Nothing Up My Sleeve

 

 Dhoom: 3 (2013) has everything you would expect from an entry in the Dhoom franchise: motorcycles, increasingly improbable stunts, terrible police work, male bonding, and an antihero who completely overshadows the series leads.  It also has a tremendous sense of style and some remarkable performances in this silly, silly movie.

The film opens in 1990 Chicago.  Iqbal Khan (Jackie Shroff) and his son Sahir (Siddharth Nigam) have one chance to impress banker Warren Anderson (Andrew Bicknell) and convince the Western bank of Chicago not to foreclose on their fledgling "Great Indian Circus."  It is a remarkable performance, skilled stage magic mixed with Cirque du Soliel style acrobatics, but Anderson is not impressed, because it's not dumb enough.  He explains that circuses are stupid, and people only want to see stupid things.  This is Sahir's villain origin story, so there's really only one way it can end.  Iqbal takes his own life, and Sahir is left (almost) alone and very, very angry.

Years pass.  Sahir (now played by Aamir Khan) is about to reopen the Great Indian Circus, but he has other interests; he's been pulling off spectacular bank jobs, breaking into branches of the Western Bank of Chicago, throwing the money at the crowd, and then escaping through a combination of parkour and genuinely ridiculous motorcycle stunts.  That may be why the Western Bank of Chicago and/or the Chicago PD decide to call in Jai Dixit (Abhishek Bachchan), India's leading motorcycle detective.

Jai naturally brings along his sidekick Ali (Uday Chopra), motorcycle mechanic turned annoying police officer.  They are met at the airport by Chicago PD's Victoria Williams (Tabrett Bethel) and because she is blonde and attractive Uday immediately starts objectifying her despite Jai urging him to act like a professional.

Sahir has been searching for the perfect leading lady for the circus, and that is why nerdy Aaliya (Katrina Kaif) barges in and demands a chance to audition.  Sahir offers her five minutes, and warns that if he looks away for a second it's over.  She delivers a performance straight out of All That Jazz, with added acrobatics.  Naturally, she gets the job.

Jai sets a trap for Sahir, appearing on television to dare the mysterious bank robber to rob again.  Sahir responds by going to meet Jai as himself, claiming to be a concerned citizen with a circus background who once worked with an embittered clown who knew how to vanish from one location and appear in another.  And Jai lets him join in on the planning, even sharing security codes with the civilian he just met.  You might think this is part of a cunning plan on Jai's part, but he's just bad at his job.

sahir strikes again, using his inside knowledge, and escapes with an even more ridiculous motorcycle stunt.  Jai follows in a helicopter and shoots into traffic, wounding Sahir on the shoulder, then realizes that the civilian he gave the access codes to must be the one who used them. He goes to the circus and confronts Sahir, demanding to see his wounded shoulder.  The shoulder is not wounded, Jai is humiliated, and he and Ali are kicked off the case.  (Naturally they keep working the case, because they are maverick cops.)

There's a trick.  The trick is Sahir's identical and autistic twin brother Samar, who has been kept hidden since before Iqbal died for the sake of the act.  Sahir and Samar can perform amazing feats of misdirection since no one knows there are two of them, and that is also really helpful when fleeing the scene of a crime.  Samar is onboard with committing crimes to avenge his father, but he is his own person with his own interests.  He loves spending Sundays out in the world by himself, and he loves Aaliya, who does not know the secret and has no idea that she's been performing with two different men all this time.  Sahir and Samar have a close bond, at least until Jai accidentally discovers that Samar exists and sets out to exploit that.

The action in the Dhoom series escalates from movie to movie, and Dhoom 3 adds gadgets.  Samar's and Sahir's motorcycles are tricked out Bond-style, with impractical grapple guns and the ability to convert to jet skis.  Like the other Dhoom movies, this is a very male world, and Jai's wife Sweety (played in the earlier movies by Rimi Sen) doesn't even get mentioned.  Jai's important relationships are all with men; he's exasperated with Ali, feels betrayed by Sahir, and betrays Samar in turn.  (He does feel terrible about it.)  Ali is a bit creepy around Victoria, but it doesn't go anywhere.  There is some genuine feeling behind Samar's relationship with Aaliya, though.

Dhoom 3 does have two advantages over the previous film, though.  The first is Aamir Khan, Bollywood's "Mr. Perfectionist," who is incapable of phoning in a performance, no matter how ridiculous the movie is.  He acts the hell out of both his characters, and it lifts the film.

The second advantage comes from a simple syllogism.  The movie is set in Chicago.  Bob Fosse co-wrote and choreographed the musical Chicago.  Therefore Dhoom 3 should channel Fosse whenever possible. Aaliya's sizzling audition scene and the movie's opening tap number are clearly Fosse inspired, but there are touches of Fosse sprinkled throughout all the dances, and Sahir spends most of the movie wearing a bowler hat.  It's not the most Fosse thing I've seen come out of Bollywod (that would be the song "Jab Bhi Ciggaret" from the movie No Smoking,) but it does give the movie a strong and distinctive style that the other Dhooms lack.

Eight months of winter.

 

 Tum Bin II (2016) is a loose sequel to the 2001 romantic drama Tum Bin.  It's a very loose sequel, sharing similar themes, some character names, and one small cameo by a recurring character, but those themes make this a throwback to the kind of sweeping romantic drama that ruled Bollywood in the late 90s and early 2000s.  

 Taran (Neha Sharma) and Amar (Aashim Gulati) are a young engaged couple enjoying a skiing holiday in the Alps.  Well, Amar is enjoying it; he's a passionate skier, but Taran doesn't care for the sport.  Still, they have time for a quick love song before Amar goes out skiing alone, is nearly hit by a snowmobile, and falls off a cliff.  When Amar doesn't come back for dinner, Taran calls his father (Kanwaljit Singh), who immediately flies out to join the search for his son.  After nine days, the authorities decide that Amar is obviously dead, and they promise to call Taran if the body is recovered.  Taran and her would-be father in law return home to Scotland to mourn.

If you've ever seen a Bollywood movie, and especially if that movie was Deewana, you  probably suspect that Amar is actually alive.  And you're right, Amar survived the fall and is being cared for by nuns nearby.  He is in a convenient coma, so no one knows who he is and the rest of the plot has a chance to happen.

 Taran mourns for months, and then there's a ray of light in the darkness.  Amar's father introduces her to Shekhar (Aditya Seal), the son of his old friend.  Shekhar has recently lost his own father, and he's had time to process that loss and develop a philosophy about facing your fears and embracing life and love while you still can.  He's happy to share that philosophy with others, and Taran slowly realizes that she just might be ready to listen.  (Shekhar has a lot of thoughts about a lot of things, really; he has an anecdote for every situation, with a tidy moral to go with it.  He's very wise, probably.)

 Taran's dream is to open a patisserie shop, and Shekhar happens to know a great chef living in London, so they drive through the mountains from Edinburgh to London (Bollywood geography at its finest).  The meeting goes well, Taran is happy for once, she drinks too much champagne, and then she goes on a Magic Pixie Dream Rampage, running through the streets with a bottle in her hand.  For a moment she feels like there's hope.

 

 (The sequence is set in London, but was clearly filmed in Edinburgh; I know Victoria Street when I see it.  But that's only fair when so many of the Edinburgh scenes are obviously filmed in Glasgow.)

Shekhar is kind, patient and wise, and Taran can't help but be drawn to him him.  She also can't help feeling guilty about that, but all of her friends and family love Shekhar and think that he can make her happy.  Finally, one of his life lessons ends with a kiss, and finally, eight months after losing Amar, Taran is ready to move on.  And that's when Amar shows up.

This is a Bollywood movie about a love triangle, so there will be tears and speeches and everyone will act nobly and somebody is going to give up the woman he loves so that she can finally be happy.  The triangle is a bit undercut, though, because Amar is so underdeveloped as a character.  We barely get to meet him before he falls off a cliff, and after his return he is earnest and noble and doesn't have much of a personality, while Shekhar is full of anecdotes and inspirational quotes about living your best life and carpeing the diem, and he's hiding a secret that will change everything.  The triangle isn't really balanced, it's scalene rather than isosceles, let alone equilateral.

Still, the movie is a solid weepy if you're in the mood for that sort of thing. 

All You Need Is Cash

 

 The Rutles: All You Need is Cash (1978) is a documentary chronicling the rise and fall of the Prefab Four, Liverpool's favorite sons, the Rutles.  Any resemblance to a real0world supergroup from the 1960s is entirely intentional.  I think the real message here is that it's easier to tell a coherent story about the rise and fall of the Beatles when they aren't real.

 

Eric Idle plays . . . well, Eric Idle plays a lot of parts in this, but he plays the Narrator, a documentarian chronicling the early days of the band.  Band members include Dirk McQuickly (Idle), Ron Nasty (Neil Innes), Stig O'Hara (Ricky Fataar), and Barry Wom (John Halsey), whose real name is of course Barrington Womble.  It is quickly obvious who is supposed to be who; Dirk is Paul, Nasty is John, Stig ("The Quiet One") is George, and Barry ("The Noisy One") is Ringo.  The boys meet in Liverpool, form a band, and after sharpening their act in Hamburg, they are discovered by music entrepreneur Leggy Mountbatten (Terence Bayler.)  The band becomes a huge hit, the idols of millions, and soon they are being chased around Britain and America by hordes of screaming girls.

All of which sounds very straightforward, and it is.  There are absurd moments in this section of the movie; Fifth Rutle Leppo Sitoncliff (Ollie Halsall) is last seen in Der Rat Keller in Hamburg, climbing into a small trunk with a smaller German woman.  But things get much weirder when the Rutles start making their own movies.  "A Hard Day's Rut" is just A Hard Day's Night with a silly title, "Ouch!" manages to be even more problematic than Help!, and "The Tragical History Tour" is . . . from the clip we see, the experience of watching "The Tragical History Tour" is almost exactly the same as watching The Magical Mystery Tour.  Some things are beyond parody. And, the little we see of "Yellow Submarine Sandwich" is more surreal and considerably less coherent than Yellow Submarine.

 The band begins to fall apart, gradually and then all at once.  The group[ establishes an organization called Rutle Corps, an apparently charitable organization which immediately loses enormous amounts of money, despite (or perhaps because of) the efforts of brutal promoter Ron Decline (John Belushi).  Stig is drawn to Arthur Sultan, the Surrey Mystic (Henry Woolf).  And Dirk and Nasty both get married.  Dirk falls for French actress Martini (Bianca Jagger), who is barely a parody of Linda McCartney at all.   Nasty is captivated by German conceptual artist Chastity (Gwen Taylor), who is strongly implied to be the daughter of Adolf Hitler, but at least nobody but Mick Jagger (Mick Jagger) blames her for breaking up the band.  (Apparently Yoko Ono found the character hilarious, so I won't quibble.)

All You Need is Cash is packed with celebrity cameos, particularly Saturday Night Live alumni; it's always nice to see Gilda rRdner.  It's the cameo by actual factual George Harrison as an interviewer asking questions about Stig being attacked by the Hell's Angels in the basement that is the real get, though, putting the mockumentary one Beatle ahead of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

 This is a comedy.  It's full of surreal humor and whimsical asides, which is fitting, considering Idle's career and the movies the Beatles made themselves.  It's also surprisingly more coherent than the history of the Beatles.  Reality doesn't have to be realistic, but little tweaks like having the death rumors be centered on Stig/George rather than Paul make a lot more sense.

 

The family that steals together, heals together.

 

 Con City (2026) opens with an ordinary family suddenly thrust into extraordinary circumstances.  Saravana (Arjun Das) runs a small restaurant with his wife Mithra (Anna Ben).  There is obviously tension in the relationship, but they stay together in order to take care of their wheelchair-bound seven year old son Jeeva (Akhilan), with Mithra's brother Jackie (Yogi Babu) and mother Janaki (Vadivukkarasi) helping with both home and business.  One day Saravana is late picking up Jeeva from school, and by the time he arrives someone else has taken the boy.  Nobody knows who this person is . . . until the family gets a good look at the CCTV footage, and the whole family immediately recognizes the perpetrator.

The film skips back seven years, when the family wasn't ordinary or even a family yet.  Saravana is working for the power company while quietly struggling to repay the loans his mother took out years ago.  Mithra is alone and pregnant, and only discovers that she's been the victim of a real estate scam when she's thrown out of the house she thought she leased.  Jackie is an aspiring actor hoping to fulfill his late father's dreams when he discovers that Janaki has cancer and needs a great deal of money for an operation, and soon.

And so they all make questionable choices.  Saravana begins skimming payments at the power company, then funnels the money through his stockbroker friend Satha (Sathanand) to create a pyramid scheme.  Mithra begins a real estate scheme of her own, and she turns out to be really good at it.  And Jackie and Janaki receive enough money in donations through the charitable trust established by Jackie's father (a former stuntman) to pay for Janaki's operation, only to discover that the doctor is incompetent and she's fine.  Janaki insists that they keep the money and use it to fund Jackie's debut film; he doesn't want to, but she's his mother, so he agrees.

Mithra, Jackie and Janaki all invest their money with Saravana.  Saravana invests the money with his childhood friend Sabari, who promises a large return after a smuggling deal.  But Sabari is killed, everyone's cons manage to collapse at once, and the characters are all brought in by the ferocious police inspector Sundaram (Nanda Gopal).   Sundaram wants to know where the money is, and uses all the police brutality at his disposal to find out, but everyone tells him the truth and he does not believe them.  When it becomes clear that he plans to arrange for them to be killed in "an encounter," Saravana masterminds a jailbreak, and the group stays together; the others are hoping that Saravana will eventually lead them to the money.

Back to the present.  The man on the video taking Jeeva away is Sundaram.  He's found them.  Saravana insists on going back home and turning himself in, hoping that Sundaram will release Jeeva and let the others go.  The others insist on coming along.  But Sundaram is no longer a policeman, he's retired, with a bad gambling habit. He doesn't want them arrested, he wants them working for him, and he reveals that he let them escape; he's been quietly returning criminals to the wild for years, so that he can make use of their talents later.  

This is a con artist movie, so there are schemes within schemes and it's not clear who is playing who until the very end.  It's not the most devious plotting I've ever seen on film, but everything more or less hangs together and the big reveal at the end makes sense.

However the movie is not entirely focused on the cons.  It's also about the fake family evolving into a found family, and learning to trust and rely on each other.  They also manage to avoid the obvious romantic track, at the end Saravana and Mithra are getting along better, and may have moved to a real relationship, but they're still primarily together for the sake of the kid.  It's both refreshing and sensible, since the script doesn't really have room for romance on top of everything else.