Dasavatharam - A Movie For The Record

by Nikhil Sundaram    June 25, 2008

I was planning this for quite some time since the news of it's impending release started floating in the air.It was creating some sort of ripples though more so only among the Tamil populace that is spread out in many parts of India and the rest of the world.Dasavatharam - The movie was getting released.

The final release date was 13th June 2008.I decided that I must watch the movie.Not only because there was much hype surrounding it,but also because this would be the first movie I would be watching after my marriage.My wife had for so many days been complaining that we had not caught a movie after our wedding.So it is a deal I thought and booked a ticket for us two for a morning show on 14th June 2008.

We reached the venue well before time and were just watching the crowd trickling in.Soon there was a sizeable Tamil speaking crowd - only natural as this movie starred one of the Superstars of Tamil cinema Kamal Haasan.

But somehow I was skeptical as always about the movie content.I had a feeling that this was going to be another all hype kind of stuff.And then we entered and took our seats in the cinema hall.And from then on it was a two and half hour long 'work of art' unfolding on the screen.

I came out during the interval to get some popcorn.If I were still single I would have liked to skip the next half of the movie and go home.But I was married AND my wife would have nothing of it!She wanted to stay and watch the other half of this 'record - breaking' work of art!Well somehow I sat through it and found solace in the popcorn - it was much crisper than the script.

At the end of it all I felt that this was a movie that was of the Kamal fan(Mr Kamal himself as he seems to revel in his own glory and like to take refuge so much in make-up not for just one but for ten different characters),by the Kamal fan(Mr.K.S.Ravi Kumar the director),for the Kamal fans(there are still so many of them).

I get the feeling that this is a movie made just for the record.To tell the world that here is a great actor who can play ten characters all in one movie.So what if these characters except for one or two don't have anything substantial to contribute to the movie in totality.They looked like just caricatures and seemed to come in suddenly,mouth the lines that were written for them and then go into oblivion.They didn't have any semblance of depth or expressiveness.

And the actor has disappointed me for the umpteenth time now.The last really good movie that I watched him star was Anbe Sivam which showed some of the brilliance that was associated with him.I just hope that some future offering would be able to capture the same for me to lessen the skepticism that has crept in whenever a talk of any of his new movie comes up.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

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