Poda Podi: "It’s cool man, it’s cool"

A brief synopsis for anyone who missed this gem of a movie.

It begins with the hero (I will henceforth call him Mr. Hero for the sake of simplicity) mis-quoting Hamlet, saying “To love or not to love: that is the question” while violently moving his body to what appears to be music.

Mr. Hero then goes to a bar, meets some girl who dances with him simply because he’s filthy rich, and then instantly becomes his girlfriend. After a few jokes involving lodges in Mahabalipuram, she becomes Mrs. Hero.

Unfortunately for Mr. Hero, his wife likes to dance salsa, which he finds terribly offensive. So he decides that the only solution is for his wife to get pregnant. Mr. and Mrs. Hero then have a baby (doll).

Thanks to some brilliant script-writing, we now enter the intermission while faced with this massive ground-breaking twist in the storyline.

In Part-2, Mr. Hero decides to go bash up his wife’s dance partner, and his wife repays him by *accidentally* killing their baby. She then gets angry with Mr. Hero for several months because it's all his fault. Mr. Hero then tries to re-kindle his lost love by declaring to his wife's dance instructor “I want to have 10 more babies and I cant do it by myself”. This seems to be a satisfactory apology, so Mrs. Hero moves back in with him.

But their marital problems continue; not because of the dead baby, but because of the salsa dancing, which of course is way more important. After much visual and auditory trauma to my senses, they both finally decide that the only way to win the dance competition would be to dance together. Unfortunately he’s useless at this, so the judges all go “You’re terrible. But we’re still putting you through to round 2”

Mr. Hero then decides that he is a “kuthu dancer” and so Mr. and Mrs. Hero both simultaneously have a 3-minute long generalised tonic-clonic seizure on stage, and in response the judges jump up and start dancing. This of course means that they win round 2.

They then have baby #2 and we are informed that there are 14 more rounds to go. Thankfully, this is where the movie ends with a “To be continued” notice as the credits start to roll.

Poda Podi is quite a movie. This is 1 hour and 58 minutes of acting, which takes place despite several drawbacks:

1) It has a total cast of 4 characters (Mr. and Mrs. Hero plus a completely mad chitappa with an even madder wife)

2) There is no real story-line

3) It takes place entirely in London and Disneyland, where people seem to neither know english nor tamil properly

Despite all of this, it still relentlessly plods on for almost two hours, and for that it must be applauded.

(PS. It's still better than "Enthiran")