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.