Citizen Kane meets Sunset Boulevard, but with more dance numbers.

CLIMAX (2021) falls in the uneasy territory between quirky art film and loud and glitzy entertainer, being both a character study of the rise and fall of a wealthy eccentric, and a silly detective story in which the two big crimes are committed by different people, in the same room, about twenty minutes apart.

After a failed political campaign, eccentric multimillionaire Vijay Modi (Rajendra Prasad) has spent the last two years living in a hotel room, brooding and occasionally presiding over tawdry parties like an aging Jay Gatsby.  It's not exactly a life of solitude; in addition to the parties, Modi makes frequent talk show appearances to discuss his bizarre and often offensive statements on Twitter.  Still, Modi has separated himself from his businesses and his family; both his wives and their respective sons are staying at the family mansion, though he does pay them the occasional visit.

When he notices the young and beautiful Navya (Sasha Singh, looking a bit like a young Juhi Chawla) watching him, Modi is intrigued.  He thinks . . . well, it's pretty obvious what he thinks, but perhaps he also thinks he's found his Nick Carraway, since when he finally meets the young woman he offers her a great deal of money to stay the night and listen to his story and his philosophy of life.  Which he delivers as a freestyle rap, because it's that kind of movie. 

The next morning, Navya leaves in a hurry, and later that day Modi's body is discovered in the hotel room, badly mutilated.  The rest of the movie is a mystery, as the police explore Modi's history of cynical self-promotion, his brief (and self-financed) career as a movie star, the quick collapse of his political career as soon as people learned his political positions.  And then there's that mountain of debt and the nine life insurance policies taken out in the weeks before his death.

It's not a very hard mystery.  Everything hinges on the the mysterious woman who shut off the CCTV cameras, and once her identity becomes clear the solution is obvious.  That's not necessarily a problem, since the mystery is just an excuse to explore Modi's character.  

And that's the tricky part; the movie has to make us want to spend time with Modi.  And they do try - Prasad's performance is great, but Modi as presented is never as charming as he or the movie wants us to think he is, and he certainly isn't as profound as the movie pretends.  Most of his cynical platitudes sound like a moody teenager who has just discovered Ayn Rand, and while he sometimes stumbles into a reasonable opinion, "Children should take care of their aging parents" is not a stunning new insight.  CLIMAX is a well-executed character study about a character who really isn't that interesting.

Couldn't get away.

At first glance, Looop Lapeta (2022) might look like your average movie about a woman stuck in a time loop as she desperately runs through the streets, trying to raise a small fortune in order to save the life of her hopeless boyfriend.  It look s that way on a second glance, too.  The third glance is when things start getting weird.

Savi (Taapsee Pannu) is a former track star whose career was ended due to a bad fall during a race.  She's tempted to end it all, but her life is saved by Satya (Tahir Raj Bhasin), and the pair quickly fall into a relationship.  The good news is that Satya has all the enthusiasm, charm, and loyalty of a big floofy puppy.  Unfortunaterly, he also has all of the brains and common sense of the same big floofy puppy; Satya is a slacker and compulsive gambler who works for violent restaurateur and drug kingpin Victor (Dibyendu Bhattacharya).  Satya is really, really into the relationship with Savi, while she's just tired of running and ready to settle down.

It's Savi's birthday, so Satya asks Victor for an advance on his salary so that he can buy her a nice present.  Victor isntead offers to let him work for it; all Satya has top do is deliver a package to a particular address, then bring a bag of money back within eighty minutes, which is just long enough for Victor's turkey to cook.  (Honestly, the eighty minute turkey is the most unbelievable thing about the movie.)  Satya is, as mentioned, a compulsive gambler who is not very smart, so he decides to gamble with the money, return the original amount to Victor, and keep the profits for himself.  Within eighty minutes.  Shockingly, it does not go well.

Savi is trying to wrap her mind around a positive pregnancy test when she gets a panicked phone call from Satya.  He explains the situation, and she vows to find the money to save him.  First she tries to get the money from her estranged father and former coach Atul (KC Shankar), but there's too much bitterness there, especially since she has never accepted Yash (Varun Pande), the man her father started dating after her mother died.  

Savi keeps trying, in the process crossing paths with Jacob (Sameer Kevin Roy), a cabdriver who is heartbroken that his beloved Julia (Shreya Dhanwanthary) is marrying another man.  Meanwhile, Satya decides to rob the jewelry store owned by Malesh (Rajendra Chawla), only to be interrupted by Malesh's incompetent sons, who are also trying to rob the place.  In the confusion, Satya is shot and killed in front of Savi.

Savi remembers Satya telling the story of Savitri, who matched wits with the death god Yama in order to bring back her husband Satyavan.  (And yes, our leads are named Savi and Satya.  Subtle allusions are for cowards.)  

And then the day starts again, because this is a remake of Run, Lola, Run, giving Savi another chance to get it right.  All she manages to do is get Satya killed by a different person.  She remembers more of the story, and then she's back at the beginning of the loop, ready to try again and this time try to make all the right choices.

A good remake, Bollywood or otherwise, should bring something new to the story.  Otherwise, why bother?  Looop Lapeta shifts the cultural context of the original film, but it also shifts the genre; it's not just a thriller, it's also a quirky romantic comedy with gangsters and time loops.  It's shiny and fun and manages to feel new, even when telling a story that I've heard before.

Whaaaat?

 This is apparently real.  There's a long way to go between "announcement" and "actual movie that I can watch", but I'm going to be excited for a while anyway.

You get what it says on the tin.

Some movies take a while to figure out; they are full of symbolism and careful characterization, all leading to a deeper meaning than what you see on the surface; sometimes, there are multiple layers of meaning that a careful viewer can sift through.  Biskoth (2020) is not one of those movies.

Dharmarajan (Aadukalam Naren) is a hard working baker with a small business selling biscuits to local stores.  With the help of his friend Narasimhan (Anandaraj), and especially with some useful advice from his young son Raja, "Magic Biscuits" becomes a success, and Dharmarajan dreams that one day it will become a big business, with Raja as general manager.  He dies before his dream can come true, but sure enough, after many years Magic Biscuits is a big company, with Raja (Santhanam) . . . working on the factory floor.  Narasimhan runs the company now.

Raja is ambitious.  He wants to fulfill his father's dream and take over the company, and he'd also like to move his relationship with Narasimhan's daughter Laya (Swathi Muppala) from "childhood friend" to "girlfriend."  But his immediate problem is his supervisor Ganesh (Bharath Reddy), a smug jerk who has used Raja's hard work and bright ideas to secure a promotion for himself.

Raja volunteers at a nearby rest home, where he clashes with the beautiful Doctor Anitha (Tara Alisha).  It's also where he meets Janaki (Sowcar Janaki), a resident with a gift for storytelling.  Janaki tells him a story about a brave prince who was unjustly passed over for the throne, but who earns another shot at becoming the heir through his skill and bravery.  And then it rains money for no reason.

The next day Raja notices that events in his life start mirroring events in the story, culminating with money raining don on him while his bike is stopped under an overpass.  He returns to Janaki for another story, this time giving her suggestions to shape it into a cool Seventies action thriller which ends with the hero getting the girl and the company.  It doesn't work - Janaki's parts of the story come true, but Raja's additions do not, leading to a confusing day of failure.

Humbled, Raja asks for one last story, and Janaki tells him a story about 12th Century Rome, in which the Princess of Rome's faithful Spartan bodyguard gets everything that he ever wanted and then ruins everything.  Raja is bad with subtext, so he follows the same path.

You may be thinking that this sounds an awful lot like the Hollywood movie Bedtime Stories.  Is this just a Bollywood ripoff of an Adam Sandler movie?  Of course not.  This is a Tamil film, making it a Kollywood ripoff of an Adam Sandler movie.  This is not a deep movie, it's a harmless bit of fluff. The stories are fun, at least, and each echoes a different movie; the tale of the prince looks a lot like Bahubali, the cool seventies thriller has a cameo by Jeeva playing Rajnikanth playing the title character from Billa, and the story of the Roman princess sounds like 300 with even less historical accuracy. And the process of cultural translation has at least provided the film with a very clear moral: Be nice to old people, because they have magical powers.

That's So Maasha!

 Gulaebaghavali (2018) is a farce in which a charming gang of misfits compete with vicious criminals to retrieve a fortune in diamonds.  That's a surprisingly common synopsis in Indian cinema, practically a subgenre, and they always seem to end the same way, with a desperate but silly struggle between competing factions for the diamonds.  Still, there's always room for  a twist.

This time, the fortune in diamonds is buried under a tree just outside of a temple in the village of Gulaebaghavali.  Corrupt businessman Sampath (Madhusudhan Rao) wants it; it was buried by his grandfather, who had stolen them from a shady foreigner during the British occupation of India.  The village is full of superstitious and well-armed locals, though, so to retrieve the diamonds Sampath is going to need help.  Expendable help.

Munish (Ramdoss) is an easy recruit; he works for Sampath's gangster brother-in-law (Anandraj), so he only has to be told what to do.  Badri (Prabhu Deva) is a little more complicated; he's a swashbuckling thief and statue smuggler who stumbles across Munish and company during their initial attempt to retrieve the diamonds.  Badri is stealing a statue at the time, but has to take a break in order to rescue a damsel in distress, accidentally foiling Munish's plans in the process.  Sampath's men capture Badri and confiscate his statues, but he's offered a great deal of money just to retrieve the chest.  (They do not bother to explain what is in the box.)

And then there's the damsel.  Viji (Hansika Motwani) is an attractive young woman whom Badri met at a nightclub and utterly failed to make an impression on.  After her driver makes a crude pass, Viji gets out of the car and starts walking down the creepy Indian rural road, accidentally stumbling across a local performing a naked ritual.  She's captured by the villagers, who now want her to perform the ritual, but she escapes when Badri makes his clumsy rescue attempt.  Then she is promptly captured by Sampath's men.

The plan is for Viji to return to the village and perform the ritual, distracting the locals long enough for Badri and Munish to retrieve the box.  However, while driving to the village Munish crashes the car into a lamp post, then loudly starts talking about a confrontation with the police.  The trio leave the scene of the accident, and Munish explains that the car is bugged, and he is under orders to kill Badri and Munish once the box has been retrieved.  He doesn't want to do that, though, and suggests that instead they split the contents three ways.

Munish tries to hijack another car, but the car that he selects happens to be driven by middle-aged con artist Maasha (Revathi), who quickly proves her worth by rescuing the group from Badri's old associates (Yogi Babu and Mansoor Ali Khan.)  The bad news is that the group are down to a four-way split, but the good news is that Maasha is easily the most competent person in the entire movie.  And she has more than one car.  And a house they can stay at.  

Even with Maasha's help, though, they have a tough job ahead of them, as they are forced to evade angry villagers, three separate criminal gangs, and Police Inspector Mayilvaganam (Sathyan), who happens to have been conned by each of the quartet at one time or another.  

Badri is clearly supposed to be the hero here, and he certainly has all the qualities; he's brave, clever, and an excellent fighter, and his cynicism and greed masks the obligatory heart of gold.  But Maasha steals every scene that she's in, and eventually runs off with the entire movie, along with a few shiny things she noticed along the way.  She's even cleverer, enormously charming, and her greed and reflexive lying mask a heart of - well, it might be gold plated.  That's the twist.  Popular Indian cinema is often driven by testosterone, so it's a treat to see a woman run away with the movie like this.

A Study in Black and White

 Byomkesh Bakshi is the best known detective hero from Bengali literature, and Satyajit Ray is a legendary director, considered by some to be one of the greatest filmmakers of all time.  So Chiriyakhana (1967), featuring Bakshi and directed by Ray, has to be good, right?

It starts with a song.  Wealthy businessman and retired judge Nishanath Sen (Sushil Majumber) overhears a melody that he remembers form a movie that he watched years ago.  He wants to know the name of the song, the movie it came from, and the actress and singer, and since Google hasn't been invented yet he turns to the famous detective Byomkesh Bakshi (Uttam Kumar).  Because the detective business has been slow, Bakshi and Ajit (Shailen Mukherjee) happily accept the job, and also accept Sen's invitation to visit his estate and meet the eccentrics and reformed criminals living there.

Bakshi visits a film expert and learns the details that Sen wanted.  Most importantly, he learns that the song was sung by the actress, Sunaina, who was accused of murdering the producer's son and vanished soon afterwards.  He visits Sen's estate disguised as a Japanese horticulturalist (for reasons) to report his findings, and learns Sen's true motive for contacting him: Sen suspects that Sunaina is living on his estate in disguise.  Byomkesh agrees to help.

That night, Sen calls Byomkesh to tell him that he;'s discovered something very important that he can't reveal over the phone, and Byomkesh should return to the estate as himself so he can tell him.  However, Sen is murdered by an unknown assailant before the end of the phone call.

The next day, the police call upon the famous detective Byomkesh Bakshi to help solve the murder of retired judge Nishanath Sen.  They don't know that Byomkesh knew Sen, let alone that he'd been to the estate before, so he has a little fun showing off his deductive skills by dramatically revealing things that he already knows, but soon he's hard at work trying to figure out which of the estate's residents is a killer, just in time for the second murder.

Some of the more recent Byomkesh Bakshi movies have embraced a mix of pulp and noir tropes, with Byomkesh engaging in daring chases and meeting sultry femmes fatale.  Not this time.  Byomkesh and Ajit drink coffee and discuss love and literature while sifting through clues.  It's as much Agatha Christie as it is Arthur Conan Doyle, though the movie does have some fun with the Holmes influences, as multiple characters point out that Byomkesh and his faithful biographer bear more than a passing resemblance to a certain famous detective duo.

The movie is smart, but maybe too slow and stylish; the opening scene, in which Byomkesh answers a wrong number while the camera pans around the room to showcase the objects he's picked up on his many adventures sets the pace, and it's not a terribly quick pace.  And I'm not sure the reveal of the killer's motives quite holds together.  While the movie might meander, though, it looks fantastic, and Uttam Kumar's performance was good enough to earn the first ever National Film Award for Best Actor.

Advanced Buntys and Bablis

 2005's Bunty Aur Babli is one of my favorite movies; it's a giddy romp about a pair of golden-hearted con artists, a movie beautifully painted in shades of pink, driven by a gorgeous soundtrack and a series of ferocious dance numbers, and given life through the chemistry shared by Abhishek Bachchan and rani Mukherjee.  Naturally, I was intrigued by the trailer for Bunty Aur Babli 2 (2021), which shows the original pair leaving their retirement in order to track down a new pair of scammers who have assumed the Bunty aur Babli identities.  It's a fantastic premise for a sequel, but of course everything depends on the execution.

Vimmi (Rani Mukherji, as she spells her name now) and Rakesh (Saif Ali Khan, replacing Abhishek Bachchan) are law-abiding citizens leading a comfortable, if boring, small town life.  Rakesh is a ticket collector for the railway, while Vimmi is a housewife and devoted mother to their spoiled son Pappu (Agrim Mittal).  Looking at them, nobody would suspect that they were once the infamous Bunty and Babli, a pair of con artists who trekked across India scamming the rich and giving to the poor.

And then Bunty and Babli are back in the news, scamming a group of sleazy businessmen and leaving behind their famous calling card.  Police inspector Jatayu Singh (Pankaj Tripathi) knows Rakesh and Vimmi's secret, so he arrests the pair, but while they are in jail Bunyu and Babli strike again.  Jatayu realizes that they are dealing with a new Bunty and Babli, so he blackmails Vimmi and Rakesh into helping him capture them, though he's secretly planning to arrest all four Buntys and Bablis when he gets the chance.

Vimmi in particular is eager to protect the brand, so she and Rakesh get to work.  And while the movie wants us to think that they're out of shape has-beens, they actually catch Kunal (Siddhant Chaturvedi) and Sonia (Sharvari Wagh), the new Bunty and Babli, in short order.  However, there isn't a lot of evidence and so Sonia and Kunal browbeat Jatayu into letting them go.  Rakesh and Vimmi figure out the next target and craft a plan to catch the new pair in the act, but Jatayu sidelines them at the last minute, and Sonia and Kunal get away with billions of rupees.  

Jatayu throws them off the case, despite the fact that he's the one who failed.  But now it's personal, and Rakesh and Vimmi decide to stop trying to act like the police, and instead tackle the problem as Bunty and Babli.  Cue training montage.

 

As good as the premise is, the actual movie is . . . flawed.  Part of the problem is that while the new Bunty and Babli are reasonably attractive and charming, we're not really given much reason to care about them.  In the original movie, Rakesh and Vimmi sang a whole song about their frustrated hopes and dreams before they even met.  We saw them try to do things the right way before drifting into scamming people, and we saw their relationship slowly develop.  Kunal and Sonia, on the other hand, arrive as a couple, already con artists, and we don't get much insight into their motivations until the every end of the movie, apart from the fact that Sonia is trying to raise money in order to launch an app she developed.

On the other hand, in the first movie, Vimmi and Rakesh were fun.  They spend much of the sequel as bickering, frustrated sad-sacks, even when they are doing much better police work than the actual police, and it takes far too long for them to get their groove back.  Some big dance numbers would help with the energy level, but there aren't any, at least until the closing credits.  We get jokes, but a lot of them fall flat.

Which is not to say that the movie is completely terrible.  The scams are fun. Rani Mukherji always has charm to spare, and I appreciate that Saif Ali Khan has embraced playing a middle aged guy lately.  But it's missing the drive and the heart of the original.  Bunty Aur Babli managed to capture lightning in a bottle, but the sequel is just trying to sell us the bottle.  Don't get me wrong, it's an okay bottle, but the lightning is missing.