Khan Saheb Kamal Haasan's Jamaat/Jeba Koottam/Devasthaanam - Part 8

[Cinemarasigan]

HH, i also read the similar reports and thought vivek is being cast.

Vivek is not there in UV... All are rumours only

[oyivukac]

அன்றைய ஆனந்த விகடன் திரைவிமர்சனத்தில் பல தடவை 100 க்கு 50+ மதிப்பெண்கள் பெற்று சாதனை படைத்தது உலகநாயகனின் படங்கள் மட்டுமே!!!
16 வயதினிலே - 62.5
நாயகன் - 60
மகாநதி - 60
இளமை ஊஞ்சலாடுகிறது- 59
கல்யாணராமன் - 57
சிகப்பு ரோஜாக்கள் - 53
மூன்றாம் பிறை - 53
ஓரு கைதியின் டைரி- 53
வறுமையின் நிறம் சிவப்பு - 50+
வாழ்வே மாயம் - 50
பேசும் படம் - 50
மீண்டும் கோகிலா - 50
உன்னால் முடியும் தம்பி - 50
அபூர்வ சகோதரர்கள் - 48

[Adox]

Ragu - Good one. Thanks for the post ..

[avavh3]

thanks raghu. guna? only 48 for AS that deserves more than 60 for the sheer idea of appu character. but overall UN used to get vgud reviews from all tamil magazines.

[avavh3]

can some one post AV vimarsanams of thalaivar movies plz?

[rsubras]

I vaguely remember AV review for Aboorva sagotharargal.......... it went something like.......... (they meant like this..don't remember the words used) oru pulichu pona pazhi vaangara kathai ya ivlo suvaiya padaikka mudiyum nu athu kamal ah la mattum than mudiyum.........

[dell_gt]

The waiting room of Kamal Haasan’s office in Alwarpet turns out to be the best place for an interview. There are a bunch of photos mounted on easels, marking in black and white and sepia the roles that he has essayed over decades. They invite drama into the frame, indicate the stature of the man sitting in front, and they lend the right context and mood to the conversation. Symbolically, celluloid strides in the room, as a righteous presence, listening along with us to Kamal Haasan as he speaks with authority, launches a scathing attack on those who strive to silence cinema.

He is probably Indian cinema’s loudest and most consistent opponent of “post-censor censorship”. “It should be called ‘censorism’,” he suggests with a laugh. “I don’t know why, may be I have not voiced myself well, I have been targeted many times. There was a film called Sandiyar: etymologically, politically, ethnically, they were wrong when they said the name had to be changed. Today, another movie called Sandiyar was recently released.”

“There was an agitation against Mumbai Express: because part of it is an English word. There is no Tamil word for Mumbai Express. I am sure all those who were against it, even they wouldn’t say ‘I love you’ to their lovers in Tamil. Many don’t even thank in Tamil,” he says. Righteous indignation creeps in as he goes on: “It is ridiculous to take a free ride on a vehicle that is available. Somebody has to put a stop to this.”

“If you take Hey Ram, much before its release, a senior politician perceived it as an anti-Gandhi film based on the poster and wanted it stopped. Au contraire, the modus operandi of the film was to mirror the technique of Mark Antony’s funeral oration. It starts with the praise of Brutus, but moves to the defence of Caesar.”

The conversation naturally veers toward, as it must, Vishwaroopam. “I was confident that when they saw it, there wouldn’t be a problem. But, they sort of hyped themselves into a mood of negation… I still stand by the film — it said nothing wrong about Indian Muslims. The only good Muslim is an Indian even if they say that all other Muslims were bad, which I disagree with, in the film.”

He’s on a roll: “I am trying to do my best. If I am wrong, I correct myself. I am right, I stand by it. I don’t regret the fight in Vishwaroopam, I have lost a lot of money. It was a very costly battle, in fact. But I don’t think it should be allowed to happen. We used to think that the Censor Board should be abolished, but seeing how things are going, maybe it should stay on for some more time, until sense prevails.”

Does he think there is any validity for social boycott of films in a liberal democracy? “None. In every religion, there are people who lack sense, and people who are good and rational… Cinema itself is a voice; striving to silence it amounts to fascism. I am attacking everyone who does not allow the arts to flourish,” he replies.

Is all this happening because people are taking cinema too seriously? He doesn’t hesitate for a moment, “No. The politicians are taking cinema too seriously. The people don’t take cinema seriously. As a matter of fact, they have stopped taking even politicians seriously.”

What is the solution: legally and politically empowering the censor board? “The whole system is corrupt. The best way is, to quote a Gujarati gentleman (Mahatma Gandhi), ‘Don’t cry for change. Become the change.’ That’s the only answer.”

But, there is a responsibility for the film maker too. A consummate performer like Kamal is more than aware of that; in fact, he’s clear that as film makers recording conflicts and contentious subjects, “we need to be responsible, have a civic/social sense when we talk through films. It should not be used as a platform for something else.”




http://www.thehindu.com/news/nationa...cle6339409.ece

[avavh3]

His classical odyssey
Forget the actor. That was the brief. After 50 years of acting, that’s the only facet of Kamal Haasan people think about. Sometimes, maybe, they think of Kamal Haasan the writer or Kamal Haasan the director. But it’s almost always the actor. So one evening this April, in Bangalore, I asked him about the other things: the singing, the poetry, the photography, and the dancing, especially the dancing. He was in the city filming ‘Uthama Villain’, but it was the day of the elections, so there was no shooting across the State. Dressed in a white linen ensemble and looking extremely relaxed, he told me, “This kind of exposure to the arts you can get only in two places – either a Brahmin household or a community dedicated to art. I didn’t have a choice. I was born into this Brahmin atmosphere.”

He spoke about a house in Paramakudi filled with music. His mother Rajalakshmi played the violin. Elder brothers Charuhasan and Chandrahasan were singers. “So it was an environment of music,” he said. “Like others hum cinema songs, classical music would be running through my mind.” But as far as the others in the family were concerned, he was about as talented as his father Srinivasan, who couldn’t sing at all and, therefore, had decided to become a patron of the arts. The house was on a two-acre tract of land, and half of it became a sort of open-air auditorium where artists would be invited to perform. MLV. Madurai Somu. A young Kunnakudi Vaidyanathan.

Kamal Haasan spoke about his sister, the family’s only daughter, who was sent off to Thanjavur to train in classical dance in a gurukulam, when she was five. “When she was eight, she returned to find a surprise, a very late-born brother. That was me. I was not planned. Everything else in the family was planned. The eldest son would be a lawyer. The second son would also be a lawyer. The daughter was going to be a classical dancer.” They even named her Mrinalini, because his father was a great fan of Mrinalini Sarabhai.

Listening to Kamal Haasan speak is like sitting down for a screenplay narration. The tone is steady. The tale is dramatic. Then, when you least expect it, there’s a splash of comic relief.

Listening to Kamal Haasan speak is like sitting down for a screenplay narration. The tone is steady. The tale is dramatic. Then, when you least expect it, there’s a splash of comic relief. He narrated the stretch where he – we should probably name this character in the flashback; let’s call him by the diminutive Kamal – was cut off from art for a while when his mother was diagnosed as a chronic diabetic and had to be sent to Chennai, where her elder brother lived. Kamal accompanied her. “I was about three. They enrolled me in Holy Angels. I had this uncanny knack of running away. I’d pick up a taxi and come back home.”

Kamal turned five. He became an actor. And music and dance returned to his life when his sister came to Chennai. He used to escort her on the bus for veena classes, and there, to keep him out of mischief, he’d be given a small veena to play. “In a way,” Kamal Haasan said, “I could say that music is my sister’s strong influence.”

He said that he was not a keen learner of the arts. He just picked things up by ear, karna parampara, rather than actual practice. But he used to talk like he was going to perform at The Music Academy the next day. “All that was leaning towards acting, not playing the veena,” he laughed.

What you cannot do, you tend to dislike. It was too much hard work.

The story Kamal Haasan told that evening kept going back and forth in time, a jumble of memories – like this one from when Kamal was seven or eight. He was friends with Palghat Mani Iyer’s son, an accomplished violinist, who thought Kamal was a budding veena genius. “He took me around saying that this guy is a genius, he knows everything. But I couldn’t play. I could only talk about it. I didn’t know how to get out of it.” So Kamal had this fear. There was disdain too. “What you cannot do, you tend to dislike. It was too much hard work.”

Then, this one from when Kamal was 10 or 12. He joined T.K. Shanmugam’s theatre troupe – Kamal Haasan respectfully called him Annachi – where he was trained in swordfight and stunts and even dance. “That’s where I suddenly thought: Maybe I can shake a leg.” That is possibly the understatement of the century.

This was the scene on stage: the mother is dying, and she wants her son (played by Kamal) to sing one last song for her. Shanmugam Annachi, never one to let the show not go on, urged Kamal from the wings: “Go on! You know the words. Sing!”

“I think I discovered myself as a singer in the TKS Nataka Sabha,” Kamal Haasan said. But it was an arduous, and somewhat accidental, discovery. The troupe was staging a play named ‘Appavin Aasai’. There were songs in it, but because no one knew if Kamal could sing; they played these songs on a Grundig spool-type tape recorder and asked him to lip-sync them on stage. Then, one evening, the tape snapped. This was the scene on stage: the mother is dying, and she wants her son (played by Kamal) to sing one last song for her. Shanmugam Annachi, never one to let the show not go on, urged Kamal from the wings: “Go on! You know the words. Sing!” And Kamal sang ‘Uzhaithu pizhaikka vendum’, which seems a rather odd song to sing in this situation. Anyway, as scripted, the mother died. The unscripted coda to the scene: a singer was born.

“That’s when I realised I could boldly sing before an audience,” Kamal Haasan said. “And it’s not like playback singing, where the mike is in front of you. The mike is at a distance.”

In a play named ‘Avvaiyaar’, Kamal played the young Murugan, singing folk songs while perched on a tree.

A number of names, famous and otherwise, popped up as supporting characters in Kamal Haasan’s flashback. S.G. Kasi Iyer, S.G. Kittappa’s brother, who composed the music for a dance drama on Lord Muruga’s Arupadai Veedu; he would compose perfect swaras for sound effects, to mimic, say, the opening of a door. Madurai Venkatesan, who taught Kamal the basics of Carnatic music. K.B. Sundarambal, who lived in the house behind Kamal’s and would make aappams and sing songs for him when he jumped over the wall to visit his classmate Ganapathy Subramaniam, her adopted son. (“In my naiveté, I used to sing ‘Pazham Nee Appa’ to her. And she tolerated my singing.”)

And Mylapore Gowri Ammal. “I had the great honour of lying on her lap, in the Ranganatha pose, as I watched my sister learn dance. She would sometimes play the taalam on my shoulder or cheek.”

The Guru and his sishya: Classical singer Balamuralikrishna with actor Kamal Haasan.

Another famous name played a bigger part in Kamal’s musical education, and for that story, we must cut to the early 1980s. Kamal is a very busy actor. It’s been some 10 years since he sat in Madurai Venkatesan’s class. It’s been 10 years since he learnt any new music. He’s shooting in Bombay for ‘Karishma’, the Hindi remake of ‘Tik Tik Tik’. He has an accident. He breaks a leg. He has to buy two tickets to fly to Chennai, the extra one for the seat in front that has to be folded down so he can stretch the broken leg. The man in the adjacent seat observes his plight and asks him: “What are you going to do in the months it’s going to take for this to heal?”

That was M. Balamuralikrishna. Kamal said he didn’t know. Balamuralikrishna asked Kamal if he liked music. Kamal nodded. Balamuralikrishna said, “Instead of wasting time, why don’t you learn something from me?” Kamal thought he was joking – until Balamuralikrishna landed up at Kamal’s house the next day. Classes began with the sishya’s foot in the air. “My guru found me,” Kamal Haasan said.

Balamuralikrishna asked Kamal what he’d learnt. Kamal said he knew some 30-odd keerthanas. Balamuralikrishna asked him to sing. Kamal sang. Balamuralikrishna said, gently, “Let’s start at the beginning, with a geetham.” Kamal Haasan laughed at the memory. “So I knew what he thought of me. He wanted me to be good enough to give a public performance, but I wasn’t there yet. He still keeps asking me when I am going to sing on stage.”

When Kamal’s leg got better, Balamuralikrishna said, “We can shift the classes to my house.” Kamal began to hobble over to his guru’s house, where he’d sit on a sofa and learn music. Eventually, Balamuralikrishna asked him, “Is your leg okay? Can you walk?” Kamal said yes. Balamuralikrishna said, “Then you can sit on the floor and continue.”

Classes went on for about one-and-a-half years. I asked Kamal Haasan to name something he learnt. He thought for a minute and then launched into the Karnataka Kapi kriti, ‘Sri Raghurama Samara Bheema’. I thought he’d stop there, with this opening line of the pallavi, but he continued... ‘Sasi Mouli Vinuta Seeta Ramana... Mukendu Lalitha Hasa Pariyathi...' And then he sang the swaras... ‘Pa dha ni pa ma ri ri ga ma ri sa / pa dha pa sa ni pa dha ni pa ma ri ga ma...’ He stopped dramatically, after negotiating the sharp, colourful turn at ‘Ramana... ri ga ma.’

Kamal Haasan said he still remembered the song because he learnt it when he was going to New Delhi to receive the National Award for Best Actor for ‘Moondram Pirai’. “My guru asked me to learn a new geetham for the occasion.” When the leg healed and Kamal resumed shooting, he continued with classes whenever he found the time. He’d call Balamuralikrishna and go over.

Then, during a shooting, Kamal misplaced a notebook filled with song notations. “I think he was a little upset about this. Then I got busy, and we gradually lost touch – otherwise, I would have been his student for 22 years now.” I asked him about his guru’s dream that Kamal Haasan should sing on stage. He laughed. “Balamuralikrishna saying that I can do this is like Sivaji Ganesan saying, “Nadippu romba easy pa.”’ You shouldn’t take it seriously.”
http://www.thehindu.com/features/fri...cle6317133.ece

[avavh3]

‘You can feel the fear in the song’
Between takes, Kamal would keep humming on the sets, and one day ‘Muktha’ Srinivasan, the director, caught him singing a keerthanai.

I had one last question about theatre when I met Kamal Haasan again in June, at his office in Chennai. Did he miss it? Doesn’t he feel like doing the odd play between films, the way Richard Burton did, the way Denzel Washington does? “Yes,” he said. “But even if I am performing on stage, I’d still like it to be televised. I want more people to see it. The bane of a theatre artist is that he can’t get his art across to a large audience. I have gotten used to technology, to that audience.” He compared this to running, and then suddenly slowing down to walk. “I am refusing to walk... unless it’s for health reasons.” He does this often. He’ll think up a metaphor on the spot, and then he’ll put a spin on it that sounds like a non sequitur but perhaps really isn’t.

***

We then began to talk about the movies, about his singing for them, beginning with the number ‘Gnayiru oli mazhayil’. The film was ‘Andharangam’, where Kamal played the manager of a “beauty clinic” that’s frequented exclusively by young women who want to get into shape and often find themselves entwined in the tape measure in his hands. Between takes, he would keep humming on the sets, and one day ‘Muktha’ Srinivasan, the director, caught him singing a keerthanai. A surprised Srinivasan decided to make Kamal sing a number for the film and took him to the music director G. Devarajan – or “Devarajan Master,” as he was called. Devarajan Master was very close to Thangappan Master, the choreographer under whom Kamal had worked for a while as an assistant, and he knew Kamal. During the recording, he stood near the new playback singer, moving his hands the way conductors do. “I was very scared of him,” Kamal Haasan said. “You can feel that fear in the song.”

Part 1: His classical odyssey

The same year, 1975, Kamal spent seven months learning to play the mridangam when K. Balachander told him that his character in ‘Aboorva Raagangal’ was required to play the instrument. “That’s why I play so convincingly in the film,” he said. Music was all around him. He spoke of his co-stars – the Malayalam actress Srilalitha who was a student of the composer Dakshinamurthy, and Srividya, who, of course, was the daughter of ML Vasanthakumari. “We were all very close and I would keep asking them to sing.”

Sometimes, they would perform at music nights helmed by Gangai Amaran. “Film stars singing light music was a new thing then,” Kamal Haasan said. They used to sing Tamil songs, Hindi songs, and then, one day, they were invited to perform at a function organised by Cinema Express magazine. Kamal suggested that they sing ‘One, a song written by Harry Nilsson and later popularised by Three Dog Night. Someone asked him if the audience would understand. He said if they could “understand” a Sanskrit shloka then they could understand this. “It’s the same. It’s all music.”

This is not a new anecdote (and people familiar with the Kamal Haasan mythology will know where this is headed), but it was something to hear it in person. The Harry Nilsson original is a mid-range song, and the Three Dog Night cover touches a few higher notes, but when Kamal Haasan launched into the number, he leaped over an octave and hit a stunning falsetto note – it isn’t there in either of the earlier versions.

This is probably how he sang the song that night, at the function, and the audience applauded. Seated in the audience, and listening very carefully to the way Kamal caught that pitch, was Ilaiyaraja.

(This is the second part of a series of articles on Kamal Haasan’s tryst with the classical arts.)

[Russelldwp]

[QUOTE][QUOTE]

அன்றைய ஆனந்த விகடன் திரைவிமர்சனத்தில் பல தடவை 100 க்கு 50+ மதிப்பெண்கள் பெற்று சாதனை படைத்தது உலகநாயகனின் படங்கள் மட்டுமே!!!
16 வயதினிலே - 62.5
நாயகன் - 60
மகாநதி - 60
இளமை ஊஞ்சலாடுகிறது- 59
கல்யாணராமன் - 57
சிகப்பு ரோஜாக்கள் - 53
மூன்றாம் பிறை - 53
ஓரு கைதியின் டைரி- 53
வறுமையின் நிறம் சிவப்பு - 50+
வாழ்வே மாயம் - 50
பேசும் படம் - 50
மீண்டும் கோகிலா - 50
உன்னால் முடியும் தம்பி - 50
அபூர்வ சகோதரர்கள் - 48[/

Dear

You have to include HAY RAM also