Cinemaah

Kid Zone


There used to be—still is—a Children’s Film Society of India that was supposed to make films for kids. For years the CFSI has been plodding away, with its dismally low budgets, making wholesome moral-flaunting films, usually too boring for its target audience.

If the CFSI had bigger budgets and/or a star like Salman Khan to back their films, then Chillar Party is probably what it would come up with.  Let’s not forget kids in India now get high-powered entertainment from Hollywood (the last Harry Potter movie comes up next week) and are used to sophisticated animation and 3D. So a homegrown product has to offer something that money cannot buy.  Which is not just Salman Khan muscle and Ranbir Kapoor dance number, but characters and plot that bypass the gloss and go straight to a kid’s heart. This is what Vikas Bahl  and Nitesh Tiwari’s charmingly titled Chillar Party does, to some extent.

The children in the film are not model-cute or filmi-precocious, but the kind you could find in your building. Chandan Nagar Society has kids with nicknames like Jangya, Encyclopedia, Secondhand, Shaolin, Motu, Aflatoon, Panvati etc. so that the viewer can keep track of which is which. What they have in common is their love of cricket and their hatredfor dogs, caused by a white Pomeranian.
Into their world comes street kid Fatka (Irfan Khan), a skinny kid with a canine buddy called Bhidu. He puts up with alot of hostility from the kids, only to hang onto his menial job washing cars.

Eventually, he is accepted into the fold, and also gets the kids on his side for a Save  Bhidu campaign (that includes a chaddi march) when a nasty politician  (Shashank Shende) decides to clear the area of stray dogs.

The kids vs adults war is fun and the inherent sweetness of the film covers up for the excessive melodrama of the second half. It’s a film with a conscience, which is more than what one can expect from the movies these days.

Chop and Cringe

The Bhatts had always found a way of bypassing the star system and the bylanes Bollywood by making strong on plagiarised content films with good music and their own roster of actors. Of late they have taken advantage of a more liberal censor boardand easygoing going audiences to churn out sex-and-sin thriller, mostly with Emraan Hashmi and an interchangeable ‘hot bod’.

Hashmi has played the cynical, amoral, character so many times, he could write a book on it. But it is still a bit much when Arjun, a commitment-phobic, ex-cop turneddrug peddler and his skin model inamorata Priya (Jacqueline Fernandez) exchangehard luck back stories to explain why are the way they are – her mother wentmad after her love was spurned by an angrez,his whole family committed suicide.
 
In Mohit Suri’s Murder 2 (lifted generously from The Chaser) the psycho villain Dheeraj (Prashant Narayan) has an equally bizarre tale—tortured his wife, got himself castrated, and goes about killing and dismembering girls.  It’s not a spoiler, the serial killer is revealed quite early on in the film, because the story is supposed to be about the apathetic Arjun’s redemption.  He is hired by a pimp to find out where his girls are disappearing to, and Arjun runs into a morbid serial killing scenario.
It’s quite a traditional cop-and-creep thriller, that moves along at a decent pace, but forthe viewer there is no great excitement in watching a mad pervert torturing women, unless they are titillated too-- like Dheeraj--  by their screams, chopped body parts and blood.There are too many yuck-making, eye-averting scenes of gruesome violence; makes you wonder why you should spend good money on a film that is not entertaining and makes you come out of the cinema wanting to upchuck your last meal. The sex is used like an ‘item’—butthe film could very well have done without the Priya character, since the catalyst for Arjun’s change is a young teenager Reshma (Sulagna Panigrahi), Dheeraj’s latest victim.

The Bhatts may very well have hit on their hands, people still remember Murder, but they have stooped really low this time, and the censors really have to do their jobs better if they are to justify their existence.