Super Deluxe: Tamil Movie Review

Blue and ocher. Blue walls and blue outfits contrasting with rust, mud and bronzed faces. As a visual person it was the color scheme of Super Deluxe which caught my eye first. The urban grime becomes sell-able with swishes of blue and bronze.

The vibrant color palette is just a start. Super Deluxe is all about quirkiness. I have noticed that all off-center movies have signature color schemes. In Thiagarajan Kumararaja, the director of Super Deluxe, Kollywood has the beginnings of their own version of Wes Anderson or Coen Brothers.

You do not see many such successful idiosyncratic attempts in Indian regional language movies. A recent one I remember is Lijo Jose Pellissery's Double Barrel. Despite being a visual treat it couldn't impress the box office with its colorful eccentricities. Hollywood and Asian movies excel in this genre like Little Miss Sunshine, Everything is Illuminated, any Wes Anderson or Coen Brothers' movies or Takeshi Kitano movies.

Super Deluxe is a multi-narrative film. If done right, it will keep the audience hooked to the very end till it leads them to a confluence of all the threads. Super Deluxe mixes the multi story threads with a fair dose of hyper-reality and delivers a winner.

The cast is impressive. Vijay Sethupathi as the trans-gender woman is probably a first for Tamil movies. He crushes it. Fahadh Fazil, Samantha Akkineni, Bhagavathi Perumal, Mysskin, Ramya Krishnan and all the kid actors excel in their roles.

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'96 - a tamil movie review

96 is a very topical movie. The only question was who would make the topic (more on the topic right after this) into a watch-able movie. Like many ground breaking moves they make (discovery of A.R.Rahman for one), Tollywood claims the story and victory.


Chat apps like Whatsapp, WeChat, Line or Telegram didn’t make any significant inroads in the U.S because the U.S already had free SMS and free calls with most cell phone bundle plans. But for the rest of the world and emerging markets like BRIC, these chatting apps are huge players with about 70-80% market penetration. This gave rise to school and university alumni Whatsapp groups, a la  Snapchat for adults with privacy and secure territoriality packed into an instant message environment.


There was only a matter of time before someone made a movie out of this ubiquitous social networking phenomenon. High school and college Whatasapp groups provide ample material for sentimental, nostalgic stories. There is always ‘the one that got away’ and the ‘could-have-beens’, but ’96 directed by C.Prem Kumar, starring Vijay Sethupathi and Trisha Krishnan does not dissolve into a syrupy emotional mess, it could have become with a different script and a different director.


Tamil movies rarely operate at the pace of real life, but ’96 takes the slow lane. Although it was dragging at places, it can be excused for keepin’ it real.

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