him.The subsequent developments form the plot of the movie.....

The best thing about Swades is the Indian element in the movie.You can sense and smell India rite from when Mohan lands at IGI airport,New Delhi.We have the ubiquitous dhoti clad villager, the sarpanch,etc - reminiscences of a bygone era of Indian cinema.The film is mostly shot in brown giving us a deep sense of the rugged Indian village...

Ashutosh Gowariker has delved seriously into the problems of any common Indian.His strong obsession with the Indian village life is present in each and every frame of the movie-the landless villager and the child who sells water for a pittance at the railway station being some examples.These images bring a sense of nationalism to any Indian watchin the movie...

Ashutosh filmmaking reminds me of the early 80's school of malayalam cinema spearheaded by Bharatan and Padmarajan.He has a story which he deals starightforwardly without any unnecessary subplots...

The biggest problem with the film is its length.The song "pal pal he bhaari" could have been easily dumped into the editors bin...The obsession of the director with the theme becomes a little bit tiresome during the post interval portions....

The best thing to happen to Swades is Shah rukh khan.He gildes through the role and acts with utmost perfection never going overboard.The scene in which he runs from the turbine to the reservoir(executed in one shot i think) completely defines the dedication of the man..

Songs are good but the background music doesnt reach the league of previous rahman classics like Lagaan or Dilse...The ladylead,Gayathri joshi is good and looks quite composed..The supporting cast is also realy good .

This review wont b complete without a mention about the title card.The names of heavyweights like Ashutosh,A R Rahman,Javed akhtar are written in the same font size and design as that of any other technician and this in a nutshell shows us the meaning of the first three words of the preamble to our constitution-"We,the people"

I would rate Swades an 8 on 10 because it has something to tell us all-esp to ppl like us who wait to catch the next flight to the US

Khoya Khoya Chand

I started worshipping Sudhir Misra after watching Hazaaron Khwashishein Aise (HKA). The movie earned him the respect and adulations of a lot of serious movie buffs and if not for HKA, people like me wouldn’t have desperately waited for over a year to watch Khoya Khoya Chand. Sadly, the end product has turned out to dismal.

Hazaaron Khwashishein Aise (HKA) had the perfect storyline- A love story set against the naxal uprising and political turmoil of the 1970s. Kay Kay Menon, Chitrangada Singh and Shiney Ahuja lived their roles and the impeccable screenplay made it a modern classic for people of my generation.

Khoya Khoya Chand (KKC) had all the ingredients of a modern classic: the resplendent backdrop of the 1960 Hindi film industry, characters etched from the life of Guru Dutt, Waheeda Rehman and Madhubala and wonderful music by Shantanu Moitra .The grave mistake that Sudhir Misra made was casting Soha Ali Khan as the heroine. The incapability of the lead actress is so conspicuous in the movie and Sudhir Misra tries to hide her histrionics through innumerable long shots and clever editing.

Imagine this scene: Soha Ali Khan tells Shiney Ahuja how she was molested at a tender age of fourteen and throughout the scene; she remains as wooden as the old Sherwood tree. Vidya Balan or Chitrangada Singh would have fit the role to a tee and I think that even Rakhi Sawant would have fared better than Soha Ali Khan. The reason for casting Soha Ali would have been her 1960s look (thanks to her mom Sharmila Tagore) and her lineage but she is sadly unable to realize the depth of her role and ends up destroying the movie.

Speaking about Rajat Kapoor, he did a splendid job in Monsoon Wedding and Bheja Fry but he couldn’t do justice to his role of an arrogant superstar in KKC. His body language is out of tune and he doesn’t have the demeanor associated with the stars of the 1960s. Shiney Ahuja does justice to his role and delivers his lines with conviction. In the emotional scenes, he is exemplary but then again Soha Ali Khan fails to perform. Vinay Pathak is brilliant.

The story is a little dragging in the first half but anyone who has followed retro Indian cinema can easily identify with the characters that are trapped in a life of sleaze and deceit. After the interval, Sudhir Misra is totally lost and has no clue how to end the movie. The last half an hour is void of the emotional intensity of the first half and almost like a Karan Johar movie; characters shed their elements of grey and eventually sing and dance with the lead couple.

If HKA was a classic tribute to the student movement of the seventies, KKC is a half baked tribute to the sixties. There is a particular scene in the movie when Shiney Ahuja sits in an almost empty movie hall screening his directorial debut when a film reviewer walks to him and asks how it feels when one’s own movie bombs so miserably in the first week.

Same question to you, Mr. Sudhir Misra.

Sabari
10 Dec 2007

Shootout at Lokhandwala....

10 REASONS Y ONE SHOULDNT WATCH "Shootout @ Lokhandwala"
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#1: Dont get carried away b the big star cast like AB, AB Junior, Sanjay Dutt, Vivek Oberoi, Suniel Shetty...I should have checked the name of the producers, Ekta Kapoor and Sanjay Gupta. Sanjay Gupta is notorious for making B Grade copies of classics like Resorvoir Dogs and Oldboy & Ekta Kapoor needs no intro...

#2: Just imagine Abhishek Bachan coming in an Enfield bike, chasing some Khalisani terrorists and gettin shot within 5 mins. Yup, hezzz dead...Reminded me of the "K" serials in which the hero is killed all on a sudden and his portrait hung on the wall either bcos he asked for a pay hike or Maam Ekta Kapoor was pissed of with him...Ditto for Abhishek Bachan

#3: Another producer of the movie is Suniel Shetty who has not learned the art of acting even after a decade of movies. He has the same "constipated" emotion thruout the movie and has a Hindi accent which would put Katrina Kaif/ Tom Alter to shame...

#4: We also have an Arbaaz Khan(with a mustache that keeps on fluttering in the Bombay breeze) who handles English ,hindi N uRDU one liners with elan...Tuff!!! Beta, its better for you spending time with your wife Maliaka Arora.

#5: Tushar Kapoor(who happens to be Ekta Kapoors bhai) who desperatley tries to be a tough guy but has a voice that sounds like a kitten which meows frantically.....He better concentrate on movies like "Good Boy, Bad boy" which suits him to a Tee

#6: Aarti Chabria(whoz that???) trying to look sensuous as a bar dancer in 3 horrible item numbers ...

#7: Apporva Lakhia who directed mega blockbusters like "Mumbai se aaya mera Dost" and "Ek Ajnabee". His personal relation with the Bachans would get him a good star cast, but direction is another game dude...And learn the art of copying from English movies from "Sanjay Gupta"..You made a mess out of the scene "inspired" from Ed Norton's American History X

#8: Mr. Amitabh Bachan (the lawyer who pleads for the cops in the court) makes an appearance every ten mins in the movie. I just wanted to ask him one thin "Kyun g--d mein guss .......???" Sadly for Bachan, ppl in the multiplex were so irritated with his role that they started walkin out wenever he came on screen

#9: The story( Police attack goondas in a residential building - kill 5 of them - activists come against them n move the court- Bachan Senior pleads their case - Victory- And they lived happily ever after) is so wafer thin that the director has to get fillers in the form of Abhisek Bachan, Amrita Singh and Rakhi Sawant!!!!!

#10" Diya Mirza (as a reporter with a weird name like "Tuttu Kuttu") and Neha Dupia(the quintessential officer's wife who complains that he has no time for family blah blah) who are the female leads...I wonder that Hindi movies cast heroines bcos there is a mandatory clause in the Bollywood Film act to have at least one wife/girlfriend/item number per movie)


TAKE AWAYS FROM THE MOVIE
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1. Dawood Ibrahim always wears a dark cooling glass and sits by the pool side with a host of "firang" beauties in swim suits

2. Mumbai police do not need bullet proofs even if they are attacked by 1000s of bullets and rocket launchers....

3. During an encounter, police block all the roads and checkposts but do not cut the telephone lines so that the goons in the building can call up their family/ girl firends and say "tata, buy buy"... I luv Mumbai police.

4. Ray Ban is the official choice of all policemen and goons...everyone in the movie wears it except Arbaaz Khan

INTERESTING STATISTICS
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1. Number of cigarettes used: Sanjay Dutt(3 packs Marlboro) + Vivek Oberoi( uncountable)
2. Number of bullets wasted: 2000 +
3. Liters of blood: easily more than 10 gallons
4: Time taken to write the screenplay: 2 mins


On the whole, Lokhandwala is an "anmol ratan" which has to be send to the "cans" this year..

My rating = 1/10

Sabari