Vaathi : Ok Sir, Thank you Sir, Poor execution Sir #Vaathi

 

Vaathi is a movie that makes a commentary on the society and the habits that plague it. Some habits have been there for generations and some have cropped up in recent years. The movie takes a critical look at these and tries to provide some practical solutions. These may seems very obvious and redundant for the people living in cities with access to the internet and working in multi-national companies but it is certainly something that people with less exposure to the outside world will find new.

There are two societal habits that the movie majorly focuses on :

- Untouchability that is practised in many parts of the country on the basis of caste.

- Commercialisation of education - "More money, more education. Less money, less education."

There were some subtle commentaries on how politics and laws are also shaped by commercial aspirations of the business people and politicians and that everything in society is controlled by money.

So, the story talks about this "Vaathi"(teacher) who tries to change the lives of 46 students in a rural village on the Andhra/Tamil Nadu border. 

The story was overall good but there were a lot of things that just seemed off about the technical aspects of the movie that made the experience somewhat underwhelming.

1. Firstly, it seems like a lot of portions were shot in Telugu and dubbed in Tamil. That was very disappointing having sold to the audience as a bilingual. The lip-sync issues especially at the start of the movie were just unacceptable for a movie mounted on a star like Dhanush. 

2. The comedy track in the initial part of the movie involving two other teachers just felt so forced and absolutely unnecessary. They added no value to move the story and felt like we were literally back to the nineties where there used to separate comedy side track in movies. At least those were funny, this was just testing our patience.

3. There were a bunch of logical loop holes that were so obvious - like how does a dark skinned boy suddenly become so fair-skinned once he grows up. If you really wanted to show that twist by hiding the name among two of the 46 students, at least you could have cast actors that matched the skin tones so that it didn't look childish. The other thing that annoyed me was how this boy whose grandfather played a critical role in the success of the 46 students lives, did not know that his grandfather's theatre had now become a big coaching centre. He knew of the "vedio" shop but not about the theatre.

In short, I was disappointed with the execution of the technical team but the story is written with the right intent so ultimately it worked well. However, I wish I had waited for its OTT release instead of going to the theatre.

Pathan : Only for SRK fans

 

There was a time when I used to like watching movies for SRK. After sitting through Pathan yesterday, I can safely say those days are long gone. I went in with really high expectations for some mad fun but was totally disappointed. There were so many things that did not work for me in Pathan unfortunately -

• Very fast paced action which keep moving so fast that my eyes ad brain could not keep up and lost interest very quickly. There should be some time/gap in the stunts so that they can be viewed, savoured and eventually enjoy the scenes.
• Poor VFX which was just distracting. Everyone, including my 63 year old dad could tell that the locations were fake.
• The movie also was perhaps not made for IMAX screen. There were so many scenes where some frames were just so pixalated that it again adversely impacted the whole viewing experience.
• A lack of emotional pull in the movie meant I just couldn't care enough for any of the characters. I couldn't care enough when Rubina betrays Pathan or when Nandini(Dimple kapadia) and her team gets blasted in their lab or when Pathan's teammate is blasted in a car in Dubai. None of that emotion ever translated to me or even my mother who can cry at the drop of a hat for a movie.

Overall, I feel that the bar for action movies has been raised so high by movies like Bahubali, RRR,  Pushpa, Vikram, etc. that it feels like creators of Pathan have just taken the audience for granted with an absolutely dated and below-average movie. Pathan is a movie we would have thoroughly enjoyed perhaps in 2012. It's not for 2023 and certainly not for audience that has been better cinematic universe movies to watch such as Vikram.