He who comes from hell is not afraid of hot ashes.
This is the tagline of the movie ‘Anniyan.’ Now why, you might ask is this bloke watching a Tamil movie? Not as if I know the language. But anyway, a bunch of Tam people got the movie and insisted that I sit down with them and see it. Now there are many better was of spending a lazy Sunday afty, in fact, going to lab and working is a good one.. but I decided to give it a shot.
So here goes,: Anniyan means ‘foreigner’… and this story is about a regular Tam Brahm bloke. (Tam Brahms, or Tamil Brahmins are one of the most orthodox.. [read pain in the arse] group of people on this planet. They do have some redeeming points like being very cultured and all that.. but they have a very well deserved reputation for being properly disliked all around.) Yes, so this bloke likes to follow rules and is really unhappy that people around him do not. (This is India, people). And he slowly transforms into this avenging angel who extracts hideous vengeance for transgressions of a seemingly trivial nature. Then there is this chick who walks around draped in a sari most of the time. Of course, he louvvs her. And she couldn’t care less. So when he gets the proverbial boot, he transforms again.. and becomes this hip bloke who romances chicks all around. Now mind this,, it doesn’t take much to be hip in Chennai, the heart of Tamland, but he does go and become a model or something to that effect.
It is important at this juncture to throw things like logic and sense out of the window, surviving most Indian movies is not possible otherwise. Right, so back to the movie.. this new avatar of our protagonist starts wooing the chick, with perfectly superb results… I mean standard fillum ishtyle, they dress up in shiny horrid jeans and manage to look retarded(the guy) and in some really skimpy clothes and look HOT (the babe). And they run around some high rise office/mall/INOX complex (again, the days of the hero and the heroine running around mere trees at public gardens are long gone, these days the more posh the locale, such as the interior of a five star hotel, and the more cheesy and ridiculous their antics, the more the song becomes popular). Singing some weird song which apparently involves the bloke comparing his babe to, in sequence: cappuccino, nokia phones and someone called Sophia. Yes, the meaning of the song was lost on me. Speaking of which there was yet another song which was vaguely erotic and had the hero promising to do massage the chick with olive oil. Now this left me totally bemused. Ok, to be honest, I was just reading the subtitles, and that was what came up.. but there is no olive oil in South India! This is a logical paradox. Conclusion, there is sense, there is nonsense, and then there is the stuff which happens inside the heads of Tamil lyricists.
The pick up line. This deserves its own entry. The gurle standing at the bus stop, the guy comes up on his motorcycle (again, a mainstay of Indian movies) and says, ‘hey Nandi, lets go somewhere and do the yo-yo!’ Yes, that line made me fall off the sofa laughing.
Anyway, so this guy has three personalities at last count.. the regular bloke, the avenger and the Don Juan. Yes! Multiple Personality Disorder!! Come to think of it, it reminds me a lot of a really awful Sidney Sheldon novel I once had the misfortune to read. But let me not spoil it further.. there are precious few Indian mainstream movies made which have a semblance of a plot. This is one of them. For all the inherent corny-ness, its still quite watchable. And the chick is hot. http://www.anniyan.com/
This is the tagline of the movie ‘Anniyan.’ Now why, you might ask is this bloke watching a Tamil movie? Not as if I know the language. But anyway, a bunch of Tam people got the movie and insisted that I sit down with them and see it. Now there are many better was of spending a lazy Sunday afty, in fact, going to lab and working is a good one.. but I decided to give it a shot.
So here goes,: Anniyan means ‘foreigner’… and this story is about a regular Tam Brahm bloke. (Tam Brahms, or Tamil Brahmins are one of the most orthodox.. [read pain in the arse] group of people on this planet. They do have some redeeming points like being very cultured and all that.. but they have a very well deserved reputation for being properly disliked all around.) Yes, so this bloke likes to follow rules and is really unhappy that people around him do not. (This is India, people). And he slowly transforms into this avenging angel who extracts hideous vengeance for transgressions of a seemingly trivial nature. Then there is this chick who walks around draped in a sari most of the time. Of course, he louvvs her. And she couldn’t care less. So when he gets the proverbial boot, he transforms again.. and becomes this hip bloke who romances chicks all around. Now mind this,, it doesn’t take much to be hip in Chennai, the heart of Tamland, but he does go and become a model or something to that effect.
It is important at this juncture to throw things like logic and sense out of the window, surviving most Indian movies is not possible otherwise. Right, so back to the movie.. this new avatar of our protagonist starts wooing the chick, with perfectly superb results… I mean standard fillum ishtyle, they dress up in shiny horrid jeans and manage to look retarded(the guy) and in some really skimpy clothes and look HOT (the babe). And they run around some high rise office/mall/INOX complex (again, the days of the hero and the heroine running around mere trees at public gardens are long gone, these days the more posh the locale, such as the interior of a five star hotel, and the more cheesy and ridiculous their antics, the more the song becomes popular). Singing some weird song which apparently involves the bloke comparing his babe to, in sequence: cappuccino, nokia phones and someone called Sophia. Yes, the meaning of the song was lost on me. Speaking of which there was yet another song which was vaguely erotic and had the hero promising to do massage the chick with olive oil. Now this left me totally bemused. Ok, to be honest, I was just reading the subtitles, and that was what came up.. but there is no olive oil in South India! This is a logical paradox. Conclusion, there is sense, there is nonsense, and then there is the stuff which happens inside the heads of Tamil lyricists.
The pick up line. This deserves its own entry. The gurle standing at the bus stop, the guy comes up on his motorcycle (again, a mainstay of Indian movies) and says, ‘hey Nandi, lets go somewhere and do the yo-yo!’ Yes, that line made me fall off the sofa laughing.
Anyway, so this guy has three personalities at last count.. the regular bloke, the avenger and the Don Juan. Yes! Multiple Personality Disorder!! Come to think of it, it reminds me a lot of a really awful Sidney Sheldon novel I once had the misfortune to read. But let me not spoil it further.. there are precious few Indian mainstream movies made which have a semblance of a plot. This is one of them. For all the inherent corny-ness, its still quite watchable. And the chick is hot. http://www.anniyan.com/
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