Godavari

For me, the best part of Godavari was the cute, little dog - which replaces all the buffonery (Sunil, MS Narayana, Aali, Brahmanandam, Venu Madhav) in Telugu cinema with a dog-ifestation of man's quirky ways. Thats the biggest victory for Telugu cinema: knowing that self-deprecatory buffonery is not humor.
However, Godavari treads the feel-good path of Anand, inserting many suspensions-of-disbeliefs and formulae-for-success: a returned Masters-in-US wooing a modern-yet-simple telugu girl, sipping coffee/tea in the monsoon, the glory of being simple-minded, how beautiful India is, undercurrents of old-telugu-cinema and scriptures, heart-warming music etc.

Whether Godavari is better or worse than Anand is debatable, but we need films like these to take back Telugu cinema to where it was, and where it can go. To get to point C from point A, we need a few point B's. And, Godavari and Anand are point Bs. And I hope Shekar realizes this and takes us to point C fast.

"After Anand, I had a tremendous response from family audiences -- especially the educated middle class. I felt they lacked representation. I also belong to the middle class."

"After the overwhelming response, I decided not to experiment too much. I wanted to sustain it, yet do something new. I knew that one factor which could sweep away all memory of Anand was the Godavari itself. So, I picked it as a backdrop."
-Shekar Kammula

Read the complete interview here:
http://specials.rediff.com/movies/2006/jun/07sd1.htm