8 Khon...No Maaf :-|

After a good long hiatus on the cinema front, I did the brave thing by hitting satyam cinemas website and checking out what was on offer. After having read about Vishal Bharadwaj's latest flick and found decent positives on the review, I thought it was a good choice and the guy sitting to my left at this point, seconded that thought. So we ventured out. Ever since man evolved from the monkey, it has been well documented that human emotions are very highly altered by fellow human being's influences. Adding another vindication to that work of history, the third guy in the party at present said "Ok let's go". So it was down to choosing the fourth companion since the movie was decided.  "7 Khon Maaf" had become people's choice for the 10:15 PM night show. Like it happens in the 'Usual Suspects', we got our usual companion on the phone and confirmed her presence in the scheme of things.

So, It was me, Laurel and Hardy (using my mom's choice of names for the two guys I always roam about with, ever since I landed at Chennai from Hyd) and the fourth soul gearing up for it. As is often the case with my dad, I was sent out of home at sharp 9:15 PM, so as to "be on time" for the movie. For the uninitiated, my dad has this weird idea of packing off people well before time when it comes to going to the railway station/bus stand to catch a train/bus on a journey. He makes sure we reach the platform at Chennai Central at least a few seconds before the engine driver boards the engine at the shed. Sigh!. One gets the drift here, I suppose. It is such a pain for the victim in point to have to do that long, never ending wait at the end of such crises. So there I was at No.8 Thiru Vi Ka Road, Royapettah, a good 40 minutes before time.

Choosing the very usual way of killing one's time, I picked up my phone and rang up all those friends who I had to pick a good number of threads with, people who I missed to check upon for 2-3 years now, or people who had promised to call me but never did so in the recent weeks. So after all the deliberation, we enter "Seasons" to watch the advertisements that test our patience levels like  - Vicco Vajrathanthi (twice), Nathella Samptha Chetty (twice), some random Tamil Nadu police announcements etc. So having gone through a bad phase already, we garnered the interest to concentrate on the movie for the day. Scene 1 enter "Gun", enter "Blood", enter some arbit ghost in human form more on the lines of one of these.

No, do not misunderstand me here. None of these people have played any role in this movie. The make up of our beloved protagonist, madam Priyanka made the trick and delivered the look alike at this juncture. I then realized why the censor board was bent upon giving an 'A' rating for this movie. Not that the certificate is debatable per se, the movie has a good number of scenes worthy of an A rating. But, think of it folks, with people below the age of 18, there his very high probability that they might get scared and/or faint at the very introduction of the heroine. So put your hands together for the diligent censor board rating. Moving further on the review of the movie, which was the initial intention in this post, it moved at nautical speeds for the first one hour. It was like some recursive function that goes like, love, marriage, sex, murder, love again, marriage again, sex again, murder again...With that one line, i think i have done a wonderful precis on the review of the first half of the movie. For the benefit of readers, I did not choose to show the recursive pattern 3 times, to say that 3 iterations of it happened in the first half.

So there it was, Interval, and the message on the screen read "4 more to go". It would be gross injustice to Laurel , if I did not applaud his sense of humor at that very juncture. He contrived to do a rhyme there. "No more folks, shall we go?". I mean, see the "go" and "go". Though Laurel did not get any takers when he cracked that for the first time, in the hope of getting some admirers on this platform, I have posted it here. Laughers at this point, can go and laugh. After all it's interval.

So cutting the tangent, finishing the popcorn and emptying the coke tin, we come to the second half. I would get tomatoes, eggs and what not (those that should have been thrown at plenty towards Priyanka, if one has to be judicious) if I write that recursive function once again to describe the scenes from the second half. Same set of chores, mate. So we come to the climax where we are offered a slight twist. The recursion stopped. This time, our heroine decides to change the order of things. Murder loses its position at the last. She decides to marry someone who cannot be murdered. So as to avoid any spoilers at that juncture, I shall say "Oh Jesus Christ". For the over smart people who think even that was a spoiler, sorry people, you are too intelligent for that movie. Give it a miss.

So there were 7 folks in all. 7th being the one where I chose to leave the suspense as it was. And I would like to add that "murder" was definitely the order of the day, because, guys, the movie itself becomes the murderer in the end and stabs the viewer to make it 8 in all.

Disturbingly fast, bad screenplay, worst acting performances (barring Irfan Khan and Naseeruddin Shah of course)....useless in all. Is this to Vishal Bhardwaj, what Raavan is to Mani Ratnam????

That story was definitely better left in the form of the book from which it has been inspired.