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Mithran Jawahar’s Kutty (also spelled as Kutti) (2010) is the Tamil remake of Sukumar’s Arya (Telugu, 2004). It stars Dhanush, Shriya Saran, and Sameer Dattani in the main roles.

Kutty turned out to be not as good as the wonderful original version. It is almost a scene-by-scene remake but the original Arya’s charm is missing. Dhanush has a very limited range of facial expressions compared to Allu Arjun and some of the jokes aren’t performed as well as in the original. (The remaking is still done much better than in the Bengali remake of Magadheera.)

Devi Sri Prasad, the music director of Arya, composed the music also for the remake. While some songs are familiar from the original Arya, some other great songs are replaced with new and not-so-great songs. “You Rock My World” has been entirely cut off.

Overall, Kutty might be an OK movie but it’s not possible to not to compare it to the original Arya and it just doesn’t have anything new to offer. I would recommend this only if you like the actors or are a curious Arya fan. Otherwise it would probably be better to watch Arya instead.

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I guess I’ll have to write a short post about the coolest thing that happened last week. I’m so envious of the American and Australian Tollywood fans as they apparently get to see most of new Telugu film in theaters. Here in Finland we get only the biggest Tamil movies (some may even have two or three screenings!), and Telugu movies are much rarer. Often the Telugu movies do not even come with subtitles. (In our Eega show we had an additional video projector for the subtitles and an awesome guy who manually changed the visible line through the whole movie!)

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So, after a short wait (just a couple of days earlier I had heard that there was going to be a screening) I was finally able to see Trivikram’s S/O Satyamurthy (which means “Son of Satyamurthy”) on last Saturday. Furthermore, the film had subtitles and it played in a new movie theater less than a kilometer away from where I live!

The film stars Stylish Star Allu Arjun as the son of Satyamurthy (Prakash Raj). This was my fifteenth Allu Arjun movie and the second time in a theater (after Iddarammayilatho), and he’s still my favourite dancer. His acting isn’t terrible either. (But his hair is, at least in some scenes.) The heroine is played by Samantha. She is good but gets about as much screentime as in Dookudu (which means not much).

S/O Satyamurthy is a quite typical Tollywood film with almost nothing special. Now I’ve seen three movies from the director, Trivikram, and he still hasn’t really impressed me. Devi Sri Prasad’s music is OK but not his best. This is also far from the best Allu Arjun film. It was still worth watching and a rare chance to see Upendra on the big screen. He was perfect for his role and not as crazy as in his older movies that I’ve seen.

The film uses a lot of dialogue and the subtitles aren’t too readable (too long lines, sometimes they are too fast, very infrequent usage of capital letters, and impossible to read on white background) so I was somehow able to follow what happened but I don’t have very clear idea about all the details. For example, Brahmanandam can get the whole audience laughing and even with the subtitles I don’t most of the time understand what was so funny. This movie would need a rewatch with pause button. However, I can’t blame only the movie about my difficulties to follow the story as my old eyeglasses caused me a little headache when I continuously had to read the small subtitles from the back row. I’ll definitely update the glasses before Baahubali.

It remained a mystery to me how the organizers thought they could show a movie of length 2:40 with an intermission in a time slot of 2:15. Next they were playing a presumably tedious Finnish biographical film for a completely different kind of audience. I think I noticed some “high-culture lady” trying to enter the hall sometime during the climax scene, maybe thinking it was already the next movie that got postponed, but she was quickly scared off by furiously shouting Upendra.

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For a more detailed summary of the plot I recommend reading Cinema Chaat which is probably the most useful Tollywood review website on the internet.

I don’t always write new blog posts when something cool happens, so maybe I should periodically summarize the most relevant unblogged things from a longer period of time into a single post. This is a brief summary of the most exciting film related things that have happened to me in March 2015.

  • The blog now has a new domain name and I even managed to write a new about page!
  • Even though I didn’t yet advertise it anywhere, I made a new high score system for the Magadheera-inspired Warrior Game that I made last year. (My record is now 353.) I hope to add support for touchscreen devices some day but right now I have no idea how to do that. Until that, it’s playable only with mouse or touchpad.
  • I started the Super Star Project which might have been my worst decision ever. My DVD shelf is already so full! I’m glad I’m not doing a Brahmanandam Project.
  • Now I’ve finally seen Student No.1 (Telugu, 2001) which completed my list of movies directed by S. S. Rajamouli, and Gangotri (Telugu, 2003) which was my last unseen movie of Allu Arjun as the hero.
  • Dhoom Dhoom 1+2+3
  • I’m quite a newbie to Hindi cinema since I’ve watched mostly South Indian films. While I’ve seen some random Hindi films before, I haven’t seen anything that good that would make me watch more Hindi films instead of Telugu or Tamil films. Still Hindi films are more popular than South Indian films, so maybe I’ve just watched the wrong movies? Now I started to explore Hindi cinema a little more systematically than before. I began by watching Sholay (1975) which was actually quite good. I was surprised how well the songs fitted in the story, as most Indian films that I’ve seen have at least a couple of songs that feel a little random and disconnected from everything else. I also got DVDs of some newer “super hits”, for example Dhoom and Krrish series, as well as some more or less questionable Hindi movies.
  • Bollywood for Beginners Bollywood for Beginners
  • Just when I started to wander around in the big and scary world of Hindi cinema, one of the greatest Indian cinema bloggers, Filmi Girl, published a book called Bollywood for Beginners. I’ve really enjoyed reading it so far.
  • I remember a day last summer when I traveled around my home town. I laughed silently in my head because I saw a man that I thought looked a little like Dhanush. Then I came home and read the unthinkable news that Dhanush was making his new film Shamitabh in Finland! I missed a screening of the movie in February but this year the Season Film Festival screened two Hindi films, Shamitabh and Raja Natwarlal, so I got another chance to see it. Both of the movies were worth watching even though I probably missed a lot of references to other Hindi films in Shamitabh. It’s funny that the first Bollywood song shot in Finland is a song about toilets. I also made a fool of myself by some very bad dancing when a Bollywood dance group made the audience to try some dance moves in the cinema hall before the show, but I forgot it as soon as an enormous image of Rajinikanth appeared on the screen in Eros International’s short video clip and said “Let’s begin!” which already was more than enough value for the ticket price.
  • At least three interesting soundtrack albums for upcoming movies were released recently: M. Ghibran’s Uttama Villain (Kamal Haasan), Devi Sri Prasad’s S/O Satyamurthy (Allu Arjun, UPENDRA), and Ilaiyaraaja’s Rudhramadevi (Anushka, Rana, Allu Arjun). I managed to watch the live stream only from Rudhramadevi’s audio launch event. It was held in two different cities on consecutive days so that they released three songs a day. Anushka made a grand entrance in a royal carriage and some of the dance performances were entertaining (while some others were embarrassing).
  • Aa Okkadu Aa Okkadu
  • I also have to mention that I got the DVD of Aa Okkadu (Telugu, 2009) which has AJAY in hero role! I hope to watch it as soon as it fits into the schedule of one of my friends who also is an Ajay fan.
  • And finally, I now have Yoddha (2014), the Bengali remake of Magadheera, on (unsubtitled) VCD, so now I’ll be able to make a screencap comparison between the two if I won’t have anything better to do.