You have made me wonder if maybe Sense and Sensibility might not be worth reading. You also definitely took my mind off of a whole lot of stuff last night, and you made me spend over an hour trying to figure out how on earth to render your name in Tamil, and I’m still not convinced I got it right. Tamil may deserve its own apostrophe, as it seems like there’s discrepancies between how Unicode wants to write the syllables and how the syllables are written on the various posters and things I’ve managed to download.
Still, this is about you, the movie, and not the language you’re in, though I do wish I knew more about the history of Tamil cinema, because you seem, in your Elinor/Sowmya subplot, to have quite a bit to say about the relationship of Tamil cinema to Indian cinema as a whole. I’m no expert, so I’ll leave it to the commenters to flesh you out.
Your overriding theme of self-reliance and dispossession, however, does not need a deep knowledge of Southern Indian cultural and historical practices to understand and appreciate—in that sense, had I not already known that you were loosely based on an Austen novel, I might have guessed a Waugh novel. Marriage and inheritance and they way they figure with class mobility are truly absolutely fascinating, whether it be in English, Tamil, or Telugu (I think you were also released dubbed in Telugu). But the Marianne/Meenakshi plot was what totally overwhelmed me. I don’t know if everyone has felt, at some point, to be a Col. Brandon/Major Bala, but I know I have, and, damn… Tears, dammit. Tears. Well done.
In criticism, I do have to say that your subtitling sucked. They whizzed by, and, about midway through the movie, got trapped 10-15 seconds behind the dialogue. Luckily, by that point your plot was pretty well-established, so I was able to follow along rather well. Also, your editing is really bizarre, especially in the beginning, but that might just be an attempt to get the action rolling forward. Finally, I have no idea what kind of fandom Abbas has around the world, but man does he look like a thug to me. Aishwarya Rai, on the other hand…
February 27th, 2005 at 8:59
maybe i;m just a reactionary but what, in a general sense, is the instructive/stylistic value of writing these movie apostrophes in the second person? because it mostly makes me want to throw things at you or your web site. i don’t suppose i have a point, other than to register my sharp dismay at reading another one of these
February 28th, 2005 at 10:24
You answer why they’re “in the second person” when you call them apostrophes. If they were written differently, they wouldn’t be apostrophes.
The effect of appealing to an inanimate object instead of simply reporting about it, though, is up to the reader. You obviously hate it. Sorry. Though not really.