Sankranti Movie Ratings (Telugu) "Darbar"/ "Sari Leru Neekevvaru"/ "Ala Vaikuntapuram lo"/ "Entha Manchi Vaadavura"

Sankranti films are always special. And I have seldom missed in the last twenty years. Didn't have the time to review in detail, though because reviews hardly matter for Sankranti releases. You will somehow watch with your gang of birds flocked together in urban or rustic settings. But I will give my strong opinions (as strong as ever) if it still counts:

1. "Darbar" (starring Thalaivaa Rajnikanth)...Telugu

Average film with below-par story and straight narration by AR Murgadoss. We expect nothing but mediocrity from Rajni and yet fall for his swagger and mechanical drills but are more harsh in our expectations when it comes to other Tamil Superstars like Kamal Hassan, Suriyaa or Vikram. It seems to get incurable and hopeless with each passing year for Rajni except last year when "Betta" had electrifying Rajni effects.

Rating: 2.5/5

2. "Sarileru Neekevvaru" (starring Superstar Mahesh Babu)...Telugu

A routine story with high dose of entertainment and commensurate performances by actors alongside Superstar. Notable are Prakash Raj, Rajendra Prasad, Rao Ramesh and Vijay Shanti. Rashmika is cute but over-the-top in the movie with her ibby-jibbies. Highlight of the film is Mahesh Babu's out-of-comfort-zone acting and body language that reminds you of films like "Khaleja" and "Dookudu". His characterization is also refreshing as to how a soldier would mend civilians losing their civic sense and sense of civilization. If only he allowed more space for etching out Vijay Shanti's character, the film would have gone to another level. But the soldier's take on society is both pleasant and rapturous thanks to Anil Ravipudi's directing. Despite the film moving on predictable lines post-interval, his clarity and grip on what he wants the audience to take away from the film is complete. Tamannah Bhatia gets the most flattering item song for any item girl in the industry so far. Length could have been shorter by 25 minutes. If there is anything for Mahesh Babu to consolidate his position, he should reduce focus on his good looks and screen time and invest in better and more interesting stories. Yet, 169 minutes is mostly watchable once.

Rating: 3/5

3. "Ala Vaikuntapuramlo" (starring Stylish Star Allu Arjun)...Telugu

Trivikram created an entertaining narrative of 165 minutes about a theme stealth-borrowed from an old Telugu film classic starring NTR and R Nageshwar Rao "Inti Guttu". He re-interpreted the film for the new-age audience well but there are fatal flaws in the film which are not discernible to the audience. Yes, you can ignore baby-swapping as a doable crime 20 years back. But Trivikram who defends middle-class moralities and lectures on their upkeep has created a story which has faultiness on middle-class morality. Firstly, no middle-class father foregoes his baby boy to enter a billionaire family so he may get ahead in life and riches. Secondly, no adopted son disowns his past upbringing to crave for a billionaire's mansion at the very moment the secret unfolds. Thirdly, it is irresponsible on Trivikram's part to paint the picture as rosy as a "Lion King" destiny in picturing Allu Arjun's moment of destiny just like in Walt Disney tale where a baby Simbha learns that his blood is leonine and hence cut out for bigger things like ruling the kingdom. Yes, blood is thicker than water but in reality your upbringing and environment makes all the difference in how you shape your daily moments and destiny. In characterizing the contrasting roles played by Sushant and Allu Arjun, director shows as if none of the inputs or parental guidance provided by either set of parents has any bearing on the way their personalities are shaped. This is ridiculous and self-perpetuating myth which only leads to inequalities in society. The most famous case is the "Nobel Prize Winner Sperm Bank Experiment" where someone thought it is best to impregnate as many women with the sperm bank of Nobel Prize winners so that mankind will get more geniuses like Nobel winners. Trivikram's thesis in the movie is that outrageous and preposterous. I am appalled that along with many other flaws as pointed earlier, it is middle class audiences who are raving about the film as a cult classic. Nonsense. Despite that, the film is carried entirely by Allu Arjun with a never-before performance that stands out in all departments. Thaman's BGM and musical score are also a stand-out; his transformation from copying fast-track western albums to creating new sounds with refreshing mix of traditional and western instrumentation is the story of the last three years as to who is ruling the sound waves in TFI. Stunts are always creative in Trivikram's films but when you are surrounded by so many bashers, how does anybody get so creative to wield a woman's dupatta or a car windshield to polish off the villains beats me! Entertainment quotient is high though comedy content is low. What disappointed me is lack of clarity in Trivikram's taking in the film right from points mentioned above to Murali Sharma's unrepentant characterization. At least a minute out of the 165 minutes could have been taken to round off Murali Sharma's litany of crimes. Watchable once.

Rating: 3/5

4. "Entha Manchi Vaadavuraa" (Starring Kalyan Ram)...Telugu

Vegesna Satish comes with interesting concepts that hold some message for the new generation drifting apart from the world we grew up in the 60s and 70s. This time he comes with a theme of filling the void left by growing generation gap in our society. Like buying bottled water and twiggy-ordered food, he builds a beautiful plot around hero Kalyan Ram and his fiancé Mehreen. Kalyan sees every family has an emotional bond missing with the loss of a dear one be it a grand-father, son, sister, daughter or an aunt and so he sets up a company which "leases" the missing kin until the emotional needs are fulfilled. It is a slow narrative of 144 minutes with only three songs but content is unique and layered with good performances by hero and heroine besides a galaxy of vintage actors like Annapurna, Suhasini, Sarath Babu and Giri Babu. Like "Shatamaanam Bhavati", Satish has a knack of presenting relevant messages to keep our social structure intact in the wake of increasing nuclearisation of families and isolation of the elderly generation with the dawn of new technologies and general apathies. It is tough to expect jazzed up entertainment in this kind of narrative but if you are patient for the first thirty minutes, you will get some moments of epiphany in the film. Music by Gopi Sundar is outstanding. Watchable once with the elders.

Rating: 2.75/5

#Darbar #SarileruNeekevvaru #AlaVaikuntapuramlo #EnthaManchiVaadavuRaa" #SankrantiReleases #SankrantiMovies

Narayanaguda Nostalgia

Narayanaguda. YMCA. Used to be an epic dimension of our daily lives in 80s. It is all set to change from this Sankranti as the last of the metro train stations (part of the green line) will open this festival connecting one of the busiest areas to the bustling Hyderabad Metro to one of the most vibrant areas which had its sparkling days filled with fun and frustrations (of traffic). Narayanaguda metro once opened will go all the way to Mahatma Gandhi Bus Depot in Gowliguda taking the narrowest roads of Sultan Bazar, Badi Chowdi, Chikkadpally all the way to Secunderabad Railway Station. This part of Hyderabad, this dense part of Hyderabad is where we lived for a large part of our lives once my parents decided to settle down in Hyderabad. Where do I start recollecting the symbols of our childhood which have now disappeared or relocated to other ares?
Padmavati Stationery. Still one of the best stationery shops for artists and students with the best of paper and drawing materials but fragmented so much that each brother of the third generation has taken one part of the Stationery business.

The Petrol Pump of Narayanaguda has survived. But opposite Padmavati Stationery there was another famous stationery shop called Anil Stationery. While Padmavati was run by close-knit Vysya community, Anil Stationery had two big shops run by marwaris. Both these shops competed with cut-throat pricing and competitiveness but once the patriarch died, both the groups fell out but Anil Stationery folded up sooner, giving way to a commercial complex that houses some quick service restaurant and another Padmavati branch of the brothers who split.

Next to Anil was the Camlin shop - still the original favorite for school-kids - which had the best of charcoal pencils, postal colors and orange-color geometry boxes proudly branding Camlin. That shop disappeared almost a decade back but while it lasted it was the sole distributor of Camlin products and one of the best-kept secrets of Narayanaguda. They hardly sold retail products and encouraged walk-in customers to buy wares from Padmavati or Anil next-door. But our family had a great relationship and I used to draw and paint in my middle-school using all the special high-quality colors from Camlin including oil pastels and oil colors. The high-point for me was in 1979 when I won the All India Children's Painting Competition conducted by an agency as popular as Shankar's.
Right next to our house, which was atop Padmavati was a famous tailor called YAK's tailors. The fellow was more famous than today's Reid and Taylors or Manyavars or Kochin's. He was designing bespoke suits and exotic dresses for aristocratic men and corporate executives. I don't remember having anything bought for myself because I was still a toddler and by the time I wore pants I was out of that area. My father had a great rapport with YAK's. The highlight of YAK's was in the 80s when Megastar Chiranjeevi burst open in Cinema. After the film "Devanthakudu" was released which had Chiranjeevi tame the mighty god Yama, YAK's owner got an idea to produce a film with Chiranjeevi by launching his daughter as heroine. The film was titled "Dhairyavanthudu". I don't remember much about the film but it bombed at the box-office leaving YAK's Tailors financially crippled. Within a few months, YAK's folded up and disappeared from the Streets of Narayanaguda.

RK Library used to be at the place opposite Deepak bus stand. It was the single-best library of the twin cities and used to be one of the heritage icons of Hyderabad. Everything from "Competition Success Review" to "India Today" to Archie Comics to TinTin to Amar Chitra Katha and PG Wodehouse used to be there. It was the best watering hole for youngsters as well as elders looking for sensational headline copies of "Blitz" and "Illustrated Weekly of India" or "Sunday" magazine. Within a constrained room of 300 sqft, Rashid and his father who ran the shop with passion and commitment to keep the reading habit alive those days. It formed the bedrock of my reading habit, made me win several quizzes including the Tinkle Quiz where I stood Second in 1983 beaten only by Vamsee Juluri, actress Jamuna Ramana Rao's prodigal son. RK Library, when I last saw a few years ago disappeared as Rashid became less interested to keep the circulating library alive, his interests were into skating since then and that became his main bread-winner vocation. What I miss is those scribbles in a long-rule registers Rashid used to maintain which had on each page the name of the book renter, the rent of one rupee to two rupees per day for each magazine and the deposit money of around Rupees Twenty Five to Fifty. Magazines like "Time", "Newsweek", "Life" and "Punch" had higher rents and hiked deposit fees. It used to be quite a sight those days to see all the boys and girls park their BSA-SLR bicycles and pretend to browse the books and periodicals when actually we were all interested to observe each other and flirt if possible. After we moved out of the area and moved away from Narayanaguda, when I started building my own book collection which is sizable by any standard, I always had one eye on Rashid's collection. If there was anybody on earth who had all the books of PG Wodehouse, I knew it has to be Rashid. But Alas! I lost touch at the crucial time he made up his mind to dispose off all his collection to one of the used-book sharks of the city.
As you walk down the path of Deepak theater from YMCA, many other shops which had epic followership have disappeared from the street. Keerti Medical Shop next to the Irani Restaurant was the most famous medical shop of those days run by Gujarati brothers - met with the same fate as Padmavati. Lack of succession planning and split among the brothers. Bapujee Electricals was another famous electrical shop which had seen better days. Swatantra Medicals, one of the best medical shops opposite Deepak. It survives but as a pale shadow of what it used to be. BN Brothers - undoubtedly the best grocer and supermarket of the 70s and 80s - it had the best variety chocolates, talcum powders, dry fruits and other confectionary items. Households flocked to BN Brothers to give any fancy general store item or edible item including the knick knacks for birthday parties. Next to them was a bakery run by Aga Khan muslims - it had the best salt biscuits and crescent chand biscuits and fruit juices those days. Again disappeared. Rao & Co, another famous dealer of electronic items had a loyal customer from our house, my mother. In those days, my father had a salary of six hundred rupees and my mother drew one hundred and fifty rupees from their vocations but Mr Rao always found a financing solution to everything we added in the eighties including USHA sewing machine, Dyanora TV, Philips Radio, Sony Taperecorder and so on. The last time my mother and I visited Mr Rao was in late nineties when cable television already became a rage and my mother bought another color TV for my Baamma on finance.

Back those days, it was possible to breeze through any distance of unto 3 kms in manual-pulled rickshaws. It cost us just fifty paise to go to Chikkadpally to meet my cousins. And most theaters were in the vicinity of Narayanaguda. Shanti theater is still around, Deepak was next-door too, Venkatesa and Srinivasa we used to walk to, Basant theater and Venkataramana and Padmavati theaters we used to walk to. We took rickshaws only to go to RTC X Road theaters like Sangam, Sudarshan, Sandhya and Subhash (now Usha Mayuri). Odeon and Saptagiri came much later. Or even to go to Thyagaraya Gaana Sabha in Chikkadpally. That reminds me of Kishore Theater and the funny story about it when my father started practicing and also did some project consultancy.
Kishore was one of the best theaters those days and had an unsusually elegant facade. You could walk into the door by buying the ticket right next to the door - it gave you a nice cosy feeling. No other theater gave you that ambience except maybe Liberty theater in Himayatnagar. But Kishore was a great theater and it was so close, closer to our home than either Deepak or Shanti theaters. So close that once my parents goaded me and my brother Aditya to go to "Alien" a scary movie about a creature popping out of your stomach in space. The movie scared my younger brother so much that he said I am walking back home while I said I will hang on. He ran out of the theater scared while I selfishly watched the movie - but it was so safe and close those days to watch a movie in Kishore. If I remember, two of the biggest flop films of the 80s had their movies inaugurate the theater. One was a Jitendra starrer "Aasha" and the other was a Telugu film called "Buchibabu" starring ANR and Jayaprada. Both bombed at the box office but Kishore gave us amazing memories including films like "Rahasya Goodachari" starring Krishna and Jayaprada and countless Hollywood films including Bond thrillers. Then all of a sudden the theater was shut and everything from Supermarket to Furniture shops sprung up on the outer facade of the theater.

One of the less-known secrets of Kishore was that he asked my father to prepare a project report on alternatives to a movie-flex. My father gave a detailed project report and said it will cost Rupees Fifty Thousand those days.The owner agreed to pay but after collecting the Report dodged payment for several weeks and months. Eventually, my father realized he rendered charity to the owner. After a gap of over a decade, Kishore became SaiKishore theater and I remember watching a movie called "Alladin" in 90s. That was the last we saw Kishore screen a film. It went the same way as Sangeet. In the entire street of Narayanaguda, only one theater remains and that is Shanti.
As you stroll past Shanti theater, few shops retained their character and personality. A general store run by an aunty, a typewriting institute run by two committed brothers which gave Oriental Typewriting a run for money, an Irani restaurant that was buzzing with people right until midnight, an Excise Police Station and the Narayanaguda Police Station. All of them have disappeared. What remains are few icons like the YMCA, the watch repair shop tucked between two garment outlets, the Andhra Bank and the Sivananda Mithai Bhandar (which still has the best Palak Pakoda in town!),Kalpana Hair Dresses, the Cane Furniture Shops and Canara Bank. Unlike the Sultan Bazar merchants, the Narayanaguda shop-keepers never got pressurized to move out elsewhere. But they were disrupted, or got short-changed by the cross-currents of technology, business cycles, family feuds or change in consumer demand and tastes. It makes for a more detailed examination of street history that changed forever well-before the Metro Station can dismounted many motifs and icons of small business history for good. Narayanaguda was once the epicenter of everything happening in Hyderabad. This post doesn't cover so many other outlets including Balaji Bajrang Mithai Bhandar (still has the best Dhokla, Ajmer Kalakhand, Gulab Jamun in town), PT Reddy Museum (which had a great collection of a Dentist who used to have a TV Set - the only one those days  - so residents of Narayanaguda used to flock to the TV every Sunday when Doordarshan started showing movies every Sunday, Srinivasa Hotel (which had good idly and Sambar) and Vijay Cottage (which had good sweets and tasty curd).

Many of them had seen epic booms but couldn't survive to pass on the baton to the next generation. Like Apollo Ice Creams which had the best Tutty Frutty ice creams and other mouth-watering desserts in Hyderabad (almost like Ajanta Cool Drinks in Vijayawada near Besant Road!).
Narayanaguda had other infamous bits of history too. In the 1980s, the YMCA Chowrastha next to Shanti theater used to see everything from 7th Class to Tenth Class exam question papers leaked on the streets in the wee hours of the day. It was a sight to behold when anxious parents of mediocre students jostled with each other to pay hundreds of rupees to buy subject question paper - and all this happened right in front of the Narayanaguda Police Station. With Metro Station getting hooked to Narayanaguda at Madapati Hanumantha Rao school, a new era dawns in an area which had the best entertainment, education and shopping ecosystem once upon a time in Hyderabad. It is all history now.