B and C Center Audience - Modern Day Mythical Creature

For the original, please visit: Claps and Boos

How often have you come across these?

1. Hero gets down from a car. Camera low angle pans from the heroes shoe lace to head. And then the camera keeps a low angle shot and the hero walks as if he in constipation (aka slow motion).
2. Some horrible ‘punch’ dialog, where the line has no relevance to the movie or the scene – but has loads of meaning of the star’s real life activities
3. The hero is allowed to gallivant with whores, call girls and all that. But the heroine has to be a vestal virgin. If she was previously married, it would not have been consummated.

The reason that the hero (in the case of non-acting actor Vijay) or the directors give us, the audience, is that they are catering to the B and C center audience. I have been long wondering who this mythical C Center audience is who is receiving so much leniency from the director and the film fraternity. The scenes in Vettaikaaran or Aegan did not impress anyone – which is why you see the movies had a poor run in the theaters starting not only in Sathyam in Chennai but also at Kottaampatti.

I strongly believe that today’s heroes treat cinema as an easy way to make money. If you have some political backing or financial backing, you can quite easily make a movie and then using the political strings make a publicity splash with “Siraapaga vetri nadai podum” being tagged to the movie right from the first of the movie’s screening in all TV channels. And from thereon, all you got to do is to turn up for shooting and you are an ‘actor’. Bash up 5 goons, sing 5 duets, talk some utter crap dialogs as ‘punch’ dialogs and go home and in the process make a bit of money. This seems to be a sweet deal to me.

In Shankar style, while MBA’s from IIM or B.Tech’s from IIT fight to keep themselves at the top of the pecking order in their industries by taking up more certifications, the Tamil Hero has perhaps the cushiest job that you can imagine. He has an excuse to do nonsensical stuff – tell the population that B and C Center audience only like that kind of stuff, conveniently hiding the fact that their recent movie was ripped in every available center. Starting from Rajni Kanth and Kamal Haasan to the newest kid on the block like Vishal and Bharath invariably are nowadays using this reason of center audience for giving stupid movies.

From all these, I can have only two inferences – that this mythical B and C center audience is nobody but the brainless fans/fanatics for these actors. These fans have to be classified in the lowest possible IQ group known to mankind. How often have I seen some guy say “I’m seeing this movie for __________”. These fan boys are not only insulting their intelligence (assuming they have some) but also spoiling Tamil Movies for the general audience too (Point to be noted: Any actor’s fan boy population is surely less than the other group of normal Tamil cinema audience). These fans/fanatics of these heroes are the reason number one that Tamizh cinema has denigrated to its current levels. That is why you see a substandard actors like Silambarasan or Jai or any other new actor who do not have even an iota of acting skill in them trying to ‘praise’ another established hero to make sure he will get some stupid fan boys of the established hero to support him. So this fan boys syndrome is like a plague, threatening to make Tamil Cinema irrelevant and stupid in this age of realistic cinema. While we see an Avatar and are wowed by the technical aspects in it or 3 Idiots and cannot stop gushing about the story, we turn a blind eye towards stupid movies being churned out in Tamil cinema.

In this regard, I declare the fan boys of heroes as Public Enemy No.1 for Tamil Cinema.