I didn't study.

They say that in Bollywood, romance is dead.  It isn't, really, but romantic comedies don't have the same box office draw that they did in the days when King Khan reigned supreme.  However, things are different on the other side of the border; apparently the Pakistani film industry is happy to turn out wholesome romances like Mumbai used to make twenty years ago.  Exhibit A:  Lahore Se Aagey (2016).

Lahore Se Aagey is apparently a direct sequel to a movie I have not seen, Karachi Se Lahore, and picks up right where the previous movie left off, so I was initially very confused, but I soon realized that Moti (Yasir Hussain), a stocky, bearded guy with a pronounced stutter, is our romantic lead.  Moti is on his way to see his rich uncle (Behroze Sabzwari), but he is being chased by hitmen A and AB (dunno who plays A, but AB is Omer Sultan.)  You can tell they're serious and scary assassins because as soon as they show up onscreen, gratuitous slow-mo doves appear.

However, they aren't very good at assassinating people; Moti loses the killers by mugging a passing fashion designer for his clothing and then ducking through an outdoor concert being held by aspiring rockstar Tara (Saba Qamar).  After the concert, and after Tara breaks up with her annoying boyfriend, she nearly hits Moti with her car, then saves him from A and AB.  And that's basically the plot; Moti is on his way to see his uncle, Tara is on her way to a big concert which turns out to be basically "Pakistani Idol", and they travel together, fighting, talking, dodging assassins, singing songs, having adventures, and inevitably falling in love.

Even for a road movie, Lahore Se Aagey is very episodic; Tara and Moti stumble into a strange situation, sing a song, grow a little closer, and move on.  Most of the time this works, but there is an extended sequence involving offensive tribal stereotypes, a secret jungle rave, a dance-off to the death, and a whole lot of product placement for KFC which drags on for far too long.  (And, again, the treatment of tribal people in the scene is genuinely terrible.)

The humor is hit and miss; many of the jokes rely on references to or cameos by various Pakistani celebrities that I have never heard of.  I did catch the occasional Sholay reference, and there is a lovely gag involving a power drill that transcends cultural boundaries.

The romance is a bit more interesting.  Tara acts tough, but deep down she's just hoping to find someone who will actually listen to her.  And Moti is spellbound by Tara, but he's so insecure that he sometimes hides his feelings by acting like a sexist jerk.  I think the relationship would be an absolute disaster in real life, but that's often the case with romantic comedies.

In the end, I'm not sure what to make of Lahore Se Aagey.  I feel unprepared; I think I really need to see the first movie and pick up a working knowledge of Pakistani pop culture before I can judge it properly.

Something is rotten in the state of Kashmir.

"Denmark is a prison" according to Hamlet, and as author and general smart person John Green points out, he is absolutely right.  Hamlet's Denmark is a surveillance state in which everybody is being watched by someone, and sometimes seeming to be mad is the only safe choice.  That's even more true of the Kashmir seen in Haider (2014); this is Kashmir in the nineties, dominated by insurgents, military checkpoints, and civilian disappearances.  It's a world where an anonymous tip can be deadlier than ear poison.

Let's take it from the top.  Haider (Shahid Kapoor) is a college student who returns home to find that his father, Doctor Hilal Meer (Narendra Jha), has disappeared, taken away by the army, who blew up the house for good measure.  Ghazala (Tabu), Haider's mother, has taken refuge with her brother-in-law Khurram (Lay Kay Menon), and they are entirely too close for Haider's comfort.

Rather than mope around his uncle's house, Haider scours the country looking for his father, helped by his childhood sweetheart Arshia (Shraddha Kapoor), and later joining protests with the family members of other disappeared.  Khurram, meanwhile, uses his brother's disappearance to further his own political ambitions, while Ghazala tries desperately to reconnect with her son.

And then Arshia is contacted by Roohdar (Irffan Khan), who claims to have a message for Haider from his father.  The message is, as you might guess, "avenge my death."  According to Roohdar, Khurram was responsible for Hilal's arrest.  Hilal and Roohdar were cellmates, and so Roohdar was present when Khurram arranged to have them both murdered.  To prove his claims, Roohdar directs Haider to his father's grave, and then, since this is a tragedy, everything goes to hell.  There are soliloquies (so many soliloquies), antic dispositions, a big musical number which is the thing wherein to catch the conscience of the . . . lawyer with military connections turned powerful politician, and a climactic and astonishingly bloody gunfight in a graveyard.

This is not Hamlet the play, it's an adaptation, and that means there are differences.  The treatment of the female characters is markedly better; Arshia isn't just Ophelia, she also fills in for Horatio, which means she displays a lot more agency than her Shakespearean counterpart; she is Haider's partner, rather than someone to be lied to and avoided.  Like Ophelia, Arshia is present for Haider's big "To be or not to be" speech, but unlike Ophelia she gets to interrupt him to ask what the hell he's talking about.

Ghazala, meanwhile, is basically a tragic hero in her own right, She is torn by conflicting loyalties, has an even more complicated relationship with her son than the notoriously complicated Hamlet-Gertrude relationship, and yet remains an active character throughout the film and goes out on her own terms.  The entire cast is great, and Shahid Kapoor may well be my favorite cinematic Hamlet, but Tabu is even better.  It's an amazing performance.

Haider is also an intensely political film.  Haider is not a prince, he's a common man crushed under the weight of an oppressive system.  The film's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern analogues are obsessed with Bollywood actor Salman Khan, and the film will sometimes cut between snippets of Khan's goofy nineties movies and the casual brutalization of the people of Kashmir during the same period, including meaningless checkpoints, targeted arrests, torture, and the extrajudicial murder of prisoners.  This is not just a meditation on the limits of personal revenge, it asks big questions about how to change a system that has no intention of changing.  There are no answers provided.

Desi movie, Scottish play

Veeram (2017) isn't my first Indian MacBeth, but while Maqbool was a gritty tale of love and murder in the contemporary Mumbai underworld, Veeram is aiming for epic, with big battles, stunning scenery, and a storyline which mixes Shakespeare with traditional ballads.

Chandu (Kunal Kapoor) is a warrior, a master of the martial art of Kalaripayattu, and member of a clan of duelists.  While returning home from a successful duel, Chandu and his friend Kelu (sorry, Kelu, but the internet won't tell me who plays you) wander into a cave, where they encounter a sorceress and her naked medium.  The medium makes the expected predictions; Chandu will become the lieutenant to the clan chieftain, and then chieftain himself, while Kelu's son will be chief after him.

The pair laugh off the spooky naked prophecy and continue their journey home. When they get there, they learn that Chandu has been promoted to be the lieutenant to the current chieftain, Aromal (Shivajith Padmanabhan).  Aromal is a bit apprehensive, since he personally prevented Chandu's marriage to the lovely Unniyarcha (Himarsha Venkatsamy), but everyone assures him that it will be fine, since Chandu is such an upright and honorable man.

Everything is not fine.  Chandu is suddenly filled with ambition.  Unniyarcha is suddenly very interested in Chandu, despite already having a husband, but Kuttimani (Divanaa Thackur) manages to win his heart, then Lady MacBeths him into sabotaging Aromal's weapon for an upcoming duel.  And when that doesn't work, the pair tale matters into their own hands, everything takes a turn for the decidedly tragic.

This is post-Baahubali MacBeth; the budget is lower, but the scale is still suitably epic.  The fight scenes are lovingly choreographed and make great use of the urumi, my personal favorite impractical melee weapon.  The cinematography and set design is even more impressive, making stunning use of color and scale.  And the

If the movie has a weakness, it's the dialogue.  Like many Indian movies, Veeram was shot in multiple languages.  I watched the English version, and while some of the lines were lifted directly from Shakespeare, much of the dialogue sounds like a modern translation aimed at students, replacing the original poetry with something more . . . prosaic.

Still, while the dialogue is a bit mundane at times, nothing else in the movie is.  This is tragedy on a grand scale, like Baahubali's art-house cousin.

Romancing the large bag of cash.

Kshana Kshaban (1991) opens with a bank robbery gone bad, leading to a shootout with the police.  Ringleader Narayana (Horse Babu) manages to escape with one accomplice and a bag of money, but he kills the accomplice and runs off with the money, infuriating his boss, quirky crimelord Nayar (Paresh Rawal).  After concealing the money, Narayana hides out in his brother's photo studio, where he is quickly caught and tortured.

Narayana did leave directions to the treasure, but through a series of coincidences the directions wind up in the hands of one of the photo studio's customers, spunky office worker Satya (Sridevi).  One of Nayar's men tracks her to her apartment, and after a brief struggle over  a pair of scissors, he winds up dead.  Unfortunately, Satya's creepy neighbor chooses that precise moment to drop by, and even more unfortunately he's from the Village of People Who Jump to Conclusions, so Satya suddenly finds herself on the run from the police.

And that's when she meets Chandu (Venkatesh Daggubati), a streetwise thief with the requisite heart of gold.  he saves her from a pair of Eve teasers, and when the police show up looking for Satya, he assumes they're looking for him (because thief), takes her hostage, and the pair flee into the Fire Swampnearby forest.

Kshana Kshanam has a remarkably straightforward plot, especially for an Indian movie from the Nineties; there's a clear MacGuffin, and Satya and Chandu look for it while dodging both Nayar's goons and the police.  Sridevi handles the bulk of the comedy, so there's no need for a comic relief subplot.  Still, the movie is two and a half hours long, and fills its running time with wild changes of tone.  The opening bank robbery is dark and bloody and features no dialogue, while the scenes of Satya's daily life are bright and brittle, painting a picture of a woman who is not happy and hasn't realized it.  And yet when Satya and Chandu begin to fall in love (because of course Satya and Chandu fall in love) we get dance numbers.  Colorful, enthusiastic, occasionally silly dance numbers.

 Kshana Kshanam was director Ram Gopal Varma's second film, and it shows; many of Varma's directorial quirks are on display here, including his trademark weird camera angles, but they lack polish.  It is an interesting idea to film part of a car chase from the underside of a car, for instance, but it doesn't really work well in practice.  Still, while the movie is sometimes clumsy, it is consistently interesting.  Granted, sometimes the movie seems to be coasting on Sridevi's natural charisma, but she's got charisma to spare, so you can do that.

No, I mean it. Don't stand so close to me.

It's no secret that I love Juhi Chawla.  That's why I decided to watch Andaz (1994.)  Yes, it was directed by David Dhawan, who is known for incredibly broad and sometimes tasteless comedies and directs with all the subtlety and grace of a brick to the head, but it's a Juhi Chawla movie!  How bad could it be?

Ajay Saxena (Anil Kapoor) is a new teacher at the S. T. School, his alma mater, run by a kind, dedicated, and apparently nameless Principal (Kader Khan).  I think he teaches history, but it's hard to tell, because he spends most of the time dealing with the antics of his unruly students.  There are a lot of them, but only two are really important: Jaya (Karisma Kapoor) and Shagun (Shakti Kapoor).  Jaya is brilliant, talented, and an incorrigible prankster, while Shagun is the absolute worst. He actually attended school with Ajay but kept getting held back far past the point of plausibility, and now he is a lazy, surly, deeply annoying adult who expects special treatment from his old classmate and is angry when he doesn't get it.

During a school picnic, Ajay manages to win over his students the old-fashioned way, by beating up a terrorist in front of them.  (There's a whole terrorist subplot, but it's not that interesting and doesn't really become important until the climax.)  However, Shagun was not on the picnic, since Ajay had suspended him for being the worst, so he is not won over.  Shagun takes his revenge by planting fake love notes which are supposedly from Jaya, and when Ajay "returns" them to her, she thinks they are love notes from the teacher.  Before the confusion can be cleared up, rumors are flying all around the school, and even some of the other teachers join in mocking and harassing the unfortunate pair.

Despite being the worst, Shagun eventually confesses, and Ajay and Jaya apologize to one another.  She suggests that, since their reputations are already ruined, they should go ahead and get married.  Ajay is rightly horrified by the idea (and so am I.  What the hell, movie!) but Jaya is persistent.  She leaves the hostel and takes a room next door to his house, and becomes such a nuisance that Ajay leaves home.

He comes back with his new wife, Saraswati (Juhi Chawla, finally!), a local orphan.  He married Saraswati in a hurry, not realizing that she can't speak English, can't sing, can't cook, and can barely read; at the orphanage they taught her to just smile and say yes when her husband asks her something she doesn't understand, and Ajay is apparently bad at asking follow up questions.  Fortunately for her, Jaya is there to teach her everything she needs to know, and the two women quickly become very close.

(As an aside, while she's poorly educated, Saraswati does seem to have a natural talent for the marital arts, since she and Ajay spend an awful lot of time canoodling.  Like a lot of Bollywood movies of the time, the film cuts to a song whenever the characters are about to get frisky, but in Andaz the lyrics are unusually filthy; nothing actually explicit, but there are many references to trains and overheating engines and banging on the door.)

The plot makes it sound like Andaz is a psychological thriller about a man whose life is torn apart by a deranged stalker, but no.  This is a romantic comedy.  Jaya is presented as a wonderful, loving person who's determined to land her man, and as the perfect romantic partner for Ajay, if it weren't for that pesky "under-aged student" thing.  Karisma Kapoor was twenty when this movie came out, but she's very clearly playing younger here, with glasses, pigtails, a breathy little girl voice, and some very short skirts.  It's creepy.

But even setting aside the creep factor, the movie is a slog.  The students are supposed to be charming scamps, but they come across as sadistic jerks.  Every second that Shakti Kapoor is onscreen is excruciating.  The terrorist subplot provides the occasional bit of dramatic relief, an escape from the oppressive comedy, but the action scenes are not that interesting and drag on too long.

And Juhi?  She's fine.  "Uneducated but spunky village belle" is a stock part that she plays really well, but I can see her play that part in better movies than this one.

Tainted Love.

Iru Mugan (2016) draws its inspiration from European history, particularly the Second World War, when Adolf Hitler used a drug called "Speed" to turn his troops into invincible super soldiers who rampaged across Europe, only to face defeat when said invincible super soldiers went berserk and turned on their own officers.  If you squint, you can see elements of actual history here, but it's possible that the filmmakers were not entirely rigorous in their historical research.

The Indian embassy in Malaysia is attacked by one old man who displays amazing superhuman strength and reflexes, killing several security guards before abruptly collapsing.  The old man has a heart tattoo on the back of his neck, leading RAW chief Malik (Nassar) to believe that mysterious and supposedly dead drug lord Love is responsible.  Malik calls in Akhilan (Vikram), the man who supposedly killed Love, then walked away after his former partner and new wife Meera (Nayantara) was murdered.  And because Akhilan is a disgraced former agent and loose cannon who plays by his own rules, junior agent Aayushi (Nithya Menen) is assigned as the official agent in charge of the case and Akhilan's unofficial babysitter.

The pair arrive in Malaysia and get to work.  Akhilan quickly establishes himself as the brutal and driven renegade who will let nothing stand in his way, while Aayushi provides the requisite conscience.  After a bit of investigation and violence and violent investigation they find a corrupt scientist to deliver the necessary exposition: Love is indeed back, and has recreated Speed, which works by flooding the body with adrenaline for exactly five minutes.

Despite the pulpy premise, Iru Mugan feels like a relatively grounded action movie; the action is sometimes over the top, but the story is centered on Akhilan working through his pain.  And then Love appears onscreen.  Love, also played by Vikram, is introduced wearing a gas-mask and a fabulous suit, and while the gas-mask is quickly set aside, the suits only get more fabulous.  Love is flamboyant, fey, capricious, and deadly, like the Joker if he were inspired by Bea Arthur rather than clowns.  he is, in other words, a bundle of problematic stereotypes with no apparent motivation beyond "is evil," yet still manages to be an active and interesting character with agency.  (Evil agency.)

There's no real reason for Love and Akhilan to be played by the same person.  The pair never switch places; there's no suggestion that they look at all alike, even.  Whatever the reason, Vikram turns in an impressive pair of performances, since Love and Akhilan are not just completely different people, they come from completely different genres.  Even though he's the hero, I think Akhilan is the odd man out.  Everything about him screams gritty spy drama, but he is navigating a world where Hitler's lost super soldier formula is a matter of public record.  A murderous super-chemist/fop fits right in.

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.