Fortunately, anyone can be told precisely what Srivalli is.

Srivalli (2017) is a science fiction thriller about artificial reality and multiple levels of consciousness.  It is also a sleazy erotic thriller about an obsession which spans multiple lifetimes.  And it is occasionally a Lifetime drama about a woman who has had enough and is ready to fight back.  Genre boundaries are more like guidelines, really.

Valli (Neha Hinge) is returning to India after twelve years in the US, accompanied by her little brother and their father, Ramachandra (Ranjeev Kanakala.)  Her incredibly devoted childhood sweetheart, Gowtham (Rajath Krishna), is waiting for her.  And everything is great!  At least until the car accident that kills Ramachandra and puts Valli's brother in a coma.

That's not the end of her problems, though.  Andrea, a classmate of hers from America, has followed her to India.  Andrea is obsessed with Valli, and resumes her unwanted sexual, advances.  When Gowtham finds out, he tracks down Andrea and brutally beats her to death in a jealous rage.  (The Andrea subplot is nasty and unpleasant and perpetuates some horrible tropes about predatory lesbians.)

Since Valli doesn't know that Andrea is dead, Gowtham gets to keep hanging around and playing the Caring Friend Who Wants To be More.  Valli doesn't have time for romance, though - she's fascinated by the work of Doctor Verma, who is hoping to harness the power of brain waves in order to treat addictions and mental illnesses.  Valli agrees to have her brain waves mapped (a process that requires her to be naked, because it's that sort of movie), and she is thrilled to learn that the process can be used to help her comatose brother.  And then Verma leaves for America.

After the professor leaves, Valli is haunted by strange dreams about a mysterious man named Manju (Arhaan Khan), who appears every night at midnight to seduce her.  (I say seduce, but it is strongly implied that there is supernatural coercion involved.)  When she finds Manju's bracelet in her bed one morning, Valli realizes that Manju is no dream.  He claims to be the spirit of her lover from a previous incarnation, but he might be a side effect of Verma's device, or Andrea's vengeful ghost, or just a symptom of Valli's mental decline.

For much of its running time, Srivalli is grimy and unpleasant.  It does improve somewhat when the movie stops trying to be sexy and Valli stops being so passive, but it never rises to the level of a good movie.  Even without the sleaze, it's hard to maintain a sense of mystery about who the true villain is when the audience has already seen one of the characters brutally beat a woman to death because she threatened the object of his obsession.

Yama: Endgame

After a month spent exploring the Yama Cinematic Universe, I am impressed with just how versatile a character Yama is; he can fit easily into a political sketch comedy, or a sincere exploration of the fragility of family ties, or, as in Yamadonga (2007), a bombastic romantic action-comedy.

Raja (Jr NTR) and Mahi (Priyamani) met briefly as children, and while she was impressed enough to give him Chekhov's Locket, their lives developed in very different directions.  Mahi grew up to live the life of a fairy tale princess - specifically Cinderella.  While she is the heir to the family fortune, her greedy relatives force her to toil as a household servant.  Worse, they are planning to marry her off to her loathsome cousin so that they can seize control of the family fortune.  Mahi suffers in silence, dreaming of the day when her handsome prince will carry her away on a winged horse.

Raja, however, is no prince.  He's a thief and a conman and (because this is a South Indian Mass movie) fantastically skilled at beating people up.  While Raja and his partner Sathi (Ali) are very good at taking other people's money, their fence, the lovely Dhanalakshmi (Mamta Mohandas) is even better at taking theirs, so the pair are hoping for one big score.

They get their chance when Raja is hired to recover a lost dress (it's complicated.)  Naturally, Raja succeeds, inadvertently rescuing Mahi from a gang of kidnappers in a spectacular action sequence involving a giant hamster ball.  Unfortunately, the happy client drops dead just before he can sign the check, leaving Raja even deeper in debt.  An angry and drunk Raja curses Yama, swearing vengeance for the poorly timed grim reaping.

Unfortunately, at that very moment, Yama (Mohan Babu) is showing the other gods just how much the people on Earth fear and respect him.  (The trickster sage Narada (Naresh) suggested the celestial show and tell, meaning once again everything is Narada's fault.)  Yama is so angry and humiliated that he orders Chitragupta (Brahmanandam) to alter Raja's entry in the Bhavishyavaani, changing his date of death from "in seventy five years" to "in ten days."

Back on Earth, angry drunk Raja throws Mahi out of the house.  In the morning, though, he watches the news and discovers that she is a missing heiress, so he finds her (not hard since she's right outside the front door), charms her, and makes arrangements to ransom her back to her family.  However, Raja is betrayed and murdered before he can collect the ransom, meaning he's sent straight to Yamalok.  And then things get complicated.

After finding out where he is, Raja gets to work.  He tricks Chitragupota into handing over Yama's magic noose, his "Life Extractor" as the subtitles call it, and because there's no pesky "if he be worthy" clause, he is granted the power of Yama.  Original Yama also has the powers of Yama, of course, so there is a problem.  Narada pops up long enough to suggest settling the dispute with an election, and the two Yamas agree. Classic Yama has experience and a loyal populace on his side, but New Yama grew up on Earth, so he is armed with the power of dirty politics and a lot of empty promises.

Yamadonga is about three hours long, which means that I have only scratched the surface of the plot, and it jumps genres more than once.  Whenever the complicated plot starts to drag, though, the movie gives you a big elaborate action scene or an even bigger dance number.  And because the movie is so long it can act as a sort of "Yama's Greatest Hits" compilation, prominently featuring the book of destiny, gods descending to Earth, a mortal causing trouble in Yamalok, an election in the afterlife, a mortal soul on parole, and a scheme lifted directly from Bugs Bunny.  The only thing that's missing is ice cream.  Maybe in the sequel.

Insert Tolstoy quote here.

Ramchandra Purushottam Joshi (2013) was based on a stage play, and it shows; the movie is almost Aristotelian in its tight focus on a the events happening in a single house, to a particular family, over the course of eight hours, and also in its penchant for characters explaining interesting things that are happening just off stage.  naturally, the movie opens with a lengthy special effects sequence, making heavy use of computer animation that is so imaginative and so dated that it really deserves a soundtrack by Thomas Dolby.

Once again, we're visiting a shiny, modernized, technologically advanced Yamalok.  This time, Chitragupta is still around and doing interesting stuff off-screen, but the old Yama has retired.  The new guy (and the imdb is not great with Marathi cinema, so I am not sure who plays him, or most of the other characters) is slick, smart and ambitious.  He's got a grand scheme: give some of the better behaved souls in his care an early release, allowing them to sped a day on Earth visiting their loved ones and telling them about how great Yamalok is now before ascending to heaven.

The proof of concept soul selected is Ramchandra Purushottam Joshi (Dilip Prabhavalkar), a scrupulously honest retired civil servant.  Ramchandra is offered the chance to go back to earth for eight hours, on the anniversary of his death, and he is thrilled to have the chance to see his family again.  He's so excited that he wastes they first hour telling his "minder," the dour green psychopomp Ugrakesh all about his doting wife Janki (Suhas Joshi), responsible elder son Nishikant, only daughter Sandhya, and straight-laced younger son Ninad.

But a lot can change in a year.  When Ramchandra finally enters the house, he discovers that Ninad is now an angry drunk, Sandhya is nowhere to be seen, Nishikant is plotting with his in-laws to sell off the ancestral home, and Janki refuses to accept his death and spends all day locked in her room talking to an imaginary husband.  And Ramchandra is powerless to help, because no one can see or hear him . . . until Sandhya makes it home.

There's a moment late in the film when Ramchandra notices that the trees in the garden are dying, and explains to Ugrakesh that no one has been putting in the work to maintain them.   It's an incredibly obvious metaphor, but an effective one.  This is a story about how quickly a family can fall apart, and how hard it is to put it back together, but it succeeds by focusing on this particular family being unhappy in its own way. 

Yamalok can wait.

Jagga Jiunda E (2018) features a shiny, updated afterlife.  Chitragupta, the judge of the dead, has retired and been replaced by Chitr Singh (Gurpreet Ghuggi), the book of destiny has been uploaded to a shiny new computer system, souls are ferried on shiny spacefaring elevators rather than the traditional buffalo, and Yama himself is wearing a cool white suit and is played by Jackie Shroff.  This is a Yamalok where they make Baahubali jokes.

It's also a Yamalok where they make mistakes.  Yama's assistants collected the soul of Jagga (Daljeet Kalsi), a kind, generous, loyal man who loves his mother, when they were supposed to take Daljeet (also Daljeet Kalsi). a spectacularly corrupt and brutal police officer who is cruel to his mother.  Unfortunately, Jagga has already been cremated, so they cannot simply send him back.

Instead, they place Jagga's soul in Daljeet's body.  Jagga is a good man, so he immediately uses his new life to start making things better, first by being kind to Daljeet's mother (Sunita Dhir), then by cleaning up the local police force and clashing with Daljeet's old partner-in-crime Vikram (Harp Farmer), son of the local MLA.  (And I'm not sure who plays the MLA, but he does a fantastic Amrish Puri impression.)  Along the way he finds time to woo the lovely Harleen (Kainaat Arora), who is technically his subordinate but let's not worry about that right now.  Meanwhile, a ghost called Billu Comrade (Sardar Sohi) keeps trying to talk Jagga into completing the unfinished business of the local restless spirits.

"Good man takes over the life of a bad man" is not the most original premise, even with the heavenly clerical error, but it's a fun premise, with a lot of comedic and dramatic potential.  That's why I was so disappointed when the movie suddenly shifted genres to become a brutal revenge melodrama, especially when a minor female character was brutally attacked and murdered just to make sure Jagga is properly motivated.  As revenge melodramas go, it's competently executed, but I want my supernatural comedy back.

The father-in-law from Hell.

Narada is a legendary sage who appears in a number of Hindu texts, including both the Mahabharata and the Ramayana.  In the movies, though, he acts as the local divine trickster; if you have a serious problem, you should get Narada to solve it, since it's probably his fault anyway.  Yamudiki Mogudu (2012)?  Definitely Narada's fault.

Due to a celestial mixup, Naresh (Allari Naresh) is born a month early and without a destiny, which means that he is immortal and has power equal to the gods.  Indra and the other gods ask Yama (Sayaji Shinde) to deal with the situation, but Yama doesn't want to, so instead Narada is chosen to deal with the unexpected immortal and also humble the god of death.  (Which is just as well, because it is Narada's fault.)

Years pass.  Naresh grows into a charming loafer and terrible student.  Worse, he's also an aspiring actor!  Naresh is cast as Ram in a play about Sita's Swayamvaram ceremony, and just as he's about to go onstage, Narada makes his move.  He convinces the husband of the actress playing Sita to drag her home, then talks Naresh into calling out for a replacement; thanks to Naresh's subconscious godly powers, the replacement Sita is Yamaja (Richi Panai), the daughter of Yama.  And since apparently they don't have religious drama in Yamalok, Yamaja believes that they actually are now married, and starts following Naresh around and calling him "husband."

Naresh tries to get Yamaja to go away, but eventually brings her home disguised as the family's new maid.  And after a brief period of adjustment, she wins the family over, and suddenly everything is going really well.  Most importantly, Naresh's brother gets a promotion at the bank where he works and manages to get the infamous gangster Royyala Naidu (Tanikella Bharani) sent to prison, an action that I'm sure will have no negative consequences.

Meanwhile, Yama is worried about his missing daughter, so he allows his son Yamaganda (Master Bharath) to go to earth to search for her, as long as Chitragupta (Krishna Bhagavaan) agrees to accompany the boy.  Yamaganda isn't the brightest spark in the pyre, so before he can find his sister, there's a lot of slapstick and confusion and a great deal of ice cream.

Yamana won't leave her husband, so Yama is forced to do things the old fashioned way, by traveling to Earth himself and forcibly abducting her.  Thinking quickly, Naresh grabs the tail of Yama's divine buffalo, and rides it up to the heavens, where, with a little help from Narada, he can match wits with the Lord of Death to win back his love.  Unfortunately, Yama does not play fair, and while Naresh is immortal, his family is not.  And there's the matter of the gangster with a grudge.

Despite the supernatural setting and the meddling trickster sage, Yamudiki Mogudu is basically an old fashioned romantic comedy in the DDLJ mode, with the hero living among his future in-laws and slowly winning them over.  That means that Yama is playing a different stock part than usual; he's the stern father-in-law, the relationship End Boss who must be convinced before the hero and heroine can be happy.  This Yama is still a bit of a stentorian buffoon, but he has to be more competent and cunning in order to be a suitable antagonist.  And he has to be hostile and scary and still believably change his mind at the end.  Movie Yama is a more flexible character than you might expect.  And we're not done yet.

It's a jolly holiday with death.

Yama, god of death, is a stock comic figure in Indian cinema.  He's a stout, jolly fellow with distinctive headgear and spectacular facial hair, and he lives in a magical realm with his helpers and a large buffalo.  He's like Santa Claus bringing the gift of passage to the next life to . . . everybody, really.  And that is why we have Yamaleela (1994).

As the movie opens Yama (Kaikala Satyanarayana) and his assistant Chitragupta (Bramhanandam) are hanging out in the afterlife doing vaudeville bits, but on Earth, Suraj (Ali) is having a much harder time.  He's a carefree scamp who owes money to a lot of people, but while leading his debtors on a Benny Hillesque chase through town doesn't bother him, this time he's also made his mother (Manju Bhargavi) cry.  When the family servant reveals that the family is actually royalty, reduced to Jane Austen poverty because of debt, Suraj vows to make enough money to buy back the family castle.  (Said castle is surprisingly affordable; the specific figure given is one crore rupees, which works out to about 130,000 dollars.  But Suraj is poor enough that it's still an impossible task.)

While trying to earn the needed money, Suraj runs afoul of the local organized crime syndicate.  Syndicate may be a bit too generous, actually; there are two gangs in town.  The "bat batch" are all men who use hockey sticks as weapons and are led by the cartoonishly evil Thota Ramudu (Tanikella Bharani.)  The "chain batch" are young, attractive women who use bicycle chains as weapons and are led by Lilly (Indraja), who isn't as violent as Thota Ramudu but is a terrible, terrible person.  Suraj instantly falls in love with Lilly, and tries to earn money from Thota Ramudu, but he is doubly disappointed and winds up standing in the rain all night only to collapse in the morning.

And that's when his luck changes.  Chitragupta drops the Bhavishyavaani, a book which records the future of every human being, and it falls right on Suraj.  When he opens the book he sees lottery numbers.  The next day, he takes his lottery winnings to the race track, and soon he's rich enough to buy the castle, with enough left over to live in luxury and toss the occasional huge stack of money at nearby gangsters.

Meanwhile, Yama and Chitragupta have been stripped of their divine powers and sent to Earth to retrieve the book.  They have thirty days to find it before they are exiled to Earth forever, and it will not be an easy task, especially since Yama keeps getting distracted by the pleasures of Earthly life, by which I mean ice cream.  And because Yama doesn't have the book, he can't be sure when anyone is supposed to die, so he refuses to take any souls.  That's good news for Suraj, who has the book and therefore knows that his mother is definitely going to die very soon, unless he can find a way to save her.

So, can Suraj save his mother?  Does Yama restore the balance of life and death to the universe?  Will Lilly become at least slightly less terrible?  You already know the  answers.  This is not a deep or complicated movie; it's a fluffy and comfortable and very silly movie about death.  

Not sorry, Shaktimaan.

These days, there are a lot of superhero TV shows available, and these shows will carefully adapt the source material, focusing on the best bits and changing things as needed in order to adapt to the medium of TV.  Shaktimaan (1997-2005), on the other hand, is like injecting the distilled essence of Silver Age comic books directly into your brain.  Let's explore.

It's important to note that the title character (Mukesh Khanna) isn't called Shaktiman, he's called Shaktimaan.  The double "a" is important, because the name translates to Powerful Mind rather than Powerful Man.  Shaktimaan is, as the theme song explains, an ordinary man, rather than the last son of a dying planet.  All of his amazing powers (flight, telepathy, super strength, super speed, spinning, shooting lasers from his fingertips, and basically anything else the plot requires) are obtained through the careful practice of meditation and yoga; it's explicitly stated several times that anyone could have the powers of Shaktimaan if they are willing to put in the work.

Shaktimaan's origin becomes increasingly complex and baroque as the series goes on, but the essence always remains the same.  He was destined from birth to rid the world of evil, and trained to do so by the Suryanshis, a secret order of monks.  His destiny is very clear; Shaktimaan is to fight sin, not sinners. He is to inspire the people with his teaching and his example, rather than just punch bad guys, though there is rather a lot of bad guy punching involved.

Of course, the forces of evil are not going to take this lying down.  Evil is personified by Tamraj Kilvish (Surendra Pal), though he's usually too busy reigning in dark Satanic majesty to get personally involved, so he works through a variety of evil minions, the most important being the self-proclaimed great Shaitan scientist Doctor Jackal (Lalit Paramoo), who dresses like an evil hotel bellhop, shouts the word "Power!" at random intervals, and uses his mastery of evil science to create monsters and supervillains and an elixir which can permanently turn people evil.  (I am pretty sure he's named after Doctor Jekyll.)  Other minions of evil include Catwoman (Ashwini Kalsekar), a witch with the power to change from cat to Nastassja Kinski in Cat People to a woman wearing furry mittens and an unconvincing cat hood, and Plastica, who is made of plastic bags and breathes clouds of deadly poison, but is mostly dangerous because she cannot be safely burned or buried without harming the environment.

Shaktimaan can't superhero all the time, so he has a secret identity: Pandit Ganghadar Vidhyadar Mayadhar Omkarnath Shastri, though everybody else just calls him Ganghadar.  Ganghadar pretends to be a buck-toothed, bespectacled buffoon with an irritating laugh.  He's silly where Shaktimaan is solemn, playful where Shaktimaan is pedantic, and not above using his super powers for practical jokes.  Ganghadar works for the newspaper "Aaj Ki Awaz", alongside plucky reporter Geeta Vishwas (first played by Kitu Gidwani, then by Vaishnavi Mahant.)  Geeta and Shaktimaan have the perfect superhero relationship; they love each other, but because of his vows Shaktimaan is forbidden from individual love and Geeta is determined not to be an obstacle, so the relationship can never be resolved one way or another, instead existing as a perpetual angst machine.

Shaktimaan doesn't do season long arcs, instead focusing on a particular storyline for a few episodes, then quickly moving on.  And the stories themselves are ripped off frominspired by a wide variety of sources.  I've mentioned Cat People, but I've also spotted elements from Frankenstein, Star Wars, Predator, and Superman II, among others, all mixed with original ideas to create a show that is at once crazy and compelling.  As weird as things get (and they do get weird) everything is rooted in character.

And then there are the special effects.  They are bad.  They are sub-Tom Baker era Doctor Who at best.  And yet after a while they seem to fade into the background.  It's like a stage play; the special effects are not trying to convince you, they are just there to indicate what's supposed to be happening onscreen.  Perhaps because of that, the show doesn't take shortcuts.  If a helicopter is going to explode, if Doctor Jackal is sealing the city in an impenetrable force field, if Shaktimaan is throwing a planet in the path of an oncoming death comet, you will see it.  It won't be at all convincing, but you will see it.  And perhaps that's what I love about the show; it is pure, unfiltered superhero content, without a trace of deconstruction or irony.