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Manadhai Thirudi Vittai |
The day they decided to make this movie, they had also decided to make
it extremely mediocre.Prabhudeva and Gayathri Jayaram clash with each other for the first few reels. Just when they start falling in love with each other, Prabhudeva gets introduced to Kausalya. When he realizes that he was the one responsible for the dire and dejected state that Kausalya was in, he decides to give up his love for Gayathri. He does this by creating a small real-life drama. In the end, he marries Kausalya. The director had been fumbling pretty badly right up to the end of the first half. The sequence of scenes that lead to the coming together of Prabhudeva and Gayathri Jayaram makes the audience squirm. Prabhudeva writing letters to a non-existing mother shows the level of shortage of fertile imagination. But, the greatest plus and strength for the movie is its comedy. They had fallen as low as they could to offer a distasteful comedy track like that but it achieves its purpose - somehow, not laughing requires a very big effort. Especially when Vadivelu abuses Gayathri Jayaram in a flood of bad languages and when an on-the-'spot' injection had to be given to cure Kaka Radhakrishnan's problem: you just have to laugh. Between the Vivek and Vadivelu twosome, it's Vadivelu who overshadows and overtakes Vivek. One has to concede that there are some things that only Vadivelu could do. 
Everything about the song 'Manjal Kaatu Maina' is beautiful. Costumes
and Choreography add beauty to it.Prabhudeva's acting caliber starts to reveal itself only after he comes to know that he'd been responsible for the miserable state that Kausalya is. Is there some unwritten rule that the hero has to fight? For no obvious reasons, we have two fight sequences here. Make up and costumes don't suit Gayathri Jayaram even a bit. It's a surprise that a professional model like her, had failed to notice this. Another unwritten rule is that girl students of Music College wear very dignified dresses. But here we have Gayathri Jayaram, her thighs a display, playing the violin. Though Kausalya changes the course of the story, opportunities given to her are pretty minimal. When Prabhudeva meets Gayathri Jayaram to tell her that he's dropping the wedding plans, she unawares, shows him her self-made designs of the photographs of the wedding-that-was-to-be. That was a very impressively done scene. Wonder where that talent disappeared for the rest of the movie. When one leaves the theatre, the only thing the mind recollects about the movie is its comedy. But, we could always see the comedy track on the TV. That's all the picture is.
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