Lemony Snicket's "A Fistful of Dollars."

Avane Srimannarayana (2019) starts with a murder.  Bandit leader Rama Rama (Madhusudhan Rao) has captured a band of traveling religious pageant actors because he believes that they stole a truck load of gold, and he wants it. The actors won't, or can't, tell him where the gold is, so he shoots them all, apart from the hapless bandmaster (Gopalkrishna Deshpande), whom he keeps around as a sort of mascot or court jester.

 

Years pass.  Rama Rama is on his death bed, and his men have gathered to hear who will be the next leader of the bandit clan.  Rather than passing the throne (there's a literal throne, but it's made of wood and just looks like an uncomfortable chair) on to his scary, violent son Jayarama (Balaji Manohar) or his devious and ruthless son Tukaram (Pramod Shetty), Rama Rama declares that the throne will pass to whoever manages to find the lost gold.  This goes about as well as you would expect, and soon a maimed Tukaram has been sent into exile, while Jayaram has seized power, claiming to act as regent for his dead father until the gold has been recovered.

More years pass.  Jayaram rules the bandit clan with an iron fist, crucifying the occasional bandit that questions his authority.  Tukaram is a politician, using similar methods but with a thin veneer of legitimacy.  They both want the treasure, which means they are both pressuring Inspector Srimannarayana (Rakshit Shetty) to find it for them.  

 

Srimmanarayana is probably not a very good cop; he spends a little too much time in bars, and isn't likely to take a case unless there's something in it for him.  On the other hand, when he wants to be, he's a brilliant detective, and he's very good at punching people as well.  Srimmanarayana is ably assisted by Constable Achyuthanna (Achyuth Kumar) and frequently annoyed by plucky but kind of bossy small town reporter Lakshmi (Shanvi Sristavasta).

 

All of which sounds pretty standard.  There are dueling bad guys, a dashing scoundrel, a prim love interest, and a shiny macguffin, and everybody has their own agenda, including and especially our hero.  But that's because I haven't mentioned Cowboy Krisna's, an exact replica of a Western saloon owned by an eccentric cattle magnate, where you can hire a team of hyper-competent cowboy-themed mercenaries using a convenient letterbox.

 

And then there's the secret society of actors, who lead mundane lives in town during the day, but at night they secretly dress up in costume and perform theatrical rituals in the woods, preparing for the day when their prophesied savior will arrive and help them perform their last play so that they can finally move on to the next town.

 

What I am saying is, this is a weird movie.  It's not just a bombastic, over-the-top action movie, it's also a whimsical, surreal comedy.  Or it's not just a whimsical, surreal comedy, it's a bombastic, over-the-top action movie.  Either way, it mangles genres boundaries with glee, and the end result is as charming as it is strange.

I am slapsticked out.

I like to watch a wide range of Bollywood and related cinema, but I have to admit that the nineties and early oughts are really my era.  I love a good nineties romantic action comedy, and I regret to inform you that Hello Brother (1999) is not a good nineties romantic action comedy.

Salman Khan plays Hero, a courier working in Mumbai, and he is . . . Look, I get that this movie is a goofy comedy, and characters are going to be drawn very broadly, but Hero is a capering  twit whose behavior doesn't even rise to the level of "buffoon."  He's like Pee Wee Herman with muscles.  He also has a habit of picking fights with little or no provocation, and he tends to end these fights by giving his hapless opponents purple nurples.  He is an interesting choice of protagonist.

 

Hero is in love with his next door neighbor/gal pal Rani (Rani Mukerji), but while they do flirt a little bit during the obligatory neighborhood "Boys Versus Girls" song, she makes it very clear that she thinks of him as a friend.  hero is still holding out hope, though, so he asks his boss Khanna (Shakti Kapoor) for some extra work, and Khanna is happy to assign him some extra, special deliveries.

Enter grouchy supercop Vishal (Arbaaz Khan, Salman's real life brother).  Vishal has pretty much cleaned up the drug trade in his home city, so his superiors have arranged to have him transferred to Mumbai, where he is under the command of the explosively flatulent Senior Inspector Khan (Meeraj Vora) and ably assisted by Constable Hatela (Johny Lever).  Vishal is convinced that Khanna is using his courier business to ship drugs, so he marches out to the golf course and threatens him.  Hero does not believe that Khanna is capable of anything shady (because Hero is an idiot) and jumps in to defend his boss.

 

Before too long, Hero is the Roadrunner to Vishal's Coyote, stymieing his investigation at every turn, because apparently the police academy doesn't prepare you for dealing with nitwits.  And then one of Hero's packages spills, revealing drugs!  Hero races to tell Khanna about what he's discovered.  Vishal follows, alone, because he's a maverick cop who doesn't care about rules or backup.  It doesn't go well; Khanna kills Hero, then shoots Vishal through the heart.

 

But the movie isn't over yet.  Vishal is given Hero's heart, because apparently this hospital is run by maverick doctors who don't care about the rules.  And unfortunately Hero isn't out of the movie either; he's hanging around as a ghost that only Vishal can see.  The only way to make Hero go away is to avenge his death, so the pair are forced into an awkward buddy comedy alliance in order to take down Khanna.  And things get even more complicated when Vishal meets Rani and falls instantly in love.

One of the few things I liked about the movie is that Rani was completely sincere about being Hero's friend.  Once she finds out about his death, she immediately claims the body and arranges a funeral, and she genuinely mourns his loss.  It's the one bit of emotion in the film that isn't immediately undercut with stupid slapstick and fart jokes.

 

And the rest of the movie is, well, undercut with stupid slapstick and fart jokes.  Again, I get it, it's a goofy and incredibly broad comedy, but when Johny Lever is playing a more nuanced and dignified character than the movie's star, things may be a little too goofy, even for me.

Charlie's Shiny New Year

If 2020 has taught me anything, it's that life is a lot like Bollywood: the genre can change completely, right when you least expect it.  Sometimes that's good, and sometimes it's a humanitarian disaster of global proportions, but change happens.  And that's what New Year's Eve is really all about; whatever calendar you use, it's good to take one night a year to decide what genre you really want to live in.  And that brings me to Happy New Year (2014).

Charlie (Shah Rukh Khan) is not happy.  He's a street fighter, and as the film opens he's competing in a very female-gazey match, complete with a lot of mud and water and lingering close-ups of his abs.  Charlie is supposed to throw the fight.  He's ready and willing to throw the fight . . . until his opponent tries to needle him by calling him the son of a thief.   Instead, he delivers a brutal beatdown and leaves, and the terrifying gangster he was working for apparently gives up and completely disappears from the movie.

 

Later, Charlie is relaxing in his very spacious apartment (street-fighting pays much better than I would have expected, apparently) when he learns that a shipment of priceless diamonds will be kept in the vault of the Atlantis Hotel in Dubai for one night, Christmas Eve, and will be protected by the security company owned by Charan Grover (Jackie Shroff.)  And that's when Charlie reveals that this is actually a heist movie.

Every heist movie requires a team, and Charlie recruits Jag (Sonu Sood), a military veteran and movie special effects expert who is deaf in one ear; Tammy (Boman Irani), an epileptic safe cracker; Rohan (Vivaan Shah), hapless teenaged nerd and super hacker); and Nandu (Abhishek Bachchan), a drunken idiot who happens to look exactly like Charan Grover's son Vicky.  

Charlie has a plan, and it can work, if everybody plays their part.  Step one, naturally, is to enter the World Dance Competition, which is sort of like Eurovision, only for dance. They don't have to win the competition; they don't really even have to qualify, since they have a hacker handy, but they do need to pass the first round of auditions.  Cue a training montage filled with silly dancing and pop culture references.

 

But they're still terrible.  The team needs a coach, since this is now a sports movie.  Nandu suggests his childhood friend, Mohini (Deepika Padukone), a bar dancer with the soul of an artist.  They get off to a rocky start, but Mohini soon whips them into a sort of shape; they don't actually become good, but what they do is mostly recognizable as dancing.  Meanwhile, Mohini is enthralled by Charlie's drive and English skills and abs, and the pair start to creep towards maybe starting a relationship.  (She can do better, but I'll get to that later.)

 

Mohini does not know about the heist, and she certainly isn't in the loop when the rest of the team cheat their way into becoming Team India.  All she knows is that they are on their way to Dubai, to represent their country.  Unfortunately, nobody likes them, because they're terrible dancers.  And the leader of the North Korean team (Jason Tham) picks a completely gratuitous fight with Charlie.  And worst of all, the diamonds are delayed for a week, so the team of terrible dancers absolutely has to get through the first round of the competition.  The success of the heist movie depends upon the success of the sports movie.

 

This is a Farah Khan movie, which means that wild swings in genre and tone are to be expected; in one scene Jag uses cartoon physics to defeat a group of bouncers with silly names, and in another we learn the tragic secret of what happened to Charlie's father and exactly why everybody is so set on taking down Charan.  As usual, Khan packs the movie with stuff that she thinks is cool, which makes for a dizzying pace.  It is a long movie, but it does not feel like a long movie.

 

The film does have some flaws.  The humor is generally pretty broad, which means some of the jokes are cheap shots or play to stereotypes, and both Tammy's epilepsy and Jag's hearing loss are used for cheap laughs more than once.

 

I'm more bothered by the romantic track, though.  I get what the movie is trying to do; Mohini's attraction to Charlie plays up a  number of tropes of Bollywood romance while reversing the gender; in one scene, for instance, she's so busy staring at Charlie that she doesn't hear a word that he's saying.  That's cute and all, but it's not really healthy.  More seriously, Charlie is kind of a jerk who is constantly saying well-meaning but tone deaf things about Mohini's social class and job.  He doesn't really show her respect, and Mohini is all about demanding respect.  It's not something that she should give up on; no amount of English or abs is worth that.

 

On the other hand, this is a movie about change, about how life can change in an instant whether you're ready or not, and about how if there's a change you want to see happen, you can't just wait for fate.  Charlie is beginning to change himself by the end of the film, and Mohini is pursuing her own dreams rather than waiting around for him.  It's a new year, and anything can happen.

John Woo presents Jane Austen's 'Persuasion'

 If you're looking for a Bollywood Christmas movie, pickings are decidedly slim.  There's Bada Din, which is fantastic and which I reviewed years ago, and there's Hide & Seek, an okayish slasher movie featuring a killer Santa prowling through a deserted shopping mall, but after that you have to settle for vaguely Christmas adjacent movies like Dilwale (2015), set in largely Christian Goa, in which Christmas lasts just long enough to rip off a scene from Love, Actually.

 

Let's start with Veer (Varun Dhawan.)  Veer works as a mechanic in the garage owned by his brother Raj (Shah Rukh Khan.)  Veer is a simple soul; he likes fast cars and . . . well, that's pretty much it.  Fast cars.  Until, that is, he meets Ishita (Kriti Sanon), and immediately falls in love.

One night while out on the town the pair run afoul of a gang of drug dealers.  Veer beats them up, but later they ambush him and beat him badly enough to put him in the hospital.  At which point his older brother Raj, gentle, responsible Raj, covers his face, tracks the drug dealers to their lair, beats them all up, then burns their merchandise.  When the goons say that they work for King (Boman Irani) and he'll have his revenge, Raj tells them to look for Kaali.

And we flash back fifteen years to an unnamed city in Bulgaria, where two crime cartels are battling for control of the city, one run by Dev Malik (Kabir Bedi) and one by Randhir Bakshi (Vinod Khanna) and his son and right hand man, Kaali (SRK).  

During a car chase, Kaali accidentally hits a woman named Meera Dev Malik (Kajol) with his car, and if you noticed her surname, you're paying more attention than Kaali is.  Kaali is fascinated by her, and she is surprisingly open-minded about the whole "brutal gangster" thing, so he wages a full Shah Rukh Khan charm offensive and apparently wins her over. 

 

It's obviously a trick.  Meera is Dev Malik's daughter, and ambushes Kaali and his men during a gold shipment.  On a whim, she leaves him alive.  Soon after, he saves her from falling off a cliff (long story) and she falls for him. Will she be able to win him back?  Yes, thanks to the most expensive musical number in Bollywood history.  They resolve to tell their respective fathers about the relationship, and it goes badly.

 

The movie flashes forward to 2015 Goa.  Veer wins Ishita's heart thanks to the aforementioned scene from Love, Actually and the nice young couple decide to tell their respective family, starting with Raj.  Raj is delighted, and goes to meet with Ishita's sister to formalize the proposal, only to discover that the sister is Meera.  The young lovers find themselves suddenly star-crossed, and since it is really, really obvious that Raj and Meera have a history together, they resolve to get their older siblings to fall in love . . . again. What could possibly go wrong?

Let me deal with my Festivus grievances before I get to my Christmas delight.  Boman Irani is a fine actor, more than capable of playing a genuinely menacing character.  That's not what he does here; King is a buffoon who is consistently played for laughs, and because he's the designated villain for the Goan sections of the story, that undercuts a lot of tension.

More seriously, because we see the flashbacks almost entirely from Raj's perspective, we understand his perspective and actions in a way that Meera can't, which means that he comes across as noble and self-sacrificing, while she seems like a terrible person.  The fact that she is still somewhat sympathetic is entirely due to the strength of Kajol's performance.

 

And that leads me to the Christmas delight.  The plot may be a bit muddled at times, but the cast is stellar.  I would happily pay good money to see Shah Rukh and Kajol read the phone book together.  It's not just their well-publicized chemistry; the pair work best when they are playing grown-ups with grown-up concerns, balancing their responsibilities with their love lives.  It gives the relationship more weight than you get when Shah Rukh is cast opposite a youngster like Anushka Sharma or Deepika Padukone.

The first time I watched Dilwale, it struck me as a version of Romeo and Juliet gone wrong.  On a second viewing, though, it seems more like something out of Jane Austen.  He's too proud, she's too quick to judge, and they're both missing a key piece of information which will help them unravel their competing priorities.  More gunfights than you usually see in Austen, though.

Actors never stay in the jeep.

 Sometimes you can just look at a character in a movie and see that they're doomed.  In Main Khiladi Tu Anari (1994), that character is Arjun Joglekar (Mukesh Khanna, who will always be Shaktimaan to me.)  Arjun is an incorruptible supercop and thorn in the side of drug kingpin Goli (Shakti Kapoor.)  He's also a devoted family man, with a wife (Beena Banerjee) that he just learned is pregnant, and a spunky younger sister, Shivangi (Raageshwari).  And of course he's in a big budget Bollywood movie, but played by an actor who is mostly known for his television work.  He's doomed.

Goli asks bar dancer Mona (Shilpa Shetty) to lure Arjun to her apartment and offer him a bribe.  She does, and Arjun refuses the money and delivers a lecture about honor and duty which, to be fair, is exactly what Shaktimaan would do. And then Goli and his henchmen walk in the door and kill him.  Traditionally, the actual hero (usually another cop) enters the movie at this point, vows to take care of his fallen comrade's family, and spends the rest of the movie seeking justice and maybe finding love in his spare time.  And that's exactly what happens here.

Said actual hero is Arjun and Shivagi's brother Karan (Akshay Kumar), who is also an incorruptible supercop, but he's played by a film actor so he's probably safe.  Karan quickly convinces Mona to testify against Goli, but before that can happen Goli uses a helicopter to sneak up on them and shoots her dead.  And even though Karan saw the whole thing, Goli is too powerful and connected to be charged with a crime without hard evidence.  (The testimony of a police officer who witnessed everything directly isn't enough.)

While he waits for another chance to take down Goli, Karan busies himself with actual police work, and by actual police work I mean he hears about a corrupt and mob-connected film producer assaulting aspiring actresses, so he goes to the man's office and beats him to a bloody pulp.  Film star Deepak Kumar (Saif Ali Khan) happens to be there to see the beating, and he thinks that Karan is so incredibly cool that he must play him in a movie.  Deepak makes arrangements to shadow a reluctant Kumar in order to research the character.

Meanwhile, Kumar stumbles across Basanti (also Shilpa Shetty), a street performer who happens to look exactly like Mona.  Suddenly Deepak is useful!  Deepak trains Basanti to impersonate Mona, then they install her in Mona's old job and apartment so that she can spy on Goli's organization.

(Side note - Basanti is very obviously based on Hema Malini's performance as Geeta in the long lost twin drama Seeta Aur Geeta; she dresses like Geeta, speaks like Geeta, and even even threatens to demolish a police station like Geeta.  However, she's named after Malini's character in Sholay.)

And while Basanti is risking her life in the figurative lion's den, Karana nd Deepak . . . mostly muck about and engage in buddy comedy hijinks.  There's a lot of bickering, and each man has his own deeply problematic romantic arc.  Shivangi is a Deepak Kumar fan, but they only realize how big a fan she is when she cuts herself badly while trying to carve his name into her hand.  Apparently this level of extreme devotion is just what Deepak is looking for in a woman, because before long they're talking about marriage.  Karan is an obstacle, but Deepak tries to deal with the problem by tricking Karan into falling in love with Basanti, a plan which revolves around getting Karan drunk and then, in the morning, convincing him that he had taken advantage of Basanti.  It's . . . it's not good.  Shaktimaan would not approve.

Dysfunctional courtship is kind of a hallmark of mid nineties Bollywood, and, as usual, once the respective relationships are established with their respective dance numbers, the characters start acting like relatively reasonable people again.  It does take a little while to get there, though.

Icky romance isn't the only nineties trope on display here.  The plot is lifted from an American movie that I haven't seen (The Hard Way), the film meanders from genre to genre, there's a board meeting of international criminals, Goli has a right hand man with a distinctive look and a stupid haircut, and Johny Lever, Kader Khan, and Shakti Kapoor all have significant roles.  (Much to my surprise, Shakti Kapoor isn't terrible here.)  It's like a microcosm of the Bollywood of nthe era; mostly big dumb fun, but there are elements that have not aged well at all. 

The fly who loved me.

 The reincarnation revenge drama, like the snake movie, is one of those subgenres you don't normally see outside of India.  (Sometimes reincarnation revenge dramas are snake movies!)  It's a fairly simple formula: our hero is brutally murdered, but he comes back in his next life to defend his loved ones and avenge his own death.  Of course, they tend to have the same problem.  It takes time for the reincarnated hero to grow up and get into revenge-taking shape, so no matter how you dress it up, in the end you have a virile young hero beating up an old guy.  Eega (2012) finds a way around the problem, though, and it is clever.

Nani (Nani), a poor but charming fireworks salesman, lives across the street from Bindu (Samantha), who works for a charity and creates micro-art in her spare time.  (All of this will be important later.)  Naturally he loves her, but she studiously ignores him.  He is convinced that she's just playing hard to get. (Ugh.)

Bindu's charity needs money, so she approaches suave businessman Sudeep (Sudeep).  Sudeep is happy to help, because he is a sexist creep who believes that he can have any woman in the world and who probably murdered his wife.  Sudeep doesn't just donate money; he hangs around and feigns interest in the charity's work, all to get closer to Bindu.  He is worried about Nani, though.  And he is right to be so, because Bindu really has been playing hard to get. (UUUUGHH.)

Before Bindu can tell Nani how she really feels, Sudeep's men kidnap him, and Sudeep steals his phone, reads Bindu's romantic text messages aloud, then kills him.  Fortunately, Nani is immediately reincarnated . . . as a housefly, which means it's time for a quick change of genre as Nani explores his strange new oversized world.  He eventually winds up in Sudeep's office, though, and immediately regains his memory, so it's time for REVENGE!

Or not.  The tiny fly literally bounces off Sudeep.  Nani settles for an ongoing campaign of harassment, leaving Sudeep twitchy and paranoid.  But despite his best efforts (including a car crash), it's clear that he's going to need some help.  Thanks to Bindu's powerful magnifying equipment (because micro-art) and some spirited gestures, Nani explains who he is and what happens to him, and Bindu immediately joins Team Kill Sudeep. She makes him tiny armor and weapons, there's a training montage, and I suddenly find myself wondering exactly who the target audience for this movie is.

For the most part, Nani's crusade against Sudeep is played for laughs; it's more Tom and Jerry than The Punisher.  Nani's early experiences as a fly are very light-hearted and filled with wonder as well as danger.  And there's a light framing story in the opening credits, with a father telling the tale of the bad man and the fly to his young daughter.  And yet the hero is murdered onscreen, Nani and Bindu are planning to kill Sudeep, and the final confrontation is brutal and bloody.  Is this a particularly violent kid's movie, or an unusually whimsical action movie?  I don't know.

What I do know is that Eega manages to neatly sidestep the "beating up an old guy" problem.  You can't help but be the underdog when you're a literal housefly.

Legal action!

 Bollywood is better known, but the Telugu film industry produces some of the most innovative and exciting films in India, often kicking off major cinematic trends for the subcontinent; Bollywood is still trying to make its own Baahubali, and many new Bollywood pictures are remakes of Tollywood films.  Tollywood has a reputation for films of epic scale and high quality . . . now.  Vicky Dada (1989) comes from a different time.

Vikram (Nagarjuna) is a young, idealistic law student.  He'd better be idealistic; his mother Srividya (Srividya), a judge, raised him to respect the law and seek justice whenever he can.  Vikram does have a bit of a temper, especially when his girlfriend Shyamlee (the incomparable Juhi Chawla) is threatrened.  But I'm sure this will have no negative consequences.

Shyamlee is called away to tend to her ailing sister in America.  Vikram graduates, and immediately begins work as a prosecutor.  His first case (tried in front of his mother, which is far from the worst conflict of interest in a courtroom scene in this movie) involves Savitri (Radha), who has been accused of prostitution.  Vikram wins easily, because he is good at lawyering, but when he realizes that Savitri was framed as part of a land grab masterminded by corrupt politician Ranganatha Rao (Ranganath), he pays her fine and uses his lawyering skills to stop the land grab.

Thwarted, Rao calls on crimelord Prabhakar (Tiger Prabhakar) for help.  Prabhakar sends his goons, one of them kills a guy, and Vikram vows to bring the killer to justice.  Prabhakhar uses his corrupt influence to threaten the eyewitnesses, and the goon is set free.  Vikram doesn't give up, though.  He and his sister, the plucky aspiring reporter Rekha (Vara Lakshmi), team up to find out more about him.  Unfortunately, Rekha decides to break into Prabhakar's evil lair and film him.  She's caught and kidnapped, but not before she mails a cassette tape to Vikram, revealing what's happened.

Vikram has Prabhakar arrested, and prosecutes the case.  (Again, in front of his mother, which also means that both the prosecutor and judge are related to the victim.  And yet that's still not the worst example of conflict of interest in the movie.)  Prabhakar gets off, thanks to some genuinely ridiculous legal trickery, and because Vikram was provoked into throttling the defense counsel, he's suspended.  Vikram declares that he doesn't want to be a lawyer anymore anyway, and runs off to become a violent (but stylish) vigilante.

Vigilante stuff happens.  Vikram and his dog wage war on Prabhakar's criminal empire, beating up vast quantities of henchmen and picking off the gang's lieutenants one by one, then using his lawyer skills to get off scot-free. Yes, I'm kind of glossing over the vigilante action, but the movie does as well, because surprise!  This is actually a romance!  Shyamlee returns from America and wants to continue their relationship, but Vikram dispenses justice on a freelance basis now, and feels he no longer has anything to offer her, so he pushes her away.  Savitri, meanwhile, has fallen hard for the man who has saved her so many times.  It's a good old fashioned love triangle, with occasional action scenes.

About halfway through Vicky Dada, I realized that it's probably not a very good movie.  The plot doesn't really make sense, the action scenes are enthusiastic but sloppy, the court scenes are enthusiastic but really sloppy, the dance numbers are phantasmagoric, and why does Prabhakhar have a jeep with an infinite number of rockets, anyway?  More seriously, the movie indulges in some of my least favorite eighties Indian movie tropes, particularly the hero's sister meeting a dire end in order to motivate the hero.

And yet, bad movie or not, I was glues to the screen the whole time.  Maybe it's the fantastic cast, who treated the wobbly material with a respect that it may or may not have deserved.  Maybe it's the sheer enthusiasm of the thing.  Maybe I just wanted to see what the hell the dancers would be wearing in the next number.  Whatever the reason, Vicky Dada is possibly bad but definitely watchable.