Adavari Matalaku Ardhaley Verule
The leading lady if you notice carefully is reading Ayn Rand's Fountainhead. I have tried several times to finish off the book but never succeeded. I give up on it and soon somebody will praise it to the end of the world and I get back on it. Each time raising my tolerance for the boringly lengthy prose but she always beats me. Finally the last time somebody praised the book, I asked "if Howard Roark would ever read such a book". The answer obviously was "no". And thats the end of it.
Unfortunately I cant apply the same logic to this movie and say "Will Venky watch this movie?". Of course he will, probably even 23 times. But I can stick to my original question "Will Howard Roark ever watch this movie?" Hell no!!!!! Not even if you pay him a million bucks, with stock options on the movie. But no that doesn't stop me this time. Its passive entertainment and my tolerance is much higher.
Venky does disappoint yet again. Something he's been doing since Subhash Chandra Bose(easily the Worrusst movie ever) I think probably the campaign makers and the movie makers never met. The campaign posters like the one here set your expectations on a completely different plain from what the movie offers. With a name and colors like that you would expect a light hearted romantic story. It wasn't lighted hearted, no... like not at all. Neither was it romantic. It is closer to a family tragedy than anything else.
The little comedy they had must be amusing to a 10 year old who probably was the target audience. I did like some scenes though. My favourite is where the kids tell the grand old chauvinistic man what Venky was saying about him and then the little girl says "nuvvu psycho vanta....blah blah blah", closely followed by the one in which Venky stays overnight in the office to set right the code and gets the message on his DOS desktop "Code accepted" and then prints out twenty thousand copies of the code to be adapted as the company bible and distributes to all associates . I drew lots of inspiration from this particular scene and I went to my office and stayed overnight and started printing twenty thousand copies of my spreadsheet model. Don't think many people liked it. None of them realized that I stayed overnight and almost everybody cursed me for keeping the printer busy, some of them using choicy four lettered words to describe the dumb ass who gave such a huge print job. After sometime, I couldn't resist and I also joined the party in cursing the dumb ass. Needless to say I never picked up the print outs much less distribute them. Hmm..I think I should join Venky's company, where such hard work can be well appreciated.
The director probably never graduated from high school. He seems to think that the managers treat their subordinates much the same way as the teachers of some 2nd grade private school proud of its SSC rank holders, would treat their students. Or maybe even worser. Venky the jobless ageing man finds a job thanks to a lot of favouritism shown by Keerthi(Trisha), who is completely oblivious of the fact that Venky is the hero of the movie. Poor fellow Venky misunderstands the favouritism and thinks that Trisha already understood the fact that he is the hero and gets slapped around by many people for it over the length of the movie.
Like it so often happens in real life they have an important client project for which Venky and Trisha have to go to Australia. Now if you didn't know, Telugu heroine is a very interesting species. They can run fortune 500 companies single handed, bash up 500 gundas if needed, outsmart the cunningest of mother in laws and as I recently learned, even read Ayn Rand, but none of them can tell the difference between coke with alcohol and without. Yup none of them. And without exception all of them seem to like it with alcohol and end up consuming it like a thirsty camel which found water in a desert after 6 months. What happens next is boringly predictable with the hero playing the responsible caretaker spoiling what could have been a very interesting night.
About this time Kota realizes that the movie is indeed boringly predictable and decides to kill himself after getting slapped by Trisha, to give it a much needed twist in the tale. With some more very logically laid out twists, Venky finds himself in Trisha's house back in her remote village. Our man has a good time with all the kids, one of whom even has a crush on him much like Venly has a crush on Trisha. Unfortunately for the sis, she is not the leading lady and her crush remains a crush while Venky's graduates to true eternal love, a "janma-janmala bandham"*. Our man says he is hungry and 50 people come with 3.46 tons of food to feed him. How I wish it happens to me. The last time I was hungry I had cereal with milk.
The leading pair goes through very complex human emotions during the rest of the movie, which I am too immature to understand and make sense of. I think this movie if anything endorses the age old "manu"istic wisdom of marrying the girls off before entering double digits in age and saving the family "whose females are looked upon as equivalent of goddesses by the villagers", some potential embarrassment. It was a good risk mitigation strategy developed by India's most influential philosopher ever and like all best practices has survived the test of time.
Its a movie lost between the philosophies of Manu and Ayn Rand. The campaign is all Ayn Rand but the movie is only good old Manu. Or maybe the campaign was done by the ladies and they lived upto the title of the movie.
