The boss

I saw a Tamil movie last Saturday, called "Sivaji The Boss". It is seriously the talk of the nation right now. Everyone has seen it multiple times, and the music from the movie is playing everywhere. It is an unbelievable cinematic experience, like none I've ever seen before.

First off let me say: this movie is terrible. But it's also awesome, just awesome. Absolutely everything in this movie is done to excess. Indians do not have much of an appetite for subtlety; they like their heroes to possess superhuman fighting skills and be pure good, and their villains to be pure evil. They overact everything, so much so that you don't even need to know Tamil to understand the plot. The movie is three hours long and has an intermission, and I actually fell asleep for a big chunk of it, but trust me -- I didn't miss anything.

The hero is this 50 year old guy named Sivaji who is a really rich businessman who is building a free hospital and med school, but the villain is trying to block him from doing this and ends up putting him out of business completely and Sivaji seeks his revenge to get his reputation and money back, all the while courting a girl who can't be older than 20. He is kind of fat and has big 70's hair and is so cheesy but so awesome. In the dance sequences, he doesn't move as much as the other dancers, which is also really funny.

He always says "cool" in a way that's sooooooo cheesy. There's one point in the movie where they are resuscitating him with the defibrillator and all of a sudden he comes back to life, and immediately looks at the camera and says "cool." Man oh man that was one of the best moments of my life.

On a related topic, the subtitles in Indian movies are so hilarious. In a DVD store they were playing a movie and the subtitles for a song were like "I will defeat the goblin, my heart is like chocolate fudge, something something I won't budge..."