Love in the time of COVID-19.

The Good Servant is a stock character in Indian cinema.  He (it's always a he) is completely dedicated to his employer, and will do anything to protect the family, even when the employer's ungrateful children inevitably conspire to throw the Good Servant out of the house.  The nice thing about tropes is they let you assemble a story quickly in order to reflect current trends, and that's certainly the case with Eeswaran (2021).

Twenty five years ago, Paapathi (Vinodhini Vaidyanathan) died suddenly, a death which was predicted by astrologer Kaali (Kaali Venkat.)  Her husband, Periyasamy (Bharathiraja), raises the children as best he can.  Eventually, the children all move to Chennai for work, and after a dispute involving an unpaid loan, they stop visiting.

 

Periyasamy isn't alone, though.  He has Eeswaran (Silambarasan) to help run the (rather extensive) family farm and act as servant, personal caretaker, and devoted companion.  Eeswaran has the hypercompetent swagger you'd expect from a South Indian movie hero.  He's charming, popular, blessed with a particular gift for beating bad people up, and so confident that he's willing to Casey at the bat during the finale of a cricket game.

 

Every year Perivasamy holds a feats and performs ceremonies to honor his late wife, and every year the children make excuses and don't come.  This year is special, though, because it's 2020, and India is about to lock down to slow the spread of COVID-19.  Nobody wants to be cooped up in a small apartment in the city, so the children, and their children, and assorted family hangers-on all make their way to the family farm. 

There are three major complications to the happy family reunion.  The first is Vasuki (Nandita Swetha), one of Perivasamy's granddaughters and Eeswaran's ex-girlfriend.  She left Eeswaran when he made it clear that he would not leave Perivasamy, and certainly wasn't interested in moving to Chennai to make money.  Vasuki is now married to someone else, and while Eeswaran is carrying a bit of a torch, he's keeping his social distance.  However, Vasuki's sister Poongodi (Nidhhi Agerwal) has decided that she wants Eeswaran, and she's not going to give up, even though he tries to make it clear that his situation has not changed.

 

The second complication is Kaali, the astrologer, who visits the farm and predicts that someone at the farm is going to die within ten days.  Everybody is worried, especially after some of the sons and sons-in-law hang out unmasked at a village festival and share a bottle with a local who is COVID positive.  The entire family gets tested, and they all test negative, but the doctor takes Eeswaran aside and tells him that thirteen year old Diya has a hole in her heart.  Eeswaran decides to arrange for her treatment himself, and doesn't tell the family about her condition for stupid reasons.

And the third complication is Rathnaswamy (Stun Shiva), Perivasamy's old enemy, who has just been released form prison, and who is determined to prove Kaali's prediction wrong by killing the entire family rather than just one person.  Eeswaran has to defeat a small army of goons, sort out his own love life, catch a handful of snakes, and punch destiny in the face, and maybe clear up that whole loan business and reunite the family while he's at it.  It's all in a day's work for the Good Servant.

 

Except that Eeswaran is not just the Good Servant.  Secretly, he's Perivasamy's long-lost son, which adds a bit of extra motivation for our hero (and makes the romantic subplot incredibly awkward) but otherwise doesn't impact the story at all.  This is a movie with a lot more plot than the story really needs; trim a few extraneous plot points and the story would still hit the exact same beats.  That includes the global pandemic, which is only important when it's important.  Yes, everybody has to get COVID tests, but the entire extended family also squeezes into a single hospital room near the end and absolutely nobody is wearing a mask.  It's a missed opportunity.  

Even fuller house.

You don't need to have seen the previous Housefull movies to watch Housefull 4.  The Housefull franchise is more like an anthology series of incredibly broad comedies which feature much of the same cast playing completely different characters in completely different situations.  There are  a lot of these franchises in Bollywood, and they all have big name casts and make a whole lot of money.

Harry (Akshay Kumar) is a barber living in London with his brothers Roy (Riteish Deshmukh) and Max (Bobby Deol).  Harry has a short-term memory disorder which causes him to forget what's happening whenever he's distracted by a loud noise. (This is played for laughs because it's that sort of movie.)  Harry's memory problems have already landed the boys in trouble; he accidentally destroyed five million pounds belonging to unseen gangster Michael Bhai, and Michael would really, really like his money back.

 

Luckily, the brothers are dating Pooja (Pooja Hegde), Neha (Kriti Kharbanda), and Kriti (Kriti Sanon), the daughters of business tycoon Thakral (Ranjeet), and they hope that after their respective weddings they'll be more than able to settle the debt.  At first Thakral is unimpressed by the middle-aged losers trying to marry his daughters, but after an incident involving escaped horses and some suspiciously out-of-character heroics from the mild-mannered Harry, he's happy to accept them.  After spinning the family globe, the family sets off for Sitamgarh to hold the wedding.

 

And that's when things start to get really weird.  Upon seeing the huge castle where the wedding is to take place, Harry starts to get flashes of memory.  One of the bellhops, an offensive Italian stereotype named (ugh) Aakhri Pasta (Chunkey Pandey) claims to recognize the entire wedding party, though he's quickly fired and sent away by stuffy hotel manager Winston Churchgate (Johnny Lever).  After more flashes of memory, Harry sets out to find Pasta, and has his first proper flashback.

 

Six hundred years ago, Harry was Prince Bala Dev Singh, a bald, mustachioed spider-biting scoundrel.  After Bala is exiled form his own kingdom, his servant Pehla Pasta produces an invitation to the birthday celebration of Maharaja Surya Singh, who just happens to have three daughters of marriageable age.  Bala schemes to marry Madhu, the oldest daughter, and he teams up with effeminate dance teacher Bangdu and valorous and kind of dumb royal bodyguard Dharamputra Mahabali, who have their eyes on younger sisters Mala and Meena.  Unfortunately, Suryabhan (Sharad Kelkar) has a scheme to take the throne, and he uses unstoppable barbarian warlord Gama (Ranna Daggubati) as a weapon.  In the climactic battle, everybody dies.

 

Harry realizes the truth: he was Bala, Roy was Bangdu and Max was Dharamputra, while Kriti, Pooja and Neha were Madhu, Mala and Meena, respectively, which means the brothers are all about to marry the wrong sisters.  Harry has to make everybody else remember their past lives before the wedding, and the situation becomes even more complicated when wedding singer pappu Rangeela arrives, since he is the reincarnation of Gama and they definitely do not want him recovering his lost memories.

 

Housefull 4 is a really dumb movie with a great cast.  The humor is incredibly broad, consistently crude, and occasionally funny (the running gag about Harry getting repeatedly stabbed in the backside is a lot better than it sounds), but the less said about the subplot about Winston realizing he's the reincarnation of past-Pasta's love interest Giggly (Jamie Lever, Johnny's actual daughter), the better.

I can't help but feel that there's some wasted potential here.  Bala, the mustache-twirling villain who stumbles backwards into the role of romantic hero and discovers that he's really good at it, is an interesting character.  You could make a good movie about him.  Or you could make this one, I guess.

We fight . . . with Jazz!

99 Songs (2019) does not actually contain ninety-nine songs.  It has fourteen songs, which is still a lot for a contemporary movie, and since the songs are all written by legendary composer A. R. Rahman, I am happy to round up.  And that's good, because the songs are really the main attraction here.

 

When we meet Jai (Ehan Bhat) he's about to graduate from college with a degree in music and technology.  Jai is good looking, talented, and haunted by the memory of his father (Diwakar Pundir), an angry man who blamed music for everything that's gone wrong in his life, and forbade Jai from having anything to do with it.  (You can see how well that worked.)  

 

Jai is in love with Sophie (Edilsy Vargas), a gifted artist, fashion designer, and dancer who cannot speak.  (Yes, Jai has a mute muse named Sophia, which is a bit on the nose, but it's that sort of movie.)  Her father Sanjay (Ranjit Barot) is rich, powerful, and incredibly smug.  Sanjay is initially impressed by Jai and offers him a job managing a new digital music platform, but Jai wants to make music rather than distribute it.  Sanjay doesn't want his daughter to depend on a struggling artist.  Jai insists that one song can change the world, leading Sanjay to ask, "Where's the song?"  The discussion ends with an old fashioned ordeal for Jai; he can't see Sophie again, let alone marry her, until he's written one hundred songs.

 

Jai agrees to Sanjay's terms, but when he tries to write he's immediately hit with writer's block.  His best friend Polo (Tenzing Dalha) takes him to Shillong, which helps, but eventually the writer's block returns.  Polo takes him to meet Sheela (Lisa Ray), the Jazz Queen of Shillong, and that really helps, but eventually things go horribly wrong, leaving Jai in an asylum run by a dedicated psychologist who doesn't seem to have a character name (Manisha Koirala).  

 

It is really hard to convey artistic brilliance in a movie, because somebody has got to create the painting or poem or song that all the characters are marveling at. Jai is supposed to be an incredibly gifted composer and he needs to produce one amazing song by the movie's end.  Fortunately, A. R. Rahman really is that good, and the music is fantastic.

 

That's just as well, because the actual plot is a bit thin.  This is a movie which has specific things to say about music and love and all that (literal) Jazz, and it does so by relentlessly following a set pattern of plot beats.  (Though I am happy that Sophie does get her own character arc, rather than merely serving as Jai's eventual reward.)  Everything is wrapped in a layer of metaphor and allegory but the end result is still almost too straightforward.  It's a gorgeous movie, though; the beautiful music is paired with beautiful cinematography.  It's an okay love story with amazing music.

The H stands for Hanuman

A western movie can be adapted for Indian audiences in several different ways.  Sometimes you get a relatively faithful remake, though the shift in cultural perspective always changes things.  Sometimes Indian filmmakers will take parts of one or more movies and remix them in different ways.  And sometimes you get a movie like Superman (1980), where the filmmakers start with a very obvious point of inspiration and then run screaming in a completely different direction.

Superman has had plenty of cinematic origin stories over the years, but this movie skips the usual doomed planet and desperate scientists, and instead rips off Batman.  Young Raja watches helplessly as his parents are murdered by a trio of bandits in cowboy hats.  The bandits murder the kindly temple priest on the way out, so Raja goes to live with the priest's widow and daughter, but he is determined to have justice, and after proving his devotion Hanuman appears and grants him superpowers. 

Years pass.  Raja (now played by NTR) is not a reporter for a major metropolitan newspaper, he's a part owner of a mica mine. He's devoted to his adopted mother (Pamndari Bai) and sister Lakshmi (Geeta), and divides his time between mine stuff, spending time with his family, wooing Jaya (Jaya Prada), the daughter of his business partner (Allu Ramalingaiah), and performing the occasional daring rescue; he is secretly Superman, after all.

Meanwhile, the three bandits who murdered Raja's parents have become successful crimelords.  When gold is discovered at the mica mine, they hatch a cunning plan to seize control, a plan which involves ordering their goons to dress up like ghosts and kill random villagers because that will help in some way?  Though to be fair they are also kidnapping people and forcing them to mine gold, which at least means that the bad guys get some gold.

Still, Superman is on the case, and he quickly realizes that he's dealing with his parents' killers.  he quickly eliminates Jai Singh (Tyagaraju) and his herd of brainwashed murder-elephants.  Sardar (Srilanka Manohar) and his death ray don't fare any better.  But the third bandit remains elusive, and Raja soon has other things to worry about.

Laxmi has been secretly canoodling with Mohan (Chakarapani), a boy from her college, and she has become pregnant.  Raja goes to meet the boy, and Mohan promises to speak to his millionaire father Dharma Rao (Kaikala Satyanarayana).  Rao agrees to the match, if Raja will give him his share of the mine as a dowry, and since it's a matter of his sister's prestige, Raja agrees.  However, when the papers are handed over minutes before the wedding ceremony, Rao takes his son and flees to Hong Kong, leaving Laxmi to face total social ruin.  (CLASSIC SUPERMAN ACTION!)

Raja has no choice but to follow him to Hong Kong, which is also sometimes Singapore, at least if the subtitles can be trusted.  What he doesn't know is that Rao is secretly Maharaj, the third bandit, and that Maharaj is plotting to kill him with he help of hotel manager Miss Lee (Jayamalini), who is also an evil witch.  (She's not secretly an evil witch; she's pretty open about using her spooky powers, and she wanders around in broad daylight in an evil sorceress outfit, complete with golden bat headdress.) And what they don't realize is that Raja is secretly Superman; it's easy to forget because he hasn't done any Superman stuff for a while.

This isn't the Superman I'm used to; he's bulletproof, moderately strong, and able to fly at a reasonable pace, but he won't be juggling planets any time soon.  And Raja is nothing like Clark Kent; they're both good guys, but Raja is a business owner and family man and anything but mild mannered, and his concerns are the concerns of a Tollywood hero from 1980.  He is, in other words, an appropriate Superman for his place and time.  The movie's ambitions have outstripped its effects budget, its rather baroque plot has outstripped the rather scanty concept, and the end result is a little silly, but Superman should be a little silly.

At last, the Imran Khantent you've been waiting for.

As Mere Brother Ki Dulhan (2011) opens, London-based businessman Luv Agnihorti (Ali Zafar) is breaking up with his long-time girlfriend Piali Patel (Tara D'Souza).  It's a mistake and they both know it, but as the fight drags on they can't stop saying terrible things to one another.  When Piali leaves, Luv decides that he's done with romance.  He just wants to get married, and so he calls his younger brother Kush (Imran Khan) in Mumbai and asks him to arrange a match.  

 

Kush is a photographer and an assistant director for Bollywood movies.  (This will be important later.)  He's also a spectacularly decent guy and is devoted to his brother, so after a quick musical number he subjects himself to a montage of comically unsuitable potential brides.  Frustrated, Kush changes his tactic, using his photography skills to put together a slick and filmi matrimonial ad, which leads to . . . more unsuitable potential brides.

And then Kush gets a call from retired bureaucrat Dilip Dixit (Kanwaljit Singh).  Dixit has a daughter, Dimple, who is of marriageable age, is educated, and grew up in London.  The families meet, and Kush is shocked to discover that Dimple is "D" (Katrina Kaif),  a woman he met in college when she staged an illegal concert in front of the Taj Mahal.  Dimple is just as blunt and strong-willed and free-spirited as Kush remembers, but she's ready for marriage.  Kush likes her, the families like each other, and (perhaps most importantly) Dimple's beloved autistic brother Ajju (Arfeen Khan) approves of the match, so after a quick video chat with Luv, the wedding is officially on.

 

This is a romantic comedy, not an "Arranged Marriage is Great" comedy, so there's trouble ahead.  Dimple and Kush spend a lot of time together while preparing for the wedding, and kuch kuch hota hai - they develop feelings for each other.  Dimple tries to talk to Kush about it, but he can't admit the truth to himself, let alone to Dimple, until after the engagement ceremony, at which point they are stuck.  Dimple wants to elope, but Kush isn't willing to hurt their families.  She tries kidnapping him, but it doesn't go well.

 

  However, when all you have is a Bollywood assistant director, every problem starts to look like a Bollywood plot.  Kush and Dimple and Ajju (because, as he explains, Dimple doesn't keep secrets from him) come up with a complicated scheme to make everybody happy, starting with a phone cal to Luv's ex, Piali.

 

A good romantic comedy is like an episode of Columbo; everybody knows the lovers are going to wind up together, but you watch because you want to see how it happens.  Complicated schemes are not unusual, but what makes Mere Brother Ki Dulhan so much fun is Kush's dogged determination to make sure absolutely everybody gets what they really want.  Just this once, everybody lives happily ever after.