 It's hot. Yeah, it is. It's hotter than... Big bee's nuts? I don't know about that. They're spicy, that's what I'm talking about. Yeah, yeah. Sweaty. Josh! Dude, it's up Corbin. Sup, people! I'm moving false. Instagram, Twitter, Forge, Instagram. Twitter, Forge, Instagram. Hey, you moved the butt plant. Because I touched it and she's like, nobody needs to touch my butt plant. It goes, stays up there. Yeah. So where it's supposed to be, down through like getting watered? No, she moves plants all the time. Oh, and she just wanted to touch the butt. Just like in Finding Nemo. I don't know if you know what we're referring to. Today we're doing a movie review. It's actually our Patreon request of the month. Name it on Patreon. It's the Tamil film Nayakan. The 1980s. Nayakan, right? Am I saying it wrong? Yeah, Nayakan. Nayakan. Yeah. Okay. No, that was right. I mean, question. 1987 film directed by Mani Ratnam. Who? We've watched a Mani Ratnam film before. We've never seen anything he's ever done. Composed by Rajah, sir. Who? No, he's done a few things. Never heard any of his music. Starring Kamal Hassan. Who? No, he's done. Yeah, he's done very little. Barely done. Very, very little. In an unknown film. Yes. Yes. Obviously it's going to be a hundred minutes for the review. It came out in 1987. The only time we do non-spoilers, or if something just came out. So, if you haven't watched it, go watch it and come back. Or else you're going to be spoiled like the little naughty boys that you are. Or girl, or gender nonconforming. Whatever. Rick, your initial thoughts, please. Okay. Low... how do I begin? The reason I begin the way I begin is... How do I count the ways? Exactly. How do I count the ways? When you hear things before you've seen a film. Like, greatest film in Indian cinematic history. Greatest performance by any actor in Indian history. A masterpiece for the ages and things of that nature. It always leaves me with a sense of... Because I feel like if I don't walk away. Saying that. Especially with a fan base that has been particularly kind to me. But I'll never cease to be honest. So bring on the hate folks and tell me how stupid I am. Because I just... I found it to be okay. I didn't love it. Trust me, when I say it's okay. I'm not saying I just like... I have a lot of things that I can say about it that I think are good and meritorious. But as far as a takeaway, it did not live up to everything I had heard about it. In the same way that... I'm not saying this is a comparable film or even comparable in terms of its place in cinematic history for the country. How do you feel about Titanic? I don't like Titanic. Right. And how many people consider Titanic to be one of the greatest motion pictures ever made in American history? A bunch of dumb people. There you go. But you don't like Titanic. I do not. So for me, I have a lot of things I'm going to talk about that I liked about it. But I'm not going to be jumping up and down the way I think everybody is hoping I would. I actually agree. I thought it was a good film. I did also hear those things before and it's probably not fair to the film, honestly. Truly. It's not fair to the film because obviously we've heard about Kamal Hassan for so long. And all I've heard is this is a great film, Kamal Hassan's best performance ever. Right. And although I'm not saying... I thought he had a good performance and I thought the film was good. Yes. But did it live up to the greatness? For me, no. It's mid-range for me in terms of Money Rottenham's films. I absolutely agree. I would still take Bombay and Roja. I know you probably wouldn't take Roja. No, no, no. I actually would. As far as my wanting to go back and watch it again. And then obviously Sarapathy, I think, I would put that above it as well. So it would probably fall mid-range. I'd put it above Dilsey and I'd put it above Guru. I think there's another one we saw in that. Yeah, it's absolutely for me. I think it's above Dilsey and Guru. I think it's mid-range for me. But that's not taking anything away from it. I think the biggest thing was just when you hear stuff like, I'm sure there's people that can watch, honestly, films like The Godfather Now and the fact that it's so blown out of proportion even though that is a great film. If you hear something so much, especially of an older film, because there's dated stuff in older films, it's never going to live up to you. People hate Star Wars and we think those films are absolutely masterpieces. But if you didn't grow up with it, you're going to have a different perspective. All that being said, I think it was a good film. It just didn't hit the greatness level that I was hoping it would for me. But let's get into it. I thought Kamal San actually put on a very good performance. Very good performance. There was some parts of it that I personally, if I was the director or the actor himself, I probably would have done differently to not be compared to certain characters. Even though, once I'm prefaced again, I don't think he was doing an impression of anybody. No, nor do I think. I've heard some people who've compared this and said that it's like a copy of The Godfather. No, not at all. That's actually kind of insulting to the film. That's like saying that Goodfellas is a copy of The Godfather. Yeah, I know. It's a gangster film, so it will be compared. Which is probably one of the issues I took with this performance, is that even though it might be the best performance we've seen, even though we've only seen like three films of his. Right, it's not really fair. But if you did a boxing film like Tuffin, and then he comes out, it's going to be compared to Rocky. But if you did a voice like... Yeah, if he said yo. Yeah, it's unfair to you, which is why if you do like a remake of a character, they always say go the complete opposite direction. Joaquin Phoenix. Because it won't be fair to you, because you will be compared regardless, still to that person. Yeah, it's also a matter of just choosing to go into a direction where you recognize the incarnation, and that's why I said Joaquin Phoenix. I was so happy as for you, and we found out he was doing it, because we know about him as an actor, that he's not the kind of actor who's going to do anything that's inspired by or a copy of. He's going to go deep within himself, and find what this character is within the script, and he's going to give you something that you've never seen before. Which great actors do. So what I'm talking about with this, even though like I said, I think this is a very good performance by Kamala Osan. There are certain things, I don't know if it was director, or if it was him, even though I read, he did try to do a bunch of stuff differently in terms of the way he carried himself. You can see the work he put in. Yeah, and once again, I don't think he was copying, but the fact that they gave him this kind of, when he got older, gnarled voice. There was a segment of the aged part, where it started to lean so heavily toward an affectation that I agree with you. I would have told him, or either, I don't know if the director told him to, or not. I would have, me personally, said, just do something different, because it's going to be unfair to you, because somebody's going to see this gangster role and be like, he's trying to do... Well, and probably not, you can do those kind of things when you have an audience that the predominant amount of them maybe haven't seen the Godfather. The audience for this, their thought might have been, and we may see something similar, for example, and I'm not saying this is a comparable actor, so don't get your panties in an uproar, but when we see the remake of Forest Gump, I don't know how much of... I'm hoping Amir Khan doesn't take any of what Tom Hanks is. I probably have the same issue. I don't want to see Tom Hanks' Forest Gump, or see Amir Khan's Forest Gump. And I did think that, for the most part, he was good. There weren't points, again, the hype we had heard, where I was anticipating some moments as an actor, where I was going to be so drawn and captivated by it that it was going to be spellbinding. And it did. It did reach the level of being a spellbinding performance for me that I was anticipating. And I do... The one thing I do almost feel a defensiveness about is this film, people should not say that this is a copy of the Godfather. We do know that this is specifically inspired by a real-life man whose name I'm not going to pronounce appropriately, but an actual mobster. But when you read about his life, this is one of the things that I, in the story, would have loved to have seen. I saw this about him, and again, that he had, among the many things he did, he used the slums as a safe haven to expand his criminal activities in an underworld empire of extortion, kidnapping, contract-killing, land encroachment, illegal gambling, and liquor-dense. I would have liked to have seen that. That's one of the things for him where I knew what he was doing with the docks, but I didn't see an underworld empire that this guy created. No, it was that he was loved because he took care of everybody. Right, in the same way that Escobar was loved in Colombia. Yeah, so that's probably one of the other issues is that they could have expanded it and made me... Because they covered a large part of his life. Right. And it could have easily been done in two parts, so you could have cared for more characters more, as opposed to like... Do like a wasp or one and two kind of thing. Yeah, because they kind of jumped, and then they introduced characters, and then I'm like, okay, cool. I just, I didn't too much care about almost anyone, even though I was like, okay, this is good. I liked it. Nobody had really a bad performance. Everybody, I thought, did really well. Cinematography was really nice. It's just, I would have preferred them to take a little more time. Me too. I could have cared more. I would have liked to have cared more as well. Like I did, and that's a great comparison, like I did for the characters in Gangs of Wasp. Yeah. Yeah, because I found myself and granted that it's two parts, but it's one film. There were aspects of gangs that... And I know many of you would say, well, there wouldn't be a Gangs of Wasp if it wasn't for this, and there's no denying that. Yeah. It's the differentiation of the connectivity we had, and it granted we are also outsiders who don't live in the culture, and that's a huge contributing factor to us connecting oftentimes with the story, but that's not an excuse. Because, as you know, we connect to a boatload of films and it's not from our culture. I thought the score was really good. Roger, sir. Yeah. I love the very memorable the, I don't know what it's called, but it's the theme. It's the theme. Yeah. It's a very memorable, as, like if you hear that if I hear that music, it's going to remind me of nothing, but in that film. Yeah. And that's what you want in a score with little touches throughout. I saw a review someone gave with a film who said wisely so don't remember who it was because I saw several reviews about the film getting different input from different people and said that it of in and of itself is almost telling a secondary narrative throughout the story, and I agree. It's a complex score that for me is probably my favorite thing from the film. Yeah. Is the score? Yeah. I like the song, the Holy Song, I thought was really really nice. Yeah. I liked that a lot. Some of the supporting cast I thought did really well. I enjoyed the end part of the film even though I saw it coming. Yeah, I did too. I saw it coming, but I liked that. I thought there was a lot of good moments. It was dated in a lot of areas even though the quality of this video was a thousand percent better than we had in Thotapathy. Yeah. The quality of the film was better even though it was older. Even though it was older. So they clearly didn't take care of the Thotapathy film. Right. Which is really sad. Very sad. But the quality of it, so I thought the cinematography of the whole thing was really really nice. It was dated and the fact that if I'm watching a gangster film, I want that five months. And this just, it didn't fulfill that need for me. Because they would pan away most of the time. Probably due to budgetary or technical reasons because they probably money rotten them was probably like I can't show it how I want to. It also could have been toward sensitivities because that's popped up quite a bit. But I even thought Thotapathy had more violence. It did. And they showed more of it. Even though it's maybe it's an older film and it's what they could do then. He had more money. Don't know. Because it does cost money to do it correctly. VFX is not a cheap thing to do. Nor is good just like if you need to have a bunch of squibs and have them go off the right way. That's also an investment you have to make. In The Godfather, when Sunny gets, well if you haven't seen The Godfather I'm not going to... How much The Godfather? Let's just say there's moments where people get shot up and they had to use a lot of squibs. If you don't know what a squib is, it's a small explosive device that has fake blood in it that's sewn into the fabric of clothing so that you see the person getting shot up. Another film that it's comparative to and I understand the comparison as well. Inspired by and it's comparable to and it's in the conversation is Once Upon a Time in America. Did you see that film? Yeah. So it really is I understand it being in the conversation of great gangster films like Gangs like Bombay. Like Godfather Once Upon a Time in America but the things that I had read about this being that was probably the biggest thing once again it's not fair when a film is that hyped you just like sometimes it does come to fruition I mean Gangs was very hyped Gangs lived up to the hype We saw the first one I think we liked it but then the second one is the one that made you love it That's the entire film That makes sense But obviously that's a lot that's a lot newer as well and so it didn't have the dated aspect but it doesn't always happen and granted we're talking about those films they didn't have the kind of hype that I can't think of another film This had the hype of the film and Kamal's performance once again he had a good performance like I said this might be the best performance I've seen from him it's just I maybe expecting even more My walk away from this is without question you watch this film and what you recognize watching it is that guy's a good actor that guy's solid you don't walk away from it what we were expecting like you do when you see something like there will be blood or Gangs of New York where you walk away and all you do afterwards is talk about what did I just watch Daniel Lewis do it wasn't that experience for us and the cinematography Money Rottenham he's a good filmmaker there's no denying that Money Rottenham is a very good filmmaker that would be my second favorite part aside from the music is the way he directed it in cinematography and I had to focus really hard and I'm sure I missed a lot because there was so much I was frustrated by because I'm like what am I missing what am I not getting because it wasn't living up to the hype but I did watch I think it was I don't again I don't remember who pointed it out but someone pointed out in one of the reviews how so many shots were done with frames within frames so like you would get him in a window I think that's one of the sequences when he looks down and they've told him that his son has died and you have it perfectly framed in the way that Money Rottenham had the shot framed was so that the actual window in doorway was symmetrically framed within the frame and that he does that consistently to convey the sense of even though this man is living out this envisage of as long as it's ultimately making a good it doesn't matter what you do but that that's actually not a freeing thing he's imprisoned by that decision that was pretty high level filmmaking I liked his moments with his daughter I liked his moments with the kid at the end I thought those the book ends of the kids is really nice in the film the moral message of the film is great the fact that he's like I don't know if I'm a good or bad yeah that's really great and so there's like I said there's a lot to like it's just it's one of those I think it's one of those situations where a film might have been just over hyped and then it just I know people are just going to take this as we didn't like it and that's just not the case we both I think like the film or you didn't get it yeah like we think it's a good film I just I would not put it even in I would like I said in terms of Monty Rotten I'm just comparing him to himself I'd probably it's my fourth favorite of hits yeah I'd say yeah if someone were to ask me two things the first thing they were going to say hey I'm watching I want I'm going to watch a nike and and I've heard a lot of things about it what do you think my response would be watch it but please don't read all of the hype yeah don't expect the greatest motion picture you've ever experienced in your life yeah appreciate a well-made gangster film yeah that's what I would tell them the same thing with Monty Rotman I would say as far as a Monty Rotman films concerned for me it may become your favorite but for me yeah it's like you said at the outset I absolutely agree it would be upper mid range for me in terms of my favorites of his yeah yeah so take that as you will I hope you enjoyed the real hope you covered everything in it that you wanted us to I know sometimes with people we forget stuff and people are like you didn't talk about of course sorry we tried to like E.J. Ross was probably one of them but obviously Monty Rotman and Kamala Son have tons of more films and I know there were other actors in the film that we could have talked about but we're also respectful of the time we spend yeah and there's moments we spend talking about other aspects and the other aspects we can't because we're not going to be on here for 90 minutes talking about every single possible thing I think how long should we use like 35 minutes probably I know but most of it's a rant JUSH!