Something weird, and it don't look good.

Watching the trailer, you might think that Phone Bhoot (20220 is a jumble of movie references and slacker comedy, and you would be right - that's exactly what Phone Bhoot is.  But that's not necessarily a bad thing.

Sherdil Shergil (Siddhant Chaturvedi), known as "Major" to his friends, is an aspiring Lothario from Punjab and his roommate Galileo Parthasarthy (Ishaan Khatter), also known as "Gullu", is a goofy nerd from Tamil Nadu, but they are both idiots.  They're obsessed with horror movies, and have decorated their home with horror paraphernalia, all centered around a life-sized statue of Raaka, the monster from the Ramsay film Purana Mandir, which they scavenged from behind a movie studio.  

The pair are always upcoming up with new ideas for businesses, and those businesses always fail, because the pair insist on cramming ghosts into everything.  Their new big idea is a party planning business, but nobody comes to their debut (horror-themed) party.  And to make matters worse, Raaka's glowing eyes short out, and while Major and Gullu attempt to fix them, they wind up electrocuting themselves.  But only a little!

When they come to, the party is filled with people, none of whom show any interest in paying.  When they catch right of the mysterious but beautiful Ragini (Katrina Kaif) they forget about everyone else, but after the requisite musical number, Ragini is gone, the other partygoers are gone, and the police show up to arrest them for trespassing.

Major and Gullu are released, and Ragini follows them home and explains her deal - she's a ghost, everybody at the party was a ghost, and the boys can now see ghosts after their near death experiences. She also has a business proposition - the boys market themselves as ghostbusters and "exorcise" her from the people and places that she haunts.  They refuse, and then promptly turn around and steal her idea, marketing themselves as "Phone Bhoot,."

And once again, it's a complete failure - they may be able to see ghosts now, but the hotline gets nothing but a string of prank phone calls.  After days of mockery, they finally get a real phone call, and race off to save a real possessed little girl.  And for a while they do pretty well, especially when Gullu realizes that the ghost is speaking Tamil and uses a picture of superstar Rajnikanth as a holy symbol.  But the problem isn't really solved until Ragini appears and talks to the ghost, learning her motivations.  The boys get paid, and the ghost achieves salvation.

And Phone Bhoot takes off, not as a scam, but as a genuine service.  Major and Gullu help the living, and Ragini helps the dead.  It's a big success, and they have great word of mouth among both humans and ghosts.

What they don't know is that they have competition in the salvation business; sorcerer Atmaran Dhyani (Jackie Shroff) offers salvation to ghosts who commit murder and other evil deeds for him.  Of course, Atmaran is running a scam - the ghosts he promises salvation to are taken to the back room and trapped in bottles.  he does not appreciate the idea of two idiots going around granting salvation to troubled souls for free, and he has plans to deal with them.  Fortunately, his hench-ghosts are also idiots.

Phone Bhoot is a dumb movie, and there's no getting around that fact.  However, it's a hard-working dumb movie, with a plot that might not make sense, but at least fits together as a cohesive narrative.  Running jokes from the first half of the movie actually pay off as plot points in the climax.  And I don't know why award-winning actor Jackie Shroff is even in this movie, but he's clearly having a great time.

There's no real deeper meaning or message here, apart from "Pay attention while you're driving!", but I respect the craft.

The Long Goodbye

RRR is a great movie, but not every Indian movie can be RRR.  And thank goodness for that!  If every movie is a bombastic, testosterone fueled festival of action, then they all start to blend together.  Soemtimes you need a change of pace, like a quirky feel-good family comedy set at a funeral.  And that's where Goodbye (2022) comes in.

Newly minted lawyer Tara Bhalla (Rashmika Mandanna) wins her first case and goes out to a nightclub to celebrate.  She leaves her phone at the club, only finds out that her mother Gayatri (Neena Gupta) has died suddenly when the bartender who returns her phone tells her.  She immediately makes plans to return to her childhood home in Chandigarh to be with her stern and very traditional father Harish (Amitabh Bachchan.)  She decides to leave her live-in boyfriend Mudassar (Shivin Narang) behind, since Harish doesn't approve.

Meanwhile Harish and the family housekeeper Delna (Payal Thapa) are trying to contact the rest of the family.  Oldest brother Karan (Pavail Gulati) and his wife Daisy (Elli Avrram) promptly catch a flight form their home in Los Angeles.  Adopted son Angad (Sahil Mehta) has a bit more trouble, and winds up stuck in Dubai for an extra day.  And nobody can get through to middle son Nakul (Abhishek Khan), who is off climbing a mountain somewhere.

Most of the family finally arrives, though there's still no sign of Nakul, and the preparations for the funeral rites begin, under the direction of busybody neighbor P.P. Singh (Ashish Vidyarthi).  And they bicker; Tara doesn't feel that the very traditional funeral rites are what her not especially traditional mother would have wanted.   Harish doesn't think his sons are taking the rites seriously enough.  P.P. Singh is just kind of patronizing.  And the Greek chorus of neighbors and friends of Gayatri marvel at the goings on; it's definitely sad, but not solemn, as good-hearted people bumble their way through personal loss, trying their best to make everything perfect because it's the only thing they can do.

And then things start to get better.  With the help of an unconventional pandit (Sunil Grover) the family start talking to each other rather than at each other.  Secrets are revealed, but they're generally nice secrets.  Tara and Harish start seeing things from one another's perspective, and Nakul finally shows up.

And that's it.  That's the plot.  People suffer a devastating loss, and they process it onscreen.  It's a very gentle film, very quirky, and above all very human, mixing moments of gentle comedy with Amitabh's big speech.  It's definitely worth a look if you want a change of pace.

No, you can't buy a vowel.

 In the Yama Cinematic Universe, the god Chitragupta is usually cast as Yama's comic sidekick, but he's an important religious figure in his own right, responsible for recording the good and bad deeds each person performs in life, and then judging them accordingly.  In Thank God (2022), Chitragupta takes center stage, but this time, he's cool.

Ayaan Kapoor (Siddharth Malhotra) was once a successful real estate agent who became briefly rich by dabbling in black money, then lost it all during the demonetisation of 2016.  Now, he's struggling to sell his own house. Fortunately, his wife Ruhi (Rakul Preet Singh) is a successful police officer, but Ayaan is so consumed by his losses and stressed over the sale of the house that he's neglecting Ruhi, their daughter Pihu (Kirara Khanna) and his mother (Seema Pahwa).  His relationship with his sister (Urmilla Kanetkar Kathore) is also a bit tense; she's been pouring all her energy and money into rebuilding the family home, because she blames herself for the fire which destroyed it when she and Aayan were children.

After another failed attempt to sell the house (it turns out that locking the potential buyers' son in the bathroom is a bad idea) Ayaan is driving away while bickering with Ruhi on the phone (another bad idea) when he has to swerve to avoid a motorcycle and instead hits another car.  And just like that, he's in Heaven, greeted by Yamdoot (Mahesh Balraj) and a mysterious figure calling himself CG (Ajay Devgn).

CG explains the situation: Ayaan is in critical condition, caught between life and death.  he has to compete in CG's game show and demonstrate that he has overcome his weaknesses; if he succeeds at a challenge, he earns white balls, and if he fails he gets black ones.  Earn more white and he can return to his life, but if he fails, he'll be immediately consigned to Hell.

And the game goers about as well as you'd expect.  Ayaan continues to demonstrate that he has absolutely not overcome his weaknesses, and CG is playing a deeper game than he lets on; all of the tests start to fit together, revealing the harm caused by Ayaan's selfish actions.  It all leads to one final test, one chance for Ayaan to redeem himself, and because he doesn't notice the test when offered, he fails.

Which isn't the end of the movie, obviously; this is a feel good family comedy with a message, and while a happy ending isn't guaranteed, it's pretty likely.  It's a redemption story, A Christmas Carol without the Christmas, Going Postal without the golems.  It's the story of one man learning how connected everything is, and that his actions have consequences for other people.

Thank God is probably not a very good movie, honestly.  It's predictable, the humor is hit and miss, the tone is wildly inconsistent, and the medical science in the climax is complete nonsense even by Bollywood standards.  Still, Devgn is consistently entertaining, and Malhotra manages to be likeable despite playing a complete jerk.  It's earnestly bad in the same way as many Bollywood comedies of the Nineties, so if you liked them, there's a decent chance you'll like this.

Hiatus!

 I'm off to Edinburgh for a few weeks.  Content will resume in January.

That's not how any of this works.

Indian cinema is known for its wild shifts in genre, but Jack N' Jill (2022) really commits to its wild shift in genre. It might not be enough to make it a good movie, but it does at least make it a somewhat more interesting movie.

Kesh (Kalidas Jayaram) is a brilliant scientist who has invented Kuttaaps (Soubin Shahir), a fully functional AI in a box.  he returns to India, accompanied by Kuttaaps and his Norwegian assistant Cheorlett (Ida Sophie Straume), reunites with his grandfather (Nedumudi Venu) and a gaggle of childhood friends, meets his nosy neighbor Tara (Shaylee Krishen), and builds a laboratory out in the forest so that he can complete his father's dream project, Jack N' Jill.

The Jack N' Jill project deals with brain augmentation; according to Kesh, humans use only 10% of their brains but the Jack N' Jill process can raise that to 100%!  This is, of course, complete nonsense that has been thoroughly debunked, and yet that's not the worst science in the movie - it's not even the worst science in that scene!  Kesh wants to skip animal testing and start testing the system on humans.  Specifically, he wants a human with "weak neural connections", and who is not aware that the experiment is taking place.

One of Kesh's buddies is Ravi (Basil Joseph), a man with shady connections and apparently no moral compass.  Ravi promises to find a subject and returns with Anthrappan (Indrans), a man with dementia who believes he's being taken to see his dead wife.  Stage One of Jack N' Jill goes horribly wrong, downloading a large packet of historical data directly into Anthrappan's brain, and he runs off into the forest shouting about Hitler.  Kesh and his team sort of shrug and start looking for their next subject.

Subject Number Two is Parvathy (Manju Warrier), a woman who is so traumatized that she's lost most of her memory, can no longer speak, and carries an iron with her everywhere she goes.  Kesh hooks some electrodes to her scalp, and after a short VR sequence she's speaking, singing, and dancing, and displaying an eclectic range of knowledge.  And you might be thinking, "Oh, it's Bollywood Flowers For Algernon," but no, it's about to get much weirder.

Phase Two involves bombarding Parvathy's brain with images of war and violent conflict.  According to Kesh, further traumatizing the already traumatized woman will give her "advanced survival skills," which is important for some reason.

It's about this time when Kesh meets Steven Tharakan (Sunil Varghese), a local businessman, and Stephen invites him to a talent show.  The original plan is for Parvathy to give a speech about freedom, because kesh has seen My fair Lady one too many times, but Parvathy doesn't want to give a speech so instead the group put together a quick Jazz number.  And during the Jazz number Stephen's son Joseph (Gokul Anand) makes unwanted advances to Tara, so Parvathy steps off the stage, knocks him out with her trusty iron, and collapses.

That's a problem, because Stephen and Joseph are evil businessmen, with a small army of violent goons at their beck and call, and it's increasingly clear that they have something to do with whatever traumatized Parvathy in the first place.  The only person who seems to know what happened is Stephen's adopted daughter Arathi (Esther Anil), but she's trapped in her father's shadow and unable to say anything.

Fortunately, it seems that Parvathy really did pick up incredible fighting skills from Phase Two, because  suddenly the movie is a violent revenge drama in which Parvathy keeps sneaking away from the group to deal with Stephen's men one by one after they try to bury her alive.  And yeah, the bad guys are genuinely vile, and it's viscerally satisfying to see Parvathy take them out through a combination of her newfound martial arts skills, Indian classical dance, and her trusty iron. 

(Also there's a cursory romantic subplot involving Tara's apparently hopeless love for Kesh, but that's treated as an afterthought.)

Ironically, Jack N' Jill is much less horrifying when it's a brutal revenge drama than when it's  a wacky sci-fi comedy about a handsome scientist and his annoying AI sidekick performing unethical experiments without the consent of their test subjects.  The bad guys definitely deserve an iron to the head, but Kesh really ought to be in jail.

 

Shiva Universe

Brahmastra Part One: Shiva (2022) is a movie with a lot of jobs to do; it's a superhero origin story and the first film in a planned trilogy and lay the foundation for a new cinematic universe.  But there's a reason why most cinematic universes never really get going.  You can't spend your entire movie setting up future projects; the movie the audience is watching now has to be about something.  Fortunately, Brahmastra is about something.

But before the movie can really get started, it has another job to do: enable celebrity cameos.  Shahrukh Khan plays scientist Mohan Bhargav, and somehow I didn't already know that, so I was the ideal audience for the reveal. 

Mohan is alone in his Delhi apartment studying a mystical artifact when his home is invaded by thugs Zor (Saurav Gurjar) and Raflaar (Rouhallah Gazi.)  Fortunately for Mohan, he has an ancient artifact of his own, the Vanarastra, an anklet which gives him the proportionate sass of a monkey, along with heightened agility and jumping powers.  Mohan casually humiliates his attackers Spidey-style until their boss shows up; Junoon (Mouni Roy) has an artifact of her own, and she uses it to overpower Mohan.

Meanwhile, in Mumbai, plucky DJ Shiva (Ranbir Kapoor) is living his best life.  He keeps catching glimpses of Isha (Alia Bhatt), and he falls for her - plummets for her, really.  He manages to make contact by climbing up the outside of an elevator, and after a lot of banter invites her to a party at his place, and it's actually cute and charming rather than creepy because they're both being really open and honest about their intentions.

The party turns out to be a birthday party for a little girl at the orphanage Shiva cares for, and Shiva reveals a bit of his backstory and motivation: he was orphaned as a baby, left with only a conch shell to remind him of his mother, and he cares for other orphans and looks for the light in every situation.  The romantic mood is spoiled somewhat when Shiva runs away after being suddenly overwhelmed by visions of Mohan being murdered in Delhi, though.  When he returns home, Isha is gone, and he starts to lament the fact that he has no way to find her again but the kids cut him off and explain that Isha is their Facebook friend now.

 Shiva tracks Isha down at her wealthy grandfather's estate, but along the way he catches a news report about Mohan's "suicide," and realizes that his visions are real.  Then he realizes that the next target he saw in the visions, artist Anish Shetty (Nagarjuna Akkineni) is in terrible danger.  So he rushes off to Varanasi and Isha insists on coming along and they . . . spend some time enjoying a romantic tour of the city.

Then Shiva lets slip that he is immune to fire and has a sort of vague control over it sometimes, and they remember the superhero plot and go looking for Anish. Before they find him, though, Shiva sees Junoon and the boys and they realize they have very little time, especially since Raflaar is wearing the Vanarastra.  Shiva and Isha manage to find Anish first, and Anish helps them escape with his ancient artifact, the Nandiastra, which gives him the power of a thousand bulls.  

The trio flee the city, headed for the mountain ashram maintained by Anish's guru Raghu (Amitabh Bachchan), but Junoon and her crew are following in a truck.  Anish sacrifices himself to send Junoon and Zor over the edge of a cliff, but Raflaar still has his heightened leaping powers, and tracks Shiva and Isha to the gates of the ashram.  Then he makes the mistake of threatening Isha, and Shiva unleashes a torrent of flames, burning him to ash.

Then Amitabh Bachchan appears and delivers exposition.  Long ago a group of sages used the celestial energy of Brahm Shakti to produce astras, talismans which function as weapons of incredible power, representing a number of animals and forces.  At the same time, they accidentally created the Brahmastra, mightiest of the astras, a weapon so powerful that it could destroy the world if activated.  The sages became a secret society known as the Brahmansh, charged with guarding the astras, and Mohan and Anish were both members of the society and guarded a third of the now broken Brahmastra,  And Shiva is himself an astra, the Agnyastra, able to control fire without the need for any talisman.  

There's more exposition available, but Raghu won't deliver it unless Shiva agrees to stay at the ashram (which doubles as a school for young Brahmansh to learn to use their powers, like a Himalayan X-Mansion.)  Nandini is sent away, which is a shame because Shiva's power springs from love.  And of course Junoon and Zor survived the fall, and they're building a dark army to attack the ashram.

Most of the elements of Brahmastra are things that I have seen before; there's a hidden school for budding superheroes like in the X-Men, a scavenger hunt for mystical talismans like in Jackie Chan Adventures, and a fighting style that mixes martial arts and elemental power like in Avatar.  And of course the secret society of Indian monks empowering a champion to protect the world is straight out of Shaktimaan. The real bad guy even has a secret origin that's almost identical to that of Tamraj Kilvish.   Like Shaktimaan, Brahmastra is really taking its inspiration from Hindu devotional films, but with a much higher budget.  It's executed well.  It's a tight superhero origin story with consistent rules for the superpowers.

Still, originality and execution are nice, but a movie should still be about something, and Brahmastra is about love.  Shiva is driven by love.  He's powered by love.  He saves the world through the force of his love, not in some hackneyed metaphorical sense, but literally loving the world enough to save it.  And while the movie gets dark at times (this is an Indian superhero movie, so it is not afraid to threaten children) there's a sense of optimism and hope throughout.  It's one of the most relentlessly positive superhero stories I've seen in ages.  

And then the movie ends with a plug for the sequel which couldn't be any more obvious without Nick Fury showing up.  But that is a story for another time.  Brahmastra is surprisingly self contained, despite being Part One.

At least there's no swastika hat.

Coolie No. 1 (2020) is a very close remake of 1995's Coolie No. 1, with Govinda swapped out for director David Dhawan's own son Varun.  It's a very close remake, so I'm not entirely sure why Dhawan bothered, but I will say this for him - as a director, he is incredibly consistent.  For good or ill, if you are watching a David Dhawan film, you are going to get a David Dhawan film, and this movie represents Dhawan at his Dhawaniest.

The plot is almost identical to the earlier movie.  Marriage broker Pandit Jai Kishen (Jaaved Jaafri) is humiliated by hotel owner Jeffrey Rozario (Paresh Rawal) when he brings a potential groom to meet Rozario's daughter Sarah (Sara Ali Khan).  Rozario insists that his daughter deserves a very wealthy man, and nobody who arrived by bus could possibly be good enough.

Kishen vows revenge, and as he stands in the train station glaring darkly at a picture of Sarah a gust of wind snatches the photo and deposits it on Raju (Varun Dhawan), who immediately falls in love with the girl in the picture.  Raju is a penniless orphan with an improbably backstory involving Chekhov's Long Lost Mother, but he's also handsome and probably charming and really easy to convince, which makes him the perfect vehicle for Kishen's revenge.  All they have to do is convince Rozario that Raju is really Kuwar Raj Pratap Singh, a billionaire prince from Singapore.

And with the help of Raju's mechanic friend Deepak (Sahil Vaid) and a borrowed car, they do exactly that, because while Rozario is constantly congratulating himself on his brain power, he's actually really gullible.  Sarah also falls for the "prince", while her sister Anju (Shikha Talsania) falls for Deepak after a two minute conversation.  As in the first movie, Kishen and Raju seal the deal by bringing Rozario to a rented mansion that actually belongs to Mahendra Pratap Singh (Anil Dhawan - yep!  David's brother), the billionaire whose son Raju is pretending to be.

The plot points continue to follow the first movie.  Sarah begs to go to the mansion in Mumbai.  Raju fakes a fight with his wealthy "father", then take s his new bride to a rented house.  Rozario arrives in town and sees Raju working as a coolie, leading to Raju inventing an alcoholic wastrel twin brother who is doing a permanent Mithun Chakroborty impression, and Rozario decides that said alcoholic wastrel would be the perfect husband for Anju.  The drug dealer (Vikar Verma)  Raju got arrested at the beginning of the movie turns out to be Mahendra Pratap Singh's real son, and there's a stabbing and a climactic fight scene at the hospital in which Raju and Deepak are in drag.  

There are some differences.  On the plus side, Rozario never slips drugs into anybody's drink, making him a bit less despicable than 1995's Hoshiyar Chand.  That's good.  On the other hand, because the plot is so familiar, the movie speeds through the early setup; Raju and Kishen don't have an earlier connection, so they are planning ti defraud people within minutes of their first meeting, and while Raju has a backstory laid out in the opening cartoon, a backstory which is not followed up on at all, the movie spends no time establishing his hunger for family, companionship and respect, the thing that's supposed to actually motivate him.  It's like trying to remake The Wrath of Khan without Space Seed - you can see where the emotional beats are supposed to go, but none of them have been earned.

Otherwise, it's like the first Coolie No. 1, an incredibly broad farce about terrible people committing fraud and never feeling a smidgen of guilt.  Normally in this kind of movie the hero is tormented by a guilty conscience, and their lies are exposed before they can get married, but not here!

Still, in a sense Coolie No. 1 is an impressive achievement; it's a disappointing remake of a movie that I didn't like very much the first time.