The Formulae

What is the conspiracy behind putting this one down? Well I am in quest of the secret behind the success of movies typical in South India- termed as the ‘superstar’ movies.

There are four categories of languages which fall under the ‘South Indian Movies’- Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu and Kannada. Of this I will exclude Malayalam from the discussion.

I have watched a lot of Tamil, a few Telugu and two Kannada movies. I doubt my depth of knowledge to write this. But since I have full rights to this space, I go on.

And in these three categories, there is a special genre- ‘superstar’ movies. Superstars are human super heroes who occupy the screen for 90% of movie time. The wow the audience with punch dialogues, histrionics and most of all the fights.

All the movies would be of the same mould. But you will find lakhs of fans for these stars and every movie will be a hit. The typical movie would be in the following format:

The hero would be a college kid (starring a 40 year old superstar) or a common goon with a golden heart. The movie opens with a bunch of menacing villains with funny sideburns chasing a girl. The hero would appear unarmed. He will single handedly beat down all the evil guys and the song starts.

The super hero will have a bunch of cronies surrounding him. They provide the humour element in the film. The hero will have to save these cronies from the clutches of villains from time to time. Most probably one of them will die, flaring up the wrath of our hero.

After many Song-fight sequence villain will die ultimately. What makes these movies from each other is the hairdo, the female lead, the bikes and ultimately the shortness of item girl’s dress (or limited dress edition).

The funniest thing is the importance of female characters in these movies. The success of female heroines depends on the number of superstar movies they get. They don’t have much role in these movies. Just dress up in good clothes and cry when hero gets beaten. The typical example is the South Indian sensation, Sriya, who acted with the superstar Rajni in a movie. She had no role in the movie but to showcase the curves. But she catapulted to No.1 position soon after.

If the lead female character is a simple and petite girl there is no scope for anything glamorous. So there will be a ‘modern’ girl drooling after the hero, even if he doesn’t give a damn. The second girl will be voluptuous, eager to show off the cleavage and uses the shortest skirts to cover up the fat thighs.

There will be a variety of graphic sexual innuendos like comparing the girl to some fruit and lick, suck and eat the fruit. Mind you the girl will be enjoying it immensely. To provide the icing there will be item dance where the lyrics will be sexual garbage in the dirtiest form and the dancer will get an orgasm on the slightest touch from the ‘superstar’.

Everything ends well when the ‘superstar’ gets the simple and petite girl.

So my question is what is the element that sparks passion in crores of movie lovers in Southern India? What is the secret formula that churns out hits after hits year after year? What attracts the women to these movies where women are treated as sex dolls? How come kids gets to watch these movies where the element of sex oozes out?