Oram Po
“Oram Po” (move out of the way). Pushkar and Gayatri are here. The debut movie of the husband-wife team is rocking Chennai. It is running to full houses, right from Friday when it was released.
“Oram Po” can be termed Kollywood’s answer to ‘The fast and the furious’ or maybe even the ‘Dhoom’ series as it is a movie about drag racing in Chennai. And please note, that too on unwieldy autorickshaws not sleek bikes. It is the story of two rival mechanics, Bigle (played by Lal) and Sun of Gun (John Vijay), who settle all their disputes by racing autos. Built into this is the love story of Chandru (Arya), who is the ace driver of Bigle’s mechanic shop, and Rani (Pooja), who works in a biriyani shop owned by her family, and that of some missing gemstones.
Chandru spends all the money he earns by racing on booze and friends. When the moneylender who financed his autorickshaw demands his money back, he does what he knows best: race. But then Bigle and Chandru have a run of bad luck, and Bigle loses a lot of money, his mechanic shed and his prize auto too. Sun of Gun wins it all, but there is a twist in the tale.
The movie works because of a combination of factors: cinematography by Nirav Shah, editing by Antony, peppy music by G.V. Prakash, dialogues by Kumararaja and the racy screenplay by the directors. Nirav Shah bring his “Dhoom” experience to the table and photographs Chennai like none other. The slick work by Antony maintains the pace throughout, and Prakash strikes gold with the title track “Oram Po.” The other rocking tracks are “Jigu Jickan,” in which he gives a folk song a rock makeover, and “Gun Ganapathy,” sung by actor-director T. Rajendar in his trademark style.
Arya just reprises his “Pattiyal” character, with his usual charm and irreverence. The screenplay does tax Pooja much, and she does a competent job of her role. But the pick of the lot is John Vijay, who speaks a Tuticorin dialect throughout the movie. The best lines seem to have been written for him and he brings in the laughs with his terrific delivery.
It requires a lot of guts for a lead actor to let someone else walk away with the best lines, but Arya has been a good sport. The fact that he bought over the release rights for Chennai goes to show that he believed in the screenplay and the abilities of his directors. And the audience reactions prove it right.
Tags: Tamil
Anurag Kashyap
Abhay Deol
Dibakar Banerjee
Hansal Mehta
Khalid Mohamed
Kundan Shah
Anish Kuruvilla
Jaideep Verma
Manish Gupta
Navdeep Singh
Bhavani Iyer
D. Santosh
Onir
Ashvin Kumar
Ramu Ramanathan
Sudhir Mishra
Pankaj Advani
Revathy
Saurabh Shukla
Shilpa Shukla
Sujoy Ghosh
Suparn Verma
Santosh Sivan
Shashank Ghosh
Shivajee
Pavan Kaul
Partho Sen-Gupta
Prroshant Naryannan
Sam Langoria
Satish Kasetty
And another insight into the Tamil world b y Venky…^:)^
Keep em coming… =d>
i may as well start calling myself the hater…
is it just me or that still above with arya and the chic, and the temple in the bg, such poor composition. so loose, open and not ina good way. i normally don’t comment on such things but it caught my eye, just how unaesthetic it is.
can’t they have gotten a better dp, one that actually knows how to compose shots? even the lighting, i can always spot the key light, which is very very bad.
Dabba ? picture dekh….shayad camera pan ho….aur tera displeasure choo ho jaye…..anyways stills are stills…and if you know the DOP does not take stills!!!! the camera could be somewhere else and the still guy takes it from another angle….so please “can
there IS something missing stills or no stills……
k
stills or no stills /.. i liked them … hey i can also spot the key light ;)
you are right. the DP doesn’t take stills. I over-reacted.
have u seen the movie? perhaps the composition is better in the movie and the lighting isn’t tacky (i mean, standard three point lightin you see in most tamil/telugu/malayalam movies except for the big name DPs).
Too many experiences in too many films has made me expect the worst.
hey i saw the promo .. the cinematography is good enuf … esp the tone of colours used … cause the colours used in tamil films can easily look bad … but u cant avoid them cause thats how the colours are in TN .. so its always a magic to make the red and orange and yellow look good !!!
Santhosh sivan best in that…
Vasal Bala – me plannin on Dasa OK !!! last minute le “illa pa naan romba busy nu ellam solla pudadhu ;)” even me not sure wen Kamal sir is releasin it !!! he hasnt informed me yet ;)
hey Dabba .. ironically tho .. the best DPs of india come from the south
Santosh sivan
Rajiv menon
Ravi k Chandran
P C sreeram
KV anand
manikandan
S ravi verman
these names wud again feature if i were to list the best in india !!!
@ george
very true, but they only work with mani “sir”, shankar and hindi films. your average tamil or telugu (don’t get me started on malayalam films) films don’t have them.
i find these movies so flat (for lack of a better word), with god awful compositions and some pretty bad blocking.
ya true … i was just statin an irony!!!
Who was the DP for Pudhupettai and Vetaiyaadu vilaiyadu? I thought those movies looked as good or better than most Hindi movies I’ve seen!
BTW, has Pudhupettai ever been discussed here? I wonder what people think of it? I wonder if am the only one who liked it as much as I did. The script had loopholes and wasn’t tight enough towards the end but heck it was a good movie!
vettaiaddu villayaddu .. A ravi verman
sorry … S ravi verman
Arvind Krishna handled the DOP for Pudhupet
George Cheta
Sure we make good DOPs……good Heroines…..good Music….. AND the best Appams!
Just saying that the above pix look stilted
Is it just me or does anyone else also like Bheema’s songs? Am listening to them day/night
K
Balu Mahendra is GOD of Photography So he is numero Uno to me.
putting other DOPs (including SS) above PC is blasphemy.
Nirav Shah ws DOP for Arindhum Ariyamalum and Pattiyal. He went to Dhoom later.
There are other fantabulous DOPs like the late Jeeva, Ramji (DOP of Raam, Paruthi Veeran – easily the best work of the year), Venu, Rathnavelu (DOP of Sethu and Nandha), Balasubramaniem(DOP of Pithamagan and soon to be released Naan Kadavul), Rajarajan (who shot Captain Prabhakaran, Pulan Visaranai in 90s).
Offcourse there is always that Madhu Ambat who is here, there and everywhere.
There are some yesteryear bigwigs of south like Jayanen vincent, P.S.Prakash , B.Kannan(loyal to Bharathiraaja)and ofcourse can’t miss out Ashok Kumar who shot most of J.Mahendran movies who have given us some good frames unforgettable frames right from very early days.
So to say that frame omposition is bad in Thamizh films except for Mani SIR pilums is a statement born out of ,simply put ignorance and nothing else.
///
@jaiganesh
i wasnt naming them in any order …. but true i forgot to list in Jeeva .. we will surely miss his work !!!
Guys,
Don’t forget Nutty too. He is another DOP who has made it big in Bombay.
Anand,
See Polladhavan. I like it more than Pudupettai, which I think had a lot of problems.
Kavita,
Bheema’s songs are very good, especially Mudhal Mazhai, Enadhuyire and Siru Paaryaiale. But I wish the movie releases sometime in the near future. Have been waiting for it long enough, and the songs have only made the waiting harder.
Naren,
I was there when Sivaji opened. And I know what happened.
Oram Po’s was a much delayed releas. It opened with practically zero publicity because the producer was facing some problems. Given these circumstances, the movie opened to full houses. I saw the very first show in Devi theatre, one of the biggest in Chennai. And you must have been there to see the reactions. It was not a crowd that you see in the multiplexes. It comprised mainly autodrivers, college students and the aam junta, if I could say that. Throughout the movie, the crowd kept clapping and applauding, making it very difficult for me to catch the dialogues. That is why I used the word rocking.
It is a different fact that if a Rajni movie releases, “rocking” won’t be enough to describe the atmosphere.
Actually, during the screening of “Oram Po” a lot of people were wondering why the movie was delayed so much as it was so entertaining. During the screening, a fight broke out between some auto drivers and they decided to settle it — how else — by a race.