Another year has passed for the movie buffs, and despite what the trade pundits might say it has been quite an eventful year in tollywood, ballaya tasted success at last,a moderately successful but significant multi-starer, RGV comes back to tolly -seemingly to gain some lost confidence, couple of interesting debuts, new directors, music directors, and like every year few huge disappointments . Without wasting much time on the failures and leaving it for the movie makers to learn from their mistakes, let us try and relish their success in 2010 here is a list of my favorites from last year
1) Leader
I was excited with the prospect of shekar kammula whose characters as such are never awe-inspiring or dynamic, planning to tell the story of a leader. I was interested to see how the usually soft spoken and simple director had written the powerful political scenes. And he dint disappoint . What was good about this movie is that while shekar had his vision clear, of the leader, he stuck to his strength as a director. RANA dint really have to do much except to look tall and imposing , and to his credit he did that and much more pretty well. Mickey J Meyers background score adds soul to the movie .
2) Ye maaya Chesave
At first viewing, i was not really that impressed with the movie, i thought it was a tad too slow and at the end , despite how beautiful she looked, i started getting pissed off with Jessi, like all guys i never understood what was the big deal, why is she creating such a scene, what is all this confusion about . It took me some time to realise that there in lied the beauty of this movie, it is that un-predictability, the combination of vulnerability and strengh in Jessi's character(add to that stunningly cute looks and addictive voice :)) that made this simple love story connect with people. The strong characterization of heroine, samanthas looks,gautams screenplay and simplicity fuelled with Rahmans slow poison songs have resulted in one of the breeziest love stories on telugu screen and gave Naga chaitanya his 1st and much needed hit.
3) Vedam
Vedam is a significant step in telugu film industry, and hopefuly a step that it doesnt forget. Despite all it's faults it is a compelling watch for brilliant performances by all the three main leads. It is no great movie, far from it actually( Watch Amores Perros (2000)) but it has its moments. The director Krissh, Allu Arjun , Anushka and Manoj all deserve a pat on their backs from believeing in the telugu audience and trusting that multi starers will work . It is sad though the film dint work as much as it should have, commercially, but i hope that doesnt stop all the brave directors from trying harder. For most of my tamil friends, telugu movies are naive with minimal experimentation compared to their cinema, i hope Vedam signals the start of our response :)).
4) Simha
Balayya has a hit finally, after a string of flops and below average runs, ballaya returns with a better script , better story and direction and more importantly a better ballaya and better dialogues. After a very long time people were seen uttering balayya dialogues , Chudu oka side a chudu, rendu side chudalanokovodu .....What next for balayya? All we can do is wait and watch and hope for the hit machine to come back to form. Despite the credit that experimental films get, it is films like these that keep the movie business going and the money coming. To balayyas credit he gave the decades 1st super hit and also the last super hit.
5) Prasthanam
I still believe Prasthanam could have turned out to be far better than it actually did. And that is not to say i can make it better, but that is kind of confidence Deva katta istills in you with a few scenes from the movie. Some of the smartest dialogues in recent times, powerful acting, particularly by Sai and new comer Sudeep. With an intelligent and powerful script Deva packs with movie with many powerful scenes, only the screenplay could have been a bit more crisp.
- sandeep at ragalahari.com
