August 24, 2012 Y. Sunita Chowdary
If you go to Sudigadu with a lot of expectations you will find faults. There will be too many fights, the fight scenes look repetitive, some characters get on your nerves and you will come to the conclusion that it is not a film that will make you laugh aloud. The director and hero kept saying that films from the last ten years have been made fun of but it doesn't seem so, he had used movie scenes more distant and archaic.
You still have the hero walking on fire like in Thamizh Padam, you wish the director could have put on more effort on the second part of the film that turns boring, wish he used more contemporary movies to elicit laughs. The title too is an ego fulfilling exercise for the director because it is not catchy and selling at all but maybe he used it because his previous films all started with the alphabet 'S'. But then, when you return home you still carry some scenes that make you smile and discuss with your friends and that is perhaps what we call entertainment.
Sudigadu is a racy film, it does look like pieces of rags stitched together but as you ignore the abrupt cuts and the incoherent screenplay, you will begin to notice that you are looking forward to the silly jokes and spoofs that are coming in one after the other without a pause.
Bheemineni did an admirable amalgamation of spoofs of Tamil and Telugu but looked like a man in a hurry post-interval and the climax; When he thought he was short on space he used only popular dialogues of the recent films that came out on the promos. Eventually his target is met, you forget the story if at all there is one and concentrate only on the spoofs, so when the climax is falling in place you realise there was actually a story.
So go ahead and give it a watch, people who are totally into the movies and movie industry will find it silly but the rest of the movie-going crowd will be amused certainly. It is a good observation on part of the director and such a film was impending - when we have an less than ordinary stories these days running and becoming a hit solely because of one or two comedy scenes, there is a potential in such a story that is filled with spoofs of every 'extra' of a hero/director/television.
The film begins with a kid asking for a story and the father finding out if she is interested in listening to Eega and after a few exchanges there begins a saga of a typical Telugu hero who refuses to change his style even after decades of evolution. The hero is eulogised right from the intro scene when he was a baby to the last twist in the script when he turns out to be a cop followed by the inevitable climax at the aluminum factory and the easy lift from the Tamil original.
Inbetween you are treated to a toilet paper bravely put up for show by the director and of course the heroine who usually and officially comes of age at 24. Also the audience's irritation for the big wide red scrolling of the statutory warning happens when you are seeing something interesting. A couple of major scenes are hilarious but that's about it. When we can watch baseless and senseless stories, there is no harm in watching a spoof on them, the hero does it admirably be it the dialogues or dances and walks away into the sunset to shed his calories.
Music is lively and keeps you awake, the hero is at his best enjoying being in everyones shoes and using their dialogues, weapons and taking liberties. The senior youth stars put up a gutsy effort and Monal Gajjar does what she was expected to, fill in the space. No harm watching it but as we said don't go dreaming too much.
