When did two award-winning performers turn mass heroes and what was the trigger? And, who among the younger lot will take their place?
BR: We started this series about a Telugu star (Prabhas) and we went on to discuss Tamil stardom (the Vijay/Ajith phenomenon), so this time I thought it would be interesting to visit the big heroes of Malayalam cinema and see how the star system works there. You’re clearly the expert, but from what I’ve seen in the eighties and early nineties, even the big names (the 2 M’s) were more like “character actors” than heroes. Why do you think the oversized stardom of Tamil and Telugu cinema did not make it to Kerala in a big way until the Narasimham era, the early 2000s?
VM: There are many reasons for that. For one, we’ve never really had MGR-NTR levels of stardom before Mammootty and Mohanlal. Our stars before that, Sathyan and Prem Nazir, created their niche in movies that may have been melodramatic, but never really over the top. They played real people in reasonably realistic movies. The main exception may have been Jayan, who was considered a legit action hero. Had his career been longer (he died during the filming of a movie) we may have seen some of those Narasimham-type “hero” films even before.
Read the rest of this article here: https://www.filmcompanion.in/features/malayalam-features/malayalam-movies-conversations-mammootty-mohanlal-and-their-long-delayed-journey-to-mass-baradwaj-rangan-fahadh-faasil/
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MANK
September 18, 2020
Malayalam cinema always had a small market, hence each film required the patronage of every section of the audience, especially the women and family audience, even the more intelligent\intellectual audience, to become profitable. So films are made with a certain amount of class and subtlety, eschewing all forms of OTT ism in depiction of sex, violence, heroism etc, except maybe in the case of comedy and melodrama. The section of the audience that prefer the Tamil Telugu brand of OTT star driven cinema would patronize films from those languages. As I mentioned in my own piece on my love affair with films, Tamil and Telugu films have a huge market in Malayalam. Those are our guilty pleasures . For some substantial movie watching we preferred Malayalam cinema. But by the end of the 90’s., With the proliferation of cable channels with their mega serials and variety entertainment programs, the women and family audience completely stopped going to the cinema. Now the only audience left were the youth who were more into other language cinema. To interest them in Malayalam films, the makers started designing the films in the mold of Tamil , Telugu and Hindi films. Just as the films, the audience also started following the audience in other languages: hence the proliferation of fan clubs, OTT heroism, star wars palabhishekams and all that nonsense. Narasimham released in 2000 set the tone for the entire decadent decade. It was only after that generation passed and a new generation of filmmakers and audience who grew up on the great films of 80s and 90s ( ironically thanks to the same channels that destroyed Malayalam cinema to an extent and who used to show these films on a loop) that Malayalam films regained much of it’s lost glory.
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H. Prasanna
September 18, 2020
It will be interesting to see Parvathy Thiruvothu or Manju Warrier do mass films as protagonists.
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Sreehari
September 18, 2020
MANK, it’s a romantic notion held by many (and I heard Anjali Menon getting this all wrong as well, in her interview with Rangan) that Malayalam Cinema slipped in the 2000s because it failed to keep up to the standards of the 80s and 90s. The plan fact remains that 2000s was so bad for Malayalam Cinema because it couldn’t improve upon the 90s.
2000s was spent largely on regurgitating many of the formulae that came up in the 90s — and Narasimham is an easy target; look at what happened to someone like Sreenivasan, who became a second-rate writer in the 2000s dishing out many of the same formulae that defined his screenplays in the 1990s.
Or look at a filmmaker like Sathyan Anthikad who really, really must get out of that rut of projecting the Malayali youth as someone who’s inherently aimless, lazy, and kind of a kook — it boils my blood when I hear people speak of a film like Njaan Prakashan in the same breath as a Maheshinte Prathikaram (I think it’s an insult to a film like Maheshinte to be compared to a shoddy work like Prakashan).
So if Malayalam Cinema did “pacha pidikkal” (post 2016, if you ask me), it’s not because Malayalam Cinema started to revisit its 1990s’ phase (And this is what bothers me about this PPT style reviewing — this “referring back to Slide 2”), it’s because it DEVELOPED AN ANXIETY OF INFLUENCE for the 1990s.
Malayalam Cinema evolved post 2015 because that is when it finally started to think beyond Malayalam Cinema of the1990s.
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MANK
September 18, 2020
Malayalam Cinema evolved post 2015 because that is when it finally started to think beyond Malayalam Cinema of the1990s
I don’t agree with that at all. A lot of the post 2015 films have their roots in the films of 80s and 90s. Obviously they have to be revised, updated, modernised or whatever to fit in and appeal to the times
What happened with sreenivasan , lohithadas sibi malayil etc in 00s is quite natural, that kind of regression in their creativity has happened to a lot of the greats in Indian and world cinema. They all ran out of ideas . Though I always felt that there has always been an element of dishonesty even in the best of Sreenivasan screenplays. He was never above propogating certain stereotypes and wrong ideas for commercial viability.
BTW I thoroughly disliked njan Prakashan
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krishikari
September 20, 2020
How cute is Mammootty in this silly role in 2009. Plus the revival of this old classic.
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