Written by Trey Seah

I’ll like to start by say­ing, bravo to Real Steel; the impact this film had on me was stronger than steel.

Many of us would remem­ber Hugh Jackman as Wolverine from the X-Men films, with his bushy hair, long side­burns and badass claws, it wouldn’t be hard to imag­ine him in another film which involves fight­ing and metal, albeit the clean shaven look with short hair.

Real Steel is set in the future, where human box­ing becomes obso­lete and robots are fight­ing in the ring instead. Hugh Jackman, who was once a boxer in the ring, ends up using robots to com­pete and runs into many obsta­cles. At the same time, he took care of his 11 year old son, who forms an unlikely rela­tion­ship and braces through the hard­ships together.

 Written by: Dennis Lam

Contagion(2011) seemed more like a doc­u­men­tary than a movie.

Contagion was pro­moted as a film with an extremely estab­lished cast. The actors and actresses in the film met my expec­ta­tion for act­ing qual­ity. Particularly, Laurence Fishburne and Matt Damon.

Written by Trey Seah

Being one of the most talked about film, which would be directed by Joss Whedon (Firefly, Serenity), is com­ing up in May 2012.

The Avengers is based on a super­hero team of the same name. The film will include Iron Man, Hulk, Captain America, Nick Fury, Natasha Romanoff, Hawkeye, Thor, Clint Barton, Loki and Maria Hills.

This is the trailer that was released just yesterday.

Are you ready for The Avengers?

Written by Parveen Maghera

“I’ve had the time of my life
 No I never felt like this before
 Yes I swear, it’s the truth
 And I owe it all to you.”

We take you back to the 60s, into the decade before the Beatles came, before John Kennedy was shot and before the hip­pies were in. It was the decade of the 1963 Oldsmobile Dynamic 88 and the 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air. It was the decade of the twists and the turns, the Mambo and the Cha Cha, the ulti­mate Dirty Dancing.

Beautifully directed by Emile Ardolino, this 1987 film por­trays a rich under­stand­ing of dance. From the cos­tumes and make up used to the music and chore­og­ra­phy put in, Dirty Dancing makes one start tap­ping just from the seat, well, for me at least. This film pri­mar­ily focuses on the Mambo dance, where lead actor Patrick Swayze (Johnny) is por­trayed as a ver­sa­tile and strong dance part­ner who trains Jennifer Grey (Baby) for a Mambo act which Baby will­ingly agrees to fill in for a preg­nant dancer. And this is where their roman­tic love story begins dur­ing a sum­mer vaca­tion in Catskills Mountains.

Written by Nishanthini Ganesan

Written by Irish author Bram Stoker in the year 1897, the book’s title char­ac­ter Count Dracula was inspired by the real-life Romanian prince Vlad III, Prince of Wallachia who was infa­mous for his cruel meth­ods of tor­ture and noto­ri­ous for his sup­posed prac­tices of eat­ing his din­ner amongst his dying vic­tims and drink­ing their blood. The char­ac­ter of Count Dracula would then become one of the most fre­quently por­trayed char­ac­ters in film.

In the 20^th Century, this book was adapted into hun­dreds of dif­fer­ent film ver­sions. The pro­gres­sion of this lit­er­ary clas­sic into film after film is as much a story as the tale of Dracula itself. The adap­ta­tions of the title char­ac­ter dif­fer greatly, from the awk­ward, mys­te­ri­ous Count Orlock of Nosferatu(1922) to the ani­mal­is­tic Count of the 1958 Dracula.

The first film adap­ta­tion of Bram Stoker’s Dracula was the unau­tho­rised 1922 German silent film Nosferatu: Eine Symphonie des Grauens (trans­lated Nosferatu: A Symphony of Terror) directed by F.W. Murnau and pro­duced by the German film studio, Prana Film. Nosferatu would then become the first and only film ever to be pro­duced by the stu­dio after Bram Stoker’s widow sued the authors of the film for copy­right infringe­ment. Stoker’s widow won the lawsuit, resulting in the bank­rupcy of the German stu­dio and the ordered destruc­tion of all known exist­ing copies of Nosferatu. However, sev­eral pirated copies of the movie have sur­vived to the present, enabling today’s audi­ences to catch a glimpse of this iconic classic.

In 1979 Nosferatu was remade by direc­tor Werner Herzog.

Paathshaala — A Revolution Part 1

Written by Nishanthini Ganesan

Edited by Parveen Maghera

Overall, mobile fram­ing is used in Paathshaala to make the viewer almost feel like a stu­dent in the school. There is fre­quent dol­ly­ing of the cam­era through the cor­ri­dors as it films the events hap­pen­ing in the class­rooms through doors and win­dows. It has been shot from the point-of-view of a stu­dent who is walk­ing through the cor­ri­dors and peek­ing through the win­dows at the lessons; at their school­mates, their friends. The audi­ence is brought into the school and made to feel like one who who lives, works and stud­ies in it. After all, Saraswati Vidya Mandir is as much a school as it is one big family.

Low cam­era angles are used in this film to por­tray power and grandeur. The school build­ing itself is fre­quently shot in a low angle, as if the viewer were a small stu­dent look­ing up at its grandeur on his first day at school. When the author­i­ties of Saraswati Vidya Mantir, highly-distinguished men includ­ing the school’s trustee, come to the school in order to con­front Principal Sahay, they are is also shot at a low angle as they exit their car to show how intim­i­dat­ing they would seem to a young child.

Written by Nishanthini Ganesan

Edited by Parveen Maghera

“Revolution doesn’t belong to an era, it can occur any­where, any­time and anyhow.”

India, home of the second-largest Education sys­tem in the world; but where 53% of stu­dents drop out before com­plet­ing pri­mary school. What isn’t rare in this coun­try is for a school to become so poor that due to a lack of sup­plies, their stu­dents barely learn any­thing even after being enrolled in it for 5 years. The Central Government of India spends 10% of its bud­get on Education but as there are no reli­able reports on the dis­tri­b­u­tion of gov­ern­ment resources, there is no way to tell where the money really goes. The sys­tem itself is rife with cor­rup­tion and pol­i­tics so what is left for the pub­lic schools is just a frac­tion of the intended expenditure.

Private schools rely on high stu­dent fees and trustees to cover their costs. These schools are left to the mercy of tyrants dis­guised as the respec­tive schools’ Board of Directors who turn the schools into profit-generators.

What do these schools do to make up for their lack of income?

They put their stu­dents through vig­or­ous train­ings dis­guised as co-curricular activ­i­ties in order for them to appear on tele­vi­sion and print, in this way bring­ing hon­our and atten­tion to the schools. The school becomes the vic­tim of mass-communication and a port for sup­plies to be bought in and sold out­side. The biggest profit is no longer the stu­dents com­ing into this school and leav­ing with a proper edu­ca­tion. It becomes cold, hard cash. Lakhs and lakhs of rupees are earned and thou­sands of stu­dents crum­ble and break under the pres­sures of these school sys­tems. Along with this, stu­dents in the top schools face exam stress. To quote the head of the Scientific Advisory Council to the Prime Minister, C.N. Rao, “India has an Exam System, not Education system.”

Like a plea from the masses to address this prob­lem came the rev­o­lu­tion­ary 2008 Hindi Film, Paathshaala.