Rupert and the Frog Song

 Rupert Bear is a British icon, a character who first appeared in a newspaper comic strip in 1920.  So why am I talking about Rupert and the Frog Song (1984) in the middle of my Beatles binge?

 

That's why.  Paul McCartney acquired the film rights to the character the day after he announced he was leaving the Beatles, and he wrote, produced and starred in Rupert and the Frog Song.  The short was released in theaters to accompany Give My Regards to Broad Street, and unlike the feature film it was actually well received.

 The plot is not only there to string the songs together, mostly because there's only one song. It's a beautiful day, and Rupert (McCartney) decides to go for a walk.  He chats with his friends Bill and Edward, stands under a tree covered with butterflies, and finally discovers frogs in a pond.

Rupert walks some more, and discovers a secret cave with a sign warning "Frogs Only Beyond This Point."   That does not deter him, and nor do the frog guards stationed in the cave.  Rupert sneaks in and discovers the frogs preparing for a special ceremony that happens every couple of hundred years, so it's good timing.  But what Rupert doesn't know is that he's been followed by an owl and a pair of black cats.

 

 Rupert watches as the frogs sing "We All Stand Together," a psychedelic Busby Berkely dance routine breaks out, the Kinga nd Queen of Frogs make a brief appearance, and the owl and cats interrupt the ceremony, though thankls to a quick warning from Rupert no harm is done to the frogs.  Then Rupert goes home and tells his mother about what he's seen.

 

 I've seen Give My Regards to Broad Street, so I know that Paul McCartney was in a nostalgic mood in 1984.  On the other hand, there's a strand of nostalgia running through all his work, showing up in Beatles songs like "Penny Lane" and "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band."  But I think there's more to it than that - this short film isn't just celebrating a beloved character from Paul's childhood, it's creating wonder.  The key scene for me comes before the frog song, when Rupert discovers that the tree he's standing under isn't covered in leaves, it's covered in butterflies.

 It's a moment devoted entirely to wonder, the kind of scene you see in My Neighbor Totoro or 1982's The Snowman.  (And given the timing,  I suspect The Snowman was a direct influence.)  It's a very short film, and it's not deep, but it is lovely.

Give My Regards to Broad Street

 Give My Regards to Broad Street (1984) was written and produced by Paul McCartney, so it's a good opportunity to see how much he's learned about film-making since Magical Mystery Tour.  The results are mixed.

 

The plot of Broad Street (and it does actually have one!) is remarkably straightforward: Paul McCartney falls asleep in a limousine.  Okay, it's a little more complicated than that.  Paul dreams that he is driving in a flashier car, on his way to a business meeting.  The bright red car phone rings, and it's bad news. Harry (Ian Hastings) is missing, and he has the master tapes for the new album; since Harry is an ex-con whom Paul gave a second chance to, so everyone assumes that he's taken the tapes.  Worse yet, if the master tapes aren't recovered by midnight, the Paul McCartney music empire will fall into the hands of sinister financier Mr. Rath (John Bennett) for complicated business reasons.

And Paul McCartney is a lot of things, but he is not a detective, so he lets the police do their jobs and goes about his day, rehearsing and filming videos with his band, including wife Linda (Linda McCartney) and drummer Ringo (Ringo Starr), though Ringo spends a great deal of the film flirting with a beautiful journalist (Barbara Bach, Ringo's real life wife), and quite successfully, too.  Ringo's got rizz, as the kids will probably stop saying any minute now.

 That doesn't mean that Paul isn't worried about Harry, though; he keeps drifting in and out of elaborate daydreams about what might have happened to him, including a lengthy chase through the foggy streets of Victorian London.  And he also finds time to try and comfort Sandra (Tracy Ullman), Harry's . . . partner?  The relationship is never made clear.  Still, Paul handles the music, his right hand man Steve (Bryan Brown) handles the business, and the police are theoretically handling the investigation.

 But the plot is only there to string the songs together.  There are a lot of songs, a generous mix of Beatles songs and songs from Wings and Paul's solo albums, and while the movie flopped, the soundtrack was a big success.  

The movie definitely makes more sense than Magical Mystery Tour, but it's a very sedate affair, lacking the frenetic energy of the earlier film.  On the other hand, there's an actual story, and Paul's character has an actual arc, grappling with the question of whether he was right to trust Harry.  (He was right, because there's no way that Paul McCartney of all people is going to make a movie where cynicism is the right choice; sunny optimism is his brand!) 

More than that, Give My Regards to Broad Street has an actual theme!   Paul isn't just promoting a new album, he's trying to protect his legacy, and the "Greatest Hits" nature of the soundtrack helps with that.  The threat is that Paul will lose control of the music that he's created.  Fortunately the threat is averted, and now I will take a big sip of coffee while reading about what happened to the Beatles' catalog in 1985.

On the other hand, while the plot is more substantial than the plot of Magical Mystery Tour, it's still not very substantial.  The movie is very slight, more like a concert video with a framing device, and it doesn't help that the plot turns out to be all a dream.  There is an actual movie here, but it's really just an excuse for silly love songs.  And what's wrong with that?

 

Magical Mystery Tour

 

 After watching something particularly baffling, I will sometimes shake my head and say "That was definitely a movie."  After watching Magical Mystery Tour (1967), though, I'm honesty not so sure.

Here's the thing. In Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, the plot is only there to string the songs together.  In Magical Mystery Tour, the plot (such as it is) is mostly there to kill time between songs.  It's really more of a vague premise than a narrative experience, but here is what I can gather.

Richard Starkey (Ringo Starr) and his Aunt Jessie (Jessie Robins) book tickets for "The Magical Mystery Tour," a bus trip managed by Jolly Jimmy Johnson (Derek Royle) and Miss Wendy Winters (Miranda Forbes), joined by Buster Bloodvessel (Ivor Cutler), who doesn't actually work for the company but seems to like the uniform.  The other Beatles are also passengers; John and George are sitting together and practicing comedy bits, while Paul is flirting with the starlet (Maggie Wright) sitting next to them.  The bus drives from one destination to another, while in a magical high school science lab above the clouds, four or five magicians (the Beatles and their road manager and personal assistant Mal Evans) follow the progress of the bus and use their magical powers to do vague things.  Aunt Jessie is looking for a new husband and has her eye on Bloodvessel, and that's as close as anyone gets to a tangible motivation.

It's definitely a strange and ambling film, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.  At its best it's an example of the sort of British surrealist humor that Monty Python would start doing in 1969, and that the future Pythons were already doing on TV shows like At Last the 1948 Show (featuring Graham Chapman and John Cleese, along with Marty Feldman and the lovely Aimi MacDonald) and Do Not Adjust Your Set (featuring Eric Idle, Terry Jones and Michael Palin, along with Denise Coffey and David Jason.  Music provided by the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, who also perform "Death Cab For Cutie" in Magical Mystery Tour's strip club scene.)  At it's worst the script is incoherent nonsense; nobody changes, nobody learns anything, and Aunt Jessie never manages to land Bloodvessel, at least as far as we can tell.

Of course, people probably watch the movie for the songs.  Whether you like the music or not will depend on whether you like the Beatles, but the songs are presented in a variety of striking visual styles, including the funny animal costumes for "I Am The Walrus," extreme closeups of Paul's eyes for "The Fool on a Hill," and George playing a keyboard drawn with sidewalk chalk for "Blue Jay Way."  Perhaps it's better to think of this as a collection of music videos with bonus sketch comedy bits rather than a movie.

 

The other Beatles tend to blame Paul for Magical Mystery Tour.  This will be important later. 

 

 

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1978) is a movie with a certain reputation, and it's not a good reputation.  It was not a commercial success, and it was savaged by critics and angry Beatles fans upon release.  On the other hand, I've been on a steady diet of Bollywood for the past few decades, so I am no stranger to confusing plots, endless musical numbers, and respected actors who are chewing the scenery and being well paid for it. 

Heartland, USA is an idyllic, if fictional small town that is most famous for being home to the legendary Sergeant Pepper and his Lonely Hearts Club Band, who managed to win the First World War for the allies by being so gosh-darned inspiring.  (I think - the movie isn't really clear on this point.)  After the war the band spent a few decades going in and out of style, but eventually time catches up with us all, and when the Segeant died, he left his magical instruments in the care of the town's mayor, Mr. Kite (George Burns).  The instruments were kept in the town's wax museum, and as long as they remain in Heartland, the people of the world would know happiness and peace.

After twenty years a new Lonely Hearts Club Band forms, led by Pepper's grandson Billy Shears (Peter Frampton) and featuring the Henderson brothers, Mark (Barry Gibb), Bob (Maurice Gibb), and Dave (Robin Gibb).  Billy's brother Dougie (Paul Nicholas) is the manager, while Billy's sweetheart Strawberry Fields (Sandy Farina) is there to provide wholesome small-town charm.  They're a big hit in Heartland, and powerful music mogul B. D. Hoffler (Donald Pleasence) thinks they can be a big hit everywhere.  He invites the band to come out to Hollywood and sign with his label.

This is a rock musical about the music industry made in the Seventies, so when the boys reach Hollywood they are immediately seduced by glitz, glamor, while Billy is literally seduced by Lucy (Dianne Steinberg), the lead singer of girl group Lucy and the Diamonds.  Meanwhile, in Heartland, real estate mogul Mean Mr. Mustard (Frankie Howerd) and his assistant (Carel Struycken, Star Trek's Mr. Homn) arrive in town in a high tech van with a supercomputer and two lady robots (Anna Rodzianko and Rose Aragon).  Their mission is to steal the instruments, and they do, easily, because they're just on display in the museum.  Mustard also wants to steal Strawberry Fields, but he never gets the chance.

Once the instruments are gone Heatland immediately becomes seedy and corrupt, which is just what the sinister and mysterious Future Villain Band wants.  Strawberry takes a bus and arrives in Hollywood to find the Lonely Hearts Club Band, and while she's miffed about the Billy and Lucy situation, she quickly moves past it, because they have instruments to recover.  That means visits to evil plastic surgeon Maxwell Edison (Steve Martin) and crossing guard turned cult leader Father Sun (Alice Cooper).  During the fight with Father Sun Billy is accidentally electrocuted, but after Strawberry sings her namesake song, Frampton comes alive.  

 While the band is adventuring they are not performing, so B. D., Dougie and Lucy arrange for a benefit concert to help clean up Heartland and hopefully restart the planned national tour.  The concert is good enough that while Earth, Wind and Fire are performing, Dougie and Lucy have the chance to steal all the money, and Mustard manages to recover the instruments and kidnap Strawberry while he's at it.  

The boys rush to rescue Strawberry and the instruments from the Future Villain Band.  Who could the mysterious mastermind be?  Turns out it's Aerosmith.  Unfortunately, Strawberry is the smart and competent one, so it doesn't go well.  The next scene is Strawberry's funeral, and Billy is about to jump off the roof, but then Magical Flying Billy Preston appears from Heartland's weather vane to fix everything.  Yes, it really is that abrupt.

 Summarizing the plot makes it sound more sensible and comprehensible than it actually is, but that's okay, because the plot is only there to help string the songs together.  There are a lot of songs, and the covers vary in quality; Earth, Wind and Fire's cover of "Got to Get You into My Life" is probably the high point, and Frankie Howerd's "When I'm Sixty-Four" might be the nadir.  (There is competition.)

 But even that doesn't convey how weird this movie is.  Despite the songs, this is basically a silent movie.  There is no dialogue, and the story is conveyed through the songs, intertitles, and some narration by George Burns.  The actors convey emotion through facial expressions, among other things, and they do a decent job.  It's a fascinating experiment, but why would you hire Donald Pleasence and not give him any lines?

 This is probably not a good movie, but it is definitely an experience, and there are days when we all need Magical Flying Billy Preston to help us.

 

 

Stupid Zombie Hitler.

 

 

Horror comedy is still a thriving genre in Indian cinema at the moment, and  Pallu Padama Paathuka (2023) is yet another horror comedy, this time relatively light on the horror and heavy on the comedy.  Or "comedy."  This is an incredibly broad Tamil farce, and the good news is that over the years I have built up a resistance to broad Tamil farces.  The bad news is that after Go, Goa Gone I have surprisingly high standards for Indian zombie comedies.

 After a cold open involving a young man getting more than he expected form his girlfriend during a forest rendezvous, the movie introduces us to Gopi (Shah Ra), a voice actor who dubs Bear Grills into Tamil.  Gopi is kidnapped and brought before Don Varadha (G. M. Kumar), who is rich, powerful and blind.  Varadha recognizes Gopi by his voice and thinks that he is Bear Grills, and wants him to guide him in the forest for a very important reason that I didn't quite catch.  They meet a zombie, and the movie jumps ahead four years.

In the next scene, a group of strangers meet on a cliff overlooking Kanjuthanni Forest.  They all intend to take their own lives, and they all have tragic backstories which are told in flashbacks.  It's all classic movie tragedy, including a man whose boyfriend is getting married to a woman, a man fired just before his wedding, a man who discovers that his family are really a cult of Satanic cannibals who plan to sacrifice him on his birthday, and a man who set off a chain of accidents that killed his entire family by dropping a bar of soap.  And then there's Mahesh (Dinesh), widely known as "Revolting Mahesh," who unwittingly set off a popular uprising after he was arrested for getting drunk while sitting on a voting machine.  Mahesh is our hero, though he's every bit as hapless as the others.

After drinking together, the group decide to explore the forest, and they meet a swarm of zombies.  Fortunately they are rescued by Sathya (Sanchita Shetty),  a two-fisted action scientist.  Unfortunately, she drugs them, intending to use them as zombie bait, though she changes her mind and rescues them again at the last minute, getting bitten by one of the zombies in the scuffle.  Fortunately she doesn't change completely yet, and tells the men that she has an antidote in her home.  They make it to her compound with only one casualty, and she injects herself with the antidote and introduces her partially zombified father, Rohit Sharma (Anand Babu) and drops some exposition.

Sathya and her father were working on a military project dubbed "Project Cthulhu," which which was . . . supposed to create unkillable zombies, so I suppose it was a success.  (Project Cthulhu's logo which is just the Hydra emblem from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, so the evilness is pretty easy to spot.) Rohit and Sathya had second thoughts about creating an undead army, but the military took the formula by force and accidentally released it in the compound, thus creating the current zombie outbreak.

The good news is that the zombies are pretty much confined to the forest, so they can just leave.  Sathya knows the way and offers to lead them, and along the way they meet Gopi, who is not dead and instead living in the woods as a half-crazed survivalist.  Mahesh is completely in love with Sathya at this point, and he writes a letter to propose to her, but after he gives it to her she is kidnapped by Nazi zombies.  Gopi provides the necessary exposition: Rohit tested the formula by using it to animate the frozen body of Adolph Hitler (Hareesh Paradi), and Hitler now has his own compound full of uniformed and relatively loyal zombies.  There's a problem beyond the fact that they brought back Hitler - Zombie Hitler came back obsessed with sex, and he is convinced that Sathya is Eva Braun, either because he thinks she looks like Braun or because she's the only woman in the area.  

 Mahesh and his friends must rescue Sathya from Zombie Hitler, and at this point the movie pretty much abandons horror entirely, treating the zombies as a bunch of guys in unconvincing makeup, and after a bizarre item number Mahesh and Hitler have to compete in a drinking contest for Sathya's hand.

This is broad farce, one of the broadest farces I have ever seen.  And that is a problem, because the movie is leaning hard into the absurdity of the premise.  This movie wants to be so bad it's good, but you can't make a movie that is so bad it's good on purpose, because you wind up winking at the camera rather than taking your own movie seriously.   Some of the jokes land well, but many of them do not, and the film relies on lazy and sometimes homophobic innuendo.

It is not fair to compare this with Go Goa Gone, a movie with an actual budget and some A-list stars.  But it's not the budget that sinks Pallu Padama Paathuka, it's the writing.  Go Goa Gone puts some work into making its slacker heroes grow and change, treats its zombies as a consistent threat with consistent rules, and has an actual theme that develops over the course of the film, and Pallu Padama Paathuka does not.

 

 

Noir for the whole family!

 

 

 Raymond Chandler famously defined his hard-boiled detectives by saying "But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor—by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world."  In Sampradayaini Suppini Soodapoosani (2026) the mean streets belong to a rural Indian village, and the man who is not tarnished nor afraid is Sriram (Sivaji), an incorruptible civil servant.  

Sriram is responsible for approving construction projects in the village, which means that he is constantly being offered, and refusing, bribes.  One enterprising thug decides to try intimidation instead, threatening to kidnap Sriram's son Mittu (Rohan), and Sriram critiques the kidnap plan and offers a more practical scheme instead.  He explains to the baffled thug that Mittu is obsessed with making Youtube reels, and he's already filmed himself attacking people in the hopes of going viral.  The thug switches to threatening to kidnap Sriram's wife Utthara (Laya), but she's overbearing and overprotective, willing to use loose wires to shock a hapless burglar.  The thug decides it's better to walk away quietly.

 Later Sriram has a public argument with  Vikram (Prince Cecil), the corrupt and womanizing head of the village's police department.  The next day Vikram shows up at Sriram's house, invites himself in and leers at Utthara for a while.  And when Sriram makes it home, there's a dead policeman on the couch, shot in the head by . . . .Mittu, who was playing around with Vikram's gun.  Sriram's first instinct is to turn himself into the police, reasoning that after the public argument no one will believe that he didn't shoot Vikram anyway, but Utthara urges him to put aside his rigid ethics for a while and help her to hide the body, and he reluctantly agrees despite knowing that wackiness is bound to ensue.

Meanwhile, the corrupt MLA (Sharath Lohithaswa) is worried about the monthly "gift" he's supposed to send to his superior.  The "gift" (a large bag of money) is usually placed in the trunk of a sportscar belonging to his personal assistant, who happens to be Sriram's next door neighbor, before being picked up by one of his men and then delivered.  This time the money has not arrived on time, and when they send someone to check the car, it's gone, because Sriram and his family "borrowed" it while looking for a way to hide the body.  It's a fun family roadtrip, with Vikram in the trunk!

Despite appearances, there is an actual mystery here, though Sriram is more focused on protecting his family than solving anything.   It's also technically a comedy, though the jokes aren't a real focus either.  Instead, this is very much a quirky character piece, with Sriram meeting a large cast of eccentrics as he tries to reconcile his rigid code of ethics with the fact that he's trying to cover up a murder.  Can he stay the best man in his world, or does he have to give that up to protect his family?  

And will they ever get Mittu the counseling that he so desperately needs?

 

  

Legally this counts as a Christmas movie.

 

 

 

You can add Gurkha (2019)  to the long list of movies where I have seen the Indian remake but not seen the American original, so I cannot tell you how well this Tamil action comedy captures the subtle nuances of Paul Blart: Mall Cop.  I can only look at the movie in front of me.

 

The titular Gurkha is Bahadur Babu (Yogi Babu), though the opening sequence quickly establishes that he is the son of a Gurkha father and a South Indian mother, because Yogi Babu does not look at all like a member of the Gurkha community.  Bahadur and his fellow Gurkhas provide security for their neighborhood in Tamil Nadu, but they are not respected, so Bahadur decides that he will become a police officer, and specifically a police officer like Singham.  

 

Bahadur does not become a police officer.  He doesn't make it through the first night of training before ACP Harris Jayaraj (Ravi Mariya) throws him out, along with the equally hopeless aspiring police dog Undertaker.  Bahadur then gets a job with Shaktimaan Security, a small private security company owned by Kavariman (Manobala).  (And the terrible commercials for the security company just reminded me of how much I miss Shaktimaan.)  Initially he's assigned to provide security for a house, and he wanders next door and meets instantly falls in love with Margaret (Elyssa Erhardt), who happens to be the American Ambassador to India.  

 

Bahadur never gets a chance to confess his love or even really get to know Margaret before he's reassigned to work at a large shopping mall; he nearly quits before he learns that Margaret visits the mall regularly for her yoga class.  He's assigned to work with an older security guard named Usain Bolt (Charle), who shows him the secret room which the security cameras don't record where they can hang out all day, a secret room which I am sure will not be important in any way later.  When Margaret's bag is stolen, Bahadur and Undertaker (mostly Undertaker) manage to recover it, and he manages to befriend Margaret, though she does warn him that as a career diplomat she could never marry an Indian citizen because it would require her to give up her job.

 

And then the terrorists show up.  In theory they are a band of disgruntled former soldiers, though leader Thyagu (Raj Bharath) has his own agenda.  They launch a fairly sophisticated scheme to lure a large crowd of civilians into the mall's movie theater with free tickets to Bahubali 3 and a large gift certificate, and then they strike!  Margaret is the real target, but after killing a couple of hostages for emphasis they demand a small ransom from the government within an hour.  When the government can't get its act together in time, the terrorists turn to crowdfunding, demanding a much larger ransom form the people of Tamil Nadu with a four hour deadline, which is probably the most genuinely interesting thing in the entire movie.

 

 The police won't go in, because some of the hostages lured in by the promise of Bahubali are the wives of high ranking police officials, including the wife of ACP Jayaraj.  Most of the security guards are forced out early in the siege, and the halls of the mall are being patrolled by flying camera drones.  Only Bahadur, Usain, and Undertaker are left to save the hostages - it's basically Die Hard with slapstick, and whether you like the movie or not is going to depend on your tolerance for broad South Indian comedy.

 

That said, tone is an issue.  Bahadur is a big goofball with a funny dog, but while he's mucking about people are dying.  Even the hostages alternate between stark terror and comedy bits, though Thyagu and his men are at least consistently serious.  Bahadur's level of competence also varies wildly, swinging from action hero to buffoon as the script requires, and sometimes literally swinging from a firehouse dangling from the roof.

 

On the plus side, the movie never suggests that Margaret (the ambassador) and Bahadur (the mall cop) end up together; my suspension of disbelief can only stretch so far.