Minmini Movie Review: How much guilt is too much guilt, asks Halitha Shameem in her newest film, Minmini. How one deals with guilt and remorse varies from person to person; Minmini takes us through the lives of Praveena (Esther Anil) and Sabari (Pravin Kishore), who have a contrasting approach to dealing with sorrow.

Praveena and Sabari meet as adults while riding to the Himalayas in their Royal Enfield. While Praveena soaks in each moment of the trip and pauses to marvel at what she sees, Sabari keeps riding and focuses on reaching the destination. In contrast to Praveena, he values the destination more than the journey.

Quite early in the film, while Sabari is in school, a teacher asks the class what they want to be. The answers range from fashion designer to singer but the only two answers that cannot be limited to just naming one profession were Sabari’s and Pari’s. Pari is the popular boy at school, whereas Sabari is the studious one. Both of them do not instantly get along due to them being so different from one another and their interests being different. But, along the way, Halitha takes us through the mind frame of two teenagers.

Minmini is one of those films that has a first and second half that are so tonally different from each other. It is already well known that the schooltime portions of the film were taken in 2015, while the portions where the characters have grown up have been shot more recently. So, it benefits the flow of the film that the story is told in a linear format rather than cutting between the past and the present.

Will the film have the same impact if the same actors hadn’t played their grownup versions? Maybe yes. But the tonal change in the second half would have been more evident if other actors had been cast for those parts. But Halitha doesn’t rub it in our faces that she has shot with the same actors over a period of years. Rather, the story naturally unfolds along the way in an understated way.

While the school portions are more out there and animated, the grownup portions are soothing. Also soothing is Khatija Rahman’s understated music, which goes well with the tranquil nature of the film. All in all, Minmini is a refreshing film in the current Tamil cinema setup. It’s both emotional and humane and except for a few forced humour scenes consisting of the character of a Malayali teacher, Minmini has a novelty that we hardly see in films nowadays.

The film explores an otherwise unexplored topic like survivor guilt and calls for pursuing our passion and being ourselves. But it does so without seeming preachy or draining. The film comes into its own in the second half when the seeds planted in the first half are delved into. Just like Praveena and Sabari, we, the audience, also feel like we have been through a journey by the end of the film, as we travel from a secluded boarding school to the soaring heights of the Himalayas.

Esther Anil, Pravin Kishore and Gaurav Kalai make us care for their characters. The former two actors’ fun banter is amplified by the natural chemistry that they share with each other.

English comic actor Matt Berry describes the level of improvisation afforded to him and the cast of FX’s hit comedy “What We Do in the Shadows,” in which four vampires and a human familiar share a house on suburban Staten Island, as “very generous.” That freedom to “go for the most outrageous thing,” he says, is one reason why his justly admired performance as vaingloriously pervy 300-year-old bloodsucker Laszlo Cravensworth earned him an Emmy nomination for lead actor in a comedy. It’s a first for Berry, who also has won U.S. fans with such imported Britcoms as “The IT Crowd” and “Toast of London,” a show he co-created about an arrogant actor.

But before he filmed one episode of “Shadows,” one of Berry’s ideas was met with serious resistance by creator Jemaine Clement and executive producer Taika Waititi. “I offered at the beginning to do a sort of Eastern European accent, what you always associate with vampires,” he recalls, then imitates the pair’s reaction — “no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no” — with a deadpan calm that slyly conveys exactly how horrified Clement and Waititi would have been to lose one of the more priceless gifts in present-day comedy: Berry’s epically plummy, theatrically swaggering English baritone. “And so I have my own accent,” he says, adding, “on the keen enthusiasm from the creators.”

I should first clarify for readers that in real life you don’t speak like the ghost of every British stage ham converged into one larynx. But it’s not that far away, either.

To me, it doesn’t sound anything exceptional, because I’ve had it all my life. When I was younger, it made me laugh if I heard someone with a clipped accent be pompous. I’d instantly mimic it. It’s rare to hear now. Maybe some members of the royal family, but not your average citizen.

When you’re revving it up, is there anyone in particular you’re thinking of?

An actor called Jon Finch [who] had an incredible delivery. Even when doing everyday things, he sounds like he’s doing Shakespeare. And Tom Baker.

… Who is most well known for playing Doctor Who in the ’70s.

When I was a kid watching [Baker], I thought he was terrifying, the way he sounded. As I’ve become an actor, I’ve realized a lot of it was down to the fact that he was trying to remember his lines. He would start every sentence with [affects a deeply throaty sound] “We-e-e-lll …” and then he’d launch into whatever he was doing. That I find really funny. And I find anyone who is not particularly self-aware very amusing.

Laszlo certainly qualifies. Do those showy Victorian threads help put you into his ancient-and-randy mindset?

It’s also the sets. They’re so good, you forget you’re in a warehouse in Canada. You really are in this turn-of-the-century mansion full of furniture from the last 700 years. Because they’re vampires, they don’t get rid of anything. It’s so kind of warm and inviting, you want to stay there. Because outside is a warehouse and, you know, three feet of snow.

Is there a vampire power you’d take?

It wouldn’t be immortality. As you can see from them, it doesn’t look fun. And if you suffer from a mental health issue, you’ve got that forever. But they have no real interest in material things. That’s what I like. They couldn’t give a f— about things around them, or technology. That’s what I envy about them.

A very human power you have is musical ability. You’ve released many albums, and you’ve been a musician longer than you’ve been acting. Didn’t it play a part in how you were discovered?

I was playing singer-songwriter-type songs, and for a comedy club above a pub, I turned it into a character who was actually a serial killer confessing in his songs what he’d done. I thought it was hilarious. Matt Holness and Richard Ayoade saw me, and they were looking for someone to play a doctor in the TV version of their Edinburgh show, which became “Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace.”

That spoof of ’80s-era horror television, which first ran in the U.K. in 2004, became a cult comedy classic.

I’m so thankful for it every day. I’ve worked ever since, which is a complete and utter mystery.

What can we expect from the final season of “Shadows,” coming this October?

There are some clever things with the finale that I hope people will be really into. I’d be into it if I had nothing to do with it. Don’t get me wrong — nothing to do with me. The concepts, I think, are interesting, as opposed to watching myself. I must make that clear.

It’s funny how, being so expert at playing grand narcissists, you retreat from the merest hint of self-promotion.

That’s a British thing, I suppose, isn’t it? We largely don’t like to blast our own horns outwardly.

I don’t know if it’s just me, but it seems the variety of movie options in theaters this summer is as barren as my love life. So the superhero comedy Deadpool & Wolverine has appeared like an oasis in a bland, monotonous desert this season for a lot of people (including me). Now that I’ve reached this oasis, it didn’t totally quench my thirst.

After the excitement of the first two Deadpool films from 2016 and 2018, Ryan Reynolds (Free Guy, 2021) is back in the red & black costume playing the wisecracking mischievous mercenary. This second sequel starts with our swearing, sarcastic anti-hero working at a used car dealership and wearing a toupee. But his ordinary civilian boredom stops when he’s recruited by a government office called the Time Variance Authority to travel through the multiverse and save another universe from destruction. But instead of following orders, Deadpool decides to save his own universe from approaching oblivion and goes to a few other universes to recruit a Wolverine (Hugh Jackman, Logan, 2017), who’s still alive, for some reinforcements.

So let me be honest, that explanation might not be totally accurate. I’m still hazy on some of the details in this film, because the exposition at the beginning is so long and so convoluted. There’s special technology for Deadpool to travel through the multiverse. There’s a naturally dying timeline that can’t be reversed. And one of the bad guys has built a machine called a “time ripper” capable of destroying entire universes! It felt like the team of five screenwriters (which includes Mr. Reynolds) was desperately grasping for an interesting story to even allow this film to exist. So with the horribly shoddy premise to work from, Deadpool & Wolverine is almost dead on arrival.

But Ryan Reynolds’ spirited performance keeps this film somewhat fun. Like the two previous films, he gives perfectly timed jokes filled with raunchy bluntness, sexual innuendo, and real-life jabs at the 20th Century Fox and Disney movie studios. But, of course, this style of humor is not new for this film. All Deadpool fans have seen these sorts of jokes before. This film’s biggest boast, or biggest draw for viewers, is its long list of surprise appearances by famous actors playing mostly forgotten comic book characters. That part is entertaining, and the dirty adult humor had me laughing, or silently in shock, multiple times in the movie theater.

Hugh Jackman, sadly, is given nothing to do but repeatedly grumble unhappily, kill lots of people, and look tiredly in every direction. Maybe because Ryan Reynolds has worked with this director before on the action films The Adam Project (2022) and Free Guy (2021), they had too strong a rapport with each other to let Hugh Jackman in on more fun. (This director I’m referring to is the Canadian, Shawn Levy.)

By the time the fourth, large scale, extended, bloody fight scene started near the film’s climax, I thought, “Okay, boys. I’m ready for my lobotomy now.” With a runtime of two hours and eight minutes, this one could easily have been a minimum of 20 minutes shorter. As the 34th entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), I walked away from this one thinking it was just okay. Not a disaster….but merely satisfactory. And aren’t we done with the MCU now? Is anyone else ready to move onto new frontiers?

And earning $211 million in its opening weekend has reminded us there’s apparently still an audience for these flashy, bro-centered, R-rated, superhero adventures. But not for viewers under 17 of course. (Wink wink!)