E

Watched E yesterday. came back feeling very disappointed. this anti-hero thing is turning out to be the worst thing that happened to Tamil cinema in this decade.

Let's assume that Danush in Pudhupettai was the prototype for this behavior. I get a creeping feeling that the anti-hero in his complex form is just gonna keep evolving for years until we are sick and tired of him. he will just get more and more vulgar and obscene as time goes by. In E, the hero justifies his lack of morality by essentially saying that he grew up in poverty, had no father and the villains are all anyway much worse than him. Here are the laws of behavior of the anti-hero and their love interests.

1. Guys are either mafia henchmen or smalltime porukki. They cheat and murder as if to make up for the time when heroes in Tamil cinema never murdered.
2. Girls fall in love with the porukki because they sense that beneath the gruff exterior is a good man.
3. Girls place smartness over goodness.
4. The baddies are only slightly worse that the hero. they dont even have the moral centre that heroes have. we identify with the hero not because we see ourselves in him but because they simply spend more time onscreen than the villain.
5. Girls make half hearted attempts to reform the hero, but are never successful.
6. Women are more brazen than men when it comes to sex. males in the audience are supposed to feel thrilled by the sexual permissiveness of the on screen female.

Sigh, I yearn for the days when the hero was the knight in the shining armour and the heroine was the damsel in distress. I yearn for the days when violence and revenge was a romantic idea and was not so cinematically real.

To be fair, there are wonderful moments in the movie. But all in all it just got too sick for me. May be the movie wasn't funny enough or ironical enough or something.

A word on Devi Bala. Pathetic theatre. It's in the basement, where there is no mobile signal and, worse, no oxygen. the sound was bad and from the back row about four inches from the top of the screen was cut off. I suppose it will be better when the renovation in Devi comes to an end.