Blindsided.

Lafengey Parindey (2010) is a good example of how hard it can be to judge a Bollywood movie by its DVD cover. It’s the story of a fighter in an underworld boxing ring and his love for a blind dancer, so I was really expecting a lot more Ghulam II: The Blindening, and not so much roller dancing.
Our fighter is Nandu (Neil Nitin Mukesh), or “One Shot Nandu” as he’s known in the ring. Nandu has a pretty impressive gimmick; he fights blindfolded, taking a beating until he can figure out exactly where his opponent is, then dropping them in one shot.

Nandu fights for gambling kingpin Usmaan Ali (Piyush Mishra), who treats him like a clever and talented child. Despite working for a mobster, Nandu has managed to avoid being corrupted by the people around him, but he does look up to Anna (Kay Kay Menon), one of Usmaan’s top men, so when Usmaan asks him to drive Anna on a mission, Nandu is happy to agree. Anna is a little less happy, and tries to steer Nandu toward an honest job as a bouncer, but without much success.

Nadu drives Anna to his destination, and then everything goes horribly wrong – Anna has been shot, men with guns are chasing them, and as Nandu drives through the pouring rain he accidentally runs over a young girl. Anna convinces Nandu to get out of the car and then drives away, happy to take the blame for the hit and run since he’s dying anyway.

The victim of the hit and run is Pinky (Deepika Padukone), a talented dancer and skater who dreams of roller dancing on India’s Got Talent. The accident leaves her permanently blinded and unable to skate, and a guilt-ridden Nandu suddenly realizes that while he doesn’t have enough money to make a real difference, he is uniquely qualified to help her learn to see without using her eyes. Time for a training montage!

Montage completed, Pinky feels ready to skate again, and she needs a partner. Since she trusts Nandu, he’s the one that she wants. He reluctantly agrees, and the pair . . . I was going to say they drift into a relationship, but that’s really not the case, since Pinky is very much the instigator. (Nandu falls for her during the training montage, but he feels too guilty to make a move.) However, police inspector K.K. Sethna (Manish Chaudhary) knows that Anna wasn’t driving when Pinky was struck. Despite being ordered off the case, he keeps investigating, and quietly builds an impressive case against Nandu, who still hasn’t told Pinky the truth.

You may think that the plot is building toward one final climactric boxing match in which Nandu tries to earn the money to get Pinky’s eyes fixed, but that’s exactly what doesn’t happen. While Lafengey Parindey is kind of a sports movie, the sport in question isn’t underground blindfolded bareknuckle boxing, it’s reality show rollerdancing. The “big game” isn’t a boxing match, it’s the India’s Got Talent finals.

Another movie would have focused on the boxing, but that’s because that other movie would be about Nandu, while this movie is about Nandu and Pinky. At heart it’s a romance which happens to have some “gritty crime drama” trappings. The streets may be mean, but the people by and large aren’t; even Usmaan, the obvious villain of the piece, makes a fairly reasonable offer that Nandu can’t refuse. It’s like a Jane Austen novel, but with more gangsters and less insight into the human condition.

Pong: The Next Level

As long time readers know, I love Indian special effects extravaganzas, movies starring Shahrukh Khan, and thinly veiled retellings of the Ramayana, so yes, I was really looking forward to Ra.One (2011). It isn’t quite what I was expecting, though; I thought it would be Bollywood Tron, steeped in cultural references, and instead I got a Bollywood remake of that episode of Star Trek where Geordi accidentally brings Moriarty to life. As a reviewer, where am I supposed to go with that?

Khan plays software designer Shekhar Subramanium, who is a lucky, lucky nerd. Sure, he’s clumsy, socially awkward, and has a terrible haircut, but he’s married to the lovely and intelligent Sonia (Kareena Kapoor), he has a great job at a large electronics firm in London, and he’s a fantastic dancer. The only problem is that his son Prateek (Armaan Verma) doesn’t respect him.

When Shekhar and his team are assigned to create a new videogame for the Indian market, Shekhar sees a chance to change that. Prateek thinks heroes are lame and villains are cool, so Shekhar designs a game around Ra.One, the coolest villain ever, a bad guy who can never be beaten. And of course there’s no way that could possibly go horribly wrong, unless they designed the Ra.One character as a separate program which is capable of learning and adapting to the game, and the company was also working on a system for projecting digital information into the real world without the need for a screen. And what are the odds of that?

(The video game featured in the movie is, as you’ve probably guessed, terrible. It’s a fighting game with one protagonist, one opponent, and one backdrop – basically a fancy version of Pong. Like in Toonpur Ka Superhero the game has three short levels so that our protagonists can play through the entire game at the climax without the movie being fifty hours long; unlike Toonpur at least all three levels come from the same game here. As lame as the game itself is, though, the hardware involved, and especially the adaptive antagonist, would be revolutionary.)

Work on the game moves quickly, and the company holds a party to celebrate the game’s completion. While the adults drink and have a dance number, Prateek insists on trying out the game for himself – he’s nearly won when it’s time to go home, so the game is shut off. And then everything goes horribly wrong. Ra.One, who cannot accept defeat, uses the company’s technology to enter the real world, uses his shape changing and mind control powers to kill and impersonate Akashi (Tom Wu), Shekhar’s coworker, and goes in search of “Lucifer,” which happens to be Prateek’s gaming handle. Shekhar quickly realizes what has happened and tries to stop Ra.One by claiming to be Lucifer, but Ra.One doesn’t believe him and kills him anyway.

Grief stricken, Sonia decides to take her son back to India. Prateek, meanwhile, is convinced that his father didn’t die in an accident, he was killed by Ra.One; investigating the labs, he quickly learns that he’s right, and that Ra.One is on the way. He tries to pull the hero of the video game, G.One (who was modeled on Shekhar) out of the game as a protector, but without apparent success. And then Prateek is finally caught . . . by Sonia. Unfortunately, Ra.One is close behind.

After a lengthy and destructive car chase through the streets of London, Ra.One catches up with mother and son, but G.One appears at the last moment and apparently defeats Ra.One, who collapses into a pile of shiny cubes and is buried under the road. With nowhere else to go, G.One joins Sonia and Prateek as they travel to India.

The family quickly settle into life in India, though Sonia is a little disturbed by the superpowered robot with her dead husband’s face hanging around the house. Still, he’s useful, and before long sparks are literally flying.

Before they can get too comfortable, though, Ra.One reforms, this time taking the face of a male model from a nearby billboard (Arjun Rampal). He quickly tracks the family back to India and mayhem ensues.

This movie looks fantastic. The production design is spot on, the action sequences are kinetic but shot without a trace of shakeycam, and only a few of them are ripped off from The Matrix and Terminator 2. Prateek’s opening dream sequence, which features Khan as Lucifer as long-haired Final Fantasy-styled prettyboy using his oversized sword to fight Sanjay Dutt on the Moon is amazing.

As impressive as the visuals are, though, I was left feeling a bit . . . unfulfilled. The movie rushes from gorgeous set piece to gorgeous set piece without really giving the characters time to react to anything, so the whole picture is lacking in context. There are moments of pathos, but they’re mostly crammed into a song and then forgotten about. The lack of feeling is particularly jarring because this movie stars the Rajah of Relationships, the Maestro of Melodrama, the Tzar of Manly Tears, but for most of the film he’s playing an emotionless robot.

I can understand the lack of melodrama because this movie is clearly aimed at the younger set, and adolescent boys are not known for their interest in interpersonal drama and talking about feelings. My real problem with Ra.One is that the movie keeps introducing interesting ideas, and then refuses to follow up on any of them. For example, there’s a wonderful character bit where Prateek takes a handful of his father’s ashes and, instead of immersing them in the river, he sticks them in his pocket. It’s a great character bit which could be used to set up either some genuinely satisfying character development or an emotionally manipulative sci-fi climax (or both!) but it is never mentioned again.
(I don’t mind the Chitti cameo, though, because it’s so gratuitous and bizarre. It’s like Batman popping up in the new Spider-Man movie to have a cup of coffee, and then leaving.)

I’m a little frustrated. I want to like Ra.One, and I guess I do, but I’m afraid it will always be my second favorite Indian movie about robots.

The Taming of the Jerk

Dulha Mil Gaya (2010) is never going to win any awards for originality; the story of the scorned or neglected wife winning back her husband by harnessing the twin forces of jealousy and a fabulous makeover is one of those stories that recurs over and over again in Bollywood.

Let’s start with the husband. At the start of the film, Tej Danraj (Fardeen Khan), known as Donsai to his friends, is a billionaire playboy who lives in the West Indies with his manservant Hussain Bhai (Johhny Lever.) Donsai takes his job as a billionaire playboy seriously, and spends his time winning the hearts of beautiful women, and then not marrying them.

Unfortunately for the eternal bachelor, his late father’s will was very specific; Donsai inherits everything, but only if he marries Samarpreet Kapoor (Ishitta Sharma), daughter of a family friend. On the advice of slimy family lawyer Vakil (Vivek Vaswani) Donsai (as Tej) flies out to the Punjab, meets the Kapoors (who are naturally wonderful people and the salt of the Earth), marries Samarpreet in a quite civil ceremony, then flies back home, sending the family a check every month in order to soothe his wounded conscience.

Samarpreet grew up knowing she’d be marrying Tej someday, and upon meeting him she instantly falls in love. When months pass without even a word from her new husband, she’s heartbroken, and finally decides to fly to the West Indies herself and find out exactly what’s wrong. Naturally, the trip is a complete disaster; nobody’s there to meet her at the airport, the security guards won’t even let her in the house, when she does manage to sneak in she finds there’s a party going on and her husband is making out with a stranger in a bikini, and after she’s thrown out of the house crying, she’s promptly hit by a car.

What Samarpreet needs is a fairy godmother. What she gets is Shimmer (Sushmita Sen), an eccentric supermodel and Dorsai’s friend and neighbor. Shimmer literally picks Samarpreet up off the street, and after learning her story, resolves to help. Naturally, that means transforming simple Punjabi girl Samarpreet Kapoor into the beautiful and glamorous Samara Capore.

Shimmer has her own romantic troubles, of course. The incredibly wealthy and successful Pawan Gandhi (Shahrukh Freaking Khan) is completely devoted to her, and she probaly loves him too, but she’s too wrapped up in her career to admit it – at least, that’s what her sidekicks Lotus (Howard Rosemeyer) and Jasmine (Suchitra Pillai-Mallik) think. Samarpreet decides to repay Shimmer for her kindness by helping Pavan and Shimmer to get together.

Introducing the Pavan and Shimmer romantic subplot could have been a problem; Fardeen Khan is a fine dramatic actor and one of the best creeps in Bollywood, but when it comes to playing the romantic lead, he’s no Shahrukh Khan, while SRK is. The writers wisely decided to make this a plot point, with Donsai feeling completely inadequate in the face of Pavan’s amazing romantic charisma.

Another nice touch is that Shimmer encourages Samarpreet to ask herself if she really wants her husband back, rather than assuming that existing relationships must be preserved at all costs. Of course, Samarpreet does decide that yes, she does want him, because he’s become much less of a jerk (and because existing relationships must be preserved at all costs) but it was refreshing that the characters didn’t consider it a foregone conclusion.

Apart from these flourishes, Dulha Mil Gaya is . . . solid. It’s an entertaining movie with a good cast and some funny bits. It won’t go on my list of best Bollywood movies ever, but I’m glad I watched it.

The streets could be meaner.

Legendary Bollywood actor Dev Anand died this month, so this week I’m reviewing Taxi Driver (1954), which is at once a charming romance, a gritty crime drama, and a reminder that “gritty’ doesn’t always mean “dark.”

Taxi driver Mangal (Anand), known as “Hero” to his friends, is decidedly scruffy, his best friend Mastana (Johnny Walker) is a pickpocket, and he spends his evenings in a bar; not the ideal romantic lead, in other words. Still, Hero is a genuinely nice guy and very protective of the people around him; there’s a reason they call him “Hero,” and a reason why he’s caught the eye of sultry bar-dancer Sylvie (Sheila Ramani).

When Hero rescues Mala (Kalpana Kartik, the future real life Mrs. Anand) from a pair of lecherous goons, life suddenly gets complicated. Mala is a simple girl from the village, in Bombay to look for Ratan Lal, the music director who complimented her voice while passing through the village a year ago. Unfortunately, the address she has for Ratan Lal is a year old, and she has no idea how to track him down. Mala has no money, and she can’t go home, so Hero takes her to his apartment, and goes outside to sleep in the car.

The next day, Hero and Mala look for Ratan Lal, without success. The day after, they do it again. Gradually, though, their odd living arrangement becomes the new status quo; Hero returns to driving the taxi, but with Mala as his secret house-guest.

Just when everything is going well, Hero’s sister-in-law comes for a visit. There’s no way she would understand an unrelated woman living in Hero’s apartment, so he quickly comes up with the worst plan possible, and disguises Mala as a boy, probably just so we can see Kalpana Kartik learn to swear and walk like a man. Bizarrely, it works, and soon Mastana and the rest of the gang are introduced to “Rajput”, Hero’s new cleaner.

One of the lecherous goons from the beginning of the movie (I don’t think the character is ever named, but I like to call him Frenchie, since he’s a string of onions and a beret away from looking like a stereotypical cinematic Frenchman) hasn’t forgotten about the girl who literally got away. he follows Hero to the bar, hoping to pick a fight, but Sylvie manages to defuse the situation with a quick dance number. Undeterred, Frenchie and the gang steal Hero’s taxi and use it as the getaway car for a bank robbery. Hero makes a full report to the police, and he and Mala are both in danger when the gang decide they need to be silenced.

As a romance, Taxi Driver works very well; Anand and Kartik have a fun, light-hearted chemistry and the relationship that develops onscreen is so understated that neither character seems to notice it until it’s threatened. As a gritty crime drama? Well, there is crime, and the movie’s Bombay certainly looks and feels seamy, but it’s nowhere near as seamy as it could be. And Frenchie and his gang are so wildly incompetent that it’s hard to take them seriously; when you try to silence a witness by shooting him in a crowded nightclub full of potential witnesses, you’re probably better off in jail, anyway.

Romeo must play dead.

Roadside Romeo (2008) is, in theory, a joint venture, produced by Yash Raj Films and the Walt Disney Company. I’m really not sure how much input Disney had, but after an introductory, mostly silent short in which Donald and Mickey discover that cooking Indian food is hard and they should get a woman to do it for them, the film is a whole lot of Yash Raj, and a little bit Disney.

Romeo (Saif Ali Khan) was a pampered family pet, living in a mansion and apparently given the run of the place, including his own bedroom and access to the family pool. That’s all over, now – the family moved to London and left their dog behind.

Romeo wanders the street in abject poverty for about fifteen minutes before being cornered by a street gang of Bollywood stereotypes, including Guru, the tough leader with a heart of gold (Vrajesh Hirjee); Hero English (Kiku Sharda), the guy who thinks he can speak English but really can’t; Mini (Tanaaz Currim Irani), the tough girl who wants to be just like the boys, who in this case is a tough cat who wants to be just like the dogs; and Interval (Suresh Menon), the annoying comic relief who speaks entirely in movie quotes and bad impressions. (There’s also an adorable orphan/mouse, but he doesn’t do much.) Romeo quickly wins over the gang with his amazing grooming skills, and they decide to open a salon together. (Because of course stray dogs have a functioning economy, based on the bone standard, can use scissors, and are able to redecorate a vacant lot without any humans noticing.)

There’s a problem, of course. The gang started the salon business without consulting Charlie Anna (Javed Jaffrey), the local canine crime lord who maintains control of the neighborhood with ht ehelp of his “angels,” a sultry trio of kung fu canines.

When Charlie’s official sidekick Chhainu (Sanjay Mishra), the ugliest dog in the world, comes by to collect protection money, Romeo chases him away. This does not make Charlie Anna happy, but before he can properly torture the gang, Romeo manages to smooth things over.

Then Romeo makes things worse. Late at night, Romeo hears a mysterious voice singing. He follows it, and discovers Laila (Kareena Kapoor) dancing alone on a rooftop. He’s immediately smitten, but she’s reluctant. What he doesn’t know is that Charlie Anna is also plenty smitten with Laila, and makes a habit of roughing up dogs who get too close. Romeo escapes a beating by promising to help Charlie win Laila’s heart, and it’s just about this time that Laila decides she really likes Romeo after all . . .

The animation in Roadside Romeo is pretty good, as Indian animation goes. It’s certainly not on the level of what you see in, say, Kung Fu Panda, but it’s comparable to what you see in Legends of Awesomeness. I do have an issue with the character designs, though; they display a sort of quantum anthropomorphism. Sometimes the dogs move like dogs, sometimes they move like dogs walking on their hind legs, and sometimes, especially when dancing, they move like people. Watching the dogs shift from Tom and Jerry to Lady and the Tramp and back is a little disturbing.

If the characters were not dogs, Roadside Romeo could be an average Bollywood romantic comedy from the 90s, the sort of thing that launched Saif Ali and Kareena’s respective careers. The movie is for children, of course, so everything is softened somewhat; Charlie Anna threatens and throttles, but never actually beats anyone up, for instance, and Laila is basically a bar dancer but faces no social stigma at all. Still, this is a movie with a Disney look and a Bollywood heart.

The Gang That Wasn’t There

C Kkompany (2008) isn’t just a Bollywood screwball comedy about a gang of lovable losers looking for one big score that will change their lives forever. It also flirts pretty aggressively with the populist notion of the common man standing together to achieve what the government can’t or won’t. It’s an idea that shows up often in Bollywood, and that’s understandable, given that the modern Indian state was born from just that kind of action. Granted, I don’t think that extortion by telephone was quite what Gandhi had in mind.

Our three protagonists are relatively ordinary men with relatively ordinary problems. Ramakant Joshi (Anupam Kher) is a retired accountant living with his very successful but deeply ungrateful son Purshottam (Nitin Ratnaparkhi). Labhodar (Rajpal Yadav) is short, angry, and lives in fear of the day that his horrible wife tells their son that he actually works at the mall, in a chicken costume.

And then there’s Akshay Kumar (Tusshar Kapoor), a crime reporter who is in love with Priya (Raima Sen), who happens to be the much younger sister of brutal but soap opera obsessed crimelord Dattu (former Disco Dancer Mithun Chakraborty, who has grown much scarier with age). Akshay and Priya want to get married, but they’ll need money to fly away to somewhere safe first, so that they can avoid being killed. (“Crime reporter in love with a gangster’s sister” doesn’t really strike me as a common man with common problems, but then again I don’t live in Mumbai.)

The three friends play a prank on Purshottam in order to convince him to treat his father a little better; Labhodar calls up and pretends to be a gangster looking for money in exchange for lack of violence, then Ramakant takes the phone and diffuses the situation. And the three friends note that Purshottam is really eager to pay, and they toy with the idea of another call, but then laugh and forget it.

Then everything gets worse. After a fight, Labhodar’s wife drags their son to the mall to show him his father at work. Pushottam garlands his dead mother’s picture with artificial flowers rather than “waste money” on real ones. And Dattu arranges his sister’s marriage to another gangster, meaning Akshay has to raise the money to run away with Priya within a month or lose her forever. Suddenly blackmail and extortion doesn’t seem so bad.

The trio, after much consideration, name their fake criminal enterprise “C Company,” and send Pushottam a fake DVD showing the fake murder of the fake gangster from their previous prank. Pushottam is terrified, and agrees to pay up by the end of the month. Unfortunately, Akshay leaves a copy of the DVD at the TV station he works at, and the next day the media is buzzing about the mysterious “C Company.”

That would be the end of it, but Ramakant learns that a friend is being evicted by a greedy developer, along with his entire neighborhood, in order to make space for a shopping mall. Ramakant convinces Labhodar to help, and after a flashy scheme, the developer backs down, and the media are even more obsessed with C Company, who have been labelled the “Robin Hoods of the Underworld.”

The developer in question was paying protection to Dattu, which means that C Company is now hurting his business. Dattu questions Akshay about the new gang, and Akshay claims to know nothing. He’s now really, really sure it’s time to end the C Company business, and then his network assigns him to host a reality show in which ordinary people call in to talk about their problems, and find out whether the government or C Company solves them first.

The trio can’t help but get involved when they hear the stories of the people who call in, meaning more phone calls, and the C Company craze spirals completely out of control; suddenly, it’s not a fake gang anymore, it’s a fake political movement. And then Dattu, still determined to wipe out the Company, gets the lead he’s been hoping for.

C Kkompany is pretty good, as Bollywood screwball comedies go. The three leads manage to stay sympathetic throughout, and while the plot is completely unrealistic, it’s consistently unrealistic; if you accept the conceit that three knuckleheads could manage an extortion ring without anybody finding out or saying no, then the plot holds together very well. And Rajpal Yadav delivers a strong performance as an angry man who discovers a positive outlet for his boiling rage.

Still, I can’t help but be a little frustrated by the movie. The idea of the imaginary gang turning into an imaginary revolution with real results is fascinating, but the film too concerned with Akshay’s love life and Ramakant’s family woes to really focus on the implications. It’s an idea that’s too big for this movie.

Bhooty Call: A Flat

At first glance, A Flat (2010) looks like a typical modern Indian ghost story, right down to the angry vengeful ghost’s long black hair and bad posture. And honestly, the story is very traditional, but it’s told in a very different way. Not entirely successful, mind you, but it is different.

Prompted by a bad dream, Rahul (Jimmy Shergill) calls his former girlfriend Preity (Kaveri Jha) and learns that she’s getting married, and that she really doesn’t want to speak to him. Rahul immediately makes plans to leave America and return to India, but by the time his plane lands, Preity has vanished and his father (Sachin Khedekar) has been horribly murdered while preparing Rahul’s apartment, which means that a romantic reunion is pretty much off the table.

After his father’s funeral, Rahul visits the apartment, and discovers that it’s full of flashbacks. He basically wanders from room to room while remembering every stage of his (not entirely healthy, as it turns out) relationship with Preity.

He also keeps finding strands of long black hair throughout the apartment, and it’s clear to the viewer, but not to Rahul, that there’s something supernatural and really ticked off lurking in the background.
Preity finally calls. Rahul makes arrangements to meet her, but both the elevator and the stairs lead him directly back to his 17th floor apartment. The ghost begins haunting in earnest, and herds Rahul into the bedroom, where he discovers a diary belonging to Geetika (Hazel Croney), a simple, free spirited village belle who was rescued from an angry mob by Karan (Sanjay Suri), Rahul’s good friend and the guy who rented the apartment while Rahul was in America. That means more flashbacks, as Rahul learns how the happy filmi romance of Geetika and Karan went horribly, horribly wrong.

There are a lot of flashbacks in this movie. Most of the character development is discovered through flashback, rather than a more linear presentation of events. On the positive side, that means that the main plot itself is incredibly focused on the worst afternoon of Rahul’s life, so much so that it practically follows the Aristotelian Unities.

On the other hand, the movie is just over an hour and a half long, and with so many flashbacks, that means there’s time for maybe twenty minutes of scary stuff. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a scary twenty minutes, but it’s still only twenty minutes.