Cinemaah

Sunshine Kids


Amole Gupte used an unusual method to make Stanley Ka Dabba.  He worked with a bunch of kids without telling that a movie was being shot.  The adult actors were not given any lines, and had to improvise. The result is a  Dogme style film without any artifice.

It takes a while getting used to the rawness and the fact the scenes are not structured. But the kids in the film have fun, so do the grown ups. There is an appealing naturalness to the proceedings, and a ‘story’ is not forced in. When everybody is good and ready, the point the director is trying to make, neatly enters and wraps things up nicely.  Not at all an easy exercise to pull off and hell for the editor, in this case Deepa Bhatia, to turn it into a film with a proper flow.

Stanley (Partho Gupte) comes to school with mysterious bruises and no tiffin, like the other well-scrubbed kids whose mothers (always mothers in this day and age?) pack their dabbas. One of the teachers, Mr Varma (Amole Gupte) salivates at the sight of all the food and it takes all the kids’ ingenuity to dodge his greedy eyes and hands.  Food becomes a central motif of the film—and anyone who can come out if the cinema not feeling hungry for rich home-cooked food, is probably anorexic.
It’s tough to say what happens next without serving up a spoiler, but there is admiration for the way the kids communicate their generosity as well as their mischief without irritating filmi precocity. Children will probably relate to the film whole-heartedly.

Bungle in the Jungle


While her TV soap operas extol the virtues of the great Indian family,  Ekta Kapoor has been trying to tap a different market for her films.  And she has, quite astutely, figured out the sex sells.  Now, with the censors getting more liberal, filmmakers can also get bolder.  Combine sex with horror (with the Hollywood slasher genre does without any qualms), and there is an audience out there wanting to watch locally made soft (well, almost) porn.

Dibakar Bannerjee’s Love Sex Aur Dhoka was a somewhat daring attempt to get a mix of sex, social comment and experimentation with new technology.  Ragini MMS, directed by Pawan Kripalani is just unimaginative and exploitative--- the horror is not scary enough, the sex is not titillating enough.  After a point, it just turns out to be a more boring version of the several horror films from the Ram Gopal Varma Factory.  As far as the jerky, grainy visuals go, Hollywood has already done it all with films like The Blairwitch Project and Paranormal Activity, so Ragini MMS is not even a genre-breaker in any way.

A girl called Ragini (Kainaz Motiwala) sneaks off for a dirty weekend with her boyfriend Uday (Raj Kumar). The first thing you wonder why she is even with such a coarse and abusive guy.  They land up at the jungle getaway, with a miraculously uninterrupted power supply, where, unknown to Ragini, hidden cameras have been placed to catch the  two in action.  There is a lot of kissing, heavy breathing and bleeped out profanity, but there is constant interruption. The censors must have passed the film, because the actors always remain fully, if skimpily, clothed.

First their friends turn up, and then a Marathi-speaking ghost sends across sporadic scares. Ragini is handcuffed to the bed for  a large part of the film, and it does make you wonder how she goes without water, food and a loo.  When the plot (such as it is) runs out of tricks, and the two simply cannot get into bed and start the heavy breathing routine again, the film degenerates into mass killing of  random strangers.  The two lead actors are earnest and uninhibited, which is the best that can be said about them.

The film is being positioned as a date movie, so maybe it will be frequented by masses of giggly teens connecting with the frustration of the characters in the movie; if here is a moral in there, it is: Don’t get too close to the boyfriend, he may be a pervert!  So Ekta Kapoor has her cake (of peddling voyeurism) and eats it too (by advocating restraint).