The Sorrow of Saroja

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I agree. I thought this site owner actually far exceeded his bandwidth limit when he made this sorrowful movie called "Saroja", which is neither story driven, nor character driven. In fact, it is like it is not driven at all! I just couldn't bring myself to care about anything in this overrated movie. To top it all, it is a copy of another movie! How bad could you be as a copycat that this one ends up in the miserable bottom of the heap?

To write a review would be to somehow give credit to a piece of work that attempts to be some kind of artistic endeavour. Saroja is not. So, if you are expecting this to be a kind write up about a movie that has its plus points, please excuse yourself.

For all the hype surrounding how "different" and "cute" this movie is, the latest tributes coming from someone as cerebral as Suhasini herself on Jaya TV, it is a miserable and highly forgettable piece of directionless, artless, tasteless garbage unleashed on hapless masses done in by a marketing machine.

Make no mistake - Saroja has no personality, no identity, and indeed no idea what it is trying to be. A thriller? A comedy? A caper? It is none of the above. In fact, it is an attempt at all the above in pieces, made by a pretentious, over confident, jackass-of-all-things-cinematic director who has not studied the basics of the art form, has no respect for any of the norms of storytelling, and has had the audacity to hit us with computer graphics that go far enough to tell us who is a "driver" and who is a "servant"! There should have been one pointing to the director telling us in no uncertain terms who the "idiot" is.

This is clearly not a director who has had to come up the hard way. His earlier debut movie was a runaway success and he apparently comes from a lineage that reeks of quality involvement in Tamil cinema. This movie is the one where the monkey came out of the sack and showed its true colours. If this is what this fool is about, I don't want to see any more of his movies.

This is the kind of movie that would result from picking up a camcorder, rounding up a bunch of your friends and neighbours and going on a trigger happy "shooting spree" around the neighbourhood, and then getting to an editing table to see how much more fun you could have with it. This is the kind of movie that should be released on cell phones and You Tube, not in theatres where people spend precious time and money.

When a movie wants to be a "thriller" it should have something to thrill us with. If it wants to be a comedy, it needs to have better than mediocre comedic situations and actors, and it cannot be begging for the audience to forgive mediocrity all the time, especially when it wants to repeat things that didn't work the first time. The writing was terrible to start with, and no good movie ever came out of a bad script. This guy is no writer. It is as simple as that. That apart, you cannot have a jackass directing a movie that would take a genius to get right. Even copying another film takes some talent!

By no means am I suggesting that this movie could somehow have been rescued from the bowels of abject negligence of script, and an outrageous disrespect of audience sensibilities. It just winds its way tortuously through terrible scenes, half baked sequences, unconvincing events, utterly crappy music, all the way to an end that was a relief and escape from this unforgivable mess.

There are too many lows to list but one should sum up the quality of this movie experience I had - there were a total of nine people in the balcony section of the theatre before the intermission, and only five after! A lady walked in during the second half and made sure she switched off the fans below which there were nothing but empty seats!

If there is any way we could cut off the resources that flow to empty heads like the clown who made this stupid movie, that would be a huge service to humanity.