The Gorilla’s Lament

Bollywood sequels are fairly rare, and when you do see one it’s usually a situation like Krrish; the characters from the previous movie are killed off offscreen, so that their identical children can have new adventures with new love interests. Dhoom: 2 is unusual, because it features the same characters doing the same sorts of things, only on a bigger scale.

Ali (Uday Chopra) is now a police officer, but he’s still the same goofy sidekick as ever, more concerned with finding food and a wife than with any sort of police work. Ali’s partner Jai (Abhishek Bachchan) and his wife Sweety (Rimi Sen) are expecting their first child, which gives Sweety the opportunity to be even more of a cliched nagging wife. Ali and Sweety tease Jai about not being able to attract a woman even if he wanted to cheat (he doesn’t) and that’s when Jai’s curvy college friend and now fellow police officer Sonali (Bipashu Basu) arrives to brief him on his new assignment.

This time around, they’ve been assigned to catch the mysterious Mister A (Hrithik Roshan), an international cat burglar and master of disguise armed with an array of high tech gadgets that would make James Bond weep with envy. Jai suddenly realizes that there’s a pattern to Mister A’s crimes, and that the next robbery will be in Mumbai. (And if they didn’t already know that, why were they briefing the Mumbai police?) Jai, Ali, and Sonali set out to foil the robery and capture Mister A, and, of course, they fail dismally.

On his way out of town, Mister A catches a bit of a newscast which claims that Mister A has announced another theft. He’s intrigued, and decides to catch the impostor in the act, even as the police scramble to catch him again. The impostor turns out to be Sunehri (Aishwarya Rai), an aspiring thief who wants to learn from the best. A is reluctant, but after a dance number, he agrees to take her on as an apprentice, and they head for Rio. Jai and Ali follow; Sonali was incapacitated by a sprained wrist during the second heist, so she remains in Mumbai, but while in Rio Jai and Ali will be staying with her identical twin sister Monali (also Bipashu Basu).

The character dynamics in Dhoom: 2 are largely the same as in Dhoom. Ali is still a goofy sidekick who contributes nothing of substance to the actual investigation, and Jai is still a stylish thug who isn’t above blackmailing random criminals into undertaking dangerous missions. The film is also nearly as testosterone centric as its predecessor, with Sweety losing the “sexy wife” aspect of her character and becoming entirely comic relief; her relationship with Jai is once more eclipsed by his relationship with Ali, and the boys even have a “relationship talk” to work out their issues. While Sonali is a tough, independent lady cop, by the interval she’s been replaced by her air-headed, beach dwelling party girl twin. The sole exception is Sunehri, who has an actual character arc, making her the most fully realized character in the Dhoom franchise.

In the end, Dhoom: 2 is basically the same movie as Dhoom, only more so. The action scenes are bigger and more improbable. The heroes travel to Rio rather than Goa. The “villain” is a suave international super thief rather than a disgruntled pizza delivery boy. The difference is that the sequel seems to be more comfortable with its dumbness; nobody bothers to pretend that the leads are particularly smart or the plot is particularly clever. It’s just empty-headed fun.

I have to respect a movie that knows what it wants to do, and then does it. Dhoom (2004), for instance, sets out to be a big dumb action movie, and it succeeds admirably on all counts. It’s big, it’s an action movie, and it’s dumb.

A new gang of motorcycle riding super-thieves are operating in Mumbai, and so far the police are powerless to stop them. ACP Jai Dixit (Abhishek Bachchan), the rising star of the police department, believes that to catch these thieves, they’ll need someone who thinks like a thief, and he knows just where to turn. His wife Sweety (Rimi Sen), a veterinarian with a fondness for strays, has befriended hapless, slightly shady, but charming mechanic and motorcycle racer Ali (Uday Chopra), and Jai blackmails Ali into working for the police.

Ali provides a completely different perspective on the case, and thanks to his street smarts and contacts in the motorcycle racing world, Jai and the police are able to get close tot he thieves and . . . No, wait. That would make sense. Jai brings Ali into the investigation, and then spends the rest of the movie not listening to him. Ali is there for comic relief, and to give Jai a buddy to bond with, and any actual police work on his part is apparently purely coincidental.

The gang of thieves are, in fact, a group of pizza deliverymen led by Kabir (John Abraham). Kabir runs a tight ship, and he’s so insistent on keeping a low profile that when one of the gang buys a fancy sports car, he drives it off a cliff, just to make a point.

Despite this, Kabir calls Jai and offers him the time and location of the next heist, daring the police to stop it. Jai and his men try, but fail, in part because Ali chooses to save the woman singing on the burning stage (Esha Deol) rather than try and catch the fleeing motorcyclists. After a very public fight, Jai resigns in disgrace, while Ali returns to the motorcycle racing circuit . . . where he’s recruited by Kabir to be the new member of the gang.

Dhoom is set in a hypermasculine world. Sweety is probably the most important woman around, but after her initial scantily clad dance number, she fades into the background, appearing every now and then to cook food, fawn over small dogs and nag her husband. Instead, the movie remains focused on the relationships between men, as they zoom around on motorcycles and shoot guns at one another. It’s male bonding writ large, as Jai and Ali learn to work as a unit, while Kabir tries to woo them both.

And then there’s the plot. Long time readers of the Gorilla’s Lament will know that I’m very forgiving of big dumb action movies, as long as the action is good. I would be happy to extend the same forgiveness to Dhoom, if Jai and Kabir didn’t spend so much time congratulating one another on being brilliant. They’re not brilliant. They’re idiots, who only manage to succeed through coincidence and poor planning on the part of the equally stupid people around them. I don’t demand brilliant plotting from my cheesy cops and robbers movies, but don’t tell me your plotting is brilliant when it really, really isn’t.

That said, the action scenes were indeed plentiful, improbable, and a great deal of fun. I enjoyed Dhoom, I just don’t think I’ll respect it in the morning.

I can’t decide if this is brilliant or the worst idea ever. Either way, I’m going to have to see it.

I can say that the design for the Kajol character is impressive – recognizably Kajol, while still being a dog.

Because Bollywood actors are often working on several movies at one time, filming a week or two for one film before moving on to the next, it’s not unusual for a movie to take years to produce. That doesn’t always make for a bad movie, but even the best of these multi-year projects can end up feeling disjointed. Aladin (2009) is a case in point.

Aladin (Ritesh Deshmukh) is the orphaned son of globe trotting adventurers who spent their lives searching for Aladdin’s magical lamp, hoping to use its power to help the world. Aladin is now a young college student, mostly ignored by nearly everyone apart from the owner of a small cafe (Ratna Pathak), who acts as a surrogate big sister, and Kasim (Sahil Khan), his childhood bully, who even after all these years thinks it’s hilarious to gather his friends and force the hapless Aladin to rub random lamps.

When the lovely Jasmine (Jaqueline Fernandes) transfers to his college, Aladin is immediately smitten. Unfortunately, so is Kasim. A psychological bully of tremendous skill and experience, Kasim throws a birthday party for the hapless Aladin as a means of making himself look good to Jasmine, and even manipulates her into presenting Aladin with an old lamp as a birthday present, and asking him to rub it. Aladin does, and then heads for home.

On his way home, however, Aladin is stopped by Genius (Amitabh Bachchan), the one and only Genie of the Lamp. Genius is one month from retirement (no, really!) and he just wants Aladin to make his three wishes so that he can be free. Aladin, after a lifetime of lamps being shoved in his face, isn’t interested. After some cajoling by Genius and a few moral qualms of his own, Aladin finally wishes for Jasmine. It doesn’t go well. His second wish is used to undo the first, leaving him with a girl to woo, a bully to defeat, and one wish to do it with.

Kasim isn’t Aladin’s biggest problem, however. That would be former genie Ringmaster (Sanjay Dutt) and his gang of evil circus folk, including a bald knife thrower, a Klingon strongman (strongKlingon?), a masked firebreather, and a clown who is incredibly creepy even by clown standards. Ringmaster plans to use the power of an approaching comet to become a genie again, kill everyone, and rule the world. (In that order. Ringmaster is crazy.) Despite not being a genie anymore, Ringmaster still has impressive supernatural powers, and holds a fragment of the lamp, so Genius can’t touch him. Fortunately, there is a prophesied chosen hero who can defeat him. Unfortunately, that prophesied champion is the decidedly hapless Aladin.

Aladin’s two plotlines never really intersect; while Ringmaster is doing vaguely menacing things in the background throughout the movie, Aladin never even hears about him until after the Jasmine situation has been resolved. The character development is oddly paced, as well. Despite expectations, Genius never really urges Aladin to confront his fears or anything of the sort, flatly declaring that Kasim is not his problem, and the Kasim situation never reaches the expected climax. On the other hand, it’s actually kind of refreshing to see a movie where the bullied protagonist doesn’t ever hit the bully; Aladin doesn’t ever hit anyone, in fact, leaving the physical heroics to Genius and Jasmine. (Jasmine studies karate, and actually gets to use it!)

Storyline and character development is rather beside the point, anyway. Just as one of the major attractions of The Forbidden Kingdom was watching Jackie Chan and Jet Li fight, the real charm of Aladin is watching Amitabh Bachchan and Sanjay Dutt try to out-charisma one another. (I’m going to call it a tie.) Despite all the newfangled special effects, this is a movie which wisely relies on good old fashioned scenery chewing.

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.