I heard (read) a lot of good things about Sekar Kammula’s latest flick “Happy Days”, but viewing the movie is a better experience than what all of them described. I watched the movie last weekend with my family and visiting Sunitha and her kids. Before watching the movie, I thought that the movie may appeal to young, college going students. But after watching the movie, I realized I was wrong. I enjoyed the movie as much as my kids (13 and 8 ) and my niece (7).

In retrospect, I could see many reasons for the success of the movie. And many ways in which the film stands out when compared to the contemporary Telugu movies.

• Cast: This movie is a good example that you can make a successful movie if you have a good script and good actors. There is no need for big names in the cast to pull the movie.
• Relevance: The movie touches all the relevant feelings around (watch out that word “around”) the student community in the society today. Right from freshers, ragging, ambitions, goals, parents, hard work, disabilities, poverty, helping juniors, job interviews, what not. Most of them are subtly woven into the story and all of them look very natural and believable.
• Script: None of the characters get a big entrance and the script takes its own time to introduce all the lead players. But the viewers are fully engaged in that process, because the script focuses on the salient characteristics of the individuals rather than situations and comedy alone. I got a similar feeling when I watched Chak De India.
• Positiveness: The movie is full of positive energy and positive characters. Even the mother of the disabled student explores the positives and tries to establish a win-win scenario rather than portraying her son as a person that requires lot of support. Closer to the end of the movie, even the rudest of the senior batch exposes his positive outlook. The romance between the characters also takes a simple and ethical route than displaying stupidity all the way.
• Simplicity: The movie is made up of simple things that work (like Unix operating system 🙂 ). Things like characters, locations, songs, costumes, scenes and so on. No expensive foreign locations, no grandeur sets, no heavy scenes etc. Simple.

Given all these right ingredients, there are lot of people who can relate their present, past or future with scenes in the movie, hence they feel like being part of the story. That is the critical factor behind the success of the movie.

BTW, I bought the audio album of the movie right after watching the movie. All the four kids at home can now sing to the tunes of these songs. Because they play these repeatedly in the car and on the computer.

Watched the movie “Chak De India” with Latha and kids at Prasads IMAX on Saturday evening. (This gives you an idea of the movies backlog our family has.) I am really impressed with the movie. The good story is packed with powerful performances by all the newcomers and pros alike. Even SRK, who over dramatizes some scenes, gave a splendid and subtle performance in this movie. The characters are well etched, well cast and well delivered on a grandeur backdrop. Even though the script moves forward with unrealistic pace (especially on the way to the finals) at a few places, the movie leaves you with a great feeling.

Bought the album of Yamadonga, the Jr. NTR starer movie. This is the first (I guess) ever album released by Vel Records, a company owned by Music Director M. M. Keeravani. The album is typical Keeravani/S.S.Rajamouli combination album, trying to cover several types of songs with ample melody.

First let me talk about the packaging of the album. They gave a free “flip animation” booklet containing NTR on one side and Mohanbabu (as Yama) on the other side. That makes the packaging bulky. The quality of the booklet material is good, but the print quality and alignment (of multiple pages to give the animation feeling) is not that great. My kids flipped it once and threw it to the dash board of the car, where it may be charred in the heat for eternity. There are also a couple of stickers (again, NTR and Mohanbabu) and I am not sure if I ever take them out of the CD jacket again. Well, the Keeravani and Rajamouli combo doesn’t need tricks like these to sell their albums. They have a great track record already.

Here is my take on the songs:

• Rubberu Gaajulu: A fast beat duet with voices of Daler Mehandi and Pranavi. Typical Daler kind of song with decent music.
• Nunugu Meesalodu: Voices of Keeravani and Sunitha. The most melodious song of the album. I love this duet for its simple music and enchanting voices. If you are a melody lover, this will leave a mark on you.
• Nachore Nachore: Deepu and Ganga gave voices to this duet that is fast paced. Music reminds me of typical western-cowboy tunes.
• Nuvu Muttukunte: With Renjith and Pranavi’s voices, this is a bearable song, but not definitely among the best in the album.
• Young Yama: This is the song with biggest potential to make it to the top of charts, especially among the mass audience. Typical double meaning song you can expect from this music director and director combo, who deliver one song of this sort in every one of their movies (like Nuvu wistleste Andhra soda buddi in Simhadri.) Expect multiple female actors dancing for this song in the movie. The lyrics may confuse you with ambiguous voice rendering between politically correct words and their not-so-correct clones. You know what I mean. Lot of voices to the credit: Keeravani, Sankar Mahadevan, Mano and Pranavi.

All the above songs are penned by Anantha Sreeram.

Now let us visit the pleasant surprise of the album:

• Olammi Tikkareginda: Remember that song from classic Yamagola? This song starts with the same lyrics and tune. Instead of entirely depending on the same lyrics and tune, Keeravani blended the tune with his own variation during charanalu. I love this. The song drifts from the original and his own tune back and forth, creating a magic all over you, if you ever liked the original. I have a feeling that this song is a cross between Olammi Tikkareginda from Yamagola and Cheema song from Simhadri. The lyrics are by Jonnavittula. Voices are Mamatha Mohandas (great voice here) and, hold your breath, Jr. NTR. He did a splendid job on this song. His voice is smooth. BTW, the jacket of the album is printed with credits to Music Director Chakravarthi for the original tune. Good job by Keeravani for showing the due respect to his predecessor.

There are three more songlets/poems/whatever-you-call in the album, all penned by Jonnavittula. I think they may make more sense in the movie than for a pure audio experience.

Overall, this is a good album to buy and listen to.

Latha and me watched the movie Lakshyam during the weekend. It is a good pass time movie. The characters are well etched and there is no over-acted melodrama in the movie. Except for the feeling that there are lot of action sequences in the second half, the movie flows smoothly. After watching the movie, the audio album is more enjoyable.

I bought the  audio album of the movie Sankar Dada Zindabad. Listened to 3 tracks so far and they are typical Sankar dada type, likely to be hit with Chiranjeevi fans. The biggest let down is the price of the CD, which is Rs. 66 for a combo CD pack (the second cd is so useless that you throw it right away into trash can.) All these big actors talk a lot about preventing piracy, but don’t control the pricing of their own products. With a typical price of Rs. 40 for a Telugu audio CD, the pricing of this album is mere exploiting. That may encourage more people to pirate the content. Hope these people realize that point.

I really loved the last line 🙂 from this RGV interview.

Watching Shahrukh during the Filmfare awards show last night was both a pleasure and surprise. Good to see him saying that Amithabh is the undoubted Baadshah of Bollywood and Hrithik is the one who has the potential to be the best. He surprised me (and many I guess) to acknowledge the potential of two of his biggest competers. He handled the show very well.