The Gorilla’s Lament

The stern father is one of the most common stock figures in Bollywood. He’s always there to disapprove of young love, whether by glowering and making angry speeches or by hiring assassins. Usually he frowns upon the match because of class or caste issues, but sometimes, as in Mr. & Mrs. Khiladi (1997), he is exactly right.

The stern father in question is Badri Prasad (Kader Khan), self made man and wealthy exporter of fish and fish byproducts. We first see Badri rejecting a potential suitior for his daughter Shalu (Juhi Chawla) because while the young man is very rich, he’s never actually worked a day in his life; Badri knows that wealth can be fleeting, and he wants to be sure that his daughter will be taken care of no matter what happens.

Shalu herself is bright, spunky, and a huge fan of Amitabh Bachchan. It’s the latter fact that gets her in trouble. When the unctuous Vicky (Gulshan Grover) harasses her at the gym, she reacts with Big B’s swaggering bravado, despite the fact that she’s a tiny little thing with absolutely no combat training. Still, she acquits herself well, thrashing Vicky and two or three of his goons. Eventually, she is outnumbered and overwhelmed, and has to call upon handsome stranger Raja (Akshay Kumar) to save her.

Raja is charming, essentially good natured, and very very good at kicking people in the face. He’s also exactly the kind of man Shalu’s father warned her about. he’s well educated, with several degrees, but he doesn’t have a job because his astrologer uncle (Satish Kaushik) says that within a year, he’ll be king, and it wouldn’t do for a future king to work. He’s so wrapped up in astrology, in fact, that he waits before stepping in to save Shalu, since his uncle has warned him not to hit anybody before noon.

After the rescue, Shalu is smitten. (Nobody ever falls in love in a David Dhawan movie unless a gang of potential rapists has been beaten up first. They’re like bees.) She falls even more in love with Raja after she accidentally runs him over, and he takes the blame and refuses to press charges.

Her father does not approve of the match (and rightfully so,) but she takes him out for a drive and they calmly discuss the matter until he reluctantly gives his blessing.

Unfortunately, Shalu forgot to check with Raja. His uncle has warned him to stay away from single women, so he’s not interested in her advances. Shalu goes home, cries, shoots the furniture, and threatens to shoot herself (I like Shalu, but she’s a complete psycho) until Badri Prasad promises to fix things. Since he is a Magnificent Bastard, Badri goes straight to the source of the problem, and bullies Raja’s uncle into making a new prediction. Soon, the happy couple are engaged.

Raja is still an arrogant, lazy twit, however, so Badri adds a condition to the match - Raja must present him with 100,000 rupees before getting married. Raja promises to get the money, and quickly comes up with a wacky scheme - if he invites one thousand people to the wedding, and they each give him one hundred rupees as a wedding present, his problem will be solved.

At the wedding ceremony, when Badri asks for the money, Raja explains his plan. Badri tries to cancel the wedding (since the deal was money before the ceremony, and presents come afterward) but Shalu threatens to set herself on fire (since she’s a psycho) so he allows the ceremony to proceed, but frightens the guests away before they can give Raja anything.

That night, Raja enters the bridal chamber, and finds . . . Badri, who calmly explains the new deal - 100,000 rupees before he can touch Shalu. And that sets up the basic conflict of the film - Raja tries to weasel around the specific terms of the deal, while Badri tries to teach his new son-in-law some responsibility.

While Raja is the nominal protagonist, Badri is clearly the hero here. Everything he does is designed to make Raja finally grow up, and while he’s a Magnificent bastard, he never descends into villainy. He’s also much more reasonable than you’d expect; after Raja wastes time with wacky schemes he modifies the deal and allows Raja to pay in installments, when Amrish Puri would have just killed him.

The inversion of familiar Bollywood tropes isn’t the only thing to like about Mr. & Mrs. Khiladi. The movie doesn’t take full advantage of Juhui Chawla’s Amitabh impression, but it’s great fun while it lasts, and while Shalu does fade into the background after marriage (having become a prize to be won rather than an active agent in the plot) but she still retains a distinct personality, and she’s still funny. In the end the movie is light frothy fun, and thinking too hard about it will only make your head hurt a little bit.

One thing I learned from Bhoot is that the very best ghost stories are never really about the ghost, they’re about people. The makers of Bhool Bhulaiyaa (2007) clearly agree with me.

The family of Siddharth Chaturvedi (Shiney Ahuja), and especially Siddharth’s adopted cousin and childhood sweetheart Radha (Amisha Patel), are delighted when he leaves America and returns to his family estate. Radha is a little less delighted when she learns that he’s brought his new wife Avni (Vidya Balan) with him. His uncle Badrinarayan (Masnoj Joshi) isn’t pleased at all when he learns that Siddharth plans to live in the family palace; the place is haunted, after all. Still, Siddharth is the rightful Rajah, so if he wants to live in a haunted palace, the entire family will movie in there with him.

Siddharth is a modern guy, and doesn’t really care about any alleged ghosts. He only wants to move into the palace to make Avni happy; she’s a modern woman, but she enjoys the pageantry and tradition. Avni is fascinated by the ghost story; when she learns that nobody ever goes into the third floor, she just has to look, and when she discovers the locked door that’sm supposed to keep the ghost trapped, she just has to open it.

Once the door is opened, spookiness ensues; one of the maids is terrified by a mysterious female figure, Anvi’s video camera is smashed and her Sari is set on fire, and someone is singing and dancing on the third floor every night. Uncle Badrinarayan ties to call in the famous priest Yagyaprakashji Bharti (Vikram Gokhale), but the priest is busy lecturing at Trinity College. His assistant (Rajpal Yadav) tries to help, but sees the ghost and is terrified into bad comic-relief insanity.

Siddharth, on the other hand, contacts his psychiatrist friend Doctor Aditya Shrivastav (Akshay Kumar.) Aditya is a big goofy guy, and the family react accordingly. He’s also very shrewd (and played by the star of the film) so he quickly sets to work unraveling the web of intrigue.

Bhool Bhulaiyaa is a mystery, more than anything else, and so it’s hard to talk about the plot without giving the whole thing away. On the other hand, as a mystery it plays fair. The big reveal fits perfectly with everything that has gone before, and all of the guns on the mantel are fired at the appropriate time. The subplots do not fare quite so well; Aditya’s romantic plot line is not only resolved almost entirely off screen, it isn’t even mentioned until the resolution.

What impressed me about Bhool Bhulaiyaa is the treatment of the relationship between science and religion. In most ghost-themed Indian movies, either the scientific explanation is completely wrong, and the ghost can be laid to rest only by embracing tradition, or there are no ghosts, and the only way to solve the problem is by rejecting superstition and embracing science. In Bhool Bhulaiyaa, the priest and the psychiatrist work together to save the girl and exorcise the ghost, and there’s no hint of conflict between the two approaches. (The specific psychiatry employed in the film is nonsense, however. Therapy does not work that way.) The film is also vague about whether the ghost is really a ghost, or just the creation of a troubled mind. In the end, though, it doesn’t really matter. The ghost is not as important as the people she haunts.

Or at least a week without a new review. It’s my Mom’s birthday, so I’m taking her out to the movies.

(I did watch Shastra (1996), but Danny Denzongpa’s “Walker, Texas Ranger” impression is the only remotely interesting thing about the movie.)

Doodh Ka Karz (1990) is a movie about the bonds that can develop between humans and their animal companions. It’s very much like what a Bollywood Lassie movie would be, if Timmy’s father had been falsely accused of theft and then brutally murdered, and Timmy fell in love with the villain’s beautiful daughter, and Lassie were a snake rather than a dog. Like a Lassie movie but much, much better, in other words.

Raghuvir Singth (Amrish Puri), son of the local Thakur (Kamal Kapoor), is desperate. His prostitute girlfriend claims that she’s pregnant, and is threatening to tell his father everything if he doesn’t pay her off. Raghuvir doesn’t have the money, and his father won’t give him the money without knowing what it’s for. He discusses the problem with his friends Sampath (Prem Chopra) and Bhairon (Sadashiv Amrapurkar), and Bhairon has a suggestion: they could steal the diamonds from the local temple of Shiva. Then Raghuvir could pay the blackmail, and they’d be rich in their own rights rather than having to depend on the kindness of fathers. And since the shrine technically belongs to Raghuvir’s family, it wouldn’t really be stealing, just a horrifying act of sacrilege! Sampath and Raghuvir are reluctant, but finally agree. (What they don’t realize is that Bhairon is secretly even more evil than he lets on - he secretly orchestrated the entire blackmail scheme in order to convince Raghuvir to steal the jewels, and he’s already disposed of the prostitute. Evil.)

Meanwhile, a snake charmer (possibly played by Kuldip Pawr; the imdb isn’t clear) and his heavily pregnant wife (definitely played by Aruna Irani) seek shelter in the temple. The wife goes into labor, so the priest (Birbal) runs into town to find a midwife, and returns just in time to see Raghuvir and friends sneaking out of the shrine with a big sack of diamonds. Bhairon kills the priest, and Team Evil scampers away. The snake charmer discovers the fallen priest, and is standing over the body just as the midwife and assorted villagers arrive.

The next day, Raghuvir, Bhairon, and Sampath publicly whip the snake charmer to death, all the while demanding to know where he’s hidden the stolen diamonds. (They have apparently decided that if they’re going to be bad, they may as well be bad.) His wife drags his body out into the plains, builds a pyre, and cremates him. Then she sits down and breast feeds her son. Realizing that the family snake hasn’t eaten for two days, she gives the snake some milk and then tearfully pleads with it to go away and take care of itself. (This is, of course, a very significant moment.)

Having completed her religious duties, it’s time to confront the villains. Things do not go as planned, and by the end of the evening, the old Thakur is dead, Raghuvir is the new Thakur, and the snake charmer’s wife and infant son are presumed dead but secretly alive and in the care of the local blacksmith (Goga Kapoor.)

Years pass. Raghuvir has still not sold the stolen diamonds, and Bhairon and Sampath are getting desperate. While Raghuvir has carefully managed his inheritance, they are both out of money. Since Raghuvir won’t budge, Bhairon decides to try Plan B, and begins laying the groundwork for a marriage between Raghuvir’s daughter Reshma (Neelam Kothari, last seen in these parts as the talk show host in Kuch Kuch Hota Hai) and his own son Ajit (Gulshan Grover.)

Meanwhile, the snake charmer’s son, Suraj, has grown into Jackie Schroff. His mother has carefully raised him to take revenge on the men who killed his father, but since she’s never mentioned any of this to him, he spends his free time performing dance numbers with the blacksmith’s obsessively devoted daughter Kajri (Varsha Usgaonkar.)

Reshma’s servant Haribhari (Guddi Maruti, who has the second best name in Bollywood) convinces her to attend a ceremony honoring the snakes at Shiva’s temple, and to see the mysterious snake which refuses to drink milk. Unfortunately, the snake recognizes her pendant (her father was wearing it when he helped kill the snake charmer) and attacks. She runs home, frightened and perplexed.

Perplexed or no, when she hears a snake charmer’s flute she sneaks out of the house and spies Suraj wandering in the woods. The snake spots her, and bites her foot. Luckily, Suraj hears her, and sucks out the poison. After an introduction like that, what choice do they have but to fall in love? The two young lovers are blissfully happy, but since he’s poor and she’s rich they keep the relationship a secret. That never works. Raghuvir finds them, and Suraj is brutally beaten (only to be saved by the snake), while Reshma is locked away in her room.

When Suraj’s mother finds out, she finally explains the whole vengeance thing. Suraj is conflicted, but as a good Indian boy he does what his mother wants and immediately starts plotting revenge.

W. C. Fields once warned that actors should never work with children or animals, and Jackie Shroff probably should have listened. He’s seriously upstaged in this movie. The average Bollywood hero can usually handle five goons at a time. Suraj never gets more than two, because the snake is hogging all the action. The snake also gets to finish off all of the main baddies, and is acknowledged by Suraj’s mother as the more dutiful of her sons. The only thing missing is a shot of the snake and Reshma riding off into the sunset together.

On the other hand, nobody ever upstages Amrish Puri. The man spent nearly his entire film career playing variations of the same two roles, and he did it brilliantly, always bringing something different to the table. His performance in Doodh Ka Karz is particularly good; Raghuvir does very bad things, but he comes very close to being a sympathetic character. He’s obsessed with his own status in society, easily led, and simply too weak to make the right choices.

As good as Puri is, though, the real reason to see Doodh Ka Karz is the climax. This is, simply put, the snakeiest movie I’ve ever seen. Suraj is forced to use his flute to lead the snake into a trap, but the snake brings friends. Lots of friends. Great heaping handfuls of friends. Soon the mansion is full of hissing, growling, flying snakes, striking down guards and cultists and Bob Christo left and right. It really has to be seen to be believed.

According to Chekhov’s famous maxim, “If in Act I you have a pistol hanging on the wall, then it must fire in the last act.” In other words, if you’re not planning on following up on a plot element, you shouldn’t introduce it in the first place. Bollywood movies, with their famously sprawling plot lines, often have a spare gun or two lying around, and that’s understandable. Home delivery: Aapko . . . Ghar Tak (2005), on the other hand, manages to lose track of an entire arsenal.

It’s two days before Diwali, and advice columnist Sunny Chopra (Vivek Oberoi) should be happy. He has a good job which affords him a comfortable living and a modest degree of fame. He’s been hand-picked by Karan Johar (Karan Johar) to write the script for his next film. His younger sister Anju (Rushita Pandya) absolutely adores him, and his Christian fiance Jenny (Ayesha Takia), affectionately nicknamed “Nani”, is planning a big Diwali celebration in order to make his family feel welcome. Sunny even has his very own Krameresque wacky neighbor, Pandey (Saurabh Shukla.)

Sunny isn’t happy, though, and that’s largely his own fault. He’s self-consciously cynical, and can’t resist sneering at anyone who doesn’t share his gloomy outlook on life; unfortunately, that includes the deeply religious Nani. While he loves Nani, he’s freaked out by the idea of committing to one woman for the rest of his life, and rather than discussing his feelings like an adult, he complains bitterly every time she tries to do something nice for him. When he has the chance to meet sexy South Indian actress Maya (Mahima Chaudry), he charms her with a combination of fanboy trivia and the as yet unfinished Karan Johar script, and soon finds himself with a date, a date which conflicts with Nani’s scheduled Diwali party.

Sunny’s love life isn’t the only thing currently off track. He hasn’t made much progress on the script he’s supposed to be writing, and he hasn’t been into work for two weeks. He deals with these problems by lying to Karan and by dodging the angry phone calls from his boss (Juhi Chawla.) Sunny is, in short, a self-obsessed adolescent, the kind of person who would use his celebrity to cheat a pizza delivery boy out of seven bucks. He’s in desperate need of someone to show him the true meaning of Diwali.

The Spirits of Diwali Past, Present, and Yet to Come are not available, so instead Sunny gets Michael (Boman Irani), a sweet-natured, slightly befuddled older man who has just landed a job as a delivery person for Mummy’s Pizza. Michael makes his first delivery to Sunny’s apartment, and Sunny’s usual lines don’t work, he tries anything and everything short of paying the money he owes to get Michael to go away - until, that is, he discovers that Michael knows how to make halwa, Maya’s favorite treat. Since the employee’s handbook for Mummy’s Pizza says that customers are friends and should be helped whenever possible, Michael cheerfully goes to work in the kitchen, and Sunny quickly learns that when your life has become an elaborate tissue of lies, the last thing you want to do is invite a free spirited innocent into it.

Home Delivery is what they call in Hinglish a “time pass.” The central story of a curmudgeon’s holiday redemption is old but reliable, and Sunny is just sympathetic enough that you want him to be redeemed (although I would have been happy with a little more comeuppance.) The film has an engaging, whimsical visual style, and is frequently very funny; I was especially amused by the brief retrospective of Maya’s film career. It’s also fun trying to spot the numerous celebrity cameos.

On the other hand, there are all those guns on the mantel. This is a sloppy movie. Most seriously, it is clearly established at the beginning of the movie that young Anju has a Santa Claus fixation, and that she is expecting Santa to show up on Diwali and make all her dreams come true. Michael, Sunny’s redemptive agent, the man who indirectly does make all her dreams come true, is a heavyset older man with a long white beard and a red shirt and hat. The film does nothing with this, instead wasting time with an occasionally amusing subplot about a serial killer (Arif Zakaria) who never actually interacts with any of the main characters.

Home Delivery was an okay movie, but with a little more focus and discipline it could have been a great one.

Izzat Ki Roti (1993) follows in the grand Bollywood tradition of movies with extensive backstories to drive a very simple plot. In this case, the backstory involves Vijay (Khulbushan Kharbanda) and Veeru (Prem Chopra), two truck drivers. The two are close friends, but while Vijay is a pious, forthright, and honorable family man, Veeru is a bit more morally flexible; when he’s approached by an unnamed but evil foreign government about smuggling narcotics into India, he is happy to oblige. He’s not a very good smuggler, though, and after crashing through a police barricade, he is promptly captured by Vijay, and led off to jail, vowing revenge.

Meanwhile, Veeru’s distraught girlfriend discovers that she’s pregnant. She lives just long enough to deliver a son, and then drops dead of a broken heart. Lakshmi (Tanuja), Vijay’s wife, adopts the child, swearing to be his Yasoda. The couple soon have another son, and as the years pass Vijay becomes a successful businessman and the owner of the Malhotra Transport Company. He celebrates his success by driving too fast, and is killed in a car crash.

Years later, the Malhotra Transport Company is still a success. Sensible older brother Krishna (Rishi Kapoor) manages the business, while wise-cracking younger brother Jeet (Sunny Deol) beats up all of the assorted underworld goons who try to extort money from them.

The brothers are nice Indian boys, as shown by their obvious affection towards their mother. And, this being Bollywood, they each have their own respective love interest. Krishna has been seeing Pinky (Farha Naaz) for a year, but they’ve been keeping the relationship a secret for . . . no particular reason that I can see. Jeet, meanwhile, is immediately smitten when he meets the lovely Jyoti (Juhi Chawla), and annoys her until she falls in love with him. (This is a common romantic technique in Bollywood, but it never seems to work for me. Maybe I’m not doing it right.)

Veeru is finally released from prison. He quickly rises to the top of the local underworld, mostly because he is apparently the only criminal in all of New Delhi to carry a gun. This is just the first step in Veeru’s insidious scheme to destroy the Malhotra family. At least, I think it is; it’s hard to tell, because we never find out what his scheme actually involves, apart from waiting for lucky coincidences. He does approach Pinky’s uncle Girdharilal (Anupam Kher) and offers him cheap booze and cheaper women if he will help. Girdharilal enthusiastically agrees.

After a little manipulation, Krishna and Pinky are married, and Girdharilal has moved into the Malhotra home, where he sets about driving a rift between the brothers and feeding Krishna bad business advice. It’s a lot like Othello, if Iago were a smirking, giggling sycophant rather than a master manipulator, and Othello wore a lot of sweaters. It’s hard to accept as an insidious plan because Girdharilal is mostly acting on his own initiative to make things generally worse, acting as the opportunity presents itself rather than moving toward a particular end, and because there’s no possible reason why Krishna would choose to listen to Girdharilal, who is an idiot, rather than his own brother.

I’m a Bollywood fan, though, so I can live with a little sloppy plotting. And the movie does have a fantastic cast; I love Juhi Chawla, and even the actors I hadn’t heard of before are related to actors that I like. However, there is a reason why Sunny Deol is usually cast as the bland but dependable older brother or the grim badass with a heart of gold: Sunny Deol isn’t funny. At all. Jeet is supposed to be the free-spirited, quick witted brother, and so he spends much of the first half of the movie making jokes and doing silly voices and dressing up in outrageous disguises, and it all falls flat. Sunny is Differently Charismatic; he’s fine with older, more responsible roles, but just doesn’t have the right sort of charm to pull off the part of the wacky younger brother; when Girdharilal enters the picture and takes over comic relief duties, things improve immensely. On the other hand, Sunny does do a fine Manoj Kumar impression.

No review this week. I watched Sati Naag Kanya (1983), a religious movie about Soluchana, wife of Indrajit and daughter-in-law of Ravanna, but while I love Hindu devotional movies, I find them impossible to review. It would be like going to someone else’s church and critiquing the youth choir.

No new reviews for the next few weeks, either. I’ll be in Scotland, visiting family. Specifically, I’ll be here,

and here,

and even here.

I might also make it up here,

but probably not here.

The next new review will be posted on March 30.

As the title promises, Ali Baba Aur 40 Chor (2004) is an adaptation of the story of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. It’s the kind of story that Westerners often don’t know as well as they think they do; everybody remembers “Open Sesame,” but people often assume that Ali Baba is the leader of the Thieves, and most adaptations of the story leave out the dinosaurs entirely.

So Ali Baba Aur 40 Chor isn’t that faithful an adaptation of the story, either. The film is set in a bizarre version of contemporary India; the village of Sonapur looks like every other Bollywood village ever, but visiting American journalist Susan spends the boat ride to the village happily photographing the vast herds of dinosaurs on shore, and nobody finds the presence of extinct megafauna worthy of comment.

Susan is in Sonapur to interview Shangrila Baba, the local herbalist and mysterious old man, who has been put in the Guinness Book of World Records for being a hundred and fifty years old. Shangrila talks to his plants, which is normal. They also talk back to him, which stuns Susan. (Dinosaurs? Meh. Talking plants?!) Shangrila isn’t really interested in talking about his magical herb garden, though, or about how old he is. Instead, he wants to talk about his grandson, Ali Baba (Arbaaz Khan), woodcutter, manly man, and self-proclaimed protector of the forest.

At that moment, Ali Baba is on horseback, riding out of the village and toward the city. He stops to tease his sort-of girlfriend, Marjina (Pinky Harwani), a simple, naive village belle who dresses like an extra from a Pat Benatar video. Ali and Marjina sing a song, he beats up her jealous suitor and a pair of hired thugs, and then he’s back on his way.

Meanwhile, extremely evil bandit chieftain Zakali (Tej Sapru) is having a staff meeting with his men. They’re all looking forward to doing some robbing, but instead Zakali decides that they will raid the village and kill a lot of people, partly because this will increase the gang’s reputation, and partly because Zakali is just that evil.

The raid goes well, from a bandit’s point of view. The new forest officer arrives in town the next day, and the villagers rebuke him for not having been there. (Bollywood villagers tend to overreact and jump to conclusions, but in this case they do actually have a point.) The forest officer vows to bring Zakali to justice.

That night, the forest officer (who never gets a name) and his men encounter Ali Baba, returning from the city. Upon learning about the attack, Ali declares that he will bring Zakali and his men to justice. He finds the bandit camp by following the sound of their dancing girl, but he’s quickly discovered. After a quick fight, the bandits capture Ali, and Zakali decides to feed him to the giant lizard that lives in the black valley.

Ali escapes from the lizard (and say what you will about Ali Baba, but any man who can drive off a T-Rex using a small knife gets serious badass points), climbs onto his trusty horse, and makes his way back to town, where he promptly collapses. After Shangrila and Marjina nurse him back to health, he refuses to tell anyone about what happened, even though the villagers offer to help him fight the bandits. Instead, he goes back to work.

The next day, while cutting wood in the forest, Ali catches sight of Zakali and his men. he follows them through the black valley to their secret treasure vault. And I’m sure you already know what happens next: Ali watches as Zakali uses the magic words to open and close the vault, and after they leave he enters the vault himself and takes some gold.

As Ali explains to Marjina, the gold belongs to the villagers, and he intends to make sure that they get it all back. (Even though nobody in the village could have possibly had that much money in the first place.) Ali’s brother Qasim, who stumbles across the gold and badgers Ali until he learns where it comes from, has no such scruples. He goes to the cave and steals all the gold he can. In his excitement he forgets the magic words, Zakali arrives, and . . . well. Things don’t go well for Qasim.

Ali is a good brother, and he returns to the cave to look for his brother, finds him, and brings the pieces home. (Zakali: “Where is that corpse I hacked in half?”) Of course, now Zakali knows that someone else knows the secret of the cave, and he really, really wants his gold back.

The dinosaurs are actually my favorite part of Ali Baba Aur 40 Chor. It’s not that the computer animation is terribly good ((it isn’t,) and it’s not that they do anything interesting (they don’t.) I like the dinosaurs because they make absolutely no sense. I keep trying to figure out what sort of a world this movie takes place in; clearly there must be dinosaurs in more places than just the village, because Susan isn’t surprised by them, and the village is not swarming with scientists.

Even without considering the dinosaurs, the writing is sloppy. Susan, the American journalist, is roughly equivalent to Christopher Sly; she listens to some expository dialogue and then vanishes entirely. The real problem with the film, though, is that Ali Baba himself is not a likable character. He’s gruff, surly, and rude to everybody, and only seems interested in stopping Zakali because that’s what the leading man is supposed to do. Zakali is frankly more charismatic, in the way that insane Bollywood villains tend to be, and his chief henchman has a cool eye patch.

The movie isn’t very good, but there are entertaining parts. It’s recommended, but only if your Bad Movie Tolerance Threshold is high.

Many Bollywood reincarnation thrillers begin with a lengthy prologue thoroughly detailing the circumstances which lead to the hero’s original demise; often, the hero doesn’t get around to dying until the intermission. Karz (1989), by contrast, gets straight to the point: Wealthy landowner Ravi Verma (Raj Kiran) has just won a lawsuit against the villainous Sir Judah (Prem Nath, also known as “that guy who looks like Leo McKern”), who is possibly English but definitely mute, and can communicate only by using his long fingernails to tap out messages in Morse code which are then interpreted by his loyal henchman (the always reliable Mac Mohan.)

Ravi is in love with Kamini (Simi Garewal) and doesn’t realize that she’s secretly evil. (And a smoker!) Sir Judah, on the other hand, does realize this, so he summons her to his lair and taps out an offer: If she will marry Ravi, kill him, and then sign over all of his property to Sir Judah, she’ll be given a generous stipend and the big house in Ooty and allowed to play at being queen for the rest of her life. On the other hand, if she marries Ravi, kills him, and then keeps the property for herself, she’ll be brutally murdered. After thinking it over for all of two seconds, Kamini chooses option A. She marries him, and as he’s driving her to the ancestral home in Ooty to meet his mother (Durga Khote) and sister (Abha Dulia), his jeep stalls, and she takes the opportunity to “accidentally” run him over. Repeatedly.

Years later, Monty (Rishi Kapoor) is an orphan turned hugely successful pop singer so starved for parental affection that he calls his chilly, controlling manager G. G. Oberoi (Pinchoo Kapoor) “daddy.” When Monty brings old friend Dayal (Jala Agha) home for dinner, the Oberois have other plans, so he allows Dayal to drag him off to a party. There he catches a glimpse of the lovely Tina (Tina Munim) working in the kitchen. He falls for her instantly, and after the party he sends a drunken Dayal into the kitchen to find her, only to learn that she’s not a servant at all, she’s a schoolgirl from Ooty who had been visiting a friend from her village, and she’s already gone home.

With no hope of locating Tina, Monty falls into a pleasant romantic melancholy, and writes some new songs. He doesn’t have much time for brooding, however; while playing the guitar on stage he’s suddenly confronted by visions of a man being run over by a jeep. Sensibly, Monty goes straight to the hospital. While the tests are inconclusive, his doctor advises him to take some time off and go find somewhere quiet to relax. Somewhere like, for instance, Ooty.

Once in Ooty Monty is quickly reunited with Tina. (Why didn’t he go to Ooty before? No idea.) Tina, it turns out, is just as smitten with him, and he quickly wins over her guardian, local strongman Kabir (Pran). He’s also haunted by strange memories of another life and death, and when Tina introduces him to her patron, Kamini, it all becomes clear - he is Ravi Verma reborn!

Monty wants revenge on the woman who killed him. He plans to shoot her, but Kabir points out that he’ll just be arrested. Instead, he suggests that Monty convince her to confess her crime by worming his way into her affections and then scaring her with familiar music, hints about her past crimes, and men dressed as skeletons doing aerobics.

Karz is widely regarded as a Bollywood classic, for one simple reason - the movie is hugely entertaining. The prologue delivers only the information we need to know, and any other details about Ravi’s life are reserved for flashbacks. As a result, instead of boring exposition, there’s something interesting happening on screen all the time, whether that something is a huge dance number or a gratuitous fight or sappy romance or ominous scheming or Kabir just being awesome.

The movie does have flaws, of course. Some of the “ghost” scenes are downright silly, especially the aforementioned Jazzercising skeletons. Tina is witty and strong-willed in Bombay, and turns into a ninny immediately upon returning to Ooty. Dayal doesn’t do much, and then promptly vanishes from the narrative. And Kamini may be written too well; she’s clearly a bad person, but she’s portrayed with such clarity that it’s hard not to sympathize with the aging beauty who made a horrible bargain in her youth and is unaware that her new chance at happiness will only lead to betrayal and pain. It means that Monty comes off as a bit of a bully, and that’s more moral ambiguity than I was expecting. The movie is relentlessly watchable, though, flaws notwithstanding. Karz is one classic that deserves the title.

In classic Bollywood tradition, Jangal Mein Mangal (1972) is too much movie to be confined to a single genre. The movie is really two movies; one is a light-hearted, sunny romantic farce reminiscent of Love’s Labours Lost, and the other is a groovy madcap mystery that owes a great deal to Scooby Doo. The two sub-movies are deftly balanced and almost perfectly blended, but there is a twist that spoils the otherwise irresistible good mood.

The first plot is very simple. Professor Laxmi (Sonia Sahni) and her eight students, accompanied by their chaperon, Sister Sophia (Meena Roy), arrive at a guest house in the forests of Kerala for a botanical study. Laxmi is pleased that there are no men in the immediate vicinity, apart from the servant, Totaram (Paintal), who explicitly doesn’t count. The girls, including the remarkably cute Leela (Reena Roy), tough girl Lata (Meena T.), and Saroj (Jayshree T.), the other one, are less pleased.

Before Laxmi and her students can get properly settled, the other guests arrive: botany professor and confirmed bachelor Retired Colonel M. K. Das (Pran), and his nine male students, most notably talented singer Rajesh (Kiran Kumar), effeminate hippy Raghu (Pran again), and Baldev (Narendra Nath), the other one. And that’s really all you need to know. Of course Das and Laxmi take an instant dislike to one another. Of course there are fights and misunderstandings and wacky schemes and cross dressing. Of course the movie ends with everyone neatly paired off.

The plotline unfolds at a pleasant, leisurely pace, though, and there are a few nice touches; while Das and Laxmi only overcome their differences because she’s a girl and girls are afraid of snakes (tee hee), Laxmi’s students trounce the boys at kabaddi, and then have the chance to sexually harass the boys in song, in a gleeful inversion of Bollywood gender norms.

The other plotline is more complex. A ruined temple has been discovered in the area. The local villagers are ecstatic, but the local Thakur claims that the land and everything on it belongs to him, and that there’s no temple there anyway. He’s perfectly capable of bribing any and all government officials to side with him, so the villagers are out of luck, at least until Rajesh, Raghu, and Baldev decide to get involved.

What the meddling kids don’t know is that the current Thakur’s late brother discovered a treasure trove of valuable statues along with the temple. He usurped his brother (with extreme prejudice!) and kidnapped his manager (and Sophia’s long lost father), Thomas (Balraj Sahni) in order to get his hands on the statues. Thomas refuses to tell him anything, so the Thakur employs a man dressed in an unconvincing ghost costume to scare away the villagers. Naturally, wacky hijinks ensue.

The “ghost” also kills four people; it’s as if Old Man Jenkins finally snapped. The deaths don’t advance the plot, and don’t even advance the Thakur’s evil schemes; it’s a sudden dose of reality in a movie which really doesn’t need it, and the effect is jarring. On the other hand, the characters do acknowledge that people have died before walking into the sunset hand in hand, which is refreshing.

Jangal Mein Mangal attempts to blend two very different stories, and is nearly completely successful. It would have gotten away with it if not for that meddling ghost!