The Long Goodbye

RRR is a great movie, but not every Indian movie can be RRR.  And thank goodness for that!  If every movie is a bombastic, testosterone fueled festival of action, then they all start to blend together.  Soemtimes you need a change of pace, like a quirky feel-good family comedy set at a funeral.  And that's where Goodbye (2022) comes in.

Newly minted lawyer Tara Bhalla (Rashmika Mandanna) wins her first case and goes out to a nightclub to celebrate.  She leaves her phone at the club, only finds out that her mother Gayatri (Neena Gupta) has died suddenly when the bartender who returns her phone tells her.  She immediately makes plans to return to her childhood home in Chandigarh to be with her stern and very traditional father Harish (Amitabh Bachchan.)  She decides to leave her live-in boyfriend Mudassar (Shivin Narang) behind, since Harish doesn't approve.

Meanwhile Harish and the family housekeeper Delna (Payal Thapa) are trying to contact the rest of the family.  Oldest brother Karan (Pavail Gulati) and his wife Daisy (Elli Avrram) promptly catch a flight form their home in Los Angeles.  Adopted son Angad (Sahil Mehta) has a bit more trouble, and winds up stuck in Dubai for an extra day.  And nobody can get through to middle son Nakul (Abhishek Khan), who is off climbing a mountain somewhere.

Most of the family finally arrives, though there's still no sign of Nakul, and the preparations for the funeral rites begin, under the direction of busybody neighbor P.P. Singh (Ashish Vidyarthi).  And they bicker; Tara doesn't feel that the very traditional funeral rites are what her not especially traditional mother would have wanted.   Harish doesn't think his sons are taking the rites seriously enough.  P.P. Singh is just kind of patronizing.  And the Greek chorus of neighbors and friends of Gayatri marvel at the goings on; it's definitely sad, but not solemn, as good-hearted people bumble their way through personal loss, trying their best to make everything perfect because it's the only thing they can do.

And then things start to get better.  With the help of an unconventional pandit (Sunil Grover) the family start talking to each other rather than at each other.  Secrets are revealed, but they're generally nice secrets.  Tara and Harish start seeing things from one another's perspective, and Nakul finally shows up.

And that's it.  That's the plot.  People suffer a devastating loss, and they process it onscreen.  It's a very gentle film, very quirky, and above all very human, mixing moments of gentle comedy with Amitabh's big speech.  It's definitely worth a look if you want a change of pace.

No, you can't buy a vowel.

 In the Yama Cinematic Universe, the god Chitragupta is usually cast as Yama's comic sidekick, but he's an important religious figure in his own right, responsible for recording the good and bad deeds each person performs in life, and then judging them accordingly.  In Thank God (2022), Chitragupta takes center stage, but this time, he's cool.

Ayaan Kapoor (Siddharth Malhotra) was once a successful real estate agent who became briefly rich by dabbling in black money, then lost it all during the demonetisation of 2016.  Now, he's struggling to sell his own house. Fortunately, his wife Ruhi (Rakul Preet Singh) is a successful police officer, but Ayaan is so consumed by his losses and stressed over the sale of the house that he's neglecting Ruhi, their daughter Pihu (Kirara Khanna) and his mother (Seema Pahwa).  His relationship with his sister (Urmilla Kanetkar Kathore) is also a bit tense; she's been pouring all her energy and money into rebuilding the family home, because she blames herself for the fire which destroyed it when she and Aayan were children.

After another failed attempt to sell the house (it turns out that locking the potential buyers' son in the bathroom is a bad idea) Ayaan is driving away while bickering with Ruhi on the phone (another bad idea) when he has to swerve to avoid a motorcycle and instead hits another car.  And just like that, he's in Heaven, greeted by Yamdoot (Mahesh Balraj) and a mysterious figure calling himself CG (Ajay Devgn).

CG explains the situation: Ayaan is in critical condition, caught between life and death.  he has to compete in CG's game show and demonstrate that he has overcome his weaknesses; if he succeeds at a challenge, he earns white balls, and if he fails he gets black ones.  Earn more white and he can return to his life, but if he fails, he'll be immediately consigned to Hell.

And the game goers about as well as you'd expect.  Ayaan continues to demonstrate that he has absolutely not overcome his weaknesses, and CG is playing a deeper game than he lets on; all of the tests start to fit together, revealing the harm caused by Ayaan's selfish actions.  It all leads to one final test, one chance for Ayaan to redeem himself, and because he doesn't notice the test when offered, he fails.

Which isn't the end of the movie, obviously; this is a feel good family comedy with a message, and while a happy ending isn't guaranteed, it's pretty likely.  It's a redemption story, A Christmas Carol without the Christmas, Going Postal without the golems.  It's the story of one man learning how connected everything is, and that his actions have consequences for other people.

Thank God is probably not a very good movie, honestly.  It's predictable, the humor is hit and miss, the tone is wildly inconsistent, and the medical science in the climax is complete nonsense even by Bollywood standards.  Still, Devgn is consistently entertaining, and Malhotra manages to be likeable despite playing a complete jerk.  It's earnestly bad in the same way as many Bollywood comedies of the Nineties, so if you liked them, there's a decent chance you'll like this.

Hiatus!

 I'm off to Edinburgh for a few weeks.  Content will resume in January.

That's not how any of this works.

Indian cinema is known for its wild shifts in genre, but Jack N' Jill (2022) really commits to its wild shift in genre. It might not be enough to make it a good movie, but it does at least make it a somewhat more interesting movie.

Kesh (Kalidas Jayaram) is a brilliant scientist who has invented Kuttaaps (Soubin Shahir), a fully functional AI in a box.  he returns to India, accompanied by Kuttaaps and his Norwegian assistant Cheorlett (Ida Sophie Straume), reunites with his grandfather (Nedumudi Venu) and a gaggle of childhood friends, meets his nosy neighbor Tara (Shaylee Krishen), and builds a laboratory out in the forest so that he can complete his father's dream project, Jack N' Jill.

The Jack N' Jill project deals with brain augmentation; according to Kesh, humans use only 10% of their brains but the Jack N' Jill process can raise that to 100%!  This is, of course, complete nonsense that has been thoroughly debunked, and yet that's not the worst science in the movie - it's not even the worst science in that scene!  Kesh wants to skip animal testing and start testing the system on humans.  Specifically, he wants a human with "weak neural connections", and who is not aware that the experiment is taking place.

One of Kesh's buddies is Ravi (Basil Joseph), a man with shady connections and apparently no moral compass.  Ravi promises to find a subject and returns with Anthrappan (Indrans), a man with dementia who believes he's being taken to see his dead wife.  Stage One of Jack N' Jill goes horribly wrong, downloading a large packet of historical data directly into Anthrappan's brain, and he runs off into the forest shouting about Hitler.  Kesh and his team sort of shrug and start looking for their next subject.

Subject Number Two is Parvathy (Manju Warrier), a woman who is so traumatized that she's lost most of her memory, can no longer speak, and carries an iron with her everywhere she goes.  Kesh hooks some electrodes to her scalp, and after a short VR sequence she's speaking, singing, and dancing, and displaying an eclectic range of knowledge.  And you might be thinking, "Oh, it's Bollywood Flowers For Algernon," but no, it's about to get much weirder.

Phase Two involves bombarding Parvathy's brain with images of war and violent conflict.  According to Kesh, further traumatizing the already traumatized woman will give her "advanced survival skills," which is important for some reason.

It's about this time when Kesh meets Steven Tharakan (Sunil Varghese), a local businessman, and Stephen invites him to a talent show.  The original plan is for Parvathy to give a speech about freedom, because kesh has seen My fair Lady one too many times, but Parvathy doesn't want to give a speech so instead the group put together a quick Jazz number.  And during the Jazz number Stephen's son Joseph (Gokul Anand) makes unwanted advances to Tara, so Parvathy steps off the stage, knocks him out with her trusty iron, and collapses.

That's a problem, because Stephen and Joseph are evil businessmen, with a small army of violent goons at their beck and call, and it's increasingly clear that they have something to do with whatever traumatized Parvathy in the first place.  The only person who seems to know what happened is Stephen's adopted daughter Arathi (Esther Anil), but she's trapped in her father's shadow and unable to say anything.

Fortunately, it seems that Parvathy really did pick up incredible fighting skills from Phase Two, because  suddenly the movie is a violent revenge drama in which Parvathy keeps sneaking away from the group to deal with Stephen's men one by one after they try to bury her alive.  And yeah, the bad guys are genuinely vile, and it's viscerally satisfying to see Parvathy take them out through a combination of her newfound martial arts skills, Indian classical dance, and her trusty iron. 

(Also there's a cursory romantic subplot involving Tara's apparently hopeless love for Kesh, but that's treated as an afterthought.)

Ironically, Jack N' Jill is much less horrifying when it's a brutal revenge drama than when it's  a wacky sci-fi comedy about a handsome scientist and his annoying AI sidekick performing unethical experiments without the consent of their test subjects.  The bad guys definitely deserve an iron to the head, but Kesh really ought to be in jail.

 

Shiva Universe

Brahmastra Part One: Shiva (2022) is a movie with a lot of jobs to do; it's a superhero origin story and the first film in a planned trilogy and lay the foundation for a new cinematic universe.  But there's a reason why most cinematic universes never really get going.  You can't spend your entire movie setting up future projects; the movie the audience is watching now has to be about something.  Fortunately, Brahmastra is about something.

But before the movie can really get started, it has another job to do: enable celebrity cameos.  Shahrukh Khan plays scientist Mohan Bhargav, and somehow I didn't already know that, so I was the ideal audience for the reveal. 

Mohan is alone in his Delhi apartment studying a mystical artifact when his home is invaded by thugs Zor (Saurav Gurjar) and Raflaar (Rouhallah Gazi.)  Fortunately for Mohan, he has an ancient artifact of his own, the Vanarastra, an anklet which gives him the proportionate sass of a monkey, along with heightened agility and jumping powers.  Mohan casually humiliates his attackers Spidey-style until their boss shows up; Junoon (Mouni Roy) has an artifact of her own, and she uses it to overpower Mohan.

Meanwhile, in Mumbai, plucky DJ Shiva (Ranbir Kapoor) is living his best life.  He keeps catching glimpses of Isha (Alia Bhatt), and he falls for her - plummets for her, really.  He manages to make contact by climbing up the outside of an elevator, and after a lot of banter invites her to a party at his place, and it's actually cute and charming rather than creepy because they're both being really open and honest about their intentions.

The party turns out to be a birthday party for a little girl at the orphanage Shiva cares for, and Shiva reveals a bit of his backstory and motivation: he was orphaned as a baby, left with only a conch shell to remind him of his mother, and he cares for other orphans and looks for the light in every situation.  The romantic mood is spoiled somewhat when Shiva runs away after being suddenly overwhelmed by visions of Mohan being murdered in Delhi, though.  When he returns home, Isha is gone, and he starts to lament the fact that he has no way to find her again but the kids cut him off and explain that Isha is their Facebook friend now.

 Shiva tracks Isha down at her wealthy grandfather's estate, but along the way he catches a news report about Mohan's "suicide," and realizes that his visions are real.  Then he realizes that the next target he saw in the visions, artist Anish Shetty (Nagarjuna Akkineni) is in terrible danger.  So he rushes off to Varanasi and Isha insists on coming along and they . . . spend some time enjoying a romantic tour of the city.

Then Shiva lets slip that he is immune to fire and has a sort of vague control over it sometimes, and they remember the superhero plot and go looking for Anish. Before they find him, though, Shiva sees Junoon and the boys and they realize they have very little time, especially since Raflaar is wearing the Vanarastra.  Shiva and Isha manage to find Anish first, and Anish helps them escape with his ancient artifact, the Nandiastra, which gives him the power of a thousand bulls.  

The trio flee the city, headed for the mountain ashram maintained by Anish's guru Raghu (Amitabh Bachchan), but Junoon and her crew are following in a truck.  Anish sacrifices himself to send Junoon and Zor over the edge of a cliff, but Raflaar still has his heightened leaping powers, and tracks Shiva and Isha to the gates of the ashram.  Then he makes the mistake of threatening Isha, and Shiva unleashes a torrent of flames, burning him to ash.

Then Amitabh Bachchan appears and delivers exposition.  Long ago a group of sages used the celestial energy of Brahm Shakti to produce astras, talismans which function as weapons of incredible power, representing a number of animals and forces.  At the same time, they accidentally created the Brahmastra, mightiest of the astras, a weapon so powerful that it could destroy the world if activated.  The sages became a secret society known as the Brahmansh, charged with guarding the astras, and Mohan and Anish were both members of the society and guarded a third of the now broken Brahmastra,  And Shiva is himself an astra, the Agnyastra, able to control fire without the need for any talisman.  

There's more exposition available, but Raghu won't deliver it unless Shiva agrees to stay at the ashram (which doubles as a school for young Brahmansh to learn to use their powers, like a Himalayan X-Mansion.)  Nandini is sent away, which is a shame because Shiva's power springs from love.  And of course Junoon and Zor survived the fall, and they're building a dark army to attack the ashram.

Most of the elements of Brahmastra are things that I have seen before; there's a hidden school for budding superheroes like in the X-Men, a scavenger hunt for mystical talismans like in Jackie Chan Adventures, and a fighting style that mixes martial arts and elemental power like in Avatar.  And of course the secret society of Indian monks empowering a champion to protect the world is straight out of Shaktimaan. The real bad guy even has a secret origin that's almost identical to that of Tamraj Kilvish.   Like Shaktimaan, Brahmastra is really taking its inspiration from Hindu devotional films, but with a much higher budget.  It's executed well.  It's a tight superhero origin story with consistent rules for the superpowers.

Still, originality and execution are nice, but a movie should still be about something, and Brahmastra is about love.  Shiva is driven by love.  He's powered by love.  He saves the world through the force of his love, not in some hackneyed metaphorical sense, but literally loving the world enough to save it.  And while the movie gets dark at times (this is an Indian superhero movie, so it is not afraid to threaten children) there's a sense of optimism and hope throughout.  It's one of the most relentlessly positive superhero stories I've seen in ages.  

And then the movie ends with a plug for the sequel which couldn't be any more obvious without Nick Fury showing up.  But that is a story for another time.  Brahmastra is surprisingly self contained, despite being Part One.

At least there's no swastika hat.

Coolie No. 1 (2020) is a very close remake of 1995's Coolie No. 1, with Govinda swapped out for director David Dhawan's own son Varun.  It's a very close remake, so I'm not entirely sure why Dhawan bothered, but I will say this for him - as a director, he is incredibly consistent.  For good or ill, if you are watching a David Dhawan film, you are going to get a David Dhawan film, and this movie represents Dhawan at his Dhawaniest.

The plot is almost identical to the earlier movie.  Marriage broker Pandit Jai Kishen (Jaaved Jaafri) is humiliated by hotel owner Jeffrey Rozario (Paresh Rawal) when he brings a potential groom to meet Rozario's daughter Sarah (Sara Ali Khan).  Rozario insists that his daughter deserves a very wealthy man, and nobody who arrived by bus could possibly be good enough.

Kishen vows revenge, and as he stands in the train station glaring darkly at a picture of Sarah a gust of wind snatches the photo and deposits it on Raju (Varun Dhawan), who immediately falls in love with the girl in the picture.  Raju is a penniless orphan with an improbably backstory involving Chekhov's Long Lost Mother, but he's also handsome and probably charming and really easy to convince, which makes him the perfect vehicle for Kishen's revenge.  All they have to do is convince Rozario that Raju is really Kuwar Raj Pratap Singh, a billionaire prince from Singapore.

And with the help of Raju's mechanic friend Deepak (Sahil Vaid) and a borrowed car, they do exactly that, because while Rozario is constantly congratulating himself on his brain power, he's actually really gullible.  Sarah also falls for the "prince", while her sister Anju (Shikha Talsania) falls for Deepak after a two minute conversation.  As in the first movie, Kishen and Raju seal the deal by bringing Rozario to a rented mansion that actually belongs to Mahendra Pratap Singh (Anil Dhawan - yep!  David's brother), the billionaire whose son Raju is pretending to be.

The plot points continue to follow the first movie.  Sarah begs to go to the mansion in Mumbai.  Raju fakes a fight with his wealthy "father", then take s his new bride to a rented house.  Rozario arrives in town and sees Raju working as a coolie, leading to Raju inventing an alcoholic wastrel twin brother who is doing a permanent Mithun Chakroborty impression, and Rozario decides that said alcoholic wastrel would be the perfect husband for Anju.  The drug dealer (Vikar Verma)  Raju got arrested at the beginning of the movie turns out to be Mahendra Pratap Singh's real son, and there's a stabbing and a climactic fight scene at the hospital in which Raju and Deepak are in drag.  

There are some differences.  On the plus side, Rozario never slips drugs into anybody's drink, making him a bit less despicable than 1995's Hoshiyar Chand.  That's good.  On the other hand, because the plot is so familiar, the movie speeds through the early setup; Raju and Kishen don't have an earlier connection, so they are planning ti defraud people within minutes of their first meeting, and while Raju has a backstory laid out in the opening cartoon, a backstory which is not followed up on at all, the movie spends no time establishing his hunger for family, companionship and respect, the thing that's supposed to actually motivate him.  It's like trying to remake The Wrath of Khan without Space Seed - you can see where the emotional beats are supposed to go, but none of them have been earned.

Otherwise, it's like the first Coolie No. 1, an incredibly broad farce about terrible people committing fraud and never feeling a smidgen of guilt.  Normally in this kind of movie the hero is tormented by a guilty conscience, and their lies are exposed before they can get married, but not here!

Still, in a sense Coolie No. 1 is an impressive achievement; it's a disappointing remake of a movie that I didn't like very much the first time.

It's a twin movie with no actual twins.

Coolie No. 1 (1995) was  a big success for director David Dhawan, and now it's considered something of a cult classic in India, an excellent example of Dhawan's particular brand of comedy.  That can be a good thing, because he's made a number of successful films.  Of course, he also made Andaz, and I'm still mad about that one.

 Raju (Govinda) is a humble coolie, carrying luggage for disembarking passengers at the bus station.  Well, perhaps "humble" is the wrong word; Raju is proud to be "Coolie Number One," and wears an inscribed armband that he can point to while bragging.  He's a devoted follower of the Coolie's Code, determined to help carry the burdens of the people around him, and he is also (as is common for Bollywood heroes) unexpectedly good at beating people up.  He demonstrates both qualities when drug smuggler Mahesh (Mahesh Anand) hires him to carry two suitcases before being chased off by the police.  Raju tracks Mahesh down, delivers the suitcases as promised, and then beats him up and drags him to the police station.  Mahesh vows vengeance, but he's safely locked away, and it's not like he's the son of a wealthy businessman who will return to play a key role in the movie's climax or anything, right?

During another feat of bus station derring-do, Raju befriends priest and marriage broker Shadiram (Sadashiv Amrapurkar).  Shadiram brings a potential groom to meet Malti (Karisma Kapoor), the daughter of Hoshiyar Chand (Kader Khan), but when Hoshiyar Chand discovered that the family arrived by bus, he berates them for being too poor for his daughter, humiliating Shadiram in the process.  Shadiram vows revenge.

The plan is simple - disguise Raju as a rich prince visiting from Singapore, get him married to Malti, then reveal the truth to Hoshiyar Chand at a suitably dramatic time.  Raju is so smitten with Malti's photo that he agrees right away.  His mechanic friend Deepak (Harish Kumar) agrees to provide a "borrowed" car and pose as the driver, which is convenient because Hoshiyar Chand has two daughters, so Malti's sister Shalini (Kaanchan) can have a love interest too.

And the plan works really, really well.  Malti immediately falls for Raju as "Kunwar Mahendra Pratap Singh".  Literally - she falls out of a tree into his arms.  (Shalini falls for Deepak at the same time, but that's not a part of the plan, just a thing that happens.)  Hoshiyar Chand prides himself on being suspicious, but a quick visit to a rented mansion and a little reverse psychology are enough to make him agree to the match, and Raju and Malti are promptly married.  

And then Malti decides that she really wants to see this mansion everybody's talking about, and insists that Raju whisk her away to her glamorous new life in Mumbai.   He buys some time by pretending to be feuding with his "father," the businessman who owns the mansion (Kulbhushan Kharbanda) and storming away from the mansion and his alleged life of privilege, and the couple settle into a modest life in a rented home.  Also Shakti Kapoor is there and attempts comedy.

But it's a David Dhawan movie, so it needs more complication.  Hoshiyar Chand arrives in Mumbai to check on his daughter, and he arrives by bus, so he runs into Raju working as a coolie.  Raju quickly spins a story about his disgraced alcoholic philandering twin brother, and Hoshiyar Chand decides that that would be the perfect husband for Shalini.  Now Raju has to protect his original secret, maintain an imaginary twin brother, and avoid getting married to his sister-in-law.  Oh yes, and there is that angry drug dealer form the beginning of the movie.

David Dhawan has a distinct niche.  He makes broad comedies with a strong romantic track which manage to just pass the Indian censor board, and he's good at that.  Coolie No. 1 in particular is genuinely loved by a lot of people.  However, the movie can be a bit hard to watch for the first time in 2022,  The "trick the daughter of the man who insulted you into marrying under false pretenses" plan is kind of despicable, and it doesn't seem to bother the protagonists; they're upset that they have to keep coming up with new complicated lies rather than the simple ones they started with, but Raju in particular just wants to live with the wife who thinks he's someone else.

Hoshiyar Chand is even worse, with his insistence on marrying Shalini to the imaginary twin.  The movie's low point is the scene in which he tries to slip an aphrodisiac to the man he believes is an angry drunk and then leaves him alone with his daughter.  While the ladies are nice, the men are awful, but the movie ends with a happy reconciliation which is really not earned.

Once you get past all the awful people and a number of jokes that really didn't age well (in particular Shakti Kapoor's hearing aid, the fake Asian gibberish and the lead being in drag for the entire climactic fight) it's a well executed farce.  They really don't make them like this anymore, but on the other hand there's a reason for that.  And the less said about the swastika hat, the better.

(Okay, David Dhawan does make them like this anymore - the 2020 Coolie No. 1 is coming up next week.)