They do eventually get to the fireworks factory.

 Marjaavaan (2019) is a very retro film, but it's a particular kind of retro.  It hearkens back to the Bollywood of the 1980s, when seemingly every other film featured a hero seeking revenge on the man who wronged him, eventually leading to a blood soaked climax.  The only thing missing is Shakti Kapoor.

Raghu (Sidharth Malhotra) is an orphan, raised by crime lord Narayan Anna (Nassar) to be his strong right hand.  He's got the whole orphan-turned-enforcer package: swaggering charm, almost supernatural fighting skills, a band of loyal friends (Shaad Randhawa, Godaan Kumar, and Uday Nene), an unofficial relationship with beautiful bar dancer Arzoo (Rakul Preet Singh) and the undying envy and hatred of Anna's biological son Vishnu (Riteish Deshmukh).  Vishnu is a little person and unable to perform the violent acts of daring that Raghu can, so he feels that Raghu has taken his place in his father's heart, and is just waiting for a chance to destroy him; it's all very Shakespearean, but not in a good way.

And then Raghu meets Zoya (Tara Sutaria), a mute woman who teaches music.  Tara is looking for local children to perform in a music festival in Kashmir.  Raghu is immediately smitten, and helps her gather some students, including Payal (Alina Kazi), Arzoo's sister.  Soon, Zoya is also smitten, and the pair are singing love songs.  (Well, he's singing, she's signing.)  And at last, Vishnu has his opening.

Vishnu has his goons kidnap one of Zoya's students, leading her to follow.  He orders the boy to shoot the captive Gaitonde (Anant Jog), one of Anna's enemies, and when the boy refuses he shoots him himself.  Zoya sees everything, and manages to escape Vishnu's goons, so Vishnu contacts his father, and then Anna orders Raghu to deal with the problem by shooting this Zoya girl.

Raghu does not want to shoot this Zoya girl, so instead he finds her and they prepare to go on the run together.  Vishnu responds by having some of his men ambush the young lovers, but only after they have kidnapped absolutely everyone he could use as leverage against Raghu, up to and including a nice old lady that Raghu helped for a single scene earlier.  

Before Vishnu can have everyone killed, Anna intervenes.  In gratitude for Raghu's earlier services, he promises to let everybody go, but only if Raghu carries out his original order and shoots Zoya.  Raghu refuses, but Zoya takes matters (and the gun) into her own hands.

Six months later, Raghu is in prison for Zoya's murder, but Vishnu still doesn't dare leave the family compound.  He tries to have Raghu murdered in prison, but Raghu is still just too good at fighting to die, so instead he has Raghu released, planning to ambush him during the inevitable revenge-fueled rampage.

Raghu does not rampage; he just wants to be left alone to drink himself to oblivion.  Vishnu knows he has to be faking, so he keeps trying to provoke the inevitable rampage with more and more acts of villainy.  Raghu suffers every humiliation with silent resignation.  Will he ever fight back?  Well, yes, because this is a revenge melodrama, and there's no way to avoid the upcoming volcano of stylized violence.

Let me begin with the faint praise: Marjaavaan is a very well made bad movie.  The action scenes are imaginative and well choreographed, the leads are engaging, and everybody spouts their ridiculous dialogue with utter sincerity.  It's a very faithful recreation of the 80s Bollywood revenge melodrama without an ounce of parody.

The problem is that it's a very faithful recreation of the 80s Bollywood revenge melodrama without an ounce of parody, which means that it has all the flaws of an 80s Bollywood melodrama.  Zoya and Arzoo have strong personalities, but ultimately they're just there to further Raghu's story, which is a very familiar one.  There's an early item number featuring a sexy hen party which is particularly gratuitous and exploitative.  The movie is unabashedly violent, even as the characters praise their own devotion to peace, leading to a muddled sense of morality.

And then there's Deshmukh, who gives a fantastic performance in a role that he should not be playing.  It's probably the best performance of a Bollywood actor who is not a little person playing a little person that I have seen, but there's really no excuse for not casting an actor of appropriate stature.  And the problems with Vishnu go beyond the casting; Vishnu's physical differences are supposed to represent the corruption in his soul, which was awful back when Shakespeare did it and has not become more palatable in the intervening centuries.  And Vishnu is constantly making references to height and size just to make absolutely sure that the audience understands that he's short.

I don't mind a lack of subtlety.  I'm even fine with the movie's constantly repeated Ramayana references, which are there just in case anyone anywhere missed that Vishnu is the demon who took Raghu's love away, and that Raghu is the righteous avenger that will overcome said demon with the repeated application of violence.  It's fun to watch Vishnu gleefully hasten his own demise.  But ultimately, it's a thin story with no real surprises; even Zoya's death was telegraphed early on.  It's presented well, but it's nothing you haven't seen before.

It's Tabu's world, we're just living in it.

Long delayed sequels are apparently a thing in movies nowadays, both in India and the West.  But sequels vary; Bunty Aur Babli 2, for instance, was a very direct sequel with close ties to the original film, but Bhool Bhulaiyaa 2 (2022) is a sequel in the traditional Bollywood sense, sharing at least one cast member, a few character names, and some broad thematic similarities with the original Bhool Bhulaiyaa, but remaining very much his own thing.

Ruhaan (Kartik Aaryan), a charming young man and enthusiastic traveler, meets Reet (Kiara Advani) at a ski resort.  Reet is engaged to Sagar (Sparsh Walla), though she's not very enthusiastic about the match, and she's on her way home to Rajahstan to get married.  Ruhaan convinces her to visit a local music festival and catch a later bus.

And it's a good thing she did, because while catching that later bus they learn that the original bus tumbled off a cliff, killing everybody onboard.  Reet calls home using Ruhaan's phone, but before she can talk to anyone, she overhears her sister Trisha (Mehak Manwani) telling Sagar that she had been praying for the wedding to be cancelled so that they could be together, but not like this!

So, the fiance who Reet isn't that interested in is in love with her sister.  Reet's father (Milind Gunaji) is stern and traditional and would never accept a substitute bride scenario, so Reet decides to stay dead in order to protect her sister's happiness.  (This is a fairly terrible plan, but that's Bollywood tradition.)

Reet convinces Ruhaan to accompany her to Rajahstan and they hide out in her family's abandoned mansion, but Chote Pandit (Rajpal Yadav), one of the local comic relief priests, notices that the lights are on, so the entire family leaves Reet's funeral and goes to investigate.  Ruhaan is spotted, but he quickly spins a story about being a medium led to the house by Reet's spirit, which will only be able to achieve salvation if the family all move into the mansion together, and if Trisha marries Sagar in her place.  Reet had told him just enough about the mansion and her family to make in convincing, so they accept Ruuhan as an intermediary, and everybody movies in and starts planning the wedding.

The problem is, the mansion really is haunted; Reet's sister-in-law Anjulika (Tabu) had an identical twin, Manjulika, who was consumed by jealousy and turned to black magic.  Manjulika tried to kill Anjulika on her wedding night, but ended up dying herself, and after a ghostly rampage her spirit was confined to a room on the third floor which must never be opened under any circumstances.

 And then Chote spots Ruhaan with Reet, and brings a mob of villagers to search the mansion and prove that Reet is really alive and Ruhaan is lying to everyone.  There's only one place to hide that the villagers definitely will not search, and Reet doesn't believe in the ghost anyway.  What could possibly go wrong?

The original Bhool Bhulaiyaa played coy about whether or not its ghost was real, but the ghost in Bhool Bhulaiyaa 2 is definitely real.  She is played by Tabu, so she's also spectacular.  Tabu steals the show with a pair of fine performances, but then that's pretty much what Tabu does these days: she steals shows with fine performances.

Both the Bhool Bhulaiyaas are horror comedies with a (possible) ghost haunting a mansion and threatening to derail a wedding after being released from a forbidden room.  The movies rhyme, with music and other motifs from the first movie reappearing in the second, most notably a frenzied kathak in which secrets are revealed, but while the these are similar, the two films spin them in different directions.  That's enough to make this one of the most satisfying sequels I've seen in a long time.

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.