RIFLE RANGE BOY

Silence 1: Can You Hear It? Silence 2: The Night Owl Bar Shootout Written & Directed:  Aban Bharucha Deohans It is not easy to catch many whodunnit mystery dramas in Indian cinema. Most stories are too convoluted to follow or too outlandish to believe. Sometimes, the investigative officers are given superhuman capabilities and have to single-handedly swashbuckler or chase the villains to the conclusion. That is history.  With more exposure to police procedural TV shows and Hollywood offerings, audiences can no longer be fooled by this dated production. They are demanding more. With the advent of OTT platforms, it seems that newer, bolder, and more realistic scripts, sticking to real investigative police work, are on the menu these days. Many real-life crime dramas are shown as docuseries and movies. These two films with the same cast are fine examples. In Silence #1, a young lady is found dead with a gaping wound on her head by hikers at a popular hiking site. Novice sleut...

Silence (Nishabdham, Tamil; 2020) This film was initially meant to be a silent movie, one without dialogues. It would have probably done better. The dialogue was a killjoy and laughable. A significant proportion of conversation of the film was in English, and that is the one that looks so fake, especially the lines written for Hollywood actor Michael Madson.  It starts off as a paranormal tale but later goes on to give a serial killer angle to the final story. It is predictable with many glaring loopholes in the narration. The cast comprises an ensemble of a few Indian actors (R Madhavan, Anushka Shetty and a few young actresses) and many amateurs.  Forget the story. What fascinated me about this film is how Indians in this story blended into American society. Filmed amidst the lush landscape around the outskirts of Seattle, Washington, we see how the characters mingled seamlessly partaking in what is considered the culture of the local populace. They indulge in classical musi...

Silence is golden, they say. Sometimes all that you needed to do was to do nothing. Precious time can be used to ponder, meander and introspect. These things are necessary to take stock of our performances in our duties as parents, siblings, offspring, employers, employees, pet owners or just as a mere person. Libraries, parks, open spaces, temples of worship and wilderness once were freely available for this purpose. On the one hand, we say that resting is part of training and that still water runs deep or that only the empty makes the loudest noise. In the same breath, we also say that an idle mind is the devil's workshop, as if our brain must always be doing something at all times. Perhaps, it was a ploy by the people in power so as not to make his subjects a thinking lot. The modus operandi  is to keep their minds occupied only with their almighty bosses' rhetorics - no place for the lowly minions to start using the brains to start a revolut...