Shaka, when the walls fell.

This is supposed to be a review of Diljale (1996), but it's Diljale (Abridged) because the cut of the movie I watched has had more than an hour trimmed off its running time.  It was a long movie before, and there's still a lot of plot left, but the climax hinges on a few crucial changes of heart which apparently took place during off screen conversations.  It certainly helps keep the pace up, though.

Army officer Ranveer (Parmeet Sethi) is exploring the countryside around his new posting (they never explicitly say which state the movie takes place in, but it it clearly and obviously Kashmir, and not just because the movie was filmed in Switzerland, a popular Kashmir-double) when he catches sight of a mysterious and beautiful woman (Sonali Bendre) walking through the woods.  He doesn't manage to catch her, but he's already in love, and he sings a song to his men about how in love he is.

Later that night Ranveer meets his father's old friend Raja Saab (Skakti Kapoor) at a party, and is introduced to Raja Saab's daughter Radhika.  Radhika is the woman he saw in the woods, and since the families know and like each other, the pair are almost immediately engaged.  It's a remarkably easy love story, but there's a twist; Radhika has a dark secret in her past that her father is desperately trying to ensure stays secret.

Just as the engagement party is about to begin, Ranveer is called away to deal with a terrorist attack, and for some strange reason Raja Saab decides to go with him.  It's a diversion, though, and after they leave the notorious terrorist Shaka (Ajay Devgn) attacks the compound and then burns down the wedding pavilion.  He exchanges portentous glances with Radhika, and then leaves.

After the attack Shaka visits his mother (Farida Jalal), and the movie switches to a long flashback to when Shaka was a carefree but deeply patriotic college student named Shyam, son of a deeply patriotic village leader (Akash Khurana.)  Shyam's good heart and overwhelming patriotism catches the attention of Radhika, who is studying at the same college, and she starts sending him anonymous love notes.  Many, many love notes.  Shyam asks Radhika to help him figure out who is sending the notes, and she thinks it's funny to pin the blame on an overweight classmate.  (It is not funny, it's cruel, and if I were in charge of cutting an hour from the movie I know exactly where I would start.)

After a lengthy song about how he's not going to fall in love with anybody, Shyam figures out that Radhika sent the notes, and promptly falls in love with her.  This should be happy news, but Raja Saab is not happy when he finds out.  Not only is Shyam of a lower social status, his father is a thorn in Raja's political side.  He frames the father for sheltering terrorists, and the army makes the man disappear.  Shyam tries to find his father and get him released, only to be disappeared as well.  Raja Saab makes sure to show up at the prison so that father and son know exactly what he did and why.  After a brutal beating Shyam's father dies, and Shyam manages to escape, finally finding shelter with avuncular terrorist leader Dara (Amrish Puri).  

Back to the present.  Ranveer vows that he will not marry until he has killed Shaka.  For his part, Shaka keeps pretending that he doesn't care about Radhika anyway and busies himself doing terrorist stuff, finally kidnapping a bus full of pilgrims to exchange for four of his recently captured comrades, and the fact that Radhika happens to be on the bus is just a coincidence.  Honest.

Shaka's partner Shabnam (Madhoo), who is not-so-secretly in love with him, wants to execute Radhika right away.  Shaka can't bring himself to hurt her, though, and he won't let anybody else hurt her either, which means they get to play mind games with one another for a while.  Meanwhile, Ranveer is tearing up the countryside looking for his missing fiance, and Dara is plotting to bring his men to "a neighboring country" where they can be trained as suicide bombers and return to destroy India from within.  (Whenever a Nineties Bollywood movie plays coy about "a neighboring country" they always mean Pakistan.)

In a lot of ways, this is all typical Nineties fare, featuring a cast doing what they usually do.  Farida Jalal is the ideal mother, Shakti Kapoor is despicable, Amrish Puri steals every scene he's in, Sonali Bendre gets to display some real spine, and Ajay Devgn stumbles through his romantic scenes as Shyam but glowers impressively as Shaka.

The treatment of the politics, though, is surprising.  Dara and his men are not two-dimensional fanatics driven by ideology, they are people with a legitimate grudge against the Indian government, which is in fact disappearing people.  It's the same period covered in Haider, Vishal Bhardwaj's adaptation of Hamlet set in the Kashmir insurgency.

Of course, there's only so much nuance you can fit into a Nineties action-romance. The movie is very clear that being a terrorist is bad, even if you have a point, and Dara and company get a comeuppance in the end, though perhaps not the comeuppance you were expecting.  (And fair enough; terrorism absolutely is bad, even if you have a point.)  If you want a thoughtful, in depth fictionalized examination of the situation in Kashmir at the time, watch Haider.  On the other hand, even with its saccharine ending and the stated moral that "love can stop terrorism," it's remarkable that this silly action movie goes as far as it does in criticizing India's handling of the conflict while the conflict was still going on.

I'm wondering if she still gets her commission.

 In Bollywood they say that romance is dead.  It's not, of course; the Hindi film industry runs in cycles, and romance will always come back, though it is true that the days in which Shah Rukh Khan stood over the subcontinent like a colossus, arms outstretched and asking a nation to look into his eyes have ended.  In any case, Bollywood is not the only game in town, and the Telugu film industry is still making movies like Shaadi Mubarak (2021).

Even though Satya (Drishya Raghunath) is the daughter of a marriage broker (Rashshri Nair), she's not particularly interested in tying the knot herself, and especially not with the college friend her mother has picked out for her.  Still, Satya likes to slip her picture into the collection of eligible brides her mother keeps in the office, just to see if anyone likes her.  (They do!)  But while Satya may be mischievous, she's still a dutiful daughter who cheerfully listens to her father's story about the baby boy born at the same hospital on the same day as her, a boy whose mother died, leaving a heartbroken husband and a valuable lesson about the power of love, even though it would be an outrageous coincidence for the boy to show up now after all these years.

On her birthday, Satya is asked to take a client to meet three potential brides.  The client is Madhav (Sagar R. K. Nadu).  When Satya asks him why he's ready to get married now, a question she asks all her clients, Madhu explains that his horoscope predicts that he will marry an older woman, and his parents insist on marrying him off right away to avoid that terrifying fate.  And in a shocking coincidence, it's also Madhav's birthday.

Madhav dutifully meets with the potential brides, but it's clear that he's more interested in Satya.  She finds him intriguing as well, and snoops through his bag when he's not looking, playfully trying on the ring she finds inside.  Naturally, it gets stuck on her finger.

Despite the mutual attraction, though, meeting other women is not a situation conducive to anything more than a little light flirting and the occasional bit of exposition.  Satya learns about the girl Madhav used to love, before her policeman father rounded him up along with his friends and had him beaten.  And in another coincidence, that girl, Bhagyamati (Aditi Myakal), is the third bride.

It must be fate, because by the end of the day Madhav has accepted Bhagyamanti, and a heartbroken Satya calls her mother and agrees to marry the man picked out for her.  Madhav tracks her down and tries to explain that he only agreed to Bhagyamanti's proposal in order to help her elope with the man she's secretly in love with, but Satya grew up in the Village of People Who Jump to Conclusions, so she assumes that he's only after his ring and refuses to listen.  

It sounds like a perfect recipe for drama, and there's certainly a fair bit of angst involved, but this is a light fluffy romance, and the problem is solved through the grand romantic tradition of separate epiphanies followed by a loud argument in the middle of someone else's wedding.

Shaadi Mubarak is not a deep film; it's the kind of earnest and goofy romantic comedy that they made in Bollywood fifteen years ago.  It's a pleasant movie about good looking people who are nice and eventually wind up together; that may sound dismissive, but being pleasant etc. is what you want out of this kind of movie.  That's its job, and it does it well.

Eventually they assemble.

Sooryavanshi (2021) is the continuation, and perhaps the culmination, of Rohit Shetty's Cop Universe.  Like the other Cop Universe movies, this is not a film about superheroes, but is still follows all the beats of a big superhero team-up movie.  It's not The Avengers, but there's still an awful lot of avenging going on.

The movie starts with a massive amount of exposition, beginning with the 1993 Mumbai bombings, though in this universe ace detective Kabir Shroff (Javed Jaffrey) solved the case in two days, arresting most of the conspirators.  One  of the ringleaders, Bilal Ahmed (Kumud Mishra) fled to Pakistan and the protection of terrorist ringleader Omar Hafeez (Jackie Shroff), who subsequently ordered the creation of a network of sleeper agents spread throughout India and overseen by Riyaz Hafeez (Abhimanyu Singh), Omar's son.

Veer Sooryavanshi (Akshay Kumar) lost both of his parents in the 1993 bombings, and so he has become a superhero maverick cop who plays by his own rules but gets results.  Sooryavanshi has  assembled a small team of loyal subordinates to help him in his rule breaking and results getting, and he repays their loyalty by consistently forgetting their names.  This is played as a humorous quirk, presumably to set Sooryavanshi apart from his fellow maverick cops, but Akshay Kumar is able to set himself apart through the power of acting.

Veer is currently separated from his wife Ria (Katrina Kaif) and son Aryan (Vidhaan Sharma) after an incident when he brought them to a car chase and shootout.  It wasn't entirely deliberate, and he had planned to have them wait in the car, but once he spotted the baddies he pursued them without dropping his family off, and Aryan was wounded.  They try to be civil, but Ria is planning to take Aryan with her to Australia, and I am on Team Ria.

Meanwhile, terrorists.  By this point Kabir Shroff is Joint Chief of Police and Sooryavanshi's boss.  The police have finally discovered Riyaz Hafeez's location, so Shroff sends Sooryavanshi to make the arrest.  After a big action scene, he succeeds, and further investigation leads them to Kader Usmani (Gulshan Grover), a pickpocket turned terrorist now posing as a Muslim religious leader.  They don't have enough evidence to charge Usmani with anything, and he's too politically connected to arrest anyway, but Sooryavanshi still insists on making a dramatic speech and threatening future arrest.

All of that is enough to make Hafeez Senior send Bilal back to India to retrieve a hidden store of highly explosive RDX, and to activate the scattered sleeper agents.  The explosives are retrieved, Riyaz is broken out of prison, and plans are made to hit Mumbai with a massive attack, including six carefully placed bombs and a direct assault on the Anti-Terrorism Squad headquarters.  

Can Sooryavanshi foil the terrorists and patch things up with his estranged wife?  Yes, but he'll need help from the other Cop Universe heroes, Simmba (Ranveer Singh) and Singham (Ajay Devgn).  And it's when the crossover starts that things begin to get really interesting, because while our three heroes are the same type of character, their respective movies fall into different subgenres, and they bring their genres with them.  Sooryavanshi is probably the most typical of the three, a cop on the edge with an estranged wife, and more often than not he wins through persistence and dangerous stunts.  He's the John McClane of the group.

Simmba is different. He's wisecracking and genre aware, like Dirty Harry as played by Bugs Bunny, and when he takes the spotlight the movie takes a sharp turn into comedy.  And Singham is a surly and hypercompetent badass; while everybody gets their share of ridiculous action movie stunts, the laws of physics seem to bend in Singham's presence.

If you like ridiculous action movies, then you are in luck.  This is a very well made ridiculous action movie.  The plot is simple but presented sincerely, and the many big action scenes are as fun as they are implausible.  (Yes, that does mean that the action scenes become more fun when Singham finally shows up.)  

However, the movie has the same problem that the other Cop Universe films share; simply put, they're cops.  They are cops who are happy to bend and break any rule that they please, up to and including torturing and summarily executing their opponents.  Because it's a movie, we know that the bad guys really are bad, but that sort of behavior would be scary when practiced by mere superpowered vigilantes.  Uniformed agents of the government taking the law into their own hands in that way is much scarier.  By all means enjoy the fun action movie, but remember that with police power there must also come police responsibility.

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.