Venky Mama

Movie trends keep changing every few decades. After the 70s wave, we now again live in the era of experimental movies and new form of story-telling.

Also, the era of bio-pics, the Dirty Picture heralding a beginning ...now milked to exhaustion! Tired of watching these bio pics, (esp from our hero of hysterical nationalism), stories drawn from real-life incidents, the historicals, the gangster movies and all, the heart was yearning for the good old entertainers with a simple story-line. 

In Telugu movies, the 90s was dominated by Venkatesh kind of movies, attracting the family audience. Many of us would be dismissive of Venkatesh's stardom calling him an actor who catered to ladies' sentiment alone. 

Now again, we have in Venky Mama, a commercial, which has all elements of a pure entertainer. And we can only watch admiringly as Venkatesh emotes so effortlessly and so well! It was a treat watching him again in his original form after a couple of decades. Sorry Nag Chaitanya, your uncle has outshone you in this joint venture.

Nag's character gets orphaned in childhood and Venkatesh brings him up. The movie explores without emotionally exploiting this uncle-nephew sentiment. It touches your heart as you know that they are real life uncle-nephew and that Nag's father had indeed separated from his mother in his childhood. The story mostly builds on this sentiment, and how they try to get each other married and how misunderstandings are built around the grandfather's belief in astrology. The heroines don't really have much to do.

Those who yearn for movies based on  good family story (without again the trend of a large joint family kind of set-up), will love this movie.Towards the end there is some villainy, perhaps to showcase Nag Chaitanya's action abilities but that still doesn't help. Despite Nag's very sincere performance, Venkatesh, even at this age stands out with his brilliant comic timing, and the movie belongs to him alone. Go watch and be entertained!

I don't need to rate this. Sufficient to say it is the 90s Venkatesh kind of a movie. The Telugu movie buff will know :)