The Gorilla’s Lament

Despite the title, Raaz: The Mystery Continues (2009) is not a sequel to 2002’s Raaz It’s an entirely separate J-horror influenced Bollywood ghost story about a woman teaming up with a mysterious man to investigate a dark mystery which leads back to her own life, and the people closest to her. And when it sticks to that formula, Raaz: The Mystery Continues is a pretty good movie.

Nandita (Kangana Ranaut), affectionately known to her friends as “Nutty,” is a successful model in a somewhat dysfunctional relationship with Yash (Adhyayan Suman), weaselly documentary filmmaker, militant atheist, and host of an award winning TV show about superstition. The couple have just moved into Nandita’s dreamhouse, and life is good.

Life is not so good for Privthi (Emraan Hashmi), a struggling artist with a drinking problem and a strong resemblance to Brian from Spaced. Privthi’s recent paintings all feature a woman he doesn’t know in various states of dire peril. When he realizes that the woman in the paintings is Nandita, he decides to stalk her for a while, apparently believing that she’s be more likely to listen to a spooky warning from the man who has been following her around and staring for the past few days.

When Privthi finally approaches Nandita, she doesn’t believe him. She escapes as soon as she can, goes home, and takes a bath . . . only to be attacked in the tub by a ghost. She survives, but winds up on the floor with a slit wrist, in a pose which exactly mirrors one of Privthi’s paintings.

Despite Nandita’s protests, everyone assumes that she cut her own wrist. The ghostly attacks continue, but only when Nandita is alone, so no one believes her. Yash is particularly useless, accusing her of not being atheistic enough and therefore reflecting badly on his professional image. He suggests that they get married and go on a long vacation. Instead, Nandita turns to Privthi for help; he’s discovered a series of mysterious suicides near a chemical factory in northern India, and the attacks on Nadita seem to fit the pattern. The two set off on a road trip, and things get worse.

As a ghost story, Raaz: The Mystery Continues is very well done. There are some genuine scares here; I may never use an ATM again. And while a few scenes are lifted from western movies, they work in context. The movie tries to be about more than that, though, and that’s where it stumbles.

This is yet another bhoot movie which tries to present a conflict between faith and reason. Unfortunately, Yash, the designated representative of reason, is an atheist strawman whose arguments against religion all boil down to “You shouldn’t believe that! That’s stupid!” To be fair, the token representative of organized religion in the movie is at first corrupt and then insane; I suspect we’re supposed to contrast Yash with Privthi, who carries his father’s Gita with him everywhere, but never actually talks about religion.

The importance of faith isn’t the real message of the movie, however. In her opening narration, Nandita alludes to the Butterfly Effect, the idea that a butterfly flapping its wings in one part of the world could lead to a tornado in another. Nandita eventually decides that she is responsible for everything, that the chain of events leading to the hauntings can be traced back to a bit of casual bad advice that she offered to the wrong person. The clear moral of the movie is that even the smallest actions can have dire consequences, so we should be careful about what we say and do. While the ghost seems to share Nandita’s interpretation of events, I think they’re both wrong. The film’s genuine villains were engaged in their corrupt and murderous behavior long before Nandita said anything, and the person she gave the bad advice to made his own choice; she’s not responsible at all. “Be careful of what you say and do, because small actions can have big consequences” is a valuable life lesson, but it really doesn’t apply here, and attempting to make it apply seems forced and more than a little silly.

Raaz: The Mystery Continues is a solid ghost story with its heart in the right place and its head on backwards.

(No screenshots this week, since I don’t actually have a DVD; I watched Kurbaan via Netflix’s “watch it now” feature.)

Kurbaan (2009) opens with Avantika (Kareena Kapoor), a psychology professor from New York who’s currently teaching in India, meeting Ehsaan (Saif Ali Khan), the new guy at her college. Ehsaan is immediately smitten, but Avantika doesn’t want to get involved. Still, he’s charming, very very persistent, and played by Saif Ali Khan, so the couple are soon canoodling over coffee, and when Avantika is called back to New York, Ehsaan offers to follow her, as her husband. She accepts.

The happy couple find a house in an Indian neighborhood about an hour form the university. The neighbors are all fairly orthodox Muslims, but very friendly, with Bhaisaab (Om Puri) and his wife Aapa (Kiron Kher, who is clearly enjoying the chance to play something other than the hero’s long-suffering mother for once) acting as community leaders.

Avantika realizes something is not right when one of the neighborhood wives asks her to take a message to a reporter (Diya Mirza). Ehsaan advises her not to get involved, but when her neighbor disappears, Avantika investigates and learns that a) her neighbor is dead, murdered by her husband, b) the men in the neighborhood are all members of a terrorist cell, and are planing to blow up an airplane carrying a UN delegation to Iraq, along with Avantika’s reporter friend, c) Ehsaan is a member of the terrorist cell, and has been since before she met him, and d) it turns out marrying a man you barely know is a bad idea, no matter how persistent he is.

Avantika tries to warn her reporter friend about the bomb, but she’s too late and the plane is destroyed. Ehsaan insists that, while she does know too much, they don’t have to kill Avantika, so instead the cell keep her in a sort of house arrest while they plan for their real target. Her only hope is Riyaaz (Vivek Oberoi), a reporter who is determined to infiltrate the cell and bring its members to justice. Unfortunately, Riyaaz is determined to bring down the terrorist cell by himself, so he hasn’t notified anybody of what he knows or what he’s doing.

Kurbaan is trying very hard to be evenhanded about a very sensitive issue, but it does so in a strange and lopsided manner. We get to hear the terrorists’ speeches about their grievances, but we also get a good look at the horrible consequences of their actions. In contrast, the only real argument presented for the “not a terrorist” side is the lack of people being brutally murdered. (Granted, that is a pretty compelling argument.) And the presentation of Muslims in the film is relentlessly one sided; apart from Avantika’s reporter friend, all of the Muslim women in the film are strongly traditional housewives who do what their husbands tell them, and with one exception, every Muslim man in the film is a terrorist or at best a terrorist sympathizer. For that matter, while the film does present a Muslim hero, Riyaaz himself is every bit as driven by anger and revenge as the terrorists he’s trying to stop.

There’s a Mitchell and Webb sketch about the writers of a medical drama who deliberately do not do the research because they want to focus on the drama, rather than on the medicine. Kurbaan seems to have been made with a similar philosophy in mind. That’s not an entirely bad thing, because the drama itself is quite good; Ehsaan in particular is an impressively complicated character, an unrepentant and highly skilled terrorist (he kills a guy with a fork!) who genuinely loves his wife and can’t quite understand why she’s mad at him. While Saif Ali is never quite as brilliant as he was in Being Cyrus or Omkara, it’s an impressively nuanced performance, a suitable blend of romantic charm and subdued menace.

On the other hand, the terrorism plot doesn’t quite hold together; neither terrorism nor America work that way. Leaving aside nit-picky details like Ehsaan’s class, in which he, Riyaaz, and several privileged white kids hold a spirited (if a bit one sided) conversation about the ethics of terrorism in perfect Hindi, there are some serious problems in the narrative, most notably the initial plane bombing. In the real world, this would be one of the most successful terrorist attacks in American history, but in the movie the terrorists themselves dismiss it as a mere prelude to their real attack, and the case is assigned to one overworked guy at the FBI (Carl Burrows), despite the fact that an entire UN delegation was killed, making it a major international incident.

Kurbaan features some strong performances, particularly from Khan, and the film features some lovely cinematography. However, the movie is never as profound as it would like to be, and there are . . . problems with the plot.

Welcome to Sajjanpur (2008) isn’t your typical Bollywood narrative. It’s practically an anthology; the film presents a series of incidents in the life of a small, fictional village, as seen through the yes of aspiring novelist Mahadev (Shreyas Talpade). Unlike most of the villagers, Mahadev is educated, but after failing to find work after college, he had to return to the family vegetable stand. He’s drifted into a side job writing and reading letters for the mostly illiterate villagers, in exchange for a few rupees or whatever his clients have to give.

As the village letter writer, Mahadev is a witness to the private lives of many of the villagers. Despite his best efforts, he also finds himself more and more involved in the election for village headman, which quickly narrows into a contest between the murderous wife of Ram Singh (Yahspal Sharma), former village headman and wannabe brutal warlord, and the hijra Munnibai (Ravi Jhankal).

Still, Mahadev is mostly a witness to the world around him. And then she walks back into his life. Kamla (Amrita Rao) was Mahadev’s childhood sweetheart, and he’s crushed to learn that she needs his help to send a letter to her husband. Then he learns that the husband is in Mumbai, and Kamla hasn’t seen him in four years. Assuming the marriage is on the rocks anyway, Mahadev starts tweaking the wording of Kamla’s letters, and carefully summarizing when reading her the responses, all while playing the kind and understanding friend whose advice can be relied upon. (Yes, this is completely reprehensible behavior, and yes, Mahadev does eventually realize this and try to make amends.)

Those are the two major plotlines in Welcome to Sajjapur, but there’s an awful lot going on in this town. The local pharmacist (Ravi Kishan) is in love with the widowed daughter-in-law (Rajeshwari Sachdeva) of a retired army officer (Lalit Mohan Tiwari). A snake charmer without a snake is looking for his missing father. And a superstitious mother (Ila Arun) tries to break the alleged curse on her independent, stubborn, and surprisingly awesome daughter (Divya Dutta) by marrying the girl to a dog. (One of these plotlines ends in murder. I’ll let you guess which one.)

The diffuse nature of the plot, the almost anthology like structure, is one of the strengths of Welcome to Sajjanpur, because the movie doesn’t have to be about only one thing. Village life is wonderful and idyllic, except when it’s stifling and violent. There’s always time for a song about how great it is to live in a democracy. And Mahadev himself . . . well, he’s complicated.

I spent a good part of the movie actively disliking Mahadev; he does engage in some very creepy behavior, all in the hopes of winning the heart of a married woman he hasn’t seen since they were both children. And then, actual character development happens. Usually in this sort of plot, the hero gets caught lying, and makes a big, tearful, public confession, at which point everyone forgives him because he’s such a wonderful person when not lying and scheming and manipulating people to get what he wants. Mahadev, on the other hand, doesn’t get caught. Instead, he realizes that what he’s been doing is wrong, and goes to great lengths to make amends. But that’s not all! While at the beginning of the movie, he’s clearly uncomfortable with Munibai and the other hijra, and insists that any help he gives her is kept a secret, he learns to see her as a human being and becomes one of her staunchest, and most public, supporters. It’s refreshing to see a character work so hard to earn his happy ending.

Dashavatar (2008) opens with two adorable animated moppets, Ajay and Aarti, fleeing from the gangster’s who’ve kidnapped them. The kids run into an abandoned temple, where Aarti sees a statue of Krishna, and prays for help. Which she gets! But since the children don’t directly see Vishnu’s miraculous intervention, Ajay doesn’t believe it. And then the children meet a priest (Shreyas Talpade), who teaches them a mantra which transports them to the planet Pandora, where the children witness the struggle between human colonists and the native Na’Vi.

Wait. Sorry. Wrong Avatar. The priest, who turns out to be the sage Narad in disguise, teaches the children a mantra which transports them to Heaven, where they witness the ten incarnations of Vishnu.

And that is basically the movie. It’s essentially a religious primer, more or less faithfully retelling ten familiar stories. Some of the retellings are quite clever; the film manages to depict most of the Ramayana within the space of a single song, for instance. On the other hand, the film is explicitly aimed at children, and so some uncomfortable details are ignored. The Ramayana retelling ends with Ram having rescued Sita and the happy couple flying off into the sunset together.

Dashavatar is practically review proof; it’s one of those movies which does precisely what it says on the tin.

The single best thing about cgi and computer graphics becoming relatively inexpensive is that it makes south Indian special effects epics like Arundhati (2009) possible. Tollywood tend to be a bit over the top anyway, but readily available computer graphics ensure that the top is that much higher up.

Arundhati (Anushka Shetty) has just become formally engaged to Rahul (Deepak), and she’s very, very happy. Her large and improbably loving extended family are also enormously happy, and Rahul himself seems pretty pleased. (Though it’s hard to be sure, as he doesn’t get much screentime.) Naturally, it’s only a matter of time before things go horribly, horribly wrong.

And they do. When her beloved grandfather slips and falls, Arundhati rushes home to the family estate, only to discover that the married servants sent to deliver the wedding announcement wandered into the ruined castle on the edge of town, where the wife vanished and the husband apparently went insane; the family are keeping him chained up in the back yard. Modern, educated girl that she is, Arundhati clashes with Anwar (Sayaji Shinde), the fakir with whom her family consults, and at the end of the argument he warns her that evil is coming for her, specifically, and she should leave town while she can. And something is trying to draw her into the castle.

It’s only after the servant in the backyard escapes, goes to the castle, and opens the sealed tomb on the top floor that Arundhati learns the truth: she is the apparent reincarnation of her great grandmother, a princess also named Arundhati. When she was still a girl, the elder Arundhati saw her vile brother-in-law Pasupathi (Sonu Sood) rape and murder her dancing teacher. (At the same time. Pasupathi is the most despicable villain I’ve seen onscreen for a long time.) Thanks to her sister’s sacrifice, Pasupathi is stripped of his legal protection, and Arundathi orders him beaten half to death by an angry mob, tied behind his own horse, and driven out of town.

Arundathi grows into a virtuous and fearless young woman (also played by Anushka Shety), and is greatly loved by her subjects, who call her Jejemma, after the local goddess. (From this point on, I will also be calling the older Arundhati Jejemma, just to make things simpler.) Jejemma spends her days ruling wisely, and masters every skill she tries her hand at, including archery, swordfighting, painting, and dance.

Unfortunately, Pasupathi also survived, and spent the intervening years mastering the blackest magic imaginable. On the eve of Jejemma’s wedding, he returns to seek his revenge. He’s too powerful to fight, but Jejemma manages to subdue him, alone, armed only with a pair of scarves. Her personal priest warns her that killing him will just create a powerful and angry ghost, so instead she orders Pasupathi entombed alive on the spot, and adds every mystical protection imaginable to the tomb.

In the present, the ghost of Pasupathi appears to the current Arundathi and explains the deal. If she tries to leave town, he kills everyone she loves. If she tells anyone, he kills everyone she loves. If she tries to get help . . . well, you get the idea. He won’t kill her, or at least not right away, because . . .

Arundhati may be the reincarnation of Jejemma, but she’s not a polymath warrior princess, she’s an ordinary woman with no means of fighting back. Fortunately, Jejemma has planned for this as well.

While the action in Arundhati is wonderfully over the top and more than a little gory, the plot holds together surprisingly well. Causality is still in effect, and events are driven by character, rather than supernatural powers and amazing scarf-fu skills. At its best and worst, it’s like a cross between a high action wuxia fantasy and a Lifetime TV movie about a woman fighting back against her stalker, a perfect mix of improbable action and weepy melodrama.

I’m really not sure what to make of Good Boy Bad Boy (2007). On the one hand, it’s a wacky comedy about mistaken identity andf college hijinks, all revolving around a clerical error that should have been noticed and fixed almost immediately. On the other hand, the movie is apparently just a little smarter than anyone planned, and there are hints of actual character development. It confuses and frightens me.

The Bad Boy of the title is Raju Malhotra (Emraan Hashmi), a charming slacker who bounces from college to college, playing pranks, looking cool, and disappointing his parents. He’s currently studdying at BSS College, and like all college movie bad boys, he’s set his sights on the local Good Girl, Rashmi Awasthi (Isha Sharvani), who naturally can’t stand him. The Good Boy, on the other hand, is Rajan Malhotra (Tusshar Kapoor), BSS College’s prize pupil. who spends his time studying and being repsonsible. Somehow, Rajan has managed to catch the eye of Party Girl Dinky (Tanushree Dutta), and can’t figure out how to shake her.

BSS College is, frankly, a bit of a dump. The teachers have completely lost control, and the student body are a walking collection of party school cliches. New college principal Diwan Awasthi (Paresh Rawal) is appointed to clean up the mess. (Yes, Awasthi is Rashmi’s father, and no, Raju doesn’t figure that out until very late in the movie.) He does this by dividing the student body into three groups: the high scoring students are placed in group A, and encouraged to just keep on doing what they’re doing; average students are placed in B, and given academic support; and struggling students are placed in group C, an given . . . discipline.

Because they have nearly identical names, Raju and Rajan are initially placed in the wrong groups. Raju sees an opportunity to get close to Rashmi, and convinces Rajan to keep quiet about the switch, and from this point things happen pretty much exactly as you think they’ll happen; academic chicanery ensues, the nerd gets a makeover and unlikely love blooms. Twice. The main difference is that Awasthi is on to the boys from the start, and gives them just enough rope to hang themselves, by entering them into the Inter-Collegiate Youth Competition . . . Raju-as-Rajan in the quiz, and Rajan-as-Raju in ther dance competition.

So far, Good Boy Bad Boy sounds like any number of college comedies, and that’s pretty accurate. There are some differences, though. For one thing, the movie doesn’t take place in the same moral vacuum that other college comedies do; our heroes beating up the campus ruffians is treated as a bad thing, for instance, and admitting the truth and saying you’re sorry doesn’t make everything magically better. Raju actually has to gradually woo Rashmi, rather than simply stalk her until she changes her mind, and Dinky does not turn out to have been a genius all along (though it’s clear from her late night study session with Rajan that she’s smarter than she lets on) but she does turn out to be caring, loyal, and easily the most practical and genuinely useful person in the movie. By the end Rajan is clearly aware of the differences between them, but just as clearly determined to make the relationship work anyway.

Good Boy Bad Boy is an odd little chimera of a film. By all rights, it should be an idiotic comedy, but it isn’t, quite. I’m not sure it ever rises to the level of a good movie, but it’s better than it ought to be.

When reviewing a movie, and especially when that movie is some sort of murder mystery or filmi noir, I try to be careful about spoilers. It’s not always easy, especially in a movie like Nazar Ke Samne (1994), where the audience learns the identity of the murderer less than an hour into the film, then spend another hour watching the protagonists completely fail to figure it out. This is a movie that spoils itself.

Newspaper editor B.K. Sharma has been murdered, and press photographer Umesh (Dharmesh Tiwari) stands accused. Fortunately, he has the help of superstar lawyer S.S. Sahani (Kiran Kumar), who has famously never lost a case. After a brilliant courtroom performance, it looks like Umesh is also headed for acquittal, unril Jai (Akshay Kumar), a concerned citizen, steps forward and testifies that he saw Umesh commit the murder. Umesh is sentenced to death.

Umesh’s younger sister Sarita (Farheen) returns from college, and asks her family where Umesh is, only to be told the horrible news. (Apparently nobody thought to mention to her that her brother was on trial, and they don’t have newspapers or TV at her college.) She tracks down Jai, who has just returned from a week long vacation with Chamiya (Ekta Sohini), his favorite prostitute, and learns that he is in fact a professional perjurer, and was paid well for his false testimony. Sarita drags him home, and after he witnesses the suffering his false testimony has caused, Jai vows to do whatever it takes to get Umesh set free. (Presumably, Jai is usually hired to set the guilty free, rather than imprison the innocent. Easier on his delicate conscience that way.)

Jai recants his testimony, and Sahani files an appeal, which is promptly rejected. Jai tries to find the truth on his own, but unfortunately, he’s a terrible detective; he manages to track down and beat up the man who hired him, but after the man escapes, Jai literally does not have a clue, so he and Sarita fall in love, instead. (This is very bad news for Chamiya; Bollywood love triangles tend to end very badly for prostitutes, hearts of gold notwithstanding.)

After taking a few playful pictures of one another, Jai and Sarita have the last roll of film in Umesh’s camera developed, and discover a picture of blood-stained, golden shoes. Figuring that these must be the feet of the killer, they take the photo to Sahani, who agrees with their reasoning, congratulates them on their persistence, and ushers them out of the room before they notice that he’s wearing the shoes right now! A timely flashback reveals his part in the murder, but his motive remains a mystery until the very end of the movie. (And I won’t reveal it, either, since it’s really not that interesting.)

It’s just as well that Sahani’s villainy is revealed as early as it is, because unlike the hapless Jai, who seems to be incapable of noticing any clue that isn’t dropped directly into his lap, Sahani is capable of driving the plot. He promptly sends his men after badass street ice cream vendor Baadshah Khan (Mukesh Khana), the only man to have seen him in his golden shoes on the night of the murder. Naturally, Jai shows up just in time to help Baadhsah drive off his attackers, and the two swear eternal friendship. What they don’t do is talk about their respective plotlines, so Jai has no idea that he’s just met the man who could identify the real killer and save Umesh.

Nazar Ke Samne is a sort of half-hearted masala film; the film jumps freely from genre to genre, but without fully committing to any of them. There’s a mystery, but the viewer is shown the truth halfway through the film, while the heroes bumble cluelessly. There’s a love triangle, but Jai and Sarita fall in love just because, and Chamiya never finds out that she has a rival. Umesh’s family, despite suffering nobly, don’t have enough screen time to generate proper family drama. That leaves action, and while the fight scenes are fun, there aren’t enough of them for a proper action flick. I’ve often referred to other masala films as two or three different movies smooshed together, but Nazar Ke Samne is four half movies smooshed together.

The opening of Punnami Nagu (2009) is straightforward enough. A pair of divine cobras travel to Earth in order to perform a sacred dance, hoping to convince Shiva to save the world form impending doom due to pollution, since it’s become perfectly clear that the humans aren’t going to do anything about it.

Of course, these days divine cobras can’t go anywhere without an evil tantric trying to kill them and take the mystical jewels from their foreheads, in order to rule the world. This time the tantric in question is a woman named Karjari (Nalini). Karjari mesmerizes the cobras with her snake charming flute, but before she can spring her trap, a trio of hapless and basically interchangeable poachers (Vinodkumar, Varni, and Lochan) kill the make cobra, and the female cobra escapes.

Karjari explains to the three idiots that they’ve ruined everything, because you need both jewels in order to use their power. All is not lost, however; she predicts that the female cobra will possess a young woman with a snake shaped birthmark. If they can find the woman, they’ll be able to get there hands on the other jewel, and the world will be theirs, bwa ha ha, etc.

Since the poachers are also wealthy industrialists and crime lords, they search for the woman with the snake birthmark by blackmailing the warden of a local girls’ hostel to send girls to their lair, where the girls are plied with drugs and examined for birthmarks.

This does not go unnoticed; a heroic police inspector (Nizhalgal Ravi) is determined to bring an end to their creepy behavior. Unfortunately, the inspector (who probably has a name, but this is the sort of movie in which characters don’t call each other by name very often; I didn’t find out that the villain was called Karjari until the last fifteen minutes of the movie) can’t simply arrest the poachers, because they have informants in the department, so he sends his daughter Nagini (Mumait Khan) undercover to infiltrate the gang. And yes, Nagini does have a snake shaped birthmark on her spine. How did you guess?

Things don’t go quite as planned, however; the inspector is killed, and Nagini is beaten to a pulp and left bleeding on the pavement. Fortunately, a wandering band of good-hearted thieves (including Rajiv Kanakala and Srinivasa Reddy) are interrupted while looting her body, and take her to the hospital instead. Nagini is comatose and likely to die . . . until one of the poachers forces her doctor to implant the one jewel they have into her leg. (I have absolutely no idea what he was thinking.) Nagini makes a miraculous recovery, walks out of the hospital, and takes refuge with the thieves, where she divides her time between taking revenge on her father’s killers through a combination of cunning, kung fu, and snake powers, and helping the leader of the thieves resolve his marital problems.

For an Indian movie, Punnami Nagu is fairly short, but the filmmakers manage to cram an awful lot of movie into its two hour running time. The storyline is standard snake movie fare and doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense, but the movie features enough cheesy action, broad comedy, and bad cgi for three lesser films. There’s always something happening onscreen.

Apart from the generous servings of ham and cheese, the interesting thing about Punnami Nagu is that the story is a conflict between women. Nagini and Karjari are the driving forces here, with the men in their lives reduced to henchmen and helpers, or killed off in order to motivate the heroine. Nagini in particular is a surprising character, because unlike most Indian action heroines, she has no love interest, and so never has a chance to ‘turn into a girl,” to be transformed by the love of a good man into someone who needs to be rescued. The contrast makes for a good bad movie.

I’m taking some graduate classes these days, and I’ll be spending the next few weekends doing coursework rather than blogging, so there will be no full review this week.

However, I won’t leave you empty handed. I present screenshots from another Dharmendra-Jeetendra vial of cinematic crack, Dharam Veer (1977). It’s just as well that I’m not reviewing this movie, since I don’t think I can write about it without sounding like an eight year old on a sugar rush. It’s a movie with multiple infants switched (and switched again) at birth,

Pran the wandering samurai,

jousting,

gladiators,

romance,

swashbuckling,

princesses who fight,

Dharmendra dressed as Xena,

And a dude who totally gets shot in the face with a cannon.