#kaappaan

[alaipayuthey]

Happy Birthday to our Nadippin Nayakan Suriya!

[gayathreya]

jd x jd

boyfriends on a break but one of them still worried about his alcoholic drunk ex in a bar and trying not to get caught while looking out for him cos his heart can’t let him go entirely to move on

[gayathreya]

[gayathreya]

[gayathreya]

[gayathreya]

[gayathreya]

someone told him he’s a pretty pupper

[gayathreya]

some kaappaan thoughts i had to let out (mild spoilers);

thinking about Kaappaan again cos of all the deleted scenes being slowly released and how it's just. SO DISAPPOINTING watching shallow films like this which wants to try a hand at some form of enlightening their audience but does such a bang up job on it

now, i'm not ragging on the film. for me it was an average watch, it's far from being a horrible film. but the annoyance comes with the messages being shallow and tonedeaf as f which is the main issue for me. people think the "social message" in films is what's bad but imo the problem is when it's not done proper or with any kind of understanding on what institutional structures or power and oppression are

Madras, Kaala, Vada Chennai, etc, these are just the recent films i can think of that handled their so called "social message" well and... it wasn't some weak surface understanding of it? they actually showed structural concepts and how they feed into their respective socio-political issues. they had proper lines and imagery about politics, caste, religion, gentrification, forced homogenisation of a populace, i could go on

Kaappaan wanted to highlight agriculture and theft of land by corporations - which, SURE, yes. it's valid and not unimportant in our current climate. but HOW IN THE GODDAMN FUCK can you make a movie about this without even talking about CAPITALISM? like.... wtf. the way this movie presented it was as if there was One (1) big bad dude and One (1) big bad corporation and once you remove them, everything would be fine and dandy. except. THAT'S NOT HOW STRUCTUAL POWER AND CORPORATE GREED AND CAPITALISM WORKS. you cut off one head, another will arise. nothing has been solved, nothing resolved or even partially changed. i just cannot get over how shallow the writing was when it came to this

not to mention the absolute disgusting way the indian army was portrayed like how they're this great saviour fighting moustache twirling evil bad pakistan's army and Kashmiris happily receiving them. you have to be really fucking tonedeaf to think your army alone is a big innocent and pure baby when in reality everyone with half a brain and some political sense know Kashmiris hate both your guts and you're both demons to them who have committed literal war crimes of mental and physical torture, rape, and murder. you BOTH are sick and disgusting, you BOTH deserve to be spat on. armies are not there to primarily sing songs and defend people as school propaganda says, they're primarily there to act as an option for potential state violence against another nation or even its own people cos governments can and WILL use its own forces on its own people to subjugate them. it's 20 fucking 19 and you're literally still writing stories glorifying indian presence in Kashmir, making light of Kashmiri independence from both your demon claws, framing it as an undesirable outcome where you have forces aggressively removing them in the film, all cos you're sucking some fascist nationalist dick.

like i just cannot even begin to explain how these 2 things were a huuuge bother for me cos the writing is just ridiculously at the level of someone having their politics from 10 years ago and making zero attempt at actually analysing any kind of structural violence and systems in place. now sure the movie ultimately wasn't about this and dissolved into your basic old revenge plot, but then my question would be why include these elements at all? either you make a proper film about the very real consequences of government compliancy for capitalism and environmental collapse, or you shut the fuck up about it instead of acting like it's all the fault of one big bad man and that the problem has been solved at the end credits (hint: it's not)

the actual only thing with respect to these points that i can praise Kaappaan about was the tiny moments of Suriya's character eye rolling at assholes in the film trying to put the blame on communists for causing unrest, and openly stating that the police kills protestors and they very well could be against the people. but these were such small moments that would've been lost if you blink, and it had no real weight against the horrid things i'm talking about

if you follow me you know Suriya is my baby but damn this film was just sooo. shallow, tonedeaf, and weak af when it came to the actual stuff they wanted to present. a damn shame considering if it just happened to be a typical commercial flick i'd have enjoyed it more, the biggest irony for me cos i don't enjoy typical commercial flicks from suriya at all. again, this isn't a terrible film, but it was just soulless to me. everyone panned NGK but fuck y'all that had way more heart and fire to it than this apparent political commentary that came from the mind of a person who didn't bother with political evaluation of current affairs at all

fuck capitalism, fuck cops, fuck the military, and fuck your government. all of these that you're capping for would pointblank shoot a farmer, refugee, immigrant, protestor, communist, etc, right in the face, and life would go on with no accountability. because that's what systems of violence are. Kaappaan shows problems as that of an individualistic error and immorality, when it should've been showing structural immorality alongside complicit governance. or better off be not showing it at all if you don’t have the nuance and wisdom to handle it

eta: update to say yeah i hate this film now and i think it’s the worst movie he has done in his whole career yet. i cannot forgive imperialist bootlicking and cop/army propaganda.