A poster for Olympian Anothony Adam shows Mohanlal twirling the discus (see text for explanation of this scene)

I wish I could bring out all my Mallu impressions onto this page, I wish I could pronounce every word the way it is supposed to be pronounced, Mellu style.

Still, begg-yers can't be choosers, we will have to wait till Yess. Yay. Paul's next Miracle Meeting (Olleloojah!) to get the Good News.

I wish that the makers of the film, Olympian Anthony Adam (1999), had attended one of those Miracle Meetings (blind can see! lame can walk!) so that their lame but unintentionally funny script-e could get some legs of its own, olleloojah.

Anyway, this is what happened.

I wouldn't have gone if they hadn't sent out the email, and then I would have missed out. The Science Institute Malayali Association (SIMA) at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) is to thank for the creation of this page. It was either late '99 or early 2000, and one fine day we get this campus-wide email from broadcast@ece, originally sent by the SIMA head-honchos (what would be pronounced by a Mallu as hoan-choe). Said email proclaimed the screening (I'm pretty sure it was on a Wednesday) of a recent Malayali film called Olympian Anthony Adam  - as soon as I read the title of the film, I was almost out the door to see if anyone else wanted to go spend some time at the gymkhana appreciating some South-Indian style serious-movie humour, but there was more in the email. The Association said something about this being a recent movie and it has really amazing special effects (but they also warned us that being members of a scientific institute such as IISc, these special effect and hi-tech scenes might be commonplace for us).... I forget the rest of the email, I wish I had preserved it for posterity! But the fact remains: I DID convince Sandeep (come on, we will go watch the 6 PM show, and if it turns out to be bad, we can walk out immediately, but if its good enough, then let's stay till dinnertime!).... I think we either saw Tobyda or Joby (Toby's brother) at the movies. I think it was Toby, because I remember him explaining the discus dialogues to us... but I'm getting ahead of myself, as I usually do when I'm excited.

The movie starred Mohanlal in the lead role, in case you haven't already clicked on the imdb link to the movie above, you lazy bums!

So anyway. This is the story of the movie.

Has anyone seen Kindergarten Cop (1990)? Well, if you have, you already know the story of Olympian. This we figured out within the first 15 minutes of the movie (Our discovery was only delayed by the fact that they had the unnecessarily long terrorist-interrogation scenes in the beginning. If you had any co-ga-nutte o-yil in your blood, like the Mellus, you would say Kindergartenn'Koap-pu.

Anyway, the story in short: Kerala border patrol police chance upon a truck carrying illegal stuff. They detain the driver and also discover a box of Chocolates which contains a cryptic message which the police link to chemical weapons. The cops have reason to believe that whoever masterminded this plan has a kid that studies in a boarding school somewhere in South India. A well-known and fearless detective is brought in, and he goes undercover as a Physical Education instructor to find this kid and, therefore, track down the mastermind.

Unfortunately, I didn't watch the whole movie (Sandeep, damn him, wanted to leave for dinner at 7:45, even though he admitted that this movie was worth watching till the end), but the amount of text on this page should tell you how much of what I saw has affected me enough to write about this magaaaan movie.

Anyway, less chat, more hat. Let's get on with the movie, shall we?

Police detain the driver, who claims to be mute. They give him the third-degree, and he tries to escape, but they somehow manage to restrain him. The big-shots at Police Headquarters decide to bring in Inspector Anthony Varghese IPS. Except, since its a Mellu movie, his name is Ann-tenny Ver-geese. From this sentence on, I will try to write in a Mellu accent to give you the flay-vourrr-e of the movie. The inspector in question, of course, is busy partici-pay-tinggue in the village festivvittieees-e, in fact deeply involved in some stupid bullock-plough race that takes place in mud for some reason. He wins, of course, but it makes you wonder how strong the oxen must have been to have carried this fatass across the finish line. As soon as he wins, someone offers him a jug of toddy... and there's a typical hero dialogue ex-tole-ing the virtues of "taa-dee".

The cops get there, late as you-shoe-al, and inform him that he is needed at HQ. Cut to scene where he's in full uniform and salutes to the IG or DIG or someone like that. They take him into the cell where he decides to play good cop-bad cop with the supposedly mute driver (but plays both parts himself) and finds out that he isn't really mute after all, and manages to get enough out of him for the police to start suspecting that the cryptic message inside the chocolate box (WHICH BTW: NOTE AT THIS POINT - is pronounced in proooo-ber Mellu as Choe-ga-laitt-e)

Let me digress for just a second here - does anyone have parents that had a friend, or maybe you had an uncle, that was in the UK in the 80s, and they would bring back "Quality Street" chocolate boxes, with the Royal Guard guy standing there on the street with his tall hat, on the box? Quality Street and Macintosh were the same brand, I think. Okay, back to the movie.

The box they get from the truckk-e happens to be a box of Mekkin-toe-sssh-e Choe-ga-laitts, something that Mohanlal refers to in the movie during his good cop-bad cop routine as "World's bestt-e choe-ga-laitt-e". Damn, even Mellu movies had merchandising ideas!!! I wonder if they got reimbursed with tons of choe-ga-laitt-e boe-xess-e for this plug in the movie!

Anyway, they find out that its for some kid that might be the child of the mastermind, and there's a meeting at HQ of all the important people - some cops from around the stay-tt-e, looks like. Pay attention right now to two people: Mohanlal, and some super-koap-pu extra who probably got paid Rs. 25 extra for screaming extra loud and trying with his thick mousss-taya-cch-e to look like Subramaniam Bharati:

At this monumental meeting, Mohanlal informs all the biggies that there might be a threat of chemical and maybe even nuclear weapons being sold to other countries and being tested on unsuspecting Indian civilian populace. This of course shocks everyone (what a shaw-kk-e!), because the word NUCLEAR stands out on its own. At this point, Mohanlal has already mentioned at least once that there's a child involved, and he also manages to deliver the following piece of shaaaaaaddddddyyyyy dialogue:

"Children are my wee-kku-ness-e"

If I was in the movie, I would keep my kids away from any guy who smiles coyly like Mohanlal when he says that line. And for the benefit of the dumb gullible people in the audience who might think it safe for him to babysit their kids or even be their scout master at some point, he repeats this line at least twice during this scene. Anyway, towards the end of this scene, Supercop is very alarmed because the information just relayed to them has disturbed everyone at the table. So, when Mohanlal says, "Sir, I would like to personally be involved in this matter, because children are my wee-kku-ness-e", he objects, saying that this is a matter for the Big Shots, and should not be handed to a single Inspector. At which point, Mohanlal mentions something about how everything the police knows about this case revolves around finding the kid, and he says the following dialogue:

"....because child is the nucleus of everything."
(maybe he meant THIS child is the nucleus of everything, who knows with Mellu dialogues?!?!)

and Supercop stands up, still looking like Bharatiyaar, and replies:

"YES! And nucleus [sic] always leads to ALL-O-KOSHT!"
(yes, and nucleus always leads to holocaust, for you non-Mellus)

You can not even BEGIN to imagine the intensity of our laughter at that point. Sandeep was sold, if there was any doubt before this dialogue. This is arguably one of the best dialogues in the movie.

Needless to say, Inspector Ver-gees-e is given the permission to go undercover and find the kid. And after some really impressive searching on Yahoo.com (those pages loaded faster than he could click "Search", so fast that I think they actually had those pages loaded on their personal computer. Still, this part was not shabby at all! Compared to movies like Mission Impossible (1996), where that asshole Tom Cruise uses something generic called "Web Search" to search for one word - "Job", and DOESN'T end up getting at least a hundred thousand links to jobsearch sites!!! Here's what happened when *I* searched on Google for the same word. God-DAMN! I wish I had me THAT search engine, it knew EXACTLY what he wanted, and filtered out the shit! Freaking idiots. In Olympian, they actually show  him narrowing down the search from like thousands of matches to maybe ten matches by the process of elimination in front of the cinema audience. This shows that Indian audiences are apparently given more credit (but, unfortunately, ONLY in this movie) when it comes to tech-stuff. The Indian audience may not raise their voices in protest when the hero-heroine couple, in the course of the same song, change their clothes or go from Bombay to Singapore to Australia, but if you show them something related to computers and you're faking it, they will know (Do you hear me, Hi Raja ENTER Hi Roja ENTER Assholes?!)....

I digressed, again.

Inspector Ver-gees-e narrows it down to one school in either Ooty or Kodai (which, as is typical in movies everywhere, happens to be run by... surprise surprise! A Keralite administration, and everyone there speaks floo-enn-te Mellu, of course)

This ends the prologue of the movie. Now, Inspector Ver-gees-e dons his disguise: he is now a physical education instructor (someone who ACTUALLY coaches people in athletics rather than sit around bitching about how the whole administration is trying to shit on him while his lackies nod and sympathize with him so that they are given special preference and can wear canvas shoes while everyone else wears leather shoes to school as part of their uniform, I'm bitter so shoot me)... his undercover name: Anthony Adam, but its pronounced in prooo-ber Mellu as Ann-tenny Adem. Where does the Olympian thing come in, you ask? Okay, here's the intro. He's standing on the stage with the principal and some other teachers during the assembly, and the principal introduces him to all of the school children and the faculty. She says that he is their new P.T. instructor and his name is Ann-tenny Adem and he represented India in the 1988 Olympics (except, in Mellu, its pronounced Olum'bix) - therefore, later on, everyone starts referring to him as Olumbian instead of the usual "Sir". But: that's far ahead.

As soon as the principal announces that he represented India in the Olum'bix, some kid at the head of the line shouts out loud, "What event?!" challengingly. Mohanlal shuts his eyes calmly, nods and smiles. He spreads his legs a little and puts his right hand into his coat pocket and...... VOILA! Out comes an honest-to-God discus he used during the Olum'bix in 1988!  [See picture above] He slowly takes his run-up or whatever it is discus throwers do when they rotate a couple of times before throwing their discus, and throws his discus. As soon as the discus leaves his hand, we are taken into the hi-tech world of Cheap Computer Graphics hybridized with a scale model of the entire boarding school (right upto the black cylinder at the top of one of the buildings that says "Water Tank"!).... The discus completes a circuit of the school, and returns to safety in fatass Olumbian's hands. Everyone, faculty and students alike, are applauding at this achievement. I think the audience at the gymkhanas also should have been applauding, because anyone who just hybridized the discus throw with a boomerang from the Outback deserves a standing ovation.

If you are wondering, at this point, like I was, how the FUCK is that supposed to happen, fret not!

After this spectacular display, all the kids start to call him Olumbian, and a couple of the kids ask him how he managed this feat. And he starts out this line in Mellu which is something like has the words Mass-e, Til-de, Vell-oh-sittee... and we understood, of course what he was saying, and Tobyda confirmed our guess. He said something like "any mass-e, if given the prooo-ber til-de (tilt) and prooo-ber vell-oh-sittee will return to you".....

This is only a tenth of the amazing dialogues in the most awesome South Indian English accents of them all, the Mellu accent. For more, you should definitely watch this movie, preferably WITHOUT a Mellu translator present, because you don't need one, because the *MONEY* dialogues are all in English and they are wonderfully pronounced.  So get oaf-fu your butt-ex-e and go watch this movie.

And the next time November 14th comes around, remember:

"Child is the nucleus of everything"
"YES! And nucleus always leads to All-O-Kosht!"
 

Check out this review of the movie, and a phill-oh-soaphi-kkel discussion about boomerang physics:
http://movies.indiainfo.com/reviews/south/malayalam/olympian.html

A postscript to this article: Sandeep informed me that they went to Kaveri theater outside IISc to watch Company (which Mohanlal would probably pronounce Kem-beni). Apparently, Mohanlal's opening dialogues consist of the line that goes something like, "Mumbai mein har din sau log marte hain", i.e., a hundred people die in Bombay everyday. Mohanlal couldn't hide the cogenettu in his blood-e and apparently ended up saying, "Mumbai mein har din SOW log marte hain" with a huge emphasis on the OW in SOW. The theater was silent except for one audience member, who yelled out, "Well try, Mohanlal, well try!"