When I took a flying catch of the Ananda Vikatan which the paperwala threw to my balcony, today morning, I flipped through the pages fast to see what Vikatan had to say about S J Surya‘s New. (Un)Fortunately, Vikatan did sport a review of New this week and I am upset about the biased outlook of the popular Tamil media, especially Vikatan. Keeping this discussion to the fag end of this review, New is a movie filled with gross vulgarity and intense close-up cleavage shots. Last week, on Saturday, when I watched New in the Udhayam theatre, I felt it had nothing new in it except that it’s a pretentious flick in form of a breakthrough science fiction film.
Over two years in production, this movie started with Ajith and Jyothika as the lead pair. Due to untold reasons both of them moved out of the movie, so S J Surya decided to star himself along with Simran. There is a rumor that Surya told the story to A R Rahman in a Chennai-Mumbai flight. The excited Rahman then agreed to tune for the movie.
All that details aside, New is inspired(?) from the Tom Hanks and the beautiful Elizabeth Perkins starrer Big where a 5th grade kid wishes to a festival wishing machine and the next day morning the kid becomes Big as Tom Hanks. With a mind of a kid, Tom Hanks goes through the adolescence and also manages to get a girl friend in this process and finally he becomes a kid again. This story added with some garam masala, customizing for tamil/telugu audience(!) has become as NEW. Having enjoyed S J Surya’s direction in Vaali and Kushi, though both have some shades of other movies, I was completely disappointed in the route S J Surya has taken to ensure that the film is a success.
The only solace is some intelligent screenplay tricks that he has managed to do and the MTV type music videos with the help of A R Rahman. Full scores for Surya for the picturisation of the songs. Great job. And A R Rahman with rocking tunes like New, Sakkarai and the Amma song. SPB‘s comes back in the Sakkarai Inikkira Sakkarai song. The experimental spiderman song also gets full points.
S J Surya, stars as a man with a kid’s mind. New to the front-of-camera, he wades through the character and passes it. But one always gets a feeling that he could have done this rather comical character better that what it is. His intonations at times don’t go with his body language. Simran does her role convincingly well.
The movie is clouded with explicit dialogues and unnatural bedroom situations, which gives the viewers some time to enjoy. But every time when people clap for such scenes, I have no idea, where the Tamil cinema is heading for. I am definitely not against sexually explicit scenes in Tamil movies. We can be as explicit as possible but vulgarity or unnecessary comical scenes that make one get a sick feeling about the humor sense of people can be avoidable. You can either make a healthy comedy out of sex or make it seem crazy. This one belongs to the later category. Especially when the kid gets a devilish idea and leans on Simran in the auto, the scene where Surya explains what happens in the bed with Simran, Balaji making explicit visual descriptions while saying Kiran to Simran and when Surya talks about Simran to Karunas are some of the avoidable scenes. These are just scenes. A huge array of dialogues have also found their way through the censors.
The movie is already a hit and there is no way the media can oppose it. Because when people bend their heads towards the movie, the media too has to go by it. Ananda Vikatan, which out rightly rejected to review Shankar’s Boys and just said ‘Chee…’ as the review for Boys, has given 34 marks to New. Now isn’t that being unbiased. Vikatan also drops a line that because this movie is just about a husband/wife relationship and not exploting the curiosity of adolescence, the movie is ok to be reviewed. I hate to call this as a husband/wife bedroom story. This one talks about a eight year kid, getting transformed into a 28 year old guy’s body and getting a baby. Also the review compares Surya’s acting skills with that of Jim Carrey. Huh !. The TV media says New is a new experiment and people have accepted it. So much for the experiment, guys. Poor Shankar who got flamed in Boys for showing the reality.
Calling all the dads/moms who walked out of cinema halls of Shankar’s Boys, for a viewing of this New. Watch it, Enjoy it. Sure, it doesn’t show any of the real things what your teenage boy/girl does. It doesn’t show how they date girls in mahabalipuram, it hides the fact that they read porno books, it also doesn’t call love as the function of a teenage mind. It doesn’t show any of those realistic expressions. It’s fiction. So enjoy dudes!.
kirukkal.com 