A rich harvest of films this Pongal waits movie buffs

Chennai, Jan 13 (UNI) No Pongal Festival (marking the harvest season) is complete without the Tamil film industry, popularly referred to as Kollywood, adding its own flavour to it with new releases.

This year though Pongal (marking the harvest season) may not be as sweet for Kollywood with Chief Minister M Karunanidhi, himself a Kollywood 'star' having been a story, script and dialogue writer of repute, bringing down the ticket rates considerably first and then hiking them a bit.

The box office fortunes of the six action and love genre Pongal releases this time are uncertain, according to industry sources, but there is quite a glamour and glitz associated with a few of them.

The budgets for these films range between Rs 15 to Rs 25 crore, according to a leading PR person in Kollywood.

Topping the high expectation list among the Pongal releases spread over four days between January 12 and 15 is one of Indian cinema's ace directors Mani Ratnam's ''Guru'' in Tamil down south and in Hindi starring Abhishek Bachchan, Aishwarya Rai, Vidya Balan and Madhavan with Mithun Chakaraborthy making a comeback in a meaty role playing a media baron.

The film, by Mr Ratnam's own admission, is not about the life of the famous Ambani clan but about a person who makes it really big in life.

Going by the publicity programmes for the film on a leading satellite channel, it also has the usual sentiments associated with commercial cinema to bring in the audiences.

Young actor Vijay, who had his last release during the Pongal last year, is hoping to reaffirm his status of No 1 among the current stars with ''Pokiri,'' a remake of a Telugu film by the same title.

The success of this film is quite crucial for Vijay, though he had already signed his next film.

The dancing Tamil star, Prabhu Deva, often dubbed as India's Michael Jackson, makes his debut as a director in Tamil cinema with this film.

Music Director Deva has already made a successful switch over to direction in Telugu last year.

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