Wednesday, May 10, 2006

The Southern film Industry

After taking care of reservations & family planning, Avuthu-pottu is now back to analyze the southern film industry.

Couple of months ago, when Thespian RAJKUMAR died a natural death, a lot of hue and cry happened in Karnataka. Buses were torched, vandalization of property, riots in all places, stone-pelting in some pockets and what not !! It is as if the entire Karnataka wanted to protest Yamadeva's action of taking the thespian's life.

I more or less felt that the action was purely to show to entire world that there existed a Kannada film industry in India. When Veerapan kidnapped RAJKUMAR, India came to know that there existed a hero in this part of world (at an age of 60+ is still remarkable). Then Kannada industry went a step further and banned new hindi films from being released in Bangalore citing protection of local industry. The local industry still did not do well with this protectionist measure as there is simply a lack of quality in their movies. Now let me explain you how ....

The Malayali film industry like the Bengali one had an excellent lot of script-writers. Now a film is not complete by just writing a script. You need actors/actresses to completely do justice to that script. Actresses were bounty of the range of Meera Jasmine, Asin & Shakeela. These actresses covered a wide gamut of scripts and made movies which even rule the Mallu land today.

But in case of actors, they did not have a new face after Mamooty and MohanLal... The Tamil industry came to the rescue in the form of providing faces like VIJAY, AJITH, SURYA, DHANUSH, VIKRAM & even the good-ol THALAIVAR (RAJNI-KANTH) ... The partnership took the industry by storm and even today Tamil film industry has a better revenue than the Bollywood. Actors like VIKRAM, THALAIVAR are better payed than Amitabh or Shahrukh today.

The Telugu film industry had been languishing all these years. It's only face N.T RAMA RAO made upteen number of movies potraying himself as "LORD KRISHNA" and winning elections. The Telugu film industry saw this booming opportunity in their southern neighbours. Now, ideally all Gults are good at mugging (hard-work). You can see the amount of marks they score in exams purely by mugging formulaes ... 100/100 in the english paper is child's play here ....
They simply started dubbing the Tamil films in Telugu. The people enjoyed good,fresh new faces on screen as well as savoured on the histrionic skills of tamil actors. You can safely the entire industry rode on the success of Tamil films in Tamil Nadu.

Now the Kannada film industry felt that it was left behind. It could not copy the movies made by Tamil film industry as there were lot of ego problems created between the two states by a river dispute. So Kannada film industry started borrowing from Telugu film industry (That lead to their demise as they started borrowing ORIGINAL scripts of the Telugu industry).
Now these scripts and movies are typical. You have a hero who will dance in extremely gaudy clothes (yellow shirt on orange pant types)around trees with a hands on a 42 inch belly swerving around a comparable heroine ... Andavaa!! Even my hands shudder when i have to describe such a scene in detail.

The movies have the same set of story-line with a unrelated rape scenes & obscene dances thrown in between so as to capture the attention of audience for the entire span of 3 hours. And this is how most films came to be characterized. The people of Karnataka initially enjoyed but then became mature as a result of mingling with outsiders pouring in karnataka. To this date, a single Kannada film has not been described a nation-wide hit either due to superior script or due to it's star-cast.
And what even irritates me to the point is the very persons who support the spread of Kannada language by such goosy measures send their sons to work in companies abroad or put them in the best english medium schools across india.

I do not have many kannada friends as of date, but i heard that these people are very passionate about their film industry. I would like to hear their views on this........

6 comments:

Aravindan said...

avuthu pottutaa po!!!!

anyway reg golt films have u heard the joke?

these golts dub a tam or an other movie. n if it runs well, they try remaking it as well....hehehe....

K7 said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
K7 said...

@ amrutaunshu

Flashes of brilliances are there in any film industry .....

But a film industry has to base itself on solid script, solid star cast which every industry cannot afford and hence it must innovate , Look at newer avenues.. Look what bollywood has done to marathi film industry .. but the industryrecovered as actors dived into theatre and made a mark there ...

The general trend is that you simply cannot borrow formulas to run your shows .... be it hindi, tamil, telgu or kannada ...

Vikrant Naik said...

heheheh

Edmont Dante said...

I know as a blogger you will not leave my comments on your blog! Your essential ignorance, I suppose being a tamilian is understood about the other film industries! But to this extend, I am really sorry to know that!
As to fresh faces in malayalam film industry, there is a superstar chain other than the mega stars Mammooty and mohan lal, you can se excellent actors in National award winning actors/heros like Suresh Gopi, Balachandra menon. If you even ignore such talents you cannot ignore the hero's like Jayaram and Indrajeet, who are tamil movie industry's heart throbs these days.
And also actors like Dileep are to be seriously considered, as he is the reining star these days due to his comic timing and excellent acting skills.
Take some time off your tamil junk and watch some good malayalam movies... even the new rajani movie is a remake of our comedy star srinivasan's new movie called "kadaparayumbol" wherein rajani's role was done by Mamooty!

Edmont Dante said...

sorry the actor I was mentioning was Pratviraj (brother of Indrajeet, both sons of late character/superstar actor Sukumaran)