Bhooty Call - Anjaan: SCU

It's very tempting to compare Anjaan: Special Crimes Unit (2018) to the X-Files.  After all, both series feature a skeptic and a true believer investigating paranormal cases, and both shows combine "mythology" episodes which are tightly tied to an ongoing plotline with monsters of the week.  (Or monsters of the day - during its original run Anjaan ran on a soap opera schedule rather than as a weekly show.)  In this case, our skeptic is tough talking Mumbai cop Vikrant Singhal (Gashmeer Mahajani) and the true believer is psychic rookie cop Shivani Joglekar (Cherry Mardia), who just wants to find out what happened to her brother; later Delhi police officer Aditi Sharma (Heema Parmar) joins the team. 

Rather than aliens and liver eating mutants, the Special Crimes Unit deals with cases involving ghosts and cursed objects, along with the occasional yellow eyed demon and one vishkanya in a small but crucial role.  The big difference between Anjaan and the X-Files, though, is the way the officers are treated.  Mulder and Scully are considered a laughingstock, work out of a basement, and constantly have to worry about conspiracies above them in the chain of command.  Vikrant and the gang work out of their own (admittedly haunted) police station, and they are respected and generally deferred to by the other police they encounter.  Broadly speaking, when there's something strange in a given neighborhood, the local police know whom to call.

However, the X-Files isn't the only series that Anjaan reminds me of.  Some major plot elements are very reminiscent of the gloriously cheesy Nineties superhero serial Shaktimaan.  Both shows prominently feature mysterious sages, ancient symbols, heroes of uncertain parentage, and a drug that can turn humans into demons, and both Anjaan's Vanraj and Shaktimaan's Tamraj Kilvish are Satanic figures devoted to spreading evil and sin through the human world. The tone is entirely different, of course, and Vanraj comes across as Kilvish's edgy younger brother.

So is it scary?  Well, sometimes.  It's a show made for TV audiences, which means that gore is limited, and they tend to lean into Bollywood ghost story tropes rather than try to subvert them, which can make the scary moments kind of predictable.  On the other hand, those same tropes are often very well executed; I'm still a little unsettled by the haunted wedding bus and the hungry old lady, as well as the way the yellow eyed demons move.  One final word of warning, though: the baddies on this show can and do sometimes harm children, so if that's an issue, this may not be the show for you.

Bhooty Call 2019

It's almost October.  The nights are getting longer, the wind is getting colder, and something is stirring.  If you're careful, you can catch a glimpse as it meanders through ruined havelis, down creepy rural roads, and into the corners of poorly lit apartment buildings.  The Gorilla's Lament is back from the dead, but something came with it.  

It's almost October.  Time for a Bhooty Call.

The Bhooty Call is one of our favorite traditions here at the Gorilla's Lament offices, a month-long celebration of the many ghosts of Bollywood.  Look for a batch of scary and not-so-scary movies (and this year, one TV show) starting in October.

Run, Bhola, Run

Fraud Saiyyan (2019) opens with a full-fledged Benny Hill chase, as Bhola (Arshad Warsi) scrambles to escape the wrath of an angry wedding party.  He's just making his escape when the narration kicks in and we skip back in time to see just what he did to get into this mess.

Bhola is married to Sunita (Deepali Pansare), who dotes on him, gives him money, and asks for only one thing in return - she needs him to pick up her uncle Murari (Saurab Shukla) from the train station.  Before he can make contact, though, he's attacked by a gang of gun wielding goons, and dashes onto the train.  Murari recognizes Bhola from a picture Sunita sent him, but Bhola doesn't recognize Murari, so he doesn't mind taking a call from his other wife - well, one of his other wives.  Turns out Bhola has a lot of wives, and he's about to make the moves on a new candidate, the lovely Payal (Sara Loren) when her husband intervenes.

Bhola gets off the train at the next station, where he's attacked by the same gang of gun wielding goons.  (Apparently they are fast runners.)  Bhola dives into a car that happens to be driven by Murari, and turns on the charm, hoping for a ride to Benares.  Murari obliges, hoping for a chance to catch him in the act of bigamy (dodecagamy, as it turns out.)  And it fails - even when confronted with another wife, Sunita is too besotted to turn on her husband.

However, Bhola still doesn't know who Murari is, so Murari tries again, this time asking to become Bhola's student in the art of the con.  Bhola reluctantly agrees, mostly because Murari has a car.  And so they set out on a road trip of crime, with Murari subtly sabotaging Bhola along the way.

And then, suddenly, they run into Payal again.  Wealthy, recently widowed Payal.  Payal, who could be the answer to all of Bhola's problems, as long as he doesn't do anything stupid like falling in love.

Now, I like Arshad Warsi; he's the best second banana in Bollywood, and as a lead he has a sort of befuddled scruffy everyman charm.  This time, though, it's not enough.  Bhola is such a colossal, self-centered jackass that not even Warsi could make him likable.  On the other hand, I'm not sure if I was supposed to like Murari as much as I did; he was the obstacle in our unwitting hero's path, but again, our hero was such a jackass that he needed more obstacles to keep him from doiung bad things.  Either way, Saurabh Shukla is one of the finest "that guy"s in India, and it was nice to see him in such a meaty part.

 Fraud Saiyaan has a good cast and features some moments of genuine humor mixed in with the fart jokes, but charm can only take you so far. 

That just raises further questions!

From the moment I first saw the amazing movie poster, I have dreamed of watching Rocket Tarzan (1963). For the longest time, that was easier said than done, but the current copyright holders have finally put a nearly complete version on Youtube, and my dream has been fulfilled. Well, kind of - the print is grainy and occasionally skips, the sound drops out completely from time to time, and most seriously, there are no subtitles. Ive managed to watch the occasional movie without benefit of subtitles in the past, but Rocket Tarzan is particularly tricky since there is so much apparently going on and I still have yet to find a single plot summary online.

Here's what I've been able to figure out. Tarzan lives deep in the jungles of India or possibly Africa; either way, sometimes he fights lions and sometimes he fights tigers. he's not alone in the jungle, though. There's a nearby kingdom, which may be a surviving Roman colony, or may be an ordinary isolated kingdom with a fondness for cosplay. There is also a brilliant professor, his beautiful daughter, and his laurel-and-hardyish lab assistants/comic relief sidekicks. The professor is trying to build a rocket to travel to the moon. The people of the mystery kingdom are helping him, but a guy with a mustache wants the rocket for himself! Fortunately, Tarzan is there to help, and also fortunately the comic sidekicks are surprisingly competent; one of them gains superhuman strength and combat skills when he drinks from the bottle he always carries with him, but I'm not completely sure if it's some sort of potion or he's just a mean drunk.

After many shenanigans and kidnappings and narrow escapes the main characters all climb aboard the rocket (with Mustache Guy stowing away) and fly to the moon, where they discover ancient ruins, cheap sets, giant cardboard stars, and a big-nosed evil alien who sends a robot (or "Robert," as he keeps saying) to attack our heroes. (They are actually menaced by two apparently unrelated robots. The one from the poster is by far the more convincing of the pair.) The Robert is defeated, the big nosed alien is blown up, and then Tarzan faces Mustache Guy in, and I am not making this up, a lightsaber duel.

Rocket Tarzan is obviously very different from the Bollywood movies of today; with all the narrow escapes and sudden twists and turns it's structured more like an old fashioned movie serial, like Commando Cody with occasional musical numbers. I'm not sure if my experience really counts as watching the movie, since I'm still not clear on what just happened, but on the other hand, I don't know if it would make much more sense even with subtitles. Either way, though, I'm still counting this as a dream fulfilled.

What can change the nature of a man?

Thugs of Hindustan (2018) is a movie about thugs.  In Hindustan.  These are not the murderous Kali cultists you may know from pulp fiction and British propaganda; these thugs are heroic freedom fighters, led by noble badass Kudabaksh (Bollywood legend Amitabh Bachchan) and his ward, literal warrior princess Zafira (Fatima Sahna Shaikh, who played one of the kids in One 2 Ka 4 and suddenly I feel so very, very old.)  Kudabaksh and Zafira have a tragic backstory, but the film explains it right away, so I'm not going to bother. The thugs are fighting against the tyranny of the British East India company, personified by the nefarious John Clive (Lloyd Owen), and their first move is to steal a British ship because in addition to being a drama about the struggle for Indian independence, this is also a pirate movie.

In order to locate Kudabaksh, Clive hires charming scoundrel Firangi Sailor (Aamir Khan), and I am deeply disappointed that this movie has a lead character whose name literally means "foreign sailor" and nobody ever makes the obvious "named after his father" joke.  Firangi manages to feign heroism long enough to join up with the thugs, betrays them, betrays the British, and so on.  One of the many criticisms of this movie is that Firangi is just a copy of Captain Jack Sparrow, but while there's an element of truth there (they're both weirdos with questionable loyalties, awesome hats, and eye makeup who somehow manage to convince people to trust them), Firangi is a more self-aware character than Sparrow is.  The movie is at its best when it's  about Firangi and Kudabaksh, two strong characters played by two great actors musing about human nature and whether change is really possible.

But the movie is not always at it's best.  A good masala movie will leap over genre boundaries with purpose, while Thugs of Hindustan just sort of meanders from one genre to the next.  There are pirates, and then Firangi is dressing up as a British officer to woo a courtesan (Katrina Kaif) and then there';s a literal Benny Hill chase scene, and on to the next thing, over and over.  The same meandering spirit affects the fight scenes, which should be great.  Kudabaksh glowers impressively, Zafira is fast and acrobatic and seems to have the bow from Hawk the Slayer, and Firangi swashes all the buckles, but there's no real weight to anything, so it all comes off as very by the numbers - pretty numbers, but numbers nonetheless.

I'm a little frustrated.  Thugs of Hindustan is not a bad movie, but it could have been a really good movie.  Like Firangi, it needs to commit.

Community theatre saves lives.

One of the fringe benefits of watching a lot of movies made in a language I do not speak, from a country where I do not live, produced by an industry that I don't really follow, and advertised on TV channels that I do not watch is that often when I sit down to watch a movie, all I have to go on is the Netflix summary and maybe a few familiar names listed in the cast. Even today, I can be surprised. Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga (2019) surprised the hell out of me. That said, I'll be spoiling all of the things, so if you want to be surprised too, stop reading, turn on Netflix, watch the movie, then come back. I'll still be here.

Let's get the obvious stuff out of the way first. There's a boy, struggling Delhi playwright Sahil (Rajkummar Rao). There's a girl, small town garment factory heiress Sweety (Sonam Kapoor.) Boy meets girl, girl tells boy his play sucks because he's obviously never been in love, boy helps girl escape from an angry man who turns out to be her brother Babloo (Abhishek Duhan). Boy discovers that girl is from a small town, and decides to produce his next play there, with local talent, assisted only by the theater company's caterer (and wannabe actress) Chatro (Juhi Chawla, who, I believe I have mentioned, is the absolute best.)

And at first, everything happens just as you would expect. Sweety's father, Bablbir (Anil Kapoor, Sonam's actual dad) is strict but loving. He also always wanted to be a chef, but was prevented by his own strict parents, so naturally Sahil meets him while he's cooking and assumes he's the family chef. Rumor has it that Sweety is in love with a Muslim man, and everybody (including Sahil) assumes that man is Sahil. It's not. Drama! Complications! Then Sahil confesses his love, and Sweety tells him the truth: she's not in love with a Muslim man, she's in love with a Muslim woman, Kuhu (Regina Cassandra.)

Sahil quickly gets over himself and resolves to help Sweety. (One of the more subtle Good Things about this movie is that this isn't presented as an act of amazing nobility or anything; Sahil's just being a decent person.) Of course, when all you have is a playwright, every problem looks like a stage, so Sahil comes up with the fairly terrible plan of producing a play about a young Indian woman played by Sweety in love with another woman, played by Kuhu. Sweety's family will be so moved by the play that they'll accept Sweety when she comes out to them. Things fall apart in short order, with Sweety outed ahead of schedule, but she insists on continuing the play anyway, not because she thinks it will help her now, but because it would have been a lifeline to her younger self, something to show her that she's not completely alone.

Ek Ladki is not much of a romance. Sweety and Kuhu are already in an established (if secret) relationship, and the onscreen relationship is incredibly chaste, to boot; there's some hugging and some earnest conversations, but Chatro and Balbir get to display a lot more chemistry. But that doesn't really matter, because Sweety is right; this is not a movie about romance, it's about representation. The emotional climax happens before the happy ending, during the play's performance, as the audience realizes what the play's actually about. Some people stay, some people storm out, but the camera lingers on one young girl's face as she suddenly realizes that she's not alone.

It was a nice surprise.

Madam, my heart is yours sincerely.

Quick Gun Murugun: Misadventures of an Indian Cowboy (2009) is the most action-packed movie about vegetarianism I've ever seen. Murugun (Doctor Rajendra Prasad) is, as advertised, a cowboy, which means he considers it his sacred duty to protect cows, especially from the people who want to eat them. (This is India, after all.) Murugun wanders the dusty plains of South India in the 1980's, accompanied only by his horse and his Locket Lover (Anu Menon), the image of his deceased sweetie who still speaks to him, mostly to nag him about getting a steady job, maybe something in IT? In the course of his wandering and gunslinging, Murugun runs afoul of Rice Plate Reddy, a gangster who plots to force all the local hotels to stop serving vegetables and instead serve beef. After a Crouching Tiger-inspired ambush in a coconut forest, Murugun is captured and delivered to Reddy, who defies centuries of villainous tradition and just shoots the hero while he has the chance. RIP Quick Gun.

As soon as he reaches Heaven, Quick Gun files the proper paperwork to be sent back to Earth. Unfortunately, the wheels of bureaucracy turn slowly, and he's sent back to Mumbai in the twenty first century. Locket Lover thinks this is the perfect opportunity to get a job selling kerosene, but instead he reunites with his older brother and sister-in-law, then sets out to track down Reddy, who has become a business tycoon and is about to launch McDosas, a chain restaurant with an all-meat menu. He also meets the lovely Mango Dolly (Rambha), a bar singer and Reddy's secret girlfriend.

What follows is a dizzying array of explosions, kidnapped housewives, and completely improbably gunfights. The special effects are, frankly, a bit on the cheap side, but it's all a part of the fun. Despite the computer-aided supernatural gunslinging, though, I think the closest comparison I could make is to Adam West's Batman; Quick Gun Murugun is a portly middle aged man in a technicolor cowboy outfit who wanders through one ridiculous situation after another, but he's also a fearless hero with a kind heart and a natural poetry to his dialogue, and the movie never loses sight of that.

"The Earth is my bed. The sky is my ceiling. The whole of creation is my native place. My name is Murugun. Quick Gun Murugun. Mind it!"