Bollywood

[Small Man Big Horse]

Kapoor & Sons (2016) - Horny grandfather Dadu is soon to turn ninety but is rushed to hospital after a heart attack, and so his grandsons fly in from across the world. This is the kind of dysfunctional family that I've not seen in the Bollywood films I've watched so far, with infidelity, grief and homosexuality major themes, and though it risks occasionally being slightly melodramatic it's very affecting, the rom-com element is handled really well, and it was a movie I found to be pretty damn lovable. 8.1/10

[Small Man Big Horse]

DHOOM, and the sequels

One of the best flicks of all time imo. A ludicrous big budget action comedy series that comes across like a parody of the genre. Whenever I've mentioned this film to South Asians they have rolled their eyes and laughed.

I watched the first one tonight and really enjoyed it, and look forward to catching the other two soon. Here's the mini-review I wrote for my files:

Dhoom (2004) - Very silly action comedy with a lot of motorbike chases, not particularly complicated heists and plenty of ridiculously over the top stunts, along with a few fun songs and a smattering of romance, though only a tiny bit really. And it's great, perhaps slightly overlong, but otherwise consistently fun and the action sequences are laugh out loud funny due to their audacity,

Spoiler alert

the speedboat bit at the end especially

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. 7.5/10

Think I'm gonna try to watch the Baahubali franchise. The sequel is the second-highest grossing Indian movie of all time, and it's an epic action movie.

Watched Dhoom 2 with the fiancee a few days ago and we've both been endlessly singing the soundtrack since.

Well, when I say soon I clearly mean "in about eleven months or so". Anyhow, this was my short review:

Dhoom 2 (2007) - I feel a little frustrated by this as when it's great it's fucking amazing (that opening with the train and a very famous figure, the various songs, the various chase sequences, and the finale) but it spends a little too much time on the romantic side of things, and needed one more big set piece to be something I truly loved. Still, it's a very likeable film, and the ridiculousness of it all appealed greatly. 7.5/10

I'll definitely watch the third in the series, and far sooner than I did the second, if only because I know Aamir Khan's in it and I have something of a man crush on him.

[Small Man Big Horse]

Luck By Chance (2009) - Satire of the film industry and the crazy amount of nepotism that goes on, I think this is the most cynical Bollywood film I've seen so far, and it has a fair share to say about jealousy, fragile egos and manipulation. But there's not much here that hasn't been said before and it only briefly references things like the casting couch and what actresses have to do to make it big, and its digs at print media are pretty mild. The romantic subplot takes a more interesting and unpredictable direction, and the cast are all great, but this is a tad average and the satire isn't as sharp as it could have been. 6.4/10

[Herbert Ashe]

Just had 2 inexplicably mislabelled files (didn't even know this was still a thing) and 2 films of opposite quality.

First I was hoping to watch Magadheera (Rajamouli, 2009) but got Rachcha (Sampath Nandi, 2012) which is one of the worst, most inane Indian films I've ever seen, and I ended up skipping through big chunks of it. Seemingly endless zooms (and I'm a massive fan of both Hong Sang-soo and 70s Hong Kong Kung Fu, I have extremely high zoom tolerance) and those irritating sound effects to underscore the jokes.

Then rather than Coolie (1983) it was Chupke Chupke (Hrishikesh Mukherjee, 1975). Big 30s Screwball comedy vibes; 2 leads very charming and photogenic, obviously; plenty of untranslated wordplay but not to distraction. Light - no peril, significant drama - in the absolute best way. Really enjoyed how...

Spoiler alert

...apparently sets up the premise but then resolves it nearly instantly, only to then replay it, at length, with the now-married couple in on the joke, doing some PG-rated roleplay.

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Highly recommended.

[Sebastian Cobb]

I'm not sure of the strict definition of whether an Indian film is or isn't Bollywood. But I recently watched Mrinal Sen's In Search of Famine and that was pretty good https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080341/

Spoiler alert

Although the version I watched had subs that faded into the film in bright scenes and combined with not entirely clear distinction between which bits where 'the film' and which bits were 'the film within the film' left me a little confused.

Also the ending felt a little tacked-on, as if they felt the need to add closure after test screenings or something and settled with "you know that woman whose life seemed pretty bad? Well it got worse".

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[Small Man Big Horse]

Bhool Bhulaiyaa (2007) - Hindi psychological thriller with a fair amount of comedy, as husband Siddharth and wife Avni come to live in a local palace but are told to keep out of the third floor as it's haunted. Naturally the first thing the couple do is mock that idea, but then a number of strange and mysterious incidents occur which become increasingly violent, so Siddharth calls his psychiatrist friend who visits and makes fun of a man's penis, and he sort of becomes the main character. Tonally this is all over the place, one moment there's foreboding music and panicked rushing about, the next something's played for a laugh and there's some upbeat singing and dancing about a wedding, even though poor old Radha has been locked in her room because the elders believe she's possessed by a ghost. Ultimately it turns out

Spoiler alert

that Avni is suffering from Dissociative Identity Disorder, and I think the best thing you could say is that the film means well, but the way they help her is incredibly questionable,

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and this is one of those films where I enjoyed it while I was watching it but I don't think I'd recommend it to anyone. 6.7/10

[Herbert Ashe]

Coolie (1983) (which i was trying to watch in my last post)

Good, fun, preposterous. Amitabh Bachchan has a pet hawk to help him out, lots of long-lost Xs, Ys and Z. Old-fashioned with it's decidely leftist and pro-multi-faith co-existence and harmony. Fun omelette cooking scene.

famous for this moment, an innovation I'm slightly amazed 80s Hong Kong never seems to have tried (screenshot, spoilery for non-plot reasons):

Spoiler alert

On 26 July 1982, while filming a fight scene with co-actor Puneet Issar for Coolie, Bachchan had near-fatal intestinal injury. Bachchan was performing his own stunts in the film and one scene required him to fall onto a table and then on the ground. However, as he jumped towards the table, the corner of the table struck his abdomen, resulting in a splenic rupture from which he lost a significant amount of blood. He required an emergency splenectomy and remained critically ill in hospital for many months, at times close to death.

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[Small Man Big Horse]

I'll definitely watch the third in the series, and far sooner than I did the second, if only because I know Aamir Khan's in it and I have something of a man crush on him.

Well, when I say soon I clearly mean "in about eight months or so". Anyhow, this was my short review:

Dhoom 3 (2013) - Jai and Ali are back for a third instalment and this time they're off to America as a person of colour is robbing banks but bizarrely the police don't fire a single bullet at him. Aamir Khan plays the bad guy and I'm pretty sure he gets more screen time than the lead duo, but that's not an issue as I love him and want to marry him a lot. As well as Khan's performance I loved so much of this film, the beautifully choreographed song and dance at the circus about 80 minutes in is worth the entrance fee alone, but there is a slight problem

Spoiler alert

in that Ali twice describes as a character with certain mental issues (which the film leaves undefined, but who I'm presuming is meant to be on the autism spectrum?) as a retard, and the way Jai manipulates that character makes him a bit of a shit,

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oh, and at 172 minutes it's of course too long. But despite such issues this was such good fun to watch, it's a daft, ridiculous action film which an insane amount of slow motion shots, but that just made it funnier to me, and it's gorgeously filmed too, so I can't help but rate it 8.0/10

[Small Man Big Horse]

Bach Ze Kara (2008) - This is the Bollywood rip off of The Evil Dead, though there's no mention of Sam Raimi in the opening credits and it quickly becomes clear why that is as the film steals a few ideas but most of the time it's just weirdly boring. It begins with an archaeologist finding the (tiny) book of the dead, reading from it, and his wife becomes one of the undead, but then it cuts to a group of friends having a dance and singing a song in a nightclub, and then there's another bizarre bit of editing and they're all hanging out by a lake.

After that all that happens for far too long is lots of shots of them making out with each other, in what feels like soft porn except everyone keeps their clothes on. Every so often you get an imitation of Raimi's famous shaky cam, complete with demonic noises, except that it's so slow it's impossible to take seriously, and I'm really not sure if the cameraman was able to do anything other than walk incredibly slowly for one minute and then stop to get his breath back.

About forty minutes in the teens find the archaeologist's house in the woods, lark about, find a dead body, start digging a grave for it, before making out with each other again, and completely forget that they just found a murdered woman. Eventually Sweety, the only female who doesn't have a boyfriend, heads out in to the woods and sees the dead wife, who's now singing about being a living corpse. though most of the song is the words "Come, see me" repeated over and over again.

The whole thing feels like someone saw The Evil Dead when drunk thirty years ago and so they vaguely remember a tiny bit of the plot, but very, very little else. The infamous tree rape sort of makes an appearance here but instead of sexually assaulting Sweety it looks like it's tickling her, though she screams a lot in an attempt to make us think this is scary. With about twenty minutes to go some of the characters become deadites, but most of the time it's just shots of the cast wearing white contact lenses and laughing, and when there is any violence it's almost always off screen. And because this is such a bizarre oddity, whenever anyone is hit they use the same two sound effects each time, both of which are like a punching sound from a cheap arcade game.

One of the worst films I've ever seen, this seems like it's directed by someone who had never seen a full length film before, there's so many reaction shots that it slowly becomes weirdly hilarious, and it's very, very clear that no one involved in the making of the film knows what the word "continuity" means. I wouldn't even recommend this in a "So bad it's fun" kind of way either, as most of the time it's so bad it's exhausting. 0.8/10



The Book Of The Dead, yesterday 15 years ago.

[JaDanketies]

Well, when I say soon I clearly mean "in about eight months or so". Anyhow, this was my short review:

Dhoom 3 (2013)

Did you notice how much Aamir Khan acts like Mr Bean? I Googled his name and apparently he's even more Beanesque in a Forest Gump remake. He was very Bean.

Dhoom 2 is the best. I liked Dhoom 3 but the Dhoom franchise seemed tacked on. Also Christopher Nolan did a very similar storyline 7 years earlier (no spoilers)

Next one I want to watch is Pathaan which I believe is the Dhoom directors but it's not family friendly fare so I can't watch it with my kid. Dhoom 2 he's fucking obsessed by, he could watch it all day, especially the music parts

[George White]

Tere Bin Laden (2010) - Shortly after 9/11 after trying to help an air hostess by returning a knife she dropped our journalist hero Ali Hassan (Ali Zafar) is accused of being a terrorist and is banned from American for life, the racist bastards that they are, destroying his lifelong dream of working there. Seven years later and he's now working for the largely unheard of StingTv and covering tedious madness like a Rooster crowing competition when he spots someone who sure does look a lot like Osama Bin Laden (Pradhuman Singh) and after recruiting a make up artist, a voice over artist and a couple of others they manufacture a video that everyone believes is real which they sell for a sod load of money, but which backfires when America uses it as an excuse to start a war and tries to track them down. Given the subject matter it's surprisingly a quite lightweight romp, fun for sure but the satire isn't subtle, and it feels a bit slight, I'd recommend it  but it's lacking the big colourful musical moments I love Bollywood for. 7.4/10

Reminded of the truly insane Indian_British 7/7sploitation film Shoot on Sight (2007).

Like with Conspiracy of Silence (2003), this is a deliberately controversial film that despite a known cast, got barely any release.
Now, there is a reason for that. This is an Anglo-Indian co-production, directed by Indian-American softcore porn auteur Jag Mundhra, and starring a respectable cast of Indian and British names. But despite the cast, it's typical Mundhra schlock. It got  a UK theatrical release, and advertising but no press reviews, being released on the British Asian minority circuit.
But it's astonishing.
It's a cash-in on the post-7/7 killing of Jean Charles de Menezes, by British police in the mistaken belief the Brazilian was an Islamic terrorist. Here, it's a British-Pakistani who gets killed, by Ralph Ineson's 'realist not racist' copper, on the orders of Stephen Greif's corrupt officer.  Yes, Travis from Blake's 7 is playing Cressida Dick.
Greif's boss, Brian Cox (who now, with Succession, surely never has to do anything like this ever again, more's the pity) is horrified by the killing, and sends in another senior policeman to investigate.
 The whole twist is that that the investigator is a fictitious British-Pakistani copper, Naseeruddin Shah's long serving Muslim veteran of the "Central London Police", Tariq Ali (!), married to Greta Scacchi with his son and suspiciously pale daughter.  The son is obsessed with 'Carlos Viera' of Charlton Athletic, a stand-in for then-popular Patrick Vieira. Shah's nephew comes to England, and then we learn he's secretly being radicalised by Shah's estranged childhood friend-turned-evil Imam/would be criminal mastermind Om Puri , who masterminds a plot to blow up Viera's book signing (outside a shuttered Waterstone's! - clearly shot on a Sunday).

It's gobsmacking. Sadie Frost appears as a deputy.   The film has a fictitious portrayal of Channel 5 news, as if thinking the latter is a respectacle news organ. Ineson dresses like Harry Hill in the interrogation room.  There's a ludicrous 'Islamic chemical weapon-making scene' in what appears to be a high school lab.  Shah gives the best performance. Bits feel slightly Edgar Wallace, with bodies being fished out of the Thames and what not - Puri almost coming across as a 21st century Fu Manchu, Southall being the modern Limehouse. Puri is hamming it up. And Julian  Glover is wasted as Shah's father in law.