The following blog entry is a word for word quote from one Praveen K in Chennai.
Finally!! I watched THE man on big screen and fortunately, being really strong hearted, I am living to tell you about it. I found it an amazingly entertaining movie and would recommend it to all you guys and gals out there for two main reasons. One, its super fun. Two, its totally economical - you can buy a ten rupees ticket and still manage to sit in A row, for all you need to do is turn back and understand that you are alone. So lets get to the review of Sudhesi, the film of the year 2006.
I watched the film on Saturday with a huge bunch of friends. The theater was jam packed with around 12 people and over 948 seats. The whistles began right away. It was a pleasant shock that the film was produced by Sudhish, an ultimate fan of Captain. I guess he chipped in with this movie before "That Four Letter Word" so that he could possibly invest the huge profits obtained from Sudesi. He told me that he did not sponsor Captain's clothing alone, which is understandable since buying off Aravind Mills is not an easy joke.
The film starts off on a political note : the death of the Chief Minister, which completely puzzled the viewers since Captain hadn shown his face yet. Riots break out everywhere after the new Chief Minister is decided and that is when Captain comes into the picture. Such an awesome intro he gets. A group of rowdies try to kill a poor man during the riot and suddenly the theater erupted as the camera joomed to show us a man wearing a sports soo and running on the road like Gilli Vijay. [Trivia
: This road later came to be known as Bannerghatta Road] When the camera joomed out, there was an amazingly youthful Captain in a red tracksuit. He was drop-dead gorgeous : five people dropped dead. Captain came walking towards the rowdies with camera trying to focus his face from beneath his shoes like in Chandramukhi, but unfortunately his stomach stood in between and they ended up focussing something private. This was followed by terrific fight sequences, at the end of which there was so much destruction that all the shop owners felt that it was more economical to allow the riot to continue next time.
Sudhesi is basically a do-gooder. He helps people round the clock. Velai vetti illa-nu vidhyasama solli irukkar director. He solves a mystery involving the death of a young boy and gives a half an hour lecture in the court which impresses the judge so much that he appoints him as a Public Prosecutor in his court. However, Sudhesi's extraordinary language skills played spoilsport since a Bublic Brasecootar made him appear like a Naidu Hall salesman he loses his job. He has statistics about each and every thing in the universe in his finger tips and often lectures people with such intensity that it would make even Ramanujam hate numbers. The only other thing possible was mentioning his vital statistics, which was left out since it hasn't been measured accurately due to inadequate technology.
As always, Captain proves that he is highly romantic. He is constantly nagged by his mora ponnu who, for some reason, finds him to be the hottest person on earth and troubles him to marry her. I did not find any compelling reason why a girl would love Captain, considering the death rate of his heroines, unless ofcourse she'd been paid all the extra money like Isha Kopikar in Narasimha. So, the director had to be really smart and he was. All scenes were shot in the evening coz the heroine had maalai kannu noi.
Karunas has been included for comedy, but he pales in comparison to our MAN. I pity Sudish who ended up spending extra money for a redundant character. There is a scene in which Karunas and Sudhesi travel by bus. They were both supposed to travel on the footboard. However simple equations of physics showed that if that scene was shot, the bus would topple for obvious reasons. So Sudhesi alone got a nice place inside the bus, as a result of which it was completely crowded and Karunas had to hang on for dear life hoping that Captain doesn't sneeze or cough. In certain scenes, the direction was completely flawed - Captain says to Karunas, "Dei nee powder poosina panni maadhiri irukka" - it is always better to rehearse the scenes so that you don't end up saying the other person's dialogues.
Captain's costume in the movie were revolutionary. His wardrobe was provided by M.A. Jacob, the carpet people. The colourful flowers on his shirts are only found in two other places - bedspreads and ooty flower show. It is said Sudhish refused to buy faded jeans and so Captain bought normal 52inch jeans, forced himself into it and made faded designs with chalkpiece. Such wonderful costumes made Sudhesi appear so youthful that it gave us a glimpse of how Captain might have looked during his adolescent ages. He was equally scary then. He infact rides an Enticer with such ease that it looked like he was riding a tricycle. Such was his class. In one scene, the heroine jumps into the bathroom where she thinks Sudhesi is taking bath and with her looks matching that of her man's, the guy inside comes out shouting "Ayyoo Peyiiiii". Thank god Captain was not inside the bathroom, or else the heroine would have come out running. There is a duet song in the movie which has extremely relevant lyrics about Pongal festival. Captain has danced very lightly for this song and thus the heroine was reported to be safe.
Kadhai-la ippo dhaan taRning point. The Chief Minister and his right hand are totally greedy and selfish in this awesomely innovative script. They do lotsa kedi thanams including killing the ex-CM, which the right hand secretly tapes using a micro camera. This video falls on the hands of Sudhesi. After having watched Ramana, the right hand knew that this was highly dangerous since Captain was the only person capable of dragging and dropping new pieces of information into videos using Windows Media Player. The right hand comes looking for the CD and holds Sudhesi's mom a hostage with a knife and a gun simultaneously. But he had already seen Narasimha, he knew that Sudhesi would dodge all the bullets and decided to use a time bomb instead. He locks Sudhesi and his mom inside a room and fixes a time bomb. The bomb explodes. Mom dies. But amidst the flames thalaivar comes out flying. Sudhesi escapes. The bomb had actually thrown Sudhesi out of the house into a safe area. Friendly bomb.
In the second half of the movie, Sudhesi decides to use the CD and blackmail the CM to do good stuff for the people. The CM decides to kill Sudhesi and there is a super fight in a shopping complex with Captain wearing the kalyana band master dress seen in the posters. He freezes after every punch he delivers and the camera jooms to show his eyes in close-up which had as much sex appeal as a garbage truck. Even his coolers refused to stay in its place and flew away, but Captain pulls it back with a romantic stare and a there-is-nothing-like-early-morning-shitting smile.
Sitting on the stairs of a half-constructed building, Sudhesi proposes reforms in the medical field to the CM. This caused unnecessary expenditure for Sudhish, who had to pay compensation for damaging the foundation of the building. So next time onwards they decided to use fax mizeens. Sudhesi, who failed four times in fourth standard, now proposes educational reforms that take the entire state by storm. All this increase the popularity for the CM and he wins the elections easily, while it was the mastermind of Captain in the background!
So the CM calls Sudhesi to a place that is supposedly a factory but has a double cot in the manufacturing section. What sort of a factory would have a bed in such a place? Sudhesi senses that there is something fundamentally wrong and just as he expected the bad guys appear out of the blues. Plenty of wired stunts in this scene with Captain being wired with Amman TRY Murukku Kambis and lifted by cranes. One senseless guy tried hitting Captain with a steel rod, which just bends around Captain's wrist like a watch. What a man. Suddenly one bad guy says, "Dei ivan romba nallavan da, evalo adichaalum chamatha freeze panni nikkaraan" and the fight stops. The CM apologises to Sudhesi and urges him to become the CM. That triggered a half hour Sudhesi sbeech which makes you desperate to take a dip in the evergreen cooum and close your ears with cork. After the speech, the CM commits suicide for making the deadly mistake of holding "talks" with Captain.
Captain is back in form after a really dry period last year. Punch dialogues like, "MGR-kum enakkum orey oru vidhyasam dhaan. Avar kai-aala adipparu, naan kaal-aala adippaen" made us have a hearty laugh in the theater after we made all crooked sentences out of it! (Purinjavanga sirichukkonga pa, inga me no tell that, naan good boy!) The heroine disappears after the first half since Sudheshi did not want to distracted by silly matters. Everybody wondered what happened to her, but I am sure she must have cancelled her dates on the pretext of going on a sight seeing to Dumil Kuppam, after the duet song with Captain.
I thank Sudhish from the bottom of my heart for giving us such a wonderful film, and hereby confer upon him the title, "Sudheeshi".
