KSD Appalaraju - Wrongly handled good story

Cast:

Sunil, Swathi, Sakshi, Brahmanandam, Raghu Babu, Ajay and others

Story, screenplay, direction:

Ramgopal Varma

Varma has chosen the Tollywood circuit as the backdrop and tried to portray his views in the satirical way. Let us see how convincing they were.

Story:

Appalaraju (Sunil) hails from Amalapuram and he is a passionate film buff. His dream is to direct a film and for that he already writes a script for a tragedy film with the title ‘Nayaki’. With full confidence, he comes to Hyderabad and manages to set foot in the industry.

Sunil & Swathi

It is here he comes across people like Rocky (Raghu Babu), creative head Pushpanand (Harshavardhan) as a team. Eventually, he manages to convince glamour queen Kanishka (Sakshi), the muse of Babu Garu (Adarsh), as the leading lady for his project. Then comes KT (Ajay), a star who hates Babu Garu and has got an eye on Kanishka. While all this is one side, a twist of events occur and Appalaraju is forced to join hands with mafia don Srisailam Anna (Brahmi) who becomes the producer of this film.

What are the challenges and experiences for Appalaraju? Is he the same man who comes from Amalapuram after the completion of his film? Will he be successful in making his ‘Nayaki’? All this forms the rest of the story.

Performances:

Sunil has given his best for the role and it was looking clear that he was imitating the body language of Ramgopal Varma in many scenes. He rocks with his graceful dances every where and punch dialogues here and there.

Swathi does her bit as required and it was a different experience to see the glamour avatar of this slender girl in songs.

Sakshi Gulati

Sakshi Gulati has sex appeal written all over her, except the face. She was sensuous, gave the apt expressions and though her role was limited, she made the best use of it and shows potential.

Brahmanandam managed to get few smiles with his one-liners.

Tanikella was apt, Raghu Babu was good, Harshavardhan imitated RGV completely right from facial expression to walk, Ajay was effective, Adarsh was powerful. Venu Madhav was irritating, Krishna Bhagawan was cool as usual, Kota was okay, Ali was not used rightly. MS Narayana, Suman Shetty, the lad with pony tail filled the gaps.

This beautiful story was wrongly handled by the director missing the spice and kick in entire drama. He ended up this film as a b-grade film without any Midas-touch by him.

Highlights:

•     Ramu was successful in creating characters that both the film folks and the media folks will be able to connect with real time personalities but not for general audience.
•     The song which has dupes of Balakrishna, Chiranjeevi, Venkatesh, Nagarjuna doing few antics gets huge applause in theaters
•     The song on film directors hitting directly with their names mesmerizes the audiences.
•     The song ‘Ringu Road kaada..’ shot on Ajay and Sakshi stands as an example for technical brilliance and appealing look.
•     Sunil’s dances
•     Lyrics on a whole and especially ‘cinema mayam’

Drawbacks:

•     The emotional anguish of the protagonist was not etched well, it is hard for the audience to connect to him.
•     Weak comedy
•     No flavor in drama
•     The scene after interval when Brahmi reveals his lyrical talent and sits with Ali. It got dragged to nearly ten minutes with no power in content.
•     The scene between Ravi Teja and Sunil. The reactions of Sunil were not right given the background he comes from in the movie. Also, it is not sure what the intention was behind having that scene. Instead of empathizing with Ravi Teja in the scene, Sunil discards him. That affected his characterization.
•     The scene between Sunil, Raghu Babu and Harshavardhan at ice cream vendor and auto-wala tests the patience of audience.
•     Lengthy narration
 

 

Bottom-line:

Good story but bad narration.