One of the most accurate movie titles I have ever seen.

Actors grow up so quickly.  It seems like only yesterday that Jimmy Shergill was playing the fresh-faced young Karan in Mohabbatein, and how he's playing grizzled, world weary policemen in movies like Collar Bomb (2021).  It's an amazing transformation.

  Update: I have just been informed that Mohabbatein was released in the year 2000, and Shergill has had a very busy career over the last twenty one years.  So it's a slow transformation, but still impressive.

A year after the tragic death of high school student Neha Potkar, her exclusive private school holds a memorial service, which also serves to honor the police officer who solved the case, SHO Manoj Hesi (Jimmy Shergill).  It's an awkward ceremony; the murdered girl's mother can't bear to even look at manoj, while his son Akshay (Naman Jain) is mortified when he realizes just why he received his admission to the school.  Then Manoj's drunken former partner Ratan Negi (Ajit Singh Palawat) makes a scene.  And then a gloomy young man named Shoeb Ali (Sparsh Srivastav) bursts in and takes the entire school hostage.

Ali has a gun, which he demonstrates by shooting a school nurse (Rajshri Deshpande) in the arm, but he also has a collar bomb clamped around his neck.  Ali issues a number of confusing and horrible demands, including that one parent of each child must die in order for their children to be freed, and then he hands Manoj an earpiece.  

The voice on the other end of the line (later identified as "Rita") gives Manoj a series of tasks, violent, criminal tasks, in order to save the children.  After each task is completed, Rita reveals one of the four codes needed to unlock the bomb attached to Ali.  Meanwhile, Manoj is pursued by the police, including his former protege Sumitra Joshi (Asha Negi.)

Manoj is a perfect noir protagonist, jaded and cynical, deeply flawed, but with the remains of a sense of honor and duty about him.  It's very clear almost from the start that he's hiding something about the investigation into Neha's disappearance, and all the horrible events of the present spiral outward from that original sin.

Rita, on the other hand, is basically a Batman villain.  She's planned for absolutely everything, including Manoj's unpredictable investigations, she has a great deal of skill in explosives and electronics and a supernatural talent for poisons, she has a theme which barely gets mentioned, and she has a sympathetic background and motivation but quickly reveals herself to be an enormous hypocrite.

In other words, the protagonist and antagonist come from different genres, and as a result the tone of the movie can swing wildly.  Sometimes it's The Big Sleep, sometimes it's Saw, but it never entirely holds together.  It is consistently dark and gritty though, and a long way from Mohabbatein.

Chhota Bheem and the Highly Successful Marketing

Chhota Bheem is a successful Indian cartoon franchise.  There's certainly an awful lot of it; the original series has run for twelve seasons, with 624 episodes, along with forty three movies and five different spin off series.  Bheem is a brave and heroic boy with superhuman strength, which he uses to protect his home kingdom of Dholakpur as well as travel the world having adventures.  In his time, Bheem has traveled the world, met aliens, seen dinosaurs, learned kung fu, gained super powers, and befriended Krishna, Ganesh, and Hanuman.  And then there are the Vikings, as seen in Chhota Bheem the Crown of Valhalla (2013).

 

After an unrelated amazing adventure, Bheem is sailing home to Dholakpur, along with ship's captain and token adult Samudra Sen, plucky platonic gal pal Chutki, tiny sidekick Raju, huge and somewhat-reformed bully Kalia, annoying twins Dholu and Bholu, and talking monkey Jaggu.  The ship is caught in a terrible storm, and they emerge in the legendary Black Sea of Valhalla, where they are attacked by Vikings!  Who are also pirates!  (Okay, all Vikings are at least a bit piratical, but these Vikings sail in big ships armed with cannons and wear the skull and crossbones on their Viking helmets.  Historical accuracy is not a priority here.)

 

The leader of the Vikings is a big, bearded brute with an eyepatch and two ravens which perch on his shoulders, so naturally he is named Valkyrie.  Valkyrie is determined to become king of Valhalla, and for some reason he believes that attacking ransom ships is going to help with this.  Bheem's ship is quickly overwhelmed, even after Bheem eats a laddu for extra strength (Bheem operates under Popeye rules) and starts throwing cannonballs back at the pirate Vikings.  Just when all seems lost, Bheem and his friends are saved by a huge wave, and find themselves on an island ruled by Viking Prince Fainir.

And then there is exposition.  Fainir's father was the King of Valhalla, and used the power of the Crown of Valhalla and the nation's incredible shipbuilding abilities to . . . well, mostly sail around and be good.  However, the King's brother Valkyrie wants the throne and magical crown, and murders his brother while at sea.  The crown is lost, and Valkyrie and his men are cursed to burst into flames if they ever set foot on land (through the power of "It just happens, okay?") and they devote themselves to a blockade, trapping the good Vikings on their home islands and blowing up passing ships for fun.

Bheem is a hero, and so he cannot let this stand.  Bheem and his friends set out to find the Crown, along the way meeting wise old Raghonark, teaming up with the brave Viking Vanir, who is totally not a spy for Valkyrie, and engaging in sword fights with ghosts.  As you do.

After watching Chhota Bheem, I have to question the accuracy of their historical research.  I also have to question the existence of their historical research.  The animation is not great, with continuity errors popping up within the space of a single scene, and at one point Valkyrie's eyepatch vanishes with no explanation.   And the plot is enthusiastic nonsense.  Still, I have a hard time judging the show when I am so far from being the target audience.  I'm not planning to watch anymore Chhota Bheem, but it's not for me, and the kids the show was made for seem to like it a lot.

Yamagain.

Yama movies tend to be pretty predictable.  There are a few basic plots which get recycled and rewritten over and over again.  Yama has to visit Earth and eat ice cream.  Yama has to deal with a man who died by mistake.  Yama gets involved in politics.  When you decide to watch a Yama movie like Adisaya Piravi (1990), you have a pretty good idea of what you're getting.  Usually.

Kalaiyan (Rajnikanth) is a talented freelance tough guy living in a poor neighborhood in Madras.  He uses his ill-gotten gains to support the people in his neighborhood, most notably his mother (S. N. Parvathy) and his sidekick and alleged martial arts instructor who doesn't seem to have a character name but is played by a little person actor named King Kong.  (A clip from this movie of King Kong dancing went viral in 2006, so you may have already seen part of this movie.)

After Kalayain disrupts a shipment of illegal liquor belonging to corrupt businessman Murukesh (Nagesh), Murukesh decides he'd rather have Kalayain working for him, rather than againts him, so he invites the young tough to his mansion for an "audition," by which I mean send waves of goons after him to see how long he lasts.  This is a bad idea on multiple levels, since Kalaiyan easily dispatches every goon sent his way, and in the process manages to win the heart of Murikesh's Bruce Lee obsessed daughter Sumathi (Sheeba Akashdeep.)  

When he's not wooing Sumathi Kalaiyan also finds time to foil the plans of Murukesh's business partner (Jaiganesh), who had planned to demolish Kalayain's neighborhood, and put a stop to the scheme of Jaiganesh's son (Betha Sudhakar) to force himself on Sumathi.  The angry rich guys try sending waves of goons after Kalayain, and when that doesn't work they conspire to run him over with a truck.

However, this is a Yama movie, so death is not the end.  Kalaiyan arrives in the afterlife and meets Vichitragupta (Cho Ramaswamy), assistant to Chitragupta (V. K. Ramaswamy), who is in turen the sidekick and assistant to Yama (Vinu Chakravarthy).  Kalayain isn't supposed to be dead yet, so after some arguing, Yama agrees to send him back in the body of soon to be deceased villager Balu (also Rajnikanth).

Balu is actually quite wealthy, but his father's will left him in the care of his uncle Chinnasamy (Senthamarai), who has beaten him into submission, leaving him to play Cinderella in his own home, his only comfort being his equally mistreated mother and his sweetheart Gauri (Kanaka.)  Balu is about to inherit, and the will is ironclad, so Chinnasamy poisons him.  And that's when Kalayain steps in.

Kalayain doesn't retain his memory when he becomes Balu, but he does retain his courage and fighting skills, so he quickly takes charge of the household and puts his wicked relatives in their proper place.  And everything is great, until Murukesh shows up in the village to visit his old friend Chinnasamy.  Balu suddenly remembers everything, and he sets off for Madras to set his other life in order.  Now Kalayain/Balu has to avenge two murders while balancing two mothers and two love interests, all while foiling one united team of rich evil jerks.

I've seen movies that are conceptually much weirder than Adisaya Piravi, and I am no stranger to bad editing or outrageous costumes.  But there's something about the combination of jumpy editing and sloppy fight choreography and some truly atrocious subtitles that gives the whole thing a deeply surreal quality.  It's not the weirdest movie I've seen, but it may be the most accidentally weird movie I've seen.

Jackie Shroff, talk to your agent.

Writing one of the internet's finest gorilla-themed Bollywood review blogs is fun, but it does come with responsibilities.  When a new gorilla-themed Bollywood movie comes out, I pretty much have to watch and review it, and today it is my sad duty to review Hello Charlie (2021).  

 

The Charlie in question is Chirag Rastogi (Aadar Jain), an enthusiastic young man who's left his home village and come to the big city in order to earn money to pay off his late father's debts.  Charlie promises his truck driver uncle Karsan (Darshan Jariwala) that he'll find a job and earn his keep.  The problem is that Charlie is a lunkhead, a jabroni, a Simon-pure labrick if ever there was one.  He makes stupid mistakes and is fired from a series of jobs, culminating in a pizza delivery gone wrong which ends with the pizza shop in flames, a car crash, and the escape of the most wanted man in India.

The wanted man in question is M. D, Makwana (Jackie Shroff), a rich jerk who has defrauded the Indian people in what seems to be a Bernie Madoffesque fashion.  (The movie doesn't really care about the specifics.  He's bad, okay?)  Makwana calls his gun-toting model girlfriend Mona (Elnaaz Norouzi) for help in getting out of the country.  Mona comes up with the uniquely terrible plan of disguising Makwana as a gorilla, and hiring a truck to take him to the coast.  And of course the truck she hires is driven by Charlie, since his uncle is out of town.

 

Meanwhile, a plane carrying an actual gorilla has crashed in the nearby jungle.  The pilots are fine, but the gorilla has escaped, and forest ranger Solee Topi (Rajpal Yadav), who is basically Dogberry with a dart gun, is on the case.  Will there be mistaken identity hijinks?  There will, since this is a universe in which people can't tell the difference between a gorilla and a guy in a gorilla suit.  (Though with the budget this movie is working with, it's really the difference between a guy in a gorilla suit and a guiy in a cheaper gorilla suit.)

 

I could go on.  Charlie meets a nasty circus owner (Girish Kulkarni) and a very nice circus dancer (Shlokka Pandit).  It's a broad farce, and ridiculous things happen.

 

Hello Charlie was actually better than I expected; maybe an eighth of the jokes actually land, and the movie mercifully steers clear of "humor" about overly amorous apes.  A lot of contemporary Indian farce draws its humor from sex and other bodily functions, but this is a movie you could watch with your kids.

However, being better than expected doesn't mean that it's good.  It's a dumb movie.  It's probably safe to skip this one unless you have specific gorilla related obligations.

Love in the time of COVID-19.

The Good Servant is a stock character in Indian cinema.  He (it's always a he) is completely dedicated to his employer, and will do anything to protect the family, even when the employer's ungrateful children inevitably conspire to throw the Good Servant out of the house.  The nice thing about tropes is they let you assemble a story quickly in order to reflect current trends, and that's certainly the case with Eeswaran (2021).

Twenty five years ago, Paapathi (Vinodhini Vaidyanathan) died suddenly, a death which was predicted by astrologer Kaali (Kaali Venkat.)  Her husband, Periyasamy (Bharathiraja), raises the children as best he can.  Eventually, the children all move to Chennai for work, and after a dispute involving an unpaid loan, they stop visiting.

 

Periyasamy isn't alone, though.  He has Eeswaran (Silambarasan) to help run the (rather extensive) family farm and act as servant, personal caretaker, and devoted companion.  Eeswaran has the hypercompetent swagger you'd expect from a South Indian movie hero.  He's charming, popular, blessed with a particular gift for beating bad people up, and so confident that he's willing to Casey at the bat during the finale of a cricket game.

 

Every year Perivasamy holds a feats and performs ceremonies to honor his late wife, and every year the children make excuses and don't come.  This year is special, though, because it's 2020, and India is about to lock down to slow the spread of COVID-19.  Nobody wants to be cooped up in a small apartment in the city, so the children, and their children, and assorted family hangers-on all make their way to the family farm. 

There are three major complications to the happy family reunion.  The first is Vasuki (Nandita Swetha), one of Perivasamy's granddaughters and Eeswaran's ex-girlfriend.  She left Eeswaran when he made it clear that he would not leave Perivasamy, and certainly wasn't interested in moving to Chennai to make money.  Vasuki is now married to someone else, and while Eeswaran is carrying a bit of a torch, he's keeping his social distance.  However, Vasuki's sister Poongodi (Nidhhi Agerwal) has decided that she wants Eeswaran, and she's not going to give up, even though he tries to make it clear that his situation has not changed.

 

The second complication is Kaali, the astrologer, who visits the farm and predicts that someone at the farm is going to die within ten days.  Everybody is worried, especially after some of the sons and sons-in-law hang out unmasked at a village festival and share a bottle with a local who is COVID positive.  The entire family gets tested, and they all test negative, but the doctor takes Eeswaran aside and tells him that thirteen year old Diya has a hole in her heart.  Eeswaran decides to arrange for her treatment himself, and doesn't tell the family about her condition for stupid reasons.

And the third complication is Rathnaswamy (Stun Shiva), Perivasamy's old enemy, who has just been released form prison, and who is determined to prove Kaali's prediction wrong by killing the entire family rather than just one person.  Eeswaran has to defeat a small army of goons, sort out his own love life, catch a handful of snakes, and punch destiny in the face, and maybe clear up that whole loan business and reunite the family while he's at it.  It's all in a day's work for the Good Servant.

 

Except that Eeswaran is not just the Good Servant.  Secretly, he's Perivasamy's long-lost son, which adds a bit of extra motivation for our hero (and makes the romantic subplot incredibly awkward) but otherwise doesn't impact the story at all.  This is a movie with a lot more plot than the story really needs; trim a few extraneous plot points and the story would still hit the exact same beats.  That includes the global pandemic, which is only important when it's important.  Yes, everybody has to get COVID tests, but the entire extended family also squeezes into a single hospital room near the end and absolutely nobody is wearing a mask.  It's a missed opportunity.  

Even fuller house.

You don't need to have seen the previous Housefull movies to watch Housefull 4.  The Housefull franchise is more like an anthology series of incredibly broad comedies which feature much of the same cast playing completely different characters in completely different situations.  There are  a lot of these franchises in Bollywood, and they all have big name casts and make a whole lot of money.

Harry (Akshay Kumar) is a barber living in London with his brothers Roy (Riteish Deshmukh) and Max (Bobby Deol).  Harry has a short-term memory disorder which causes him to forget what's happening whenever he's distracted by a loud noise. (This is played for laughs because it's that sort of movie.)  Harry's memory problems have already landed the boys in trouble; he accidentally destroyed five million pounds belonging to unseen gangster Michael Bhai, and Michael would really, really like his money back.

 

Luckily, the brothers are dating Pooja (Pooja Hegde), Neha (Kriti Kharbanda), and Kriti (Kriti Sanon), the daughters of business tycoon Thakral (Ranjeet), and they hope that after their respective weddings they'll be more than able to settle the debt.  At first Thakral is unimpressed by the middle-aged losers trying to marry his daughters, but after an incident involving escaped horses and some suspiciously out-of-character heroics from the mild-mannered Harry, he's happy to accept them.  After spinning the family globe, the family sets off for Sitamgarh to hold the wedding.

 

And that's when things start to get really weird.  Upon seeing the huge castle where the wedding is to take place, Harry starts to get flashes of memory.  One of the bellhops, an offensive Italian stereotype named (ugh) Aakhri Pasta (Chunkey Pandey) claims to recognize the entire wedding party, though he's quickly fired and sent away by stuffy hotel manager Winston Churchgate (Johnny Lever).  After more flashes of memory, Harry sets out to find Pasta, and has his first proper flashback.

 

Six hundred years ago, Harry was Prince Bala Dev Singh, a bald, mustachioed spider-biting scoundrel.  After Bala is exiled form his own kingdom, his servant Pehla Pasta produces an invitation to the birthday celebration of Maharaja Surya Singh, who just happens to have three daughters of marriageable age.  Bala schemes to marry Madhu, the oldest daughter, and he teams up with effeminate dance teacher Bangdu and valorous and kind of dumb royal bodyguard Dharamputra Mahabali, who have their eyes on younger sisters Mala and Meena.  Unfortunately, Suryabhan (Sharad Kelkar) has a scheme to take the throne, and he uses unstoppable barbarian warlord Gama (Ranna Daggubati) as a weapon.  In the climactic battle, everybody dies.

 

Harry realizes the truth: he was Bala, Roy was Bangdu and Max was Dharamputra, while Kriti, Pooja and Neha were Madhu, Mala and Meena, respectively, which means the brothers are all about to marry the wrong sisters.  Harry has to make everybody else remember their past lives before the wedding, and the situation becomes even more complicated when wedding singer pappu Rangeela arrives, since he is the reincarnation of Gama and they definitely do not want him recovering his lost memories.

 

Housefull 4 is a really dumb movie with a great cast.  The humor is incredibly broad, consistently crude, and occasionally funny (the running gag about Harry getting repeatedly stabbed in the backside is a lot better than it sounds), but the less said about the subplot about Winston realizing he's the reincarnation of past-Pasta's love interest Giggly (Jamie Lever, Johnny's actual daughter), the better.

I can't help but feel that there's some wasted potential here.  Bala, the mustache-twirling villain who stumbles backwards into the role of romantic hero and discovers that he's really good at it, is an interesting character.  You could make a good movie about him.  Or you could make this one, I guess.

We fight . . . with Jazz!

99 Songs (2019) does not actually contain ninety-nine songs.  It has fourteen songs, which is still a lot for a contemporary movie, and since the songs are all written by legendary composer A. R. Rahman, I am happy to round up.  And that's good, because the songs are really the main attraction here.

 

When we meet Jai (Ehan Bhat) he's about to graduate from college with a degree in music and technology.  Jai is good looking, talented, and haunted by the memory of his father (Diwakar Pundir), an angry man who blamed music for everything that's gone wrong in his life, and forbade Jai from having anything to do with it.  (You can see how well that worked.)  

 

Jai is in love with Sophie (Edilsy Vargas), a gifted artist, fashion designer, and dancer who cannot speak.  (Yes, Jai has a mute muse named Sophia, which is a bit on the nose, but it's that sort of movie.)  Her father Sanjay (Ranjit Barot) is rich, powerful, and incredibly smug.  Sanjay is initially impressed by Jai and offers him a job managing a new digital music platform, but Jai wants to make music rather than distribute it.  Sanjay doesn't want his daughter to depend on a struggling artist.  Jai insists that one song can change the world, leading Sanjay to ask, "Where's the song?"  The discussion ends with an old fashioned ordeal for Jai; he can't see Sophie again, let alone marry her, until he's written one hundred songs.

 

Jai agrees to Sanjay's terms, but when he tries to write he's immediately hit with writer's block.  His best friend Polo (Tenzing Dalha) takes him to Shillong, which helps, but eventually the writer's block returns.  Polo takes him to meet Sheela (Lisa Ray), the Jazz Queen of Shillong, and that really helps, but eventually things go horribly wrong, leaving Jai in an asylum run by a dedicated psychologist who doesn't seem to have a character name (Manisha Koirala).  

 

It is really hard to convey artistic brilliance in a movie, because somebody has got to create the painting or poem or song that all the characters are marveling at. Jai is supposed to be an incredibly gifted composer and he needs to produce one amazing song by the movie's end.  Fortunately, A. R. Rahman really is that good, and the music is fantastic.

 

That's just as well, because the actual plot is a bit thin.  This is a movie which has specific things to say about music and love and all that (literal) Jazz, and it does so by relentlessly following a set pattern of plot beats.  (Though I am happy that Sophie does get her own character arc, rather than merely serving as Jai's eventual reward.)  Everything is wrapped in a layer of metaphor and allegory but the end result is still almost too straightforward.  It's a gorgeous movie, though; the beautiful music is paired with beautiful cinematography.  It's an okay love story with amazing music.