They laugh alike, they walk alike, at times they even talk alike.

Amitabh Bachchan was the King of Bollywood in the Seventies and Eighties, the "angry young man" who captured the spirit of the era.  Today, Bachchan is the industry's reigning patriarch, the finest of stern father figures, and he's branching out into a number of offbeat roles.  But there's a long stretch of time between these two periods in which Bachchan was appearing in movies like Bade Miyan Chote Miyan (1998).  

 

Bachchan plays police inspector Arjun Singh, who is not particularly angry or young.  Singh has a mother (Sushma Seth), a spunky younger sister named Seema (Raveena Tandon), and a partner, Pyare Mohan (Govinda).  Pyare and Seema secretly love each other, but they know Arjun would never approve, so they plan to get Arjun married to someone, hoping that it will put him in a better mood.

 

Meanwhile, hotel maid Madhu (Divya Dutta) sees smuggler Zorawar (Paresh Rawal) and his henchmen murdering a police officer.  She escapes, and files a report with Pyare and Arjun, but when she returns Zorawar is waiting and kills her.  Madhu's roommate Neha (Ramya Krishnan) witnesses this murder, escapes, and calls the police, but insists she will only speak to Pyare.  Since Pyare is out, the Commissioner (Anupam Kher) orders Arjun to pretend to be Pyare.  He does, and takes her to hide out at Pyare's home, which means that Pyare has to go and stay at Arjun's house.  With Seema.  Wackiness ensues.

 

Arjun and Neha fall in love, because it's that sort of movie, but she still thinks that he is Pyare, which means that a mistaken identity plot is inevitable.  It doesn't last long, though, and soon both couples are happily in love and Zorawar politely steps out of the spotlight so that the movie can introduce Bade Miyan and Chote Miyan (Bachchan and Govinda), two thieves who happen to look exactly like Arjun and Pyare, leading to an entirely different mistaken identity plot, this time partly cribbed from Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors. 

 

Despite the tenuous Shakespearean connection, though, this is an aggressively dumb movie.  The pacing is off, with much of the early runtime devoted to setting up the first mistaken identity plotline, a plotline which is almost immediately discarded.  Zorawar just wanders from place to place menacing and murdering, rather than following any sort of coherent scheme, and one of his henchmen is killed at least twice but still shows up for the final fight scene.  And the movie never quite decides which Bachchan-Govinda pairing are the protagonists until the very end.

On the other hand, aggressively dumb movies can be fun, sometimes.  Bade Miyan Chote Miyan has some funny jokes and goofy action scenes and brightly colored dance numbers with terrible costumes and a completely gratuitous cameo by Madhuri Dixit.  Clearly a lot of people liked it, since it was the second biggest box office success of 1998, only overshadowed by megahit Kuch Kuch Hota Hai.  It was one of the high points of the low point of Amitabh Bachchan's career.

Your plastic pal who's fun to be with!

Goa, 2031.  On a dark and rainy night, a self driving taxi swerves to run over a man, an action which clearly violates the First Law of Robotics.  The investigation will lead a cynical cop and an idealistic robot rights activist into the dark underbelly of this neon future, where they must deal with a shady robotics corporation and its missing CEO, an anti-technology cult leader who doesn't wear clothing, an immersive virtual reality video game for disaffected robots, and at the center of it all, an AI which was created to save the world but decided to go into stand up comedy instead.  OK Computer (2021)  is a cyber-noir detective story mixed with absurdist comedy, like Blade Runner as told by Douglas Adams.

 

The detective in question is Saajan Kundu (Vijay Varma), and while he might seem like the only sane man in a collection of misfits, he's just as quirky and damaged as everybody else.  Saajan has lived in his car since the Covid-19 pandemic, and he has an instinctive distrust of machines and a superstitious fixation on a large sea turtle.  Saajan is ably assisted by the earnest and awkward Monalisa Paul (Kani Kusruti), a police detective whose mother belongs to an anti-technology cult, and he's forced to team up with robot rights activist Laxmi Suri (Radhika Apte.)  Saajan and Laxmi seem to have a past, but they parted on bad terms after he killed a submarine.

The suspects are an equally motley crew.  Mysterious billionaire CNX is missing, his interests represented by a small army of lawyers, a pair of computerized shoes, and a holographic bear.  Cult leader Pushpak (Jackie Shroff) is by turns whimsical, philosophical,  and sinister, but is always naked. 

 

And then there's Ajeeb, the prime suspect.  Ajeeb is an artificial intelligence designed to solve all the world's problems.  It was given a physical form and became a beloved celebrity, but after a crisis of confidence it quit to pursue comedy, and the backlash was so severe that Ajeeb was forced into hiding.  The show is quite open about being influenced by The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and Ajeeb is sort of the Anti-Marvin; there it is, brain the size of a (metaphorical) planet, and everybody knows and expects incredible results. Ajeeb deals with the pressure by projecting a sunny disposition which may or may not conceal a murderous dark side.

 

I'm not sure if OK Computer counts as a dark comedy, but it's definitely a sad comedy.  These are people who have seen absurd and terrible things, and it has marked them. And while Pushpak is a big naked idiot, but he does explain that this isn't the future people wanted.  "They were promised salvation.  Flying cars.  Smart cities.  Cheap medicine, longevity.  Freedom.  Privacy.  Unity.  But what did we get instead?  Private date theft.  Fear, discrimination.  Destruction of the environment.  Stale memes.  24 hour surveillance."  And if the dark future sounds like our dark present, well . . . 

 

OK Computer doesn't pretend to offer solutions to the world's problems.   It's just a reminder that something needs to change.

 

Weird, weird west.

Super Cowboy (2010), also known as Irumbukkotai Murattu Singam, is a Western set in India.  That's not that unusual; I've seen a lot of Indian movies that toy with Western tropes, but Super Cowboy is totally committed to the bit.  Every character looks and acts like somebody from the old West.  Sometimes that's good, and sometimes, not so much.

Singaram (Lawrence Raghavendra) is a semi-reformed thief and a terrible security guard.  After a priceless diamond is stolen on his watch, the town puts him on trial and then sentences him to death.  Singaram insists that he did not steal the diamond, but nobody cares.  They're holding him responsible anyway.

At the last moment, Singaram is rescued by a band of masked men who turn out to be middle aged dudes from the nearby village of Jayshankarapuram.  The men explain that their village is being menaced by the bandit warlord Kizhakku Katai (Nassar), master of the Iron Fort.  Jayshankarapuram had a protector, an amazing gunslinger named Singam, but he has vanished.  Singaram happens to look exactly like the missing Singam, so if he will play the part long enough to rally the villagers to fight back, they'll give him their diamond, which happens to look exactly like the stolen gem.  Singaram agrees, and so we have a plot.

 

Singaram is not much of a gunslinger, but he is a pretty good actor, and before long he's inspired the townspeople to stand up for themselves, and also managed to catch the eye of Baali (Padmapriya), the town's pretty young doctor.  Katai's henchman Ulakkai (Sai Kumar), also known as Cheetah, tries to kill the returned hero, but thanks to a combination of skillful bluffing, help from the middle aged dudes, and dumb luck, Cheetah is driven off.  Unfortunately, Katai has a plan for that.

 

Despite the Western trappings, the movie is set in sort of contemporary South India.  (The opening narration claims that it's the Eighteenth Century, but that is immediately followed by a trial scene which directly references Amitabh Bachchan.  It's not the Eighteenth Century.)  However, the tribal people living near Jayshankarapuram dress and speak like stereotypical Hollywood native Americans, though they draw upon stereotypical representations of indigenous peoples from many continents.  They're treated with more respect than the Rakshasa from Maharaj Ki Jai Ho, but that is damning with very faint praise indeed.  

Anyway, Katai's big scheme is to attack the tribals and place the blame on Singam.  It works, Singaram and friends are captured and about to be sacrificed (ugh) when Singaram saves the day and makes peace through his amazing dance skills.  The tribals agree to join the fight against Katai if Singaram will agree to marry the chief's beautiful daughter Thumbi (Sandhya).  Singaram negotiates a long engagement.

 

And then the movie suddenly shifts genre as representatives of all three factions team up to discover an ancient treasure by following a mysterious map and then solving a series of puzzles, which gives Katai's right hand woman Pakki (Lakshmi Rai) a chance to become Potential Love Interest #3.  

 

The switch in genres doesn't last long, though, because this is a movie that is passionate about embracing Western tropes, so there has to be a climactic gunfight before our hero can ride off into the sunset with his love interest of choice.  I just wish they had been more careful about which Western tropes to embrace.

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.