Local Kung Fu (Assamese)

I am a huge fan of first time directors.  Especially those who buck the system to follow their dreams.  They may stumble and stutter and fall all over themselves in an attempt to prove a point or 2 to those who called them stupid.  I am quite certain Kenny Basumatary faced the brick bats when he dropped out of IIT Delhi (yep. U heard those three alphabets right) to follow his dream – cinema. Read more about Kenny here - http://www.westlandbooks.in/author_detail.php?author_id=320

So when Kenny B finally got done with his extra curricular activities, he finally got down to making Local Kung Fu, an Assamese martial arts movie in 2010.  What did they have in hand to spend? Next to nothing when you look at movies with budgets that go into several digits.  Kenny and his team (mostly family) restricted the budget to less than 6 figures.  Rs. 90000/- to be precise.

But, that’s not the only thing that makes Local Kung Fu special.  There is a reasonable story, some decent script writing, some cheesy slapstick humour and some really good Kung Fu sequences that make LKF really worth watching.  Charlie (KB) practices Kung Fu at his uncle’s (Amar Singh Deory) place and is reasonably good at it.  He has been seeing Sumi (Sangeeta Nair) for nearly 5 years but hasn’t been able to gather courage to speak to her uncle (Bhobananda Dass).

To add spice to their lives are some local goons lead by Dulu (Utkal Hazowary) and his sidekick Tansen (Bibhash Singha) who want to get a liquor license from the local excise officer who also happens to be Sumi’s uncle.  The upright Dass Uncle refuses because it is right in front of a primary school.  The goons of course try every trick in the book including threatening Sumi and Charlie for the license.

The stand out part for me was the almost real Kung Fu sequences.  There were times when I believe there was actual contact between the two fighters.  For a movie that was shot at home and edited as well, the quality of work is really good.  The script could have done with some lesser slapstick but I believe that was the intent and I say, “mission accomplished”.

LKF is a actually a very decent watch.  I would have normally given 5 for the movie.  But I am going with 6 on 10 simply because it was a sincere effort from a bunch of young aspiring blokes. Much better than most of the crap that is being dished out these days.

KB wanted to release the movie on you tube and considering the money spent, it may not have been such a bad idea.  However, some well-wishers got him to go the big screen way.  And as luck would have it PVR has decided to slot it for 1730 (Mulund Nirmal & Goregaon Oberoi) & 1800 (Andheri). Go ahead and watch it.

Watch the trailer on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQnFbfRqG4g.