Throwing a "Part One" in the title would have been nice.

Indian cinema can teach us many lessons: fight for your love, respect your family, never threaten the hero's mother, listen before jumping to conclusions, and don't make any vows unless you've had a  day or so to think it over, among others.  One of the most important lessons these movies can teach us, though, is never take your children to the fair, because one of them will inevitably get lost, leading to years of painful separation, mistaken identity, and a climactic fight scene before the truth finally comes out, and who has time for all that these days?  If the characters in Avatara Purusha (2022) had paid attention to this valuable lesson, they could have saved themselves a lot of trouble, though they would still have the black magic to deal with.

Twenty years ago, Yashodha (Sudharani) took her seven year old nephew Karna to the temple fair.  He vanished, and after a desparate search and a call to the police, she was forced to contact her brother Rama (P. Sai Kumar) and explain what happened.  Rama quietly shows her out of the house, and that was the last time that Yasodha saw her brother.  When she tells the story to her daughter Siri (Ashika Ranganath), Siri vows to reunite the family by finding Karna!

But that sounds kind of hard, given that the boy vanished twenty years ago, so instead she vows to reunite the family by hiring an actor to pretend to be Karna!  After a brief audition process she settles on "Overacting" Anil (Sharan), a junior artist in films with dreams of stardom and a tendency toward, well, overacting.  Still, Anil is a passionate performer, and Siri figures that's what she needs to make her aunt and uncle believe in their new "son."

As a first step, Siri invites herself to her uncle's house and announces that she's moving in.  At this point the sensible thing to do would be to get to know her family for a while and then eventually bring up the topic of her mother, but Siti is committed to her terrible plan, so she manages to "find" Anil-as-Karan thanks to amazing apps on her computer.

Rama is suspicious. His wife Susheela (Bhavya), who had spent the last two decades confined to her bed by grief, is ecstatic.  Soon she's walking and has resumed her normal life, and Rama, a practitioner of Ayurvedic medicine, considers putting up with the imposter "medicine" which is clearly helping his wife, so Anil stays.

 

Meanwhile, notorious black magician Darka (Ashutosh Rana) is searching for the Trishanku stone which will enable him to enter the parallel world of Trishanku, presented here as an empty celestial realm suspended between heaven and Earth.   he knows that the stone is in Rama's house, but it's protected by a powerful blessing placed by Rama's father Brahma (Ayyappa P. Sharma), and that protective aura can only be removed form within the house.  Normally this would be a problem, but the presence of a bumbling actor in the house presents an opportunity.

(There's actually a third plot, involving property rights, but it's relatively underdeveloped and mostly serves to give Anil an excuse for comedic shenanigans.)

There are a lot of Indian movies about people pretending to be vanished relatives and learning to love the family that they're conning; it's a well developed subgenre with its own tropes, so it's no surprise when the apparently real Karan (Srinigar Kitty) shows up and Anil has to leave his new family.  The subsequent black magic duel with fight choreography seemingly lifted from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is a bit more surprising.  

And then the movie ends on a cliffhanger, because this is apparently part one in a series, and part two doesn't seem to have started filming yet.  It's very abrupt, and it's hard to say much about the movie's theme and overall impact without knowing how everything turns out.  The only lesson I can really take from this is to avoid going to the fair altogether; it's just not worth dealing with the curses.

Wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey.

 Many Bollywood movies will boldly jump from one genre to another, but Baar Baar Dekho (2016) doesn't do that.  Instead, it sort of meanders into the valley between genres and sits for a while.  Is it a romance with fantasy elements?  Is it a fantasy about a struggling relationship splintered through time?  Baar Baar Dekho doesn't want to worry about genre boundaries, it just wants to live in the moment.

Delhi, 2016.  Mathematical prodigy Jai (Sidharth Malhotra) and aspiring artist Diya (Katrina Kaif) are childhood sweethearts, and they have a musical montage to prove it.  The relationship isn't perfect, but it's going well enough that when Diya proposes, Jai feels he has no choice but to accept.  He's quietly freaking out, though, and when the priest (Raji Kapur) drops by to explain the rituals, Jai peppers him with questions about the logical and mathematical underpinnings.

Things get worse when Diya reveals a special wedding surprise, a house which she bought with the help of her wealthy father (Ram Kapoor).  Jai feels that he should have been consulted first (fair), and he's weighing a job offer from Cambridge and doesn't want to be tied down to a house in Delhi.  They fight, Diya storms off, and Jai drinks a bottle of champagne and passes out.

He wakes up in Thailand, with Diya, ten days later.  They're on their honeymoon, and while jai is baffled about what has happened, they still manage to have a lovely time.

The next morning it's two years later, in 2018, and Diya is in labor.  Jai tries to drive her to the hospital, but he doesn't know his way around Cambridge.  When they reach the hospital Jai looks for a doctor to examine his brain.  After the doctor tells him he's fine, he runs into the priest from his wedding, who tells him to look for tiny moments.  And then his mother (Sarika) arrives, and gets him to hold his newborn son Arjun.

The next morning Jai wakes up in his classroom, with bored students waiting for him to start the lecture.  It's 2034, and after the lecture, Arjun (Varun Raj), now a Goth teenager, arrives to drive him to the courthouse.  It's only when he arrives that Jai realizes that he's there to finalize his divorce from Diya.  Jai pleads with Diya for another chance, and when that doesn't work he goes home and pleads with whatever force is moving him through time.

And then he wakes up in 2023, at home with Diya and his children - Jai and Diya also have a daughter, much to Jai's surprise.  This is his second chance and, well, he tries.  He receives a job offer to teach at Harvard, but he's sidetracked by a call for help from his old friend Chitra (Sayani Gupta), who is worried about the potential collapse of her marriage, and winds up missing both Arjun's football game and Diya's first art exhibition.  Still, he manages to not have an affair with Chitra, and that should be enough to fix everything, right?

The next morning, it is 2047, and everything is not fixed.

Now, obviously Jai is going to learn a valuable lesson about living in the present and focusing on life's small moments as they happen, because otherwise why go on a time travel adventure at all?  However, while Jai and Diya clearly have relationship issues at the beginning of the movie, he's largely learning about his mistakes before he actually makes them!  It's as if Ebenezer Scrooge received the full three ghost visitation the night after his broken engagement with Belle.  It sidesteps years of potential regret and suffering, but still feels a bit like supernatural punishment for futurecrime.

As a romance, Baar Baar Dekho is very restrained.  Malhotra has a knack for playing gloomy young men who grow into love and happiness, but that does require a brighter partner for balance, and in most of the time periods Katrina Kaif is either sad or angry.  (Usually both.)  The right lessons are learned and the story reaches a satisfying conclusion, but you're not going to be swept along by the tide of romance.  It's probably better to focus on the small moments.

Unspecified Drug Madness.

Forget the gratuitous celebrity cameos.  Forget the love songs. Forget the interminable tap dance sequence.  Forget Johny Lever mugging for the camera.  Try to forget the goats - you won't be able to, but try.  Dushman Duniya Ka (1996) is a very serious movie with a very serious message, though it isn't the message that the movie thinks it's sending.

Mahesh (Jeetendra) grew up as an orphan, poor but scrupulously honest and with a strict code of ethics.  When Mahesh meets fellow adult orphan Reshma (Sumalatha), he is immediately smitten, but he's clueless about how to approach her.  Luckily, his good friend Badru (Shahrukh Khan with a Charlie Chaplin mustache, in what may be his most irritating role ever) is there to give him advice and occasionally money.

Thanks to Bandru and the kind Sister Superior (Farida Jalal) who runs the orphanage where Reshma lives, the pair are married and soon have a son, Lucky.  When Lucky is at school, Badru has the chance to do Mahesh one final favor, saving Lucky from an oncoming truck, then dies.  By this point, though, Mahesh is established as a forest ranger, and the family settles into a happy life.

Years pass, and Lucky grows into a tap dancing medical student played by Manzoor Ali.  he is inexplicably popular with the ladies, but he only has eyes for his childhood sweetheart Lata (laila Mehdin).  That's bad news for rich boy and alleged friend Raman (Ali Asgar), who has a ferocious crush on Lata and resents Lucky for winning her heart.

Raman and his hangers on are devotees of the Goat Baba (Mehmood) who is . . . there's no sensible way to explain the Goat Baba.  He is a drug dealer who likes to dress up as a religious leader who is also a goat, and he bleats while he sells drugs to college students.  Because he's so focused on the Goat Baba's offerings, all of Raman's schemes are drug related - he uses peer pressure to get Lucky addicted to drugs out of general spite, and he gets his revenge on Lata by hiring a mechanic to pose as a college professor and drug Lata, posing her in a compromising position just as Lucky arrives, which causes him to storm off angrily.

The police arrive before the "professor" can do anything else, and Lata is arrested.  Her mother promptly dies of shock, and Lucky refuses to have anything to do with her until another friend proves that Raman set her up.  The young couple are reunited, and everybody should learn a valuable lesson about trusting the people that you love rather than instantly leaping to the worst possible conclusion, but they do not.

Even after all of this Raman is not in jail because he's rich, but Lucky sensibly keeps his distance.  Until, that is, everybody meets Bollywood actor Salman Khan wearing a  goofy mustache and playing himself.  Salman doesn't know why the boys are not getting along, but he sings a song about the importance of friendship and forgiveness, and the former friends make up.  This means that the tragedy that follows is all Salman Khan's fault.

Mahesh discovers Lucky's drug use, and makes it very clear that he believes that people should help themselves so Lucky must kick the habit entirely on his own.  And over the course of a long and sweaty night, Lucky does exactly that!  He vows never to do drugs again, drops out of college, and takes a series of jobs to prove himself to his father.

Unfortunately, no matter what job Lucky takes, Raman and his hangers on find him, usually just in time for Mahesh to see them and jump to the wrong conclusion.  Lucky explains himself over and over again, but Mahesh never listens. And things go from bad to horrible when Lucky gets caught up in a drug bust.  Raman and friends are all bailed out, but Mahesh refuses to bail out Lucky.  Instead, after a drug test, he's released by the police with an apology and a doctors' note confirming that he had no drugs in his system, but Mahesh still doesn't believe him, and kicks him out of the house.  

Lata would like to take Lucky in, but she can't; she's a single woman living alone, and her reputation couldn't survive a live in boyfriend.  Lucky has nowhere else to go but Raman's boat, and soon, he's back on the drugs.  Raman has finally been cut off by his rich father, and he and the gang are useless, so before long Lucky is supporting the entire group and all of their drug habits by stealing.  But the downward spiral can't be stopped, leading to an act of shocking brutality and a broken Mahesh pleading with the young people on screen and in the audience to "say no to drugs!  Say no to drugs!"

In essence, Dushman Duniya Ka is an afterschool special about drug use, only with musical numbers and an extended subplot about Johny Lever being menaced by imaginary ghosts.  (And of course the goats.)  There is fun and romance and hope at the beginning of the movie, but once the Very Special message starts, it's all grim and joyless and senseless tragedy.  Nobody ever points out that the real message of the movie is "Say no to immediately jumping to the worst possible conclusion and refusing to listen to the people you claim to love."  Lucky did say no to drugs, quite successfully, and he would have been fine if his father had trusted him.

In addition to the needless tragedy, this movie is also notable for the sheer quantity of "What the hell?!?" it manages to pack into two and a half hours.  There's a whole lot of weird going on here, though it is all eclipsed by the Goat Baba.

Despite all of that, there are some genuinely good bits.  Both of the cameoing Khans are playing the most annoying versions of themselves, but Shahrukh always has fantastic chemistry with Farida Jalal, and for once she is not playing his mom, so it's fun to see them bantering in a different context.  And Johny Lever is really good at broad physical comedy and acting through exaggerated facial expressions; he gets to display these talents here, and it's frankly one of the film's better performances.

That said, while I am a fan of Nineties Bollywood comic relief, if the highlight of your movie is Johny Lever, something has gone wrong.

The last commercial was "In Space," so the obvious next step is . . .

 The Police Universe is cool and all, but I kind of want Rohit Shetty to focus on making noodle commercials.

A heavenly spinoff.

 The death god Yama does not appear in Old Monk (2022), but it still feels an awful lot like a Yama movie.  This time, however, the action centers on the heavenly sage narada.  To quote myself from another review, "Narada is a legendary sage who appears in a number of Hindu texts, including both the Mahabharata and the Ramayana.  In the movies, though, he acts as the local divine trickster; if you have a serious problem, you should get Narada to solve it, since it's probably his fault anyway."  Cinematic Narada usually acts a s a foil to Yama or Indra, inadvertently causing chaos which embarrasses the gods but winds up teaching a valuable moral lesson.  This time, though, he winds up ticking off the wrong god.

Krishna (Sunil Raoh) is enjoying a pleasant afternoon in Heaven, watching a cricket match, when Narada (MG Srinivas) drops by to pay him a visit.  Ten minutes later Krishna's chief wife Rukmini (Meghashree) is about to leave him, because Krishna forgot her birthday while Narada made a big show of remembering.  A furious Krishna curses the celestial sage, banishing him to Earth until he can win the heart of a woman and convince her family to agree to a love marriage.

Narada is reborn as Appanna, the HR manager for an IT firm.  Appanna is not popular with his fellow employees, because he hates love and does everything he can to prevent workplace relationships by keeping men and women separate; he doesn't even allow pictures of married gods, so only bachelor deities like Hanuman and Ganesha can be displayed.  

Appanna explains his motivations in a flashback: his earthly father Narayan (S. Narayan) believes that all marriages should be arranged, and so e has spent years sabotaging every one of his son's attempted relationships.  (It's not just Narayan; there have been many unfortunate coincidences which are probably the work of Krishna.)  As a result, Appanna has decided that if he can't be happy, he doesn't see why anybody else should have a good time.  In fact, that's the reason he became an HR manager in the first place.

Two employees in love complain to their new boss (Sihi Kahi Chandru), and he vows to put a stop to Appanna's antics and get them married, or else he will . . . shave off his mustache!  This proves to be a mistake, because while Appanna is human now, he's still a trickster, and soon the wedding is off, along with the mustache.

Appanna and his sidekick Ranveer Singh (Sujay Shastri) visit a very specialized retirement home designed to reunite old flames, and it's there that he meets and immediately falls for Abhigna (Aditi Prabhudeva).  (She's not a resident, she's running the place.) After a rocky start, he manages to win her heart and make friends with all the residents, and everything is going so well that Abhigna invites him to meet her father, who turns out to be his former boss, sans mustache.  

Up in Heaven, Krishna and his one eyed sidekick (I think he might be Time, but he's definitely played by Satish Chandra) decide it's time to introduce the villain.  Shashank (Sudev Nair) is Abhigna's arranged fiance, Appanna's new boss, the son of a powerful and corrupt politician, and he has been holding a grudge against Appanna since college, when one of Appanna's pranks ended up costing him his girlfriend.  Shashank fires Appanna and then invites him to his wedding to Abhigna.  

Since he comes from a political family, Shashank is running for office.  Since he's mad and doesn't have anything else to do with his time, Appanna decides to run against him, and they both make stupid macho vows about Abhigna's hand in marriage while challenging one another, rather than asking her what she thinks.  Shashank comes form a political dynasty that does not fight fair, but Appanna is the earthly incarnation of a celestial trickster; he doesn't fight fair either.

For most of the movie, Appanna is Appanna rather than Narada.  He claims in a voice over to remember every detail of his heavenly existence, but it has no actual impact on the plot.  Even the curse is pretty quickly forgotten, and Krishna and Time(?) are more like Statler and Waldorf than active antagonists.  Still, Appanna is like the cinematic Narada in one very important way: nearly everything that goes wrong is his fault, spinning out of a scheme or scam or trick gone bad.  Old Monk might be structured like a Yama movie, but when you replace the jolly god of death with an ancient sage who can't resist meddling, the end result is rather different.

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.