A few years back, one of our friends from Chennai got us a bunch of DVDs including one featuring three Rajinikanth films Thillu Mullu, Ranga and Moondru Mugam.

For some reason, the DVD wouldn’t play in our Panasonic home-theater.

So we kept it aside and completely forgot about it until we recently got an Acer Revo PC.

At a loose end this morning, we hooked up the Acer Revo PC to our Samsung HDTV via the HDMI port and then hooked up an external Asus DVD player to the Revo PC.

We then popped the Rajnikanth DVD into the Asus DVD player and, voila, it worked.

Alas, unfortunately it worked.

Total Nonsense

What a misfortune, what a horrid trial the sordid movie turned out to be.

* A film like Moondru Mugam can only be made in a land bereft of all aesthetic sense. A nation, where art and fart are synonyms.

* A film like Moondru Mugam can only be watched and reviewed after we’re fortified with a quadruple dose of gin in our system as we currently are. 😉

* A film like Moondru Mugam can only receive high accolades in a benighted country like India (Rajni got the Tamil Nadu government award for this garbage) where movie-goers are for the most part still two rungs below Homo Sapiens in the evolution ladder.

From the opening scene when Arun (Rajnikanth #1)  dressed in a saint’s saffron robe descends the steps of the aircraft to the final moments after the weird fights on the ship, Moondru Mugam is a movie that screams its amateur status to the world in one unendurable frame after another.

Oh, we forgot. Rajnikanth has a triple role in the movie. Each one vying to be more unimpressive, more irritating than the other.

Bizarrely Asinine Story

The story, if you schmucks insist on the summary, is of twins separated at birth, one Arun growing up in a rich family, recently returned from the U.S. after 10 years of studies there and the other an ex-jailbird Johnny (Rajnikanth #2) living with his poor aunt Mary and given to boozing and petty crimes.

The separation of the twins follows their parents’ death, the mother in child-birth and Alex Pandian, the father (Rajnikanth #3), an upright, brave police officer is stabbed to death by a villainous character Ekambaram.

Of the three Rajinikanths in Moondru Mugam, the police officer Alex Pandian with his lips curled upward and walking strutting like a peacock is probably the worst.

As if this nonsense is not bad enough, we have Arun’s father Ramanathan (Thengai Srinivasan) engaging Reporter Rekha (Radhika) to get his American-returned-turned saint son into a normal human being setting the stage for the romantic interludes.

Romantic Nonsense

The Radhika-Rajinikanth romantic interactions in the beginning are beyond silly and beyond endurance of a normal human being, particularly the shaving scene, the bathroom episode and the change of clothes. Yeeks!

Except for the Devamrutam Jeevamrutam song on the beach, the remaining are not worth spending even one nanosecond over.

As for the picturization of any of the songs, it’s the usual simian antics common to Tamil movies for the past five decades.

Just like the other parts of this abomination, the fight/stunt scenes too are horribly amateurish in Moondru Mugam.

That this piece of shit (released in 1982) directed by a buffoon called A.Jagannathan made it to the screens is a testament to the clowns lording over Kollywood.

  Moondru Mugam, Radhika, Rajinikanth, Shivaji Rao Gaekwad