Majority of us used to watch other language films. We can see many exciting thrillers in English. Final Destination series, Phonebooth, Italian Job etc are some examples. These films do not have a long story. But they have a tight screenplay and direction. Thus they make us thrilled till the end. There are some good thrillers in Hindi also… Humraaz, Naqaab etc.. There comes some inspired versions in tamil also. Recently made Pachaikili Muthucharam was inspired from Derailed.
But as far as malayalam is concerned, we have some suspense movies. CBI series and some films in the same category, that have a suspense in the climax. But they all are investigative stories. ‘4the people’ was a moderate thriller. Santhosh Sivan has made an attempt with Aparichithan, but the movie didnt reach upto mark. I dont think that we need a big budget for making a thriller in malayalam. If we consider the movie Phonebooth, we can see that around 80% of the film’s duration is only a single scene, in which the hero speaks from a phonebooth. Movies of such genre can be made in malayalam also with out spending much money. We can create our own scripts in malayalam other than adopting from other languages.
We should make exciting thrillers also for the prosperous future of malayalam cinema… We have vibrant youngsters like Prithviraj, Narain, Indrajith etc….. Only need appropriate screenplay and director.
By the seond half of 90’s there was some nice youngster movies got released. Sibi Malayil’s “Summer In Bethlehem” was one of the noticed ones in 1997. It was very refreshing script from Ranjith, amazing music from Vidya Sagar and well planned art direction. Eventhough it didnt have a great story, the movie was very entertaining to watch. The stars Suresh Gopi and Jayaram was more young that time to show justice to the characters. The song picturisation was excellent especially the opening “ethrayo janmamayi” and the dance number “confusion”. Well made sets like farm house, fences, and apt colouring made the movie more colourful.
Pranayavarnangal was also got noticed for its music, but didn’t came upto Summer. After the 90’s era, Sibi Malayil got faded. Eventhough Kamal made some youngsters attempts by 2000-2002, only Niram came upto an average mark. Ranjith came up with Nandanam, but we turned for Super star movies after that. Then there happened the multi starrer super hit “Swapnakoodu” in 2003. It was clearly a feel good movie and it got good hype even before its release. There was huge crowds at the releasing date itself, including me. But due to lack of insight during direction, Kamal was forced to chop down some of the scenes after the first day.
Here comes the Laljose-Roshan Andrews era. Laljose gave the block buster “Classmates” by including all the youngsters like Prithviraj, Narain, Jayasurya etc. Roshan made the classic Notebook. But due to planned downgrading, Notebook didnt get its deserved success. The hype for classmates was huge before the release. That contributed to ints initials. It all points to one thing. Youngsters movies get initials if it is a multistarrer, and can attain success if it has a reasonable entertaining content. “Summer”, “Swapnakoodu”, “Classmates” are the examples.
For attaining a momentum for our young actors, i think the promising film makers like Roshan, Laljose, Ranjith etc should make multistarrer movies with two or three of them.