Going down the only road I've ever known.

Every genre has its tropes.  Karwaan (2018) is a road movie, and an arty one at that, so you can expect repressed emotions, at least one free spirit, unfortunate misunderstandings, misplaced luggage, and maybe some gangsters.  As always, everything depends on the execution.

Avinash (Dulquer Salman) is an IT worker in Bangalore with a tedious job and an abusive, incompetent boss. Avi has a real passion for photography, but he gave it up and took the terrible job after an argument with his now estranged father (Akash Khurana).  Still, when the new guy at work asks Avi if he likes the job, he tells him he's made his peace with it.  It's certainly a very simple life; Avi works, he goes home, and he totally fails to flirt with his attractive neighbor.

One night Avi gets a phone call from a travel agency.  The nice but busy lady on the phone tells him that his father has died while on a pilgrimage, and  he can pick the body up at the airport.  She hangs up before Avi can ask any of his many follow up questions, so Avi has to turn to his friend Shaukat (Irrfan Khan) for help; Shaukat is eccentric but loyal, and more important, he has a van.

After some bureaucratic nonsense Avi retrieves the body and makes arrangements for its cremation.  Just before that can happen, though, Shaukat looks in the coffin and discovers that they have the wrong body; it's somebody's mother rather than Avi's father.

After some investigation, Avi is contacted by a widowed hotel owner named Tahira (Amala Akkeneni), and she tells him that she has his father's body and would very much like her mother's body back, please.  Tahira lives in faraway Kochi, and at first the plan is for them to meet halfway, but Avi is hopelessly nice and soon he and Shaukat agree to make the entire journey.

But it's a road movie, so of course there are a number of distractions and sidequests, most importantly collecting Tahira's daughter Tanya (Mithila Palkar) from her college in Ooty.  And tanya completes the road movie ensemble, giving the film three strongly contrasting personalities to bounce off one another.  Tanya is a sullen teen with a keen eye for social dynamics and a need for a bit of structure and boundaries in her life, Shaukat is both an eccentric with the heart of a poet and a devout and conservative Muslim, while Avi is painfully nice but can't bring himself to stand up for what he really wants.  Everybody has a lesson to be learned, and they're all ideally positioned to help one another.

There's nothing really innovative or surprising about Karwaan; the meanderings of the plot are entertaining but fairly predictable.  However, the three leads are quirky and interesting characters played by a trio of actors who excel at quirky and interesting, especially Irrfan Khan who is amazing in everything.  Everything depends on the execution, and in this case the execution is warm and comforting, like a cinematic hug.

This movie brought to you by the tourist board of Amritsar.

 Chandigarh Amritsar Chandigarh (2019) is not a Bollywood movie; it's a product of "Pollywood," the Punjabi film industry, but the storyline is the kind of thing I would expect to see from a Bollywood movie made ten or so years ago.  In fact, it's exactly the story I saw in 2014's Mumbai Delhi Mumbai, which was in turn a remake of the 2010 Marathi film Mumbai-Pune-Mumbai.  It's a very adaptable premise, so you can take any two rival cities, add local cultural flavor to taste, and create your own New York LA New York or Edinburgh Glasgow Edinburgh.

Reet (Sargun Mehta) is a fashion designer form sophisticated Chandigarh.  She's come to bustling Amritsar to meet and reject the potential groom her parents have lined up for her.  Of course, this isn't the way things are normally done.  Usually the groom is supposed to go and meet his potential bride, but Reet wants the whole thing over with, so she's making the trip to Amritsar without consulting her parents.

Almost immediately after arriving, she manages to pick a fight with her rickshaw driver, Murari (Rajpal Yadav) over which city is better, and he winds up cycling away in terror with her phone still in the seat of his rickshaw.  Reet is alone and having trouble navigating the city, so she asks local Rajveer (Gippy Grewal) for directions, spoiling his cricket game in the process.  Rajveer gives her the directions she asks for, she finds the groom's home but discovers that he is not there, and then she realizes that her phone is gone.

Reet asks Rajveer top help her find her phone, and he agrees because he considers it a matter of his city's honor.  And he keeps on helping her, even when they argue. They argue a lot at first - she seems to be a bit stuck up, he seems like exactly the sort of overly dramatic Amritsar guy she's been complaining about, but as the day goes on they start to get along and become friends, despite never finding out the other's name.

Meanwhile, Murari the rickshaw driver is having a terrible day.  Every fare he finds eventually complains of the seat vibrating and eventually slaps him.  He visits a guru who tells him that the rickshaw is haunted, probably due to driving over a lemon (it's a thing) and gives him a list of ridiculous instructions to exorcise it.  And to top it all off, the scary lady from Chandigarh keeps chasing him down and yelling at him for reasons he doesn't understand.  In other words, while Reet and Rajveer are living a romantic comedy, Murari is stuck in the sort of farce that usually stars Rajpal Yadav.  

It's all building up to a final. . . . well, not really a  twist.  A final punchline about the identity of the groom.  I already knew the punchline but if you've seen pretty much any movie ever you can probably figure it out.  But that's okay; a movie like this is all about the journey, and it's a pleasant journey in the company of attractive and ultimately nice people.  Not every movie has to break new ground.

Maybe try talking next time?

 Chori Chori Chupke Chupke has always been my benchmark for terrible plans in Indian movies; it's hard to top "Honey, let's hire a sex worker to live with us in Switzerland for a year and bear your child in order to make Amrish Puri happy, because there's absolutely no risk of everything becoming a complicated tangle of emotions that threatens to end our marriage and upend our place in society."  However, Hey Sinamika (2022) may be a new contender.

When driven paleotempestologist Mouna (Aditi Rao Hydari) meets unemployed free spirit Yaazhan (Dulqer salman) they are immediately caught up in a heavy storm, which means that when I say they have a whirlwind courtship, it's a pun rather than a cliche.  Yaahzhan may be unemployed, but he's handsome, cultured, an excellent cook, and a skilled and dedicated conversationalist.  So yes, whirlwind courtship.

Two years later, they are married.  Mouna is using working at an architectural firm, using her knowledge of weather patterns to help create safer buildings.  Yaazhan is still unemployed but happily busies himself as a devoted househusband.  Every time Mouna turns around he's there to feed her some sort of strange and fattening treat, he fusses over his houseplants nearly as much as he fusses over her, and he is. Always. talking.  Mouna is on edge, and after a car trip in which Yaazhan tries to A. R. Rahmansplain her own taste in music back to her, she's had enough.  She wants out.

Mouna can't bring herself to hurt Yaazhan, though, so she schemes with some co-workers to find a way to convince Yaazhan to divorce her.  (This is a bad plan, but it's not Chori Chori Chupke Chupke bad.  Worse is still to come.)  All of these schemes fall through, because Yaazhan is so aggressively laid back that nothing bothers him.

Mouna is frustrated, but she manages to wrangle a year-long assignment in Puducherry, so that she can at least enjoy a year of being able to hear her own thoughts and eat what she wants.  She breaks the news to Yaazhan, emphasizing how terribly she's going to miss him, so of course he follows her there so that she won't be alone.  It's the same dysfunction, but in a different city.

One of their neighbors in Puducherry is Dr, Malarvizhi, a psychologist and family therapist.  Malarvizhi has a tragic backstory which doesn't come up until late in the movie, but it has convinced her that there are no good men in the world, and she brings that belief to her counseling work, striving to expose the men in the couples that she counsels, going so far as to photograph one client canoodling with another woman at a wedding.  This is incredibly unethical, but nobody ever points that out.  

Mouna learns of Malarvizhi's reputation for destroying marriages, and that's when she hatches her terrible, terrible plan: Malarvizhi will seduce Yaazhan, and Mouna can have the divorce she wants without having to have an uncomfortable conversation with her husband.  Even Malarvizhi can see that this is a gross violation of her professional ethics, but Mouna manages to browbeat her into taking the job.

Step one is to get Yaazhan a job, so that he can be out of the house and easier to observe.  Mouna calls in some favors, and Yaazhan is hired by a local struggling radio station as on air talent.  Talking constantly is a useful skill for a radio jockey, and he's an immediate success.  Step two is to make contact, and thanks to information from Mouna, Malarvizhi manages to befriend him in short order.

Two problems quickly become apparent.  First, Yaazhan is a good (if annoying) man who loves his wife, so while he is happy to be a friend, he's quick to step back whenever Malarvizhi even hints at anything improper.  Malarvizhi falls hard for him.

Second, after seeing her husband with another woman, Mouna starts to realize that she does love him after all; it helps that he has a job which encourages him to ramble on as much as he wants and  also a friend, so he's not entirely focused on Mouna at all times, making him considerably less annoying.  Suddenly convincing another woman to seduce her husband doesn't seem like such a good idea after all.

Hey Sinamika has more in common with Chori Chori Chupke Chupke than terrible life choices; in both movies, those terrible life choices are made by otherwise lovely people played by charming and attractive actors, and you find yourself rooting for the characters despite knowing that everything bad happening to them is all their fault.  Even Malarvizhi, whose Angry Psychology is a moral and professional disaster, comes across as a sympathetic character.

It's a very old school formula that was employed by many movies during the nineties (looking at you, half of Shahrukh Khan's early career), and when it works, it works.  Just don't forget that it's a movie, and in real life this kind of terrible plan will lead to a lot of damaged people rather than a happy ending.

A role that's so nice, they cast it twice.

 When Bollywood legend Rishi Kapoor died in 2020, shooting for his last film, Sharmaji Namkeen (2022) was still incomplete.  Rather than scrap the movie, the producers considered a number of frankly terrible ideas such as creating a CGI Rishi Kapoor or putting Kapoor's son Ranbir in prosthetics to play the part, but instead veteran character actor Paresh Rawal stepped in to complete the missing scenes.  The end result is a movie with two leading men both playing the same role, and it works better than you might think.

Our hero is Brij Gopal Sharma (Kapoor and Rawal), who has just been forced to take early retirement from the kitchen appliance company where he worked.  Sharma is not cut out for sitting at home and watching TV, so after driving the entire neighborhood crazy with home improvement projects, he spends some time bouncing from hobby to hobby and job interview to job interview.  His only real passion is cooking, but when he suggests opening up a small stall, his older son Rinku (Suhail Nayyar) shuts down the idea immediately; it's not a respectable position for someone of their social class.

However, when his old friend Chadda (Satish Kaushik) asls him to cook for a relative's religious function, Sharma agrees.  he cooks wonderfully, the people are all nice, everything is great . . . until Sharma catches a glimpse of the guests and realizes that he's not cooking for a religious function, he's cooking for a kitty party!  (A kitty party is a mostly Indian tradition, one part social outing and one part savings club, in which a group of (usually) women pool money in a "kitty", and then they take turns every month using the money to host a party for the group.)

Sharma is horrified, leaves immediately, and makes polite excuses whenever the women call him and try to hire him again.  But it was nice to have something to do, and even nicer to be treated with respect.  And he's intrigued by one of the women in the group, the beautiful, sophisticated, and widowed Veena (Juhi Chawla.)  So he goes back again.  And again.  Soon he's a fixture at the kitty parties, but he's still careful to keep his new career secret from his family and friends.

Sharma's not the only one keeping secrets.  Younger son Vincy (Taaruk Raina) has been focused on his dream of dancing, and has failed his college exams.  And Rinku is in a relationship with coworker Urmi (Isha Talwar).  They're practically engaged, and Rinku has already made a large down payment on an apartment, but the corrupt developer seems intent on keeping the money without letting the young couple move in.  Everybody's tired, and everybody's stressed.  And then a family friend finds footage of Sharma dancing at a kitty party on Facebook.

This is a very Rishi Kapoor movie. The man was a versatile actor, and he's put in some strong performances in a variety of roles, but even before he aged out of playing romantic leads his public image has always been cuddly and avuncular.  Sharmaji Namkeen has a charming, cozy ambiance that plays into that image.  There's conflict, but it's mostly conflict between people who love each other, and we know they'll make it work in the end.  The closest the movie gets to social controversy is its portrayal of kitty parties as a space where women can express themselves without worrying about their assigned societal roles.

It takes a little while to get used to the dual lead actors alternating scenes, but it's not as distracting as you might think.  It helps that Paresh Rawal doesn't look very much like Rishi Kapoor and isn't trying to do any sort of Rishi Kapoor impression, he's just  playing to the emotional truth of the character in his own fashion, a bit less cuddly and a bit more exasperated.  It lets Kapoor and Rawal fade into the background and lets Sharma take center stage.

This is not a groundbreaking movie, but it's a fun and comfortable movie, and casting Juhi Chawla as the female romantic lead in a new movie will always get bonus points from me.

It's probably complicated.

Abhay Deol is the nephew of Dharmandra, the "He-Man" of Bollywood, and the cousin of nineties action stars Bobby and Sunny Deol.  Despite belonging to the Deol dynasty, though, Abhay has really focused on what's called "parallel cinema", and even when he dabbles in mainstream films, he tends to play complicated and nuanced characters rather than the usual action and romantic roles.  So when I sat down to watch Velle ( 2021), I knew I would be getting an Abhay Deal movie, but I did not realize how very Abhay Deol the movie would be.

Deol plays Rishi, a ghost-writer in the film industry who hopes to finally make a movie under his own name. He's hoping that Bollywood star Rohini (Mouni Roy) will agree to play the lead, and when they finally meet, he begins narrating the story to her in traditional Bollywood fashion.

Cut to Rahul (Karan Deol), Rambo (Savant Singh Premi) and Raju (Vishesh Tiwari), a trio of high school slackers who call their tight-knit circle of friends "R3".  (They all look too old to be in high school, but the film helpfully explains that they've failed the twelfth grade several times.)  When they meet the principal's troubled daughter Riya (Anya Singh) she quickly becomes their partner in mischief, joining the group as R4.

Riya wants to dance, but her father insists that she focus on her studies, and forces her to take late night tuition sessions with one of the teachers.  When the teacher touches her inappropriately, her father thinks she's lying to get out of work.  Riya turns to her friends, and Rahul suggests that she just leave, go to another city and study dance.  Of course, she'll need money, so they hatch a ridiculous scheme to fake Riya's kidnapping and get her father to pay a ransom.

And it works!  Riya leaves town and enrolls in dance school.  The plan is for the other three Rs to join her later, but before they can, Riya is actually kidnapped.  The real kidnappers want a million rupees, but instead of contacting her father they accidentally contact Rahul.  He promises to get the money somehow.

Meanwhile, Rishi and Rohini have grown closer as he works his way through the story.  They are so close that when Rishi receives a call from his mother telling him that his father is in the hospital and they'll need a million rupees for the operation, Rohini immediately volunteers to help.  The money is withdrawn from the bank, and as the pair are driving to the hospital, a stone flies through the windscreen, Rohini is knocked out and seriously injured, the car crashes, and the money is stolen . . . by Rahul, Rambo and Raja.

And then things get complicated.  Riya is in real and immediate peril.  The three Rs try to negotiate her release, but it gets much harder when they realize that Rahul has lost his phone.  Rishi is scouring the city looking for the money he needs to save his father.  And Riya's father has put lazy but very clever police inspector Rajni Verma (Rajesh Kumar) on the case.

Velle handles its shifts in genre well, but I have questions!  Rishi is narrating a story which he says is fictional, but with some elements of truth.  The movie certainly implies that that movie plot is the story of Rahul and Raya, but nobody bats an eye about the story within a story escaping from within the story, and Rishi doesn't seem to recognize any of R3, so if they weren't his story, then what is his movie actually about?  Why does every single named character who appears onscreen have a name that starts with R, and what;s with all the Rs appearing in the background of various scenes?  Is the police inspector doing a deliberate Rishi Kapoor impression?  Is all of this deliberate ambiguity or just me missing things because I am watching a movie that's in a language I do not actually speak?

Having questions is good, I think?  I will certainly be thinking about this movie for a while.  And there's one thing I know to be true: Abhay Deol stars in some weird movies.

(And yes, Karan Deol is related; he's Sunny Deol's son.)

Bahubali: The Clone Wars.

Bahubali: The Lost Legends (2017-) is an animated series set in the Bahubali universe.  The series acts as a prequel to the movies, detailing the adventures of the young Amarendra Bahubali (Viraj Adhav) and his obviously evil brother Bhallaldeva (Manoj Pandey) as they compete and cooperate in an attempt to prove themselves worthy of the throne of the kingdom of Mahishmati.  Other important characters include unflappable Queeen Mother Sivagami (Manini Mishra), her treacherous husband Bijjaladeva (Mukesh pandey), and the throne's incorruptible retainer Kattappa (Samay Thakkar).  The series has original characters as well, most notably Pradhan Guru (Vinod Kulkarni), who is obviously up to something, but I haven't seen enough of the series to know what that is.   

Amazon has only two episodes of Lost Legends available for streaming.  In the first episode, Riot in Mahishtami, when food shortages and systemic prejudice lead to the death of a government official, Bahubali is charged with dispensing justice while still preserving the city's fragile peace.  because Bahubali represents an ideal king, he does this by listening to what people have to say, and in the end he manages to uphold the letter of the law while still striving to make amends for a historic injustice.  

The second episode, The Blood Moon, is a bit more action oriented; Bahubali opens an ancient urn, and when a local family disappears, the people assume that demons released by the prince are responsible.  Naturally, Bahubali investigates, and discovers that the truth is much more Scooby Doo.  This episode is notable for a much more nuanced depiction of tribal peoples than in the actual Bahubali movies.  

Bahubali is not the only Indian movie franchise to get a cartoon spinoff, but it's it's much more straightlaced than some of the others.  While Little Singham is wooing mermaids and fighting ancient sorcerers at the bottom of the sea, Bahubali is . . . . doing the same sort of things that he does in the movies.  The scale is much smaller, though.  The Bahubali movies are epics, with massive and deeply improbable battles, stupid vows, gorgeous musical numbers, and queens who SHOUT ALL THE TIME!!!!  Cartoon Sivagami is remarkably restrained, and there are a few minor skirmishes and one murder attempt but nobody enters the city via catapult.

That's not a bad thing, though.  The quieter tone and slower pace means that the characters have a chance to be fleshed out a bit more - instead of characters telling each other that Bahubali is an ideal king, he gets to show his kingliness on a regular basis.  It's not a necessary tie in by any means, but it does expand the universe and fill out the characters.

It's like the mirror universe version of "Jab We Met."

 Uday Chopra is the youngest son of legendary Bollywood director Yash Chopra, and he has a number of credits as a writer, assistant director, and producer.  As an actor he is probably best known for his role as Ali Khan, the comedic sidekick in the Dhoom series.  But there was a brief time in the early 2000's when people were really trying hard to make "Uday Chopra, romantic hero" happen.  And that's how Neal 'n' Nikki (2005) happened.

Neal (Uday Chopra) is an enthusiastic athlete and self-proclaimed "super star" leading a contented life on his family's horse ranch in Canada. Neal loves the ladies and leads a very active social life, but when his parents start pressuring him to agree to an arranged marriage, he's happy to go along with it; as he explains to his stereotypically henpecked friends, he has terrible taste in women and he trusts his parents' judgement.  (Does this movie lean heavily into skeezy "women you date vs. women you marry" tropes?  Enthusiastically.)  After a few false starts, his parents arrange a match with Good Indian Girl Sweety (Richa Pallod), and Neal is . . . reasonably pleased.  However, he asks permission to spend the twenty one days before the engagement in Vancouver, so that he can have a little fun.

Of course, when Neal says he wants to have a little fun, he means women.  His plan is to meet twenty one women, one for each remaining night of unmarried life, and he starts off strong, almost accidentally scoring a date with famous model Kristy (Kristy McQuade).  (Does this movie also lean heavily into the all too common Bollywood trope that white women are just there to be objectified?  Oh yes.)

It's on that date that Neal meets bartender Nikki (Tanisha Mukherji), and she's . . . awful.  Loud, obnoxious, aggressive, and very drunk.  She's also just been fired, and celebrates her unemployment by dancing on the tables.  Neal is suddenly paying a lot of attention, which gives Abhishek Bachchan the opening to swoop in and take Kristy away.  By this point Nikki is very drunk indeed, and she asks Neal to take her home.  He doesn't know where she lives, so he takes her to a nearby hotel, the Thorny Rhino, and . . . 

Okay, nothing happens.  Nikki falls asleep, and Neal leaves her alone.  We're supposed to think that this show's Neal's inner core of nobility, but he still took an obviously intoxicated woman to a hotel room - way to show the bare minimum of human decency at the last possible minute, Neal.  

Of course, this is a sex comedy, so thanks to a series of unfortunate events Neal is naked and standing beside the sleeping Nikki when the police arrive to raid the hotel.  The misunderstandings are eventually cleared up, and Neal and Nikki go their separate ways.  Neal continues his quest while Nikki goes back to drinking and bouncing from one job to another.  (Does the movie ever confront the issue of Nikki's obvious drinking problem?  It does not.  We're supposed to find it quirky.)

Once again, sex comedy, so every time Neal looks like he's about to achieve his goal, he's interrupted.  By Nikki.  Along the way, they get to know each other a bit better, and Nikki offers to take him to a small resort which is full of beautiful women.  Neal agrees, which means it's time for a road trip.  And whenever the hero and heroine take a road trip together in a Bollywood movie, they are bound to grow closer.

Of course it's a trick - Nikki wants Neal to help her make her ex boyfriend Trish (Alexandre Montez) jealous.  Naturally, they do that by staging a mid-nineties Bollywood romantic song and dance number, and the movie briefly becomes entertaining. Nikki wins Trish back, then dumps him, getting the closure that she needs.  She takes Neal to a bizarre midsummer Christmas party to repay the debt, and that's when they realize that they love each other after all.  They spend the night together, and after an awkward morning after Nikki preemptively dumps Neal before he can reject her, not realizing that he's about to propose.  After a bitter argument they go their separate ways.

Neal returns home and finally meets his fiance Sweety, along with Sweety's family, including her cousin Nikki.  The movie is no longer a sex comedy, it's a straight romance. Will Nikki and Neal be able to overcome their differences and unite, finally becoming the Neal 'n' Nikki that they were clearly meant to be?  Probably, but they're not very likeable, so at this point in the movie I was much more invested in the romantic travails of incredibly minor character Happy (Gaurav Gera), who's spent most of his limited screen-time singing traditional Punjabi songs in the background.  Can Happy be happy with the sweet girl of his dreams?  Hopefully!  And Neal and Nikki are there too, I guess.