Spoilers ahead…
The narrative moves in fits and starts, and I couldn’t decide if it was due the screenplay itself or due to parts being trimmed off. Either way, it’s hard to root for anyone.
In an early scene in Sri Ganesh’s Kuridhi Aattam, a little girl named Kanmani is seen caring for plants. One of these plants is withered and someone says it’s a lost case. She says that the strong plants will survive. It’s the weak ones that need our help. Later in the film, we get this question: If someone we like commits a crime, should we care about the crime or the person we care about? You think these bits of philosophy will cohere into some sort of roadmap for the film. But it’s all very vague, like the fact that the hero Atharvaa is an atheist. You could leave this aspect of his personality and the story would be no different. And what about Atharvaa’s statement that he does not like to lose? It’s again something that appears to have been written to punch up just that moment. It adds nothing to the overall picture.
You can read the rest of the review here:
https://www.galatta.com/tamil/movie/review/kuruthi-aattam/
And you can watch the video review here:
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Baradwaj Rangan 
karzzexped
August 6, 2022
Another disappointment for me after Gulu Gulu. The obvious inadequacies of the editing and the writing aside, I couldn’t fathom what this story set out to achieve.
Was it about revenge? Or was it about the mindless vicious cycle of violence the protagonist gets himself into? Or was it about forgiveness?
Sure, on paper, the parallels should’ve sounded great. How the female lead sees herself in the small child and how their fathers’ sins come back to haunt both of them. Or how the game of Kabbadi plays out in a battlefield, and how the pre-intermission set piece plays out with two people being hunted and for a change the matriarch of the gang coming out of it alive.
I found the writing and particularly the screenplay, all over the place. It had no space to breathe. The jarring jump-cut style editing, the constant middling background score did not even let me, as a viewer, to absorb even a single scene or a single emotional beat.
I thought the protagonist’s angst at being orphaned due to Radhika’s indirect actions a missed opportunity to drive the whole movie. It would’ve made sense that his anger comes from this very tragedy, rather than him standing up for his friend getting slapped by Arivu and hence getting stuck in a game of cat and mouse.
However Radha Ravi stole the entire movie with a single scene set during the car driving scene. His textbook nonchalance and comedic timing in that scene was the single saving grace for me.
And I’m starting to really like how Kanna Ravi induces life into even a poorly written role as this.
And what was it about the villain and the hero constantly running at each other in slo-mo at every given opportunity? It almost made me wanna call this movie Kurudhi Ottam, instead of Kurudhi Aattam.
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Severus Snape
August 6, 2022
Oh, I am sad that this movie was such a disappointment. Not that I had expectations(I haven’t seen 8 Thottakkal), but I could relate to the director’s demeanour in BR’s interview. It almost felt like that is what I might grow up to be. 😦
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brangan
August 6, 2022
karzzexped: I know, right?
(SPOILERS AHEAD) The character writing was all over the place.
Take the sudden blooming of the Kanna Ravi-Atharvaa friendship. It felt so odd. So Kanna Ravi waited all these years to see Sakthi as a friend? And even if he did, what caused the change? Wouldn’t it have been better drama had Kanna Ravi always had to deal with Sakthi as a “secret friend”, because Arivu would get angry if he knew? (And don’t even get me started about the writing of Arivu.)
And other scenes were so random. Why should Kanna Ravi be at the restaurant where Atharvaa is meeting Vennila? In that same shirt? We instantly guess what’s going to happen.
Why preempt what’s going to happen to the sister with that “polyester” scene? Couldn’t they come up with something better than the villain conveniently confessing everything on the phone?
Does the heroine care about Atharvaa being a violent guy (because of her past), or doesn’t she? (She keeps changing her mind.)
Best of all was the very late decision to reveal what Radhika had done to Atharvaa’s family. We have an early scene — a flash cut — of something burning, almost like a day-dream. But nothing comes of it until that late reveal. And this is something HUGE. It’s treated so casually.
Things was actually a tough review to write. I had to come back, put the story/characters chronologically and then say “this was wrong” etc. Very mixed-up writing, and the sad thing is that it’s just a basic fix.
If you want to make a “massy” film, just give the hero his motives early on or have a chunky “Shankar flashback” that explains his motives.
Those are the only two ways to define a hero in this kind of cinema. I think Sri Ganesh was trying to withhold information and dole it all out in bits and pieces — doing something experimental. And it just wrecked any kind of connection we could have with these characters.
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brangan
August 6, 2022
PS: It’s a sign of Tamil cinema today that I have not been able top do an AskBR for months now. Usually, we’d get a lot of big movies that would get audiences interested enough to send questions and we’d have a tough time selecting 20-25 questions.
This year, there was only VIKRAM, and because we did a deep focus with Lokesh post the film, an additional AskBR seemed irrelevant.
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karzzexped
August 6, 2022
brangan: “Best of all was the very late decision to reveal what Radhika had done to Atharvaa’s family. ”
EXACTLY! This to me was THE fulcrum of the entire movie. It’s personal. It would’ve made so much sense if this is why Sakthi takes the Kabbadi games so seriously, the need to beat down Kanna Ravi and Arivu into submission at every given opportunity.
And re:Arivu – It’s sad. When the Vatsan said “Unakku varaadhu Arivu”, I laughed out loud because the guy couldn’t act. He was kicked around like a football, and even something as important as the decision to kill Sakthi isn’t made by him.
I also felt bad for the editor. I was speaking to one of my friends who is also an editor and he admitted that it does look like so much was shot and chopped out to achieve the 2 hours and 30 minutes length.
And yeah! It’s been a while since we’ve gotten a Tamil movie AskBR. Beast was the last one I guess.
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Sri Prabhuram
August 7, 2022
@karzzexped KGF 2 was actually the last one.
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Sri Prabhuram
August 7, 2022
Oh wait, my apologies. Didn’t realize you wrote “Tamil movie AskBR”.
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