Citizen Kane meets Sunset Boulevard, but with more dance numbers.

CLIMAX (2021) falls in the uneasy territory between quirky art film and loud and glitzy entertainer, being both a character study of the rise and fall of a wealthy eccentric, and a silly detective story in which the two big crimes are committed by different people, in the same room, about twenty minutes apart.

After a failed political campaign, eccentric multimillionaire Vijay Modi (Rajendra Prasad) has spent the last two years living in a hotel room, brooding and occasionally presiding over tawdry parties like an aging Jay Gatsby.  It's not exactly a life of solitude; in addition to the parties, Modi makes frequent talk show appearances to discuss his bizarre and often offensive statements on Twitter.  Still, Modi has separated himself from his businesses and his family; both his wives and their respective sons are staying at the family mansion, though he does pay them the occasional visit.

When he notices the young and beautiful Navya (Sasha Singh, looking a bit like a young Juhi Chawla) watching him, Modi is intrigued.  He thinks . . . well, it's pretty obvious what he thinks, but perhaps he also thinks he's found his Nick Carraway, since when he finally meets the young woman he offers her a great deal of money to stay the night and listen to his story and his philosophy of life.  Which he delivers as a freestyle rap, because it's that kind of movie. 

The next morning, Navya leaves in a hurry, and later that day Modi's body is discovered in the hotel room, badly mutilated.  The rest of the movie is a mystery, as the police explore Modi's history of cynical self-promotion, his brief (and self-financed) career as a movie star, the quick collapse of his political career as soon as people learned his political positions.  And then there's that mountain of debt and the nine life insurance policies taken out in the weeks before his death.

It's not a very hard mystery.  Everything hinges on the the mysterious woman who shut off the CCTV cameras, and once her identity becomes clear the solution is obvious.  That's not necessarily a problem, since the mystery is just an excuse to explore Modi's character.  

And that's the tricky part; the movie has to make us want to spend time with Modi.  And they do try - Prasad's performance is great, but Modi as presented is never as charming as he or the movie wants us to think he is, and he certainly isn't as profound as the movie pretends.  Most of his cynical platitudes sound like a moody teenager who has just discovered Ayn Rand, and while he sometimes stumbles into a reasonable opinion, "Children should take care of their aging parents" is not a stunning new insight.  CLIMAX is a well-executed character study about a character who really isn't that interesting.

Couldn't get away.

At first glance, Looop Lapeta (2022) might look like your average movie about a woman stuck in a time loop as she desperately runs through the streets, trying to raise a small fortune in order to save the life of her hopeless boyfriend.  It look s that way on a second glance, too.  The third glance is when things start getting weird.

Savi (Taapsee Pannu) is a former track star whose career was ended due to a bad fall during a race.  She's tempted to end it all, but her life is saved by Satya (Tahir Raj Bhasin), and the pair quickly fall into a relationship.  The good news is that Satya has all the enthusiasm, charm, and loyalty of a big floofy puppy.  Unfortunaterly, he also has all of the brains and common sense of the same big floofy puppy; Satya is a slacker and compulsive gambler who works for violent restaurateur and drug kingpin Victor (Dibyendu Bhattacharya).  Satya is really, really into the relationship with Savi, while she's just tired of running and ready to settle down.

It's Savi's birthday, so Satya asks Victor for an advance on his salary so that he can buy her a nice present.  Victor isntead offers to let him work for it; all Satya has top do is deliver a package to a particular address, then bring a bag of money back within eighty minutes, which is just long enough for Victor's turkey to cook.  (Honestly, the eighty minute turkey is the most unbelievable thing about the movie.)  Satya is, as mentioned, a compulsive gambler who is not very smart, so he decides to gamble with the money, return the original amount to Victor, and keep the profits for himself.  Within eighty minutes.  Shockingly, it does not go well.

Savi is trying to wrap her mind around a positive pregnancy test when she gets a panicked phone call from Satya.  He explains the situation, and she vows to find the money to save him.  First she tries to get the money from her estranged father and former coach Atul (KC Shankar), but there's too much bitterness there, especially since she has never accepted Yash (Varun Pande), the man her father started dating after her mother died.  

Savi keeps trying, in the process crossing paths with Jacob (Sameer Kevin Roy), a cabdriver who is heartbroken that his beloved Julia (Shreya Dhanwanthary) is marrying another man.  Meanwhile, Satya decides to rob the jewelry store owned by Malesh (Rajendra Chawla), only to be interrupted by Malesh's incompetent sons, who are also trying to rob the place.  In the confusion, Satya is shot and killed in front of Savi.

Savi remembers Satya telling the story of Savitri, who matched wits with the death god Yama in order to bring back her husband Satyavan.  (And yes, our leads are named Savi and Satya.  Subtle allusions are for cowards.)  

And then the day starts again, because this is a remake of Run, Lola, Run, giving Savi another chance to get it right.  All she manages to do is get Satya killed by a different person.  She remembers more of the story, and then she's back at the beginning of the loop, ready to try again and this time try to make all the right choices.

A good remake, Bollywood or otherwise, should bring something new to the story.  Otherwise, why bother?  Looop Lapeta shifts the cultural context of the original film, but it also shifts the genre; it's not just a thriller, it's also a quirky romantic comedy with gangsters and time loops.  It's shiny and fun and manages to feel new, even when telling a story that I've heard before.

Whaaaat?

 This is apparently real.  There's a long way to go between "announcement" and "actual movie that I can watch", but I'm going to be excited for a while anyway.

You get what it says on the tin.

Some movies take a while to figure out; they are full of symbolism and careful characterization, all leading to a deeper meaning than what you see on the surface; sometimes, there are multiple layers of meaning that a careful viewer can sift through.  Biskoth (2020) is not one of those movies.

Dharmarajan (Aadukalam Naren) is a hard working baker with a small business selling biscuits to local stores.  With the help of his friend Narasimhan (Anandaraj), and especially with some useful advice from his young son Raja, "Magic Biscuits" becomes a success, and Dharmarajan dreams that one day it will become a big business, with Raja as general manager.  He dies before his dream can come true, but sure enough, after many years Magic Biscuits is a big company, with Raja (Santhanam) . . . working on the factory floor.  Narasimhan runs the company now.

Raja is ambitious.  He wants to fulfill his father's dream and take over the company, and he'd also like to move his relationship with Narasimhan's daughter Laya (Swathi Muppala) from "childhood friend" to "girlfriend."  But his immediate problem is his supervisor Ganesh (Bharath Reddy), a smug jerk who has used Raja's hard work and bright ideas to secure a promotion for himself.

Raja volunteers at a nearby rest home, where he clashes with the beautiful Doctor Anitha (Tara Alisha).  It's also where he meets Janaki (Sowcar Janaki), a resident with a gift for storytelling.  Janaki tells him a story about a brave prince who was unjustly passed over for the throne, but who earns another shot at becoming the heir through his skill and bravery.  And then it rains money for no reason.

The next day Raja notices that events in his life start mirroring events in the story, culminating with money raining don on him while his bike is stopped under an overpass.  He returns to Janaki for another story, this time giving her suggestions to shape it into a cool Seventies action thriller which ends with the hero getting the girl and the company.  It doesn't work - Janaki's parts of the story come true, but Raja's additions do not, leading to a confusing day of failure.

Humbled, Raja asks for one last story, and Janaki tells him a story about 12th Century Rome, in which the Princess of Rome's faithful Spartan bodyguard gets everything that he ever wanted and then ruins everything.  Raja is bad with subtext, so he follows the same path.

You may be thinking that this sounds an awful lot like the Hollywood movie Bedtime Stories.  Is this just a Bollywood ripoff of an Adam Sandler movie?  Of course not.  This is a Tamil film, making it a Kollywood ripoff of an Adam Sandler movie.  This is not a deep movie, it's a harmless bit of fluff. The stories are fun, at least, and each echoes a different movie; the tale of the prince looks a lot like Bahubali, the cool seventies thriller has a cameo by Jeeva playing Rajnikanth playing the title character from Billa, and the story of the Roman princess sounds like 300 with even less historical accuracy. And the process of cultural translation has at least provided the film with a very clear moral: Be nice to old people, because they have magical powers.