Priya Nestama

It's one of those days where everything is screwed and everybody sucks. You wouldn't awaken if you knew it would happen, and can justify ripping your boss' head off. I didn't know it either when unfeelingly I decided to watch Priyanesthama. The irritable quotient of this film is high enough to cause avalanches on K2.

The first few reels of the flick unleash a Surya (Venu) having major crushes on a piece of Telugu poetry and in turn the poetess (Shama). Foremost, he has no idea that it was a female writer since she wrote under a pseudonym, Giri (actually Girija). Still his fan mail contains subtle pick up lines that greatly confuse the sexuality of our hero.

Anyways, she's impressed by it. But their pellichoopulu go haywire, resulting in Surya's family deciding to get him hitched to some other dame Pooja (Malavika) and not Girija. A truckload of hackneyed humor and songs are stuffed in as usual.

One thing that we cannot miss is Venu's improvement in this film. He now has one expression to his forte: the expression of a man who knows his congenital incapability to act. For all this period (and further more) you'd require two shots of morphine for every aching dendrite in your optical senses.

The camera appears to have been placed on the wing feathers of an Albatross flying in a 100m dash. The shabbiness is to the extent that an official complaint was lodged with the theater management to replace 'em murky projector lenses. And if for some deranged motive of yours, you continue to watch, this is what unfolds.

Pooja, the girl Surya's supposed to marry, already has a boyfriend (Balaji), and since even Surya loves somebody else, they choose to help each other instead. Their plan being playing along with their parents till the eve of the wedding and then eloping with their respective love toys. Why wait till the eve of the wedding? To buy time to fall in love with each other, and more importantly, to prolong our desolation.

When climax time arrives, Girija and Balaji are effortlessly and conveniently deported to another store like the love toys that Surya and Pooja had their fills of. And they live happily ever after.

The clichéd story isn't a fundamental problem (as nothing is original anymore) but everything else is. Venu's performance wins an award for making the Razzies look like the Padma Bhushan, while the heroines win one for assisting him in such a noble deed. The humor is tasteless nonsense and the music isn't too audible either. The cameraman Prasad wins a bravery award for shooting while the Richter scale read 8.5. The blame obviously is put on the debutant director, though the real culprit is Ramoji Rao. Although a renowned financer, he has put his Gandhis in a cesspool of slop this time.