Home for the Holidays

 Greater Kalesh (2025) is a Netflix-original short film, but it manages to perfectly capture the feel of a holiday-centered TV movie, and I have to think that that is deliberate.  This time the specific holiday is Diwali, but the idea of the adult child returning home for the holidays and resolving family drama is pretty much universal.

The adult child in question is Twinkle Handa (Ahsaas Channa), who has a good job in Bangalore working with computers but is finally returning home to Delhi to surprise her family and attend their annual Diwali party.  Twinkle loves Diwali, and she loves her family, and she looks forward to sharing it with her father Ranjan (Happy Ranajit), mother Sunita (Supriya Shukla) and annoying younger brother Ankush (Poojan Chhabra).  But her wistful voice-over comes to an abrupt stop when she gets to the front door of the family home and overhears a bitter argument.  She rings the doorbell and Sunita lets her in, but everyone insists that everything is fine.

 Everything is not fine.  It takes persistence, but Twinkle learns Ranjan father never actually owned the house; his brother did, but now the house is going to be sold and this will be their last Diwali in what they thought was their home.  Sunita is planning to join her daughter in Bangalore (which is a surprise to Twinkle), and everyone is also mad at Ankush because he's apparently dating an older woman.  (Ankush is not dating an older woman.)  Twinkle is keeping her own secret as well - she's in a serious relationship with Rishi (Aditya Pandey), but can't bring herself to introduce him to the family.

Fortunately, Twinkle also has Pankhuri (Akshaya Naik), the obligatory plucky best friend, to give her advice.  Pankhuri points out that the problems in the home aren't actually about Twinkle, and with that added perspective, Twinkle decides to use the Diwali party to solve everybody's problems for them.  (She may have missed the point of "it's not actually about you.")  And her plan starts with inbviting Ankush's college friend Karan (Keshav Mehta) to the party.

And that's the movie.  It's a cozy and insubstantial bit of family fluff, so while the characters have problems, nobody is a villain, and everything will be solved in the most heartwarming way possible.  It's heartwarming family drama, like a 90s Bollywood movie where they're solving their own problems instead of relying on Shah Rukh Khan.  

A Bad Bromance

 Kabir (Hrithik Roshan), the edgy loner of Yash Raj Films' "Spy Universe", was last seen at the end of Tiger 3 accepting a dangerous undercover mission in order to defeat a mysterious and terrifying enemy; his mentor Colonel Luthra (Ashutosh Rana) warns him that the mission will test him, blurring the lines between good and evil and requiring him to perform terrible deeds in order to safeguard India.  And as War 2 (2025) opens, it seems that Luthra was right.  Kabir is working as a one man mercenary battalion, slicing his way through a katana-infested Japanese temple in order to eliminate his target, befriending a wolf and blowing up a helicopter along the way.  

Kabir meets his contact in Germany, and she tells him that from now on he'll be working for a secret organization called Kali.  After the customary drugging and kidnapping, Kabir wakes up in a secret lair and discovers that Kali is an international cartel with members from all of the countries surrounding India, and that they like to protect their identities by teleconferencing with high tech red shifted holograms.  It's exactly the kind of cartel you see in older movies like Mr. India; I like to think that they are literally the cartel from Mr. India, searching for a figurehead who can match the charisma and style of Mogambo.

 Kali have arranged a test for Kabir, to prove that he's not secretly still working for RAW: they've kidnapped Luthra, and want Kabir to kill him.  Kabir is reluctant, because of course he's secretly still working for RAW, but Luthra insists that he completes his mission, and finally and reluctantly Kabir pulls the trigger.  The members of Kali are pleased, and Kabir is rewarded with a meeting with India's representative in the cartel, Gautam Gulati (K. C. Shankar.)  Gulati is a villain for the modern era, an amoral billionaire who just wants more money and more power, but who can't muster thegravitas of Amrish Puri in a bad blond wig.

However, just to be very sure that Kabir isn't secretly still working for RAW, Kali send the video of Luthra's death to Indian intelligence, and Vikrant Kaul (Anil Kapoor), the new head of RAW, puts together a team to take Kabir down, because apparently Luthra was the only person who knew about Kabir's secret mission.  (I too have seen Don.)  The team includes Luthra's daughter Kavya (Kiara Advani) and decorated veteran Vikram Chelapathi (NTR Jr.) who is introduced in his own physics defying fight scene, establishing that he's skilled, a bit of a lone wolf, and played by that guy from RRR.

 The team discuss Kabir and his possible motives, and they confidently note that Kabir doesn't have any family or loved ones outside of RAW.  In the next scene Kabir is in Spain, visiting Ruhi (Arista Mehta), the young girl he adopted at the end of the last movie.  There's a chase and a fight and a train crash, and Kabir decides that Vikram can be trusted.  The men meet secretly, Kabir tells Vikram about the mission Kali has given him, and asks the other man to stop him.  Vikram eagerly agrees, and the men perform a big dance number while singing about how they're best friends now and would give their lives for one another.

But of course there's a problem.  The movie is called War, and so these two can't be friends forever.  The previous film kept Kabir's loyalties ambiguous for much of the runtime, so there was a real question of whether Kabir or his rival/protege Khalid (Tiger Shroff) was the real villain.  This time we know Kabir is on the up and up - we saw Luthra assign the mission, and we have followed Kabir closely throughout the movie, so we know he's really good.  That leaves Vikram, though the movie does manage to make the obvious twist more complicated than "he's working for Kali."

 Hrithik and NTR have great chemistry, and the movie really does set up the bromance as something that's both deeply unhealthy and very important to both men.  The rest of the movie is kind of overshadowed, though.  The plot is basically nonsense, the action scenes range from "over-the-top" to "so over-the-top that my sense of disbelief is shattered", and Kiara Advani doesn't really have much to do.  In theory she's supposed to be Kabir's love interest, but they don't have many scenes together and it's Vikram that gets the big dance number and declarations of eternal devotion.  

War 2 does add something to the evolving Spy Universe; Kali provides the franchise with a useful and uncomplicated bad-guy operation, a Bollywood SPECTRE or Hydra (and the heroes even mention that if you cut off one head, two more will take its place.)  And it is always nice to see Anil Kapoor, even though Vikrant Kaul is probably not Arun Verma in disguise.

 

 

Bhooty Call - Makdee

Writer-director Vishal Bhardaj is best known for his trilogy of Shakespearean tragedies: Maqbool (based on Macbeth), Omkara (based on Othello), and Haider (you guessed it - Hamlet.)  However, while Maqbool was an early success, Bhardaj's directorial debut was the children's fantasy film Makdee (2002).  And while Makdee is a story about a village haunted by a witch, alternately light-hearted and spooky, you can totally tell it's the same guy.

The ghost is established early, as a group of angry villagers led by the boisterous butcher Kallu (Makarand Deshpande) chase a young thief (Pappu) into the witch's house.  Nobody wants to follow, especially not village policemen Banta and Ghanta (not credited on the IMDB), until eleven year old troublemaker Chunni (Shweta Basu Prasad) appears and shames them into following her.  They're already too late, though, and everyone flees when they discover that the witch has transformed the thief into a goat.

Despite being an eleven year old girl, Chunni is very much a stereotypical Nineties Bollywood hero, complete with the confident swagger and love of pranks.  In other words, she's kind of a jerk and not quite as charming as she thinks she is.  Her twin sister Munni (also Shweta Basu Prasad) is demure and studious and kind.  And sidekick Mughal-e-Azam (Aalap Mazgaonkar) is loyal, not especially smart, and consistently hungry, since Kallu doesn't feed him if the chores aren't done properly.  Chunni can't stand Kallu, and he's a frequent target of her pranks, while he tends to chase her with a butcher knife whenever he catches her.

Things escalate when Chunni releases all of Kallu's chickens into the village.  He's furious, and chases the girl he thinks is Chunni into the witch's house.  It's not Chunni, though, it's Munni, and when Chunni realizes that her sister is in danger because of her she loses her swagger and breaks down, begging the responsible adults in the village for help.  They all assume it's another prank, though, and finally she has to enter the house herself.  And that's when she meets the Witch (Shabana Azmi).

 The Witch knows who Chunni is, and reveals that she's transformed Munni into a chicken.  She promises to turn Munni back into a human, but only after Chunni brings her one hundred hens to sate her hunger.  Not all at once, though - she's not a monster!  (Actually she is a monster.)  She demands one hen a night, and if Chunni tells anyone the consequences will be dire.  So Chunni has to collect the hens, impersonate her own sister well enough that nobody notices, and do her own homework!

Makdee goes surprisingly hard for a children's film.  As a horror movie it relies on dread rather than gore, but there is plenty of dread to spare, and the scenes in the house are wonderfully Gothic. The Witch is cruel, taunting Chunni at every opportunity and even swinging outside her classroom at school just to keep the poor girl on edge, and it's soon clear that she can, will, and indeed has hurt a child.  

 And that brings me to the acting.  Shabana Azmi is an art film legend, so it's no surprise that she brings the Witch to sadistic life.  Makarand Deshpande is another art film stalwart, and he's great whether he's singing a duet with a chicken, chasing children with a knife, or coming to the rescue when nobody else will.  But Shweta Basu Prasad was eleven years old when this movie came out, and she is amazing here.  She's not just great for a child actor, she's great for an actor of any age, balancing two distinct characters (one of whom impersonates the other) and portraying a genuinely harrowing emotional arc.  Bhardwaj's direction is confident and skillful, but Shweta makes the movie.

Bhooty Call: Kaatteri

 There are horror comedies and then there are horror comedies.  Some movies mix classic Bollywood monster movie characters with a powerful social message, some movies use spooky imagery to tell a charming story about a child gaining confidence and wisdom with the help of a friendly ghost, and some movies mix Indian folklore, cosmic horror, and gritty crime drama with a heaping helping of farce.  Which makes me think that I am probably overselling Kaatteri (2022).

 Gajja, Sankar and Kaliyurunda (Karunakaran, Kutty Gopi, and Ravi Mariya) are petty gangsters working for the ancient crime boss Naina.  They aren't very good at crime, but while searching for their missing associate Maanga Mani (Yogi Babu) they manage to kidnap perky (and presumably wealthy) psychiatrist Kamini (Nathmika).  Naina is not impressed, and informs the trio that if they and their friend Kiran (Vaibhav Reddy) don't return the money that Maanga Mani ran off with in a day, he'll have them all killed.

The trio go to meet Kiran, who is trying to enjoy his wedding night with Shweta (Sonam Bajwa) and explain the situation.  Shweta adjusts surprisingly quickly, and comes up with a plan: the gang can steal Kamini back and hold her for ransom, using whatever money they can get from that to pay back Naina.  Despite their ineptitude they manage to kidnap Kamini again, but the plan goes off track when Kamini reveals that Maanga Mani actually traveled to the remote village of Kolaatipuram in search of a fabulous treasure.  Figuring that digging up treasure will be easier than arranging a ransom, the gang heads to the village, dragging Kamini with them.

And then things get weird.  the people in the village are . . . odd, and Kiran is accosted by a mysterious old man (Lollu Sabha Manohar) who gives him enigmatic warnings and a pacifier, but they manage to trace Maanga Mani to a bungalow just outside of town.  They question the residents, don't get any useful response, and bumble their way into taking the family hostage as well.  But after night falls and spooky things start happening, they realize that the house is haunted.

 While trying to escape from the house, the gang get separated, and each little group realize that the whole village is haunted by a variety of ghosts.  In fact, everyone in the village is a ghost of one kind or another, but the most dangerous spirit they meet is Mathamma, who appears as a lovely woman who approaches her victims and asks if she is beautiful, then carries them away if they answer yes or no.  Or perhaps the most dangerous spirits they meet are the withered green specters who silently surround the group and follow Weeping Angel rules, reducing their victims to dust if they can get close enough.

Mathamma has more personality, though,  and when she manages to spirit the group into her house, she tells them a story that mixes fact and fiction, a story about stifled dreams, murder, and a hungry well that promises untold wealth in exchange for human flesh.  

This is a movie with a great premise, reminiscent of the beautiful and bleak cosmic horror movie Tumbbad, but with broad farce rather than a cold and merciless universe.  The gang are incompetent buffoons as well as criminals, and nobody is particularly sympathetic, with the possible exceptions of Kamini and Mathamma herself.  Many of the jokes fall flat, but there are some moments of genuine humor, as well as a few moments of genuine unease as the gang try to escape the village and keep on winding up in the carnival at the center of town.  It's okay, but it could have been great.