 Snoop-D-O-Double-G. Snoop-Doggy-Dog, come out and do it, Doggy, with me. Because I'm wearing blue. No, you were in the bandana blue. Hey, welcome back to our stupid rags, with the units of Corbin. I'm Snoop Dogg. And you can follow us on Instagram, Twitter for more juicy content. Hello. Patreon. Patreon. Twitter account, subscribe if you haven't, hit the like button. You know who you are. Who are they? Tyreek. Oh. It's my homies that also wear blue. Yikes. I don't even know if the buzz-in crypts are showing around, actually. They're still around. They're just, they're very, very low-key. Well, that's good. Yeah. We don't need any more high-profile stuff going on. We have enough white people shooting. That's true. Yeah, we don't need any more of that. They're probably sitting back going, Damn, look at these domestic terrorists. Crazy. Anyways, today we're doing a movie with you. And it's of the 1994 Tamil film Madhanadi. Madhanadi. So directed by Santana Bharati. Written dialogue by Kamal Hassan. And a story by him. Rocky Rangarajan. It also did a dialogue as well. Composed by Raja Sir and then starring Kamal Hassan and there's a few other people, but this is a Kamal Hassan star film. Yeah. It came out in 1994, so it's gonna be 100 cents for review. So if anyone wants to go watch it, I think we saw it on Amazon. I believe it's where we saw it. Yes, it's on Amazon. So you can go watch it. Rick, your initial thoughts, please. Initial thoughts, obviously we'll start off with the things that we liked about it, but ultimately for me, it was not my favorite at all. I like the story, but as far as the entertaining and engaging or educating and enlightening, it was, it did improve in the second half. I had messaged Corbin while we were watching it that the first half was really, I don't mean this to sound insulting, but it was boring for me. It was slow. I was trying to keep myself engaged and stay interested in what was going on. After the first hour, it did get better and ultimately I think the story is a very good story, but I think it suffers from a lot of other things that for me personally, it's a one and done. I agree with the first half or the first 45 to an hour of I was, I was like, okay, Kamal's doing good. Yeah, he's always gonna be good. Doing good, but I just like, what's the story here? Obviously you figured out why as you went along, exactly the story. But it's a long drive home. Yeah, it is a long film, especially being older as well. I think if it was made now, the obviously would be a lot more crisp and... And we understand that a lot of films in India were this length because that was the expectation and you want to give everybody the quote unquote bang for their buck. It's just not a really good... I got much more engaged though in the second half. Comparatively, I did. Especially obviously once it got into the prison and you've kind of figured out, I mean, who can't get behind, chop your arm off to kill a pedophile? I was gonna say, when I was staring off in the distance and I thought, wait, that's a spoiler. I was gonna say, you know, some things in life cost you an arm and a leg. Other things just cost you a left arm. It's true. Yeah, the last 20 minutes between letting a pedophile walk that raped your daughter and cutting off your arm, I think we can all agree on what you're gonna do. Yeah, it'd be cool, but it's a great story to tell. How'd you lose your arm? Well, I was protecting my daughter from a pedophile. You should see the other guy. He's dead now. Yeah, he's dead. So yeah, towards the second half, I got much more interested and it got just, it got a lot more engaging with the story and what would happen. I think a lot of it maybe has to do with how dated some of the film was. I'm sure the budget was really low. It is nice that obviously I really appreciated the story of it. The story and Kamal are the best things about it. Kamal obviously loves doing interesting stories. He doesn't like doing stories that just have this bland. You've seen it before. Right. There's a lot going on in this film. There is. When she was watching it, she was like, why does it seem like bad stuff just happens to him? Yeah. Every film that goes online. It's true. This is actually, in terms of how much bad stuff happens to him, in terms of like the Chandra, or whatever, the Chandanini bar, in terms of just how just bad stuff keeps happening to this thing. Let's talk about Hey Rom. He has a lot of bad stuff happening over there too. Does Kamal sound like having happy things happen to him? I think he really identifies with a good person having really bad things happen to them and how far they'll be pushed and what they do to, will they make choices where it's still a righteous decision to do what they're gonna do, or did they give in to the darkness inside of them and fight the evil with their own warped evil? He's very much interested in that human aspect. He definitely kept you engaged in the second half and obviously, you know why all the stuff happened in the first half of the doing and foreshadowing and build up and all that kind of stuff. Of course. You can debate whether that was necessary fully or not, but, and then it became multiple different things. It became a prison drama, prison action film, a thriller, what was the film with Liam Neeson, the Taken or whatever. Yeah, Taken. Any of the ones where you've done something to my kid and I'm gonna get you back for it. Yeah, essentially. It became a whole bunch of different things. It's very, I guess. Why is the door open? I don't know. We must not have latched it. I don't know if that's messing up the audio. Yeah. We have a very small room. Yes, very. But yeah. Oh yeah, Ash told me she was, oh, I didn't get back to her. She was thinking she might come join us today. Oh yeah. That was last night, but it wasn't that day happening. Yeah, I told her last night, tell me if you're coming anyway. Anyways, it's very Indian, that aspect of it, because Indian films have, just like, because when I reviewed that with my cinema club, somebody's like, so what genre is it? And they're like, all of them. All of them. I feel like that's a very, I know it's called Masala, and I know that wouldn't tentatively be a Masala. This doesn't fall into that. Right. But Indian films often, especially older ones, tend to have every emotion, every kind of genre. All genre blended in a single film. And it's an endearing thing. To have happened, I love, obviously it caught me off guard many times, because when the grandma died, right? What happened to those kids? I was like, especially her. I was like, are we really just about to put her into the sex trade? Is this man literally about to rape a 13-year-old? Like what the fuck is going on? It's like, and that's such a change from what happened in the first hour, and I don't know how it was in the film. And I will, obviously, one of the things about the film for its time is... Definitely did different stuff, for sure, for the time. For the time, and the Indian audience, that's one of the things that Kamal Hassan is known for since like his beginning films, is that he doesn't think about whether or not this is gonna be a commercial success or the audiences are necessarily gonna wanna go see it. I wanna tell a compelling story that I believe anybody who wants to hear a compelling story is gonna wanna see and has a level of artistic merit to it. So when you compare it to the other films of the day, I understand the fact that it's quite revolutionary. Yeah, in 1994, what came out? Think about the stuff that was coming out in 94 in Indian cinema. Is it DDLJ? Was it 94, 95? In that ballpark? That's the ballpark we're talking. But also, that was Hindi, so I don't know, what else was coming out in Tamil? When did Bombay and those ones come out? I don't remember the dates. But for the films that people would have known that are going on, this definitely falls outside the- Like I said, that's Wheelhouse. The overall story, and then obviously Kamal, which is both Kamal, the story is Kamal and the acting is Kamal, he's an artist, right? And so he doesn't wanna do the same thing that he's seen before. He wants to do something different. He wants to tell a different story. And you love that about the man. Yeah. And then let's talk about his performance, and then we'll get into some other stuff that we had a little more issues with, obviously. But he, this is his vehicle, right? Yeah. This is, he's the 100% star of this. There are other characters, but they're very, very small. They're quite expandable. Although I did appreciate his wife, or love interest, who became his wife. He really loves, I'm gonna talk about Kamal here, he loves putting authentic good relationships between a male and a female on screen. He's, that's one of my favorite things about him. I know we've talked about sexuality, we've talked about that, but I feel like he likes to put like a more Western, I'm not saying it's like, totally a Western thing, but the fact that, you know, loving, kissing, I want you, I want like- It very much is, I mean, and it is Western because that was a lot of the influence that he, and even Satyajit Rai, talked about in terms of wanting their storytelling to be more like that because if you look at what was going on when you talk about intimacy and sexual relationships, Hollywood was making films like Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf in the 60s, and Midnight Cowboy in the 1960s, and then in the 1970s, Taxi Driver. So you were getting very real, very raw, very mature content, controversial. It's why we came up with a rating system, and there were none until Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, and then technically Midnight Cowboy was rated X, and then because it was so commercially successful, the producers asked the rating system to please give it an R so we can distribute it to theaters and people can see it, and they did. It was not edited. The rating system just went, okay, fine, it's popular, go ahead, and they gave it a rated R, even though it was exactly the same film when they gave it an X. That's awesome. So I only mentioned that to say when you make that comparison of what was going on in the West, it's very true, and Kamal Hassan would be one of those people who was influenced as his most, I mean, you're influenced by good cinema. It wasn't only the West that he was influenced by, like if you talk to Anya Ragh, it's everywhere. His DVD collection is everywhere, same thing with Satyajit Rai. He would talk about everywhere, not just America. So that's, I agree, this is a film I can appreciate for its time and its place in the same way, this might be an unfair comparison because you're using technology and stuff, but if you watch the original King Kong, it's a one and done. You can appreciate what it meant for cinema in its day, and you can say, I appreciate, and I think that's a great story, but I'm not watching that again. That's how I felt for this one. I might watch the second half parts again if it was just on, or maybe I'd appreciate the first a little more since I know the story, but yeah, the second half was definitely the much, much stronger part, but his performance as well. His performance is, of course, it was good. He's just, he's believable, he's grounded, and there's multiple moments between him and his wife, or love interest, multiple moments where he just broke down, like obviously at the end with his daughter, which obviously you can just, he's always emotionally available. Empathized with, and then, it's kind of hard not to really empathize with what happened to him and his family. And he never does anything cliche. I believe it's justified and it's in the moment. Yeah, he's, even though there's nothing, like I wouldn't say this is a standout thing where you would want to see it for his amazing acting, but that you don't always get that in every film. He's just solid. I think it was really, really good. I did appreciate a lot of the moments in like the prison, especially when Kamal and his wife were looking at each other and what they did with that cinematically. Yeah, that's probably one of my favorite moments. Of course, with Rajasar's score. Yeah, I said out loud, I said that's really nice. I also understand that this film was the first time an Indian film had partnered with Avid Technologies, which at the time was the forefront of changing the world of editing from actual manual editing of 35 millimeter film to doing digital editing and digital, anything digital, but especially the editing aspect of both sound and visuals. So I don't know what to look for in that. I don't, my friend Kenny, who's an editor, would know what to look for and how that is. But again, groundbreaking Kamal Hassan wanting to do things that are stretching every aspect. I was looking and thinking maybe even some of the editing. He might have, he does everything. He might have. But I also heard, and I don't know if you heard this too, that his idea for the story kind of came about when somebody he knew or like one of the people who worked for him was conspiring to kidnap his kids. What? I read that in a story about the background of this, that that's part of what inspired him to write the story about this guy's kids being taken from him. Now, they never went through with it, but he had found out that was the case. Now, I may have, that may be out of nowhere, but I, Wow, that's awful if that is the... Yeah, wouldn't surprise me a person at that level. I mean, you got to be careful with... Can't think of something worse really than what really happened to this man. You can, I can completely sympathize with him and wanting to go and take revenge. Absolutely. And he's like, I know I'm here, but these people are still alive and they're not gonna leave us alone. And he raped my child. I'm gonna go kill him. I guess India was eight years or something for... There's another aspect of this. What do they call it? Here we call it time for good behavior, but there's another word for it in this film. Is it over and over again? Yeah, I forget what they say. It's not restitution, but it's a thing you can lose, which he obviously does for good behavior, which wasn't really good behavior. It's more like, do what you're told and pay the bribes and you'll get out. Essentially. Essentially. I did like that tension of, with the guards and him finally saying, I can't take any more of that. There was a lot of L.A. guards saying, I fell, I like that. I think it was just desserts. There was a lot of this movie that I actually really appreciated just artistically in terms of what it meant for the time. It's just, I think it might have fallen under also the time of the style of films that was made in terms of the length and especially in the first half, the pacing being extremely slow and uninteresting almost for a while. Yeah, I felt like there was nothing happening in terms of, I didn't even feel like it's okay if things don't happen, like in Opu, where you're just being left in a moment but you can sense that there's an intentionality behind that? Well, now that I've seen the whole thing, obviously you see the intention obviously is just, I just, in the moment before I had obviously seen it, obviously you can have, in retrospect, you can see everything but in the moment, it was just, Me too, me too. It was, I kind of had to stop it a few times and be like, okay, here we go. Get back into this. Yeah, someone said, what does this fall for you? Like if someone had never seen Kamal Hassan's movies, I would say for its time, there's a lot in this that people praise and they will get awards for. At the time, probably would have liked it a little. Oh yeah, because, well, it's like anything I look at from, like if I look at something I saw from 30 years ago, most of the time I look at it now with an excitement and go, oh yeah, that's not as good as I remembered. Just because of the time. So yeah, I would say I understand why this movie's loved and if you're a die-hard Kamal Hassan who saw it when it came out, I'm not gonna tell you it's a bad movie. I'm just gonna tell you for me, I wasn't engaged and entertained the way I thought I might be and I won't watch it again but that doesn't mean it's not, you don't, you're gonna like it. Rick hates Kamal Hassan. There you go. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Also, let all, let all of the hate just go off. I don't know where any of it lands anymore. It's really very liberating. It's wonderful. It's a quite wonderful thing. I do wanna talk about Raja Serr's composition. I thought it was actually very subtle for a Raja Serr composition. Especially for the era too. At some moments I forgot there was a score. Like there's a fight sequence where there was no score and halfway through the fight sequence I was like, how often do you get fight sequences with zero music going on. We're just getting the cooch-tooch-tooch-tooch-tooch-tooch-tooch-tooch-tooch. And then moments of score that are so, the only time I sensed that and I think this is both his choice and also the director's choice. They brought the forefront, the music was the forefront when they needed to, thematically. Like the moments, like you said, that beautiful moment where he sees her through the bars and then the lighting changes on the bars and the people disappear from behind them. That's a really nice moment. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I enjoyed his score behind it. I had a very subtle for, I feel, Rajasar. I agree. And the time and the stunt work, I feel for the day was good. Was it? For one-on-one close up for the day. I've seen way worse stunt work for early 2000s Indian cinema. No, this was for the day. This was, in fact- It's not surprising with Kamala's, huh? Exactly. No, that would be one of the things that's a story, his performance in the stunt work, score as well as the stunt work. Those are the things I was very impressed because most of the stunt work was small and that's where you can usually ruin it the most. And most of it, very nice choices. I'm sure it was his as well as the director's. You know, it's really, you should never have a big miss. And so an easy way to do that is to frame the camera rather than have it be this way, you have it be this way, so that he could be five feet away from me but it still looks like he hit me. They did a very good job with that. Yeah, totally agree. Anyways, let us know what you thought about the film. What should be our next Kamala Hassan and Tamo film that we should watch if you haven't seen our other Kamala. I think we've seen, this is probably six. Six? In that ballpark. Somewhere around there for Kamala Hassan. We're getting there. We're getting there. We're almost seeing this entire catalog. And we've actually seen a film of his now in theaters when it released. Vikram! Vikram! Let us know what the next Kamala Hassan film should be down below.