Kochadaiyaan Stills And Story Line

Superstar Rajinikanth and Deepika Padukone starrer Kochadaiyaan is one of the awaited movies in this 2012. Rajini is playing the role of a king, who is devotee of Lord Shiva in this 3D movie Kochadaiyaan.

Thalaivar will be showcasing dual roles in Kochadaiyaan that was canned using Picture Capture Technology. Story of Kochadaiyaan revolves around 3 kings played by Jackie Shroff and Nasser alongside senior Rajinikanth, who fight for a cause and the viral continues for generations.

However Junior Rajini cross-sword's Aadhi, son of Jackie Shroff in the present generation. What makes the kings declare war among them and who will win the battle marks the crux of Kochadaiyaan.

Soundarya Ashwin, the younger daughter of Rajinikanth is debuting as director with Kochadaiyaan that has music notes being composed by AR Rahman, cinematography by Rajiv Menon, story and supervision by director KS Ravikumar.

Kochadaiyaan is undergoing post production works and the movie is expected to hit the screens by September, but it may be delayed post Diwali, say trustable sources.

Shankars Next Movie I

Shankar's fresh project 'I', with Vikram in the lead, is expected to hit the floors on Sunday (July 15). The film will get a kick start at a studio in Chennai.

It is said the first look of the movie will also be unveiled on Sunday. 'I', a romantic thriller, brings together Shankar, Vikram and producer Aascar V Ravichandran after the mega hit 'Anniyan'.

"The script work is over and writers Suba have done a great job. Shankar is happy with the writer duo since he was on the lookout for a right replacement after the demise of Sujatha," say sources.

Amy Jackson is the leading lady of I, which has music by A R Rahman. Amy plays an international model in this film. International technicians have been roped in for the movie, which has Suresh Gopi, Ramkumar and others in pivotal roles.

Mugamoodi Stiils

Ilayathalapathy Vijay unveiled the audio disc of Jiiva's 'Mugamoodi' at Sathyam Cinemas on July 20. The disc was received by Kannada top star Puneet Rajkumar.

Starring Jiiva, Narein and Pooja Hegde, 'Mugamoodi' by UTV Motion Pictures is helmed by Mysskin and is about the superhero within oneself. Although the film boasts off several high voltage action scenes and a power packed climax, Mysskin has made it clear that Mugamoodi will not be like a Batman, Spiderman or any such superhero films but is tailor-made to suit Indian multiplex and mass audience.

Amala Paul Wallpapers

Anushka Sharma Wallpapers

THE DARK KNIGHT RISES REVIEW

Matt Singer: After years of waiting and months of buildup, ‘The Dark Knight Rises‘ finally rises into theaters this Friday while a curtain falls on a superb superhero franchise. The film is set eight years after the events of ‘The Dark Knight,’ and Batman (Christian Bale) is nowhere to be found. Bruce Wayne is a recluse. A mysterious mercenary with a weird breathing apparatus named Bane (Tom Hardy) arrives in Gotham City ready to stir up trouble.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves Jordan: should we do the entire review in our Muffled Bane voice? How many a’s are in “MWRAAAAA!”?

Jordan Hoffman: It’s amazing. Nolan took a lot of heat after they premiered the opening reel in front of ‘Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol’ when no one could understand Bane. Now we can understand him — he just sounds ridiculous.

Matt: It’s even worse than that — he sounds ridiculous and he’s still unintelligible. That aside, let’s get this out there right off the bat (no pun intended, I swear): ‘The Dark Knight Rises’ is an impressive, ambitious blockbuster. It is really thrilling. It looks amazing. But it’s not perfect. And one of the big problems is Bane’s voice. He sounds like a really pompous magician talking into the wrong end of a megaphone.

Jordan: This bit of silliness only added to the spectacle for me. I sincerely enjoyed ‘The Dark Knight Rises.’ I intend to see it again real soon and for a 170-minute movie, that means something. Still, anyone who takes it seriously is letting their Bat-love blind them. The script’s a choppy mess, motivations are all over the road, and I still don’t really know what some of the characters’ endgames were. Still, there is that feeling of scenes rolling perfectly into one another, and the tremendous montage, wonderfully shot by Wally Pfister and scored by Hans Zimmer. It is inimitable and it is front and center here.

Matt: The score is amazing — it lends everything this sense of grandeur and hugeness that perfectly compliments the 70mm IMAX photography. And I actually think Jonathan and Christopher Nolan’s screenplay is extremely well-written, at least from a dialogue standpoint. From a plot standpoint? Not so much, especially in a first act that tries to cram a ton of exposition into a few overloaded scenes. It almost feels like the movie started minutes before the projector did: who is Marion Cotillard exactly? What’s this experimental generator she’s talking about? Who’s this guy who wants to take over Wayne Enterprises? Most of this stuff is pretty tough to parse.

Jordan: Usually I don’t mind when a script is a step ahead of its audience, especially if there’s a reveal involved. Here it merely felt like being tossed in the deep end. The first good scene didn’t come until Catwoman (Anne Hathaway) attempts to sell something she’s stolen from Bruce Wayne in the movie’s opening moments. Which leads me to this surprise: Anne Hathaway is the best thing in movie.

Matt: I wasn’t that surprised — Hathaway is pretty reliable — but I agree: she is fantastic. She’s Catwoman, but she’s not any of the Catwomen we’ve seen before. One of the things that Nolan has shown throughout this series is a knack for reformulating these classic characters in ways that feel simultaneously fresh and faithful to their comic book core. And that’s exactly how he treats Catwoman, who gets cleverly recast as a cat burglar with an anarchic chip on her shoulder.

Nolan also does an impressive job weaving Catwoman’s story into this narrative that is mostly about a battle between Batman and Bane. A lot of super-hero sequels make the mistake of piling on the villains in an attempt to outdo previous installments. Even with everything else going on, Catwoman and the worldview she represents feel absolutely essential to the film.

Jordan: I concur. The relationship between Catwoman/Selena Kyle and Batman/Bruce Wayne is by far the best, sexually-tinged relationship in this series. Third time’s a charm, I suppose.

I want to say a few more nice things before I air my grievances. With no spoilers, ‘The Dark Knight Rises’ manages to slip in serious fan service in a way that does not feel overly egregious. I mean, there are moments directly from Batman comic books, plus many more charged with the same energy as a well-crafted comic panel. Specific examples would be spoilery, but I’m talking about the way characters are framed in certain environments. The film exudes a love of comic books that, I think, some people argue Nolan does not have.

Matt: That’s a good point; some folks who’ve enjoyed the Nolan Batman movies but don’t like comic books often say that he’s removed the “comic book-ness” from his comic book movies. And while ‘The Dark Knight Rises’ has plenty of real world resonance — Bane and his gang are like a twisted version of the Occupy Wall Street movement — it also has more than its share of flat-out comic book moments. It strikes a really nice balance. And I have to admit, even as a lifelong reader of comics, even as a guy who knows these characters like the back of his longbox, ‘The Dark Knight Rises’ managed to surprise me on several occasions. I didn’t see a few plot points coming. The ending had me squirming in my seat with suspense. Nolan plays the audience like a fiddle. Or a Bat-fiddle, I guess.

Jordan: We start to get on shaky ground, though, with the “real world resonance.” This movie yearns to be taken seriously as a treatise on varying systems of government. I give it points for trying to infuse a summer blockbuster with that level of discourse. I just don’t think it succeeds. It’s too silly. I want to engage the film’s suppositions, but I’m too busy giggling at the growls, or oooing at the tech or, shall we say, “responding” to Hathaway’s red lipstick and black catsuit. I still enjoyed almost every moment of this film, but I don’t think I enjoyed it in the intellectual manner in which Nolan and company hoped.

Matt: It’s tough to take the film seriously. If you do take it seriously, you have to consider the possibility that it is an intensely right-wing treatise on how the Occupy movement is a group of anarchists looking to destroy the world. I mean, that’s what they are in this movie, right? The cops are the good guys and the protestors, represented by Bane and his thugs, are the bomb-wielding psychos who want to redistribute the wealth from the haves to the have-nots by killing millions of people. And, of course, the leader of the heroes, Batman, is a billionaire playboy. One could argue that Bruce Wayne’s arc over the course of the film mitigates that reading somewhat, but taken at face value, ‘The Dark Knight Rises’ paints a very strange portrait of modern America. That’s why I think it’s best to take it as an extrapolation from reality, rather than a thinly-veiled recreation of it. Nolan uses the imagery and iconography of the Occupy stuff to lend a bit of heft and resonance to an otherwise ridiculous story about a dude in a rubber suit fighting a guy in a ghoul mask.

Jordan: Concerning the potential right wing undercurrent, I’m gonna say “Yes, but no.” Batman, Commissioner Gordon, and the rest of our gang are, indeed, risking life and limb to preserve the financial status quo. However, this quickly becomes a function of just trying to prevent Bane from achieving his master plan for Gotham City’s destruction. Despite being a typical bleeding heart liberal writer, this didn’t offend me, mostly because I had already checked out due to other script issues.

Matt: The “real world” stuff does also speak to the level of thoughtfulness Nolan puts into his films. I love the repeated use of subterranean imagery to give ‘Dark Knight Rises’ its core, titular motif: literally, the Dark Knight rises, over and over again. So much of the movie takes place underground: in the Batcave, in Bane’s lair, in the bunker that houses Wayne Enterprises’ magical generator doohickey that is the movie’s biggest MacGuffin. Stuff constantly rises out of the floor (see the way Batman’s costume emerges from the pool in the middle of the Batcave or Bane’s metaphor-laden origin story). Even the prison where a major character spends a good deal of the second act echoes the well Bruce Wayne fell into as a child in ‘Batman Begins.’ This film is made with a degree of intelligence and care that’s all-too-rare in major motion pictures.

Jordan: It trades in big imagery very well. They got the whole city goes into chaos thing down in a few economic shots.

Matt: Let’s talk more about the characters. Hardy is a fantastic actor, and he’s certainly an imposing physical presence as Bane but, as I think we both agree, he’s done no favors by the fact that he has to wear that ridiculous headgear in every scene. Not only does it take half his performance out of view, it ruins all his on-set dialogue, necessitating the use of extensive and extensively distracting post-production dialogue replacement.

Just about everyone else, though, is great. Bale brings the same level of haunted intensity he’s brought to the two previous movies, and Michael Caine kills a whole bunch of big moments as his tortured manservant Alfred. Hathaway, as we’ve already established, is a knockout, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt is a surprisingly convincing badass as John Blake, a Gotham City cop who idolizes Batman despite the fact that the Caped Crusader has been missing in action for almost a decade. Did you like Gordon-Levitt in the movie, Jordan? And were the theories that have swirled around his character’s ultimate fate distracting?

Jordan: JGL is as good here as he’s been in anything he’s ever done. He’s one of the finest true young movie stars we’ve got right now. I part company with you on Michael Caine, though. Was his Alfred always that cockney? I felt like he went off the rails. I giggled a few times and I think you did, too.

Matt: Maybe. Let’s wrap this up with a discussion of the IMAX. It’s used here to even more extensive effect than in ‘The Dark Knight.’ In that movie, select sequences were in IMAX; in this one, I’d guess maybe a full third of the movie is in IMAX. The aspect ratio keeps popping back and forth between full screen and widescreen, sometimes even within individual scenes. Did you like the IMAX or did the constant back and forth distract you? Would you recommend people seek out the IMAX version of the film?

Jordan: Well, it’s like complaining that your delicious ice cream sundae is too small. The IMAX looks fantastic and these guys know where to stick the camera. However, unlike previous films (or in, say, ‘Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol’) I absolutely noticed the switch back to “regular” stock. Perhaps that’s because so much of it is in the large format, or perhaps because there are those sequences that crosscut between the two — kind of a dumb move if you ask me. Personally, the brief flashes of disappointment are worth it for the breathtaking moments.

Matt, I think it’s time. Let’s sum up. Did you love this movie or merely like it?

Matt: I loved parts of it. I love the spectacle — and while I agree the aspect ratio switches become distracting, I’d definitely recommend IMAX for the full immersion into Nolan’s epic imagery. Even more importantly, I loved the way they wrapped up this version of the Batman franchise. A few moments gave me literal chills. On the other hand, there are parts that don’t work. The storytelling, especially during the opening scenes, is a mess. Most of the plot is either over- or under-explained. The overtures to real world politics enhance some sequences and muddy others.

Still, you have to admit: this is a blockbuster with some balls. Nolan and company didn’t just crank out the same Batman movie we’ve seen before. Their Dark Knight still feels relevant and contemporary (even if his politics are still a bit confused), and they bring the characters to places we genuinely don’t expect. For having the guts to swing for the fences, and having the skills to hit it out of the park at least a couple times, I give them major props. How about yourself?

Jordan: Your sentiments mostly mirror my own. However, I did a lot of laughing during this movie. I will look askance at anyone who takes this crap too seriously. That’s something I didn’t feel with ‘The Dark Knight,’ a movie that, at the end of the day, maybe stumbled into the sublime. I give this movie high marks, but a lot of that is in quotes, so to speak.

‘The Dark Knight Rises’ hits theaters on July 20th.

DREDD REVIEW

Karl Urban (at least I think it’s Karl Urban — he never takes off his helmet) hits his one note well, hard and often. As Judge Dredd, he’s a stern one-man justice machine in a dystopian megapolis, part of a woefully understaffed police force that zips among enormous city-state, 200 story apartment blocks, threatening a term in an “iso-cube,” but mostly bullet-blasting perps in ever resourceful ways. Just when you thought you’d seen every way for brains to splatter across the screen in 3D, ‘Dredd‘ comes up with something new.

This new adaptation (screened at Comic-Con 2012 in San Diego) of the British comic character is one part sly Verhoeven-esque satire, one part visual whirlwind and one part decent-enough, but basic, action picture.

After an opening chase that lays out the Judges’ rules of engagement (see someone committing a crime: kill them) we meet Olivia Thirlby’s Anderson. She failed the Judge aptitude test, but due to a childhood bordering the radiation containment zone, she’s a “mutie” and has powers of extra sensory perception. She’s given one day to prove herself as Urban’s ride-along. As it happens, this is the day they’ll stumble into the roughest block in the city — the Peach Trees.

The Peach Trees is ruled by Lena Headey’s Ma-Ma – a ruthless gang-leader with a monopoly on Slo-Mo, the hottest new drug in this miserable future. Slo-Mo is no doubt harmful to one’s health, but it does wonders for ‘Dredd’s’ cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle. The narcotic (whose delivery method is the same as an asthma inhaler, in a possible design nod to the film’s comic book roots) causes the brain to perceive time at 1% normal speed. This makes for a number of shootout scenes that are reeeeeeeeeaaaaaaalllllly cool.

The shootouts come once Ma-Ma puts a lockdown on the Peach Trees and orders all of its 75,000 inhabitants to either kill the two lawmen or stay the hell out of the way. Urban must therefore make his way to the top level and take out the boss if he’s ever to escape. His gruff, deadpan delivery mixed with a lack of hesitancy to put a bullet in your face ought to keep most people from accusing him of basically taking the same plot from ‘The Raid.’

While Urban is essentially a block of concrete with a round, shiny head, ‘Dredd’ makes decent use out of its side characters. Wood ‘Avon Barksdale’ Harris plays a detained prisoner who tries to play mindgames with the rookie Thirlby. (She, of course, being a telepath, is a hard one to fluster.)

The best performance in the film, however, is Headey’s Ma-Ma. Looking like a cross between Joan Jett and Sandra Bernhard, she isn’t, alas, given much time center stage. Her few moments, though, are devilishly milked, making her one of the best screen villains of the year.

I’ve got to give ‘Dredd’ some credit for its fundamental delight in being fascist. It makes ‘Dirty Harry’ look like ’12 Angry Men.’ Unlike ‘Starship Troopers,’ the satirical winks, while existent, are few and far between. ‘Dredd’ takes it on faith that you’ll know that this is, you know, a bad way for a criminal justice system to behave, then lets you see what a body smashing into concrete from 200 stories above looks like in extreme slow motion. There’s a moment, just a moment, where you think the movie is gonna’ wimp out, but this thread is quickly dropped. From a badass POV, that’s cool — from a “what the hell’s wrong with our culture?” angle, I’m not so sure.

So ‘Dredd’ borders on being a blast. I didn’t come out of the 3D screening at Comic-Con 2012 bursting with enthusiasm, but I did giggle most of the time. It’s a ballsy picture and I was impressed with its economic world-building. (These apartment blocks have everything in them — except showers, apparently. Everyone’s so sweaty in the horrible future!) While there are slips into substandard predictability, the film is quick to snap back to another whacked-out ESP session or hyperstylized slo-mo shoot ‘em up. All told, it’s not dreadful.