Poi solla porom, da..

Thats right, the first post with a tam title on my blog.

There are a category of movies called heist films. It involves either a sophisticatedly executed bank robbery, or art theft, or any robbery for that matter. The key to enjoying this genre is to appriciate the modus operandi.

Im a big fan of heist films, and I was very thrilled to learn of a tam movie being made along those lines. and it did not disappoint at all.

Karthik Kumar of Evam fame plays the near-centric protagonist, and its a low budget 'get back at the bad guy' kind of movie. I wouldve been very impressed if the heist itself had more detail and story built in to it. The backstory seemed to have the lions share of screen time here. Piaa Bajpai plays the love interest of the hero, decent performance. I could go on about the cast and how well they did, but thats boring.

So these guys make believe that a huge area of land surrounding the old mahabalipuram road is theirs, and fool a bad guy who is played by Nasser. This movie became a pseudo hit - so is madras ready for a wider range of movie/serials ? could the next prime time serial on sun tv be a sci fi thriller ?

There have been attempts bordering this genre before - a slew o f serials starting with 'marma desam' brought in the horror/thriller angle pretty well. But what they did not do was immerse themselves into a dedicated multi season format with a compelling story line. Some reasons why programs like NBC's Heroes succeed in the US is the strong plot, and their ability to get the viewer thinking - what if I could do those things?. This is brought out by the characters themselves who portray their parts to perfection, striking a chord of familiarity with the audience.

From a purely business standpoint, if someone has a scifi story set in the city of madras, people can go about raising investment from private parties and get a good show up and running. Im fairly confident that the returns would be sufficiently high given the low average age of the city, tempting advertisers to pay a hefty premium. I know id tune in if a tamil remake of Heroes with good enough graphics came up on TV...