The Greatest Show in the Galaxy.

 I am perhaps America's only unironic Johny Lever fan.  I get why a lot of Bollywood fans don't like him; the man has built his career on incredibly broad comic relief and frenetic impressions, and his acting range goes from chewing the scenery to nibbling on the camera lens, but he's really good at incredibly broad comic relief.  In a movie like Cirkus (2022), in which everybody is overacting at the same level, you get a sense of just how good Lever is at being Johny Lever.

The movie starts with Doctor Roy Jamnadas (Murali Sharma) expounding on his theories of nature versus nurture.  Roy is strongly Team Nurture, perhaps influenced by his own upbringing in Jamnadas Orphanage, which he now runs with his adopted brother Joy (Uday Tikekar).  When two pairs of twins arrive at the orphanage, Roy sees a chance to demonstrate his theories, and so he swaps babies, placing one twin from each pair in a set.  Both sets of twins are adopted, one by a well-to-do couple in Bangalore, and one by a couple who run a circus in Ooty.  Both sets of grateful adoptive parents decide to name their children Roy and Joy, after the people who made this adoption possible.

Doctor Roy keeps close tabs on both sets of Roys and Joys as they are growing up.  His plan is to reveal the truth to them when they turn thirty, finally proving to the world at large that it is upbringing rather than blood which shapes personality, a fact which has been amply demonstrated by countless adoptive children throughout the history of the world.  This is, of course, enormously unethical and will cause a lot of damage over the years to these hapless kids, and the movie never really calls him out on it.

The Roy and Joy in Ooty grow up as brothers in the circus.  As a child, Roy demonstrates a strange power - he can grab electric wires without being shocked.  After the death of their parents, the brothers grow up and run the circus, with Roy (Ranveer Singh) billing himself as the Electric man, while Joy (Varun Sharma) has a high wire act.  Despite the show business career, Roy is a confident and mature man, married to Mala (Pooja Hegde), who writes mystery novels under the name of "Colonel Vikrant."  The couple's one point of conflict is that Mala wants to adopt a child, but Roy is reluctant; he doesn't know that he's adopted, and believes that only a child of his own blood will be dedicated enough to take over the circus.

The other Roy and Joy, meanwhile, grew up to lead a life of privilege, watched over by their adoptive mother Shakuntala Devi (Ashwini Kalsekar).  Roy suffers from a mysterious ailment that causes him to receive electric shocks at seemingly random times, leading to him shocking the people around him in inconvenient and comic ways.  He's also naturally a bit suspicious, largely because he spends much of his time reading the mystery novels written by Colonel Vikrant.  Roy wants to marry the beautiful Bindu (Jaqueline Fernandez), but her father (Sanjay Mishra) is certain that he's seen Roy with another woman in Ooty.

When the Roy and Joy from Bangalore travel to Ooty to close a deal for a tea plantation, it leads to a comedy of errors.  Actually, it leads to The Comedy of Errors, since the plot is lifted almost directly from Shakespeare's play.  While Roy and Joy and Joy and Roy are getting their Shakespeare on, Doctor Roy follows from a distance and doesn't do anything to help, and both sets of brothers are bothered by a trio of incompetent gangsters led by Momo (Siddhartha Jadhav), who has magnificent hair and is doing his best Johny Lever impression.  Momo is working for the crimelord Poison Dada, who also has magnificent hair and is played by actual Johny Lever.

Cirkus is set in the sixties, largely because it's secretly a prequel to director Rohit Shetty's Golmaal Again, which is doubly weird because the Golmaal series has no continuity between films beyond character names and supporting cast, and now suddenly we've got a Jamhadar Orphanage Cinematic Universe.   

In any case, Cirkus takes full advantage of its time period.  The movie is a deliberate throwback to the comedies of the era, and lifts a lot of the incidental music from those movies.  The costumes are wonderful, and while it's not really a period thing, the scenery in Ooty is spectacular.  This may be a broadly comic bit of fluff, but it's a gorgeous broadly comic bit of fluff.

It's still a bit of fluff, though.  Johny Lever is the best at being Johny Lever, but everybody does their best, and Pooja Hegde manages to sneak in a bit of genuine acting when nobody is paying attention.  I would say that it's hardly Shakespeare, but it is absolutely Shakespeare.  Very much so.

Bhooty Call: Golmaal Again

Golmaal Again (2017) is not a straight horror movie.  It's not even a horror comedy, really.  This is an installment in the long-running Golmaal comedy franchise, and while there are ghosts in it, the movie is about as scary as the average episode of The Ghost Whisperer.  

The Golmaal movies don't have any real continuity from one film to the next; actors recur, and they may have the same character names or perform the same running gags as in previous films, but every movie is a world in itself, with its own overly complicated plot there to serve as an excuse for farcical shenanigans. In this case, Gopal (Ajay Devgn), Laxman (Shreyas Talpade), Madhav (Arshad Warsi), Lucky (Tusshar Kapoor), and the other Laxman (Kunal Khemu) grew up in the same orphanage, overseen by Jamnadas (Uday Tikekar).  The five orphans discovered a baby girl whom they named Khushi, but after a few happy years childhood rivalries caused the boys to leave the orphanage in two groups.  Gopal and the first Laxman grew up to be enforcers for Babli (Sanjay Mishra) while Madhav, Lucky, and the other Laxman went to work for Vasooli (Mukesh Tiwari.)

Naturally everybody has their own comic quirk.  Gopal is an amazing fighter, but is terrified of ghosts.  Laxman 1 is a loyal friend with a lisp that's supposed to be funny.  Madhav - well, Madhav doesn't really have a quirk per se, he's just a jerk who likes to play practical jokes.  Lucky speaks in complete gibberish, which again is supposed to be funny, and Laxman 2 is maybe three inches shorter than the others..

When Jamnadas suddenly dies, all all five of the gang agree to put aside their differences and return to the orphanage for the funeral.  There, they are reunited with the orphanage's librarian, Anna (Tabu), who happens to be able to see ghosts.  This will be important later.  They also meet real estate tycoon Vasu Reddy (Prakash Raj), who announces that he will be demolishing the orphanage and rebuilding it in Bangalore.

After returning home, Gopal is haunted by an actual ghost; he and Laxman 1 flee to Anna for help, and she suggests that they stay with her in the house of the blind Colonel Chauhan (Sachin Khedekar); her ghost knowledge is a strong motivation, but Gopal is also intrigued by what he thinks is the Colonel's pretty young maid (Parineeti Chopra).  Meanwhile, Madhav and his crew are hired by Vasu Reddy to chase Gopal away.

And then wackiness ensues for a while.  Fake ghost shenanigans.  Real ghost shenanigans.  Johnny Lever appears as a fellow grownup orphanage alumnus who occasionally transforms into Johnny Lever doing a bit.  It's like if Hamlet spent the first three acts of the play playing pranks on Laertes before finally finding out what happened to his father.  But eventually the real plot arrives.

The maid isn't the maid, she's the Colonel's adopted daughter.  The ghost of the Colonel's adopted daughter, actually, and these five knuckleheads can see her because she's actually the ghost of the Colonel's adopted daughter Khushi, and they took care of her when she was a baby.  (To the film's credit, at this point the various characters all point out how completely inappropriate a relationship between Gopal and Khushi would be, and the romance angle is dropped entirely.)  Khushi and Jamnadas were both murdered by Nikhil (Neil Nitin Mukesh), who was her fiance and Jamnadas's wayward nephew, all as a part of a scheme with Vasu Reddy to gain ownership of the orphanage so that they can tear it down and build an amusement park.  Anna has deliberately brought the gang together so that they can avenge Khushi and save the orphanage.

Usually, a premise like this would lead to a basketball playing dog saving the day, but this time they decide to try a reverse Scooby Doo; Nikhil is busy being evil in Dubai, so the gang decide to sue their skills, a fake Babu, and their actual supernatural ghost who has amazing powers of telekinesis and can possess anybody in order to fake a haunting and scare Vasu Reddy into confessing his crime to actual medium Anna, pretending to be a fake medium, so that they can record the confession and give it to the police.  

(The plan seems a little overcomplicated, since they have a ghost with actual supernatural powers who has repeatedly demonstrated the ability to possess people, including Vasu Reddy specifically, and make them say whatever she wants.  It seems to me that they can just have the eagles fly them to Mordorskip a few steps.  Perhaps it's better for Khushi's spiritual development if they do things the hard way.)

This is a very silly movie, and it's also largely inoffensive in its silliness.  It's certainly less obsessed with sex than most of the other big budget multi-star comedy franchises.  The complicated plot serves as a delivery vehicle for jokes, and the jokes are largely . . . okay.  (Apart from having two characters with speech impediments played for laughs.  That was not okay.)

Ultimately, the movie comes down to its performances.  Ajay Devgn is clearly having fun playing a  a parody of his usual tough guy image, combining Singham style violence with comedic vulnerability.  Johnny Lever is clearly at home here, recycling several of his most practiced comic tics.  Parineeti Chopra isn't given much to do apart from stand around and look beautiful and/or ominous.

And Tabu is largely wasted; she's an actor of tremendous depth and talent (this film was made three years after her ferocious and heartbreaking performance as Ghazala in Haider, and a full fourteen years after her chilling "Lady MacBeth" in Maqbool) and here she just narrates, speaks kindly to ghosts, and acts as stern but supportive den mother to our rowdy heroes.  Her performance is fine, she just doesn't have much to work with.

Unspecified Drug Madness.

Forget the gratuitous celebrity cameos.  Forget the love songs. Forget the interminable tap dance sequence.  Forget Johny Lever mugging for the camera.  Try to forget the goats - you won't be able to, but try.  Dushman Duniya Ka (1996) is a very serious movie with a very serious message, though it isn't the message that the movie thinks it's sending.

Mahesh (Jeetendra) grew up as an orphan, poor but scrupulously honest and with a strict code of ethics.  When Mahesh meets fellow adult orphan Reshma (Sumalatha), he is immediately smitten, but he's clueless about how to approach her.  Luckily, his good friend Badru (Shahrukh Khan with a Charlie Chaplin mustache, in what may be his most irritating role ever) is there to give him advice and occasionally money.

Thanks to Bandru and the kind Sister Superior (Farida Jalal) who runs the orphanage where Reshma lives, the pair are married and soon have a son, Lucky.  When Lucky is at school, Badru has the chance to do Mahesh one final favor, saving Lucky from an oncoming truck, then dies.  By this point, though, Mahesh is established as a forest ranger, and the family settles into a happy life.

Years pass, and Lucky grows into a tap dancing medical student played by Manzoor Ali.  he is inexplicably popular with the ladies, but he only has eyes for his childhood sweetheart Lata (laila Mehdin).  That's bad news for rich boy and alleged friend Raman (Ali Asgar), who has a ferocious crush on Lata and resents Lucky for winning her heart.

Raman and his hangers on are devotees of the Goat Baba (Mehmood) who is . . . there's no sensible way to explain the Goat Baba.  He is a drug dealer who likes to dress up as a religious leader who is also a goat, and he bleats while he sells drugs to college students.  Because he's so focused on the Goat Baba's offerings, all of Raman's schemes are drug related - he uses peer pressure to get Lucky addicted to drugs out of general spite, and he gets his revenge on Lata by hiring a mechanic to pose as a college professor and drug Lata, posing her in a compromising position just as Lucky arrives, which causes him to storm off angrily.

The police arrive before the "professor" can do anything else, and Lata is arrested.  Her mother promptly dies of shock, and Lucky refuses to have anything to do with her until another friend proves that Raman set her up.  The young couple are reunited, and everybody should learn a valuable lesson about trusting the people that you love rather than instantly leaping to the worst possible conclusion, but they do not.

Even after all of this Raman is not in jail because he's rich, but Lucky sensibly keeps his distance.  Until, that is, everybody meets Bollywood actor Salman Khan wearing a  goofy mustache and playing himself.  Salman doesn't know why the boys are not getting along, but he sings a song about the importance of friendship and forgiveness, and the former friends make up.  This means that the tragedy that follows is all Salman Khan's fault.

Mahesh discovers Lucky's drug use, and makes it very clear that he believes that people should help themselves so Lucky must kick the habit entirely on his own.  And over the course of a long and sweaty night, Lucky does exactly that!  He vows never to do drugs again, drops out of college, and takes a series of jobs to prove himself to his father.

Unfortunately, no matter what job Lucky takes, Raman and his hangers on find him, usually just in time for Mahesh to see them and jump to the wrong conclusion.  Lucky explains himself over and over again, but Mahesh never listens. And things go from bad to horrible when Lucky gets caught up in a drug bust.  Raman and friends are all bailed out, but Mahesh refuses to bail out Lucky.  Instead, after a drug test, he's released by the police with an apology and a doctors' note confirming that he had no drugs in his system, but Mahesh still doesn't believe him, and kicks him out of the house.  

Lata would like to take Lucky in, but she can't; she's a single woman living alone, and her reputation couldn't survive a live in boyfriend.  Lucky has nowhere else to go but Raman's boat, and soon, he's back on the drugs.  Raman has finally been cut off by his rich father, and he and the gang are useless, so before long Lucky is supporting the entire group and all of their drug habits by stealing.  But the downward spiral can't be stopped, leading to an act of shocking brutality and a broken Mahesh pleading with the young people on screen and in the audience to "say no to drugs!  Say no to drugs!"

In essence, Dushman Duniya Ka is an afterschool special about drug use, only with musical numbers and an extended subplot about Johny Lever being menaced by imaginary ghosts.  (And of course the goats.)  There is fun and romance and hope at the beginning of the movie, but once the Very Special message starts, it's all grim and joyless and senseless tragedy.  Nobody ever points out that the real message of the movie is "Say no to immediately jumping to the worst possible conclusion and refusing to listen to the people you claim to love."  Lucky did say no to drugs, quite successfully, and he would have been fine if his father had trusted him.

In addition to the needless tragedy, this movie is also notable for the sheer quantity of "What the hell?!?" it manages to pack into two and a half hours.  There's a whole lot of weird going on here, though it is all eclipsed by the Goat Baba.

Despite all of that, there are some genuinely good bits.  Both of the cameoing Khans are playing the most annoying versions of themselves, but Shahrukh always has fantastic chemistry with Farida Jalal, and for once she is not playing his mom, so it's fun to see them bantering in a different context.  And Johny Lever is really good at broad physical comedy and acting through exaggerated facial expressions; he gets to display these talents here, and it's frankly one of the film's better performances.

That said, while I am a fan of Nineties Bollywood comic relief, if the highlight of your movie is Johny Lever, something has gone wrong.

Even fuller house.

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

Indian Proposal

 The apparent moral of Judaai (1997) is “If someone offers to buy your spouse for twenty million rupees, say no.” I’m enough of a crazy optimist to believe that most people already know that. If they don’t, I doubt even Sridevi can convince them. No, the real moral of Judaai is “Before marriage, it’s best to do a little research.”

The film opens with the wedding of Raj (Anil Kapoor) and Kaajal (Sridevi). Kaajal’s father (Kader Khan) is thrilled with the match; Raj in an engineer, and should make good money, with plenty of extra income from bribes. He’s a little taken aback when he sees Raj refusing a very expensive wedding gift from a contractor because he does not intend to do business with the man, and Kaajal herself is disappointed when she arrives at her new marital home only to discover that there is no air conditioning, and not even a refrigerator.

Poor but honest is still honest, though, and Kaajal and Raj (and eventually their two children) settle into a reasonably happy life. Kaajal still longs for more material things, but it’s a Lucy Ricardo or Hyacinth Bucket sort of longing; she’s a bit pretentious, and sometimes she spends too much money or lies to the neighbors, but she loves Raj and he loves her and in the end they always make up.

Meanwhile, Kaajal’s Bollywood-obsessed brother Harilal (Johny Lever) provides another example of “look before you buy.” He hears a mysterious voice singing, and assumes that the singer is Vani (Upasna Singh), daughter of Raj and Kaajal’s landlord Hasmukhlal (Paresh Rawal). Hari has seen Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, so he assumes the role of the heroic suitor trying to win over his beloved’s stern father. While he’s no Amrish Puri, Hasmukhlal is in fact sort of intimidating; he dominates every conversation with a never ending stream of questions, and even has a question mark on his forehead like a low-rent Indian version of the Riddler. Hari brings home the bride, but it isn’t until the wedding night that he realizes that Vani has a severe case of Bollywood Mystery Disease, and the only thing she’s able to say is “Abba dabba jabbha.” (The entire subplot basically goes nowhere, but it’s worth mentioning because while the basic premise is stupid, Johny Lever is actually really funny in this movie.)

Raj works for Mr. Sinha (Saeed Jaffry). Sinha has a niece, Janhvi (Urmila Matondkar) returning from America. Since all of his drivers are out on other jobs, he sends Raj to the airport to collect her, and the pair immediately start arguing. Janhvi is intrigued, however, and soon decides that Raj is the man for her. Finding that he’s married really doesn’t deter her. As she sees it, Raj would hardly be the first man in India to take a second wife.

(A slight digression - Janhvi is terribly impressed upon seeing Raj refuse a lucrative job offer because, unlike the prospective employer, Sinha gave him a chance when he was just starting out, and he refuses to betray him. This is portrayed as a wonderful demonstration of loyalty, but it strikes me as arrogance more than anything. Raj has a family, money is definitely tight (they’re saving up to buy a small cassette player) and financial issues are a constant source of strain in his marriage. While ethics are important, there’s nothing wrong with finding a better job for the sake of your family, or at least asking your obviously very rich employer for a raise. Working exactly the job you want without caring about the money is a luxury best reserved for the single.)

Raj has no interest whatsoever in marrying another woman; despite the occasional arguments, he loves Kaajal. Janhvi refuses to give up, and so she approaches Kaajal at the temple and makes an indecent proposal. Kaajal will receive twenty million rupees if she convinces her husband to take Janhvi on as a co-wife. Kaajal is shocked and horrified, but then she keeps thinking about all she could do with the money. She had always wanted to put the children into a good, English, school, and they could move to a better house, buy a nice car instead of taking the bus everywhere . . . Her father thinks it’s a great idea, while her mother (Farida Jalal) tries to explain how insane the very notion is.

Kaajal makes her decision. When Raj refuses to even consider the idea, she goes on a hunger strike until he agrees. Finally he breaks down, she and Raj get a divorce, he is married to Janhvi, and they all teleport to Las Vegas for some very bad dancing before moving in together. What could possibly go wrong?

While he’s agreed to the marriage, Raj is sullen and wants nothing to do with Janhvi. Kaajal is so consumed by her new life as a wealthy woman that she has no time for anything else, though, while Janhvi transforms herself into the perfect submissive Indian wife. She wins over the children with what may well be the lamest joke ever written, and patiently sets out to woo Raj. He’s reluctant, but he finds himself more and more drawn to the woman who’s actually paying attention to him. Kaajal and Raj keep drifting farther apart, Janhvi and Raj keep drifting closer together, and then, finally, Kaajal realizes what she’s given up and decides she wants it back.

Judaai has a great cast. It is always nice to see Farida Jalal in action, and Johny Lever was (as previously mentioned) genuinely funny. Sridevi, meanwhile, is fantastic. The early portions of the film showcase her comic talents (when Janhvi approaches her at the temple, she hides behind a pillar with a strange little hop that was so funny I had to rewind and watch it again) and in the second half of the film she displays considerable dramatic depth.

On the other hand, the message of the film is a bit muddled. The idea is that Kaajal has done wrong and needs to purify herself through suffering. The characters in the film go to great lengths to point out that yes, Kaajal did ruin her own life, but it’s not until the very end of the movie that someone points out the simple fact that there were other people involved. The whole thing was Janhvi’s idea, after all, and if Raj had been more concerned about the welfare of his family than with his personal code of honor, the whole mess could have been avoided. Most importantly, Raj and Kaajal could have saved themselves a lot of grief by sitting down and talking for half an hour before marriage.

I am slapsticked out.

I like to watch a wide range of Bollywood and related cinema, but I have to admit that the nineties and early oughts are really my era.  I love a good nineties romantic action comedy, and I regret to inform you that Hello Brother (1999) is not a good nineties romantic action comedy.

Salman Khan plays Hero, a courier working in Mumbai, and he is . . . Look, I get that this movie is a goofy comedy, and characters are going to be drawn very broadly, but Hero is a capering  twit whose behavior doesn't even rise to the level of "buffoon."  He's like Pee Wee Herman with muscles.  He also has a habit of picking fights with little or no provocation, and he tends to end these fights by giving his hapless opponents purple nurples.  He is an interesting choice of protagonist.

 

Hero is in love with his next door neighbor/gal pal Rani (Rani Mukerji), but while they do flirt a little bit during the obligatory neighborhood "Boys Versus Girls" song, she makes it very clear that she thinks of him as a friend.  hero is still holding out hope, though, so he asks his boss Khanna (Shakti Kapoor) for some extra work, and Khanna is happy to assign him some extra, special deliveries.

Enter grouchy supercop Vishal (Arbaaz Khan, Salman's real life brother).  Vishal has pretty much cleaned up the drug trade in his home city, so his superiors have arranged to have him transferred to Mumbai, where he is under the command of the explosively flatulent Senior Inspector Khan (Meeraj Vora) and ably assisted by Constable Hatela (Johny Lever).  Vishal is convinced that Khanna is using his courier business to ship drugs, so he marches out to the golf course and threatens him.  Hero does not believe that Khanna is capable of anything shady (because Hero is an idiot) and jumps in to defend his boss.

 

Before too long, Hero is the Roadrunner to Vishal's Coyote, stymieing his investigation at every turn, because apparently the police academy doesn't prepare you for dealing with nitwits.  And then one of Hero's packages spills, revealing drugs!  Hero races to tell Khanna about what he's discovered.  Vishal follows, alone, because he's a maverick cop who doesn't care about rules or backup.  It doesn't go well; Khanna kills Hero, then shoots Vishal through the heart.

 

But the movie isn't over yet.  Vishal is given Hero's heart, because apparently this hospital is run by maverick doctors who don't care about the rules.  And unfortunately Hero isn't out of the movie either; he's hanging around as a ghost that only Vishal can see.  The only way to make Hero go away is to avenge his death, so the pair are forced into an awkward buddy comedy alliance in order to take down Khanna.  And things get even more complicated when Vishal meets Rani and falls instantly in love.

One of the few things I liked about the movie is that Rani was completely sincere about being Hero's friend.  Once she finds out about his death, she immediately claims the body and arranges a funeral, and she genuinely mourns his loss.  It's the one bit of emotion in the film that isn't immediately undercut with stupid slapstick and fart jokes.

 

And the rest of the movie is, well, undercut with stupid slapstick and fart jokes.  Again, I get it, it's a goofy and incredibly broad comedy, but when Johny Lever is playing a more nuanced and dignified character than the movie's star, things may be a little too goofy, even for me.

John Woo presents Jane Austen's 'Persuasion'

 If you're looking for a Bollywood Christmas movie, pickings are decidedly slim.  There's Bada Din, which is fantastic and which I reviewed years ago, and there's Hide & Seek, an okayish slasher movie featuring a killer Santa prowling through a deserted shopping mall, but after that you have to settle for vaguely Christmas adjacent movies like Dilwale (2015), set in largely Christian Goa, in which Christmas lasts just long enough to rip off a scene from Love, Actually.

 

Let's start with Veer (Varun Dhawan.)  Veer works as a mechanic in the garage owned by his brother Raj (Shah Rukh Khan.)  Veer is a simple soul; he likes fast cars and . . . well, that's pretty much it.  Fast cars.  Until, that is, he meets Ishita (Kriti Sanon), and immediately falls in love.

One night while out on the town the pair run afoul of a gang of drug dealers.  Veer beats them up, but later they ambush him and beat him badly enough to put him in the hospital.  At which point his older brother Raj, gentle, responsible Raj, covers his face, tracks the drug dealers to their lair, beats them all up, then burns their merchandise.  When the goons say that they work for King (Boman Irani) and he'll have his revenge, Raj tells them to look for Kaali.

And we flash back fifteen years to an unnamed city in Bulgaria, where two crime cartels are battling for control of the city, one run by Dev Malik (Kabir Bedi) and one by Randhir Bakshi (Vinod Khanna) and his son and right hand man, Kaali (SRK).  

During a car chase, Kaali accidentally hits a woman named Meera Dev Malik (Kajol) with his car, and if you noticed her surname, you're paying more attention than Kaali is.  Kaali is fascinated by her, and she is surprisingly open-minded about the whole "brutal gangster" thing, so he wages a full Shah Rukh Khan charm offensive and apparently wins her over. 

 

It's obviously a trick.  Meera is Dev Malik's daughter, and ambushes Kaali and his men during a gold shipment.  On a whim, she leaves him alive.  Soon after, he saves her from falling off a cliff (long story) and she falls for him. Will she be able to win him back?  Yes, thanks to the most expensive musical number in Bollywood history.  They resolve to tell their respective fathers about the relationship, and it goes badly.

 

The movie flashes forward to 2015 Goa.  Veer wins Ishita's heart thanks to the aforementioned scene from Love, Actually and the nice young couple decide to tell their respective family, starting with Raj.  Raj is delighted, and goes to meet with Ishita's sister to formalize the proposal, only to discover that the sister is Meera.  The young lovers find themselves suddenly star-crossed, and since it is really, really obvious that Raj and Meera have a history together, they resolve to get their older siblings to fall in love . . . again. What could possibly go wrong?

Let me deal with my Festivus grievances before I get to my Christmas delight.  Boman Irani is a fine actor, more than capable of playing a genuinely menacing character.  That's not what he does here; King is a buffoon who is consistently played for laughs, and because he's the designated villain for the Goan sections of the story, that undercuts a lot of tension.

More seriously, because we see the flashbacks almost entirely from Raj's perspective, we understand his perspective and actions in a way that Meera can't, which means that he comes across as noble and self-sacrificing, while she seems like a terrible person.  The fact that she is still somewhat sympathetic is entirely due to the strength of Kajol's performance.

 

And that leads me to the Christmas delight.  The plot may be a bit muddled at times, but the cast is stellar.  I would happily pay good money to see Shah Rukh and Kajol read the phone book together.  It's not just their well-publicized chemistry; the pair work best when they are playing grown-ups with grown-up concerns, balancing their responsibilities with their love lives.  It gives the relationship more weight than you get when Shah Rukh is cast opposite a youngster like Anushka Sharma or Deepika Padukone.

The first time I watched Dilwale, it struck me as a version of Romeo and Juliet gone wrong.  On a second viewing, though, it seems more like something out of Jane Austen.  He's too proud, she's too quick to judge, and they're both missing a key piece of information which will help them unravel their competing priorities.  More gunfights than you usually see in Austen, though.

Actors never stay in the jeep.

 Sometimes you can just look at a character in a movie and see that they're doomed.  In Main Khiladi Tu Anari (1994), that character is Arjun Joglekar (Mukesh Khanna, who will always be Shaktimaan to me.)  Arjun is an incorruptible supercop and thorn in the side of drug kingpin Goli (Shakti Kapoor.)  He's also a devoted family man, with a wife (Beena Banerjee) that he just learned is pregnant, and a spunky younger sister, Shivangi (Raageshwari).  And of course he's in a big budget Bollywood movie, but played by an actor who is mostly known for his television work.  He's doomed.

Goli asks bar dancer Mona (Shilpa Shetty) to lure Arjun to her apartment and offer him a bribe.  She does, and Arjun refuses the money and delivers a lecture about honor and duty which, to be fair, is exactly what Shaktimaan would do. And then Goli and his henchmen walk in the door and kill him.  Traditionally, the actual hero (usually another cop) enters the movie at this point, vows to take care of his fallen comrade's family, and spends the rest of the movie seeking justice and maybe finding love in his spare time.  And that's exactly what happens here.

Said actual hero is Arjun and Shivagi's brother Karan (Akshay Kumar), who is also an incorruptible supercop, but he's played by a film actor so he's probably safe.  Karan quickly convinces Mona to testify against Goli, but before that can happen Goli uses a helicopter to sneak up on them and shoots her dead.  And even though Karan saw the whole thing, Goli is too powerful and connected to be charged with a crime without hard evidence.  (The testimony of a police officer who witnessed everything directly isn't enough.)

While he waits for another chance to take down Goli, Karan busies himself with actual police work, and by actual police work I mean he hears about a corrupt and mob-connected film producer assaulting aspiring actresses, so he goes to the man's office and beats him to a bloody pulp.  Film star Deepak Kumar (Saif Ali Khan) happens to be there to see the beating, and he thinks that Karan is so incredibly cool that he must play him in a movie.  Deepak makes arrangements to shadow a reluctant Kumar in order to research the character.

Meanwhile, Kumar stumbles across Basanti (also Shilpa Shetty), a street performer who happens to look exactly like Mona.  Suddenly Deepak is useful!  Deepak trains Basanti to impersonate Mona, then they install her in Mona's old job and apartment so that she can spy on Goli's organization.

(Side note - Basanti is very obviously based on Hema Malini's performance as Geeta in the long lost twin drama Seeta Aur Geeta; she dresses like Geeta, speaks like Geeta, and even even threatens to demolish a police station like Geeta.  However, she's named after Malini's character in Sholay.)

And while Basanti is risking her life in the figurative lion's den, Karana nd Deepak . . . mostly muck about and engage in buddy comedy hijinks.  There's a lot of bickering, and each man has his own deeply problematic romantic arc.  Shivangi is a Deepak Kumar fan, but they only realize how big a fan she is when she cuts herself badly while trying to carve his name into her hand.  Apparently this level of extreme devotion is just what Deepak is looking for in a woman, because before long they're talking about marriage.  Karan is an obstacle, but Deepak tries to deal with the problem by tricking Karan into falling in love with Basanti, a plan which revolves around getting Karan drunk and then, in the morning, convincing him that he had taken advantage of Basanti.  It's . . . it's not good.  Shaktimaan would not approve.

Dysfunctional courtship is kind of a hallmark of mid nineties Bollywood, and, as usual, once the respective relationships are established with their respective dance numbers, the characters start acting like relatively reasonable people again.  It does take a little while to get there, though.

Icky romance isn't the only nineties trope on display here.  The plot is lifted from an American movie that I haven't seen (The Hard Way), the film meanders from genre to genre, there's a board meeting of international criminals, Goli has a right hand man with a distinctive look and a stupid haircut, and Johny Lever, Kader Khan, and Shakti Kapoor all have significant roles.  (Much to my surprise, Shakti Kapoor isn't terrible here.)  It's like a microcosm of the Bollywood of nthe era; mostly big dumb fun, but there are elements that have not aged well at all. 

I would like to see them conquer the Martians, though.

 As an American, it's really hard for me to judge just how offensive Santa Banta Pvt Ltd (2016) is.  Santa and Banta are the "stars" of a series of jokes in India, rather like Sven and Ole in the Midwest.  At best, the Santa Banta jokes present the Sikh community as naive, boisterous, but ultimately brave and good-hearted hicks, which makes it a strange subject for a film.  The movie does open with a dedication to the Sikh community, and there's a lot of dialogue towards the end about how Sikhs are brave patriots who are the first to defend India, but our heroes are still naive, boisterous, but ultimately brave and good-hearted hicks.  

This Santa (Boman Irani) and Banta (Vir Das) are unemployed layabouts who spend their time drinking and crashing parties in search of free food.  After Santa is forcefully reminded of his lost love Billoo (Neha Dhupia), the pair resolve to reform and get honest jobs.  And they do!  They immediately get a job driving a truck . . . which turns out to be a front for liquor smuggling.  Santa and Banta are arrested, but are promptly bailed out by RAW agent Arvind (Vijay Raaz), who is in Punjab looking for two missing agents, codenamed Santa and Banta.

Arvind has the wrong Santa and Banta.  He knows he has the wrong Santa and Banta, but he packs them off to Fiji anyway, mostly to annoy his boss Hanumanth (Tinnu Anand.)  Our heroes are supposed to be rescuing a kidnapped ambassador (Ayub Khan), but instead they sort of bumble around and annoy the various suspects (mostly Ram Kapoor and Neha Dhupia again), like Columbo if there were two of him and they both really were stupid.  Fortunately, actual and hyper-competent RAW agent Cutie (Lisa Haydon) and less competent but skilled supervisor Akbar (Sanjay Mishra) are there to watch over them.

They also keep running into another cultural stereotype; Nepali expat and aspiring crime lord Chooza (Johny Lever), who is convinced that Santa and Banta are there to capture him, and plans to stab them with his kukri.

There's a lot of plot in this movie, and none of it matters.  The movie is a vehicle for jokes, and some of them are funny.  The cast is full of veteran supporting actors; Boman Irani is the biggest name here, and he actually manages to give Santa a tiny bit of gravitas.

However, I don't think Santa and Banta being Santa and Banta really adds anything to the movie, apart from a sliver of name recognition.  It's a fish out of water comedy set in Fiji, and so the leads could be from literally anywhere in the world except for Fiji; dumb guys are a universal phenomenon, so there's no need to dabble in stereotypes.

Do not lick the naagmani.

Jaani Dushman: Ek Anokhi Kahani (2002) has an amazing cast, including such big names as Akshay Kumar, Sunil Shetty, Manisha Koirola, Arshad Warsi, and Aftab Shivdasani, along with a veritable who's who of Bollywood supporting players, including brief appearances by local favorites Amrish Puri and Johny Lever.  And I can't quite figure out why.  Did they all lose a bet?  Were they being blackmailed?  Have they been cursed by a wicked witch?  Are they professional actors who took a job working with an otherwise well-regarded director because they wanted to be paid?  It is a mystery.

The plot is also kind of hard to figure out, but I will do my best.  Our thirtysomething actors are part of a large group of college students.  The boys all have distinct character traits; Atul (Akshay Kumar) is a charming atheist, Prem (Aftab Shivdasani) is a hapless would be romantic, Vijay (Sunil Shetty) is tough, Abdul (Arshad Warsi) is annoying, Ashok (Aditya Pancholi) is a rich jerk, Rajesh (Rajat Bedi) is a bully with a talent for mimicry, and so on.  (This movie has a big cast)  The girls, on the other hand, are mostly defined by their relationships with men, apart from Divya (Manisha Koirola).  She's tough, fearless, kind, and doomed, and also happens to be engaged to businessman Karan Saxena (Sunny Deol.)  (And I appreciate that they didn't even try to convince us that Sunny Deol is a college student.)

Rajesh and his sidekick Madan (Siddharth Ray) break into the girls' hostel and attempt to rape Divya, only to be stopped and beaten to a pulp by Karan, who drags them to . . . the college principal?  And then convinces the principal to expel them rather than press charges?  And then, when the would be rapists beg not to be expelled because it would ruin their careers, he sends them to ask forgiveness from Divya, and then all her friends pressure her to forgive them and everybody carries on as if nothing happened.  Seriously, what the hell, movie?

Late at night, Divya follows a mysterious voice into a nearby park (which is pretty clearly a painted set, but it's a nice painted set).  The voice belongs to Kapil (Arman Koli), a magical shapechanging snake and Divya's lover in a previous life; long story short, they were dancing and singing through a mystical realm of dodgy computer graphics and accidentally disturbed the meditations of Amrish Puri, who cursed them.

Now Divya is torn between her supernatural lover and Sunny Deol, and that's when her idiot friends call to invite her to a party.  Unfortunately, she winds up talking to Rajesh, who uses his mimicry skills to convince her that she's talking to the whole group, and they all want her to show up an hour early.  She does, Rajesh and Madan attack her, and she kills herself, living just long enough for the whole group to arrive so she can swear vengeance on them all.  Kapil shows up to kill Madan, just to get the ball rolling.

From here, the film becomes a straight supernatural revenge thriller, with Kapil the serpent and Divya's angry ghost picking off the friends one by one.  The twist is that the men who actually attacked her get killed right away, while the rest of the friends are not technically guilty of the crime Divya thinks they are guilty of.  Though when I think back to the "forgive your rapist" scene, I can't help but feel that she still has a point, since none of this would have happened if Rajesh and Madan were in jail where they belong.

The problem is that the cast is huge; normally with this sort of movie the supernatural creatures are working through a group of six or so, but this group is at least twice as big.  The movie never focuses on anyone for very long, and as a result it's hard to tell who the actual protagonist is supposed to be.

Ninety percent of Jaani Dushman is fun bad movie; the special effects are atrocious, the only acting is overacting, and Kapil the ancient shapechanging serpent who spent a thousand years trapped in a  tree spends most of the movie dressed up like Neo from The Matrix for no apparent reason.  The other ten percent can get a bit heavy, though; the actual assault isn't very graphic, but watching everyone in Divya's life fail to support her is infuriating.

How sharper than a serpent's tooth . . .

Bhagyawan (1994) has an unusually ornate plot, even for the early Nineties.  As the film opens, hard-working factory worker and family man Dhamraj (Pran) returns home from work only to discover that his sister Pushpa (Rubina) is pregnant.  When Dhamraj learns that the father is his boss Hira (Ranjeet), he's furious.  He drags Pushpa to Hira's house and demands that Hira do the honorable thing.  Hira laughs in his face, Pushpa throws herself in front of a bus (spattering her brother with unconvincing blood), and Dhamraj and Hira both swear eternal vengeance on one another.  Unfortunately Hira is a bit better positioned to carry out his vengeance; soon Dhamraj is penniless and out of work.  He's so desperate that he decides to poison himself and his family, but before he can carry out the plan, an adorable orphan steals the poisoned food.  Dhamraj chases the kid down and destroys the food, and in the process discovers a winning lottery ticket.  He decides to adopt the obviously lucky kid, and that's all in the first ten minutes or so of the movie.

Twenty years later, Dhamraj owns a successful chemical business, while the orphan has grown into Amar (Govinda), an incorruptible police officer, devoted son, and fantastic dancer.  Dhamraj's wife Savitri (Asha Parekh) is eager to marry Amar off, but he's not really interested in anyone . . . until he meets Geeta (Juhi Chawla), a quick-witted con artist and part-time Robin Hood who cares for a band of orphans with the help of her partner Jhoney (Johny Lever.)  They meet, they fall in love, they get married, then he brings her home to meet the parents.

Unfortunately, Dhamraj's other children are not as nice.  Widowed daughter-in-law Renu (Aruna Irani) is mostly petty, cynical and greedy in ways which do not impact the plot, but oldest son Vishwas (Kirti Kumar) is embezzling from the family business, spurred on by his equally terrible wife Alka (Sripradha), who has a dark secret of her own.  Youngest son Kishan (Suraj Chaddha) is really just an amiable idiot, but he's in love with Radha (Shobha Singh), and the crazy kids decide to fake a pregnancy in order to convince her father to allow them to marry.  Unfortunately, her father is Hira, and when Hira visits Dhamraj's house in order to arrange the marriage . . . things don't go well.  And Hira is still much better at the vengeance thing.

And from this point on, the movie is basically King Lear.  Amar's forthright nature (and propensity for stupid vows) gets him kicked out of the house, while Hira exploits the other siblings' worst character traits in order to bring ruin to Dhamraj's home.  Fortunately, this is still Bollywood, which is known for its wild swings in tone and genre, which means a happy ending is still a possibility.  (You'd think having a skilled con artist in the family would be useful, but no, most problems are solved by Amar punching people.)

Bhagyawan is very much a product of the early Nineties.  The plot is much more complicated than it needs to be, the tone shifts back and forth with all the vigor of an inflatable tune man in front of a car dealership, and the action scenes are trying desperately to be like a Jackie Chan movie without Jackie Chan.  Still, the movie stars a number of actors that I quite like, and also Govinda.  Pran is particularly well cast, giving the part of embattled patriarch a solemn dignity and a playful spark.  Juhi Chawla is splendid as the cheery con artist, and frankly a bit wasted as the dutiful daughter in law.  And Johny Lever is relatively restrained here; there's some of his trademark mugging for the camera during some of the early con artist scenes, but Juhi is mugging right along with him, and later in the film he's just a loyal and surprisingly helpful friend.  The movie is reasonably entertaining in its own right, but perhaps more interesting as a look into Bollywood's past.

You can tell they're twins because they have the same mustache.

Twin movies are fairly common in Bollywood, and they tend to follow the same basic formula. Identical twins are separated at birth. One twin grows up poor and feisty, raised by humble working folk. The other twin grows up wealthy and meek, terrorized by evil rich relatives who are after their money, though the rich twin usually also has a good-hearted but vulnerable relative that they need to protect. Just when it seems all hope is lost, the twins accidentally trade places, with the poor twin overcoming the villains, the rich twin developing a spine, and everybody gaining a love interest. Kishen Kanhaiya (1990) follows this formula as well, but with some surprising tweaks.

The film begins just as you might expect; tragic birth, dead mother, one twin spirited away to be raised by the midwife, while the other is left with his wealthy and now widowed father, Sunderdas (Shreeram Lagoo). While Sunderdas is a devoted parent, he’s overwhelmed, and decides to marry Kamini (Bindu), the sister of his employee Gendamal (Amrish Puri). Gendamal and Kamini are, of course, evil, and soon Gendamal arranges for Sunderdas to take a convenient fall, leaving him mute and paralyzed. Thanks to a complicated will, though, Gendamal needs to keep Sunderdas and baby Kishen alive until Kishen’s 24th birthday, then force the young man to sign over the property. And in order to make this possible, Gendamal and Kamini raise the boy through terror and abuse. By the time he grows into an adult (and is played by Anil Kapoor), Kishen is basically a servant, completely cowed by his uncle, stepmother, and her illegitimate son Mahesh (Dalip Tahil).

Kanhaiya (Anil Kapooor), on the other hand, was raised by the midwife (Subha Khote), and has grown up fearless, lazy, and a bit shady, but basically good hearted. Kanhaiya is obsessed with movies, and spends his days at the movie theater, dressed in fancy clothes borrowed from his best friend Lobo (Johnny Lever). After inadvertently picking a fight with a much larger man, his filmi fisticuffs catch the eye of fellow cinemaniac Anju (Madhuri Dixit), daughter of wealthy and cranky businessman Vidya Charan (Saeed Jaffrey), who happens to be a close friend of Gendamal.

And at this point, with the characters clearly established, that you’d expect the twins to switch places. But no, not yet. Both brothers have fully developed romantic subplots under their own identities, rather than meeting their love interests while switched. Kishen falls for milkmaid Radha (Shilpa Shirodkar), and surprisingly, Gendamal is all for the match, figuring that a wife would help keep Kishen docile, and an educated woman would be harder to control.

Kanhaiya, meanwhile, grows closer to Anju, who assumes that he’s also the child of a rich family. While pursuing this relationship. Kanhaiya casually and repeatedly humiliates Anju’s “uncle” Sridhar (Ranjeet), a business associate of her father’s. Sridhar has an unhealthy interest in Anju, and is nasty enough to expose Kanhaiya’s poverty, have the young man brutally beaten, kill his adopted mother, and then shoot him in the head.

Kishen, meanwhile, suddenly grows a spine and refuses to mark the papers transferring control of the family fortune, because Radha doesn’t want him to. Gendamal does not take this refusal well, and orders Mahesh to kill Kishen and dump his body in the sea. And then, with Kishen presumed dead and Kanhaiya’s life in ruines, Kanhaiya’s adoptive father explains the switch, and Kanhaiya deliberately assumes Kishen’s identity in order to root out the villains and perhaps discover what happened to his twin.

Kishen is not really dead, of course. Anju discovers him wandering the city street and thinks he’s Kanhaiya; he cannot contradict her, because he has amnesia. Anju tries to help him recover his memories by dressing up as Raj Kapoor, but surprisingly it doesn’t work.

Kishen Kanhaiya hits many of the same story beats as, say, Seeta Aur Geeta, but it steers clear of some of the twin movie cliches. (Kanhaiya lets all the nice people know who he is as soon as possible, for instance, so there’s no tearful rejection by the family he’s trying to save.) It’s an old story, but different enough to be interesting, and the cast is full of people I like, so I thoroughly enjoyed this movie.

Yes Boss

You don’t see many films in which the sycophant is presented as a heroic or even sympathetic character. That’s understandable, of course; while there are worse sins than sucking up to the boss, it’s not nice. It’s certainly not terribly glamorous. All of which makes Rahul (Shah Rukh Khan), the protagonist of Yes Boss, an odd choice for the hero.

Rahul is a master toady. He manages Mr. Siddarth (Aditya Pancholi)’s life like clockwork, cheerfully delivering an expensive piano to the boss’s wife and then just as cheerfully delivering a break-up message to the boss’s current girlfriend. Is there any depth to which Rahul will not sink? Well, yes, obviously, because otherwise this would be a very short movie.

Of course, Rahul loves his mother (Reema Lagoo), so we know that deep down he’s a good person. He just needs to meet the right Nice Indian Girl. Enter the right Nice Indian Girl - Seema (Juhi Chawla) is an aspiring model with dreams of her own; she wants a beautiful house, beautiful car, the full package, and if she can’t get the life she wants herself, she’s happy to marry someone who can give it to her.

Rahul and Seema meet cute (it involves borrowed cars and scooters), they go out, and he likes her a lot, but he realizes that she’s looking for someone with money. Enter Mr. Siddarth. Siddarth catches sight of Seema at the fashion show he’s organizing, and wants her as his next conquest. Rahul decides to give up love in favor of ambition, and helps his boss.

When Siddarth’s wife catches him out shopping with Seema, however, a desperate lie leads to one of those trademark bad Bollywood plans; Rahul and Seema have to pretend to be newlyweds, and the pretense goes even further when Rahul’s mother hears about it. She has a heart condition, and so the truth could literally kill her. When the pair are thrown together like that, Seema starts getting pangs of guilt; she’s a Good Indian Girl at heart, after all. And Rahul finds himself falling deeper in love, and more and more aware of his boss’s dishonorable intentions . . .

The movie really takes off when Rahul starts using his powers for good instead of evil. The characters really begin to connect, and once again the Khan-Chawla pairing sparkles. Early in the film, Chawla has very little to do but look beautiful, but she really acquits herself later in the film, with some fine dramatic and comic material. She has a drunk scene with Johnny Lever that is an inspired bit of pure silliness, and supports my hypothesis that Johnny Lever makes every movie better.

I don’t think it’s a real spoiler to say that Seema ends up with Rahul rather than the rich jerk, and the scene where they declare their mutual love is another comic gem, allowing Rahul to demonstrate strong pyaar-fu.

I really enjoyed Yes Boss. It’s the Bollywood formula done incredibly well. Charming leads, great chemistry, wonderful music, a nice fight scene, and a trip to Switzerland. Because when you think of love, your thoughts naturally turn to Switzerland.

Mmmmm, masala.

Here in the West, films usually manage to keep a consistent tone. If you’re watching a comedy, it may have moments of drama, but it will begin and end as a comedy. If you’re watching a drama, there may be comic relief, but the movie will begin and end as a drama. Asian cinema is often . . . different. Especially Indian cinema. Bollywood films are sometimes referred to as “Masala”; such a film is a little bit of everything. Tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, so to speak. This can be a little disorienting, as if the musical numbers weren’t jarring enough. But when it works, it works.
Phir Bhi Dil Hai Hindustani works.

Phir Bhi Dil Hai Hindustani ("After All, My Heart Is Indian") is about . . . well, it’s hard to come up with a simple summation. Our hero is Ajay, a cocky, showboating TV journalist. When we first meet Ajay, he’s scaling the side of a building to interview a bomb disposal expert who’s trying to defuse a very big bomb. The bomb goes off, but Ajay manages to escape in spectacular fashion, leaping off the building and managing to both film the explosion and rescue a tiny kitten(!) on the way down. (If you’re wondering about bomb disposal guy, he makes it out too, but in less dramatic fashion.) Ajay is played with a swagger by Bollywood megastar Shah Rukh Khan, and the character succeeds largely because of Khan’s charisma; at this point in the film, Ajay is actually kind of a jerk, but he’s a cool jerk.

Ajay works for K-TV, and the station has reached number one thanks to him. Frankly, he’s the best, and he even has a song to prove it. K-TV’s archrivals, Channel Galaxee, hire their own super reporter, the lovely Riya (Or Rhea, or Ria . . . the subtitles are a bit inconsistent. I’ve picked a spelling and I’m sticking with it.) Riya is there to beat Ajay, plain and simple. Naturally, when they meet, sparks fly. naturally, Priya rebuffs Ajay, but manages to use his checkered romantic past to deal him (and K-TV) an impressive journalistic defeat. Suddenly, Riya is the one singing “I’m the best”.

So at this point, we’ve got the makings of a fine romantic comedy. Ajay and Riya compete for stories using every underhanded method available (with Ajay calling in help from a publicity seeking gangster played by the inescapable Johnny Lever), all the while ignoring their obvious attraction to one another. (And it is obvious. Khan and Juhi Chawla, who plays Riya, have amazing chemistry.) Even at this early point, though, there are Other Things going on in the background. K-TV have thrown their support behind Mushran, the sitting Chief Minister, while Channel Galaxee supports the opposition leader, Ramakant Dua. Both stations and their star reporters are more than willing to bend the truth in favor of their chosen candidate. And then bad things start to happen.

At a political rally for Dua, one of his closest advisors is shot and killed. The assassin is quickly arrested, and when Mushran and Dua both press the police commisioner to release their own version of the assassin’s motivations, the commisioner splits the difference and declares him a terrorist. Pappu Jr., the mobster played by Johnny Lever, decides to “aquire” the famous terrorist, but when things go wrong, the assassin winds up in the back seat of Ajay’s car. Once Ajay and Priya find out the real story, they both discover a buried passion for journalistic truth, and the story veers into political intrigue. from there it moves into a satire of the media, and on into a patriotic story of civil disobedience, and then there’s some more romance. The end.

There’s a lot to love here. the early romantic comedy elements are delightful, and while the movie slips a little once the politics get too heavy, we’ve grown to care about the characters enough to follow them through. Johnny Lever is actually relevant to the plot here, and has one of the coolest lairs in film to boot. (The character specifically patterned it after a Bond movie; if I were a wealthy criminal, I’d probably do the same thing.) The music is very good, and so are the dance numbers. The colors in this film are remarkable. Best of all, Khan and Chawla practically glow here; they both turn in marvelous performances.

Of course, the film’s not perfect.T he intrigue elements are a little clumsy. Khan turns in a dreadful Elvis impression early in the film; Elvis is supposed to sneer, and Khan can’t quite contain his usual good natured smirk. It’s downright embarrassing when Ajay and Riya go undercover as broadly stereotyped Chinese journalists. And I found it a little odd seeing an admitted murderer giving our hero and heroine relationship advice.

Still, the movie works. The various ingredients combine into a rich taste experience, instead of blandly running together.

I love Bollywood.

Sweet, sweet subtitles

Tonight’s Bollywood feature was Soldier, not to be confused with the Kurt Russel sci-fi flick of the same name. This Soldier is 100% Indian, and there’s nary a garbage planet in sight. Instead, we have an old-fashioned revenge melodrama; three Indian military officers betray their country by raiding their own supply trucks at the behest of the mysterious D.K. After the heroic Major Malhotra discovers their treachery, they kill him. Eventually. (Malhotra manages to kick all three of their asses simultaneously, until D.K. shows up to finish them off.) Twenty years later, the three are successful arms dealers living in Australia, and wackiness ensues when a Mysterious Stranger (played by Indian action star Bobby Deol) enters their lives.

At this point, if you’ve ever seen an action movie in your life, you can pretty much guess what happens. The villains get their just deserts, the hero gets the girl (of course there’s a girl. I’ll get to her later.) With this sort of movie, what happens isn’t as important as how it happens, and there’s a certain fascination in watching Vicky (short for Vikram), the aforementioned Mysterious Stranger, worm his way into the lives of his targets. Plus, there’s singing, dancing, a shark attack, divine intervention, ninjas on horseback, and remarkably unconvincing fake vultures.

Speaking of the vultures, let me take a moment to talk about the Indian film censors. Long time Bollywood viewers know that kissing is very, very rare in Bollywood. To quote from the Bollywhat FAQ on the subject,

The censor board is notoriously unpredictable; no one wants to risk getting a rating that would scare away families. Also, Bollywood plays to a diverse range of people, from the illiterate and provincial to the worldly and urban. Ideas of morality differ widely from group to group. Why include a kiss when you can easily leave it out and avoid the risk of offending customers? Also, actresses don’t want to lose their conservative fans, nor do they want to endure salacious flak from journalists. So they’re not too keen on kissing on-screen, and many proudly trumpet their refusal to do it.

Soldier actually does feature an onscreen kiss, but it’s a kiss between two Australians, rather than our hero and heroine. In fact, the kiss inspires a long, rambling digression about what people do with their noses; the hero and heroine don’t know, and nor do any of the Indian passersby they ask. This movie features two men being eaten alive by fake vultures, but clearly kissing is right out.
As I mentioned earlier, there’s a girl. Not just any girl, mind you; it’s my personal favorite Bollywood actress, Preity Zinta, playing the daughter of one of the three villains. This was one of Preity’s first movies (she’s so new, they don’t even bother to give her character a different name; everybody just calls her Preity), and it’s clearly not her film. She has some nice comic material early on, though, and displays a little bit of the unrelenting charm that made her the star she is today.
Two final notes -

1) I had planned to start this mini-review thingie by saying that the movie in no way reminded me of Shakespeare. Unfortunately, that’s not true. The ubiquitous Johnny Lever shows up in a throwaway comic relief role as a man searching for his long lost twin, which is about as Shakespearean as one can get without speaking in blank verse. The payoff to this gag comes at the very end of the film, and it’s fairly subtle, especially for a gag involving Johnny Lever.

2) An addendum to the Evil Overlord List: “If I find myself in an Indian movie, I will not under any circumstances harm or allow any harm to come to the hero’s mother. They hate that.”