Preetiyinda Ramesh Movie Review

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You’ve got mail, said the Hollywood in 1998, trying to cash in on the faceless romances blooming all over the internet through emails and chats. The film starred Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan and was a commercial hit all over the world.

A dozen years down the line and after gigantic improvements in the way we communicate over the net, director Gunkumar gets an inspiration to tell that story all over once again in Preetiyinda Ramesh. But the film neither has the bountiful subtle humor of the original nor it tries to employ modern means of communication such as social networking sites or twitter in the story.

For homegrown hunks who have no idea of existence of either Tom or Twitter, a desi reference point is readily available in Ganeshana Maduve, which came in 1990. Here Anant Nag and Vinaya Prasad romance each other over the snail mail but can’t stand the sight of each other when they come face to face as they don’t know each other’s real identity. Preetiyinda Ramesh is hip, with the leading cast chatting their way to glory over their swanky laptops with USB net connections. But they hate each other as they are competitors.

There is so much of content in Preetiyinda Ramesh that it feels someone is trying to ram in some DVD sized content in a floppy disk. There is Ramesh Aravind, who lives in a house that’ll make Ambani’s new house in Mumbai look like a hut. Other than having a book shop, all he does is to chat on the net. There are references to globalization and the effects that it has on small vendors, there are a couple of needless fights, and then, there is Suma Guha, wearing revealing clothes and telling us silently that there is much more to life than merely chatting! All these together make watching Preetiyinda Ramesh like seeing one of those multicolored web sites that keeps popping up unwanted windows every two seconds.

In internet, you usually get pop-up blockers for such mischievous sites. Preetiyinda Ramesh has none.

Be it 1998 or 2012, Ramesh Aravind looks as handsome and as young as ever. He lives in a mansion, wears designer clothes, moves around in a ritzy vehicle and romances two ladies in various capacities. But the actor in him has certainly faced better challenges and has come off with flying colors. Ramanithu Chaudhary, who seems to have been spending all the income from her small bookshop on her clothes and makeup in the film, looks glamorous and hence fails to evoke any pity as a struggling bookshop owner.

Kiran makes a comeback after Haage Summane and all he gets to say is Down Down a couple of times in a song and make angry faces with Ramanithu Chaudhary at 10 minute intervals. There isn’t much going on Suma Guha’s face, so you can concentrate elsewhere.

Details about direction, cinematography and other such technical aspects are simply uninteresting.

-Movie Review By Raju Shanbhag