It's very tempting to compare Anjaan: Special Crimes Unit (2018) to the X-Files. After all, both series feature a skeptic and a true believer investigating paranormal cases, and both shows combine "mythology" episodes which are tightly tied to an ongoing plotline with monsters of the week. (Or monsters of the day - during its original run Anjaan ran on a soap opera schedule rather than as a weekly show.) In this case, our skeptic is tough talking Mumbai cop Vikrant Singhal (Gashmeer Mahajani) and the true believer is psychic rookie cop Shivani Joglekar (Cherry Mardia), who just wants to find out what happened to her brother; later Delhi police officer Aditi Sharma (Heema Parmar) joins the team.
Rather than aliens and liver eating mutants, the Special Crimes Unit deals with cases involving ghosts and cursed objects, along with the occasional yellow eyed demon and one vishkanya in a small but crucial role. The big difference between Anjaan and the X-Files, though, is the way the officers are treated. Mulder and Scully are considered a laughingstock, work out of a basement, and constantly have to worry about conspiracies above them in the chain of command. Vikrant and the gang work out of their own (admittedly haunted) police station, and they are respected and generally deferred to by the other police they encounter. Broadly speaking, when there's something strange in a given neighborhood, the local police know whom to call.
However, the X-Files isn't the only series that Anjaan reminds me of. Some major plot elements are very reminiscent of the gloriously cheesy Nineties superhero serial Shaktimaan. Both shows prominently feature mysterious sages, ancient symbols, heroes of uncertain parentage, and a drug that can turn humans into demons, and both Anjaan's Vanraj and Shaktimaan's Tamraj Kilvish are Satanic figures devoted to spreading evil and sin through the human world. The tone is entirely different, of course, and Vanraj comes across as Kilvish's edgy younger brother.
So is it scary? Well, sometimes. It's a show made for TV audiences, which means that gore is limited, and they tend to lean into Bollywood ghost story tropes rather than try to subvert them, which can make the scary moments kind of predictable. On the other hand, those same tropes are often very well executed; I'm still a little unsettled by the haunted wedding bus and the hungry old lady, as well as the way the yellow eyed demons move. One final word of warning, though: the baddies on this show can and do sometimes harm children, so if that's an issue, this may not be the show for you.
Saturday, September 28, 2019
Bhooty Call 2019
It's almost October. The nights are getting longer, the wind is getting colder, and something is stirring. If you're careful, you can catch a glimpse as it meanders through ruined havelis, down creepy rural roads, and into the corners of poorly lit apartment buildings. The Gorilla's Lament is back from the dead, but something came with it.
It's almost October. Time for a Bhooty Call.
The Bhooty Call is one of our favorite traditions here at the Gorilla's Lament offices, a month-long celebration of the many ghosts of Bollywood. Look for a batch of scary and not-so-scary movies (and this year, one TV show) starting in October.
It's almost October. Time for a Bhooty Call.
The Bhooty Call is one of our favorite traditions here at the Gorilla's Lament offices, a month-long celebration of the many ghosts of Bollywood. Look for a batch of scary and not-so-scary movies (and this year, one TV show) starting in October.
Run, Bhola, Run
Fraud Saiyyan (2019) opens with a full-fledged Benny Hill chase, as Bhola (Arshad Warsi) scrambles to escape the wrath of an angry wedding party. He's just making his escape when the narration kicks in and we skip back in time to see just what he did to get into this mess.
Bhola is married to Sunita (Deepali Pansare), who dotes on him, gives him money, and asks for only one thing in return - she needs him to pick up her uncle Murari (Saurab Shukla) from the train station. Before he can make contact, though, he's attacked by a gang of gun wielding goons, and dashes onto the train. Murari recognizes Bhola from a picture Sunita sent him, but Bhola doesn't recognize Murari, so he doesn't mind taking a call from his other wife - well, one of his other wives. Turns out Bhola has a lot of wives, and he's about to make the moves on a new candidate, the lovely Payal (Sara Loren) when her husband intervenes.
Bhola gets off the train at the next station, where he's attacked by the same gang of gun wielding goons. (Apparently they are fast runners.) Bhola dives into a car that happens to be driven by Murari, and turns on the charm, hoping for a ride to Benares. Murari obliges, hoping for a chance to catch him in the act of bigamy (dodecagamy, as it turns out.) And it fails - even when confronted with another wife, Sunita is too besotted to turn on her husband.
However, Bhola still doesn't know who Murari is, so Murari tries again, this time asking to become Bhola's student in the art of the con. Bhola reluctantly agrees, mostly because Murari has a car. And so they set out on a road trip of crime, with Murari subtly sabotaging Bhola along the way.
And then, suddenly, they run into Payal again. Wealthy, recently widowed Payal. Payal, who could be the answer to all of Bhola's problems, as long as he doesn't do anything stupid like falling in love.
Now, I like Arshad Warsi; he's the best second banana in Bollywood, and as a lead he has a sort of befuddled scruffy everyman charm. This time, though, it's not enough. Bhola is such a colossal, self-centered jackass that not even Warsi could make him likable. On the other hand, I'm not sure if I was supposed to like Murari as much as I did; he was the obstacle in our unwitting hero's path, but again, our hero was such a jackass that he needed more obstacles to keep him from doiung bad things. Either way, Saurabh Shukla is one of the finest "that guy"s in India, and it was nice to see him in such a meaty part.
Fraud Saiyaan has a good cast and features some moments of genuine humor mixed in with the fart jokes, but charm can only take you so far.
Bhola is married to Sunita (Deepali Pansare), who dotes on him, gives him money, and asks for only one thing in return - she needs him to pick up her uncle Murari (Saurab Shukla) from the train station. Before he can make contact, though, he's attacked by a gang of gun wielding goons, and dashes onto the train. Murari recognizes Bhola from a picture Sunita sent him, but Bhola doesn't recognize Murari, so he doesn't mind taking a call from his other wife - well, one of his other wives. Turns out Bhola has a lot of wives, and he's about to make the moves on a new candidate, the lovely Payal (Sara Loren) when her husband intervenes.
Bhola gets off the train at the next station, where he's attacked by the same gang of gun wielding goons. (Apparently they are fast runners.) Bhola dives into a car that happens to be driven by Murari, and turns on the charm, hoping for a ride to Benares. Murari obliges, hoping for a chance to catch him in the act of bigamy (dodecagamy, as it turns out.) And it fails - even when confronted with another wife, Sunita is too besotted to turn on her husband.
However, Bhola still doesn't know who Murari is, so Murari tries again, this time asking to become Bhola's student in the art of the con. Bhola reluctantly agrees, mostly because Murari has a car. And so they set out on a road trip of crime, with Murari subtly sabotaging Bhola along the way.
And then, suddenly, they run into Payal again. Wealthy, recently widowed Payal. Payal, who could be the answer to all of Bhola's problems, as long as he doesn't do anything stupid like falling in love.
Now, I like Arshad Warsi; he's the best second banana in Bollywood, and as a lead he has a sort of befuddled scruffy everyman charm. This time, though, it's not enough. Bhola is such a colossal, self-centered jackass that not even Warsi could make him likable. On the other hand, I'm not sure if I was supposed to like Murari as much as I did; he was the obstacle in our unwitting hero's path, but again, our hero was such a jackass that he needed more obstacles to keep him from doiung bad things. Either way, Saurabh Shukla is one of the finest "that guy"s in India, and it was nice to see him in such a meaty part.
Fraud Saiyaan has a good cast and features some moments of genuine humor mixed in with the fart jokes, but charm can only take you so far.
That just raises further questions!
From the moment I first saw the amazing movie poster, I have dreamed of watching Rocket Tarzan
(1963). For the longest time, that was easier said than done, but the
current copyright holders have finally put a nearly complete version on
Youtube, and my dream has been fulfilled. Well, kind of - the print is
grainy and occasionally skips, the sound drops out completely from time
to time, and most seriously, there are no subtitles. Ive managed
to watch the occasional movie without benefit of subtitles in the past,
but Rocket Tarzan is particularly tricky since there is so much
apparently going on and I still have yet to find a single plot summary
online.
Here's what I've been able to figure out. Tarzan lives deep in the jungles of India or possibly Africa; either way, sometimes he fights lions and sometimes he fights tigers. he's not alone in the jungle, though. There's a nearby kingdom, which may be a surviving Roman colony, or may be an ordinary isolated kingdom with a fondness for cosplay. There is also a brilliant professor, his beautiful daughter, and his laurel-and-hardyish lab assistants/comic relief sidekicks. The professor is trying to build a rocket to travel to the moon. The people of the mystery kingdom are helping him, but a guy with a mustache wants the rocket for himself! Fortunately, Tarzan is there to help, and also fortunately the comic sidekicks are surprisingly competent; one of them gains superhuman strength and combat skills when he drinks from the bottle he always carries with him, but I'm not completely sure if it's some sort of potion or he's just a mean drunk.
After many shenanigans and kidnappings and narrow escapes the main characters all climb aboard the rocket (with Mustache Guy stowing away) and fly to the moon, where they discover ancient ruins, cheap sets, giant cardboard stars, and a big-nosed evil alien who sends a robot (or "Robert," as he keeps saying) to attack our heroes. (They are actually menaced by two apparently unrelated robots. The one from the poster is by far the more convincing of the pair.) The Robert is defeated, the big nosed alien is blown up, and then Tarzan faces Mustache Guy in, and I am not making this up, a lightsaber duel.
Rocket Tarzan is obviously very different from the Bollywood movies of today; with all the narrow escapes and sudden twists and turns it's structured more like an old fashioned movie serial, like Commando Cody with occasional musical numbers. I'm not sure if my experience really counts as watching the movie, since I'm still not clear on what just happened, but on the other hand, I don't know if it would make much more sense even with subtitles. Either way, though, I'm still counting this as a dream fulfilled.
Here's what I've been able to figure out. Tarzan lives deep in the jungles of India or possibly Africa; either way, sometimes he fights lions and sometimes he fights tigers. he's not alone in the jungle, though. There's a nearby kingdom, which may be a surviving Roman colony, or may be an ordinary isolated kingdom with a fondness for cosplay. There is also a brilliant professor, his beautiful daughter, and his laurel-and-hardyish lab assistants/comic relief sidekicks. The professor is trying to build a rocket to travel to the moon. The people of the mystery kingdom are helping him, but a guy with a mustache wants the rocket for himself! Fortunately, Tarzan is there to help, and also fortunately the comic sidekicks are surprisingly competent; one of them gains superhuman strength and combat skills when he drinks from the bottle he always carries with him, but I'm not completely sure if it's some sort of potion or he's just a mean drunk.
After many shenanigans and kidnappings and narrow escapes the main characters all climb aboard the rocket (with Mustache Guy stowing away) and fly to the moon, where they discover ancient ruins, cheap sets, giant cardboard stars, and a big-nosed evil alien who sends a robot (or "Robert," as he keeps saying) to attack our heroes. (They are actually menaced by two apparently unrelated robots. The one from the poster is by far the more convincing of the pair.) The Robert is defeated, the big nosed alien is blown up, and then Tarzan faces Mustache Guy in, and I am not making this up, a lightsaber duel.
Rocket Tarzan is obviously very different from the Bollywood movies of today; with all the narrow escapes and sudden twists and turns it's structured more like an old fashioned movie serial, like Commando Cody with occasional musical numbers. I'm not sure if my experience really counts as watching the movie, since I'm still not clear on what just happened, but on the other hand, I don't know if it would make much more sense even with subtitles. Either way, though, I'm still counting this as a dream fulfilled.
What can change the nature of a man?
Thugs of Hindustan (2018) is a movie about thugs. In Hindustan. These are not the murderous Kali cultists you may know from pulp fiction and British propaganda; these thugs are heroic freedom fighters, led by noble badass Kudabaksh (Bollywood legend Amitabh Bachchan) and his ward, literal warrior princess Zafira (Fatima Sahna Shaikh, who played one of the kids in One 2 Ka 4 and suddenly I feel so very, very old.) Kudabaksh and Zafira have a tragic backstory, but the film explains it right away, so I'm not going to bother. The thugs are fighting against the tyranny of the British East India company, personified by the nefarious John Clive (Lloyd Owen), and their first move is to steal a British ship because in addition to being a drama about the struggle for Indian independence, this is also a pirate movie.
In order to locate Kudabaksh, Clive hires charming scoundrel Firangi Sailor (Aamir Khan), and I am deeply disappointed that this movie has a lead character whose name literally means "foreign sailor" and nobody ever makes the obvious "named after his father" joke. Firangi manages to feign heroism long enough to join up with the thugs, betrays them, betrays the British, and so on. One of the many criticisms of this movie is that Firangi is just a copy of Captain Jack Sparrow, but while there's an element of truth there (they're both weirdos with questionable loyalties, awesome hats, and eye makeup who somehow manage to convince people to trust them), Firangi is a more self-aware character than Sparrow is. The movie is at its best when it's about Firangi and Kudabaksh, two strong characters played by two great actors musing about human nature and whether change is really possible.
But the movie is not always at it's best. A good masala movie will leap over genre boundaries with purpose, while Thugs of Hindustan just sort of meanders from one genre to the next. There are pirates, and then Firangi is dressing up as a British officer to woo a courtesan (Katrina Kaif) and then there';s a literal Benny Hill chase scene, and on to the next thing, over and over. The same meandering spirit affects the fight scenes, which should be great. Kudabaksh glowers impressively, Zafira is fast and acrobatic and seems to have the bow from Hawk the Slayer, and Firangi swashes all the buckles, but there's no real weight to anything, so it all comes off as very by the numbers - pretty numbers, but numbers nonetheless.
I'm a little frustrated. Thugs of Hindustan is not a bad movie, but it could have been a really good movie. Like Firangi, it needs to commit.
In order to locate Kudabaksh, Clive hires charming scoundrel Firangi Sailor (Aamir Khan), and I am deeply disappointed that this movie has a lead character whose name literally means "foreign sailor" and nobody ever makes the obvious "named after his father" joke. Firangi manages to feign heroism long enough to join up with the thugs, betrays them, betrays the British, and so on. One of the many criticisms of this movie is that Firangi is just a copy of Captain Jack Sparrow, but while there's an element of truth there (they're both weirdos with questionable loyalties, awesome hats, and eye makeup who somehow manage to convince people to trust them), Firangi is a more self-aware character than Sparrow is. The movie is at its best when it's about Firangi and Kudabaksh, two strong characters played by two great actors musing about human nature and whether change is really possible.
But the movie is not always at it's best. A good masala movie will leap over genre boundaries with purpose, while Thugs of Hindustan just sort of meanders from one genre to the next. There are pirates, and then Firangi is dressing up as a British officer to woo a courtesan (Katrina Kaif) and then there';s a literal Benny Hill chase scene, and on to the next thing, over and over. The same meandering spirit affects the fight scenes, which should be great. Kudabaksh glowers impressively, Zafira is fast and acrobatic and seems to have the bow from Hawk the Slayer, and Firangi swashes all the buckles, but there's no real weight to anything, so it all comes off as very by the numbers - pretty numbers, but numbers nonetheless.
I'm a little frustrated. Thugs of Hindustan is not a bad movie, but it could have been a really good movie. Like Firangi, it needs to commit.
Community theatre saves lives.
One of the fringe benefits of watching a lot of movies made in a
language I do not speak, from a country where I do not live, produced by
an industry that I don't really follow, and advertised on TV channels
that I do not watch is that often when I sit down to watch a movie, all I
have to go on is the Netflix summary and maybe a few familiar names
listed in the cast. Even today, I can be surprised. Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga (2019)
surprised the hell out of me. That said, I'll be spoiling all of the
things, so if you want to be surprised too, stop reading, turn on
Netflix, watch the movie, then come back. I'll still be here.
Let's get the obvious stuff out of the way first. There's a boy, struggling Delhi playwright Sahil (Rajkummar Rao). There's a girl, small town garment factory heiress Sweety (Sonam Kapoor.) Boy meets girl, girl tells boy his play sucks because he's obviously never been in love, boy helps girl escape from an angry man who turns out to be her brother Babloo (Abhishek Duhan). Boy discovers that girl is from a small town, and decides to produce his next play there, with local talent, assisted only by the theater company's caterer (and wannabe actress) Chatro (Juhi Chawla, who, I believe I have mentioned, is the absolute best.)
And at first, everything happens just as you would expect. Sweety's father, Bablbir (Anil Kapoor, Sonam's actual dad) is strict but loving. He also always wanted to be a chef, but was prevented by his own strict parents, so naturally Sahil meets him while he's cooking and assumes he's the family chef. Rumor has it that Sweety is in love with a Muslim man, and everybody (including Sahil) assumes that man is Sahil. It's not. Drama! Complications! Then Sahil confesses his love, and Sweety tells him the truth: she's not in love with a Muslim man, she's in love with a Muslim woman, Kuhu (Regina Cassandra.)
Sahil quickly gets over himself and resolves to help Sweety. (One of the more subtle Good Things about this movie is that this isn't presented as an act of amazing nobility or anything; Sahil's just being a decent person.) Of course, when all you have is a playwright, every problem looks like a stage, so Sahil comes up with the fairly terrible plan of producing a play about a young Indian woman played by Sweety in love with another woman, played by Kuhu. Sweety's family will be so moved by the play that they'll accept Sweety when she comes out to them. Things fall apart in short order, with Sweety outed ahead of schedule, but she insists on continuing the play anyway, not because she thinks it will help her now, but because it would have been a lifeline to her younger self, something to show her that she's not completely alone.
Ek Ladki is not much of a romance. Sweety and Kuhu are already in an established (if secret) relationship, and the onscreen relationship is incredibly chaste, to boot; there's some hugging and some earnest conversations, but Chatro and Balbir get to display a lot more chemistry. But that doesn't really matter, because Sweety is right; this is not a movie about romance, it's about representation. The emotional climax happens before the happy ending, during the play's performance, as the audience realizes what the play's actually about. Some people stay, some people storm out, but the camera lingers on one young girl's face as she suddenly realizes that she's not alone.
It was a nice surprise.
Let's get the obvious stuff out of the way first. There's a boy, struggling Delhi playwright Sahil (Rajkummar Rao). There's a girl, small town garment factory heiress Sweety (Sonam Kapoor.) Boy meets girl, girl tells boy his play sucks because he's obviously never been in love, boy helps girl escape from an angry man who turns out to be her brother Babloo (Abhishek Duhan). Boy discovers that girl is from a small town, and decides to produce his next play there, with local talent, assisted only by the theater company's caterer (and wannabe actress) Chatro (Juhi Chawla, who, I believe I have mentioned, is the absolute best.)
And at first, everything happens just as you would expect. Sweety's father, Bablbir (Anil Kapoor, Sonam's actual dad) is strict but loving. He also always wanted to be a chef, but was prevented by his own strict parents, so naturally Sahil meets him while he's cooking and assumes he's the family chef. Rumor has it that Sweety is in love with a Muslim man, and everybody (including Sahil) assumes that man is Sahil. It's not. Drama! Complications! Then Sahil confesses his love, and Sweety tells him the truth: she's not in love with a Muslim man, she's in love with a Muslim woman, Kuhu (Regina Cassandra.)
Sahil quickly gets over himself and resolves to help Sweety. (One of the more subtle Good Things about this movie is that this isn't presented as an act of amazing nobility or anything; Sahil's just being a decent person.) Of course, when all you have is a playwright, every problem looks like a stage, so Sahil comes up with the fairly terrible plan of producing a play about a young Indian woman played by Sweety in love with another woman, played by Kuhu. Sweety's family will be so moved by the play that they'll accept Sweety when she comes out to them. Things fall apart in short order, with Sweety outed ahead of schedule, but she insists on continuing the play anyway, not because she thinks it will help her now, but because it would have been a lifeline to her younger self, something to show her that she's not completely alone.
Ek Ladki is not much of a romance. Sweety and Kuhu are already in an established (if secret) relationship, and the onscreen relationship is incredibly chaste, to boot; there's some hugging and some earnest conversations, but Chatro and Balbir get to display a lot more chemistry. But that doesn't really matter, because Sweety is right; this is not a movie about romance, it's about representation. The emotional climax happens before the happy ending, during the play's performance, as the audience realizes what the play's actually about. Some people stay, some people storm out, but the camera lingers on one young girl's face as she suddenly realizes that she's not alone.
It was a nice surprise.
Madam, my heart is yours sincerely.
Quick Gun Murugun: Misadventures of an Indian Cowboy (2009) is
the most action-packed movie about vegetarianism I've ever seen.
Murugun (Doctor Rajendra Prasad) is, as advertised, a cowboy, which
means he considers it his sacred duty to protect cows, especially from
the people who want to eat them. (This is India, after all.) Murugun
wanders the dusty plains of South India in the 1980's, accompanied only
by his horse and his Locket Lover (Anu Menon), the image of his deceased
sweetie who still speaks to him, mostly to nag him about getting a
steady job, maybe something in IT? In the course of his wandering and
gunslinging, Murugun runs afoul of Rice Plate Reddy, a gangster who
plots to force all the local hotels to stop serving vegetables and
instead serve beef. After a Crouching Tiger-inspired ambush in a
coconut forest, Murugun is captured and delivered to Reddy, who defies
centuries of villainous tradition and just shoots the hero while he has
the chance. RIP Quick Gun.
As soon as he reaches Heaven, Quick Gun files the proper paperwork to be sent back to Earth. Unfortunately, the wheels of bureaucracy turn slowly, and he's sent back to Mumbai in the twenty first century. Locket Lover thinks this is the perfect opportunity to get a job selling kerosene, but instead he reunites with his older brother and sister-in-law, then sets out to track down Reddy, who has become a business tycoon and is about to launch McDosas, a chain restaurant with an all-meat menu. He also meets the lovely Mango Dolly (Rambha), a bar singer and Reddy's secret girlfriend.
What follows is a dizzying array of explosions, kidnapped housewives,
and completely improbably gunfights. The special effects are, frankly, a
bit on the cheap side, but it's all a part of the fun. Despite the
computer-aided supernatural gunslinging, though, I think the closest
comparison I could make is to Adam West's Batman; Quick Gun Murugun is a
portly middle aged man in a technicolor cowboy outfit who wanders
through one ridiculous situation after another, but he's also a fearless
hero with a kind heart and a natural poetry to his dialogue, and the
movie never loses sight of that.
"The Earth is my bed. The sky is my ceiling. The whole of creation is my native place. My name is Murugun. Quick Gun Murugun. Mind it!"
As soon as he reaches Heaven, Quick Gun files the proper paperwork to be sent back to Earth. Unfortunately, the wheels of bureaucracy turn slowly, and he's sent back to Mumbai in the twenty first century. Locket Lover thinks this is the perfect opportunity to get a job selling kerosene, but instead he reunites with his older brother and sister-in-law, then sets out to track down Reddy, who has become a business tycoon and is about to launch McDosas, a chain restaurant with an all-meat menu. He also meets the lovely Mango Dolly (Rambha), a bar singer and Reddy's secret girlfriend.
"The Earth is my bed. The sky is my ceiling. The whole of creation is my native place. My name is Murugun. Quick Gun Murugun. Mind it!"
With a capital T.
Up until the last year or so, the only Pakistani movie I had seen was
the notorious "Zinda Laash," which is still the only vampire movie I
know of that uses 'dracula' as a common noun. (As in, "He has become a
dracula!") This may have affected my opinions about Pakistani cinema.
To be fair, though, since the late 70s, Lollywood has been looked at as a sort of poor cousin of Bollywood, making the same sorts of movies, only cheaper and more violent. Happily, things have changed, and the Pakistani film industry is enjoying a sort of Renaissance at the moment, which leads me to Teefa In Trouble.
Teefa (Ali Zafar) is an enforcer for the Butt crime family, and no, that is not a typo. Teefa's presented as a charming rogue; he's devoted to his mother, and tries hard not to kill anybody, but he has a real talent for beating people up, and is determined to make the most of it. naturally, when Butt's old friend, legitimate businessman and Polish resident Bonzo (also not a typo) decides to marry his daughter Anya (Maya Ali) to the son of a business partner rather than Butt's son Billu, Teefa is put on a plane to Poland with orders to kidnap the bride and bring her back to Lahore. Anya, however, has her own plans, and has already made arrangements to be "kidnapped" so she can spend some time with handsome bar singer Andy (Tom Coulston), so when Teefa arrives she's more than happy to go along with them.
And that's where the titular trouble comes in - Bonzo has friends in the Polish government, so Teefa is running from the police while falling in love with Anya and battling his own conscience, and you can probably already guess where this is going. It's standard romantic comedy stuff, but it's well written and punctuated with engaging action scenes and fights that range from funny to surprisingly brutal. And not a single dracula to be found.
To be fair, though, since the late 70s, Lollywood has been looked at as a sort of poor cousin of Bollywood, making the same sorts of movies, only cheaper and more violent. Happily, things have changed, and the Pakistani film industry is enjoying a sort of Renaissance at the moment, which leads me to Teefa In Trouble.
Teefa (Ali Zafar) is an enforcer for the Butt crime family, and no, that is not a typo. Teefa's presented as a charming rogue; he's devoted to his mother, and tries hard not to kill anybody, but he has a real talent for beating people up, and is determined to make the most of it. naturally, when Butt's old friend, legitimate businessman and Polish resident Bonzo (also not a typo) decides to marry his daughter Anya (Maya Ali) to the son of a business partner rather than Butt's son Billu, Teefa is put on a plane to Poland with orders to kidnap the bride and bring her back to Lahore. Anya, however, has her own plans, and has already made arrangements to be "kidnapped" so she can spend some time with handsome bar singer Andy (Tom Coulston), so when Teefa arrives she's more than happy to go along with them.
And that's where the titular trouble comes in - Bonzo has friends in the Polish government, so Teefa is running from the police while falling in love with Anya and battling his own conscience, and you can probably already guess where this is going. It's standard romantic comedy stuff, but it's well written and punctuated with engaging action scenes and fights that range from funny to surprisingly brutal. And not a single dracula to be found.
This wouldn't have been a problem if you'd just listened to your mom and became a wrestler . . .
A brief review of Duplicate: AAAHH THIS MOVIE IS SO DUMB YOU GUYS OH MY GOSH I LOVE IT!!!!!
Ahem. Let me try that again, without shouting.
Shah Rukh Khan plays Babloo, an awkward but good-hearted Punjabi man who dreams of becoming the world's greatest chef, despite his overbearing mother (Farida Jalal, who is the mom in every other movie from the Nineties) pressuring him to take up the family business of wrestling. Step one is to get a job in the local hotel, supervised by the beautiful but snooty Sonia Kapoor (Juhi Chawla), who does not speak English as well as she thinks she does. Babloo wins the job (and Sonia's heart) by doing this:
Shah Rukh Khan also plays Manu, a vicious gangster who just escaped from prison and is hell-bent on taking revenge on his former partners, with the help of an array of cunning disguises and his sometime girlfriend, bar dancer Lily (Sonali Bendre).
Now, while Shah Rukh is best known for playing lovable goofball romantic heroes, he rose to stardom playing the villain, particularly in Darr (where he played an obsessive stalker targeting Juhi Chawla, and managed to completely overshadow the hero) and Baazigar (where he was hell-bent on taking revenge with the help of an array of cunning disguises.) In other words, this movie is pitting the two halves of Shah Rukh's career against each other, and because the comedy is so broad, at times we've got Shah Rukh Khan as a parody of Shah Rukh Khan doing a bad Shah Rukh Khan impression pitted against Shah Rukh Khan as a parody of etc. etc. etc.
But you don't need to know any of that to enjoy the film. The dumb gags translate a lot better than clever wordplay would, so you just need to be able to put up with unabashed silliness as Shah Rukh chews his way through two heaping servings of scenery, Everybody's Mom Farida Jalal gets to beat people up for once, Juhi lights up the screen with that smile, and Sonali Bendre actually plays things completely straight, giving a somewhat nuanced portrayal of the bad girl with a heart of . . . maybe not gold, but there's definitely some silver in there. Also more fight choreography directly ripped off from John Woo.
Ahem. Let me try that again, without shouting.
Shah Rukh Khan plays Babloo, an awkward but good-hearted Punjabi man who dreams of becoming the world's greatest chef, despite his overbearing mother (Farida Jalal, who is the mom in every other movie from the Nineties) pressuring him to take up the family business of wrestling. Step one is to get a job in the local hotel, supervised by the beautiful but snooty Sonia Kapoor (Juhi Chawla), who does not speak English as well as she thinks she does. Babloo wins the job (and Sonia's heart) by doing this:
(Oh for the days when I was so young and innocent that I didn't get the eggplant joke.)
Shah Rukh Khan also plays Manu, a vicious gangster who just escaped from prison and is hell-bent on taking revenge on his former partners, with the help of an array of cunning disguises and his sometime girlfriend, bar dancer Lily (Sonali Bendre).
Now, while Shah Rukh is best known for playing lovable goofball romantic heroes, he rose to stardom playing the villain, particularly in Darr (where he played an obsessive stalker targeting Juhi Chawla, and managed to completely overshadow the hero) and Baazigar (where he was hell-bent on taking revenge with the help of an array of cunning disguises.) In other words, this movie is pitting the two halves of Shah Rukh's career against each other, and because the comedy is so broad, at times we've got Shah Rukh Khan as a parody of Shah Rukh Khan doing a bad Shah Rukh Khan impression pitted against Shah Rukh Khan as a parody of etc. etc. etc.
But you don't need to know any of that to enjoy the film. The dumb gags translate a lot better than clever wordplay would, so you just need to be able to put up with unabashed silliness as Shah Rukh chews his way through two heaping servings of scenery, Everybody's Mom Farida Jalal gets to beat people up for once, Juhi lights up the screen with that smile, and Sonali Bendre actually plays things completely straight, giving a somewhat nuanced portrayal of the bad girl with a heart of . . . maybe not gold, but there's definitely some silver in there. Also more fight choreography directly ripped off from John Woo.
Like A Boss
Bollywood is my go to example for it being okay to enjoy problematic
things, as long as you keep an eye on why they're problematic. It's a
big industry, so examples vary, but gender issues in particular are
often glaring. I could write a paper. I'm sure many people have
written papers, and they need to write more, since the examples are so
numerous.
All of which is a long winded way of saying that I also re-watched Yes Boss. The other movies I've talked about so far both mix their genres; One 2 Ka 4 is Bollywood romance meets John Woo action flick, and Phir Bhi Dil Hai Hindustani is Bollywood romance meets political thriller. Yes Boss, on the other hand, just doubles up on the frothy romance, focusing intently on one love triangle which isn't resolved until the very end of the film. It's all pretty standard stuff, except much more nuanced and layered and I'm honestly not sure how I'm supposed to feel about it.
Aditya Pancholi plays Siddharth, a wealthy (but married) playboy who uses his advertising agency mostly as an excuse to meet models. Juhi Chawla plays Seema, a middle class aspiring model with no money but big dreams, and Shah Rukh Khan plays Rahul, Siddharth's smooth talking personal assistant who alternates between helping his boss juggle his assorted mistresses and placate his wife, and caring for his own mother, who has a serious but unnamed heart condition. Rahul meets Seema, sparks fly, but they're both focused on their respective careers, and as Seema says, "Two unsuccessful people can never build a successful life." So that's that. Until Siddharth meets Seema, decides she's the girl he wants, and orders Rahul to use his usual bag of tricks to make that happen.
So. Boy met girl, boy lost girl, creepy millionaire decides he wants girl, and nice-but-ambitious boy helps him. Siddharth is manipulative as hell, staging a workplace confrontation so that he can be the sensitive boss who respects women and traditional Indian values, and it works! Seema's his girlfriend now! His wife catches him out shopping with Seema, so he lies and says that Seema is married to Rahul, thereby forcing the two nice young people into each other's company with a shared secret, at first to protect the boss, and then to protect Rahul's mother, who has returned from her pilgrimage and has a heart condition that could KILL HER if she gets any nasty surprises. It's all textbook romcom stuff.
The problem is that Siddharth is an utter monster who looms over the happy romcom proceedings like Dracula's taller brother. Take this peppy little musical number:
Now, that's not a bad thing; I like a bit of complexity in my schmaltzy romance. But it does raise questions about our hero. On the one hand, the film is very clear that Rahul doesn't know about the shadier stuff Siddharth has been doing, Siddharth is manipulating him at least as much as everybody else, if not more (and even has a scene to gloat about that fact), and Rahul does experience genuine remorse and undergoes a great deal of moral growth. On the other hand, while Siddharth's previous relationships were consensual (as far as we know), they were still based on a potent stew of power imbalance and lies, and Rahul was complicit as hell. I dunno.
At the very least, the movie has its heart in the right place. At the end, our hero rushes to confront the villain because it's the right thing to do, not because he expects to get the girl. (Of course he gets the girl, but he's not expecting it.) And Mom does not die, instead directly telling the audience that it's not Seema's fault she was lied to and manipulated, so don't be a sexist jerk.
All of which is a long winded way of saying that I also re-watched Yes Boss. The other movies I've talked about so far both mix their genres; One 2 Ka 4 is Bollywood romance meets John Woo action flick, and Phir Bhi Dil Hai Hindustani is Bollywood romance meets political thriller. Yes Boss, on the other hand, just doubles up on the frothy romance, focusing intently on one love triangle which isn't resolved until the very end of the film. It's all pretty standard stuff, except much more nuanced and layered and I'm honestly not sure how I'm supposed to feel about it.
Aditya Pancholi plays Siddharth, a wealthy (but married) playboy who uses his advertising agency mostly as an excuse to meet models. Juhi Chawla plays Seema, a middle class aspiring model with no money but big dreams, and Shah Rukh Khan plays Rahul, Siddharth's smooth talking personal assistant who alternates between helping his boss juggle his assorted mistresses and placate his wife, and caring for his own mother, who has a serious but unnamed heart condition. Rahul meets Seema, sparks fly, but they're both focused on their respective careers, and as Seema says, "Two unsuccessful people can never build a successful life." So that's that. Until Siddharth meets Seema, decides she's the girl he wants, and orders Rahul to use his usual bag of tricks to make that happen.
So. Boy met girl, boy lost girl, creepy millionaire decides he wants girl, and nice-but-ambitious boy helps him. Siddharth is manipulative as hell, staging a workplace confrontation so that he can be the sensitive boss who respects women and traditional Indian values, and it works! Seema's his girlfriend now! His wife catches him out shopping with Seema, so he lies and says that Seema is married to Rahul, thereby forcing the two nice young people into each other's company with a shared secret, at first to protect the boss, and then to protect Rahul's mother, who has returned from her pilgrimage and has a heart condition that could KILL HER if she gets any nasty surprises. It's all textbook romcom stuff.
The problem is that Siddharth is an utter monster who looms over the happy romcom proceedings like Dracula's taller brother. Take this peppy little musical number:
Fun, right? Siddharth has drugged Seema, and Rahul is desperately
scrambling to get her home safely. That's probably the film's biggest
bit of tonal weirdness, but that tension is always there, even in the
happiest moments.
Now, that's not a bad thing; I like a bit of complexity in my schmaltzy romance. But it does raise questions about our hero. On the one hand, the film is very clear that Rahul doesn't know about the shadier stuff Siddharth has been doing, Siddharth is manipulating him at least as much as everybody else, if not more (and even has a scene to gloat about that fact), and Rahul does experience genuine remorse and undergoes a great deal of moral growth. On the other hand, while Siddharth's previous relationships were consensual (as far as we know), they were still based on a potent stew of power imbalance and lies, and Rahul was complicit as hell. I dunno.
At the very least, the movie has its heart in the right place. At the end, our hero rushes to confront the villain because it's the right thing to do, not because he expects to get the girl. (Of course he gets the girl, but he's not expecting it.) And Mom does not die, instead directly telling the audience that it's not Seema's fault she was lied to and manipulated, so don't be a sexist jerk.
Two Short Reviews
I've been treating myself to a sort of Shahrukh Khan-Juhi Chawla minimarathon. Movies:
One 2 Ka 4. Shahrukh Khan is Chow Yun-Fat in Neil Simon's The Star-Spangled Girl!
Basically nothing in this movie makes sense. SRK is Arun, a tough inner city cop. After his partner Javed dies, Arun is left to raise his orphaned children, and winds up asking Geeta, a spirited simple village girl he literally just met on the street a few days ago, to move in and help with the kids. Geeta is immediately smitten, Arun is notably less so, but their romantic comedy is complicated by Arun's feud with a local drug lord, the mystery of Javed's death, and the financial pressures of suddenly supporting four kids, a freelance housekeeper, and his old college roommate. There's a big twist, which makes even less sense, a lengthy series of gunfights which all seem to feature jumping sideways with both guns blazing, and a happy ending which really isn't earned at all, but despite all that the movie does a great job of blending the mid-nineties Bollywood romantic comedy aesthetic with John Woo-styled gunplay and crime drama.
Phir Bhi Dil Hai Hindustani.
There's a lot in this movie which just hasn't aged well. SRK's character starts off as a philandering creep who refuses to take no for an answer (granted, the question is "Will you tell me your phone number?" rather than anything worse, but it does not bode well) and has a small house in the country which is filled with photos of scantily clad women, which is played as offbeat and charming rather than a massive red flag, and the less said about the "Let's dress up like Chinese stereotypes in order to fool the gangsters" scene, the better.
That said, once the heroic reporters and their plucky gangster sidekick break into the TV station in order to broadcast the TRUTH and the popular, peaceful uprising that follows? Solid gold. At its best, the movie is a chilling look at what happens when the media sides with a political party, and a stirring invocation of the power of truth. I'm not even Indian but I still feel a surge of patriotic pride when the people begin their march on the prison. It's so good that I'm willing to forgive the clumsy romantic banter at the very end.
But the Chinese scene is terrible, and everybody involved should take a part of every day to feel bad about it.
One 2 Ka 4. Shahrukh Khan is Chow Yun-Fat in Neil Simon's The Star-Spangled Girl!
Basically nothing in this movie makes sense. SRK is Arun, a tough inner city cop. After his partner Javed dies, Arun is left to raise his orphaned children, and winds up asking Geeta, a spirited simple village girl he literally just met on the street a few days ago, to move in and help with the kids. Geeta is immediately smitten, Arun is notably less so, but their romantic comedy is complicated by Arun's feud with a local drug lord, the mystery of Javed's death, and the financial pressures of suddenly supporting four kids, a freelance housekeeper, and his old college roommate. There's a big twist, which makes even less sense, a lengthy series of gunfights which all seem to feature jumping sideways with both guns blazing, and a happy ending which really isn't earned at all, but despite all that the movie does a great job of blending the mid-nineties Bollywood romantic comedy aesthetic with John Woo-styled gunplay and crime drama.
Phir Bhi Dil Hai Hindustani.
There's a lot in this movie which just hasn't aged well. SRK's character starts off as a philandering creep who refuses to take no for an answer (granted, the question is "Will you tell me your phone number?" rather than anything worse, but it does not bode well) and has a small house in the country which is filled with photos of scantily clad women, which is played as offbeat and charming rather than a massive red flag, and the less said about the "Let's dress up like Chinese stereotypes in order to fool the gangsters" scene, the better.
That said, once the heroic reporters and their plucky gangster sidekick break into the TV station in order to broadcast the TRUTH and the popular, peaceful uprising that follows? Solid gold. At its best, the movie is a chilling look at what happens when the media sides with a political party, and a stirring invocation of the power of truth. I'm not even Indian but I still feel a surge of patriotic pride when the people begin their march on the prison. It's so good that I'm willing to forgive the clumsy romantic banter at the very end.
But the Chinese scene is terrible, and everybody involved should take a part of every day to feel bad about it.
Blindsided.
Lafengey Parindey (2010) is a good example of how
hard it can be to judge a Bollywood movie by its DVD cover. It’s the
story of a fighter in an underworld boxing ring and his love for a blind
dancer, so I was really expecting a lot more Ghulam II: The Blindening, and not so much roller dancing.
Our fighter is Nandu (Neil Nitin Mukesh), or “One Shot Nandu” as he’s known in the ring. Nandu has a pretty impressive gimmick; he fights blindfolded, taking a beating until he can figure out exactly where his opponent is, then dropping them in one shot.
Nandu fights for gambling kingpin Usmaan Ali (Piyush Mishra), who treats him like a clever and talented child. Despite working for a mobster, Nandu has managed to avoid being corrupted by the people around him, but he does look up to Anna (Kay Kay Menon), one of Usmaan’s top men, so when Usmaan asks him to drive Anna on a mission, Nandu is happy to agree. Anna is a little less happy, and tries to steer Nandu toward an honest job as a bouncer, but without much success.
Nadu drives Anna to his destination, and then everything goes horribly wrong – Anna has been shot, men with guns are chasing them, and as Nandu drives through the pouring rain he accidentally runs over a young girl. Anna convinces Nandu to get out of the car and then drives away, happy to take the blame for the hit and run since he’s dying anyway.
The victim of the hit and run is Pinky (Deepika Padukone), a talented dancer and skater who dreams of roller dancing on India’s Got Talent. The accident leaves her permanently blinded and unable to skate, and a guilt-ridden Nandu suddenly realizes that while he doesn’t have enough money to make a real difference, he is uniquely qualified to help her learn to see without using her eyes. Time for a training montage!
Montage completed, Pinky feels ready to skate again, and she needs a partner. Since she trusts Nandu, he’s the one that she wants. He reluctantly agrees, and the pair . . . I was going to say they drift into a relationship, but that’s really not the case, since Pinky is very much the instigator. (Nandu falls for her during the training montage, but he feels too guilty to make a move.) However, police inspector K.K. Sethna (Manish Chaudhary) knows that Anna wasn’t driving when Pinky was struck. Despite being ordered off the case, he keeps investigating, and quietly builds an impressive case against Nandu, who still hasn’t told Pinky the truth.
You may think that the plot is building toward one final climactric boxing match in which Nandu tries to earn the money to get Pinky’s eyes fixed, but that’s exactly what doesn’t happen. While Lafengey Parindey is kind of a sports movie, the sport in question isn’t underground blindfolded bareknuckle boxing, it’s reality show rollerdancing. The “big game” isn’t a boxing match, it’s the India’s Got Talent finals.
Another movie would have focused on the boxing, but that’s because that other movie would be about Nandu, while this movie is about Nandu and Pinky. At heart it’s a romance which happens to have some “gritty crime drama” trappings. The streets may be mean, but the people by and large aren’t; even Usmaan, the obvious villain of the piece, makes a fairly reasonable offer that Nandu can’t refuse. It’s like a Jane Austen novel, but with more gangsters and less insight into the human condition.
Our fighter is Nandu (Neil Nitin Mukesh), or “One Shot Nandu” as he’s known in the ring. Nandu has a pretty impressive gimmick; he fights blindfolded, taking a beating until he can figure out exactly where his opponent is, then dropping them in one shot.
Nandu fights for gambling kingpin Usmaan Ali (Piyush Mishra), who treats him like a clever and talented child. Despite working for a mobster, Nandu has managed to avoid being corrupted by the people around him, but he does look up to Anna (Kay Kay Menon), one of Usmaan’s top men, so when Usmaan asks him to drive Anna on a mission, Nandu is happy to agree. Anna is a little less happy, and tries to steer Nandu toward an honest job as a bouncer, but without much success.
Nadu drives Anna to his destination, and then everything goes horribly wrong – Anna has been shot, men with guns are chasing them, and as Nandu drives through the pouring rain he accidentally runs over a young girl. Anna convinces Nandu to get out of the car and then drives away, happy to take the blame for the hit and run since he’s dying anyway.
The victim of the hit and run is Pinky (Deepika Padukone), a talented dancer and skater who dreams of roller dancing on India’s Got Talent. The accident leaves her permanently blinded and unable to skate, and a guilt-ridden Nandu suddenly realizes that while he doesn’t have enough money to make a real difference, he is uniquely qualified to help her learn to see without using her eyes. Time for a training montage!
Montage completed, Pinky feels ready to skate again, and she needs a partner. Since she trusts Nandu, he’s the one that she wants. He reluctantly agrees, and the pair . . . I was going to say they drift into a relationship, but that’s really not the case, since Pinky is very much the instigator. (Nandu falls for her during the training montage, but he feels too guilty to make a move.) However, police inspector K.K. Sethna (Manish Chaudhary) knows that Anna wasn’t driving when Pinky was struck. Despite being ordered off the case, he keeps investigating, and quietly builds an impressive case against Nandu, who still hasn’t told Pinky the truth.
You may think that the plot is building toward one final climactric boxing match in which Nandu tries to earn the money to get Pinky’s eyes fixed, but that’s exactly what doesn’t happen. While Lafengey Parindey is kind of a sports movie, the sport in question isn’t underground blindfolded bareknuckle boxing, it’s reality show rollerdancing. The “big game” isn’t a boxing match, it’s the India’s Got Talent finals.
Another movie would have focused on the boxing, but that’s because that other movie would be about Nandu, while this movie is about Nandu and Pinky. At heart it’s a romance which happens to have some “gritty crime drama” trappings. The streets may be mean, but the people by and large aren’t; even Usmaan, the obvious villain of the piece, makes a fairly reasonable offer that Nandu can’t refuse. It’s like a Jane Austen novel, but with more gangsters and less insight into the human condition.
Pong: The Next Level
As long time readers know, I love Indian special effects
extravaganzas, movies starring Shahrukh Khan, and thinly veiled
retellings of the Ramayana, so yes, I was really looking forward to Ra.One (2011). It isn’t quite what I was expecting, though; I thought it would be Bollywood Tron, steeped in cultural references, and instead I got a Bollywood remake of that episode of Star Trek where Geordi accidentally brings Moriarty to life. As a reviewer, where am I supposed to go with that?
Khan plays software designer Shekhar Subramanium, who is a lucky, lucky nerd. Sure, he’s clumsy, socially awkward, and has a terrible haircut, but he’s married to the lovely and intelligent Sonia (Kareena Kapoor), he has a great job at a large electronics firm in London, and he’s a fantastic dancer. The only problem is that his son Prateek (Armaan Verma) doesn’t respect him.
When Shekhar and his team are assigned to create a new videogame for the Indian market, Shekhar sees a chance to change that. Prateek thinks heroes are lame and villains are cool, so Shekhar designs a game around Ra.One, the coolest villain ever, a bad guy who can never be beaten. And of course there’s no way that could possibly go horribly wrong, unless they designed the Ra.One character as a separate program which is capable of learning and adapting to the game, and the company was also working on a system for projecting digital information into the real world without the need for a screen. And what are the odds of that?
(The video game featured in the movie is, as you’ve probably guessed, terrible. It’s a fighting game with one protagonist, one opponent, and one backdrop – basically a fancy version of Pong. Like in Toonpur Ka Superhero the game has three short levels so that our protagonists can play through the entire game at the climax without the movie being fifty hours long; unlike Toonpur at least all three levels come from the same game here. As lame as the game itself is, though, the hardware involved, and especially the adaptive antagonist, would be revolutionary.)
Work on the game moves quickly, and the company holds a party to celebrate the game’s completion. While the adults drink and have a dance number, Prateek insists on trying out the game for himself – he’s nearly won when it’s time to go home, so the game is shut off. And then everything goes horribly wrong. Ra.One, who cannot accept defeat, uses the company’s technology to enter the real world, uses his shape changing and mind control powers to kill and impersonate Akashi (Tom Wu), Shekhar’s coworker, and goes in search of “Lucifer,” which happens to be Prateek’s gaming handle. Shekhar quickly realizes what has happened and tries to stop Ra.One by claiming to be Lucifer, but Ra.One doesn’t believe him and kills him anyway.
Grief stricken, Sonia decides to take her son back to India. Prateek, meanwhile, is convinced that his father didn’t die in an accident, he was killed by Ra.One; investigating the labs, he quickly learns that he’s right, and that Ra.One is on the way. He tries to pull the hero of the video game, G.One (who was modeled on Shekhar) out of the game as a protector, but without apparent success. And then Prateek is finally caught . . . by Sonia. Unfortunately, Ra.One is close behind.
After a lengthy and destructive car chase through the streets of London, Ra.One catches up with mother and son, but G.One appears at the last moment and apparently defeats Ra.One, who collapses into a pile of shiny cubes and is buried under the road. With nowhere else to go, G.One joins Sonia and Prateek as they travel to India.
The family quickly settle into life in India, though Sonia is a little disturbed by the superpowered robot with her dead husband’s face hanging around the house. Still, he’s useful, and before long sparks are literally flying.
Before they can get too comfortable, though, Ra.One reforms, this time taking the face of a male model from a nearby billboard (Arjun Rampal). He quickly tracks the family back to India and mayhem ensues.
This movie looks fantastic. The production design is spot on, the action sequences are kinetic but shot without a trace of shakeycam, and only a few of them are ripped off from The Matrix and Terminator 2. Prateek’s opening dream sequence, which features Khan as Lucifer as long-haired Final Fantasy-styled prettyboy using his oversized sword to fight Sanjay Dutt on the Moon is amazing.
As impressive as the visuals are, though, I was left feeling a bit . . . unfulfilled. The movie rushes from gorgeous set piece to gorgeous set piece without really giving the characters time to react to anything, so the whole picture is lacking in context. There are moments of pathos, but they’re mostly crammed into a song and then forgotten about. The lack of feeling is particularly jarring because this movie stars the Rajah of Relationships, the Maestro of Melodrama, the Tzar of Manly Tears, but for most of the film he’s playing an emotionless robot.
I can understand the lack of melodrama because this movie is clearly aimed at the younger set, and adolescent boys are not known for their interest in interpersonal drama and talking about feelings. My real problem with Ra.One is that the movie keeps introducing interesting ideas, and then refuses to follow up on any of them. For example, there’s a wonderful character bit where Prateek takes a handful of his father’s ashes and, instead of immersing them in the river, he sticks them in his pocket. It’s a great character bit which could be used to set up either some genuinely satisfying character development or an emotionally manipulative sci-fi climax (or both!) but it is never mentioned again.
(I don’t mind the Chitti cameo, though, because it’s so gratuitous and bizarre. It’s like Batman popping up in the new Spider-Man movie to have a cup of coffee, and then leaving.)
I’m a little frustrated. I want to like Ra.One, and I guess I do, but I’m afraid it will always be my second favorite Indian movie about robots.
Khan plays software designer Shekhar Subramanium, who is a lucky, lucky nerd. Sure, he’s clumsy, socially awkward, and has a terrible haircut, but he’s married to the lovely and intelligent Sonia (Kareena Kapoor), he has a great job at a large electronics firm in London, and he’s a fantastic dancer. The only problem is that his son Prateek (Armaan Verma) doesn’t respect him.
When Shekhar and his team are assigned to create a new videogame for the Indian market, Shekhar sees a chance to change that. Prateek thinks heroes are lame and villains are cool, so Shekhar designs a game around Ra.One, the coolest villain ever, a bad guy who can never be beaten. And of course there’s no way that could possibly go horribly wrong, unless they designed the Ra.One character as a separate program which is capable of learning and adapting to the game, and the company was also working on a system for projecting digital information into the real world without the need for a screen. And what are the odds of that?
(The video game featured in the movie is, as you’ve probably guessed, terrible. It’s a fighting game with one protagonist, one opponent, and one backdrop – basically a fancy version of Pong. Like in Toonpur Ka Superhero the game has three short levels so that our protagonists can play through the entire game at the climax without the movie being fifty hours long; unlike Toonpur at least all three levels come from the same game here. As lame as the game itself is, though, the hardware involved, and especially the adaptive antagonist, would be revolutionary.)
Work on the game moves quickly, and the company holds a party to celebrate the game’s completion. While the adults drink and have a dance number, Prateek insists on trying out the game for himself – he’s nearly won when it’s time to go home, so the game is shut off. And then everything goes horribly wrong. Ra.One, who cannot accept defeat, uses the company’s technology to enter the real world, uses his shape changing and mind control powers to kill and impersonate Akashi (Tom Wu), Shekhar’s coworker, and goes in search of “Lucifer,” which happens to be Prateek’s gaming handle. Shekhar quickly realizes what has happened and tries to stop Ra.One by claiming to be Lucifer, but Ra.One doesn’t believe him and kills him anyway.
Grief stricken, Sonia decides to take her son back to India. Prateek, meanwhile, is convinced that his father didn’t die in an accident, he was killed by Ra.One; investigating the labs, he quickly learns that he’s right, and that Ra.One is on the way. He tries to pull the hero of the video game, G.One (who was modeled on Shekhar) out of the game as a protector, but without apparent success. And then Prateek is finally caught . . . by Sonia. Unfortunately, Ra.One is close behind.
After a lengthy and destructive car chase through the streets of London, Ra.One catches up with mother and son, but G.One appears at the last moment and apparently defeats Ra.One, who collapses into a pile of shiny cubes and is buried under the road. With nowhere else to go, G.One joins Sonia and Prateek as they travel to India.
The family quickly settle into life in India, though Sonia is a little disturbed by the superpowered robot with her dead husband’s face hanging around the house. Still, he’s useful, and before long sparks are literally flying.
Before they can get too comfortable, though, Ra.One reforms, this time taking the face of a male model from a nearby billboard (Arjun Rampal). He quickly tracks the family back to India and mayhem ensues.
This movie looks fantastic. The production design is spot on, the action sequences are kinetic but shot without a trace of shakeycam, and only a few of them are ripped off from The Matrix and Terminator 2. Prateek’s opening dream sequence, which features Khan as Lucifer as long-haired Final Fantasy-styled prettyboy using his oversized sword to fight Sanjay Dutt on the Moon is amazing.
As impressive as the visuals are, though, I was left feeling a bit . . . unfulfilled. The movie rushes from gorgeous set piece to gorgeous set piece without really giving the characters time to react to anything, so the whole picture is lacking in context. There are moments of pathos, but they’re mostly crammed into a song and then forgotten about. The lack of feeling is particularly jarring because this movie stars the Rajah of Relationships, the Maestro of Melodrama, the Tzar of Manly Tears, but for most of the film he’s playing an emotionless robot.
I can understand the lack of melodrama because this movie is clearly aimed at the younger set, and adolescent boys are not known for their interest in interpersonal drama and talking about feelings. My real problem with Ra.One is that the movie keeps introducing interesting ideas, and then refuses to follow up on any of them. For example, there’s a wonderful character bit where Prateek takes a handful of his father’s ashes and, instead of immersing them in the river, he sticks them in his pocket. It’s a great character bit which could be used to set up either some genuinely satisfying character development or an emotionally manipulative sci-fi climax (or both!) but it is never mentioned again.
(I don’t mind the Chitti cameo, though, because it’s so gratuitous and bizarre. It’s like Batman popping up in the new Spider-Man movie to have a cup of coffee, and then leaving.)
I’m a little frustrated. I want to like Ra.One, and I guess I do, but I’m afraid it will always be my second favorite Indian movie about robots.
The Taming of the Jerk
Dulha Mil Gaya (2010) is never going to win any
awards for originality; the story of the scorned or neglected wife
winning back her husband by harnessing the twin forces of jealousy and a
fabulous makeover is one of those stories that recurs over and over
again in Bollywood.
Let’s start with the husband. At the start of the film, Tej Danraj (Fardeen Khan), known as Donsai to his friends, is a billionaire playboy who lives in the West Indies with his manservant Hussain Bhai (Johhny Lever.) Donsai takes his job as a billionaire playboy seriously, and spends his time winning the hearts of beautiful women, and then not marrying them.
Unfortunately for the eternal bachelor, his late father’s will was very specific; Donsai inherits everything, but only if he marries Samarpreet Kapoor (Ishitta Sharma), daughter of a family friend. On the advice of slimy family lawyer Vakil (Vivek Vaswani) Donsai (as Tej) flies out to the Punjab, meets the Kapoors (who are naturally wonderful people and the salt of the Earth), marries Samarpreet in a quite civil ceremony, then flies back home, sending the family a check every month in order to soothe his wounded conscience.
Samarpreet grew up knowing she’d be marrying Tej someday, and upon meeting him she instantly falls in love. When months pass without even a word from her new husband, she’s heartbroken, and finally decides to fly to the West Indies herself and find out exactly what’s wrong. Naturally, the trip is a complete disaster; nobody’s there to meet her at the airport, the security guards won’t even let her in the house, when she does manage to sneak in she finds there’s a party going on and her husband is making out with a stranger in a bikini, and after she’s thrown out of the house crying, she’s promptly hit by a car.
What Samarpreet needs is a fairy godmother. What she gets is Shimmer (Sushmita Sen), an eccentric supermodel and Dorsai’s friend and neighbor. Shimmer literally picks Samarpreet up off the street, and after learning her story, resolves to help. Naturally, that means transforming simple Punjabi girl Samarpreet Kapoor into the beautiful and glamorous Samara Capore.
Shimmer has her own romantic troubles, of course. The incredibly wealthy and successful Pawan Gandhi (Shahrukh Freaking Khan) is completely devoted to her, and she probaly loves him too, but she’s too wrapped up in her career to admit it – at least, that’s what her sidekicks Lotus (Howard Rosemeyer) and Jasmine (Suchitra Pillai-Mallik) think. Samarpreet decides to repay Shimmer for her kindness by helping Pavan and Shimmer to get together.
Introducing the Pavan and Shimmer romantic subplot could have been a problem; Fardeen Khan is a fine dramatic actor and one of the best creeps in Bollywood, but when it comes to playing the romantic lead, he’s no Shahrukh Khan, while SRK is. The writers wisely decided to make this a plot point, with Donsai feeling completely inadequate in the face of Pavan’s amazing romantic charisma.
Another nice touch is that Shimmer encourages Samarpreet to ask herself if she really wants her husband back, rather than assuming that existing relationships must be preserved at all costs. Of course, Samarpreet does decide that yes, she does want him, because he’s become much less of a jerk (and because existing relationships must be preserved at all costs) but it was refreshing that the characters didn’t consider it a foregone conclusion.
Apart from these flourishes, Dulha Mil Gaya is . . . solid. It’s an entertaining movie with a good cast and some funny bits. It won’t go on my list of best Bollywood movies ever, but I’m glad I watched it.
Let’s start with the husband. At the start of the film, Tej Danraj (Fardeen Khan), known as Donsai to his friends, is a billionaire playboy who lives in the West Indies with his manservant Hussain Bhai (Johhny Lever.) Donsai takes his job as a billionaire playboy seriously, and spends his time winning the hearts of beautiful women, and then not marrying them.
Unfortunately for the eternal bachelor, his late father’s will was very specific; Donsai inherits everything, but only if he marries Samarpreet Kapoor (Ishitta Sharma), daughter of a family friend. On the advice of slimy family lawyer Vakil (Vivek Vaswani) Donsai (as Tej) flies out to the Punjab, meets the Kapoors (who are naturally wonderful people and the salt of the Earth), marries Samarpreet in a quite civil ceremony, then flies back home, sending the family a check every month in order to soothe his wounded conscience.
Samarpreet grew up knowing she’d be marrying Tej someday, and upon meeting him she instantly falls in love. When months pass without even a word from her new husband, she’s heartbroken, and finally decides to fly to the West Indies herself and find out exactly what’s wrong. Naturally, the trip is a complete disaster; nobody’s there to meet her at the airport, the security guards won’t even let her in the house, when she does manage to sneak in she finds there’s a party going on and her husband is making out with a stranger in a bikini, and after she’s thrown out of the house crying, she’s promptly hit by a car.
What Samarpreet needs is a fairy godmother. What she gets is Shimmer (Sushmita Sen), an eccentric supermodel and Dorsai’s friend and neighbor. Shimmer literally picks Samarpreet up off the street, and after learning her story, resolves to help. Naturally, that means transforming simple Punjabi girl Samarpreet Kapoor into the beautiful and glamorous Samara Capore.
Shimmer has her own romantic troubles, of course. The incredibly wealthy and successful Pawan Gandhi (Shahrukh Freaking Khan) is completely devoted to her, and she probaly loves him too, but she’s too wrapped up in her career to admit it – at least, that’s what her sidekicks Lotus (Howard Rosemeyer) and Jasmine (Suchitra Pillai-Mallik) think. Samarpreet decides to repay Shimmer for her kindness by helping Pavan and Shimmer to get together.
Introducing the Pavan and Shimmer romantic subplot could have been a problem; Fardeen Khan is a fine dramatic actor and one of the best creeps in Bollywood, but when it comes to playing the romantic lead, he’s no Shahrukh Khan, while SRK is. The writers wisely decided to make this a plot point, with Donsai feeling completely inadequate in the face of Pavan’s amazing romantic charisma.
Another nice touch is that Shimmer encourages Samarpreet to ask herself if she really wants her husband back, rather than assuming that existing relationships must be preserved at all costs. Of course, Samarpreet does decide that yes, she does want him, because he’s become much less of a jerk (and because existing relationships must be preserved at all costs) but it was refreshing that the characters didn’t consider it a foregone conclusion.
Apart from these flourishes, Dulha Mil Gaya is . . . solid. It’s an entertaining movie with a good cast and some funny bits. It won’t go on my list of best Bollywood movies ever, but I’m glad I watched it.
The streets could be meaner.
Legendary Bollywood actor Dev Anand died this month, so this week I’m reviewing Taxi Driver (1954), which is at once a charming romance, a gritty crime drama, and a reminder that “gritty’ doesn’t always mean “dark.”
Taxi driver Mangal (Anand), known as “Hero” to his friends, is decidedly scruffy, his best friend Mastana (Johnny Walker) is a pickpocket, and he spends his evenings in a bar; not the ideal romantic lead, in other words. Still, Hero is a genuinely nice guy and very protective of the people around him; there’s a reason they call him “Hero,” and a reason why he’s caught the eye of sultry bar-dancer Sylvie (Sheila Ramani).
When Hero rescues Mala (Kalpana Kartik, the future real life Mrs. Anand) from a pair of lecherous goons, life suddenly gets complicated. Mala is a simple girl from the village, in Bombay to look for Ratan Lal, the music director who complimented her voice while passing through the village a year ago. Unfortunately, the address she has for Ratan Lal is a year old, and she has no idea how to track him down. Mala has no money, and she can’t go home, so Hero takes her to his apartment, and goes outside to sleep in the car.
The next day, Hero and Mala look for Ratan Lal, without success. The day after, they do it again. Gradually, though, their odd living arrangement becomes the new status quo; Hero returns to driving the taxi, but with Mala as his secret house-guest.
Just when everything is going well, Hero’s sister-in-law comes for a visit. There’s no way she would understand an unrelated woman living in Hero’s apartment, so he quickly comes up with the worst plan possible, and disguises Mala as a boy, probably just so we can see Kalpana Kartik learn to swear and walk like a man. Bizarrely, it works, and soon Mastana and the rest of the gang are introduced to “Rajput”, Hero’s new cleaner.
One of the lecherous goons from the beginning of the movie (I don’t think the character is ever named, but I like to call him Frenchie, since he’s a string of onions and a beret away from looking like a stereotypical cinematic Frenchman) hasn’t forgotten about the girl who literally got away. he follows Hero to the bar, hoping to pick a fight, but Sylvie manages to defuse the situation with a quick dance number. Undeterred, Frenchie and the gang steal Hero’s taxi and use it as the getaway car for a bank robbery. Hero makes a full report to the police, and he and Mala are both in danger when the gang decide they need to be silenced.
As a romance, Taxi Driver works very well; Anand and Kartik have a fun, light-hearted chemistry and the relationship that develops onscreen is so understated that neither character seems to notice it until it’s threatened. As a gritty crime drama? Well, there is crime, and the movie’s Bombay certainly looks and feels seamy, but it’s nowhere near as seamy as it could be. And Frenchie and his gang are so wildly incompetent that it’s hard to take them seriously; when you try to silence a witness by shooting him in a crowded nightclub full of potential witnesses, you’re probably better off in jail, anyway.
Taxi driver Mangal (Anand), known as “Hero” to his friends, is decidedly scruffy, his best friend Mastana (Johnny Walker) is a pickpocket, and he spends his evenings in a bar; not the ideal romantic lead, in other words. Still, Hero is a genuinely nice guy and very protective of the people around him; there’s a reason they call him “Hero,” and a reason why he’s caught the eye of sultry bar-dancer Sylvie (Sheila Ramani).
When Hero rescues Mala (Kalpana Kartik, the future real life Mrs. Anand) from a pair of lecherous goons, life suddenly gets complicated. Mala is a simple girl from the village, in Bombay to look for Ratan Lal, the music director who complimented her voice while passing through the village a year ago. Unfortunately, the address she has for Ratan Lal is a year old, and she has no idea how to track him down. Mala has no money, and she can’t go home, so Hero takes her to his apartment, and goes outside to sleep in the car.
The next day, Hero and Mala look for Ratan Lal, without success. The day after, they do it again. Gradually, though, their odd living arrangement becomes the new status quo; Hero returns to driving the taxi, but with Mala as his secret house-guest.
Just when everything is going well, Hero’s sister-in-law comes for a visit. There’s no way she would understand an unrelated woman living in Hero’s apartment, so he quickly comes up with the worst plan possible, and disguises Mala as a boy, probably just so we can see Kalpana Kartik learn to swear and walk like a man. Bizarrely, it works, and soon Mastana and the rest of the gang are introduced to “Rajput”, Hero’s new cleaner.
One of the lecherous goons from the beginning of the movie (I don’t think the character is ever named, but I like to call him Frenchie, since he’s a string of onions and a beret away from looking like a stereotypical cinematic Frenchman) hasn’t forgotten about the girl who literally got away. he follows Hero to the bar, hoping to pick a fight, but Sylvie manages to defuse the situation with a quick dance number. Undeterred, Frenchie and the gang steal Hero’s taxi and use it as the getaway car for a bank robbery. Hero makes a full report to the police, and he and Mala are both in danger when the gang decide they need to be silenced.
As a romance, Taxi Driver works very well; Anand and Kartik have a fun, light-hearted chemistry and the relationship that develops onscreen is so understated that neither character seems to notice it until it’s threatened. As a gritty crime drama? Well, there is crime, and the movie’s Bombay certainly looks and feels seamy, but it’s nowhere near as seamy as it could be. And Frenchie and his gang are so wildly incompetent that it’s hard to take them seriously; when you try to silence a witness by shooting him in a crowded nightclub full of potential witnesses, you’re probably better off in jail, anyway.
Romeo must play dead.
Roadside Romeo (2008) is, in theory, a joint venture,
produced by Yash Raj Films and the Walt Disney Company. I’m really not
sure how much input Disney had, but after an introductory, mostly
silent short in which Donald and Mickey discover that cooking Indian
food is hard and they should get a woman to do it for them, the film is a
whole lot of Yash Raj, and a little bit Disney.
Romeo (Saif Ali Khan) was a pampered family pet, living in a mansion and apparently given the run of the place, including his own bedroom and access to the family pool. That’s all over, now – the family moved to London and left their dog behind.
Romeo wanders the street in abject poverty for about fifteen minutes before being cornered by a street gang of Bollywood stereotypes, including Guru, the tough leader with a heart of gold (Vrajesh Hirjee); Hero English (Kiku Sharda), the guy who thinks he can speak English but really can’t; Mini (Tanaaz Currim Irani), the tough girl who wants to be just like the boys, who in this case is a tough cat who wants to be just like the dogs; and Interval (Suresh Menon), the annoying comic relief who speaks entirely in movie quotes and bad impressions. (There’s also an adorable orphan/mouse, but he doesn’t do much.) Romeo quickly wins over the gang with his amazing grooming skills, and they decide to open a salon together. (Because of course stray dogs have a functioning economy, based on the bone standard, can use scissors, and are able to redecorate a vacant lot without any humans noticing.)
There’s a problem, of course. The gang started the salon business without consulting Charlie Anna (Javed Jaffrey), the local canine crime lord who maintains control of the neighborhood with ht ehelp of his “angels,” a sultry trio of kung fu canines.
When Charlie’s official sidekick Chhainu (Sanjay Mishra), the ugliest dog in the world, comes by to collect protection money, Romeo chases him away. This does not make Charlie Anna happy, but before he can properly torture the gang, Romeo manages to smooth things over.
Then Romeo makes things worse. Late at night, Romeo hears a mysterious voice singing. He follows it, and discovers Laila (Kareena Kapoor) dancing alone on a rooftop. He’s immediately smitten, but she’s reluctant. What he doesn’t know is that Charlie Anna is also plenty smitten with Laila, and makes a habit of roughing up dogs who get too close. Romeo escapes a beating by promising to help Charlie win Laila’s heart, and it’s just about this time that Laila decides she really likes Romeo after all . . .
The animation in Roadside Romeo is pretty good, as Indian animation goes. It’s certainly not on the level of what you see in, say, Kung Fu Panda, but it’s comparable to what you see in Legends of Awesomeness. I do have an issue with the character designs, though; they display a sort of quantum anthropomorphism. Sometimes the dogs move like dogs, sometimes they move like dogs walking on their hind legs, and sometimes, especially when dancing, they move like people. Watching the dogs shift from Tom and Jerry to Lady and the Tramp and back is a little disturbing.
If the characters were not dogs, Roadside Romeo could be an average Bollywood romantic comedy from the 90s, the sort of thing that launched Saif Ali and Kareena’s respective careers. The movie is for children, of course, so everything is softened somewhat; Charlie Anna threatens and throttles, but never actually beats anyone up, for instance, and Laila is basically a bar dancer but faces no social stigma at all. Still, this is a movie with a Disney look and a Bollywood heart.
Romeo (Saif Ali Khan) was a pampered family pet, living in a mansion and apparently given the run of the place, including his own bedroom and access to the family pool. That’s all over, now – the family moved to London and left their dog behind.
Romeo wanders the street in abject poverty for about fifteen minutes before being cornered by a street gang of Bollywood stereotypes, including Guru, the tough leader with a heart of gold (Vrajesh Hirjee); Hero English (Kiku Sharda), the guy who thinks he can speak English but really can’t; Mini (Tanaaz Currim Irani), the tough girl who wants to be just like the boys, who in this case is a tough cat who wants to be just like the dogs; and Interval (Suresh Menon), the annoying comic relief who speaks entirely in movie quotes and bad impressions. (There’s also an adorable orphan/mouse, but he doesn’t do much.) Romeo quickly wins over the gang with his amazing grooming skills, and they decide to open a salon together. (Because of course stray dogs have a functioning economy, based on the bone standard, can use scissors, and are able to redecorate a vacant lot without any humans noticing.)
There’s a problem, of course. The gang started the salon business without consulting Charlie Anna (Javed Jaffrey), the local canine crime lord who maintains control of the neighborhood with ht ehelp of his “angels,” a sultry trio of kung fu canines.
When Charlie’s official sidekick Chhainu (Sanjay Mishra), the ugliest dog in the world, comes by to collect protection money, Romeo chases him away. This does not make Charlie Anna happy, but before he can properly torture the gang, Romeo manages to smooth things over.
Then Romeo makes things worse. Late at night, Romeo hears a mysterious voice singing. He follows it, and discovers Laila (Kareena Kapoor) dancing alone on a rooftop. He’s immediately smitten, but she’s reluctant. What he doesn’t know is that Charlie Anna is also plenty smitten with Laila, and makes a habit of roughing up dogs who get too close. Romeo escapes a beating by promising to help Charlie win Laila’s heart, and it’s just about this time that Laila decides she really likes Romeo after all . . .
The animation in Roadside Romeo is pretty good, as Indian animation goes. It’s certainly not on the level of what you see in, say, Kung Fu Panda, but it’s comparable to what you see in Legends of Awesomeness. I do have an issue with the character designs, though; they display a sort of quantum anthropomorphism. Sometimes the dogs move like dogs, sometimes they move like dogs walking on their hind legs, and sometimes, especially when dancing, they move like people. Watching the dogs shift from Tom and Jerry to Lady and the Tramp and back is a little disturbing.
If the characters were not dogs, Roadside Romeo could be an average Bollywood romantic comedy from the 90s, the sort of thing that launched Saif Ali and Kareena’s respective careers. The movie is for children, of course, so everything is softened somewhat; Charlie Anna threatens and throttles, but never actually beats anyone up, for instance, and Laila is basically a bar dancer but faces no social stigma at all. Still, this is a movie with a Disney look and a Bollywood heart.
The Gang That Wasn’t There
C Kkompany (2008) isn’t just a Bollywood
screwball comedy about a gang of lovable losers looking for one big
score that will change their lives forever. It also flirts pretty
aggressively with the populist notion of the common man standing
together to achieve what the government can’t or won’t. It’s an idea
that shows up often in Bollywood, and that’s understandable, given that
the modern Indian state was born from just that kind of action.
Granted, I don’t think that extortion by telephone was quite what Gandhi
had in mind.
Our three protagonists are relatively ordinary men with relatively ordinary problems. Ramakant Joshi (Anupam Kher) is a retired accountant living with his very successful but deeply ungrateful son Purshottam (Nitin Ratnaparkhi). Labhodar (Rajpal Yadav) is short, angry, and lives in fear of the day that his horrible wife tells their son that he actually works at the mall, in a chicken costume.
And then there’s Akshay Kumar (Tusshar Kapoor), a crime reporter who is in love with Priya (Raima Sen), who happens to be the much younger sister of brutal but soap opera obsessed crimelord Dattu (former Disco Dancer Mithun Chakraborty, who has grown much scarier with age). Akshay and Priya want to get married, but they’ll need money to fly away to somewhere safe first, so that they can avoid being killed. (“Crime reporter in love with a gangster’s sister” doesn’t really strike me as a common man with common problems, but then again I don’t live in Mumbai.)
The three friends play a prank on Purshottam in order to convince him to treat his father a little better; Labhodar calls up and pretends to be a gangster looking for money in exchange for lack of violence, then Ramakant takes the phone and diffuses the situation. And the three friends note that Purshottam is really eager to pay, and they toy with the idea of another call, but then laugh and forget it.
Then everything gets worse. After a fight, Labhodar’s wife drags their son to the mall to show him his father at work. Pushottam garlands his dead mother’s picture with artificial flowers rather than “waste money” on real ones. And Dattu arranges his sister’s marriage to another gangster, meaning Akshay has to raise the money to run away with Priya within a month or lose her forever. Suddenly blackmail and extortion doesn’t seem so bad.
The trio, after much consideration, name their fake criminal enterprise “C Company,” and send Pushottam a fake DVD showing the fake murder of the fake gangster from their previous prank. Pushottam is terrified, and agrees to pay up by the end of the month. Unfortunately, Akshay leaves a copy of the DVD at the TV station he works at, and the next day the media is buzzing about the mysterious “C Company.”
That would be the end of it, but Ramakant learns that a friend is being evicted by a greedy developer, along with his entire neighborhood, in order to make space for a shopping mall. Ramakant convinces Labhodar to help, and after a flashy scheme, the developer backs down, and the media are even more obsessed with C Company, who have been labelled the “Robin Hoods of the Underworld.”
The developer in question was paying protection to Dattu, which means that C Company is now hurting his business. Dattu questions Akshay about the new gang, and Akshay claims to know nothing. He’s now really, really sure it’s time to end the C Company business, and then his network assigns him to host a reality show in which ordinary people call in to talk about their problems, and find out whether the government or C Company solves them first.
The trio can’t help but get involved when they hear the stories of the people who call in, meaning more phone calls, and the C Company craze spirals completely out of control; suddenly, it’s not a fake gang anymore, it’s a fake political movement. And then Dattu, still determined to wipe out the Company, gets the lead he’s been hoping for.
C Kkompany is pretty good, as Bollywood screwball comedies go. The three leads manage to stay sympathetic throughout, and while the plot is completely unrealistic, it’s consistently unrealistic; if you accept the conceit that three knuckleheads could manage an extortion ring without anybody finding out or saying no, then the plot holds together very well. And Rajpal Yadav delivers a strong performance as an angry man who discovers a positive outlet for his boiling rage.
Still, I can’t help but be a little frustrated by the movie. The idea of the imaginary gang turning into an imaginary revolution with real results is fascinating, but the film too concerned with Akshay’s love life and Ramakant’s family woes to really focus on the implications. It’s an idea that’s too big for this movie.
Our three protagonists are relatively ordinary men with relatively ordinary problems. Ramakant Joshi (Anupam Kher) is a retired accountant living with his very successful but deeply ungrateful son Purshottam (Nitin Ratnaparkhi). Labhodar (Rajpal Yadav) is short, angry, and lives in fear of the day that his horrible wife tells their son that he actually works at the mall, in a chicken costume.
And then there’s Akshay Kumar (Tusshar Kapoor), a crime reporter who is in love with Priya (Raima Sen), who happens to be the much younger sister of brutal but soap opera obsessed crimelord Dattu (former Disco Dancer Mithun Chakraborty, who has grown much scarier with age). Akshay and Priya want to get married, but they’ll need money to fly away to somewhere safe first, so that they can avoid being killed. (“Crime reporter in love with a gangster’s sister” doesn’t really strike me as a common man with common problems, but then again I don’t live in Mumbai.)
The three friends play a prank on Purshottam in order to convince him to treat his father a little better; Labhodar calls up and pretends to be a gangster looking for money in exchange for lack of violence, then Ramakant takes the phone and diffuses the situation. And the three friends note that Purshottam is really eager to pay, and they toy with the idea of another call, but then laugh and forget it.
Then everything gets worse. After a fight, Labhodar’s wife drags their son to the mall to show him his father at work. Pushottam garlands his dead mother’s picture with artificial flowers rather than “waste money” on real ones. And Dattu arranges his sister’s marriage to another gangster, meaning Akshay has to raise the money to run away with Priya within a month or lose her forever. Suddenly blackmail and extortion doesn’t seem so bad.
The trio, after much consideration, name their fake criminal enterprise “C Company,” and send Pushottam a fake DVD showing the fake murder of the fake gangster from their previous prank. Pushottam is terrified, and agrees to pay up by the end of the month. Unfortunately, Akshay leaves a copy of the DVD at the TV station he works at, and the next day the media is buzzing about the mysterious “C Company.”
That would be the end of it, but Ramakant learns that a friend is being evicted by a greedy developer, along with his entire neighborhood, in order to make space for a shopping mall. Ramakant convinces Labhodar to help, and after a flashy scheme, the developer backs down, and the media are even more obsessed with C Company, who have been labelled the “Robin Hoods of the Underworld.”
The developer in question was paying protection to Dattu, which means that C Company is now hurting his business. Dattu questions Akshay about the new gang, and Akshay claims to know nothing. He’s now really, really sure it’s time to end the C Company business, and then his network assigns him to host a reality show in which ordinary people call in to talk about their problems, and find out whether the government or C Company solves them first.
The trio can’t help but get involved when they hear the stories of the people who call in, meaning more phone calls, and the C Company craze spirals completely out of control; suddenly, it’s not a fake gang anymore, it’s a fake political movement. And then Dattu, still determined to wipe out the Company, gets the lead he’s been hoping for.
C Kkompany is pretty good, as Bollywood screwball comedies go. The three leads manage to stay sympathetic throughout, and while the plot is completely unrealistic, it’s consistently unrealistic; if you accept the conceit that three knuckleheads could manage an extortion ring without anybody finding out or saying no, then the plot holds together very well. And Rajpal Yadav delivers a strong performance as an angry man who discovers a positive outlet for his boiling rage.
Still, I can’t help but be a little frustrated by the movie. The idea of the imaginary gang turning into an imaginary revolution with real results is fascinating, but the film too concerned with Akshay’s love life and Ramakant’s family woes to really focus on the implications. It’s an idea that’s too big for this movie.
Bhooty Call: A Flat
At first glance, A Flat (2010) looks like a typical
modern Indian ghost story, right down to the angry vengeful ghost’s long
black hair and bad posture. And honestly, the story is very
traditional, but it’s told in a very different way. Not entirely
successful, mind you, but it is different.
Prompted by a bad dream, Rahul (Jimmy Shergill) calls his former girlfriend Preity (Kaveri Jha) and learns that she’s getting married, and that she really doesn’t want to speak to him. Rahul immediately makes plans to leave America and return to India, but by the time his plane lands, Preity has vanished and his father (Sachin Khedekar) has been horribly murdered while preparing Rahul’s apartment, which means that a romantic reunion is pretty much off the table.
After his father’s funeral, Rahul visits the apartment, and discovers that it’s full of flashbacks. He basically wanders from room to room while remembering every stage of his (not entirely healthy, as it turns out) relationship with Preity.
He also keeps finding strands of long black hair throughout the apartment, and it’s clear to the viewer, but not to Rahul, that there’s something supernatural and really ticked off lurking in the background.
Preity finally calls. Rahul makes arrangements to meet her, but both the elevator and the stairs lead him directly back to his 17th floor apartment. The ghost begins haunting in earnest, and herds Rahul into the bedroom, where he discovers a diary belonging to Geetika (Hazel Croney), a simple, free spirited village belle who was rescued from an angry mob by Karan (Sanjay Suri), Rahul’s good friend and the guy who rented the apartment while Rahul was in America. That means more flashbacks, as Rahul learns how the happy filmi romance of Geetika and Karan went horribly, horribly wrong.
There are a lot of flashbacks in this movie. Most of the character development is discovered through flashback, rather than a more linear presentation of events. On the positive side, that means that the main plot itself is incredibly focused on the worst afternoon of Rahul’s life, so much so that it practically follows the Aristotelian Unities.
On the other hand, the movie is just over an hour and a half long, and with so many flashbacks, that means there’s time for maybe twenty minutes of scary stuff. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a scary twenty minutes, but it’s still only twenty minutes.
Prompted by a bad dream, Rahul (Jimmy Shergill) calls his former girlfriend Preity (Kaveri Jha) and learns that she’s getting married, and that she really doesn’t want to speak to him. Rahul immediately makes plans to leave America and return to India, but by the time his plane lands, Preity has vanished and his father (Sachin Khedekar) has been horribly murdered while preparing Rahul’s apartment, which means that a romantic reunion is pretty much off the table.
After his father’s funeral, Rahul visits the apartment, and discovers that it’s full of flashbacks. He basically wanders from room to room while remembering every stage of his (not entirely healthy, as it turns out) relationship with Preity.
He also keeps finding strands of long black hair throughout the apartment, and it’s clear to the viewer, but not to Rahul, that there’s something supernatural and really ticked off lurking in the background.
Preity finally calls. Rahul makes arrangements to meet her, but both the elevator and the stairs lead him directly back to his 17th floor apartment. The ghost begins haunting in earnest, and herds Rahul into the bedroom, where he discovers a diary belonging to Geetika (Hazel Croney), a simple, free spirited village belle who was rescued from an angry mob by Karan (Sanjay Suri), Rahul’s good friend and the guy who rented the apartment while Rahul was in America. That means more flashbacks, as Rahul learns how the happy filmi romance of Geetika and Karan went horribly, horribly wrong.
There are a lot of flashbacks in this movie. Most of the character development is discovered through flashback, rather than a more linear presentation of events. On the positive side, that means that the main plot itself is incredibly focused on the worst afternoon of Rahul’s life, so much so that it practically follows the Aristotelian Unities.
On the other hand, the movie is just over an hour and a half long, and with so many flashbacks, that means there’s time for maybe twenty minutes of scary stuff. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a scary twenty minutes, but it’s still only twenty minutes.
Bhooty Call – Shukriya
Despite the supernatural elements, Shukriya: Till Death Do Us Apart (2004) isn’t a horror movie, it’s a family melodrama like Hum Aapke Hain Kaun, a story of star crossed lovers who are surrounded by the nicest family in the world.
London-based businessman Karam Jindal (Anupam Kher) really does have it all: a loving wife, Sandhya (Rati Agnihotri); two beautiful daughters, Anjali (Indraneil Sengupta) and Sanam (Shriya Saran); an apprentice, Yash (Indraneel), who is ready to taker over the company and is practically part of the family; and, of course, lots and lots of money. Karam plans to celebrate his sixtieth birthday by using some of said money to open a new hospital, named after his late mother, which will treat the poor free of charge.
Anjali is married to a nice young man who politely stays offscreen for most of the movie. Sanam is single, and while the family really wants her to marry Yash, who absolutely adores her, but she thinks of him as a friend. Instead, she uses a bizarre little fortune telling box which informs her that her true love will be a musician. Soon after, she meets aspiring musician Ricky (Aftab Shivdasani). She likes him, he likes her, she invites him to her father’s birthday party, and, after she’s gone . . .
He’s hit by a truck and dies.
Karam, meanwhile, is haunted by a voice which claims to be Death – his death, specifically. Karam does not want to die, so he convinces the voice to let him have four more days, which will be long enough to put his affairs in order and oversee the opening of his hospital. He also tells the voice that it doesn’t understand how hard it is to be human, so Death decides to take a holiday, borrowing the body of the recently deceased Ricky to become a guest in the Jindal household. Sanam doesn’t understand why Ricky is calling himself Rohan, but she’s thrilled that the man she believes is her destined love is staying with them, while Death/Rohan/Ricky is intrigued by her and the promise of this Earth thing called kissing. And you can probably predict exactly what happens next.
Or maybe you can’t. The twist, if there is one, is that Karam has no need to learn any valuable lessons (except maybe listen when the doctor tells him to cut down on the salt, but that ship has pretty much sailed.) Karam’s priority has always been his family; even before he learns that he’s going to die, we see him tell his wife and both of his daughters that he loves them. He uses his four extra days to manage the circumstances of his death, rather than to repair any fractured relationships, because the relationships are all already strong.
This is another one of those movies where absolutely everybody is nice. The parents are nice, the sister’s are nice, the human incarnation of Death is nice. Even Yash, who is clearly set up to be the villain, is very nice, apart from one shocking moral lapse. That’s what really works about Shukriya; it’s worth fighting for four more days of this life, but you know it’s going to end anyway.
London-based businessman Karam Jindal (Anupam Kher) really does have it all: a loving wife, Sandhya (Rati Agnihotri); two beautiful daughters, Anjali (Indraneil Sengupta) and Sanam (Shriya Saran); an apprentice, Yash (Indraneel), who is ready to taker over the company and is practically part of the family; and, of course, lots and lots of money. Karam plans to celebrate his sixtieth birthday by using some of said money to open a new hospital, named after his late mother, which will treat the poor free of charge.
Anjali is married to a nice young man who politely stays offscreen for most of the movie. Sanam is single, and while the family really wants her to marry Yash, who absolutely adores her, but she thinks of him as a friend. Instead, she uses a bizarre little fortune telling box which informs her that her true love will be a musician. Soon after, she meets aspiring musician Ricky (Aftab Shivdasani). She likes him, he likes her, she invites him to her father’s birthday party, and, after she’s gone . . .
He’s hit by a truck and dies.
Karam, meanwhile, is haunted by a voice which claims to be Death – his death, specifically. Karam does not want to die, so he convinces the voice to let him have four more days, which will be long enough to put his affairs in order and oversee the opening of his hospital. He also tells the voice that it doesn’t understand how hard it is to be human, so Death decides to take a holiday, borrowing the body of the recently deceased Ricky to become a guest in the Jindal household. Sanam doesn’t understand why Ricky is calling himself Rohan, but she’s thrilled that the man she believes is her destined love is staying with them, while Death/Rohan/Ricky is intrigued by her and the promise of this Earth thing called kissing. And you can probably predict exactly what happens next.
Or maybe you can’t. The twist, if there is one, is that Karam has no need to learn any valuable lessons (except maybe listen when the doctor tells him to cut down on the salt, but that ship has pretty much sailed.) Karam’s priority has always been his family; even before he learns that he’s going to die, we see him tell his wife and both of his daughters that he loves them. He uses his four extra days to manage the circumstances of his death, rather than to repair any fractured relationships, because the relationships are all already strong.
This is another one of those movies where absolutely everybody is nice. The parents are nice, the sister’s are nice, the human incarnation of Death is nice. Even Yash, who is clearly set up to be the villain, is very nice, apart from one shocking moral lapse. That’s what really works about Shukriya; it’s worth fighting for four more days of this life, but you know it’s going to end anyway.
Bhooty Call: Purani Haveli
With Purani Haveli (1989), the Ramsay brothers attempted to recreate the success of Purana Mandir by making essentially the same movie, only with two
monsters, even more potential victims, and a stronger focus on the
star-crossed lovers than on actually explaining anything. The results
are . . . let’s say mixed.
Wealthy heiress Anita (Amita Nangia) lives with her uncle Kumar (Vijay Arora), his wife Seema (Neelam Mehra), and Seema’s sleazy brother Vikram (Tej Sapru). They are, naturally, slowly but surely embezzling her money, and are scheming to marry Anita to Vikram so that they can just take the money directly. Unfortunately for them, Anita has noticed that Vikram is a nasty little creep, and has given her heart to poor and allegedly hunky photographer Sunil (Deepak Parashar).
Kumar decides to buy a creepy old mansion for reasons which are never explained. While inspecting the place, the seller is crushed by a creepy animated metal statue, while Kumar wanders outside and through an exploding graveyard, only to be killed by the Beast, a monster which looks like it’s half Wolfman, half demonic golliwog.
Meanwhile, Seema and Vikram hire a gang of thugs to chase away Sunil. It doesn’t work, naturally, so Seema resorts to Plan B, and forces Anita to tell Sunil that she’s never loved him and is going to marry Vikram after all. Sunil believes her, because he has apparently never seen a movie before. Fortunately, his assistant Mangu (Satish Shah) and platonic gal-pal Shobha (Shubha) have seen movies before, and when Seema sends Anita, Vikram, and a small group of her friends and his henchman on a trip to the creepy old mansion, they convince Sunil to follow them.
The group settle in for a long stay. Vikram quickly shows his true colors and tries to attack Anita, but Sunil shows up at the last minute and beats him up. Then everybody goes back to the house, and the attempted rape is never mentioned again. That night, Vikram’s buddy Michael gets drunk and wanders the halls alone, only to be thrown out the window by the walking statue. The gang dig a shallow grave in the back yard, drop the body in, and go back to what they’re doing, rather than, say, calling the police or leaving the house.
After Michael’s death, things get kind of creepy. Someone (and I still have no idea who) keeps digging up Michael’s and Kumar’s bodies and leaving them around the house for the women to find. The Beast uses his Freddy Krueger powers to cause bad dreams and disturbing hallucinations. The men laugh off any concerns as silly women being silly, and they all decide to stay in the house for a few more days, despite the fact that somebody died.
At this point in the movie, horror doesn’t really seem to be much of a priority. Instead, Seema drives down to the mansion in order to scheme against Sunil and Anita, while Mangu gets his own lengthy subplot about his long lost identical twin brother, a bandit chief named Gangu. It isn’t until late in the film, after much plotting, romance, and identical bandit hijinks, that Vikram accidentally releases the Beast and scary stuff resumes in earnest.
Sometimes, I’ll watch a movie and spend the rest of the week wondering what happened. That’s not the case here; I know exactly what happened, I just can’t quite figure out why, or how. I’m geeky enough that when I watch this kind of movie, I want to be able to figure out what the rules are, and that’s just not possible here, because there’s not enough exposition. We do find out that the Beast is a Beast because of the curse on the house, but we never find out how the house became cursed in the first place, or where the murderous statue came from. And that’s just one of the nagging questions still bothering me. If the Beast is sealed beneath a crypt behind the house, how did it kill Kumar and the teenagers at the beginning of the movie? Who was moving the bodies around? Why did Kumar want the house in the first place, and why did Seema send Anita there? It makes my head hurt.
However, there are some things I liked about the movie. The big slow lumbering statue was treated as a big slow lumbering statue, able to kill people who are unsuspecting, drunk, or both, but not much of a threat if you’re able to run, and it had kind of a neat design. The romance plotline was predictable but not awful, and led to more songs than the average horror movie. And the comic relief was occasionally sort of funky; Satish Shah certainly seemed to enjoy chewing the scenery as the bandit king with a heart of gold.
If you like Ramsay style horror movies, this isn’t a bad choice. Just don’t expect it to make sense.
Wealthy heiress Anita (Amita Nangia) lives with her uncle Kumar (Vijay Arora), his wife Seema (Neelam Mehra), and Seema’s sleazy brother Vikram (Tej Sapru). They are, naturally, slowly but surely embezzling her money, and are scheming to marry Anita to Vikram so that they can just take the money directly. Unfortunately for them, Anita has noticed that Vikram is a nasty little creep, and has given her heart to poor and allegedly hunky photographer Sunil (Deepak Parashar).
Kumar decides to buy a creepy old mansion for reasons which are never explained. While inspecting the place, the seller is crushed by a creepy animated metal statue, while Kumar wanders outside and through an exploding graveyard, only to be killed by the Beast, a monster which looks like it’s half Wolfman, half demonic golliwog.
Meanwhile, Seema and Vikram hire a gang of thugs to chase away Sunil. It doesn’t work, naturally, so Seema resorts to Plan B, and forces Anita to tell Sunil that she’s never loved him and is going to marry Vikram after all. Sunil believes her, because he has apparently never seen a movie before. Fortunately, his assistant Mangu (Satish Shah) and platonic gal-pal Shobha (Shubha) have seen movies before, and when Seema sends Anita, Vikram, and a small group of her friends and his henchman on a trip to the creepy old mansion, they convince Sunil to follow them.
The group settle in for a long stay. Vikram quickly shows his true colors and tries to attack Anita, but Sunil shows up at the last minute and beats him up. Then everybody goes back to the house, and the attempted rape is never mentioned again. That night, Vikram’s buddy Michael gets drunk and wanders the halls alone, only to be thrown out the window by the walking statue. The gang dig a shallow grave in the back yard, drop the body in, and go back to what they’re doing, rather than, say, calling the police or leaving the house.
After Michael’s death, things get kind of creepy. Someone (and I still have no idea who) keeps digging up Michael’s and Kumar’s bodies and leaving them around the house for the women to find. The Beast uses his Freddy Krueger powers to cause bad dreams and disturbing hallucinations. The men laugh off any concerns as silly women being silly, and they all decide to stay in the house for a few more days, despite the fact that somebody died.
At this point in the movie, horror doesn’t really seem to be much of a priority. Instead, Seema drives down to the mansion in order to scheme against Sunil and Anita, while Mangu gets his own lengthy subplot about his long lost identical twin brother, a bandit chief named Gangu. It isn’t until late in the film, after much plotting, romance, and identical bandit hijinks, that Vikram accidentally releases the Beast and scary stuff resumes in earnest.
Sometimes, I’ll watch a movie and spend the rest of the week wondering what happened. That’s not the case here; I know exactly what happened, I just can’t quite figure out why, or how. I’m geeky enough that when I watch this kind of movie, I want to be able to figure out what the rules are, and that’s just not possible here, because there’s not enough exposition. We do find out that the Beast is a Beast because of the curse on the house, but we never find out how the house became cursed in the first place, or where the murderous statue came from. And that’s just one of the nagging questions still bothering me. If the Beast is sealed beneath a crypt behind the house, how did it kill Kumar and the teenagers at the beginning of the movie? Who was moving the bodies around? Why did Kumar want the house in the first place, and why did Seema send Anita there? It makes my head hurt.
However, there are some things I liked about the movie. The big slow lumbering statue was treated as a big slow lumbering statue, able to kill people who are unsuspecting, drunk, or both, but not much of a threat if you’re able to run, and it had kind of a neat design. The romance plotline was predictable but not awful, and led to more songs than the average horror movie. And the comic relief was occasionally sort of funky; Satish Shah certainly seemed to enjoy chewing the scenery as the bandit king with a heart of gold.
If you like Ramsay style horror movies, this isn’t a bad choice. Just don’t expect it to make sense.
Bhooty Call: Mahal
Mahal (1949) has all the trappings of a Bollywood ghost
story: an abandoned mansion, a mysterious woman singing at night, and
scary stock footage of bats and snakes. It’s really a tragedy rather
than a horror movie, though. Just like Hamlet and Oedipus and Othello, Mahal‘s
protagonist is a potentially decent guy whose life is consumed and
ultimately destroyed by a single overwhelming flaw; in this case, he’s
the most gullible man in the world.
On a dark and stormy night, Hari Shankar (Ashok Kumar) visits the mysterious old mansion his father bought at auction. He convinces the kindly old gardener, the mansion’s sole caretaker, to tell the story of the tragic lovers who lived and died in the mansion thirty years ago, then sends said old gardener to tell his friend Shrinath (Kanu Roy) that he’s in town. On foot. At two in the morning. Through a rainstorm. And Shrinath lives four miles away.
Once the gardener leaves, Hari discovers a portrait which looks very much like him. He’s already half convinced that he’s the reincarnation of the doomed lover who built the mansion when he hears a mysterious woman’s voice singing. He follows the voice, and manages to catch a few glimpses of the beautiful woman (Madhubala) singing, but she vanishes every time. Whatever she is, though, she’s not a hallucination, because Shrinath, who arrived just in time, can see her too.
Shrinath convinces Hari to leave the house, but he can’t stay away for long. he returns, and speaks to the woman, who calls herself Kamini. She explains that yes, she’s a ghost, and he is the reincarnation of her lost love. Now they can finally be together, but first Hari must kill himself (which he gleefully agrees to do) in which case they can be united in death, or he can kill the gardener’s daughter, allowing Kamini to take over her body so that they can be united in life. Hari hesitates for a split second, then agrees to do whatever Kamini asks of him.
Before Hari can kill anyone, though, Shrinath returns, accompanied by Hari’s father (M. Kumar). They take Hari away and quietly marry him off to Ranjana (Vijayalaxmi), hoping that he will settle down and forget all this ghost nonsense.
Unfortunately, Hari can’t forget this ghost nonsense. On the wedding night, just as he’s about to lift Ranjana’s bridal veil, he hears a clock and is immediately consumed by thoughts of Kamini. He decides to take his wife to a far away place where he can love her, free of the distractions of his imagined past, and, after an odd interlude in which they watch a tribal woman suspected of adultery undergo a trial by knife, they settle in an old creepy cabin in the mountains which is infested with stock footage bats and snakes and unconvincing crow puppets.
(Trial by knife is just like trial by fire, except that instead of setting you on fire, they throw knives at you. If none of the knives hit you, then you’re innocent. As the basis for a legal system, I can see some flaws. Also, if she survives the trial, you're legally obligated to kiss her.)
After two years, Hari still hasn’t lifted his wife’s bridal veil, literally or metaphorically. Ranjana is living in a desolate cabin in the middle of nowhere, isolated from nearly all human contact, with a husband who completely ignores her and will not tell her why; it’s hard to blame her for taking desperate action, even though it ends badly for pretty much everyone.
Mahal is considered one of the great classics of Indian cinema, and I can understand why; the cinematography is great, and it features attractive, doomed people making lovely speeches at each other. On the other hand, it’s difficult for me, sitting in my living room in suburban Utah in the year 2011, to really understand Hari, or “Kamini”, who isn’t exactly a ghost and turns out to have a lot more in common with Hari than either of them realize. These are Tragedy People; they make horrible decisions, then speak beautifully about Fate when things go wrong.
And while he is indeed incredibly gullible, that’s really Hari’s tragic flaw. He knows he’s a Tragedy Person – he wants to be a Tragedy Person. As soon as he sees the portrait, he’s instantly consumed by the idea of being the tragic hero haunted by the ghost of his lost love. It’s easier to pine for the wife you lost in your last life than it is to get to know and learn to live with your wife in this one. Being fifteen for your whole life must be exhausting; it’s no wonder he dies young.
On a dark and stormy night, Hari Shankar (Ashok Kumar) visits the mysterious old mansion his father bought at auction. He convinces the kindly old gardener, the mansion’s sole caretaker, to tell the story of the tragic lovers who lived and died in the mansion thirty years ago, then sends said old gardener to tell his friend Shrinath (Kanu Roy) that he’s in town. On foot. At two in the morning. Through a rainstorm. And Shrinath lives four miles away.
Once the gardener leaves, Hari discovers a portrait which looks very much like him. He’s already half convinced that he’s the reincarnation of the doomed lover who built the mansion when he hears a mysterious woman’s voice singing. He follows the voice, and manages to catch a few glimpses of the beautiful woman (Madhubala) singing, but she vanishes every time. Whatever she is, though, she’s not a hallucination, because Shrinath, who arrived just in time, can see her too.
Shrinath convinces Hari to leave the house, but he can’t stay away for long. he returns, and speaks to the woman, who calls herself Kamini. She explains that yes, she’s a ghost, and he is the reincarnation of her lost love. Now they can finally be together, but first Hari must kill himself (which he gleefully agrees to do) in which case they can be united in death, or he can kill the gardener’s daughter, allowing Kamini to take over her body so that they can be united in life. Hari hesitates for a split second, then agrees to do whatever Kamini asks of him.
Before Hari can kill anyone, though, Shrinath returns, accompanied by Hari’s father (M. Kumar). They take Hari away and quietly marry him off to Ranjana (Vijayalaxmi), hoping that he will settle down and forget all this ghost nonsense.
Unfortunately, Hari can’t forget this ghost nonsense. On the wedding night, just as he’s about to lift Ranjana’s bridal veil, he hears a clock and is immediately consumed by thoughts of Kamini. He decides to take his wife to a far away place where he can love her, free of the distractions of his imagined past, and, after an odd interlude in which they watch a tribal woman suspected of adultery undergo a trial by knife, they settle in an old creepy cabin in the mountains which is infested with stock footage bats and snakes and unconvincing crow puppets.
(Trial by knife is just like trial by fire, except that instead of setting you on fire, they throw knives at you. If none of the knives hit you, then you’re innocent. As the basis for a legal system, I can see some flaws. Also, if she survives the trial, you're legally obligated to kiss her.)
After two years, Hari still hasn’t lifted his wife’s bridal veil, literally or metaphorically. Ranjana is living in a desolate cabin in the middle of nowhere, isolated from nearly all human contact, with a husband who completely ignores her and will not tell her why; it’s hard to blame her for taking desperate action, even though it ends badly for pretty much everyone.
Mahal is considered one of the great classics of Indian cinema, and I can understand why; the cinematography is great, and it features attractive, doomed people making lovely speeches at each other. On the other hand, it’s difficult for me, sitting in my living room in suburban Utah in the year 2011, to really understand Hari, or “Kamini”, who isn’t exactly a ghost and turns out to have a lot more in common with Hari than either of them realize. These are Tragedy People; they make horrible decisions, then speak beautifully about Fate when things go wrong.
And while he is indeed incredibly gullible, that’s really Hari’s tragic flaw. He knows he’s a Tragedy Person – he wants to be a Tragedy Person. As soon as he sees the portrait, he’s instantly consumed by the idea of being the tragic hero haunted by the ghost of his lost love. It’s easier to pine for the wife you lost in your last life than it is to get to know and learn to live with your wife in this one. Being fifteen for your whole life must be exhausting; it’s no wonder he dies young.
When you wish upon a . . . butterfly?
Once Upon a Warrior (2011) is the story of what
happens when nine year old Elora Danan and the blind swordsman Zatoichi
team up to save the world and rescue Madame Xanadu from Malificent (as
played by Lady Gaga) and her army of brainwashed orc cosplayers. It’s
not exactly masala (the movie actually sticks to one genre throughout)
but it is certainly Influence Soup.
The kingdom of Sangarashtra is being terrorized by the evil ghostly sorceress Irendri (Lakshmi Manchu, assisted by as much scenery as she can chew), who carries a powerful “Black Eye” which can transform ordinary men into her brainwashed warrior slaves. Desperate for relief, the people turn to the Teardrop Cult, a network of religious hucksters who promise spiritual protection from the power of the Black Eye and are worse than useless when it comes to actually protecting anything.
When the children of the village of Agharta fall sick, hapless everyman Druki (Vallabheneni Ramji) is sent to an isolated mountain monastery to retrieve Moksha (Harshitha), a little girl with amazing healing powers. Moksha will need protecting, and Druki, while brave, isn’t really up to the task, so the blind warrior Yodha (Siddharth) is sent along as her bodyguard.
Almost immediately after the trio set out on their journey, Moksha asks Yodha about his past, which leads to a long flashback about Yodha’s love for the Gypsy fortuneteller Priya (Shruti K. Haasan), and the tragic but clearly foreshadowed end to their romance. Nearly everything in this flashback will later turn out to be incredibly important.
And from there . . . well, it’s an epic quest. Moksha and her friends travel toward Agharta. Irendri’s men try to capture them, for nefarious magical reasons. There’s a visit to Irendri’s creepy fortress, Yodha fights a bunch of guys, we find out what happened to Priya, and it all leads to a dramatic confrontation on the night of the lunar eclipse.
Once Upon A Warrior has a number of clear clear influences, and doesn’t make much effort to hide any of them. Despite this, the film has a very consistent tone throughout; it feels like a modern day cinematic fairy tale. Despite the epic quest trappings and the nation in peril, the stakes are mostly personal, and the star-crossed lovers really are at the center of everything. It’s the kind of story you’d expect from one of Disney’s better animated features, in fact; perhaps that’s not too surprising, since this is billed as Disney’s first live-action Indian film.
Once Upon A Warrior even looks like an animated movie brought to life, with rich colors and gorgeous, improbable landscapes. The special effects are literally fantastic; they’re not always convincing, but they are always magical and imaginative.
Once Upon A Warrior does have some flaws. It takes a while to get really started, and the plot is overshadowed by the atmosphere; as fantasy epics go, there isn’t much plot at all, really. Our heroic band consists of Yodha, Moksha, and Druki, and Druki mostly stands around looking surprised.
I don’t know that anything about this movie is really groundbreaking; the film pulls from a number of sources to create a story that feels comfortably familiar. On the other hand, it looks fantastic, and features a delightfully over-the-top villain, so I don’t really mind.
The kingdom of Sangarashtra is being terrorized by the evil ghostly sorceress Irendri (Lakshmi Manchu, assisted by as much scenery as she can chew), who carries a powerful “Black Eye” which can transform ordinary men into her brainwashed warrior slaves. Desperate for relief, the people turn to the Teardrop Cult, a network of religious hucksters who promise spiritual protection from the power of the Black Eye and are worse than useless when it comes to actually protecting anything.
When the children of the village of Agharta fall sick, hapless everyman Druki (Vallabheneni Ramji) is sent to an isolated mountain monastery to retrieve Moksha (Harshitha), a little girl with amazing healing powers. Moksha will need protecting, and Druki, while brave, isn’t really up to the task, so the blind warrior Yodha (Siddharth) is sent along as her bodyguard.
Almost immediately after the trio set out on their journey, Moksha asks Yodha about his past, which leads to a long flashback about Yodha’s love for the Gypsy fortuneteller Priya (Shruti K. Haasan), and the tragic but clearly foreshadowed end to their romance. Nearly everything in this flashback will later turn out to be incredibly important.
And from there . . . well, it’s an epic quest. Moksha and her friends travel toward Agharta. Irendri’s men try to capture them, for nefarious magical reasons. There’s a visit to Irendri’s creepy fortress, Yodha fights a bunch of guys, we find out what happened to Priya, and it all leads to a dramatic confrontation on the night of the lunar eclipse.
Once Upon A Warrior has a number of clear clear influences, and doesn’t make much effort to hide any of them. Despite this, the film has a very consistent tone throughout; it feels like a modern day cinematic fairy tale. Despite the epic quest trappings and the nation in peril, the stakes are mostly personal, and the star-crossed lovers really are at the center of everything. It’s the kind of story you’d expect from one of Disney’s better animated features, in fact; perhaps that’s not too surprising, since this is billed as Disney’s first live-action Indian film.
Once Upon A Warrior even looks like an animated movie brought to life, with rich colors and gorgeous, improbable landscapes. The special effects are literally fantastic; they’re not always convincing, but they are always magical and imaginative.
Once Upon A Warrior does have some flaws. It takes a while to get really started, and the plot is overshadowed by the atmosphere; as fantasy epics go, there isn’t much plot at all, really. Our heroic band consists of Yodha, Moksha, and Druki, and Druki mostly stands around looking surprised.
I don’t know that anything about this movie is really groundbreaking; the film pulls from a number of sources to create a story that feels comfortably familiar. On the other hand, it looks fantastic, and features a delightfully over-the-top villain, so I don’t really mind.
What could possibly go wrong?
Stop me if you’ve heard this one: After years of research and a
final burst of mad genius, a brilliant scientist creates new life, an
artificial man. When he rejects his creation for petty reasons, it
strikes back at him through the woman he loves, with a little running
amok on the side. It’s one of the oldest plots in science fiction, and
it’s also the plot of Endhiran (2010).
After ten years of hard work, Doctor Vasi (Rajnikanth) has finally completed his mechanical man, Chitti (also Rajnikath). After a brief interlude to win back the heart of his neglected girlfriend, Sana (Aishwarya Rai Bachchan), Vasi presents his creation to the world, and the world is impressed.
Things don’t go quite so well when Vasi’s colleagues at the university get the chance to examine Chitti. Nobody gets called mad (unfortunately), but when Vasi’s mentor Doctor Bohra (Danny Denzongpa) has the chance to run the robot through its paces, he declares that it’s too dangerous to be allowed to mix with people.
It’s true that Bohra is secretly evil; he’s building an army of killer robots in his basement which he’s hoping to sell to the highest bidder, and he’s consumed with jealousy over Vasi’s success. On the other hand, Bohra is also completely correct. Chitti obeys orders without question, but has no sense of context, no sense of restraint, and no sense of the value of human life. Vasi specifically did not install any form of Asimov’s laws because he hoped to give Chitti to the army, and a soldier might have to take human life. So Vasi has created a robot which could harm or even kill anyone at any time, just because his instructions were not clearly worded. Chitti is far too dangerous to be around people.
Vasi asks for one more chance, and Bohra gives him a month. Vasi decides that the best way to teach his robot about the subtleties of human society is to give it emotions (because we humans have emotions, and we don’t have any trouble getting along.) Thanks in part to a lucky lightning strike, he succeeds, and the new, improved Chitti promptly falls in love with Sana. Tensions mount as Chitti becomes more and more persistent, and rather than install a ‘No Means No’ chip, Vasi dismantles his creation with an axe, and throws the parts away.
And that’s when Bohra finds Chitti, brings him home, repairs him, and installs a special Red Chip which turns the robot from amoral to actively evil. Then he leaves the now malevolent, brilliant, and lovesick robot alone in the basement with his own half-completed army of killer robots. This doesn’t work out well for anybody.
Whenever a movie draws this much inspiration from Frankenstein you can expect heavy-handed subtext about tampering in God’s domain, and the epilogue, set twenty years in the future, certainly implies that everything that went wrong is a natural result of daring to create a machine that can think for itself. I have to say, though, that I’ve never seen anyone tamper in God’s domain quite so incompetently. Vasi creates a robot without any limits on its behavior other than direct orders, and when that proves to be a mistake he adds emotions, giving his creation motivation but still no control. Nobody in this movie has much sense, but Vasi is the dumbest smart guy I’ve seen onscreen in a long time.
However, this is a killer robot movie, not a primer on using science responsibly. And as a killer robot movie, it’s a great success; the fight choreography (by Yuen Woo Ping, the Farah Khan of violence) is dynamic and blissfully implausible, the musical numbers are colorful and frequent, Aishwarya is suitably pretty, and the special effects are quite advanced for an Indian movie, and certainly imaginative. This is a movie with a giant snake made of robots, and that counts for a lot.
After ten years of hard work, Doctor Vasi (Rajnikanth) has finally completed his mechanical man, Chitti (also Rajnikath). After a brief interlude to win back the heart of his neglected girlfriend, Sana (Aishwarya Rai Bachchan), Vasi presents his creation to the world, and the world is impressed.
Things don’t go quite so well when Vasi’s colleagues at the university get the chance to examine Chitti. Nobody gets called mad (unfortunately), but when Vasi’s mentor Doctor Bohra (Danny Denzongpa) has the chance to run the robot through its paces, he declares that it’s too dangerous to be allowed to mix with people.
It’s true that Bohra is secretly evil; he’s building an army of killer robots in his basement which he’s hoping to sell to the highest bidder, and he’s consumed with jealousy over Vasi’s success. On the other hand, Bohra is also completely correct. Chitti obeys orders without question, but has no sense of context, no sense of restraint, and no sense of the value of human life. Vasi specifically did not install any form of Asimov’s laws because he hoped to give Chitti to the army, and a soldier might have to take human life. So Vasi has created a robot which could harm or even kill anyone at any time, just because his instructions were not clearly worded. Chitti is far too dangerous to be around people.
Vasi asks for one more chance, and Bohra gives him a month. Vasi decides that the best way to teach his robot about the subtleties of human society is to give it emotions (because we humans have emotions, and we don’t have any trouble getting along.) Thanks in part to a lucky lightning strike, he succeeds, and the new, improved Chitti promptly falls in love with Sana. Tensions mount as Chitti becomes more and more persistent, and rather than install a ‘No Means No’ chip, Vasi dismantles his creation with an axe, and throws the parts away.
And that’s when Bohra finds Chitti, brings him home, repairs him, and installs a special Red Chip which turns the robot from amoral to actively evil. Then he leaves the now malevolent, brilliant, and lovesick robot alone in the basement with his own half-completed army of killer robots. This doesn’t work out well for anybody.
Whenever a movie draws this much inspiration from Frankenstein you can expect heavy-handed subtext about tampering in God’s domain, and the epilogue, set twenty years in the future, certainly implies that everything that went wrong is a natural result of daring to create a machine that can think for itself. I have to say, though, that I’ve never seen anyone tamper in God’s domain quite so incompetently. Vasi creates a robot without any limits on its behavior other than direct orders, and when that proves to be a mistake he adds emotions, giving his creation motivation but still no control. Nobody in this movie has much sense, but Vasi is the dumbest smart guy I’ve seen onscreen in a long time.
However, this is a killer robot movie, not a primer on using science responsibly. And as a killer robot movie, it’s a great success; the fight choreography (by Yuen Woo Ping, the Farah Khan of violence) is dynamic and blissfully implausible, the musical numbers are colorful and frequent, Aishwarya is suitably pretty, and the special effects are quite advanced for an Indian movie, and certainly imaginative. This is a movie with a giant snake made of robots, and that counts for a lot.
He is Franz Cough-ka!
What do you get when you mix a Stephen King story, a glossy
Bollywood thriller, a generous helping of Kafka, and perhaps a dash of
Bugs Bunny? Even after seeing No Smoking (2007), I’m still not quite sure. It’s certainly interesting.
Because this is, in large part, a Kafka homage, our protagonist is named K (John Abraham). K is a wealthy, self-centered and arrogant businessman who loves smoking, much to the distress of his long-suffering wife Anjali (Ayesha Takia). (K is also conducting a half-hearted affair with his busty secretary Annie (also Ayesha Takia), but she and Anjali may or may not be the same person.)
Anjali is so tired of K’s constant smoking that she leaves him. K decides that he’d rather be married than a smoker, so he visits “The Laboratory,” a recovery facility enthusiastically recommended by his old smoking buddy Abbas (Ranvir Shorey).
The Laboratory turns out to be a maze of stone rooms staffed by wrestlers and women in burqas, in the corner of a forgotten slum which is hidden underneath a dingy carpet shop. The man in charge, Baba Bangali (Paresh Rawal), forces K to sign a contract, then explains the terms. The first time K smokes, his asthmatic brother J (Sanjay M. Singh) will be placed in a room with all the cigarette smoke K has ever exhaled. After the second cigarette, K loses two fingers. After the third, Anjali will be killed. Smoke the fourth cigarette, and J goes back into the room with all the smoke. And if K smokes five times, Baba will have to take extreme measures.
K is, naturally, incredulous, but he quickly discovers that no matter where he goes, the Laboratory are watching him.
K decides to follow the rules, until old friend and cigar entrepreneur Alex (Joy Fernandas) stuffs a cigar in his mouth. And then things get weird.
No Smoking is a very dense film; I’m not sure I’ve figured out exactly what happened, let alone what the deeper meaning might be. On the other hand, I don’t think this is a movie you need to “get” in order to enjoy. It’s a slick, stylish, dark, and visually interesting thriller, worth a watch even if it doesn’t have an easily grasped meaning.
Because this is, in large part, a Kafka homage, our protagonist is named K (John Abraham). K is a wealthy, self-centered and arrogant businessman who loves smoking, much to the distress of his long-suffering wife Anjali (Ayesha Takia). (K is also conducting a half-hearted affair with his busty secretary Annie (also Ayesha Takia), but she and Anjali may or may not be the same person.)
Anjali is so tired of K’s constant smoking that she leaves him. K decides that he’d rather be married than a smoker, so he visits “The Laboratory,” a recovery facility enthusiastically recommended by his old smoking buddy Abbas (Ranvir Shorey).
The Laboratory turns out to be a maze of stone rooms staffed by wrestlers and women in burqas, in the corner of a forgotten slum which is hidden underneath a dingy carpet shop. The man in charge, Baba Bangali (Paresh Rawal), forces K to sign a contract, then explains the terms. The first time K smokes, his asthmatic brother J (Sanjay M. Singh) will be placed in a room with all the cigarette smoke K has ever exhaled. After the second cigarette, K loses two fingers. After the third, Anjali will be killed. Smoke the fourth cigarette, and J goes back into the room with all the smoke. And if K smokes five times, Baba will have to take extreme measures.
K is, naturally, incredulous, but he quickly discovers that no matter where he goes, the Laboratory are watching him.
K decides to follow the rules, until old friend and cigar entrepreneur Alex (Joy Fernandas) stuffs a cigar in his mouth. And then things get weird.
No Smoking is a very dense film; I’m not sure I’ve figured out exactly what happened, let alone what the deeper meaning might be. On the other hand, I don’t think this is a movie you need to “get” in order to enjoy. It’s a slick, stylish, dark, and visually interesting thriller, worth a watch even if it doesn’t have an easily grasped meaning.
The kids are not okay.
It’s no secret that the Bollywood viewing sections of the
internet and I don’t always agree about movies; I am an open, admitted,
and unironic fan of Johny Lever, after all. Mela (2000), however, may finally be proof that I am living in Bollywood Bizarro world.
Roopa Singh (Twinkle Khana) is a free-spirited young woman who is loved by all of the happy villagers of Chandanpur, but especially by her brother Ram (Ayub Khan) and Gopal (Omkar Kapoor), a young boy with a serious crush. Ram has fixed Roopa’s marriage to a colleague in a distant vilage, and while Roopa doesn’t want to leave her brother and her home, the other happy villagers convince her to cheer up and come to the village fair, because nothing bad ever happens at village fairs, right?
Something bad happens at the village fair. Bandit leader and part time terrorist Gujjar Singh (Tinnu Verma), in town to assassinate a visiting government minister (Kulbushan Kharbanda), notices Roopa dancing, and decides to abduct her. Before long the village is in chaos, Ram and Gopal are dead, and Roopa has thrown herself off a cliff in order to escape Gujjar’s lecherous clutches.
Roopa survives the fall, miraculously unscathed. She’s angry, afraid, and a little unhinged, and she fixates on the idea of finding her fiance-to-be so that he will protect her and avenge her. To this end, after the usual misunderstandings, she hitches a ride with truck driver Shankar (Faisal Khan) and his sidekick, aspiring actor Kishen (Aamir Khan), who happens to be looking for an actual woman to costar in his new production.
Roopa’s intended turns out to be a huge disappointment, almost as bad as Gujjar. While escaping from him, Roopa runs straight into a band of Gujjar’s henchmen. Fortunately, Shankar and Kishen come to her rescue, and she decides that her avengers and rescuers have been in front of her the whole time.
Roopa may have found her champions, but she still doesn’t really trust them, so rather than tell the truth and ask for their help, she decides to make the already smitten Kishen fall in love with her, thus cementing their loyalty. This . . . is not a great plan.
Mela was a box office disaster. One of the most widely criticized aspects of the film was Twinkle Khanna’s performance, but, and this is probably evidence of my being a resident of Bizarro World, I thought she was really good. Women in Bollywood movies tend to react to atrocity in one of two ways, either lapsing into stereotypical Bollywood insanity, or becoming Kali and killing absolutely everybody. Khanna’s Roopa behaves more like . . . well, like a woman who’s just been through a profound trauma. And a lot of this is conveyed through body language and facial expressions; Roopa visibly shrinks whenever anyone tries to touch her, and during Kishen’s show (which is attended by some of Gujjar’s goons) she alternates between bravado and abject terror. She’s clearly not okay, and it colors every interaction she has.
I won’t pretend Mela is a good movie; it’s a standard Sholay flavored revenge melodrama and Western homage, with broad comedy, a heroine more consistently imperiled than Pauline, a villain who looks like he should be in the Village People, and a plot that doesn’t make an awful lot of sense. On the other hand, the movie features one surprising performance, colorful dance numbers, a few literal cliffhangers, plenty of last minute rescues, and the mighty sideburns of Johny Lever. It may not be a good movie, but it’s certainly not boring.
Roopa Singh (Twinkle Khana) is a free-spirited young woman who is loved by all of the happy villagers of Chandanpur, but especially by her brother Ram (Ayub Khan) and Gopal (Omkar Kapoor), a young boy with a serious crush. Ram has fixed Roopa’s marriage to a colleague in a distant vilage, and while Roopa doesn’t want to leave her brother and her home, the other happy villagers convince her to cheer up and come to the village fair, because nothing bad ever happens at village fairs, right?
Something bad happens at the village fair. Bandit leader and part time terrorist Gujjar Singh (Tinnu Verma), in town to assassinate a visiting government minister (Kulbushan Kharbanda), notices Roopa dancing, and decides to abduct her. Before long the village is in chaos, Ram and Gopal are dead, and Roopa has thrown herself off a cliff in order to escape Gujjar’s lecherous clutches.
Roopa survives the fall, miraculously unscathed. She’s angry, afraid, and a little unhinged, and she fixates on the idea of finding her fiance-to-be so that he will protect her and avenge her. To this end, after the usual misunderstandings, she hitches a ride with truck driver Shankar (Faisal Khan) and his sidekick, aspiring actor Kishen (Aamir Khan), who happens to be looking for an actual woman to costar in his new production.
Roopa’s intended turns out to be a huge disappointment, almost as bad as Gujjar. While escaping from him, Roopa runs straight into a band of Gujjar’s henchmen. Fortunately, Shankar and Kishen come to her rescue, and she decides that her avengers and rescuers have been in front of her the whole time.
Roopa may have found her champions, but she still doesn’t really trust them, so rather than tell the truth and ask for their help, she decides to make the already smitten Kishen fall in love with her, thus cementing their loyalty. This . . . is not a great plan.
Mela was a box office disaster. One of the most widely criticized aspects of the film was Twinkle Khanna’s performance, but, and this is probably evidence of my being a resident of Bizarro World, I thought she was really good. Women in Bollywood movies tend to react to atrocity in one of two ways, either lapsing into stereotypical Bollywood insanity, or becoming Kali and killing absolutely everybody. Khanna’s Roopa behaves more like . . . well, like a woman who’s just been through a profound trauma. And a lot of this is conveyed through body language and facial expressions; Roopa visibly shrinks whenever anyone tries to touch her, and during Kishen’s show (which is attended by some of Gujjar’s goons) she alternates between bravado and abject terror. She’s clearly not okay, and it colors every interaction she has.
I won’t pretend Mela is a good movie; it’s a standard Sholay flavored revenge melodrama and Western homage, with broad comedy, a heroine more consistently imperiled than Pauline, a villain who looks like he should be in the Village People, and a plot that doesn’t make an awful lot of sense. On the other hand, the movie features one surprising performance, colorful dance numbers, a few literal cliffhangers, plenty of last minute rescues, and the mighty sideburns of Johny Lever. It may not be a good movie, but it’s certainly not boring.
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