I watched the Telugu movie Happy Days today at Prasad's Multiplex.  Went for this along with three colleagues from office, Ashok, Palani and Prabhu.  We went there for the 1:45 PM show, but as I'd reached there a bit early, I went inside a store selling games and bought The Orange Box (but more on that later).  The movie is written and directed by Sekhar Kammula and I'd heard a lot about it, so I was eager to watch.

The movie is set in Chaitanya Bharathi Institute of Technology (CBIT), and follows the lives of eight Engineering students and their relationships during the course of four years.  Was a very nice movie, and I really enjoyed it.  Simple story and well executed.  Of course, it's a credit to the director that he kept things grounded in reality for the most part (a few scenes required one to suspend disbelief, but everything else was realistic), as a result you could relate to what was going on.  If you've studied Engineering in any of the colleges here, you'll almost recognise situations and people you knew, in the situations and characters in the movie!  Of course, the "other side" of Engineering, dealing with the dull and unnecessarily large number of exams and everything, was not focused on much at all (heh, heh).  But then that wouldn't make a very interesting film, now would it!

The acting in the movie was nicely done and I loved the soundtrack (credited to one Mickey J Meyer — who, despite the name, is from Hyderabad it seems, according to Wikipedia).  The movie reminded me of Chennai 600028, another simple, natural but very entertaining film. Just different sets of people at different points in life in these two movies.

One interesting thing, I found while looking at the Wikipedia entry for Sekhar Kammula — apart from the fact that he studied in CBIT (Mechanical Engineering), where the movie is set, it seems he also did his schooling from St Patrick's High School — the same school Varun and myself studied in!  I guess he would have been several years my senior, though.  Anyway, after the movie was over, I stopped in the Sangeet Sagar outlet inside Prasad's and bought a bunch of DVDs (again, more on that, in the next post).