Move over, Bollywood: Here comes
The Boss By Raja M
MUMBAI - He tosses cigarettes and
sunglasses into place with a trademark flourish
that has fans howling in delight, revels in screen
mannerisms no acting school can teach, and now he,
Rajinikanth, also known as "The Style
Mannan" ("Style King" in Tamil) and
Thalaiva (leader) to his fans, has
triumphed globally with his mega-hit Sivaji:
The Boss, the most expensive movie ever made
in South Asia.
Even for the chaotically
colorful, mammoth Indian film industry,
June-released The Boss has swept moviedom
worldwide as an
unprecedented Tamil-language
film phenomenon. The US$20 million production has
hit the British Top 10, the first for a regional
Indian movie, exported 60 prints to the United
States and is smashing collection records
worldwide for a regional-language film, from the
Bloomingdale Court Theater in Chicago to the
Cathay Cineplex in Malaysia, in Singapore, Sri
Lanka, Canada and Europe.
Riots erupted
outside a cinema in Malaysia because of
insufficient prints of The Boss reaching
the country. In the opening three weeks, the film
took in a record $2 million, more than any
Malaysian movie had ever made in the first weeks
and baffling movie critics in a country where
fewer than 10% of the population speaks Tamil.
In India, before the prints were released
(bookings closed a record three weeks in advance)
they were carried on elephant-back to a famous
temple in the southern state of Kerala, where they
were handed over to the priest and then to theater
managers.
Indian films shown abroad
usually entertain only overseas Indians, but the
natives are also demanding The Boss. It's
being dubbed into Chinese languages for release in
Hong Kong and Southeast Asia; subtitles are being
readied for South Africa, where Rajini, as he is
known, has a huge following, and in Japan, where
he bewilderingly is a cult figure among youth who
adore him as Odoru Maharaj (the Dancing Maharaja).
Apart from Bruce Lee and perhaps Jackie
Chan, no Asian movie star seems to have made such
an impact as Rajinikanth has in the past decade.
Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh even
mentioned the popularity of "Odoru Maharaj" during
his address to the joint session of the Diet
(Japan's parliament) in December 2005.
After Rajinikanth's 1995 smash hit
Muthu, his star power increased in Japan to
the extent he became brand ambassador to various
Japanese consumer products such as the Tohato Co's
packaged snacks. An Indian newspaper mentioned
that the Japanese have even named a pickle after
him.
Born Sivaji Rao Gaekwad to an
impoverished family in the southern Indian state
of Karnataka and once a bus conductor in
Bangalore, Rajinikanth, 57, has traveled far to
become Asia's second-highest-paid movie star after
Chan. His $9.87 million fee for The Boss is
the highest any Asian actor has received for a
single movie.
The Boss carries a
simple enough story of a non-resident Indian
computer engineer who returns to his motherland to
serve, but runs into corruption and red tape and
ends up battling the "system", amid A R Rahman's
chart-topping music and Sankar's direction, two
more of the highest-paid professionals in Indian
cinema.
Technically the most accomplished
Indian film ever made, The Boss became the
first Indian film to use 4K high resolution that
big-budget Hollywood production houses use,
employed large helium-balloon lighting for night
shoots, and flew in costume designers and hair
stylists from France to make Rajinikanth appear
younger.
The success of The Boss
owes as much to Rajinikanth's rare screen charisma
that delivers dialogues and punch lines with cool
unpretentiousness as to the technological
brilliance about which movie critics are gushing.
Yet the extent of the success of The
Boss has surprised even his fans. It is
running to full houses even in northern India,
says Arunachalam Chakravarthy, who represents a
leading fan site, RajiniFans.com. "For the first
time, a regional-language film overtook Bollywood
films that were released at the same time across
India," he told Asia Times Online.
With
its landmark reception, The Boss seems to
have cracked a new frontier for the Indian movie
business, the largest in the world and which,
according to the Export-Import Bank of India,
enjoys an admission market that is "almost double
the US markets and three times that of the rest of
Asia". With The Boss, for the first time,
an Indian film was released on par with Hollywood
blockbusters to similar success.
Married
with a grown-up daughter who is entering film
production, Rajinikanth's otherwise unusual
personal life for a movie star fluctuates between
reports of reclusive phases spent in the Himalayas
to living it up in the most expensive of New
York's hotels and restaurants. He has a reputation
for never forgetting his old friends, and is said
to be still in touch with the bus driver with whom
he worked during his bus-conductor days.
Like major Hollywood stars, Rajinikanth
currently delivers about one movie every two
years, adding to his market value. "An analysis of
Rajini's career graph shows a remarkable absence
of fits and starts," remarks a local movie
journal, Screen India. "It has been a slow and
steady rise to the very top."
With about
63,000 registered fan clubs worldwide, Rajinikanth
has tried to leverage his following into politics,
the usual territory for a southern Indian
superstar to lumber into, but as yet has not met
with much success.
About a decade ago, he
famously said there is no worse curse for a
country than to be ruled by a woman, and his
maverick aphorisms may not yet find many takers in
a country that votes for Congress party leader
Sonia Gandhi and the former Tamil Nadu chief
minister and ex-movie star Jayalalitha, or in a
world that could next have Hillary Clinton of the
United States telling it what to do.
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