"Sesame" was the name of the sled.

Ali Baba Aur 40 Chor (1980) is the Bollywood equivalent of those Russo-Finnish fantasy epics that occasionally pop up on Mystery Science Theater 3000.  And I mean that literally - Ali Baba is a Russian and Indian co-production based on a well-known story, but because this is Bollywood, everybody needs an extensive backstory before things can really get going.

We'll start with Fatima (Zeenat Aman).  Fatima and her merchant father (Madan Puri) are crossing the desert in a caravan when they are attacked by bandits commanded by Abu Hassan (Rolan Bykov).  The caravan guards defend themselves with gunpowder, and that gives Abu Hassan an idea.  He's a very successful bandit already, with an indeterminate number of thieves under his command, as well as a cool magic cave full of treasure, but he wants more, and gunpowder can help.  He captures Fatima and her father, forcing him to make more gunpowder and her to spy in town and perform the occasional dance number.  Fatima's father realizes that she is staying to protect him, so he takes his own life, leaving her to escape alone and plot her revenge.

Ali Baba (Dharmendra) is the son of another wealthy merchant, Yusuf (Zakir Mukhamedzhanov).  Yusuf has been away on a trading expedition for years, so long that Ali Baba can't even remember what he looks like.  Ali's brother Kasym (Yakub Akhmedov) manages the family business, while their mother (Sofiko Chiaureli) tries to keep them in line.  Yusuf is finally heading for home when his caravan is attacked by Abu Hassan (thanks to information provided by Fatima) and Yusuf is left for dead.  Fortunately, Yusuf is found by . . . well, the subtitles call him the emperor, so let's go with that.  

The emperor nurses Yusuf back to health, and sends a message to his family so that he can finally return home.  Ali sets out to collect him, but before he can get there the emperor is overthrown by the evil Shamsher (Prem Chopra), and Yusuf is forced to flee along with the princess Marjina (Hema Malini).  Ali Baba runs into the pair, and fails to recognize Yusuf, and . . . . well, it gets complicated.  They meet and separate and get captured and rescue each other in various combinations, but eventually Ali and Marjina are in love, father and son have realized their true relationship, and then Abu Hassan attacks.  Yusuf is seriously wounded, living just long enough for Ali to take him home, and Marjina is lost in the confusion.

Marjina isn't missing for long, but by the time Ali finds her, she's being sold into slavery, and he has to take a sizable loan from Kasym in order to buy her freedom.  Kasym's condition for the loan is that Ali agrees to give up his share of their father's estate, and Ali agrees without hesitation.  He leaves the family house, taking Marjina and his mother with him.  He needs money, so he finds work as a woodcutter.  Kasym, meanwhile, has teamed up with Fatima; she wants someone to help her get revenge on Abu Hassan, while he wants to find where Abu Hassan keeps his fabulous treasure.

And so, finally, Ali Baba is a poor but hard working woodcutter who stumbles across the fabulous cave of the Forty Plus Thieves (a lot of them die in various fights scenes, but they eventually get down to just forty).  Ali Baba steals some of the treasure and uses it to help the people around him, while his greedy brother Kasym learns the secret, tries to steal the treasure for himself, and meets with a grisly fate.  And when the leader of the Forty Thieves comes looking for him, Ali Baba is able to survive thanks to the help of the quick-witted Marjina, who was technically a slave for a brief period of time.  Not the most faithful retelling of the original story, but it hits all of the major points.

Despite the extensive backstory, Ali Baba Aur 40 Chor moves really quickly.  There's always something happening, and it's usually something interesting.  And the leads are engaging; Dharmendra has never been very good at "charming young scamp," but he quickly settles into "solid and implacable hero," which he is very good at.  And this is post-Seeta Aur Geeta Hema Malini, which means that while she doesn't get to beat up an entire police station this time, she does get to be an active protagonist rather than a damsel in distress for most of the movie, which is unusual for a Bollywood heroine of that era.  And Zeenat Aman's character has less agency overall, but somehow manages to be a woman in eighties Bollywood who has no romantic attachments at all.  It's an impressive achievement.

Take the last train to Chennai.

Chennai Express (2013) is a deliberate throwback to Shah Rukh Khan's early career.  In fact, it's a throwback to a very specific period in Shah Rukh's career: roughly 1997, when he was making goofy romantic action comedies with Juhi Chawla.  (Not appearing in this film: Juhi Chawla.)

Khan plays Rahul Mithalwala, a forty year old bachelor, orphaned at a young age and raised by loving, but meddling grandparents (Lekh Tandon and Kamini Kaushal).  Rahul wants to take a vacation in Goa with his idiot friends, but his plans are derailed when his grandfather dies suddenly, and his grandmother asks him to immerse part of his grandfather's ashes in Rameswaram, which is at the southern end of India and very far from Goa.

However, one of the idiot friends points out that both Goa and Rameswaram touch the ocean, so anything immersed at Goa will reach Rameswaram eventually, right?  Rahul agrees, because he's very early in his character arc, and makes plans to take the Chennai Express to nearby Kalyan, meet his idiot friends there, then drive with them to Goa.  

It's a pretty bad plan, and it crumbles almost immediately once the train reaches Kalyan.  Rahul realizes that he's left the ashes on the train.  he retrieves them, but spots a beautiful woman running for the train, so he helps her board, DDLJ style.  Then he spots four large and scary looking men running for the train so he helps them board, also DDLJ style.  (It's funny if you've seen a lot of nineties Bollywood, and is probably moderately amusing otherwise.)

The woman is Meenalochni Azhagusundaram (Deepika Padukone), or Meenamma for short.  The men work for her father, Durgeshwara "Durgesh" Azhagusundaram (Sathyaraj), a crimelord with a great deal of power and influence in South India, and they were in the process of kidnapping Meenamma and bringing her home to her father so that she can be forced to marry Tangaballi (Nikitin Dheer).  And because at this point Rahul has seen too much, he is now also kidnapped.

The pair are brought to Meenamma's home village, and paraded before her father.  Meenamma claims that she and Rahul are in love and want to get marries, so that they don't kill him immediately.  Rahul nods in agreement, because he doesn't speak Tamil.  And then . . . well, it's not a very complicated plot.  Tangaballi threatens Rahul.  They escape.  They bicker.  They spend some time posing as a newlywed couple in the Village of Nice People, which gives them the chance to really get to know one another.  And it all leads to a dramatic confrontation which is probably a bit more violent than you'd expect from a 1997 Shah Rukh  movie, but Chennai Express was directed by Rohit Shetty, who also directed Singham.  

The plot is obviously very different, but the emotional beats reminded me of Yes Boss, in which a deeply flawed man named Rahul is forced by circumstance to pretend to be married to a young woman, they fall in love and grow increasingly uncomfortable with the deception, and Rahul doesn't just get the girl in the end, he becomes a significantly better person in the process.  It's an old formula, but it works.

And Geneva. Afternoons in Lebanon and Canada.

If you choose to watch An Evening in Paris (1967), you will absolutely get to see at least one evening in Paris, along with other times of day spent in a variety of other locations.  It's a shining example of truth in cinematic advertising.

Wealthy heiress Deepa (Sharmila Tagore) has grown tired of Indian men who are only after her money, so she decides to try Paris.  Her assistant Honey (Sarita) suggests that she let love find her, since that is the magic of Paris, so Deepa wanders the streets of the city, disguised (badly) as her own servant.  She immediately attracts the attention of Sam (Shammi Kapoor).  Sam is very, very persistent, and because this is 1967, we're supposed to find that charming rather than dangerous.

Deepa has also attracted the attention of Shekhar (Pran), the son of her father's business manager (David Abraham.)  Shekhar has extensive gambling debts, and he's sure that a quick marriage to Deepa will solve all his problems.  And Honey attracts the attention of Makhan Singh (Rajendra Nath), Deepa's chauffeur.

During an interlude in Switzerland, Deepa tries to scare Sam off by flirting with Shekhar, who starts plying her with liquor.  Sam intervenes before anything can happen, and Deepa starts liking him a little better, but it still takes a water-skiing musical number in Lebanon before they become a proper couple and return to Paris to enjoy an evening.

  

Shekhar, meanwhile, has an uncomfortable reunion with Jack (K. N. Singh), the gangster he owes all that money to.  Shekhar explains the "marry Deepa" plan to pay off his debt, but Jack comes up with the much simpler "kidnap Deepa and make her rich father give me money directly" plan.

And because the plot isn't complicated enough yet, Shekhar convinces Suzy (also Sharmila Tagore), a dancer at jack's nightclub who happens to look exactly like Deepa, to take her place and marry him after Deepa is kidnapped, so that they can split the money.  (There are some flaws in this plan.)  Naturally Suzy falls in love with Sam.  And just as naturally the scam is quickly uncovered, leading to a climactic confrontation at Jack's secret base, which is underneath Niagara falls because shut up, that's why.

Like a lot of older Bollywood, An Evening in Paris shifts genre over the course of the movie.  It starts as a comedic romp, careening from comic sketch to comic sketch, with Sam shifting through a variety of silly disguises.  Once the leads become established as a proper couple, the movie shifts to straight up romance, followed by a smidgen of family drama and a larger dollop of action movie.  I don't think the film entirely succeeds at any of the genres.  The early comic plotline is just disjointed, while Kapoor is just not very convincing as an action hero.  And then there's whatever this is:

 I'm not sure that matters, though, because the real genre of the movie is "Shammi Kapoor and Sharmila Tagore wear interesting clothes and wander around various foreign locations, and Sharmila is very pretty."  I don't think I've seen an onscreen couple be so aggressively In Paris since Tom Baker and Lalla Ward.  You don't just get the Eiffel Tower in the background; there are so many lingering shots of our leads visiting all sorts of famous landmarks that the film can double as an ad for a travel agency.  And, as always, Sharmila is very pretty indeed.

An adventure in space and time. By which I mean Brazil.

Professor Shanku O El Dorado (2019) is billed as "India's First Science Fiction." It's obviously not India's first science fiction film; I know that there are earlier ones because I've reviewed a bunch of them.  However, the movie is based on the "Professor Shanku" stories written by Bengali author Satyajit Ray.  The first Shanku story appeared in 1961, narrowly beating Rocket Tarzan, but there's a long tradition of Bengali science fiction going back to at least the 1890s.

The movie opens with a framing story in which a magazine writer (Subhrajit Dutta) is given one of Professor Shanku's diaries.  This comes directly from the first Shanku story, but it has absolutely no impact on the plot of the film and is never mentioned again.  The real story starts with Shanku (Dhritiman Chatterjee) sitting at home reading the article that he wrote for Cosmos about one of his many inventions.  He's interrupted by Nakur Biswas (Subhasish Mukhopadhya), a humble villager who gained psychic powers after a close encounter with ball lightning.  Biswas warns Shanku about traveling to Brazil, then returns home.

Soon after, Shanku chats with his old friends (and sidekicks) Jeremy Saunders (Ricardo Dantas) and Wilhelm Krol (Roney Facchini), who tell him that he's been invited to present at a symposium and receive an honorary degree at an institute in Sao Paolo.  Shanku decides to attend, and to take Biswas with him as his secretary. 

In Brazil, Shanku exhibits his inventions, including a  pill that can cure any disease, and the Annihilin, an honest to goodness death ray.  Creepy American Solomon Bloomgarten (Fernando Coelho) is particularly impressed and offers to buy all the patents for the princely sum of ONE MILLION DOLLARS!, but Shonku refuses to sell, calmly explaining that his inventions can't be mass produced, they have to be hand-crafted.  (That's your objection, Shanku?  Not the fact that the obviously evil guy wants to buy your death ray?)

Bloomgarten is also intrigued when Biswas mentions the lost city of El Dorado, and even more so when Biswas carelessly reveals that he has psychic powers and can actually find the lost city.  In short order, the research for Shanku's inventions is surreptitiously stolen, and Biswas joins Bloomgarten on an expedition to El Dorado, so Shanku . . . sets off for his scheduled tour of the Amazon rain forest.

It sounds like a recipe for fast-paced, two fisted pulp adventure, but instead what we get is relaxed, meandering pulp adventure; there's an entire montage devoted to Biswas getting a passport and buying new clothes for the trip.  What it actually reminds me of is early Doctor Who storylines in which our heroes arrive at an unfamiliar location, split up and wander around for a while, tell each other interesting facts, and then the villain is undone by his own hubris.  I happen to like early Doctor Who, so that's a bonus, but  it's not for everyone.

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.