Actors cite the lack of good scripts; directors speak much along the same lines while producers are perennially scared of putting their money on anything that is not run of the mill. Their concern is not unwarranted because if we ultimately look at things from a neutral perspective, it is the audiences who have to shoulder the large part of the blame of not supporting good cinema. Of course, all of us like good meaningful cinema that is driven by characters, situations that draw from life, but how many of us really pay to get into theaters to watch such a movie. We, catch up with such a movie when Sun TV or now Kalaignar TV buys it within a few months of release or even worse on pirated CDs. How much ever we blame top stars, directors and big banners of providing us with the same glossy low on content stuff time and again, still come Deepavali, Pongal, Christmas, New Year or any other day of the year, we choose to go into a theater showing yet another such movie and more often than not come out cursing ourselves for the misadventure. So, if we do not get good movies, we have only ourselves to blame. A saying goes, ‘once bitten, twice shy’. However we seem to be immune to the implications of the saying, straying back onto the same old path of commercial cacophony time and again. Not that commerce or commercial cinema is bad or despicable, quite far from that. Commerce drives every industry forward. The point is that the onus is upon us to make lines between commercial and meaningful blur, to make any such classification meaningless, to give the makers confidence in themes that have an identity.

There have been voices over the years that the makers of films tend to underestimate the tastes of an audience, dumb them down with stale repetitive stuff. But analysis might prove some, if not all of this wrong. Why? Look at the recent past in Tamil cinema. This year has been endowed with at least three films that stand apart in theme, treatment and performance. All three had great merits; great artistic value but not surprisingly, very average commercial results. Pallikoodam, Kattradhu Tamil and Onbathu Rupai Note, all dared to be different and while it must be said that none of them really broke down, all three just about broke even. An honest analysis and comparisons to the commercial hits of the year will tell us that these movies hardly come close in terms of revenue and we are not comparing these movies to a mammoth like Sivaji, just the other ordinary commercial hits of the year. Even on the top 10 ratings on our site, we have not been able to give anything but an average status to these films while giving a hit status to films like Malaikottai (no offence).