I have mixed feelings.

The basic premise of Maharaj Ki Jai Ho (2020) isn't exactly new; "street-smart guys from contemporary India trapped in the past try to survive in the court of a powerful emperor" was also the premise of the splendidly titled Fun2shh: Dudes in the 10th Century, at the very least.  The twist is that the emperor in question isn't any random maharaj, it's Dhritarashta, blind king of Hastinapur, scion of the doomed Kuru dynasty, and one of the central characters in the Mahabharata.  Did I mention that this is a sitcom?

 

Pickpocket and small-time thief Sanjay (Satyajeet Dubey) is released from jail on the day of his wedding to Sweety (Maera Mishra).  On the way home, though, he's waylaid by gangsters, who force him to steal a super-advanced solar powered car.  And when that goes horribly wrong, Sanjay drives onto a military base, where he gets sucked up by a black hole, and thrown into the past.  (Definitely not a black hole, but that's what the subtitles tell me.  Could be a wormhole.)

 

Sanjay arrives in the court of Dhritarashta (Nitesh Pandey) and his wife Gandhari (Monica Castelino.)  Since the car is obviously a miraculous chariot sent as a gift by Indra himself, it follows that Sanjay must be a miraculous charioteer sent as a gift by Indra himself.  (In the actual Mahabharata, Dhritarashta does have a miraculous charioteer named Sanjay who is gifted with divine vision; Sanjay the sitcom character is specifically named after him.)

And, well, it's a sitcom, so wackiness ensues.  Sanjay meets Albert D'Souza (Ashwin Mushran), the scientist who created the "black hole," and who has disguised himself as a maidservamt for reasons which are never entirely made clear.  He clashes with Shakuni (Aakash Dabhade), Gandhari's brother, who has been reduced from a master manipulator driven by spite to a sitcom foil driven by a desire for money.  And he falls hard for Sunaina (Riya Sharma), a ruthless bandit who turns out to be a literal warrior princess, the daughter of Dhritarashta's rival Suryabhan (Rajesh Kumar.)

 

The characters are fun and engaging, and Sanjay and Sunaina show great chemistry.  Sanjay's courtship style largely involves quoting old Shah Rukh Khan movies at Sunaina, and the show gets some great mileage out of the violin gag from Main Hoon Na.  This is a TV show that isn't afraid to milk a good joke for everything it's worth.

 

The problem is that the show is also not afraid to milk a bad joke for everything it's worth.  Dhritarashta and Gandhari are deeply in love, delightfully earnest, and fascinated by Sanjay's many "inventions" (like cricket, trial by jury, democracy, and treating women as people) but all too often the punchline is "They're blind."  D'Souza is not a mad scientist, but he is a cranky one, utterly amoral, and happy to betray everyone if it means he and Sanjay can finally go home, but the show never lets us forget that he's also a man in women's clothing.  And then there are the Rakshasas, and . . . oh dear.

 

The Rakshasas in Maharaj Ki Jai Ho are not supernatural creatures, they're a human tribe who live in the forests around Hastinapur.  I think they were intended as a spoof of the Kalakeya tribe from the Bahubali series.  Like the Kalakeya, they're named after a class of demon, and while the Kalakeya are brutal warriors who despoil all they conquer, the Rakshasas are comedy cannibals, while the Kalakeya speak a carefully constructed fictional language, the Rakshasas speak gibberish (and their chieftain is just doing a Donald Duck impression), and while the actors portraying the Kalakeya have had their skin darkened, the rakshasa are painted black.  (This seems to be true in-universe, with the characters painted black instead of it being their natural skin tone, but that doesn't really make it better.)  

The thing is, Bahubali's Kalakeya are already sort of problematic, and Maharaj Ki Jai Ho exaggerates all their problematic aspects to a cartoonish degree.  The Rakshasa showed up early in the series as Sunaina's partners in crime, and I winced through that episode and celebrated when they went away, but towards the end of the series they just kept popping up in the background. 

I'm baffled.  I'm not sure who decided that this potentially fun sitcom with an engaging premise and a charming cast needed to keep hammering away at its worst joke, but it was the wrong decision.

I think that terrifying ghost makes some valid points.

 Roohi (2021) has consistently been compared to Stree, and that makes sense; they're both horror comedies that star Rajkummar Rao and feature subtle feminist themes despite the viewpoint characters all being men.  Surprisingly, nobody ever mentions Roohi's other spiritual forbear, the 1997 Juhi Chawla farce Deewana Mastana.

The film opens with a series of cliched snippets of Indian village life, and we quickly learn why: it's a film within a film, a documentary being shot by an American (Alexx O'Neil) who is apparently named Tim.  Tim is in Bagadpur to investigate the local custom of abduction marriages, in which a prospective groom has his intended bride kidnapped.  There's no indication that the brides have any choice in the matter, but the villagers all shrug because that is the way it is done.

 

Tim's local guides are Bawra (Rajkummar Rao) and Kattani (Varun Sharma).  In theory, they are reporters, but their boss Guniya (Manav Vij) also runs the local kidnapping ring, and doesn't really segregate his businesses.  After Tim leaves, Bawra and Kattani receive a new assignment; the regular kidnappers are busy, so they are to go to the train station and kidnap Roohi (Janhvi).

 

The bride is duly carried away, but then Guniya calls again.  The wedding has been delayed for a week, so Bawra and Kattani are supposed to hold her prisoner in an abandoned wood factory.  This turns out to be a problem, because while Roohi is demure and soft-spoken, she is also occasionally possessed by Afza, a mudyapairi, or backwards footed ghost, who is brash, angry, and anything but demure.  Afza died unwed, and will not leave Roohi until she can be married.  In fact, there's a strict time limit; if Roohi doesn't marry within a year, Afza and Roohi will both die.  In fact, the year is nearly up. 

 

Bawra finds himself falling for Roohi.  Meanwhile, Kattani is immediately smitten with Afza.  It's almost a classic love triangle, except that our heroes are in love with two different women who happen to be occupying the same body, and neither of the women have shown any particular romantic interest in them, and also there's the whole kidnapping thing.  And now I need to talk about Deewana Mastana.

In Deewana Mastana, Juhi Chawla plays Neha, a psychiatrist who is romantically pursued by both her patient Bunnu (Govinda) and a streetwise thief named Raja (Anil Kapoor.)  Throughout the movie, Bunnu and Raja try to one-up each other in an escalating series of vicious pranks, all to determine who gets to win Neha.  However, they don't consult Neha at any point, and she ignores them and marries Salman Khan instead, which is the only way that particular love triangle could resolve itself if Neha is to have any agency at all.

Bawra and Kattani are not as terrible as Bunnu and Raja.  I wouldn't credit either one of them with a heart of gold, but Bawra does genuinely want to help Roohi, Kattani wants Afza to be free to rampage wherever she wants, and they're both willing to take risks to protect Roohi and Afza when Guniya decides that the wedding is back on.  But in the end, this is a story that revolves around consent, and it can't really end with a woman happily marrying one or both of her kidnappers.  The story does not end with Roohi marrying Salman Khan, but the actual resolution is even better.

 

Roohi is billed as a horror comedy with romantic elements.  It's not particularly scary, it's sporadically funny, and it's certainly not romantic, but it is consistently interesting and includes a trip to a village of exorcists. 

 

This movie needs sarcastic robots.

Full disclosure - the cut of Sanjeevani: Adventure on the Edge (2019) that I watched did not include subtitles, and so it's possible that the film's dialogue is amazing and makes up for any shortcomings in special effects or acting or pacing or costuming or basic common sense.  It's possible, but I'm not counting on it.

 

 The plot is pretty straightforward, at least.  Omkar (Manoj Chandra) is offered an absurd amount of money by the Indian military to lead an expedition to a remote Himalayan plateau in order to retrieve the titular sanjeevani, the miraculous flower that Hanuman retrieved in order to save Lakshman's life in the Ramayana.  He assembles a motley team, and here's a place where subtitles would have helped, because they seem like just a bunch of poorly prepared college kids.  Naresh (Mohan Bhagath) is at least a filmmaker, but Nandu (Anuraag Dev) and Mounika (Swetaa Varma) are actors, and not particularly good ones.  (In universe, that is; I'm picking on the characters, not the actual actors.)  And it's not clear what skills Uncle (Purnesh Gudepu, Tommy (Amogh Deshapathi), Isha (Tanuja Naidu) or Abhi (Nitin Nash) bring to the table, apart from bickering. 

 

After driving along the well-maintained road that leads to the isolated Himalayan plateau, the group takes  a moment to annoy a meditating sage (Shekhar Babu Bachinepally) and be cursed.  Then they reach the plateau in time for some walking with prehistoric beasts.  The movie opens with a military helicopter being menaced by giant flying reptiles, but they don't get much screentime.  Instead, the three terrors of the Fire SwampLost Plateau are the murderchimps, roving packs of giant spiders, and Tommy, who snaps and kills Uncle basically as soon as they are alone.  (He might have had a good reason, but again, no subtitles.)  

Fortunately, the spiders, at least, are dumb and easy to outrun or trick into losing their footing, because if there's one thing spiders are famous for, it's easily losing their footing.

The other peril our heroes face is a limited budget.  While the spiders and the murderchimps do plenty of menacing, it's clear that actually interacting with the actors is just not possible with the technology available, so any actual killing takes place offscreen, and the monsters are used sparingly.  Internal conflict within the group helps with that, and Tommy is not the last team member to get murdery for no apparent reason.,  But the real padding comes from . . .

 

Rock climbing.  So much rock climbing.

 

Sanjeevani is not a good movie, but it is an enthusiastic movie. It feels like a first time director's passion project that somehow managed to escape into mass distribution.  It's bad in a different way than a bloated, overhyped mess like Zero.  And the dialogue might be incredible.  

Same style, different story.

A mythological is a movie or TV series which draws its story from a religious (and usually Hindu) text.  Sometimes they are big budget action fests, sometimes they are quiet expressions of sincere faith, and often they are an awkward mix of the two.  I love a good mythological; the storylines are always epic, the budgets are often minuscule, and there's something about that mix of passionate belief and wonky special effects that I find very compelling.  Unfortunately, that same heady mix makes mythological movies blooming hard to review.  All of which brings me to Jesus (1973), a mythological film drawing on a different religious text.

The story is mostly familiar.  Mary (Raji) is visited by a glowing golden light, which informs her that she has been chosen to bear the Son of God.  The same light also manifests itself to her husband Joseph and helpfully explains the situation to him, preventing a lot of awkward misunderstandings.  Joseph and Mary must travel to Bethlehem in order to be counted in the census, and nativity ensues.  Shepherds watch their flocks by night.  Herald angels sing. 

Meanwhile, three Wise Men from a far off land follow an unconvincing star through the desert.  When the star disappears, they decide to consult with King Herod (Thikkurissy Sukumaran Nair).  They explain the situation, telling Herod the good news about the prophesied King of the Jews being born soon, and Herod pretends to be pleased.  He is not pleased, and orders that every male child under the age of two is to be slaughtered.  This leads to a well conceived, of not necessarily well executed, montage in which scenes of the Roman soldiers cruelly slaughtering the innocents with their . . . tulwars? are interspersed with scenes of Herod cavorting with his favorite dancing girls.

 

And from there, the movie proceeds like a speed run through the Gospels.  May and Joseph flee to Egypt!  Young Jesus impresses the Temple elders with his wisdom and knowledge of scripture, and also helps Joseph with the carpentry.  Adult Jesus (Murali Das) is tempted by the Devil (O. A. K. Thevar), then begins his ministry.  It's a bit disjointed, really; Jesus performs a miracle, then the movie jumps to the next one, only occasionally pausing long enough for a bit of sermonizing.

 

The story is mainly drawn from the Gospel of Luke, but with some additions, most notably Salome (Jayalalithaa) dancing and being rewarded with the head of John the Baptist (Gemini Ganesan), because there's no way a movie of the era would pass on such a perfect opportunity for an item number.  (There are actually two item numbers.  Mary Magdalene (Ushakumari) gets one as well.)

 

 

The movie clearly didn't have much of a budget, and it shows.  The special effects are impressively terrible, the costumers are a historical jumble, and most of the interior scenes seem to be filmed in the same house, shot from different angles in order to make it look like different buildings.  On the other hand, the cast includes a number of big names of Malayalam cinema, so that's probably where the budget went.

 

And in the end I'm . . . not sure what to say about Jesus.  It's easy to make jokes about the special effects and the pacing and so on (it's kind of my brand) but this movie is a sincere expression of religious faith.  One thing I can say is that it was never boring.  This is one part solemn religious epic, one part fever dream.

And Anushka Sharma as the tree.

A good ghost movie is never just about the ghost; the restless spirits of the dead are a perfect vehicle for the delivery of metaphor.  This is true whether the movie is a horror story or a frothy romance.  A movie like Phillauri (2017) might bend the rule, but in the end, metaphor is inevitable.

Kanan (Suraj Sharma) is an aspiring rapper, flying home from Canada to marry his childhood sweetheart, Anu (Mehreen Pirzada.)  he's also quietly freaking out; he loves Anu, but isn't sure he's ready to get married, wants to see if he can succeed in his rap career, and wants to find himself.  He's not comfortable talking about with Anu, though, so instead he stews and acts aloof and weird.

 

Things are about to get weirder.  According to his horoscope, Kanan is a Manglik, born under the malign influence of Mars, and his marriage is fated to end in disaster.  The accepted remedy is to accelerate the disaster by marrying the unfortunate Maglik to an animal, an object, or, as in Kanan's case, a tree.  Kanan marries the tree, the tree is chopped down, and the problem is solved.  

 

The trouble is, this particular tree is haunted by the ghost of Shashi (Anuska Sharma.)  Shashi is now technically married, and her tree is gone, so she doesn't really have anything else to do but haunt Kanan, and by haunt I mostly mean "Provide a sarcastic running commentary on the wedding preparations." Still, it's enough to freak Kanan out, and he starts acting even more aloof and weird, further alienating Anu.

 

And Shashi has her own story, involving her old fashioned and strict brother (Manav Vij), as well as Roop Lal Phillauri (Diljit Dosanjh), a charming rogue who makes his living singing bawdy songs for the local villagers, but also has a reputation for publishing amazing poetry in the weekly newspaper.  Shahsi isn't impressed with his singing, and she slaps him when he tries to woo her with one of the poems, because she knows he didn't write them.  She did.

Roop Lal immediately decides to reform, and does a pretty good job of it.  It's enough to win over Shahsi, but not nearly enough to win over her brother.  And since Shashi is a ghost in the present, it's clear that this story is not going to have a happy ending.

 

Phillauri is probably at its best during the scenes set in the present day, with the hapless Kanan and Anu confronted by their own anxieties and Shashi as the looming specter of relationship anxiety.  It's an engaging mix of genuine relationship drama and fish (or rather ghost) out of water comedy.  Anushka Sharma is good at being funny, and these scenes give her the chance to be funny.

 

The flashback scenes aren't bad, by any means, but they move at a much slower pace than the rest of the movie, and so they seem to drag a bit by comparison.  One thing the scenes do very well, though is the poetry.  It can be hard to convey artistic talent onscreen, but Shashi's poetry is genuinely good.

Phillauri is also genuinely good, but it's at its best when it gives its ghost a little bit of distance.

The plot does get a little fuzzy at times.

It's easy to grow jaded about movies; sometimes it seems like if you've seen one buddy picture about a reclusive genius teaming up with an animated teddy bear to battle a human trafficking ring, you've seen them all.  Teddy (2021) doesn't really stray from the genius/teddy bear formula, and it hits all the notes you'd expect from the genre, but there's something to be said for taking a tried and true formula and executing it well.

 

Srividya (Sayyesha) is a young and carefree college student with a talent for photography and a boyfriend that she's not ready to tell her parents about yet.  During a bus trip with her classmates, Sri tries to help an accident victim.  She's injured, and is promptly rushed to the hospital, where she's placed in a room with a wisecracking kid and his enormous teddy bear, but the sinister hospital staff promptly drug her and take her away.  As Sri's body slips into a medically induced coma, her spirit slips into the form of the teddy bear.  She apologizes to the kid (who is, after all, now out one giant teddy bear) and escapes from the hospital.

 

Shiva (Arya), on the other hand, is a brilliant loner with an eidetic memory.  His memory is so powerful that he's able to completely master a new skill every few months.  he's already earned several advanced degrees, but instead of working he plays the stock market in an incredibly precise fashion, always earning just enough money to live comfortably.  That takes him about fifteen minutes a day, leaving him plenty of time for learning and avoiding human contact.  Shiva has a mother (Praveena) and one friend (Satish) and that is enough for him.

 

However, while Shiva's a recluse, he's not heartless.  When he sees a gang of thugs threatening a woman on a train, he steps in.  The thugs assume he's easy prey, but Shiva hasn't just mastered mental skills, he's picked up phenomenal skill in hand to hand combat as well.  Basically, he has all the skills of Batman without the motivation, but he's more than happy to put a stop to injustice when it's happening right in front of him.

 

Also on the train?  Sri.  She realizes that Shiva is someone who could help her get her body back, so she follows him home.  Once she manages to convince Shiva that he's not crazy and she needs his help they . . . spend some time getting to know each other,  But after that montage is over, the new best pals get down to some serious Batmanning.

 

Now, we don't really live in a word where movies about crime fighting teddy bears and their brilliant hunky sidekicks are a dime a dozen.  It's a ridiculous premise.  Teddy makes it work by taking it completely seriously.  This is not a comedy.  Funny things happen sometimes, but that's because the movie pairs a chirpy extrovert with a gloomy recluse, and also they are fighting crime and one of them is trapped in the body of a toy.  The premise is silly enough, so the movie doesn't milk it, it just commits completely.  It's just a focused, fun action movie with a nasty villain, cleanly choreographed and brutal fight scenes, and engaging leads.  And a talking teddy bear.

Singlle and ready to minglle.

Jane Austen is known for her use of what is sometimes called 'Free Indirect Discourse,' a literary technique in which a character speaks through the voice of the narrator.  It's a melding of first and third person point of view, omniscient but intimate and fallible.  And it's blooming hard to pull off in a movie, but somehow Qarib Qarib Singlle (2017) manages something similar.

Jaya Shashidharan (Parvathy Thiruvothu) is fine.  Her younger brother Ashish (Siddharth Menon) is studying at Princeton, and her husband Manav passed away years ago, but she's fine.  Her work at an insurance agency keeps her busy, and she's frequently babysitting and cat-sitting for various friends.  She's fine.  Just ask her.

 

And then Jaya decides that she's sick of being fine, so she creates an account on a dating website, and is immediately flooded by crude and aggressive messages, along with a very polite and erudite note form someone calling himself Yogi.  

Yogi turns out to be Yogendra Kumar Devendra Nath Prajapati (Irrfan Khan), a self-proclaimed and self published poet who makes his money (apparently a lot of money) by suggesting food items to various companies.  Yogi is rich enough to be called eccentric, but really he's weird, a bit full of himself, and very, very talkative, and while Jaya isn't exactly charmed, she's sufficiently entertained to agree to another date. 

 

Yogi talks about . . . well, Yogi talks about everything that pops into his head, but he spends a fair amount of time talking about his three former girlfriends, all of whom (he says) still yearn for him.  Jaya suggest that he go see them and find out if they're pining or not, and Yogi invites her to come along.  Jaya surprises herself by agreeing.

 

The romantic road trip is a Bollywood staple; boy meets girl, boy and girl grow closer while taking a life-changing journey across India or Switzerland or . . . well, let's be honest, it's usually India or Switzerland.  Of course, the road trip is usually the first part of the movie, with our heroes overcoming the various obstacles to their love in the second part.  Yogi and Jaya are older, and the only real obstacle to their potential love is that they're both set in their ways and too focused on their respective pasts to move on.

 

But what really interests me about Qarib Qarib Singlle is the narrative voice.  At first the movie is locked to Jaya's perspective, and she will occasionally talk directly to the camera to comment on the action.  As she gets to know Yogi better, that loosens up, and we see more and more from his perspective as well.  (Though only Jaya gets to address the camera.)  The end result is a narrative that is intimate but fallible.  The movie seems to change its mind as Jaya does.  The story being told is not very Austen (though Yogi is proud, and Jaya is quick to judge) but the storytelling definitely is.