Behold the eldritch terror of commercial zoning!

As the title suggests, Gang of Ghosts (2014) contains many, many ghosts.  They're not really a gang, though; it's really more like a retirement community of ghosts.  The movie opens with an animated song and dance number featuring wacky dancing skeletons (the best kind of skeleton) singing about the plight of the modern ghost in a world in which old, hauntable buildings are being knocked down at a steady pace.  And yes, this is a movie about the housing problems of the dead.  It's kind of like Bollywood Beetlejuice, except different in nearly every conceivable way.

Aditya (Parambrata Chattopadhyay) is an ad director, scouting for a location for his next commercial.  He finds the perfect place in the Royal Mansion, a ruined building gently decaying in Mumbai.  The mansion has only escaped being torn down because there is an ongoing legal dispute about exactly who owns it; this will be important later.  Due to a series of contrived events, Aditya winds up staying the night in the mansion, where he meets Raju Writer (Sharman Joshi), an aspiring but so far failed script writer who finally convinces Aditya to listen to his movie pitch, and that is the framing story.

As Raju explains, the Royal Mansion once belonged to Gendemal Hemraj (Anupam Kher), a local nobleman who rose to prominence by selling his mill to the British; the mill workers are so poorly treated that they finally burn the mill down, with Gendemal inside.  Post-death, he returns home and commences haunting the Royal Mansion, where is is quickly joined by the ghost of British officer Ramsey (J. Brandon Hill.)

As the years pass, more and more homeless ghosts movie into the mansion.  The ghost of fading Bollywood starlet Manoranjana Kumari (Mahi Gill) is followed by Bengali apothecary Bhootnath Bhaduri, murdered nobleman-turned-chef Akbar Kwaja Khan (Rajpal Yadav), Brigadier Hoshiar Singh, deceased (Yashpal Sharma), burned out rock star Robin Hooda (Vijay Varma), star-crossed lover Tina (Meera Chopra), and Atmaram (Asrani), a poor taxi driver run over by a rich man whom the movie pointedly does not name.  They are an odd bunch, drawn not only from different times and places, but from different film genres.

And for a while, the ghosts just sort of . . . hang out.  Bhootnath and Akbar and Singh all compete for Manoranjana's affections.  Tina has a crush on Robin.  Atmaram drives them places.  There's really nothing overtly supernatural going on, apart from a brief bit of haunting to drive away an intrusive film company.  And then, disaster strikes.  The court case about the Royal mansion's ownership is resolved, and the building is sold to greedy (and generally terrible) developer Bhuteria (Rajesh Khattar), who plans to knock the place down and build a shopping mall.  The desperate ghosts turn to SpookBook (really!) to look for help, and wind up with Babu Hatkaka (Jackie Shroff), the one armed ghost of a gang lord and representative of yet another genre.

While he's a freelance ghost hired by some desperate spooks to chase away some pesky humans, Babu isn't very much like Beetlejuice at all; he's a gangster in death as he was in life, and plan for dealing with Bhuteria is just to shoot the guy.  The others talk him out of it, and together they come up with a more . . . creative solution.

This is possibly the least overtly supernatural movie about ghosts I have ever seen - it's about as Gothic as a baby duck on a sunny day.  The ghosts eat, they sleep, they buy things at the store, they go to the beach.  It's almost as if the whole ghost thing is an excuse to turn a strange assortment of characters into a little community, then threaten that community with encroaching gentrification.  Still not much of a gang, though.

Movie, you had me at "Murder Truck"

I have a theory about film.  (I have many theories about film, but this is the one I keep coming back to.)  My theory is this: any situation can be turned into a comedy by adding the words "wackiness ensues when . . ." to the beginning of the synopsis.  In the case of Maragadha Naamayam (2017), wackiness ensues when a pair of petty criminals resort to necromancy in their pursuit of a cursed emerald.

Senguttavan (Aadhi) and Elango (Daniel Annie Pope) are aspiring jewel smugglers, apprenticed to Nochukuppam (Ramdoss), a surprisingly sensible smuggler who deliberately avoids the big scores, opting to just smuggle enough to get by.  Senguttavan is frustrated, since he got into the business in order to make money, but Nochukupam is determined to play it safe.

Senguttavan is a little distracted from his pursuit of the smuggler's craft by his hopeless crush on Chanakaya (Nikki Galrani).  He's never spoken to her, only pined from afar, and before he can approach her, she becomes engaged to another man, who turns out to be an abusive jerk.

And then Senguttavan gets his big chance.  (His big chance to make money smuggling, that is; Chanakaya marries the abusive jerk and vanishes from the movie.  For now.)  A local fixer named John (Mime Gopi) is looking for someone to bring him a huge emerald called the Maragadha Naanayam, or the "Emerald Coin" if the subtitles are to be believed.  None of the local smugglers will take the job, not even the infamous Twinkle Ramanathan (Anandaraj), because the emerald carries a deadly curse.

Nochukuppam wants nothing to do with the job, but Elango agrees to help, as long as Senguttavan agrees to visit a priest first and seek spiritual protection.  The priest shows them the spirits of the 132 previous victims of the curse, all run over by the same truck, and gives them a lemon, along with a mantra to summon the spirit of one of the previous victims to possess the lemon, which should ward off the murder truck.

The pair try the mantra, attempting to summon the spirit of Elango's uncle Chidambaram, but it does not seem to work, and then they are told that Nochukuppan has suddenly died.  They dutifully attend the funeral of their beloved mentor, and the lemon drops unnoticed into the grave.  That night, the hapless smugglers are confronted by the ghost of Chidambaram in Nochukuppan's body.  The ghost uncle is bound to help the pair retrieve the emerald safely, whether they want him to or not.  (They do not.)  But he insists on bringing over three of his friends to help, so after a late night search for recently deceased bodies, one of which turns out to be Chanakaya, there are three (and occasionally four) dead bodies walking around, Twinkle is suddenly interested in the emerald after all and happy to kill to get it, and then things start to get weird.

Maragadha Naanayam has all the ingredients for an incredibly broad black comedy/slapstick farce, but instead it's the surprisingly nuanced story of two petty criminals learning to trust and appreciate their zombie cohorts.  Don't get me wrong, this is a farce, and some of the jokes are quite dark, but the humor is grounded in character, and the characters are layered and well rounded.  They even handle the "ghost of a male wrestler inhabiting the corpse of the female love interest" plotline with a deft touch.  I was expecting more wackiness, but I can live with a good movie instead.

The unbearable lightness of being a spy.

It's been a rough week for Bollywood. Irrfan Khan, one of India's best actors, a man who effortlessly slipped between boundaries, from character roles to lead roles, from arthouse cinema to popular blockbusters, and even from Bollywood to Hollywood, died suddenly.  The very next day, beloved Bollywood fixture Rishi Kapoor died as well.  Kapoor started is career as a fresh-faced romantic lead, but his acting career really blossomed when he grew older and moved to character roles.  It's like the industry lost its favorite quirky uncle and its jolly grandfather the same week.

Khan and Kapoor did one movie together, D-Day (2013.)  It's billed as an action thriller, but it's very much an actor's movie, giving both men plenty of scope to display their talents.  The usually affable Kapoor plays Goldman, India's most wanted, responsible for several terror attacks on Indian soil.  Goldman is quick to point out that this isn't a matter of ideology for him; he's not a terrorist, he's a don.  He only kills people because the money's good.

Goldman is currently hiding out in Pakistan under the watchful eye of the ISI, but he's determined to attend his son's wedding, and that gives Indian intelligence an opening.  RAW chief Ashwini (Nassar) assembles a team of four deniable agents to bring him back alive.  The team includes petty criminal Aslam (Aakash Dahiya), explosives expert Zoya (Huma Qureshi), brutal mercenary Rudra (Arjun Rampal) and Wali Khan (Irrfan Khan), an agent who has spent nine years undercover as a barber in Karachi, and is now married to Nafisa (Shriswara), with a son (Dwij Handa.)  Rudra is qhuick to criticize Wali for his family entanglements but that doesn't stop him from drifting into a relationship with a local prostitute (Shruti Haasan).

Plans are made.  Wali arranges for his wife and son to fly to London, then burns dowwn his own house to cover his tracks, and then the quartet spring into action.  It's a good plan, and almost nothing could go wrong, but it's April 14, 2010, and nobody counted on a volcano erupting in Iceland and completely disrupting air travel to and from Europe.  Wali's wife and child are not safe, and everything quickly spirals out of control.

This is probably the most somber spy movie I've ever seen.  Nobody's really happy; Wali is racked with guilt over his double life, Zoya is quarreling by phone with her husband (Rajkummar rao), Rudra has stumbled into human emotion for the first time in years . . . even Goldman is bored and anxious.  I suppose the wedding singer (Rajpal Yadav in a cameo) is having a good time.  The action scenes are brutal and quick rather than flashy, the technology used is completely plausible, and the agency really is willing to disavow all knowledge of their agents.

In the end, though, this is an actor's movie, and the acting is good!  I've been a bit hard on some of Arjun Rampal's performances in the past (the phrase "entirely made of wood" may have been involved) but I have to admit that Rampal is very good here.  Rudra needs to silently smolder while trying to keep emotion at arms length, and Rampal smolders well.  Rishi Kapoor is cast against type here; he's usually cast as the lovable but wise father figure, while Goldman is a monster.  he's jolly, but the smile never quite reaches his eyes.  And Irrfan Khan is really good as a man torn between his family and his country and constantly on the verge of losing everything.  Bollywood tends to default to big: big action, big dance numbers, big displays of emotion.  Irrfan Khan was a master of small, able to convey tremendous feeling with a glance or a gesture.

Irrfan Khan and Rishi Kapoor were both prolific actors, and I've seen only a fraction of their respective bodies of work; I'll be enjoying their performances for years to come.  Still, the industry is diminished by their passing.  They will be missed.

Grail quest.

Jackpot (2019) is a caper movie, with a gang of charming but perhaps morally shady misfits stumblimg into crazy situations while chasing after a MacGuffin which can change all of their lives.  In Indian movies, the MacGuffin is usually a bag of diamonds, but in Jackpot the object of desire is a magical pot with the power to multiply anything placed within it.  So, you know, not really going for gritty realism here.

Our misfits in chief are Akshaya (Jyotika) and Masha (Revathy), small time con artists who steal from the middle class and give to . . . themselves, mostly, but they both have the requisite heart of gold and will help the less fortunate when needed.  They are an effective partnership, but Masha is clearly the quick-witted sidekick, while Akshaya is the swaggering hero who can con with the best of them but also beat up a room full of thugs when needed.

The titular jackpot is buried in the estate of Maanasthan (Anandaraj).  Maanasthan likes to think of himself as a crime lord, but he's really just a big bully who employs a gang of dim-witted henchmen and lives in fear of his police inspector sister Maanasthi (also played by Anandaraj, and it's exactly as funny as it sounds, i.e. not very).  Maanasthan has no idea that the pot even exists, let alone is buried on his estate, so he has no idea why these two crazy women keep messing with him.

And then there's Ragul (Vinu Krithik), a handsome young man who dreams of a career in the movies.  One night Ragul insults the wrong soothsayer and is magically transformed into a giant insectthe decidedly less handsome Yogi Babu.  In his new form, Ragul has no identification and even his parents don't believe he is who he says he is, so after his own set of misadventures, he's left hungry and wandering the streets until he manages to stumble on to the main plot.

When discussing South Indian films, you'll sometimes come across the terms "mass" and "class."  A class film is a movie with serious artistic intent, a movie which focuses on a specific topic and is often aimed at a specific audience.  A mass film, on the other hand, focuses on entertainment, and will usually include over the top action scenes, broad comedy, catchy songs and big dance numbers.  Mass heroes tend to be swaggering badasses who can back up their swagger with physics-defying stunts when needed.  Jackpot is trying very hard to be a mass film.

The big difference is Jyotika.  She's been in mass movies before (including one which is actually called Mass) but as the love interest, not as the hero.  Here, she's the hero, and her job is to be awesome.  She's awesome.  It's not a subtle performance, but it is a very entertaining one.

Imagine suddenly discovering that Farida Jalal is your grandmother.

Saif Ali Khan is one of Bollywood's most talented and versatile actors . . . now.  But before his complex and nuanced performances in movies like Omkara and Being Cyrus, Khan rose to prominence with a string of perfectly adequate performances in movies like Yeh Dillagi and Dil Tera Diwana.  Like a lot of Bollywood actors of the era, Khan had a consistent persona; his characters tended to be charming ladies' men who are more than a little self-absorbed, at least until they are transformed by the love of a good woman.  All of which brings me to Jawaani Jaaneman (2020), in which Khan plays a charming ladies' man who is more than a little self-absorbed, but this time, he's middle aged!

Khan plays Jaswinder "Jazz" Singh, a London real estate broker who is living his dream life: a few hours a day working with his long suffering brother Dimpy (Kumud Mishra) as they chase the deal of a lifetime, long nights in the night club owned by his friend Rocky (Chunky Pandey), and the occasional Sunday dinner with his parents.  When his mother (Faida Jalal) asks him when he's going to settle down and start a family of his own, Jazz always insists that he's happy being free, and he seems to really mean it.

And then she walks into the night club, and into his life.  She is Tia (the splendidly named Alaya Furniturewala), a bright, beautiful young woman from Amsterdam who is looking for the man who might be her father.  After a bit of cajoling, Jazz agrees to a DNA test, and the pair discover that a) Jazz is indeed Tia's father, and b) Tia is pregnant, meaning that Jazz has gone from zero to grandpa in the space of a day.  Before long, Tia has moved in to Jazz's bachelor pad, and a reluctant Jazz has started to discover that adulting isn't so bad after all.

And that's basically the movie.  Oh, there are subplots, as Jazz pursues the aforementioned deal of a lifetime and nearly stumbles into a grown-up relationship with his hairdresser and sassy platonic gal pal Rhea (Kubbra Sait), and there are complications, most notably the arrival of Tia's hapless ex-boyfriend Rohan (Dante Alexander) and her aggressively laid-back hippie mother Ananya (Tabu), but at heart it's a very simple story about a charming but self-absorbed ladies' man who is transformed by the love of his long lost daughter.  Saif Ali is playing basically the same character he used to play twenty five years ago, but now he's doing it with an extra quarter century's worth of acting skills, and it makes a difference.  The entire cast is great, particularly Tabu, who combines New Age enlightenment with self-centered condescension, putting the aggressive in passive aggressiveness.  Still, while Ananya is usually terrible in an entertaining fashion, she's also involved in the film's one sour note, propositioning a clearly reluctant Jazz in a scene which promptly cuts to black.  It's played for laughs, but if the genders had been flipped I don't think anyone would have found it funny.

Apart from that bit of unpleasantness, Jawaani Jaaneman is a charming and sweet love story about a different kind of love.  I recommend almost all of the movie.

Blame it on the wind

I have to give Pokkiri Raja (2016) credit for daring, if nothing else.  Making a movie about yawning is risky, because yawns are famously contagious, and you really don't want the audience yawning their way through your action comedy.

Mild-mannered computer programmer Sanjeev (Jiiva) has a powerful and powerfully infectious yawn, capable of putting an entire office to sleep.  Because of his terrible yawn, he loses his job and his girlfriend on the same day.  Fortunately he gets a new job, thanks to his friend Mojo (Yogi Babu), and meets a new girl, Sunitha (Hansaki Motwani).  Because of a series of ridiculous coincidences, Sanjeev is convinced that Sunitha is an alcoholic, but she's actually an enthusiastic social activist dedicated to literally cleaning up the streets, most notably by riding around the city on a water truck and spraying men who are urinating in public.

Ranjeev is eventually convinced to take a turn atop the water truck.  Unfortunately, the first person he sprays is "Cooling Glass" Guna (Sibiraj), a vicious gangster who just finished murdering a woman.  Guna is publicly humiliated and arrested, and he vows to track down the guy on the water truck and make him pay.  Fortunately(?) by the time he gets out of jail, Sanjeev's yawn has evolved; it now produces a tremendous wind which shatters Guna's trademark sunglasses, blinding him.  With Guna temporarily out of the way, Sanjeev has time to pursue a romance with Sunitha and explore the nature of his powers.

And once again I am making the movie sound more coherent than it actually is.  There is a plot, and it more or less hangs together, but the plot is only there as a delivery vehicle for goofy fight scenes, dodgy special effects, and incredibly broad physical comedy.  The film fully commits to its goofy premise, but that doesn't make it any less goofy, so the end result is a goofy movie.

Villiputs & Vedhalam

Like the Baahubali films, Puli (2015) is a mytho-historical epic set in a fantastic version of India's past, in which a young man who was found in a river as a baby goes on a quest and discovers his true heritage.  Puli is definitely not a Baahubali ripoff, though; leaving aside the fact that the movie came out only a few months after Baahubali: The Beginning, human culture is full of mystery babies pulled from rivers.  The important thing is what happens next, and Puli definitely goes in its own direction.

Before we get to the baby, though, let's talk about the world.  In this particular mythic age, much of India has been conquered by the vedhalam, a race of blue-eyed demons from far to the west.  Rather than hang out in trees and ask kings questions about morality, though, these particular vedhalam do evil overlord stuff, terrifying villagers, demanding exorbitant taxes, and dragging the occasional unfortunate off to be sacrificed.  The vedhalam are beautiful and terrible and too powerful for mortal men to fight, like a cross between rakshasa and Tolkien's elves, with superpowers lifted pretty directly from wuxia movies.

And then Vembunathan (Prqadhu) finds a baby in the river.  Well, a baby and an egg.  The baby grows up to be Marudheeran (Jospeh Vijay), who is naturally charming, fearless, and a skilled martial artist, while the egg hatches into Sooran (Karunas), a magical talking bird who isn't nearly as annoying as I feared.  Marudheeran is determined to keep his village safe from the unstoppable demon-tyrants, even if that means he has to grovel to do it.  He's also determined to win the heart of Pavazhamalli (Shruti Haasan), a childhood friend who has just returned to the village.

Marudheeran does manage to woo Pavazhamalli, and they are secretly married, but while he is away from the village attending to some family rituals, the vedhelam attack, murder Vembunathan, and kidnap Pavazhamalli.  Because she was born under a full moon, she's a perfect human sacrifice, so Marudheen must rescue her from the fortress of the vedhalam queen Yavanna (Sridevi!) and her general Jalatharangan (Sudeep.)  It's true that no human can stand up to the vedhalam, but the village priest happens to have been working on a magical potion which can give a human the strength and wire-fu powers of a vedhalam, but only for eight minutes.

Just as Baahubali draws heavily from the Mahabharata, Puli pulls from the Ramayana, with Asterix as Ram and a bird as Laxman.  That's just the basic plot, though; Puli's influences are . . . eclectic.  Rather than monkeys, Marudheeran befriends the villiputs, who are, as the name implies basically Lilliputians, and possibly also the brownies from Willow.  The villiput princess Einstein (Vidyullekha Raman) joins him on the quest and they seek the counsel of the turtle from The Neverending Story.  Marudheeran gets in a fight with a panther.  He meets a cyclops. And it only gets stranger from there.

But while the worldbuilding is a glorious mess, the actual plot is a fairly straightforward quest narrative.  The real fun comes from the performances.  Sridevi in particular is delightful.  She creates an evil queen who is one part Galadriel, one part Wicked Witch of the West, chewing the scenery with style and elegance, whether she's presiding over a sinister dinner party or running up the wall during a swordfight.

I suspect that Puli is actually a bad movie, but if so it's a bad movie that I really enjoyed.