Meet the Beat Alls.

 The Powerpuff Girls was a popular show on Cartoon Network about a trio of super-powered children, Blossom (Cathy Cavadi), Buttercup (E. G. Daily) and Bubbles (Tara Strong).  The trio were created by the kindly Professor Utonium (Tom Kane) and charged with protecting the city of Townsville.  (But not the town of Cityville; that's somewhere else.)  But we're not looking at the entire series, we're looking at one episode, which places the villains front and center.  So let's "Meet the Beat Alls."

 

 Mojo Jojo (Roger L. Jackson) is an angry simian, frustrated by his repeated failure to defeat the Powerpuff Girls.  He's not the only one; fashion-forward eldritch horror Him (also Tom Kane), bratty "Little Orphan Annie" knock-off Princess (Jennifer Hale), and strong but not silent Fuzzy Lumpkin (Jim Cummings) all want to defeat the Girls as well, and they all pick the same night to attack Professor Utonium's house.  The villains argue, but when the girls fly out to tell them to be quiet they attack, and by working together they manage to . . . win?  So a new supervillain group is formed.

The Beat Alls set out on a crime spree, and they just keep winning; the four of them combined are all too much for the Powerpuff Girls to handle, and the girls finally stop fighting and let them keep at it.  The Townsville police are also helpless, and it looks like nothing can stop the Beat Alls.

 

And then she appears.  Moko Jono, a chimpanzee performance criminal.  Mojo is immediately smitten, and forces the group to participate in Moko's "conceptual crimes," leading to tension in the group and an eventual bitter breakup.

 

The entire episode is a solid wall of Beatles-related puns, quotes, and sight gags, and it is delightful.   

 

And then there's the Moko Jono thing.  For the record, Yoko Ono is not responsible for breaking up the Beatles.  The Fab Four were grown men, evolving in wildly different directions creatively, and they did not need a femme fatale to give them a push.  I suppose it's fitting that a cartoon should riff on the most cartoonish version of the end of the band, but but on the other hand, the Beat Alls aren't actually the Beatles, and the criminal band breaking up is not such a bad thing.  Also Moko Jono isn't what she seems, and is there mostly to set up a shaggy dog joke with a great punchline that I'm not going to spoil. 

 

This is a very silly episode of a silly show. But there's a real affection for the band there, mixed in with all the ribbing.

 

I thought you might like to know . . .

 I started a special month long look at Beatles-related movies, and forgot to mention that that's what I'm doing.  Normal Bollywood content will resume in a couple of weeks

Rupert and the Frog Song

 Rupert Bear is a British icon, a character who first appeared in a newspaper comic strip in 1920.  So why am I talking about Rupert and the Frog Song (1984) in the middle of my Beatles binge?

 

That's why.  Paul McCartney acquired the film rights to the character the day after he announced he was leaving the Beatles, and he wrote, produced and starred in Rupert and the Frog Song.  The short was released in theaters to accompany Give My Regards to Broad Street, and unlike the feature film it was actually well received.

 The plot is not only there to string the songs together, mostly because there's only one song. It's a beautiful day, and Rupert (McCartney) decides to go for a walk.  He chats with his friends Bill and Edward, stands under a tree covered with butterflies, and finally discovers frogs in a pond.

Rupert walks some more, and discovers a secret cave with a sign warning "Frogs Only Beyond This Point."   That does not deter him, and nor do the frog guards stationed in the cave.  Rupert sneaks in and discovers the frogs preparing for a special ceremony that happens every couple of hundred years, so it's good timing.  But what Rupert doesn't know is that he's been followed by an owl and a pair of black cats.

 

 Rupert watches as the frogs sing "We All Stand Together," a psychedelic Busby Berkely dance routine breaks out, the Kinga nd Queen of Frogs make a brief appearance, and the owl and cats interrupt the ceremony, though thankls to a quick warning from Rupert no harm is done to the frogs.  Then Rupert goes home and tells his mother about what he's seen.

 

 I've seen Give My Regards to Broad Street, so I know that Paul McCartney was in a nostalgic mood in 1984.  On the other hand, there's a strand of nostalgia running through all his work, showing up in Beatles songs like "Penny Lane" and "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band."  But I think there's more to it than that - this short film isn't just celebrating a beloved character from Paul's childhood, it's creating wonder.  The key scene for me comes before the frog song, when Rupert discovers that the tree he's standing under isn't covered in leaves, it's covered in butterflies.

 It's a moment devoted entirely to wonder, the kind of scene you see in My Neighbor Totoro or 1982's The Snowman.  (And given the timing,  I suspect The Snowman was a direct influence.)  It's a very short film, and it's not deep, but it is lovely.

Give My Regards to Broad Street

 Give My Regards to Broad Street (1984) was written and produced by Paul McCartney, so it's a good opportunity to see how much he's learned about film-making since Magical Mystery Tour.  The results are mixed.

 

The plot of Broad Street (and it does actually have one!) is remarkably straightforward: Paul McCartney falls asleep in a limousine.  Okay, it's a little more complicated than that.  Paul dreams that he is driving in a flashier car, on his way to a business meeting.  The bright red car phone rings, and it's bad news. Harry (Ian Hastings) is missing, and he has the master tapes for the new album; since Harry is an ex-con whom Paul gave a second chance to, so everyone assumes that he's taken the tapes.  Worse yet, if the master tapes aren't recovered by midnight, the Paul McCartney music empire will fall into the hands of sinister financier Mr. Rath (John Bennett) for complicated business reasons.

And Paul McCartney is a lot of things, but he is not a detective, so he lets the police do their jobs and goes about his day, rehearsing and filming videos with his band, including wife Linda (Linda McCartney) and drummer Ringo (Ringo Starr), though Ringo spends a great deal of the film flirting with a beautiful journalist (Barbara Bach, Ringo's real life wife), and quite successfully, too.  Ringo's got rizz, as the kids will probably stop saying any minute now.

 That doesn't mean that Paul isn't worried about Harry, though; he keeps drifting in and out of elaborate daydreams about what might have happened to him, including a lengthy chase through the foggy streets of Victorian London.  And he also finds time to try and comfort Sandra (Tracy Ullman), Harry's . . . partner?  The relationship is never made clear.  Still, Paul handles the music, his right hand man Steve (Bryan Brown) handles the business, and the police are theoretically handling the investigation.

 But the plot is only there to string the songs together.  There are a lot of songs, a generous mix of Beatles songs and songs from Wings and Paul's solo albums, and while the movie flopped, the soundtrack was a big success.  

The movie definitely makes more sense than Magical Mystery Tour, but it's a very sedate affair, lacking the frenetic energy of the earlier film.  On the other hand, there's an actual story, and Paul's character has an actual arc, grappling with the question of whether he was right to trust Harry.  (He was right, because there's no way that Paul McCartney of all people is going to make a movie where cynicism is the right choice; sunny optimism is his brand!) 

More than that, Give My Regards to Broad Street has an actual theme!   Paul isn't just promoting a new album, he's trying to protect his legacy, and the "Greatest Hits" nature of the soundtrack helps with that.  The threat is that Paul will lose control of the music that he's created.  Fortunately the threat is averted, and now I will take a big sip of coffee while reading about what happened to the Beatles' catalog in 1985.

On the other hand, while the plot is more substantial than the plot of Magical Mystery Tour, it's still not very substantial.  The movie is very slight, more like a concert video with a framing device, and it doesn't help that the plot turns out to be all a dream.  There is an actual movie here, but it's really just an excuse for silly love songs.  And what's wrong with that?

 

Magical Mystery Tour

 

 After watching something particularly baffling, I will sometimes shake my head and say "That was definitely a movie."  After watching Magical Mystery Tour (1967), though, I'm honesty not so sure.

Here's the thing. In Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, the plot is only there to string the songs together.  In Magical Mystery Tour, the plot (such as it is) is mostly there to kill time between songs.  It's really more of a vague premise than a narrative experience, but here is what I can gather.

Richard Starkey (Ringo Starr) and his Aunt Jessie (Jessie Robins) book tickets for "The Magical Mystery Tour," a bus trip managed by Jolly Jimmy Johnson (Derek Royle) and Miss Wendy Winters (Miranda Forbes), joined by Buster Bloodvessel (Ivor Cutler), who doesn't actually work for the company but seems to like the uniform.  The other Beatles are also passengers; John and George are sitting together and practicing comedy bits, while Paul is flirting with the starlet (Maggie Wright) sitting next to them.  The bus drives from one destination to another, while in a magical high school science lab above the clouds, four or five magicians (the Beatles and their road manager and personal assistant Mal Evans) follow the progress of the bus and use their magical powers to do vague things.  Aunt Jessie is looking for a new husband and has her eye on Bloodvessel, and that's as close as anyone gets to a tangible motivation.

It's definitely a strange and ambling film, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.  At its best it's an example of the sort of British surrealist humor that Monty Python would start doing in 1969, and that the future Pythons were already doing on TV shows like At Last the 1948 Show (featuring Graham Chapman and John Cleese, along with Marty Feldman and the lovely Aimi MacDonald) and Do Not Adjust Your Set (featuring Eric Idle, Terry Jones and Michael Palin, along with Denise Coffey and David Jason.  Music provided by the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, who also perform "Death Cab For Cutie" in Magical Mystery Tour's strip club scene.)  At it's worst the script is incoherent nonsense; nobody changes, nobody learns anything, and Aunt Jessie never manages to land Bloodvessel, at least as far as we can tell.

Of course, people probably watch the movie for the songs.  Whether you like the music or not will depend on whether you like the Beatles, but the songs are presented in a variety of striking visual styles, including the funny animal costumes for "I Am The Walrus," extreme closeups of Paul's eyes for "The Fool on a Hill," and George playing a keyboard drawn with sidewalk chalk for "Blue Jay Way."  Perhaps it's better to think of this as a collection of music videos with bonus sketch comedy bits rather than a movie.

 

The other Beatles tend to blame Paul for Magical Mystery Tour.  This will be important later. 

 

 

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1978) is a movie with a certain reputation, and it's not a good reputation.  It was not a commercial success, and it was savaged by critics and angry Beatles fans upon release.  On the other hand, I've been on a steady diet of Bollywood for the past few decades, so I am no stranger to confusing plots, endless musical numbers, and respected actors who are chewing the scenery and being well paid for it. 

Heartland, USA is an idyllic, if fictional small town that is most famous for being home to the legendary Sergeant Pepper and his Lonely Hearts Club Band, who managed to win the First World War for the allies by being so gosh-darned inspiring.  (I think - the movie isn't really clear on this point.)  After the war the band spent a few decades going in and out of style, but eventually time catches up with us all, and when the Segeant died, he left his magical instruments in the care of the town's mayor, Mr. Kite (George Burns).  The instruments were kept in the town's wax museum, and as long as they remain in Heartland, the people of the world would know happiness and peace.

After twenty years a new Lonely Hearts Club Band forms, led by Pepper's grandson Billy Shears (Peter Frampton) and featuring the Henderson brothers, Mark (Barry Gibb), Bob (Maurice Gibb), and Dave (Robin Gibb).  Billy's brother Dougie (Paul Nicholas) is the manager, while Billy's sweetheart Strawberry Fields (Sandy Farina) is there to provide wholesome small-town charm.  They're a big hit in Heartland, and powerful music mogul B. D. Hoffler (Donald Pleasence) thinks they can be a big hit everywhere.  He invites the band to come out to Hollywood and sign with his label.

This is a rock musical about the music industry made in the Seventies, so when the boys reach Hollywood they are immediately seduced by glitz, glamor, while Billy is literally seduced by Lucy (Dianne Steinberg), the lead singer of girl group Lucy and the Diamonds.  Meanwhile, in Heartland, real estate mogul Mean Mr. Mustard (Frankie Howerd) and his assistant (Carel Struycken, Star Trek's Mr. Homn) arrive in town in a high tech van with a supercomputer and two lady robots (Anna Rodzianko and Rose Aragon).  Their mission is to steal the instruments, and they do, easily, because they're just on display in the museum.  Mustard also wants to steal Strawberry Fields, but he never gets the chance.

Once the instruments are gone Heatland immediately becomes seedy and corrupt, which is just what the sinister and mysterious Future Villain Band wants.  Strawberry takes a bus and arrives in Hollywood to find the Lonely Hearts Club Band, and while she's miffed about the Billy and Lucy situation, she quickly moves past it, because they have instruments to recover.  That means visits to evil plastic surgeon Maxwell Edison (Steve Martin) and crossing guard turned cult leader Father Sun (Alice Cooper).  During the fight with Father Sun Billy is accidentally electrocuted, but after Strawberry sings her namesake song, Frampton comes alive.  

 While the band is adventuring they are not performing, so B. D., Dougie and Lucy arrange for a benefit concert to help clean up Heartland and hopefully restart the planned national tour.  The concert is good enough that while Earth, Wind and Fire are performing, Dougie and Lucy have the chance to steal all the money, and Mustard manages to recover the instruments and kidnap Strawberry while he's at it.  

The boys rush to rescue Strawberry and the instruments from the Future Villain Band.  Who could the mysterious mastermind be?  Turns out it's Aerosmith.  Unfortunately, Strawberry is the smart and competent one, so it doesn't go well.  The next scene is Strawberry's funeral, and Billy is about to jump off the roof, but then Magical Flying Billy Preston appears from Heartland's weather vane to fix everything.  Yes, it really is that abrupt.

 Summarizing the plot makes it sound more sensible and comprehensible than it actually is, but that's okay, because the plot is only there to help string the songs together.  There are a lot of songs, and the covers vary in quality; Earth, Wind and Fire's cover of "Got to Get You into My Life" is probably the high point, and Frankie Howerd's "When I'm Sixty-Four" might be the nadir.  (There is competition.)

 But even that doesn't convey how weird this movie is.  Despite the songs, this is basically a silent movie.  There is no dialogue, and the story is conveyed through the songs, intertitles, and some narration by George Burns.  The actors convey emotion through facial expressions, among other things, and they do a decent job.  It's a fascinating experiment, but why would you hire Donald Pleasence and not give him any lines?

 This is probably not a good movie, but it is definitely an experience, and there are days when we all need Magical Flying Billy Preston to help us.

 

 

Stupid Zombie Hitler.

 

 

Horror comedy is still a thriving genre in Indian cinema at the moment, and  Pallu Padama Paathuka (2023) is yet another horror comedy, this time relatively light on the horror and heavy on the comedy.  Or "comedy."  This is an incredibly broad Tamil farce, and the good news is that over the years I have built up a resistance to broad Tamil farces.  The bad news is that after Go, Goa Gone I have surprisingly high standards for Indian zombie comedies.

 After a cold open involving a young man getting more than he expected form his girlfriend during a forest rendezvous, the movie introduces us to Gopi (Shah Ra), a voice actor who dubs Bear Grills into Tamil.  Gopi is kidnapped and brought before Don Varadha (G. M. Kumar), who is rich, powerful and blind.  Varadha recognizes Gopi by his voice and thinks that he is Bear Grills, and wants him to guide him in the forest for a very important reason that I didn't quite catch.  They meet a zombie, and the movie jumps ahead four years.

In the next scene, a group of strangers meet on a cliff overlooking Kanjuthanni Forest.  They all intend to take their own lives, and they all have tragic backstories which are told in flashbacks.  It's all classic movie tragedy, including a man whose boyfriend is getting married to a woman, a man fired just before his wedding, a man who discovers that his family are really a cult of Satanic cannibals who plan to sacrifice him on his birthday, and a man who set off a chain of accidents that killed his entire family by dropping a bar of soap.  And then there's Mahesh (Dinesh), widely known as "Revolting Mahesh," who unwittingly set off a popular uprising after he was arrested for getting drunk while sitting on a voting machine.  Mahesh is our hero, though he's every bit as hapless as the others.

After drinking together, the group decide to explore the forest, and they meet a swarm of zombies.  Fortunately they are rescued by Sathya (Sanchita Shetty),  a two-fisted action scientist.  Unfortunately, she drugs them, intending to use them as zombie bait, though she changes her mind and rescues them again at the last minute, getting bitten by one of the zombies in the scuffle.  Fortunately she doesn't change completely yet, and tells the men that she has an antidote in her home.  They make it to her compound with only one casualty, and she injects herself with the antidote and introduces her partially zombified father, Rohit Sharma (Anand Babu) and drops some exposition.

Sathya and her father were working on a military project dubbed "Project Cthulhu," which which was . . . supposed to create unkillable zombies, so I suppose it was a success.  (Project Cthulhu's logo which is just the Hydra emblem from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, so the evilness is pretty easy to spot.) Rohit and Sathya had second thoughts about creating an undead army, but the military took the formula by force and accidentally released it in the compound, thus creating the current zombie outbreak.

The good news is that the zombies are pretty much confined to the forest, so they can just leave.  Sathya knows the way and offers to lead them, and along the way they meet Gopi, who is not dead and instead living in the woods as a half-crazed survivalist.  Mahesh is completely in love with Sathya at this point, and he writes a letter to propose to her, but after he gives it to her she is kidnapped by Nazi zombies.  Gopi provides the necessary exposition: Rohit tested the formula by using it to animate the frozen body of Adolph Hitler (Hareesh Paradi), and Hitler now has his own compound full of uniformed and relatively loyal zombies.  There's a problem beyond the fact that they brought back Hitler - Zombie Hitler came back obsessed with sex, and he is convinced that Sathya is Eva Braun, either because he thinks she looks like Braun or because she's the only woman in the area.  

 Mahesh and his friends must rescue Sathya from Zombie Hitler, and at this point the movie pretty much abandons horror entirely, treating the zombies as a bunch of guys in unconvincing makeup, and after a bizarre item number Mahesh and Hitler have to compete in a drinking contest for Sathya's hand.

This is broad farce, one of the broadest farces I have ever seen.  And that is a problem, because the movie is leaning hard into the absurdity of the premise.  This movie wants to be so bad it's good, but you can't make a movie that is so bad it's good on purpose, because you wind up winking at the camera rather than taking your own movie seriously.   Some of the jokes land well, but many of them do not, and the film relies on lazy and sometimes homophobic innuendo.

It is not fair to compare this with Go Goa Gone, a movie with an actual budget and some A-list stars.  But it's not the budget that sinks Pallu Padama Paathuka, it's the writing.  Go Goa Gone puts some work into making its slacker heroes grow and change, treats its zombies as a consistent threat with consistent rules, and has an actual theme that develops over the course of the film, and Pallu Padama Paathuka does not.

 

 

Noir for the whole family!

 

 

 Raymond Chandler famously defined his hard-boiled detectives by saying "But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor—by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world."  In Sampradayaini Suppini Soodapoosani (2026) the mean streets belong to a rural Indian village, and the man who is not tarnished nor afraid is Sriram (Sivaji), an incorruptible civil servant.  

Sriram is responsible for approving construction projects in the village, which means that he is constantly being offered, and refusing, bribes.  One enterprising thug decides to try intimidation instead, threatening to kidnap Sriram's son Mittu (Rohan), and Sriram critiques the kidnap plan and offers a more practical scheme instead.  He explains to the baffled thug that Mittu is obsessed with making Youtube reels, and he's already filmed himself attacking people in the hopes of going viral.  The thug switches to threatening to kidnap Sriram's wife Utthara (Laya), but she's overbearing and overprotective, willing to use loose wires to shock a hapless burglar.  The thug decides it's better to walk away quietly.

 Later Sriram has a public argument with  Vikram (Prince Cecil), the corrupt and womanizing head of the village's police department.  The next day Vikram shows up at Sriram's house, invites himself in and leers at Utthara for a while.  And when Sriram makes it home, there's a dead policeman on the couch, shot in the head by . . . .Mittu, who was playing around with Vikram's gun.  Sriram's first instinct is to turn himself into the police, reasoning that after the public argument no one will believe that he didn't shoot Vikram anyway, but Utthara urges him to put aside his rigid ethics for a while and help her to hide the body, and he reluctantly agrees despite knowing that wackiness is bound to ensue.

Meanwhile, the corrupt MLA (Sharath Lohithaswa) is worried about the monthly "gift" he's supposed to send to his superior.  The "gift" (a large bag of money) is usually placed in the trunk of a sportscar belonging to his personal assistant, who happens to be Sriram's next door neighbor, before being picked up by one of his men and then delivered.  This time the money has not arrived on time, and when they send someone to check the car, it's gone, because Sriram and his family "borrowed" it while looking for a way to hide the body.  It's a fun family roadtrip, with Vikram in the trunk!

Despite appearances, there is an actual mystery here, though Sriram is more focused on protecting his family than solving anything.   It's also technically a comedy, though the jokes aren't a real focus either.  Instead, this is very much a quirky character piece, with Sriram meeting a large cast of eccentrics as he tries to reconcile his rigid code of ethics with the fact that he's trying to cover up a murder.  Can he stay the best man in his world, or does he have to give that up to protect his family?  

And will they ever get Mittu the counseling that he so desperately needs?

 

  

Legally this counts as a Christmas movie.

 

 

 

You can add Gurkha (2019)  to the long list of movies where I have seen the Indian remake but not seen the American original, so I cannot tell you how well this Tamil action comedy captures the subtle nuances of Paul Blart: Mall Cop.  I can only look at the movie in front of me.

 

The titular Gurkha is Bahadur Babu (Yogi Babu), though the opening sequence quickly establishes that he is the son of a Gurkha father and a South Indian mother, because Yogi Babu does not look at all like a member of the Gurkha community.  Bahadur and his fellow Gurkhas provide security for their neighborhood in Tamil Nadu, but they are not respected, so Bahadur decides that he will become a police officer, and specifically a police officer like Singham.  

 

Bahadur does not become a police officer.  He doesn't make it through the first night of training before ACP Harris Jayaraj (Ravi Mariya) throws him out, along with the equally hopeless aspiring police dog Undertaker.  Bahadur then gets a job with Shaktimaan Security, a small private security company owned by Kavariman (Manobala).  (And the terrible commercials for the security company just reminded me of how much I miss Shaktimaan.)  Initially he's assigned to provide security for a house, and he wanders next door and meets instantly falls in love with Margaret (Elyssa Erhardt), who happens to be the American Ambassador to India.  

 

Bahadur never gets a chance to confess his love or even really get to know Margaret before he's reassigned to work at a large shopping mall; he nearly quits before he learns that Margaret visits the mall regularly for her yoga class.  He's assigned to work with an older security guard named Usain Bolt (Charle), who shows him the secret room which the security cameras don't record where they can hang out all day, a secret room which I am sure will not be important in any way later.  When Margaret's bag is stolen, Bahadur and Undertaker (mostly Undertaker) manage to recover it, and he manages to befriend Margaret, though she does warn him that as a career diplomat she could never marry an Indian citizen because it would require her to give up her job.

 

And then the terrorists show up.  In theory they are a band of disgruntled former soldiers, though leader Thyagu (Raj Bharath) has his own agenda.  They launch a fairly sophisticated scheme to lure a large crowd of civilians into the mall's movie theater with free tickets to Bahubali 3 and a large gift certificate, and then they strike!  Margaret is the real target, but after killing a couple of hostages for emphasis they demand a small ransom from the government within an hour.  When the government can't get its act together in time, the terrorists turn to crowdfunding, demanding a much larger ransom form the people of Tamil Nadu with a four hour deadline, which is probably the most genuinely interesting thing in the entire movie.

 

 The police won't go in, because some of the hostages lured in by the promise of Bahubali are the wives of high ranking police officials, including the wife of ACP Jayaraj.  Most of the security guards are forced out early in the siege, and the halls of the mall are being patrolled by flying camera drones.  Only Bahadur, Usain, and Undertaker are left to save the hostages - it's basically Die Hard with slapstick, and whether you like the movie or not is going to depend on your tolerance for broad South Indian comedy.

 

That said, tone is an issue.  Bahadur is a big goofball with a funny dog, but while he's mucking about people are dying.  Even the hostages alternate between stark terror and comedy bits, though Thyagu and his men are at least consistently serious.  Bahadur's level of competence also varies wildly, swinging from action hero to buffoon as the script requires, and sometimes literally swinging from a firehouse dangling from the roof.

 

On the plus side, the movie never suggests that Margaret (the ambassador) and Bahadur (the mall cop) end up together; my suspension of disbelief can only stretch so far. 

 

Just hosting a picture. Don't mind me.

 

Dating is hard.

 

Indoo Ki Jawani (2020) opens as an ordinary sex comedy.  Indira Gupta (Kiara Advani), affectionately known as "Indoo", is the most beautiful girl in her neighborhood, the object of desire for all the local teenage boys and middle-aged men who should really know better.  It's annoying more than anything else.  Indoo is far more interested in her boyfriend Satish (Raghav Raj Kakker), who in turn is interested in only one thing.  Indoo wants to wait for marriage, while Satish promises that he'll talk to her parents on the morning after.  Indoo's best friend Sonal (Mallika Dua) is a neverending font of bad advice, and she convinces Indoo to just get it over with, but Indoo walks in on Satish and another woman instead.  Sonal isn't done, and instead convinces Indoo to find a one-night stand on "Dinder".  After messaging some terrible men, Indoo finds Samar (Aditya Seal), an aspiring musician from Hyderabad, and invites him around the house when her parents are out of town.

But this is Bollywood, and genre boundaries are really loose guidelines at best.   While Indoo enjoys her awkward date with Samar, occasionally calling Sonal for more awful advice, the police are tearing the city apart searching for a pair of Pakistani terrorists.  And at the worst possible time Samar drops his passport, and Indoo learns that he's not form Hyderabad in India, he's from Hyderabad in Pakistan.  Indoo has seen too many movies and jumps to all of the wrong conclusions - he grabs a knife and orders Samar to leave her house, then drags him back inside when she realizes that the neighbors are watching and will jump to wrong conclusions of their own.

Spoiler - Samar is not really a terrorist.  It's not really that much of a spoiler, really. The movie throws some red herrings in that direction, but Samar is a consistently decent guy, and from a dramatic standpoint he pretty much has to be; Indoo is stewing in some unexamined prejudice, and she really needs to be proven wrong.  She is, but not before a stream of mistakes, including inviting the actual terrorist inside to keep an eye on Samar.

This is not really an action movie.  There are a few fight scenes, but they're short, and Samar fights like a desperate man who doesn't really know what he's doing but hopes he can overwhelm the enemy with persistence and a bit oif luck.  The terrorist plot is really just an excuse to lock these to in a house together so they can talk, and they do.  They get to know each other better, and Indoo learns a valuable lesson about judging by appearances.  Ultimately it's a silly romance with engaging leads and a really strange premise.

 And of course they never get around to having sex, because that wouldn't be funny.

 

 

Chandra the Vampire Slayer

 

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As the title implies Lokah Chapter One: Chandra (2025) is the start of yet another cinematic universe, combining superhero trappings with Malayalam folklore and myth.  That means that there are mid- and post-credit scenes to set up future entries in the series, as well as an extended cameo form the protagonist of the next planned movie, but that's the future, and I am just looking at the movie in front of me.

 The movie features a Bond-style cold open, with Chandra (Kalyani Priyadarshan) stealing an unknown but important item and then fighting an assassin working for an organization called Ishtar.  (This is the last time that Ishtar will be mentioned in this movie.)   Chandra wins, and after an animated credit sequence showing her adventuring through various places and time periods, she arrives in an unnamed Indian city which looks an awful lot like Bengalaru, where her contact Prakash (Nishanth Sagar) instructs here to lie low and rest for a while.  And Chandra does exactly that.  She loves in a small apartment, works nights as a waitress, and spends her spare time reading a book called "They Live Among Us," a supposedly comprehensive look at the supernatural world.

And then there are the neighbors.  Sunny (Naslen) lives across the street.  He's unemployed and spends his time hanging out with his friends Venu (Chandu Salim Kumar) and Naijil (Arun Kurian).  The trio seem to live in an entirely different genre than Chandra; "three layabout guys have misadventures" is practicially iots own subgenre in Indian cinema.  Sunny catches a glimpse of Chandra and is immediately smitten, but he doesn't get a chance to talk to her until they wind up in the same autorickshaw.  Sunny finally manages to start a conversation, and winds up inviting Chandra to Naijil's birthday party.

While Chandra is trying her best to lay low, she can't stand by while well-connected thug Sundari (Viahnu Priya Thoppil) threatens one of her coworkers with acid.  She smashes the acid flask in his hand and quickly knocks him unconscious.  Unfortunately, Sundari is the younger brother of Gajendran (Shivajith), a local politician who also runs the city's organ trafficking ring.  Gajendran hands the case over to Nachiyappa (sandy), a corrupt and deeply misogynistic police officer.  

The birthday party goes well (apart from a visit by Nachiyappa, looking for illegal drugs), and Sunny strikes up an odd friendship with Chandra.  There is something strange about her, though - she only goes out at night, Sunny's cat is terrified of her, and the sight of blood makes her visibly uncomfortable.  Also she doesn't seem to eat and she never drinks . . . wine.  After Chandra is ambushed by Sundari and a group of organ traffickers, Sunny tries to rush to the rescue, only to watch in horror as she grows fangs and bites throats, then asks him to help dispose of the bodies.  

 Chandra finally admits the truth - she's a yaksha, which for the purposes of this movie means she's a big ol' vampire.  Actually she's a specific yaksha, Kalliyankattu Neeli,  whom some fear as a monster and others worship as a goddess.  Sunny is sworn to secrecy, and this might be sounding a bit like Thamma.  The tone is pretty different, though - Thamma is a part of the Maddock Horror Comedy Universe, and it shows.  Chandra is funny at times, but the overall tone is darker.  Chandra defends the oppressed, but she's still dangerous, and Sunny knows that.

And things get worse.  Nachiyappa realizes that Chandra is responsible for Sundari's death.  There's fight, Nachiyappa is bitten, Sunny is shot, and everybody  runs away.  Sunny and Chandra are labelled as terrorists, the police get closer and closer, and Chandra's old friend Michael (Tovino Thomas), a Chathan (though the subtitles call him a goblin) has to temporarily save the day with his mastery of illusions before running off to star in the next movie.  And Nachiyappa is starting to change . . .

 There is a lot going on in Chandra; it feels less like a movie than an entire season of a supernatural action series crammed into two and a half hours.  The pacing isn't the only thing that's uneven; Michael's scenes represent a noticeable shift in tone, which goes away at the same time he does.  On the other hand, there's a lot to like here.  Vampires/yakshas as a metaphor for the underprivileged fighting back is interesting, and Kalyani Priyadarshan is a strong lead.  The film looks great - the city has a fantastic neon noir style, and the action scenes are frequent and elaborate, but it's still easy to see what is going on.  And I like how different this is from the Maddock movies - there's room in the cinema for different takes on Gothic heroism.

Live and Let Fry

 Spy movies are big in India at the moment, and Happy Patel: Khatarnak Jasoos (2026) is a movie about spies.  It's not a part of the Spy Universe, though, and it is a long way from the hyper-masculine world of Dhurandar and Dhurandar: The Revenge.  This is a quirky spoof, part Hot Fuzz, part Quick Gun Murugun, with a dash of Steve Martin's The Jerk.

The movie opens in Goa in the 70's, as eccentric gangster Jimmy Mario (Aamir Khan), who is so cool that he has his own theme song, is gleefully trying to murder a pair of British secret agents (Simon Fielder and Andrew Sloman).  It doesn't go well - Jimmy is fatally wounded, and so is Subhakai (Sumukhi Suresh), the agents' maid.  Subhakai leaves behind an infant son and the agents promise to take care of  him, while Jimmy's young daughter takes up his ring and  claims his criminal empire.

 Years pass.  The baby has grown up to be Happy (Vir Das).  Happy wants to become a spy, just like his dads (did I mention that they're a couple?) but he's failed the entrance exam for MI7 multiple times.  Still, Happy is a skilled ballet dancer and he makes amazing sandwiches, so he's more or less, well, happy.  He does have a lingering feeling that there is something missing in his life, and there's a reason for that - his fathers haven't even told him that he's Indian!

Happy gets his chance to be a spy soon enough.  British scientist Beatrice Fafferbaum (Maya Rachel McManus) has vanished in Goa, and MI7 chief Kenneth Mole (Benedict Garrett) decides that Happy is the perfect agent to find her.  Of course he'll need to be trained first - he doesn't even speak Hindi, so he's given a crash course in the language, and Mole then flips a big switch to change the language of the movie from English to Hindi, because the fourth wall is more of a gauzy curtain, really.  The inevitable training montage includes clips from a number of Bollywood movies as Happy learns valuable skills like holding out his arms like Shah Rukh Khan, a move guaranteed to win any woman's heart.

Mole also reveals the dark secret about Britain's involvement in modern India: before Independence India was a major part of the British economy, and now the British make money by secretly controlling the fairness cream industry.  Happy doesn't want to think about the implications just yet, but Jimmy's daughter, now calling herself Mama (Mona Singh) wants to branch out from her position as criminal overlord of Goa and launch a homegrown super-fairness cream of her own, created by a captive Doctor Fafferbaum and advertised by international supermodel Milind Morea (Imran Khan).  

Happy arrives in Goa and meets his contact Geet (Sharib Hashmi) and teen supergenius Roxy (Srushti Tawade.)  He also falls hard for  local dancer Rupa (Mithila Palkar).  Rupa seems to like him too, but her survival instincts are so finely honed that she automatically slaps him every time they so much as touch fingers, she slaps him.  Still, Happy bumbles through the investigation while wooing Rupa and becoming more and more connected to his heritage.

Obviously Happy is going to face hardships, but eventually up his game and wind up saving the day.  It doesn't look like you might expect, though; while this movie has some ridiculous action scenes, Happy never becomes an action hero - at the end of the movie he's still a sweet and gentle goofball who saves the day with an Iron Chef-style cooking competition rather than a gunfight.  It's a refreshing change from the sea of brutal manly action currently dominating the box office.

 

Believe it or not, I'm walking on air.

 

 A Flying Jatt (2016) is a classic superhero story, with colorful costumes, a secret identity, and a character arc that starts with clumsy flying and ends with a kung fu fight in space.  That doesn't mean it's a good movie, but it does mean that there's always something going on.

 Rakesh Malhotra (Kay Kay Menon) is rich, powerful, brilliant and arrogant; he's basically Single Dad Lex Luthor, dividing his time between his toxic chemical business (I'm not sure what he's supposed to be manufacturing, but he produces an awful lot of toxic waste) and his precocious young daughter (Mahi Milan.)  Malhotra wants to build a bridge across a lake to allow his factory in Punjab to dump toxic waste more efficiently, but the locals won't sell their land, because the project requires cutting down a sacred tree.

Fortunately the tree is defended . . . by feisty hard-drinking widow Mrs. Dhillon (Amrita Singh), who owns the land the tree is located on.  Mrs. Dhillon has two sons - Rohit (Gaurav Pandey), who is not the designated protagonist, and Aman (Tiger Shroff), who is.  Aman is a study in contradictions; he's a skilled martial artist who teaches karate at the local school, but the kids don't respect him and he's being bullied by Goldy (Sushant Pujari), the violin teacher.  He's in love with his colleague Kirti (Jacqueline Fernandez) but can't bring himself to tell her how he feels.  And he's a devout Sikh, but he's too embarrassed to live as a Sardar, and has disappointed his mother by cutting his hair and refusing to wear a turban.

Malhotra tries buying off Mrs. Dhillon, then tries threatening Aman.  Neither tactic gets him what he wants, so he puts out a hit on the tree, hiring scary mercenary Raka (Nathan Jones) to chop down the tree late at night during a dramatic thunderstorm.  Aman happens to be there at the tree, praying for his mother's safety, and they fight.  Raka gains the upper hand but lightning strikes just as he's about to kill the young man; Raka flies into a convenient vat of toxic waste and is definitely dead and not going to come back with pollution-based superpowers, while Aman is thrown into the tree.

And in the morning Aman wakes up from a deep sleep, completely unharmed.  After a confrontation with more of Malhotra's goons it becomes clear that he now has superpowers, so Mrs. Dhillon rents a bunch of superhero DVDs for research and they experiment to discover just what Aman's powers are.  It's a diverse powerset - Aman can fly (though he's still afraid of heights), he's strong and fast and heals almost instantly, he can temporarily absorb the qualities of physical media, allowing him to play the violin and dance like Michael Jackson and/or Sunny Leone.  Mrs. Dhillon makes Aman a costume, and he takes the name "Flying Jatt," which was his late father's nickname back in the Shaolin temple.

And then the movie settles into Greatest American Hero-style shenanigans for a while, as Aman learns to be a hero while fighting crime and saving people from disasters throughout Punjab while protecting his secret identity.  He also finds himself in a love triangle with himself, as Kriti falls head over heels in love with the new superhero while assuring Aman that he's still her best friend.  

The good times don't last, though.  In a completely unexpected development, Raka emerges from the toxic waste with pollution-based superpowers.  Aman beats him a few times but Raka feeds off pollution, and he keeps getting stronger.  Soon he has the upper hand, seriously injuring Aman and boasting that he cannot be defeated anywhere on Earth, because pollution is everywhere.

A Flying Jatt is juggling two main themes.  Aman's personal journey as he grows into a hero and learns to embrace his culture is compelling; in context the line "It's twelve o'clock" hits hard.  Punjab as a setting also adds a bit of interest - we do get glimpses of how a superhero operates in a more rural context rather than spending all their time in a big city.

On the other hand, the environmental message is handled with all the subtlety of an episode of Captain Planet.  The main takeaway is that pollution is bad, and we should stop it somehow.  And then there's Raka.  He's mean, he likes hurting people, and he wants more pollution so he can become more powerful, and that's pretty much it.  He's the final boss, but he's not a compelling antagonist.

This movie is reasonably entertaining nonsense, but there are frustrating hints that it could have been more. 

The Life and Loves of a Nice Lady

 Despite some superficial similarities in plot, Biwi No. 1 (1999) is not based on Faye Weldon's dark feminist fable The Life and Loves of a She-Devil.  On the other hand, it is pretty blatantly inspired by the 1989 movie She-Devil, which pretends to adapt Weldon's novel.  It's an adaptation of an adaptation, and the results are decidedly mixed.

 Pooja (Karisma Kapoor) lives a happy life in her spacious house with her husband Prem (Salman Khan), her children Rinku and Pinky (Master Shahrukh and Baby Karishma), her mother-in-law Sushila (Himani Shivpuri), and their dog Tiger.  Prem is a successful advertising executive (very successful - their house is huge!), Pooja is the perfect housewife, and everybody's just really, really happy.  

Prem is looking for a new model for the agency, and just as he's describing his ideal candidate (5'8", brown eyes, and a 36-24-36 figure - Prem is a simple man) aspiring model Rupali (Sushmita Sen) walks in, and she's 5'8" with brown eyes and a 36-24-36 figure.  She gets the job, and Rupali and Prem keep meeting by "coincidence."  In another movie Rupali would be a greedy gold-digger pursuing a married man, and she does tell her smitten photographer friend Deepak (Saif Ali Khan) that she's looking for a man who can support her in comfort, but it's Prem doing the pursuing here, and Rupali doesn't yet know that he's married; Pooja was too busy to go to the movie with him one time, so he decided to plummet headlong into adultery.

Prem arranges a trip to Switzerland for himself and Rupali, and at the airport he runs into his old friend Lakhan (Anil Kapoor) and his lovely wife Lovely (Tabu), who are also on their way to Switzerland.  naturally wackiness ensues, and after a series of farcical events Lakhan has learned that Prem is having an affair, while Rupali has learned that Prem is married. Prem manages to smooth things over with the old "My parents forced me to marry a mentally unstable woman, but I really love you, baby!" routine, and they all return to India.

For some unfathomable reason Lakhan decides to keep Prem's secret, while Prem buys Rupali a house and a car and uses her for all of the agency's modelling work, and he keeps on lying to absolutely everybody.  It can't last, though, mostly because Prem is a numpty.  Tiger the dog discovers Prem celebrating Karva Chauth with Rupali and brings Pooja to the scene (because this is the kind of thing that dogs do in Bollywood) and Pooja gives her husband an ultimatum: give up Rupali or leave the house.  He leaves the house.

Pooja is heartbroken, but Lakhan has realized his mistake and promises to bring Prem home.  It doesn't work, so instead he urges Pooja to fight back using the weapons at her disposal, starting with the children.  Soon Pooja drops Rinku and Pinky off at her estranged husband's doorstep, telling him that they're his children and she doesn't want anything to do with them. The children immediately start acting up. (In this movie the children are in on the plan, while in Weldon's novel they're just naturally horrible.)  Next, she drops off Prem's mother, who is also in on the plan.

 On paper Prem owns 49% of the advertising agency, while Pooja owns 51%.  Pooja takes advantage of this by firing Rupali, which ,means that Rupali has been forced into the role of housewife and mother, while Pooja is pretending to be young and carefree, wearing Western clothing and even putting together a portfolio of modelling shots.  Prem is becoming jealous, and Pooja is just getting started.

Or she would be, but here's the thing.  Weldon's novel is the story of a woman scorned who takes revenge on the people who wronged her, taking everything that belonged to other woman Mary Fisher.  The 1989 movie wasn't anywhere near as dark (or as good) but it was still a black comedy about revenge.  Biwi No 1 was directed by David Dhawan, who is anything but a feminist, and Pooja isn't interested in revenge, she just wants her man back. That changes everything.  The goal is to preserve the marriage at all costs, and nobody really stops to question whether Prem is worth the bother.

Biwi No. 1 features a fantastic cast, and also Salman Khan at his most annoying; It is a minor miracle that Sushmita Sen manages to make Rupali a sympathetic character when the script is against her.  The songs are mostly good (apart from the title song), and the movie is occasionally funny, but I have never seen an adaptation undercut the spirit of the original work this comprehensively.

He's not a tame lion.

 

 

 Mahavatar Narsimha (2024) is an animated Hindu devotional movie.  As usual with devotional movies, I am not qualified to judge the theology, so I will be looking at the movie as a story rather than as an expression of religious faith.

 

The movie establishes almost immediately that despite the animation it is not primarily aimed as kids, as the lovely Diti (Vasundhra Bose) interrupts the meditations of her husband, the sage Kashyapa (Dinesh Varma) to ask him to give her a son right now.  Kashyapa explains that it is an inauspicious time and any child conceived might turn out to be a demon who will threaten the entire universe, but Diti is really insistent, so he goes along with it.  And the next morning he angrily announces that Diti has conceived demonic twins who will threaten the entire universe.  When the twins are born they are taken away to be taught by the sage Shukra (Also Dinesh Varma), the guru of the asuras.

 Hiranyaksha (Sanchit Wartok) and Hiranyakashipu (Aditya Raj Sharma) grow up to be powerful leaders, spreading terror across the land. Hiranyaksha decides to provoke Lord Vishnu (Uplaksh Kochhar) by kidnapping the Earth goddess Bhumi (Nehal Pandey.)  Vishnu incarnates as the great boar Varaha, who rescues Bhumi form the bottom of the ocean and defeats Hiranyaksha in a great duel across the earth, sea, and space.  

 

Hiranyakashipu is furious, but Shukra tells him that he's no match for Vishnu, and advises him to perform penance in order to gain enough merit to gain a boon from Brahma (Abhishek Sharma).  Hiranyakashipu takes his advice, and spends years performing a penance that is so powerful that it threatens the world, so Brahma appears to grant the boon.  Hiranyakashipu has his carefully considered wording ready, asking for great spiritual and temporal power, and that he could not be killed by any of Brahma's creations, whether god mortal or beast, by any weapon or by hand, indoors or outside, during the day or the night, on Earth or in the heavens.  The overly specific boon is granted, and Hiranyakashipu goes on to conquer the world and the heavens, capturing the gods and proclaiming himself ruler of the universe.

However, during the penance, Lord Indra (Dixoan Shah) was worried about potential heirs to the throne of the Asuras, and kidnapped Hiranyakashipu's pregnant wife Kayadhu (Priyanka Bhandari), placing her in the custody of Sage Narad (Harish Moily), who teaches her to pray to Vishnu.  

Years later Hiranyakashipu has recovered his family and now rules the universe, devoting himself to punishing Vishnu's worshipers in his free time, but his five year old son Prahlad (Haripriya Matta) is gentle, saintly, and absolutely devoted to Vishnu, despite his father's best efforts.  Prahlad absolutely will not renounce his devotion, leading to an ever escalating feud between father and son.  Finally a frustrated Hiranyakashipu orders his son's execution, but the boy is protected by the power of Vishnu, and as the attempted executions become more and more elaborate, it becomes clear that Vishnu will have to incarnate once again, this time as the lion-man Narsimha (Harjeet Walia) for a final battle between good and evil.

 One advantage of using animation to make this sort of movie is scale; the action can be as big as the original stories demand.  the action here is huge; in an early battle Hiranyaksha personally destroys a fleet of flying battleships and it's a footnote, something he does on the way to the main event.  The final battle between Narashimha and Hiranyakashipu is epic, and surprisingly gory.  The movie absolutely delivers in terms of spectacle.

However, while the violence is spectacular, it isn't the main focus.  This is a story about faith, but it's also a story about resistance, and the real battle is the battle of wills between father and son.  And of course the outcome is never in question - Hiranyakashipu is a fine mustache twirling villain, but Prahlad is almost terrifying in his simple devotion and his determination to persist even when the entire world is apparently against him.  It's as much a character piece as it is an epic.