Dasavtaram - adding a whole new dimension

Kamal Hassan's grand movie 'Dasavtaram' opened in June atlast after a looong delay , the most anticipated movie left most of us confused too about the intent of the filmmaker as it was neither a full fledged comedy or light movie nor was it a very serious movie inspite of issues it endorsed.

" So how did you find the movie ?" ... this was the only common question in all conversation i had with my Tam friends across the country or rather world ( read Infy onsite ).
Many of my friends and lots of guys in Orkut communities etc thrashed the movie as dumb and just an excuse for Kamal to play 10 roles. But some thought otherwise , I reluctantly joined the latter group, which comprised mostly of guys brought up mostly on a diet of Tamil movies, who felt it was ok types and definitely worth a ' one-time' watch.

" People don't see movies for what they are " quipped another buddy of mine when i was talking to him about how Kamal's latest magnum opus was being soundly criticized for being very dumb. I noticed in a couple of blog posts on same topic where lots of people pointed out that this was kind of movie where you take something from what was on screen , your interpreation was what mattered. The movie has something for different classes of audience.

For almost a week most of the conversation with buddies would involve a question on what they thought bout the movie , a lot of people (again most of the guys living/raised in TN) were for the movie and a lot of people were against ( majority of these were from outside TN) . I may be wrong in generalising given the number of people i spoke to is very small ... but I guess its fairly straight forward why the movie was made the way it was ... It was meant to appeal to masses in TN and was made almost like a Rajni movie with the ' Universal hero' being the centre or rather everything in the package.

Whether it has fully succeeded or not Box-Office is not very clear , but so far it doesnt look like the film has bombed or suffered the fate of intelligent and critically acclaimed Kamal movies like Hey Ram , Anbe Sivam etc

My own take would be that a man who made movies like the above mentioned ones would be incapable of making stupid movies and whatever we saw on screen was result of toning down the film to make it palatable for masses. Come to think of it , the film had a lot of things which arent tht common in Tamil/regional cinema or i should say Indian cinema.

Movie had lots of themes like Atheism , religions conflicts , chaos theory , Biological weapons , role of America. It also touched upon the kind of impact man has on earth by highlighting sand quarrying etc. and con

At another level our Regional cinema (and Bollywood also) is very different from Hollywood where intelligent movies (atleast some of them) make it big in Box office , but it must be said that as they are made in Englsih they have a much bigger market than these regional Indian movies. Even in Hindi many good movies categorised as 'off-beat' or multiplex movies do find an audience and do well. But i guess if you spend 100 odd crores to make a movie which covers such a huge number of issued and has an actor who can pull of a stupendous 10 roles then obviously any filmmaker would try to ensure that the movie reaches the maximum possible people.

Make no mistake this is a movie for Kamal as an actor to showcase his ability to pull of such a wide variety of roles and hence its no-wonder that the movie had to 'dumbed down' to cater to masses. Once you get tht firmly entrenched in the mind , the movie pans out differenty and there is a quite a lot of enjoyable fare ! While playing 10 roles Kamal was also trying to reach all segments of audience with a film which essentially was a cocktail of lot of things.

One among the many postives of this movie is that it invovled a lot of issues of global interest which is very rare in regional cinema is our country. We usually see this kind of movies i Hollywood only where the entire world is under threat due to some strange weapon/alien or any such thing and am American steps in to save the day. But now a Tamilian has taken on the mantle to save the world and thts an interesting shift !

Perhaps it might lead to more movies involving global theme of Indians asserting their influence on the world , whether it leads to good cinema or not Im not too sure ... but the prospect sounds exciting. I just dont understand why we are always getting movies with college kids or people running around trees or in foreign locales. Perhaps the restricted environs of our movie themes had prevented some radical stories from turning into movies. But with movies getting slicker ( Billa , Sivaji et all ) and budgets getting better we should see more variety from Tamil cinema . So if this movie clicks then probably we would see lots of stories espousing different issues in a commercial format thus reaching a much wider global audience and with Projects like 'Robot' lined up future does seem bright and interesting !