[Also appeared in the DNA Sunday Mag]

If there is one thing I have learnt in eight years of posts and 57,405 comments at my blog “Random Thoughts of a Demented Mind” (http://greatbong.net) is that, nothing, and I mean nothing, gets the Indian audience more emotionally riled up than movie reviews.

Some samples:

I used to respect you as a human being. I am sorry but someone who does not understand the greatness of “Rockstar” deserves neither my respect nor my attention.?

“What? You liked “Ra One” And after this you would like us to believe your opinion counts for anything?”

“You didn’t think “Gulaal” was awesome. Yeah you are only good for reviewing Mithun-da movies. Don’t dabble in things above your intellect level.”

“More people watch Salman’s movies in a minute than those will read your book in a life-time. (I also write books). So yeah, suck it loser”

“No wonder you hate all movies by Shahrukh Khan. He ejected the Bengali God out of his team. Ha Ha.”

“You must be an Akshay Kumar fan”

“Trying to be contrarian just to be cool, eh?”

“He liked “Housefull 2″ and not “Delhi Belly”. Says a lot about his understanding of great cinema.”

“When I came to read your review, I thought you would flog this movie. I can see you didn’t like it but you should have hated it more. I think you have lost your edge.”

You see, when I write about politics, the attacks, once you think about it, are quite simple. You are either a sickular (technical term for Congress supporter) or you are an Internet Hindu (Sagarika Ghose-given sobriquet for a Saffronite).

Simple black and white.

I can deal with that.

However when you review movies, the number of labels that may be attached to you are mind-bogglingly diverse—-Salman fan-boy, Shahrukh hater, Aamir lover, Hritthik camp slave, faux-intellectual, overtly-highbrow and so it goes. The only saving grace in my case is that because I am not a professional movie reviewer (which means I don?t get invited to pre-showings or special events) I have not been accused of writing paid reviews.

Not yet any ways.

In a way, I understand why people get so frothed up over movies reviews. You buy a ticket, go into the darkened theater and feel a personal connection with what is on screen. It moves you, it makes you laugh, it makes you feel pleased with yourself. You come home, go online or pick up a newspaper and there is this weirdo brutalizing that which so touched you deeply. How dare he? Who the hell is this person questioning, in effect, my taste and my intellect? Surely, he must be an idiot (if he isn’t then I am). No he is biased. That sounds right. He has been bought by “them”. Or he must be a fan of some other star. Maybe, I was correct the first time. He is an imbecile. Otherwise how can this man like “Gunda” and not “No Smoking”?

Here is the thing many forget. Movies are evaluated as per the parameters of their genre. For example, the fact that I consider both “Deewana Mastana” and “Dekalog” as masterpieces should not be taken as proof positive of intellectual schizophrenia or of sinister design. It is just that my definition and parameters of “enjoyment” and “brilliance” are context and content-specific.

In the final analysis though, a review will always be one person’s opinion. Just like any other viewer, a reviewer brings his own biases, preferences, personal history and beliefs to the theater. And just as a film is the projection of light and shadow on a screen, a review is a projection of that film on an individual’s mind. Thus it can never be impartial. Nor can it be expected to be.

And that’s just the way it is.

[This post contains SPOILERS. DO NOT READ if you have not seen The Dark Knight Rises. For those of you interested in my opinion of TDKR: It is a solid summer entertainer that is well-worth the entrance. However it, in ITSELF, is not a classic for the ages, in the way that The Dark Knight was.]

Of all the popular superheroes, Batman, for me, has always been the most colorless. Look at his threads, for a start. A grey-black body-suit that lacks sorely the primary colors of a Super or a Spiderman. And what about his powers? Can’t stop a speeding train with his chest. Can’t see through clothes. Can’t spin webs. Can’t feel a tingle when there is danger close-by. Sure the man has some cool gadgets and a nice car but a superhero, aah, a superhero is defined by something almost transcendentally spectacular, something that elevates him above the realms of mortal-dom. That’s why Batman always seemed to need a strong supporting cast—the riotously plumed Robin to provide some physical color and a plethora of enormously colorful villains, enough to fill up one whole Lovecraft-inspired Arakham Asylum, to provide a degree of reflected bad-assery: if some one has so many super arch-enemies, it stands to logic that he must be quite the cat’s whiskers.

It was this essential problem with the character of Batman which I felt lay at the core of why the original pre-Nolan Batman films were such a disappointment—the makers just could not make him stand. They tried. They had Robin. They roped in Alicia Silverstone at the height of her bouncy appeal. They snagged Clooney. They brought in almost all of Batman’s major nemeses and had A-listers play them. Hell, they even made Clooney’s Batman have extra-erect nipples for those who buy tickets just for these things. Yet the franchise kept sinking lower with every successive installment, with the final entry beating even Adam West’s “Same bat time, same bat channel” television-rendition of “Holy Moly Batman” in its sheer campy hilarious deliciousness.

It required the genius of Christopher Nolan to rescue Batman from this deadpool of cinematically-crippled superheroes.

The way he accomplished this was, at the heart of it, quite simple.

He defined Batman’s superpower, unique in that it did not come from genetic mutation, alien parents, a military experiment or a lab spider.

It came from his humanity.

Or more precisely from two of humanity’s most noble defining characteristics.

One is, of course, man’s continuous striving to “rise” towards something greater. “Batman Begins” chronicles the beginning of that journey of ceaseless self-improvement first through the most extreme of physical conditioning and then through the conquering of fear itself. The Dark Knight Rises takes it to a glorious conclusion in its greatest sequence,(the only one that I felt truly transcended the narrative), when Bruce Wayne, with his back literally and figuratively broken, ascends the Lazarus Pit of darkness, death and despair towards “light” and “freedom”, ironically by embracing fear again. But fear of a different sort—one that stems not from the instinct of self-preservation (what will happen to me if I fall) but from empathy (what will happen to others if I cannot make it).

Which brings us to the second super-human (with emphasis on human) characteristic of Batman.

His empathy.

It is this empathy, the ability to “put a coat over a scared child” as Batman so beautifully puts its, that in Nolan’s world defines a superhero.It is that empathy that makes him embrace calumny at the end of “The Dark Knight”. It is this empathy that separates Batman from his nemeses—while both he and Bane may feel “love” towards a special someone, only Batman can feel for the whole of humanity. Which is why Batman wins while Bane, despite his overwhelming physical advantage over Batman, does not. And finally it is this empathy that is shown to define John Blake, whose entry into the Bat-cave at the end symbolizes the beginning of a new superhero.

It should be against the cosmic scheme of things to write so many words about Nolan’s Batman saga and not mention the word “Joker” once. Joker, the anti-Batman, one without an iota of empathy for any human being, a Nietzschean superhuman archetype, an embodiment of the absolute evil that may not be fathomed or reasoned with, the most terrifying visage of amorality possibly captured on screen (Hannibal Lecter looks possibly Spongebob in front of him), brought to life as much as by Heath Ledger’s bravura acting as well as, regrettably, by his death. It’s the kind of character that inspires serial killers and demented nut-cases. It’s the kind of character that makes a movie a genre-bending pop-culture phenomenon.

It’s also the kind of character that also kills a franchise, since it becomes almost impossible for any subsequent installment to raise the dramatic ante even further.

Nolan tries to side-step the shadow of Health Ledger’s Joker through deliberate creative choices. Since a large part of Joker’s nightmarish-ness stemmed from the knife-slashed smile extensions on the side of his lips, the festering wounds painted over on the mouth, Nolan chooses as Batman’s adversary someone whose facial expressions remain masked throughout. He makes that someone’s dialog-delivery flat and cold, as diametrically opposite to Joker’s maniacally joyous style as possible. The expectation was that the two would be epic in their own way and not be judged against the other.

The gamble does not work.For one, the metallic echo the Vader-lite mask puts to Bane’s words do not make him any the more menacing; just difficult to decipher. Even the lines that the ear does catch never quite chills the heart as “Why so serious?” did. Shorn of the underlying drama that defines the immortal characters of cinema, Bane is quite humdrum, more the Undertaker in Khiladiyon ki Khiladi meets Rahul of Dil To Pagal Hai than anything else. Forget comparisons with the Joker, Bane has trouble standing on his own. And remember it’s not his back that’s broken.

The Dark Knight had an intriguing meta-narrative—that when fighting total evil, one has to be prepared to do that thing the evil does not expect you to do. That is, the righteous have to be more evil than evil itself, a lesson that Alfred teaches Bruce Wayne through the “burning down the forest” parable.Leaving aside the “right” or wrong” of the so-called neo-con world view, the statement was bold, and most importantly artistically well-executed.

The Dark Knight Rising too has its own meta-narrative. That being that a “storm is coming” when the dispossessed (the canonical 99%) shall overthrow the 1% that leave so little ” for us”. Of course in Nolan’s neo-conservative world-view, the revolution of the dispossessed will be a holocaust of epic proportions, resisted only by heroic symbols of authority, as we understand it—the police and altruistic multi-billionaires. Provocative.

But here is the problem. Or rather two of them.

The symbolism of the meta-narrative is so heavy-handed that you wish Nolan would play it more subtle. Yes. I got it. This is the French revolution. The gutters. The storming of the Bastille. The ground “collapsing” under the feet of civilization. And then of course the cartoonish mock guillotine court with Scarecrow as the judge, more reminiscent of a street-play than a superhero saga.

The second problem is more severe and it stems from Nolan not being consistent in the message. A French/Russian’Khmer revolution would never have as its ultimate goal, a nihilistic “Blow everything up” philosophy of the al Ghul school. I would have been happier (and allow me a bit of liberty here) if Nolan had showed that even a revolution that starts from the noblest of intentions degenerates into a bloodbath because of the very nature of retributive violence. I would have been even happier if Batman had shown some novel emotional conflict (great narratives are all about multi-layered conflicts), perhaps a realization that the existing order for which he has fought for so long may not be worth maintaining as it exists, that the super-villain is, in essence, the dysfunctional system itself.

And that he, as Gotham’s savior, need not to destroy this enemy but do something even more difficult.

Redeem him.

Not run away with his lady love. Not die. But stay. And fight in a way he has never fought before.

That to me would have been a far more satisfactory resolution to the saga than the climax from Agent Vinod.

Maybe Nolan had just too many balls to juggle with in “The Dark Knight Rises”. There were the spectacular action set-pieces to coordinate and plan. There was Catwoman’s shapely derriere to capture. There was over-emotional Alfred’s teary-eyed Alok Nath act. There was cheerless Fox. There was the building up of Joseph Gordon Levitt’s character (Justice League?). There was Bane. There was Marion Cottilard. There was the famous Nolan twist, which unfortunately, seemed less Nolan and more Anees Bazmi. There was the “fantasy” last shot (or was it?) which worked so poignantly in “Inception” (The spinning totem— does it fall or not? Do we care if we are in a dream or in reality, as long as we are with the ones we love?) but here seems formulaic and maudlin.

If only Nolan had focussed his creative energies more on the dramatic conflicts of the Dark Knight Rises rather than all these other things. If only.

It might appear, and justifiably so, that I hated The Dark Knight Rises. I did not. It had many amazing moments and is many cuts above the average big-budget summer smash-em-up. My disappointment stems from what I believe could have been done at the very end, given the genius of Nolan and given the build-up.

It would be mean-spirited though to end on a sour note. Because Nolan’s Batman’s saga does not deserve it. Yes there may have been mis-steps. Yes there have been opportunities missed. Yes the ending could have been better.

But even then it cannot but be accepted that the trilogy, in totality, is a spectacular cinematic achievement, a nearly perfect melding of commercial with the artistic, definitely the most finely nuanced and original fantasy superhero series ever,setting the bar high, very high, for those that will follow it.

Watching Sunny Leone’s career is like rewinding a porn VHS—it starts out with full nudity and progresses to demurely clothed. She needs no introduction, of course, merely a Google search. Suffice to say, Leone grew up like many others, playing with toys along with other female friends,before moving on to other greater things, like Picasso in his “blue” period, blowing hot and cold and taking as many positions as Mitt Romney. Shooting into prominence for her appearance in a show that may be referred to, without loss of generality, as Big Bs, she caught the talent-spotting eyes of Mahesh Bhatt who then cast her in his daughter’s film “Jizz Em 2″ or, as it is called in India, Jism 2. Purely for her acting abilities. And of course because of her attention to detail, for which it seems she wanted to see health certificates (for HIV apparently) of her male co-stars [Link], perhaps because she did not quite understand what “getting into a character” meant.

The film however is Pooja Bhatt’s and she displays a penchant for giving the audience what they are not expecting. Like gratuitous shots of Randeep Hooda’s nipple, which I am pretty sure was not the nipple people paid money to see. In the hands of a lesser auteur, Jism 2 would have been a sultry sensuality-fest, which was kind of what it was advertised to be. That was however the set-up, the sleight of hand of a master magician. Jism 2 is about as arousing as wading through a three-hundred page government document for improving the production of Bajra.

Truth be told, it’s not even about marquee star Sunny Leone, whose heavy-breathing expressions do add another dimension to her multi-D talents.

No. The soul of Jism 2 is Arif Zakaria. I first became his fan in “Asambhav” when despite being a part of a stellar buffet of sumptousity, that consisted of lock-jawed Arjun Rampal, rapacious Milind Gunaji, boisterous Mukesh Rishi, and, most importantly, Anupama Verma’s legs, he stole the show with his lusty “Alissshaaaaaaaaaaa”. This was then followed by genre-busting role as the absolutely degenerate Iyer (known for drawing asleel tasweerein) in Haunted 3D, which is described, at the time of writing, thusly in Wikipedia:

In 2011, he played the ghost that haunts the female protagonist in “Vikram Bhatt”‘s “Haunted (2011 film)” & was appreciated for the ghastly portrayal of a piano teacher falling in love with his young student who gets murdered while making advances towards her and rapes her as a ghost which forces her to commit suicide in the movie.

In short, an extremely nuanced and complex role.

In Jism 2, he plays the “head” of the Agency, a shady counter-terrorism organization, based in Sri Lanka (As an aside: yes even our movies are now like our cricket…it’s all about Sri Lanka). Every second of screen-time Mr. Zakaria gets, he chews the scenery. No no change that. Chewing the scenery would be too quotidian. Mr. Zakaria bites it off like a shark does a swimmer’s leg, masticates it with absolute single-mindedness and then spits it out at the camera. He is perennially in the grip of a silent burning passion, nowhere as clearly articulated as when he tells Isna (Sunny Leone) that when it comes to seducing the mark, “Tumhe sab kuch karna hain…sab kuch”. I don’t know about anyone else, but when he said that, at least I felt “kuch kuch.”

The story is as original as any extreme adult film, you know, like where the pizza-man comes to deliver pizza and intensely interacts with the lady of the house (except of course Jism 2 does not have interactions). Irna (Sunny Leone) is a cleavage-baring lady in red who while walking around, casually striking chaste lesbian poses is picked up by a horse-man Ayaan (Arunadaya Singh). After a night of whole-some lovemaking (not shown), the horse-man reveals that “main intelligence ki aadmi hoon” with presumably the reason he got down to his chaddis so quickly was so that he could give her a mission “briefing”.

Impressed by his largeness, she says “Aap to kafi baade aadmi nikle”.

But unfortunately she has to say “No thank you” to his offer for sloppy seconds. The horse-man Ayaan makes an appeal to her patriotism. She replies “‘Mulk ke madaat main to paheli se hi kar rahe hoon, apni kapde utaarke”.

And as Poonam Pandey has taught us, no one loves their country more than one who strips for it.

The horse-man Ayaan, in return, gets passionate and shouts ” Kab tak utarogi yeh kapde” to which Irna states her price—10 crores and first-class travel.

She is then whisked off to Sri Lanka to meet the Head, Arif Zakaria, who, between intense rolling of eyes and shaking of a mane of perfectly boot-polished hair, lays out the plan—Irna has to go under cover, and then take off all her covers to seduce the dangerous terrorist Kabir (Randeep Hooda) and find out where he has hidden the “data”. Why Irna? Because she used to be Kabir’s girl-friend and so intense is his love that after their split, he has “had no girl-friends… no prostitutes even”. Which granted is a very intense sort of love. After some counter-suggestions from Irna given to the “Head” , most pointedly a suggestion for a gang-banging “Yeh kaam to aap sab milkar bhi kar sakte hain”, all of which are shot down, she is dispatched, posing as the horse-man’s fiance, to Galle in order to seduce and.. ahem…bring the serpent out of its hole (” Taaki woh saap ap ke bil se bahar a jaaye”).

There, she meets Kabir (Randeep Hooda) who looks like the serpent is caught permanently in a zipper, so perpetually tortured his expressions are. A dangerous game beings, a game of sensuality (“Naheen nikaal payogi tum, nahi main nikaal payoonga”), data-extraction (“Yeh data tum jaise rakshon ko kabhi naheen dungi”), pre-mature firing (“We have to do something naheen to mission suru karne ke liye pahele hi khatam ho jayega”), post-mature release (“Wait, I have not finished yet”), austere serenity (“Sab natak hain behenchod”), intense self-realization (“You fucked him”), horsing around (“Mera sabse behtereen siphahi ek langde ghore ke tarah kona pakadke khada hai”) and creepy mystery (What exactly does Irna when she asks Kabir to meet her in the “highway ka jungle”?)

Contributing no less to the experience are the marvelously-written lines like when Hooda’s character, after some excitement, says “Ja soja mera Laxman, tu hi mere hifazat ke liye barson se jagaa hai”.

And finally the ending, you never saw it coming, unless you have seen Gangster of course.

In short, a glorious celluloid achievement, the type that makes the audience scream for “release”, Sunny Leone stylie, “Mujhe mukti chahiye”.

As the door swings dramatically open, light streams into the darkened room. A man in an impeccably tailored black suit turns on his toes and points his gun towards the dissolving blackness.

“The name’s Bond, James Bond.”

“Oh for fuck’s sake”, says the voice from inside, “I knew it was you Mr. Bond the moment that Tadatada tune started playing. So enough with the nautanki.”

Jason Bourne never quite liked James Bond. Overtly theatrical and stylishly arrogant with a Cold War-vintage stench of Pussy Galore, Bond made him want to forget everything.

Once again.

Putting away his Walther PPK but keeping his swag on, James Bond asks “Why did you call me here, Jason. Or should I call you by your real name, David Webb?”

That British pedantry once again.

“There is this movie you need to see. Ek Tha Tiger. Or in English, Once upon a time there was a tiger.”

‘What? You sent me a distress signal on the ultra-secret spy covert channel just so that I catch a nature conservation film. By Jove. The crown jewels have been exposed in Las Vegas. The Queen has her knickers in a twist. And you call me here, for this?”

Bond feels like an idiot. Because he had fallen for the same trick last month.

“I have something you should see. It’s about your boss Q” had been the message he had received from Bourne, just when he was going to lick the caviar off the navel of his Pakistani target, whose code-name he knew only as Ten-percent.

Making a quick get-away, he had arrived at the drop-off spot to find Bourne with a video. And what had that turned out to be? A Hindi movie called “Dunno Y Na Jaane Kyon”.

No. Not Q. But Kyon. Two hours of men making tremulous love,a fat man referring to a bikini as “choli chaddi” and disturbing images of Aryan Vaid, a man on MI6′s most wanted list, sharing a bathtub with a gentleman.

Give me a man with three nipples, a man like Scaramanga any day, over this torture.

Bond is about to leave but there is something about Bourne, a kind of icy stillness, that compells him to stay.

“No Mr. Bond. This is not a movie about animal conservation. As a matter of fact, the hero here cares as much for wild animals as you care for Blofeld and SPECTRE.”

“And who is this hero we are talking about?”

“Bhai is the name by which his devotees call him. He hates black bucks more than Baba Ramdev. And when it comes to people on the pavements, he lives and let die.”

“And why, old chap, should I care about this Bhai, this Ek Tha Tiger?”

“Because old chap, this Bhai plays Tiger, a secret agent, of such great power that he can finish us off. For good. The crisis this time isn’t about stolen submarines. It is about our existence.” Bourne points away to the light. “If you still think that getting your imperial knob polished is more important, there is the door. Otherwise, we can get started.”

James Bond sinks into the leather couch and turns towards the monitor. The video seems to be paused.

“Well I can see you have already begun without me. What’s happened so far? And is that man on screen…’

“Yes. That’s Bhai. Salman. Tiger. RAW agent. More alpha than Uranium 92-238. What Ra.One needs a superhero suit for, he can do shirtless. Stop a speeding tram. Play around with high tension wires without any tension.”

James Bond is unimpressed. After all, he is the man who got Onatopp on the bottom. The world is not enough.

Bourne realizes that 007 is having trouble getting his mind around the awesomeness of Tiger. Not yet a Bhai-head, he smiles to himself. He will see the light. Soon.

“Okay let’s say the KGB have stolen plans for a secret missile to be used against the British. Time is of great importance. You have been asked to keep a nuclear scientist under surveillance, a nuclear scientist who is needed to arm the bomb. What would you do?”

“Sneak in. Plant bugs. Stakeout. Use night-vision… Why are you asking me these things Jason? You know as well as anyone what stand-ops are.”

“Guess what Tiger does ?Given a mission to keep an eye on a scientist, who looks suspiciously like that history-traveller from “Bharat Ek Khoj”, he climbs pipes, sleeps on the bench, goes out on dates, dances with backup dancers. In short everything except keeping the principal under watch. Why does he do this? So that he can fall in love with the scientist’s beautiful secretary.”

“Well Jason. I still don’t see what’s so strange about that. For decades, I have fired my heat-seeking missiles into the enemy’s soft spots, all in the service of Her Majesty the Queen. This is but yet another weapon. A pleasurable one, I do accept.”

“But you see James. That’s where things are different. Here, with the fate of the country on the line, Tiger does not go in for the quick insertion-extraction approach we learnt in spy school. No, he takes the girl to a park, watches swans and meteor showers and then asks her dead father, up there among the stars, for her hand.”

James Bond realizes Bourne has not seen the reboot of the franchise wherein he cries with the girl in the shower. Thank Goodness.

Bond gives the rakish grin. “Oh my Goodness that is just so pathetic.”

Bourne continues, “So obviously the girl Tiger falls for is an ISI agent.”

Bond knows where this is going “He shoots her. Don’t tell me he shoots her before they consummate their passion. That would be, to use a Shakespearean term, absolute KLPD. “

“No he does not shoot her. With his gun shaking, Tiger asks the pretty ISI agent—-Was that what I saw in your eyes love?”

With a shake of his head, Bond reaches for his martini “Maybe the same reason why the Indians keep Kasab alive for so long. For the love they see in his eyes.”

“You know what Tiger drinks?” asks Bourne.

“Considering what a philistine he appears to be, let me guess. Dom Perignon 53 at a temperature of above 38 Fahrenheit?”

“No. Milk…” sneers Jason Bourne, ” That too from a doodh-wala”.

James Bond seems shaken as well as stirred.

Bourne says “As part of our pysch-ops training in the Medusa project, I was made to sit through a lot of romantic Hindi movies. It was only a matter of time though before I cracked. There is just so much of Saeed Jaffrey’s hamming as the father of the heroine one could take. Any ways, most of the oldies had this formula. Boy and girl from rival clans fall in love. They sing and dance together at girl’s eighteenth birthday where she is betrothed to USA ka mashoor business man Mr. Sam ka eklauta beta. After that, the love-birds elope. In “Ek Tha Tiger”, the warrning clans become RAW and ISI. And the formula is brought back, yet again, down to the “dance at the party” and the “They won’t understand our love.” as both ISI and RAW are reduced to the same standards of villainy and manipulation.”

Bond asks “But what is Bhai’s problem? The Indian and the Pakistani could just have gotten married and settled down in Dubai. Like Shoaib Malik and Ms Thunderball…”

“Evidently not. Which is why they escape to Cuba and lie low by dancing about on the streets and fighting in front of security cameras.”

“You seem to have finished the entire movie already Mr. Bourne. Why call me then?”

“Oh this is my second-time. The reason I called you was that this is a direct challenge to you, my friend. Not that I am not afraid.”

“Me? The James Bond. Perceive a threat from this incompetent RAW spy, Tiger? And that muscled beefcake who plays him? The Bhai? Well I am Bond, James Bond. I have been played by Connery, Niven, Moore, Lazenby, Dalton, Brosnan, Craig…it’s my character that is important not the actor who plays it.”

“Aha. That is it. Bhai stands for exactly the opposite. As he has proven time and time again, it is the actor that is supreme and not the character. Bhai can play the front right tyre of an Aston Martin if he wants to and it will still rake in 100 crores in 3 days. Story, logic, script—-everything is redundant. You can get your privates almost burnt by a laser ray. No one cares that much. But as soon as Bhai stand in front of the camera, strikes a stud pose, the Money and the Penny will all pour in. Only For him. “

“So what should I do to this Bhai? Do you expect me to fight?”

“No Mr. Bond, I expect you to die. In shame. You. Me. For all of us secret agents, there is no quantum of solace.”

And just at that moment, Ethan Hunt drops in from the ceiling, like a spider descending on its prey

Bourne says “Aha look who is finally here. Didn’t you get that self-destructing “Your mission, should you choose to accept it” memo I sent you. What took you so long?”

Ethan Hunt gives a small shake of his perfectly set hair and says “Kya karein. Bhai ka picture laga hai.”

[Previous editions of Masters of Horror---Part 1, Part 2]

As someone who writes genre fiction (Please buy “The Mine” if you have not yet), I always strive to layer in my elements. In other words, I try to hide the real horror of the story beneath the surface of the narrative such that what is being shown is as important (if not more) than what is being implied. Two levels (the outer and the inner) is the maximum I can handle and that too with difficulty. Which is why I doff my cap to Vikram Bhatt, a true master of horror, who effortlessly handles four, five, six and even sometimes seven layers of horror with consummate ease.

Case in point, Vikram Bhatt’s latest blockbuster Raaz 3 aka Raaz 3D aka Raaz the Third Dimension. It has caught the world by storm, getting reviews from NY Times (link) and LA Times (link), setting box-office records in India and perhaps, most impossibly, reviving the career of Bipasa Basu. Raaz 3 has seven layers of horror, which keen readers will note is the same number of circles of Hell envisioned by Dante. This, I believe, is not a co-incidence because sitting through Raaz 3 is like descending into the deepest depths of the Devil’s Lair.

So what are these seven layers you ask. Well, here they are. In no particular order.

Bipasa Basu: It is said that the greatest raaz or secret is that which a woman carries her in her chest. No woman symbolizes this more than Bipasa whose chest contains many secrets, including but not limited to its provenance and chemical composition. In Raaz 3, she plays Shayna, an actress whose best days are behind her, as she searches for that elusive critical hit that would propel to her to the top. Some experts point out the similarity in situations between the character Bipasa plays and her own. In that she, of late, has been having a poor time at the box office, overtaken as she has been by younger and keener talents. This was of course before Raaz 3 was released. Now when you consider that in Raaz 3, Shayna obtains success by taking the help of evil spells of an undead black magician, that elusive terror-within-a-terror, the horror that comes from what is not said but implied, becomes evident.

Emran Hashmi: Affectionately called “I am a man kiss me”, Emran Hashmi displays his full repertoire in Raaz 3— from the pursed lips of intense emotion to the pursed lips when trying to kiss. Here he plays an arty movie director from the Roman Polanski-Mahesh Bhatt school of awesomeness who gets seduced by his girl-friend Shayna to pour evil spirit-juice into the water of the heroine of his movie, Sanjana, who is Shayna’s rival. The horror here is not that the lady does not use evil-spell-removing water purifiers but that Emran Hashmi, in one night of crazy terror, fornicates with Sanjana just to knock her out of a hysterical state. In the process, he adds one more terrifying line item to Bollywood’s “Situations when good men are forced to have sex even though they don’t want to” , namely “When heroine has become hysterical”, which now occupies pride of place along side “When heroine falls into ice and needs body heat to be revived” (Aa Gale Lag Ja, Ganga Yamuna Saraswati)

The new heroine: The Bhatts are known for “discovering” generic looking heroines whose utility is limited to being the other lip for an Emran Hashmi kiss and giving horrifyingly significant sound-bytes [Link]. They light up the marquee for a movie or two, their amazing acting abilities tomtommed by sympathetic PR, before they get replaced by another similarly generic body, in the same way that “business analysts” on foreign assignments are continuously replaced by newer and less expensive talent from the home-country, all so that bill-rates are kept low. In Raaz 3, a horrifying new talent is unleashed, replacing another equally horrifying talent, because the new girl “does not ask questions” [Link]

After doing a very successful Murder 2, in which she was very uninhibited in her sex scenes with Emraan, Jacqueline was the right choice for Raaz 3.But as she inched towards shooting, Vikram found that there was a hesitation in her demeanour about the costumes she would wear. This, being a horror film, required her to be scantily dressed and wear clothes that would be visibly provocative,” he says.

“When Vikram told her how he would create the illusion of nudity in this scene, it made her uncomfortable. At this point Vikram and the costume designer of the film had huge differences and Vikram felt that it was time for him to put his foot down. He needed a girl who would not ask these questions. That’s where Esha came in. She trusted me completely, which is why I stepped in for 15 days to co-direct the shoot of that sequence,” adds Mahesh.

Theirs not to question why. Theirs but to take it off and die. If this is not horror, I do not know what is.

The Third Dimension: Raaz 3 is called Raaz 3: the Third Dimension because Vikram Bhatt truly understands that the essence of 3D is DDD. He showed that in Haunted 3D [Link] where Tia Vajpayee’s depth of talent was artistically visualized by adroit camera work. Raaz 3 continues that tradition. In Vikram Bhatt’s expert hands, the power of the z-axis is fully exploited, as Bipasa Basu thrusts out her Pyar ki Bhasas time and time again, in a way that would make the man who made the comparatively mediocre Hugo, one Martin Scorcese’s blood run cold.

Cockroaches and Maggots: Some horror tropes are eternal. The creaking door. The creepy kid. The wannabe heroine who strips because the challenging role “demands it” and then tells the press how intense the act of disrobing is. To that, Raaz 3 brings something new— an intrusion of horny cockroaches rushing out of the sink forcing the heroine to disrobe and run naked into a party. If cockroaches ick you out, well then you ain’t see nothing yet. In a spectacularly choreographed scene, Shayna fornicates with a maggot-infested corpse as the price of her fame, alluding terrifyingly to what heroines have to do and with whom in order to climb the slippery pole of stardom.

The Bhatts: They have given us some of the most nightmarish imagery over the years. Pooja Bhatt. Arif Zakaria’s hair in Jism 2. The lusty Iyer of Haunted 3 D. Jackie Shroff as Samara, the creepy girl from Ring, dead in a well. An endless line of cross-border vocal and visual talents.

Recently I saw a segment on a Zee show where the Bhatts, sitting together, were gloating over the success of Raaz 3. Mahesh Bhatt, in his customarily modest way, called critics blood-sucking mosquitoes whose job it is to suck life-juices from, I suppose, gigantic reservoirs of tastiness, tastiness of the kind he possesses. He then went on to say how Raaz 3 has been appreciated by NY Times (so suck it desis) which proves, in the most QED way, that Indian critic has it for the supremely talented Bhatts.

But the terror of the Bhatts do not stop there at merely dancing on the graves of their enemies. Or their less is more policy where they make their heroines wear less for more impact. Their true spine-tingler is that they draw inspiration for their works from affairs of real life, their own real life affairs. (Arth, Phir Teri Kahani Yaad Ayee and Woh Lamhe is about one woman [Link], Ankahee is about another [Link] and Raaz 3 yet another [Link]. For lesser people, this washing linen on celluloid may be considered exploitative. But of course not for the Bhatts. For them, it is catharsis, an artist’s expression of pain. If you think otherwise, you are a blood-sucker.

Vikram Bhatt: If the Bhatts are the Texas Chainsaw Massacre family of Indian horror, then Vikram Bhatt is Leatherface, the principal orchestrator of mayhem. Just as Leatherface loved nothing more than to skin innocent victims, cut them up and then stitch them together to make macabre masks, Vikram Bhatt likes to hack together sequences from different sources—a bit of “Ring”, a cut of “Insidious”, a scrap of “X Files”, an eyebrow from “Faust”, a wing from “Black Swan”, a page from “It”, a limb from “Jagged Edge”, a finger from “The Entity” to create pastiches of enduring horror.

Like Raaz 3.

Truly a master.

[ONLY for those who have seen Skyfall. Inside references and spoilers galore.]

They came out of the darkened theater, an odd couple.

The fat man wiped the popcorn off his shirt-front and shook his head. ‘ What a bakwas fillim. Absolute bakwas.’

The young man wrapped the scarf tightly around his neck. ‘Bakwas? That was Sam Mendes…how…I…it was beautiful. Just beautiful. The best Bond ever.’

‘Whatever it be, I am not financing a Hindi movie that is lifted from that. I don’t care what a hotshot director you claim to be.’ A bit of Coke gurgled out from his chubby lips. ‘I am a diamond merchant. Not a fool.’

‘Hold on sir. Just hold on. Did you not get the ending?’

‘What was there not to get? Absolute rubbish. A bit of plot herapheri I am okay with. Just like my account books. This is after all action thriller. What do you call it? Suspension…suspension…’

‘Suspension of disbelief. It’s a contract between the director and the audience where…’

‘Contract my gaand. As I was saying, thoda bahot chalta hai adjust. I get that. Stock. Bond. Theek hain chalo. But here, the cow does not climb the tree, it goes to the moon. And then to the sun.’

‘But sir, the ending…maybe you did not..’ The young man tried to control his rising panic.

‘Abhe ending ke bacche. Listen. If someone, someone as powerful as this villain Silva, wants to get revenge against his boss and his boss’s chamcha, why does he not shoot them any random day? Given how powerful he is, he can just drive past and put two in the head.’ The fat man made his fingers into a gun. ‘Why does he have to hatch massive conspiracies, hack into British gowernment, get caught intentionally, let his targets escape again and again, but not shoot them straight. ‘

‘But’

‘But what? Are you trying to tell me it is easier to blow up the roof and bring down a train to kill Bond than to shoot the bastard in the head? Why could not the villain get a gun along with the police uniform from his henchmen? Then he could have blown Bond’s brains out in the tunnels. Damn, if we do that in Bollywood, the critics would have us by our balls. But since this is..’

‘Sam Mendes, sir.’

‘Yes whatever. Mendes. Sri Lankan. Like Duleep Mendis?’

‘Sir, if you just let me speak. Sir, it was all for the ending. The ending is the beginning.’

‘Yeh kya chutiyapha?’

‘See James Bond is an orphan. M is like his mother. Silva, the villain, has always been in love with M. That’s why he mentions the irony of them meeting for the last time at a church… the last scene, you know Christians get married in church.’

‘Yes yes..I…’

‘So, you see sir, Silva is not driven by revenge but love sir. Betrayed love. That is why he wants to die together with the woman he loved. Since James Bond is M’s surrogate son, he is also Silva’s metaphorical beta, the next “generation” of him. You understand sir?’

The fat man stood silently.

‘See how at the end the two lovers die, M and Silva, exactly at the spot James Bond’s real parents are buried. See the connection? Sir see the beauty?See the symbolism of Bond stabbing his father in the back–it is Sam Mendes’s twisted take on filial love, Bond unites his parents in the way only a son can. But not in life. Death. Death sir. In American Beauty…’

‘But I am not an American producer. I make movies for India. Bollywood. And yeh sab high-funda intellectualism leave for your critics and your Twitter fans. Don’t think I am a chooth, boy. As if I didn’t know how you take scenes from eighteen movies and then…’

He held the fat man’s hands obsequiously. ‘I understand. I was just saying…’

‘Fuck this. I come back to my original proposal. Make a sequel to Baazigar or I get another director to do it.’

The thin man’s face shrunk in fear. Then he collected himself.

‘Yes sir. That only to we will make. But we will do it like Skyfall. Skyfall meets Baazigar.’

‘How will that happen?’

‘Concept. We will call it Nightfall.’

‘English title for Hindi movie?’

‘We can change it later. For now listen no sir.’

‘Wait wait. I think I know what nightfall is. Isn’t that the “raat main ho jaana”..you know…?’

‘No no sir. Nightfall is the falling of night. Nothing more.’

The fat man craned his neck once again. No cab still.

‘So we get Rakhee Gulzar to play M. The moment we do that, we have major Baazigar recall.’

The fat man suddenly looked interested. ‘So Shahrukh Khan will play Bond?’

‘Yes sir. Of course. Who else? But we don’t call him Bond. He is Baazigar.’

‘I get that.’

Think of opening sequence. Rakhee, as the head of Indian intelligence, asks an agent to take the shot. She takes a shot and…’

‘Yes yes I saw the movie remember? Who will play the female agent..that Moneypenny lady?’

‘How about Kunal Khemu?’

‘Can’t we get a real woman?’

‘Rakhee Sawant?’

‘I said…a real woman.’

‘Sirish Kunder?’

‘Much better. Go on.’

‘Well then Baazigar is dead. M however refuses to believe it. As she tells Gareth Mallory…’

‘Voldemort?’

‘Yes sir.’

‘So as I was saying, as she tells Gareth Mallory, who we call Gangadhar Mukherjee, played by Pariksheet Sahani, that Baazigar cannot be dead.’ The young man now puts on a Bengali-Hindi accent.

‘Mera beta Baazigar ayega… dharti ka seena phaad ke aaayega. aasmaan ki chaati cheer ke aayega’, we get Rakhee to say. And every time she says it, we cut to scenes of Baazigar making love to women, appropriately named Dharti and Aasman.’

‘Spare me the details. Will there be sexy item numbers?’

‘Yes sir. We will get Brazilian model named Judi and get her Drenched…’

The fat man hums absent mindedly ‘Judi Judi, Javier ke dil liye aaye Judi.’

‘So anyhow,’ continues the young man, ‘keeping in mind the Baazigar meets Skyfall theme, we introduce the villain, ex-agent Madan Chopra, who wears a pair of magic dentures that hides the fact that chewing gutkha has dissolved his face. He has gotten his hands on a tape that has unedited MMS-s of several government persons, five of which he uploads on Debonair Blog every week.’

‘Who plays Madan Chopra?’

‘Daleep Tahil. No one else.’

‘What about his wig? That Javier Bardem’s wig was one of the few action sequences I liked.’

‘We can get Anil Kapoor to play the wig.’

‘Good.’

‘So as I was saying, then we have…’

‘Story ko choro yaaar. How many songs will we have? Only one item number won’t do…’

‘Sir, of course there will be lot of songs. So many opportunities in plot. One in Shanghai. One soulful ballad as theme “Aasman ko jhukne do”. One song in which Baazigar teases geeky Q with a “Kitabein bahoot si” type song, asking him to read his face.’

‘How about a flashback song that shows the love between M and Madan Chopra? Like M is going to brief Madan Chopra on an ultra-secret mission, he is in a romantic mood and she flirtatiously sings “Pahele padhai phir pyar hoga”.’

‘Brilliant idea sir.’

‘Other song situations?’

‘ We must do one Bhangra song in the sarson da khet when Baazigar and M escape to Baazigar’s ancestral home in Punjab, under the benevolent protection of the jolly family care-taker, played by Anupam Kher.’

‘Ah nice. Half an hour of playful village life. Works lovely with NRI Punjabi audiences. Maybe we can add the character of Archana Puran Singh as Anupam Kher’s wife, who cooks baingan ka bharta and gajjar ka halwa for M and Baazigar. ‘

‘Absolutely sir. Absolutely. And then finally a brilliant Baazigar 2 climax when Madan Chopraaaa and Baazigar fight with Baazigar escaping, by diving into the ice.’

‘Oh yes that scene. Reminded me of Ganga Jamuna Saraswati when Meenakshi Sheshadri fell into ice and Amitabh Bachchan had sex with her to prevent hyopthermia. That was more believable than what they showed in…’

The young man tried to brush away yet another interruption.

‘So as I was saying. We finish with the iconic Baazigar end-scene except here it is the Ma that dies in the lap of the beta “Mujhe tere tuxedo main samet le”, twisting the ending of the original in a very edgy way. Madan Chopra, of course, will be penetrated once again.’

‘Hmm…now that you say it. Skyfall is very similar to Baazigar.’

‘But in a very inverted way. That’s why I say let’s be inspired by it.’

The fat financier smiled. He was getting a good feeling. For the first time that night.

Work. This could work.

If you are an alien from outer space and your idea of humanity is formed solely on watching mainstream commercial Hindi movies, you could not be blamed for thinking that human beings are defined by two primary emotions. Anger and love. And that’s about it. Even in this rather restricted palette, there exist little in terms of shades. Anger is typically Sunny Deol snarling “Balwant Rai ke Tattu” (or Taate I forget which) or Amitabh Bachchanian “Aaj Khush to bahoot honge tum” angst. Love fares even worse, that many splendored thing reduced to juvenile “oohing and aahing” of the Ishq-wala love variety, an over-the-top concoction of roses-and-chocolate hyper-romance which frequently requires multiple adjectives to (“Pyar Ishq Aur Mohabbat”) hammer in the “Kaheen na kaheen koi hai” lovey-loveiness. Other expressions of emotions, when and if they are shown, are almost always concomitants to love, “Pyar ke Side Effects”. Thus melancholia has to stem either from the pain of separation between mohabbateins or from unrequited puppy-love. Even lust (“jism ki bhookh”) is defanged and transformed into a pink syrupy love-goo (“pyar ka ehsaas), bypassed from the loins to the heart in a masterful feat of moral surgery.

“Talaash” is rare in that it eschews romance in its formulaic pulpy form and instead walks the road less traveled, exploring grief in its raw intensity. Unlike most of its other 100-crore-wannabe contemporaries, it makes the effort to define a dramatic conflict, the tension between two parents as they try to cope with the loss of a child, each in their own ways. When the movie begins, the audience is introduced to the wife , emotionally unhinged, and the husband, stoic, sad but firmly in-control. As the layers unfold, the truth is revealed to be something totally different—it is the wife who clutches at hope while trying to move on and it is the husband who is caught in a downward spiral of self-loathing, teetering on the edge of insanity, refusing to let go. Through music, acting and story-situations(there is deeply moving scene between the wife and her psychiatrist) this “reveal” is beautifully executed, making “Talaash” a searing study in pure grief, reminiscent of Mahesh Bhatt’s amazing “Saraangsh”.

And as beautifully as it does this nuanced “reveal”, it fails as spectacularly in its handling of the supposed twists and turns of its main thriller plot. “Talaash” recycles a plot as old as the hills and then, if that was not bad enough, telegraphs the final twist so many times before the end that one cannot but help “get it.” It’s almost tragic. Here is a film that takes so much care to get character and progression right (the difficult part) and then does such an amazingly slapdash job with its main story and premise (the easy part), almost as if someone took the beautiful “Dhobi Ghaat” and mixed it in with the execrable “Mela”, a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde bit of schizophrenic film-making if there was one.

Despite its obvious and rather damning failings, “Talaash” still remains, in my opinion, miles ahead of the pack. It does not take the tried-and-tested route to Bollywood success—the loud Punjabi comedy-romance or the teenybopper romance. It does something different, something “adult”. It does not succeed, not uniformly any ways. At its worst, it is as predictable and brainless as any of its competitors. At its best, it is a mature exploration of a most difficult emotional nuance, the intersection between grief and guilt. And this, just by itself, makes “Talaash” an unique piece of modern-day Bollyana.

[More a deconstruction I guess than a review, (despite the title) this post has spoilers]

There have been very few movies that have had as much influence on its genre as The Godfather. When I say influence, I am of course using the Pritamian euphemism for “provide a treasure-trove of characters, situations and set-pieces on which the carrion-feeders of Bollywood can feast on for decades as they produce one aatank (terror) after another, including a movie titled Aatank Hi Aatank”. A part of the blame for being ravaged lies with the victim itself (and how often do we hear that). So epic is Godfather’s scope, so compelling are its protagonists and so eternal its dramatic conflict  that it becomes genuinely difficult to extricate oneself from its influence, even with the best of intentions.

It is easy to forget however, especially in front of the 800 pound Luca Brasi of a  Godfather, that other mafia film, smaller and less grand but as enjoyable. I am talking about, of course, Goodfellas, which is as not-Godfather as one can possibly be while remaining solidly in the mafia genre. While the world of Godfather is populated by dead-serious, larger-than-life characters and its narrative built around epic themes of revenge, sin and moral atrophy, Goodfellas is a colorful mosaic of low lives alternately, and often at the same time, pathetic, foolish, funny, shrewd and murderous. It has, because it is a more difficult movie to understand and hence lift, remained largely unmolested by Bollywood’s celluloid-pinchers,  who have instead feasted on the meaty flesh of the more lowbrow Scarface. (As an aside, when I saw Scarface in 2007, I realized how much of the movie I had already seen scattered in numerous Hindi flicks of various vintage.)

Gangs of Wasseypur may have some elements of The Godfather— the reluctant young man forced to don his father’s mafia chappals after the murder of the anointed sibling, as also a minor variation of the Jones Beach Causeway sequence. However, with its cast of quirky, bizarre, severely psychotic characters and the way it intriguingly walks the line between felony and farce,  Gangs of Wasseypur is more Goodfellas than Godfather. When I say this, I do not want to slyly imply that it is copied from Goodfellas, not even in the “it has been transplanted to an Indian context” originality argument that some film-makers, whose movies get firmly thrown out of the foreign film category at Oscars, use as a figleaf for their transgressions. The reason I spend so much text on drawing parallels is if we are going to be talking about inspirations (which we Indians love to do in a snarky way), we should at least get the most egregious inspiration correct.

For me though, and I love my game of “Who copied what” if only because they do it all the time,  Gangs of Wasseypur is wildly original, with the originality stemming from its characters,  its music (Sneha Khanwalkar thumbs up) its thematic ambivalence (Is this crime or is this comedy?) and, perhaps what I found most intriguing,  its vision.

The Gangs of Wasseypur saga, or rather the heart of it, are the characters of  Sardar Khan (Manoj Vajpayee) and Faisal Khan (Nawazuddin Siddiqui). Though they are equally dim-witted, equally murderous and equally filmy, this father and son-duo are polar opposites in every other way. And that is what makes each of them individually and together so fascinating.  Sardar Khan is all braggadocio  all “Bata deejiyega sabko” Bihari-babu swagger, the “haramkhor, bhadwa sala, randibaaz”, predator of women and slayer of men, brought to life marvelously with eyes-and-blades slashing aplomb by Manoj Vajpayee. Faisal Khan is diffidence personified,  breaking into sniffles when the love of his life admonishes him for not taking her permission before holding her hand, as passionately monogamous as his father is not, lazing about like a crocodile in a drug-induced stupor one moment and pumping lead maniacally into the bodies of his enemies the next, sometimes slinking away from battle dragging a broken foot and sometimes striding heroically with guns blazing.  Topping even Manoj Vajpayee’s performance, this is a sensational tour de force from Nawazuddin Siddiqui whose narcotics-addled gaze, vacant and remote, is about as perfect and authentic as one can get to the real thing.

And crowding around are the equally fascinating other denizens of the world of Wasseypur where the flight of pigeons is quite a bit different from the Ruskin Bond ideal. There is the supremely evil blade-runner Perpendicular, the enigmatic Definite, the strong-willed Nagma Khatoon, the voluptuous Mohsina and my personal favorite, the indescribable Ramadhir Singh. If there is one major criticism that I have of Gangs of Wasseypur is that one always seem to want to know more about these characters and many a time one feels that some of the footage, for example Faisal Khan’s long-winded adventure to procure guns, could have been edited out and that time used for more development of the fascinating support-cast.

Then there of course is the humor, which even when scraps of brain tissue are flying around, is never far from the surface. A goat grazes placidly as a romantic scene plays in the foreground. As a hit takes place, one of the hitmen relieves himself while the other seems more fascinated by the items on the mark’s grocery list than on the job at hand. In the midst of great drama, a character returns to retrieve his shoe.  A man pounds his wife in bed, comes out vacantly expressionless, and then goes back in and resumes the pounding. A Mithunda impersonator is used to taunt an opponent. Macho murderers sit around with housewives to watch Kyun Ki Saans Bhi Kabhi Bahoo Thi before the TV explodes in a hail of bullets.  A mustachioed Yashpal Sharma sings emotional Hindi songs, in a faux feminine voice, both at marriages as well as funerals. A supposedly evil usurper hatches evil plan and then just when you start getting taken in by his earnest seriousness, you see him dancing dirty, grinding into a skimpily clad human being of indeterminate gender. Before dispatching a man to meet his maker, Faisal Khan has a barber shave his head and then forces he-who-is-about-to-die to wear black goggles just so that he can have the pleasure of killing someone who looks like the legendary filmy villain Sakaal. This transition from the serious to the ridiculous is so sharp that one wonders if Gangs of Wasseypur is a crime drama or a comedy, an homage to pulpy Hindi movies or a savage takedown.

My take-away, and this could well be my personal interpretation, is that it is all of them. In my favorite sequence, Ramadhir Singh (played with heart-breaking brilliance by Tigmanshu Dhulia), once he finds out that his son, with whom he has been disappointed with in the past, had gone to see “Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge”, says with infinite sadness “Beta Tumse Na Ho Payega”. (Son, You will not amount to anything). Later on, Ramadhir Singh observes, with more than a bit of quiet satisfaction, that the only reason he has been able to outsmart so many of his opponents, spanning generations, is because unlike them, he never wallowed in Hindi cinema.  It is Hindi cinema, he claims, which makes the people around him stupid, deluding  them into constructing filmy narratives for their pathetic little lives. And this situation is unlikely to ever improve because “Jab tak cinema hain lok chutiya baante rahenge.”

Maybe I am over-analyzing but that is where I believe Gangs of Wasseypur gets in its true punch. The slavishness towards Hindi movies, while being comical is also pathetic, being  a symptom of a much more fundamental social malaise— the lack of hope. Pulpy Hindi popular entertainment in the badlands of Bihar is like a narcotic, providing a fix of scripted dreams to those that have none, creating a morass of comfortable dumbness or bewakoofi that consumes those that remain immersed in it. The battle between the bewakoof (bumpkins) and haramis (smart bastards) that is laid out in the opening voice-over is thus not an external conflict but an internal one, raging inside each and every character in the world of Wasseypur, as foolishness crosses swords with sly street-smartness. It’s a war with unpredictable results—the proudly harami Ramadhir Singh ends up riddled with bullets, his haramipanti bested by the mostly bewakoof Faisal. But then he too gets bumped off by Ramadhir’s DDLJ-watching son, bringing to fruition the prophecy of Ramadhir “Jaise lohe lohe ko kaatta hain, waise chootiya chootiyon ko katega” albeit in a supremely ironic way that old Ramadhir was perhaps too big a bewakoof to understand.

Ridiculous, over-the-top, memorable, and perhaps, just perhaps, quite a bit smarter than it appears, Gangs of Wasseypur remains, without a doubt, the best Hindi movie I have seen in some time.

[Has spoilers for Players and Race 1 and 2]

An Abbas-Mastan is an acquired taste, like single malt or Cuban cigars. Not everyone can appreciate the meticulous research that goes into the making of their crime-thrillers and the believability of their characters and situations. Even those who do often miss the small touches of consummate artistry that is their hallmark. For example in Race 2, a tense sequence in which world-famous stud-art-thief is pulled out through a manhole into the bottom of a get-away-truck (this you have seen in a Mission Impossible movie) is as much as about the heist as it is about comely lass Amisha Patel’s first-day-GABBA-pitch-bouncy  cleavage, delegated as she is, of all the characters in this crime caper, to bend and lend a helping hand to the world-famous-stud-art-thief (this duality I can guarantee you have not seen in any Mission Impossible movie).

Or when at the climax when the John Abraham breaks down and blames his break-up with the Bipasa Basu character for all this evil, one cannot but doff one’s cap to the allusion to the real world.

Or appreciate how Anil Kapoor’s shaven body is a metaphor for the rapid deforestation in the Amazon basin, a criminal heist perpetrated by the logging mafia.

For me though,  an Abbas-Mastan is mostly about learning, like a Discovery channel special on the mating habits of polar bears,  providing as it does a fascinating insight into the world of high-stake crime, a world that we otherwise know so little about.   So here are some of the things I have learnt.

1. Master-criminals are immensely rich. They fly in private dream-liners fitted out like the interior of a honeymoon suite at a 7 star hotel. The homes of Arab Sheikhs are hovels in Dharavi compared to where they rest their heels. They deal  only in billions of dollars— 50 and 100 billion being standard denominations. Picking one of their pockets on a random day would make Greece solvent and what Obama gave as TARP money to investment banks, a successful criminal in the Abbas-Mastan world, would not even get out of bed for.

2. Master-criminals are into a lot of sports. No not something  mundane stuff like cricket or football. He-man sports like no-rules cage-fighting or sexy sports like archery, sword-fighting, gambling, racing cars and horses. And they don’t just play games. They excel in it. In Race 2,  Ranvir Singh (Saif Ali Khan) comes to sword-fight with Omeesha (Jacqueline Fernandez), Omeesha thinks she has bested him in fencing but then when he leaves, her clothes fall off (yes I know you saw this in a Katherine Zeta Jones movie but please bear with me), so awesome are Saif’s skills with a saber. I won’t be surprised if in Race 3, Ranveer Singh challenges Kasparov to a game of chess, Kasparov thinks that he wins and then after Ranveer leaves, the great Grandmaster realizes he was playing with black and not with white, and it’s Ranveer Singh who has taken the baazi (just as the Race theme plays in the background).

3. Super-criminals speak in a criminal lingo that is cheesier than lasagna. Which means they almost always say “Heyyyy baby” and “Come into my lair” and “You are so hot” and “Pop my cherry”. You would think that being as suave and stylish as they are (they drink champagne always), they would show a bit more class. But hey the brothers know better.

4. Master-criminals make elaborate heist-schemes that depend critically on multiple co-incidences which they know will happen in the future. Almost as if the future is scripted.  And, oh yes, the object of the heist is always outrageous. Like the Shroud of Turin.

5. Criminal master-minds extensively sample Hollywood movies for their strategies, drawing from disparate sources like Italian Job, Mission Impossible, Ocean’s Eleven and National Treasure. Despite watching so many movies, they still regularly fall for the “the reams of paper under a layer of actual currency notes” trick.

6. The world’s most dangerous criminals (even white guys who cannot understand Hindi) obtain breaking news from one and one source only. India TV (Race 2). And based on that knowledge, they pull off heists worth billions of dollars.

7. Passwords of the most secure locations in the world are never a random juxtaposition of characters. Hell they aren’t even alphanumeric. The password that protects national treasures like the Turin Shroud are short, meaningful English words that can easily be deduced by the simple “get invisible goo on the fingers of your mark and then  later observe the buttons pressed” trick.

8. Super criminals have their own premier “Superclub” laws of Physics, not applicable to other mortals, ones that can only be accessed by a Black “Players”  Card. This allows their cars to jump up 6 stories in the air, and lets ginormous bricks of gold to be tossed around as lightly as a bra (“Players”) . This special Physics, not to be consumed with John Abraham’s special Physique, also allows super-criminals to possess the kind of technology that one can scarcely believes exist—-pressure-sensors that can “see” through matter and transmit thermo-pressure images to black goggles, vehicles that come standard with parachutes, and cards whose faces can re-arrange themselves. As a matter of fact, the only tech they don’t have are wrist-bands that promote well-being and patriotism.

9. Super criminals never kill their sworn enemies through the simple expedient of putting a bullet through their heads at close range. No. They put bombs underneath their cars which will detonate if the car goes below a certain speed. They hire grossly incompetent snipers. They construct enormous ruses, which includes double and triple crossing and egregious fornication. Basically everything, short of the simplest thing.

10. Criminals get fixated on a certain metaphor. In “Players”, it is the “Let’s play the game” and “We are players yaaahhh”. In Race, it is “tez”, raftaar” and most surprisingly “race”.

11. When at work, master criminals make Bond look like Guddu Rangeela, so suave they are with their impeccably tailored suits, their race-course champagne-drinking and their use of expensive Mont Blanc pens. But the moment they let their hair down, they transform themselves into 19-year-olds on spring-break, singing songs of party-sharty with nothing but mid-riff baring,  talli-dancing “party on my mind”, while doing ass-grinding-into-crotch dance steps.

12. And finally, the world of the super-criminals is full of surprises. When you least expect it, Aftab Shivdasani pops up. Or Aditya Pancholi. Or Bobby Deol in a sombrero playing an “illusionist”.

As a matter of fact, there are so many twists are there that in the movie “Players”, a vital prop used by a master-criminal is the book “Oliver Twist”. Really.

What’s heartening however is that the twists all follow a regular template, so regular that one might even say they are about as “I never saw that coming” as Rahul Gandhi becoming the Congress vice-president.

For instance, those that are “dead” are not—only waiting for a suitable time to make a dramatic entrance, preferably driving a car into a plane or off a multi-storied building.

When master-criminal 1 discovers master-criminal 2 is double-crossing him, he just plays along because otherwise, it would not be a “Race”. Or he would not be a “Player”. Till it is revealed that master-criminal 2 knew that master-criminal 1 knew that master-criminal 2 was double-crossing from the get-go but he also played along because otherwise, yes you guess it, it would not be a “Race”. Or he would not be a “Player”.

And for those that don’t get the pattern, master-criminals are only too helpful, stopping as they do, in the middle of the breakneck action, to explain (sometimes looking straight at the camera)  their motivations and modus operandi.

While all the time, and that is where the true devilish nature of the whole scheme becomes apparent, another major heist is going on, right on front of you.

And you do not even realize it.

A heist of 100 crores. At the box-office.

Truly masterclass.

[Has spoilers]

Finally.

A male-bonding Bollywood film that does not have 1) Rich men driving down to Goa in a Mercedes for together-time 2) Even more rich men, meterosexual enough to make David Beckham look like Merv Hughes, driving around Spain, struggling with first-world problems of designer bags and commitment 3) Genius men doing a baby-delivery using improvised devices or 4) Angsty men getting into deep depression of the breakup of their music band or 5) Shirtless men running through the fields, high on life.

All right. Kai Po Che does have number five. But it still is a breath of fresh air in the world of  the dick flick (the male analog of the chick) crafting as it does three compelling and relatable characters who, for once, do not inhabit the history-less alternate dimension that forms the backdrop for almost all of mainstream Bollywood’s popular fantasies. History here exists and it is cruel and merciless as it tests their resolve, breaks them apart and unites once again, bringing success, ruin and tragedy to  three friends—the pragmatist, the believer and the idealist.

What perhaps I could not have anticipated, but perhaps should have because no one can talk about Gujarat without evoking strong responses, was this.[Link]

In turning his decidedly political book into a feel-good Bollywood spectacle, Mr. Bhagat has, on the face of it, done nothing less than rewrite history in favor of Gujarat’s chief minister, Narendra Modi of the B.J.P., who has been dogged by questions over his role in the 2002 riots. Mr. Bhagat has, for the most part, kept the screenplay clear of damning references to Gujarat’s Hindutva nationalist politics littered throughout his book, such as a grand conference of “the Hindu Party,” where the subject of discussion is “until when does a Hindu keep bearing pain?”

To be honest, I have not read “Three Mistakes Of My Life”. Mr. Bhagat may well endorse Modi today, either because he genuinely believes in him or because it is the flavor of the season to be so. I have no way of knowing. And nor do I frankly care. But  to blame Bhagat for rewriting history in favor of Modi in “Kai Po Che” is about as much as much as a bolt from the blue as the ball that Jadeja got Clarke out in the second innings of the Hyderabad Test.

First of all, four people are credited with the screenplay of Kai Po Che, of which Bhagat is just one. So to put the entire blame at his doorstep, if indeed blame is to be placed, is unfair in the extreme.  Second, the grammar of cinema dictates departures from a novel—sequences need to be made more visual, exposition needs to be kept at a minimum,  characters may need to be eliminated, changed or fused purely based on the diktats of the format. And so yes there may be valid cinematic reasons for the nephew for the book  to become parents of the movie, without the need to suppose sinister motives for that change.

Another post in Kafila has a problem with, among other things, the dress that Muslims are shown wearing. [Link]

Every time we see a Muslim character, the males are wearing kurta pyjamas and topees and the females are wearing burkhas. The film only exacerbates a prevalent attitude that Muslims look and dress different. This may be true some of the time but it is not true all the time, as Kai Po Chewould have us believe.

Whoa. So let’s see. If Muslims are shown wearing shirt and trousers, the criticism would be that the only Muslims that are shown to be acceptable are those that un-Islamicize themselves in order to blend into the Hindu-defined “Indian identity. You almost feel that you cannot win.

As a matter of fact, you cannot. Because no matter how you slice it, what damns  ”Kai Po Che” in the eyes of many is the ending. A Muslim boy, damaged by riots, attains fame as a national cricket player, the Indian flag flutters, the accidental murderer weeps and asks for forgiveness, and the…oh my God, are they showing closure? Oh boy. Bring out the air-raid sirens. Achtung ! Achtung ! This is Modi propaganda. I knew there was a subliminal message in that Subharambh song.

Phew. Talk about knee-jerk

The problem that there is only one narrative of Gujarat that can be brought to screen, or indeed be accepted, for it not to be castigated as Modi propaganda. That is movies of the “Firaaq” and “Parzania” type, where Hindus of Gujarat are shown to be, by and large, complicit in the genocide of their fellow Muslim Gujaratis, with the police and the administration being shown to be on the side of the rioters.

It does not matter if the movie is not  interested in going into the politics of the riots, except in the way that it affects the dynamics between three friends and alters their fates.

It does not matter that the movie does not attempt to rewrite history in the places that it does touch it. Kai Po Che does not pull punches when it does deal with the divisions extant in Gujarat society. In one of the most dramatically tense sequences of the movie, a Hindu “right-wing” run refugee camp is shown turning away Muslim asylum seekers after the earthquakes, which brings about a stand-off between two friends, one of whom is eager to keep a distinction between “our people” and “them” while the other is not.

It does not matter if the Godhra violence is off-camera and Hindus attacking innocent Muslims is shown on-camera, in lurid shocking detail.

It does not matter that the villain of the movie is a member of the Hindu party.

If an intellectual environment in which one is obliged to show things only one way else risk being called a shill for a particular politician, is not an expression of the most acute form of cultural fundamentalism,  I do not know what is.

Amidst all the outrage, what I believe is lost is that Kai Po Che does not end with a solution. Nor as is claimed by critics, even a reductionist resolution or the dreaded word closure. It ends with regret. And a message of hope—that in India, true ability, irrespective of religion or social standing , will attain success.

Is that populist? Too simple? Perhaps.

Well if you want complexity, here is an alternate point of view. Maybe the  take-away of the ending is that in today’s Gujarat, the idealist becomes the victim, the believer the perpetrator and the pragmatist ends up successful.

Propaganda film no more? No more feel-good? Eh?

But leave aside the messaging, is Kai Po Che, which firmly tries to anchor itself in realism all through, let itself down with its ending?

In other words, was that conclusion even remotely realistic?

I don’t know.

What I do know is the story of two brothers, Muslims from Gujarat, sons of a muezzin of a mosque, who become millionaires from cricket and one of them, well one of them ends up canvassing votes for….

Yes.

You know who I am talking about. [Link]

Which just goes to show one thing.

That there may be many endings for real stories.

And some of them may not be the ones  you expected.

Being a father of a five month old, it is tough watching in theaters as many movies as I used to. However, this being summer and the time for “franchise” releases, I had to (than you wife) just had to see “Star Trek: Into the Darkness” and “Man Of Steel.” (I have always found Iron Man to be very meh)

“Star Trek: Into Darkness” has big explosions, big intergalactic set-pieces, Cumberbatch’s accent and lens flare. It has little else. Now I am a big fan of Star Trek’s original series, which I consider to be some of the best science fiction ever to have been produced. I  have see every episode many times, read Star Trek themes books and these to the left are 1) on one of my walls and 2) one of my cushions [Read this older post for a more full treatment of my love for Star Trek] The original series was very minimalist in special effects (this was the 60s), almost like a stage play, and hence all of its impact came from dialog, characters and story. JJ Abrams turned the whole thing inside out in his 2009 reboot, sacrificing depth of story for the slam-bang. It still worked for me perhaps because of those lump-in-throat moments when characters you grew up with come back on screen, albeit in a different avatar (Kirk and Spock are almost dead ringers of the original) and because, the character development has already taken place for me before I had entered the theater. For Star Trek: Into The Darkness I had expected depth, since the first one could claim was just the set-up. In that I was disappointed. But the disappointment was made up for by  homages to the old show, littered as Into the Darkness is with “in-jokes”, including a play on the “Wrath of Khan” story with a possibly tongue-in-cheek re-doing of possibly one of the hammiest scenes ever in a mainstream Hollywood. Though for someone not steeped in Star Trek lore, I would think that “Into the Darkness” would be another by-the-numbers summer pop-corn blockbuster.

Which brings me to Man of Steel. It’s perhaps the curse of the Dark Knight that every superhero flick is now expected to be deep, dark, somber and provide profound insights into the universe. Bryan Singer sought to provide respectability to Superman with a 2006 reboot, trying to wipe out the memory of the campy  but immensely enjoyable Superman series of the 80s, by making Superman into a moping suburban dad. It was as exciting as a root canal. While reviewing Superman Returns in 2006, I had said: [Link]

The movie also did nothing to throw light on two of Superman’s biggest mysteries: why no one can recognize Superman as Clark Kent (remember Superman does not wear a mask and has only to wear geeky glasses in order to become totally unrecognisable) and why he wears his underwear over his trousers.

In “Man of Steel”  they solved the problem of the Chaddi pahenke phool khila hai” whether by dispensing with it altogether, Yana Gupta style, or by putting it inside, I do not know. However it most certainly triggered a round of superhero costume discussion not seen since George Clooney’s nipple suit in Batman and Robin, which, truth be told, would have suited Peter Andre more than him. But the message had been sent to the fans—this Superman was going to be different and darker, and so out with the primary colors of the suit, out with the underwear over trousers. As if Nolan’s association with the project was not “This one is gonna be different” enough.

So I went in with high expectations. They start off with a planet about to undergo implosion because they cultivated the core (dependence on oil?) rather than look towards the sun (solar energy?). Okay so maybe they are going to go environment with this one. Within some minutes, the concept of humanoids being bred in pods with pre-determined roles is introduced with Superman being the first un-pod-born for hundreds of years, free as he is to choose his destiny. Ah, so this is going to be a more arty version of “Three Idiots”. But wait. Now there is yet another element. Something about “Is the world ready for a messiah?” And there is Superman on a fishing boat—is that a Biblical allusion (Matthew 4:19 Come after me, and I will make you into fishers for men?).

What happens then, and I have no evidence to back me up, is that with so many thematic balls in the air, director Synder and supervisor Nolan took their eyes off and  started watching Zee Cinema. Because Man of Steel then becomes pure old-world Bollywood. Always-ready-to-cry-supremely-sacrificing-father-figure. Check. Adopted son who snaps at golden-hearted foster-father before he dies. Check. (That’s actually a bit of Sukhen Das). Villain traversing light-years to harass the hero’s mother followed by “Abh sailaab ayega Madan Chopraaaa” moment. Check. Villain bringing mashooqa to lair. Check. (If only they had “Zod ne kiya hai isharaa” in belly-dance costume). Now I love Bollywood and I love Nolan profoundness, but individually, not together, and definitely not when the intent is to be Tarkovsky but the execution becomes Manmohan Desai.

But all this could be forgiven if “Man of Steel” was a feast of visual imagination. It is not. Superman’s first flight, which is given a lot of screen-time, with his fist on ground, then ground shaking and then finally a dramatic swoop up, is almost identical  to Neo’s  flying sequence in Matrix Reloaded. Alien ships descending through portals, threatening the rulers of the earth and then breaking skyscrapers has been done to death—Transformers and Avengers come to mind in the last few years. Epic hand-to-hand battle between alien gladiators and superhero in the setting of a small deserted Mid-west town. I think I saw that in Thor just two years back. Alien insect-like mega-machines shooting death rays through their asses. Please. From Independence Day to Mass Effect. Bang head on desk. Again and again.

Epicly disappointing. (And yes that’s one of my other walls)

{Has spoilers}

Before I start to review “Lootera”, a disclaimer is in order.

Regular readers of the blog would know that I am a Bollywood-outsider. Which means, I have never had any personal connection to anyone in a film that I have reviewed.

Till now. Vikramaditya Motwane, the director of “Lootera”,  is an acquaintance through the blog, and hence what I am going to write, may or may not be influenced by that fact. Too often, I find reviewers in mainstream media not exactly up-front with connections to their subjects (“The director is a friend with whom I have drinks with”, “I am looking to work with the production house that made the film”, “The director rejected my script. Twice” and “the PR took me out to dinner”) and I will be damned if I do the exact same thing. I don’t think my opinion of “Lootera” is influenced by my knowing the director, and those that know me from the blog and on Twitter would know that I don’t hold back on my opinions, no matter how negative, even if the person concerned is a friend. But still this needed to be said. So there.

Now the review.

“Lootera” is gorgeously mounted, every frame is like a painting,  the cinematography/art-direction/lighting/use of music is awesome. Even the bad reviews of “Lootera” say this. Which is why I shall not delve into this any more . Beautifully shot and technically sophisticated movies, by themselves, do not impress me even a bit (and that may be because I do not fully appreciate some aspects, lacking as I do any form of formal training in filmcraft). Which is why I have more or less hated, with a vengeance, most of Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s creations, since I have failed to find anything else in them other than this obsession with “Wah kya frame hai”.

“Lootera” though, at least in my opinion, is not merely an action flicker of beautifully lit images. It has, embedded within it,  two fascinating interleaved narratives—the minor and the major.

Let us first deal with the minor. For a “love story” between two individuals, it spends a lot of time on something that on the face of it seems somewhat extraneous— the post-independence dissolution of the zamindari system. But there is a reason for that.

The zamindar, (played with stately elegance by Barun Chanda) and his daughter Pakhi (a surprisingly consummate performance from Sonakshi Sinha) live an anachronistic bubble of feudal indolence which the tumult of independence and Partition seemed to have passed by, a world of elaborate Durga Pujos, pleasure joy-rides in cars over bumpy roads, leisurely days out in the sun and a naive belief that things will always remain the same. They do not. The first shock comes to the zamindar when the government seizes his lands as part of land reform, leaving him in reduced circumstances. And then the bigger shock comes, in a marvelously shot montage, when he discovers that the gentleman he let inside his house , solely based on the trust one classically places in a gentleman, has not only robbed him blind but has also left his daughter, Miss Havisham-like at the altar.  This realization of being stabbed in the back by both country as well as by kin,establishes the emotional basis for the main narrative, which is the  depth of the betrayal felt by the zamindar and his daughter, one of whom consequently dies from the shock while the other becomes a living shadow (One may argue that the zamindar or his ancestors had looted the people and now the people were looting them back but that’s a discussion for another day).

In O Henry’s “Last Leaf”, the motivations of the painter who dies of exposure, painting a fake leaf to give the heroine the will to live are left open to the reader. Is it love? Or is it the desire of the artist to create the greatest masterpiece of them all—-one that changes a life?

In “Lootera”, the answer I believe Motwane comes up with, or this may be my interpretation, is that the act of painting the leaf is the expression of the desire for redemption of a fundamentally flawed human being.

The person known as Varun Srivastava hardly conforms to the archetype of the traditional Hindi film hero. As is established in the first half, he lacks a backbone.  There were a thousand and one honorable things he could have done when Arif Zakaria, the evil uncle, (what a pleasant surprise to see him not chewing scenery) came threatening to expose his true antecedents, but Varun chooses the most cowardly, self-serving, unheroic option of them all—decamping with the loot and leaving the lady behind. When later he encounters Pakhi and witnesses first hand the destruction he has wrought, only then does he “man up” and try to restore, in the only way he can, the most valuable thing he has taken —-her wide-eyed, innocent faith in love and human goodness. In the final, deeply moving scene Pakhi looks up at the leaf, her face iridescent with joy , it is not because she mistakes it to be a real leaf  and hence a signal from above to keep living (the original “Last Leaf”)   but because she recognizes it for what it is—a gesture of repentance and an admission of love.

It’s this progression of the character from a weakling to a hero and the way Varun’s sacrifice is justified and validated that really elevated “Lootera” for me, and to use a phrase I like to use,  made it “greater than the sum of its parts.”

However “Lootera” is not without its problems. For me, it is not the languorous pacing, which I found appropriate and necessary given the theme and the mood. It is not the co-incidence of them meeting, which some found outrageous but then if of all the gin joints , in all the towns in all the worlds, her walking into Rick’s did not seem out of place, why should this? For me, it is not the lack of suspense (doesn’t the title give away the twist?) because not every story needs to have a twist or an A-ha moment.

My first, albeit minor, quibble is ironically where “Lootera” gets an universal thumbs up, its use of music. There was at least one place, where I felt that the song was a bit too contemporary for my liking, too “Rock Star”, too disruptive of the carefully constructed ambiance of the 50s, not of course in the manner of “Aa Aaa Taiyyar Ho Ja” of Asoka of course. But still.

My biggest problem in “Lootera” though is with Ranveer Singh. Someone needs to tell him that being romantic or subtle or suave or soft-spoken or whatever he was trying to be does not imply garbled dialog delivery in a half-whisper- half-whimper. And maybe this is just me, but I felt he just did not look the part, in the way that Sonakshi Sinha did. His well-manicured face and gym-sculpted body might suit him in “Ladies vs Ricky Behl” but here, as a down-on-his-luck petty art-thief from the 50s, he seems as authentic as Mallika Sherawat’s Cannes accent. In most other movies we tend to overlook such things (for instance in Bollywood war movies, none of the heroes look like they have spent a day in the sun, unlike their Hollywood counterparts who often go through boot-camp to get that battle-worn look) but when so much effort has been spent in meticulously crafting an era gone by, this dissonance becomes most jarring.

The shortcomings though fade in front of all that “Lootera” gets right, a deeply moody atmospheric  tale of trust, betrayal, redemption and, of course, love.

Highly recommended.

The nation needs a superhero. Some try to bring one back from the pages of history, make a big statue and, through it all, generate political capital. Some create a superhero from imagination, make a big statue of him on film, and from that generate actual capital.

Like Rakesh Roshan. And his immortal “Krrish” (the only superhero with a numerically correct name) franchise, which may miss a number (Krrish 1 is followed by 3) but never an opportunity for nifty surrogate advertising. Products dot the landscape of Krrish 3, like pictures of Gandhi, Nehru, Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi at a Congress convention, and had not the movie been so stupendously original and exciting, one might have thought that more attention was given on product placement than things like plot, characterization and dramatic conflict.

Fortunately, that is not the case. Krrish is stupendously original, in every sense of the term.

I won’t go into the details of the story, which is immensely convoluted and multi-layered and highly scientific with DNA and lenses and “intelligent filters” , except to say that it entails a black-lipsticked, Gothic super-villain Kaal (played with undiluted grand-masti by Viv-however-he-spells-his-name-iek Oberoi) unleashing mayhem on the world through badass rhymes like “Is vangsh ka koi angsh rahena naheen doonga main” (Note to BJP: “Copy” right this line), with Krrish and his father (all twenty-two fingers, being played both by Hrithik Roshan), belonging to the aforementioned vangsh, standing in his way.

However what I would like to talk about, in a bit of detail, are the allegations made, by certain reviewers, that parts of the movie are not wholly original. Actually almost none of it. This is very obviously a canard spread by people jealous they can’t have Hrittik Roshan’s abs and/or are Khan fans. For example, take Kaal, the super-villain. Critics have pointed out that he is a cross between Magneto and Professor Xavier. This is because he has telekinetic abilities and is also confined to a wheelchair,  (“Kaal gaale ke neeche bejaan hai, sirf haath ki do unglion ko chorkar”, which incidentally is a condition that afflicts some desi bachelor men in India, atrophied as they become through disuse and misuse). What they fail to realize is that the genius and the originality lies in putting, Magneto and the Professor together in one character, like taking chocolate and vanilla and creating a new flavor called “Two In One”. Sure some of the sequences look mildly (actually a lot) similar to stuff we have seen in X Men, (Liberty Island, Grand Central station set-pieces come to mind) but it is “adapted for India” which means the backdrop is Indian and the names have become all Indianized—Mystique  becomes Kaya, Toad and Sabertooth looks sufficiently desi (as a matter of fact, Toad here endearingly steals ice-creams because nothing spells evil for Krrish’s target audience more than he who steals icecreams), and XMen are called Manwars ( a cross between manav and jaanwar, for those of you who need everything spelled out for them). This mapping is no mean feat.

Here is where the problem is. Critics are so busy trying to find out the parallels and the gotchas (“Aha I saw that in Spiderman”) that they fail to appreciate where Krrish blazes a new path. Sure, Krrish’s costume is a cross between Neo’s and Zorro’s and Gimp’s from “Pulp Fiction”. And sure, when his black cape flutters and he holds his pose before flying, it is exactly like Neo.

But, sirs and madams, why no plaudits for Kaal’s costume, the one he gets once he gets his legs back? That’s pure originality, because I do not recall a supervillian costume which makes the wearer look like yesterday’s hotdog wrapped in an aluminum foil, ready for the microwave. One can see the Robocop origins but this one is totally whack.

Which brings me back to the point. While cribbing and carping over minute details, these critics have missed the woods for the trees. They have failed to laud the dramatic conflict between a man confined to a wheelchair and another man who jumps about skyscrapers like he was bitten by a radio-active grasshoper, nor have they appreciated the sinister meaning behind the voice over’s words “Usne janwaron ko choona proyog ke liye.”

Disgraceful.

And then there are the performances. While Priyanka Chopra continues playing the “American teenager” character she has perfected through the “Chipchip” commercial and Roshan is as absolutely abstatic as ever and Oberoi really darkens his lips, the standout performance is of Kangana Ranaut, playing Kaya, born of “girgit” DNA. In cleavage baring attire (a hat-tip to the great superhero-creator “Stan” Lee), she uses her Kaya to good effect, no where more than when she comes into Arif Zakaria’s office in a sexy mood. Which then leads to my favorite part of Krrish, where once Kaya assumes the face and kaya of Arif Zakaria, we are treated to Arif Zakaria playing Kangana Ranaut, complete with a come-hither look. What special effects, and that too without any computers. On the topic of  special effects, they are exquisite too, reminding me of olden simpler days when the hero would drive the car and sing, and it would be obvious that the foreground and the background don’t really match. I am sure a lot of SFX went into giving the film that retro feel. And just when I felt things couldnt get any more awesome, there is Mohnish Behl in a cameo and your faith in humanity is restored.

In any case, forget the critics. And the “originality” Nazis. Who cares about them anyways? What’s important is that the movie is a mega hit. The public have spoken. Through their wallets.

And why wouldn’t they?

Hum sab mein Krrish hai.

In 2004, two initiatives were launched to pass off mediocre blue-blood Babalog as superstars, while making a shitload of cash for their stakeholders.

One was the UPA government. The other was the Dhoom franchise.

In both these, the trick was essentially same. Smoke. Mirrors. Hype. And for smarter people to hold up the halo for the mediocres.

By 2004, the powers-that-be had tried, with no success, to pass Uday Chopra, the scion of one of Bollywood’s richest and most powerful families, off as a romantic hero. But after the spectacular tanking of his solo “Mere Yaar ki Shaadi Hai”, the writing was on the wall.

It was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it was to make Uday Chopra’s fantasy of being an A-list hero comes to fruition.

But they didn’t give up.

Dhoom was born, in an attempt to package Uday Chopra as an action-comic hero, but this time with solid support. Or what was known as the donut principle, surround the hole in the middle with sugary goodness. They got Abhishek Bachchan, another blue-blood of similar talent but with slightly better career prospects than Uday Chopra, to be his cohort and rising stud-muffin John Abraham to be the villain. To which was added Pritam’s inspirational music, Rimii (that’s how I think she spelt it then) Sen’s double alphabets, some bike chases, some scenes that looked suspiciously similar to Ocean’s Eleven, another hero whose name I have forgotten (oh wait…it was Eesha Deol) and a lot of Chopraian marketing and media muscle.

It worked. Kind of. Dhoom was a hit. But Uday Chopra, despite having cinema in his shirts and pants (Rahul Gandhi speak for “in his genes”), was not going to be able to go to solo outside the family’s productions.

Two years later when Dhoom 2 was made, the challenge was even greater. Now there were two underperfoming Babalog that had to be passed off as stars, with Abhishek Bachchan adding folds below his chin more rapidly than hits to his belt. With great responsibility, comes greater casting. The powers-that-be brought in even more serious talent to hide the limitations of the lead pair, making the so-called villains the marquee names. They got Hrithik Roshan and Aishwarya Rai to headline, though the heroes were still, on paper, Abhishek Bachchan and Uday Chopra. Dhoom 2 piled it on thick and fast, Roshan playing a Hispanicy basketball-player who rollerblades and dresses up as the Queen,  Aishwarya Rai playing  a faux “Are you like checking me out” accent, lifts from “Mission Impossible” and periodic appearances of Bipasa Basu’s sandbags. And then there was  Aishwarya Rai’s first on-screen kiss (She had refused to kiss Chandrachud Singh in Josh, but then who would want to kiss Chandrachud Singh or “Bhabiji” as we used to refer to him) with Roshan, which while being as cold as Aishwarya Rai, was hyped to be controversial and bold. Ho-hum.

And now 2013. Tata Young, of the original Dhoom Dhoom song, has become Tata Old. Abhishek Bachchan is as relevant today as a dial-up modem. Uday Chopra is still Uday Chopra. With the latter having ostensibly announced his retirement, (i.e. given up hope), the powers-that-be decided to give him a farewell mega-hit. Since they could not fly down Sammy and his team to Wankede, they did the next best thing.

Another Dhoom.

Chicago. 1990. People wear either Prohibition-era clothes or look like they stepped off from the sets of Duck Dynasty. A talented magician, played by Jackie Shroff, runs the Great Indian Circus which plays in an ,enormous Beaux-Arts style opera house. It is a  sad, little one-man act, consisting of an Alok Nath-eyed Shroff  pulling rabbits and other assorted things from the Mausichigaand.  The sinister “Western Bank of Chicago”, headed by the cliched “evil white man” is not impressed because he wants to see women in short skirts pulling stuff out of the mouth of a hippo.  Despite the heart-wrenching pleas of the son-of-Jackie-Shroff and Jackie Shroff’s Richard Burton accent, the evil white man decides to shut it down. Faced with heartbreak or in the grip of anger brought on by repeated retakes, Jackie Shroff  suddenly says, like a pakka denizen of the Windy City, “Bankwalon tumhare aisi ki taisi” and shoots himself with Al Capone’s spare gun.

Shattered by this experience, the son-of-Jackie-Shroff grows up to be Sahir (Aamir Khan) who decides to take revenge on the banks by robbing them, because since banks don’t have insurance against robbery, robbing the same bank a number of times destroys them. Eager to avoid capture, he leaves behind his calling card and a message written in Hindi. Chicago’s finest are immediately onto it and conversations like the one below leave the audience no doubt as to how smart they are.

Banker:  ”Whos the guy who has robbed us?”

Chicago’s finest: “It’s a thief sir”

Unable to make head or tail of the Devnagri script, and since Chicago does not fall under Preet Bharara’s jurisdiction, which if it was he could have done a cavity search and found not a brain in the cranium of anyone associated with the story and the script, a call is sent for ACP Jai Dixit (Abhishek Bachchan) and his sidekick Ali (Uday Chopra), who, immediately realize that since the messages have been written in Hindi, the thief is an Indian. Meanwhile Aamir Khan hires Katrina Kaif as his assistant, after an audition that entails her doing a strip tease. Having a woman in a short skirt who can be out-acted by a hippo and the cash from his heists (how he pulls them off is never shown precisely, perhaps because the people at the helm, I am assuming, was too lazy to have been “inspired” by sequences from a few good heist movies), Aamir Khan builds up his Baba’s dream. But he has not contended with Abhishek Bachchan’s angry-old-man-who-is-unhappy-with-his-Isabgol face ….

What the fuck am I doing? I am trying to synopsize the story of Dhoom 3. There is NO story. Or, more precisely, the story is like the Congress party’s constitution,there but really not important. Suffice to say, before the end credits roll, you will get to see Uday Chopra play Jack Sparrow, Abhishek Bacchan play a homeless person, Aamir Khan ride Batman’s Bajaj,  plot holes the size of Sharad Pawar, intellectual punch-counterpunch that would make a two-year-old laugh, and, by today’s standards, some really crappy special effects (the running down a skyscraper or hanging from a edge of a ledge look so “taken against a blue screen” that it’s laughable).

But mention must be made of Aamir Khan, the “method man” and “actor’s actor”. In a strange coincidence, he always finds himself in original works that have remarkable similarities to Nolan’s movies (in Bengal, we call him Nolan-guru and he is available only in the winter). Memento. Now another one. Had it been someone else, I would have said “copied” but Aamir Khan, being so international and sincere and method and Satyamev Jayate, would never be a part of something so Bollywood. His acting in Dhoom 3 is brilliantly diverse—consisting of a few stock expressions randomly sequenced—mildly angry face, intense Ghajini face, watching-strip-tease face, Bum-bum bole face and Ailaa Juhi Chawla face. For someone who claims to “think everything through” it’s strange how if you looked at his expression, you would never think he was running down a skyscraper or holding a man hanging over a ledge, so free of context  it is. One doesn’t expect much from AB Junior or Uday Chopra or Katrina Kaif or a park bench when it comes to acting, but when Aamir Khan dials in a mediocre performance and runs with the cheque, the cynical undertone of the whole project stares at you in the face so hard that it becomes impossible to ignore.

Of course, Dhoom 3 is a grand success. Every big-name movie nowadays seems to be. It has made God-knows-how-many-crores in the time that it took you to read this post. The director, whose greatest achievement so far was in getting Anil Kapoor to shave his chest for Tashan (an effort that I believe would have required sheep-shearing machines from New Zealand), will now be the toast of Bollywood.  Abhishek Bacchan, whose performance is being praised (albeit for now by his father), has a super-hit as a hero. (Yes he would like you to believe he is the hero)

Hell, even Uday Chopra may be back for an Afridi-like encore.

And in the midst of it all,

“Decent cinema, tumhari aisi ki taisi.”

I have known the director of Gulaab Gang, Soumik Sen, for years now through my blog and have had the good fortune of meeting him at the reading of “The Mine”. When his movie came out, I knew I had to go see it but the problem with seeing anything done by a friend is that it is difficult to be totally unbiased. Also you are kind of afraid of not liking it. What do you do then? Pretend that you didn’t see it. Be brutally honest and say the truth? Since I write books and my friends read them, I am intensely conscious of the same dilemma that I put them in and always wonder how much knowing me affects their perception of the book.

Anyways, I went to see Gulaab Gang, trying to be as fair as possible, determined to tell the truth no matter how it turned out.

My verdict?

I loved Gulaab Gang.

Of course, I will accept my bias here, not for Soumik but for Madhuri Dixit and Juhi Chawla.

I grew up on them. I lived QSQT and Tezaab. I will also accept my bias for old school Bollywood, sans the nauseating wannabeness of what has come to sully its good-name, a  Bollywood of larger-than-life characters and conflicts, script-writers who could craft memorable lines and actors who could deliver them. Dilip Kumar. Raj Kumar. Shotgun. Amitabh. Sunny. Dharam. Prabhuji. Gulaab Gang stays true to the spirit of that masala Bollywood. And in a refreshing departure from current fashion, it is reverential to its roots rather than mocking in the way the Dabangg, Singham  and that Rohit Shetty-Akshay-Kumar-Ajay-whatever-how-he-spells-his-last-name-as-now school of forty-feet-jumping trucks is, where the conventions of classic Bollywood are extravagantly exaggerated and played for comedy and nothing else.

There are some things Gulaab Gang gets bang on. First is the supporting cast. Usually in movies with two dominant characters who understandably will be given “the lines”, it usually happens that the supporting cast gets reduced to out-of-focus frame-fillers and scene-setters for the stars. Here there are very well delineated secondary characters who are given their own space. The result is a fully-fledged universe which deepens the dramatic conflict between the two stars, since now you understand what and who they are fighting for. Then of course there is the dialogbaazi, the verbal jousting between Madhuri and Juhi , which while being not as epic as Raj Kumar and Dilip Kumar in Saudagar (it will remain my favorite forever), is enjoyable nonetheless. The lines work. The delivery works even better.

Madhuri Dixit gives the performance  I thought she would. The surprise however is Juhi Chawla. Used to her as the one with the goofy eyes and that slightly scatter-brained expression, here she is just marvelous in her reinvention. The word marvelous is over-used but I can assure you I used the word with deliberation. She really is. In an era where villains have become rarer than dinosaurs, and no I don’t like Prakash Raj “Pharpharpharphar” at all, and the only great evil performance I can remember in recent times is Rishi Kapoor in the Agneepath remake, Juhi Chawla makes an entry to the hall of  memorable “bad men” and she chews it up and throws it out. Though one can say that the character is uni-dimensional and classic Bollywood rarely had more than cardboard characters, I did find quite a bit more to her character than just villainy. Like the heroine, she is a woman trying to rise in a male-dominated world, coming out of the shadow of being the one standing behind in the portrait of her husband to an independent individual, and her reaction to a bureaucrat calling her by her first name sans a salutation obviously because she is a woman, is most memorable. There are some other subtleties, which are worth calling out. When the Madhuri Dixit comes to meet her for the first time, Juhi Chawla sizes her up very cattily, noting her clothes and everything else, with a dismissive sneer. This rather feminine dynamic is captured well, (a man wont usually look at an antagonist’s clothes) which shows that Gulaab Gang is not just about replacing the traditional male characters with female but adding something a bit more.

Of course it’s not perfect. The ending I felt was slightly disappointing, almost rushed, and I would have preferred a more cerebral victory, with one character checkmating the other. And even more tellingly, the song-dance sequences. While one understands the diktats of commercial cinema and that of stars, and even accept that a group of women would sing and dance, the problem is when the song-dance sequences occur. In the first half-hour of Gulaab Gang, there is a scene where the gang cuts the water and electricity lines of a local administration office and board up its windows to prevent officials from leaving, the officials having cut off electricity to the villages because they want more in terms of bribes. With the gang surrounding the office, the tenseness of the standoff is totally dissipated by the dance that follows.

And I realize it’s not going to be everyone’s cup of tea. If you find old-world Bollywood cheesy and tacky, (Hint: you buy nachos at the multiplex) avoid it. If you are looking for an Aamir Khan “Bumbumbole” treatment of feminism and a document on women’s emancipation, then you will be disappointed. If you are looking for a documentary on Sampat Pal Devi, then watch the documentary or catch old episodes of Big Boss.

But, if like me, you are looking for old-school Bollywood and hammer-on-anvil takkar , then Gulaab Gang is worth your time.

One of the many things I do not understand about the world is why people would pay money in a theater to see Sunny Leone  in a half state of undress doing tepid things that would pass through the sieve of Indian censors when they can see her fully RTI-ed online doing bahoot hi krantikaari stuff for free.

It’s like someone getting a business class upgrade and then sitting coach-class right next to the lavatories, where the seats don’t even go back.

I never get it.

Because that’s all Ragini MMS 2 is.

Sunny Leone in lingerie and baby dolls and a song that has the words “baby doll”.

The first Ragini MMS was a passably good horror Hindi movie, given the severe restrictions of the Indian horror genre, stuck as it is in the scantily-clad lass in peril mode since the days of Ramsays. There were some nicely done moments, Rajkummar Rao is always good in whatever crappy role he is put in, and Kainaz Motivala’s demurely voluptuous charms captured through strategically-placed cams I at least understood the artistic reason for.

But Ragini MMS 2, with Sunny Leone playing a character called Sunny in the same way Himesh Reshammiya plays characters called Himesh (Himesh’s gratuitous cleavage being a horror movie in itself), is a disaster in every sense of the term.

The story? A bunch of to-be-dead-meat stereotypes go to the haunted bungalow in the center of the woods, the only massive bungalow in India that Kejriwal would not ask the governor for. The Marathi Manoos chudail of the first part returns and she not only hates North Indians but also North Americans like Sunny, as she ends up entering and then possessing her, but not in the way we are used to seeing Sunny entered and possessed.

The standard shit then happens.

It’s not that Ragini MMS 2 does not have horror. It does. The movie is a hit. That’s terrifying in itself. There are dialogs like “Yeh porno se Rituporno kaise ban gaye”. The actors seem to have been paid by expression, so over-the-top they are. There is a sequence where Sunny Leone simulates an orgasm to show how difficult it is to act in pornographic movies. There are deep-throating scenes. No not what you think. Literal deep-throating. The camera focusses down onto Sunny Leone’s tonsils and a finger is shown inside her, and no once again, it is not the Bulli ki ungli type. Tanmay Bhatt, one of India’s most famous stand-up comedians, has a one-some scene in the dark with very little connection to the main plot. And finally the first screen that comes up, the very first screen, says “The film does not encourage any illegal action of girl kissing or anti scientific activity”.

Yes ladies and gentlemen. It does not support blind superstition nor does it condone the “illegal action of girl-kissing”. So you can choke your chicken without guilt. Which also the movie does not allow for it announces “No birds were harmed during the making of the movie”

On the topic of girl-kissing, a passing comment. Yes this movie has a “girl-kissing” scene between Sunny Leone and Sandhya Mridul, which was prominently played up during the promos, is as awkward as Vadra’s pink trousers. Now here is where Ragini MMS 2 pisses me off no end. This is one thing we know Sunny Leone does very well. And yet watching that kiss is like watching an Yuvraj innings of today, you know he can do better and you expect that any moment now, he will show us what he has showed in the past and yet that moment never comes. (Suggestion:If you are into steamy same-sex action, I would much recommend Ranveer and Arjun Kapoor’s shirt-ripping, male-nipple-wrestling in Gunday over this vapid non-sequence.)

Summing up, Ragini MMS 2 is somewhat like MMS’s UPA 2. It delivers nothing.

Avoid.

[Has spoilers]

Winston Churchill had once said about Russia, “It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma”.

The Red Rose, (a scene-by-scene remake of a Kamal Hassan and Sridevi Tamil movie) is a Russia, wrapped in Russia, inside a Russia, so convoluted and complex it is, with its nested riddles, mysteries and enigmas.

Is Red Rose, with its themes of  perversion, voyeurism, gratuitous gore, sexuality, verdant chest-hair and mammaries (only Om Shivpuri’s is shown) , an Indianized tribute to the Japanese pinku eiga or the Hong Kong Cat III or the Giallo genre of Italy?

Is Red Rose about random props that prop up at random places? A naked bust of a woman on the table of the CEO. A gigantic mermaid. A rotatory telephone that lets out orgasmic dial-tones. A creepy musical cigarette case. An entrance to a house shaped like the mouth of a lion. A blood-eating pussy cat. A knife stand stocked with the murderer’s knives  but which has Love One Another written on it. A library full of “waisi kitabein” (the kind that makes Rajesh Khanna’s wife played by Poonam Dhillon go teee-heee) that include books with names like “Sex Energy”. A snarling lion-toy controlled by a remote controller connected to the toy by a wire.

Is Red Rose an alternate history re-imagining of Rajesh Khanna’s Anand, since Rajesh Khanna’s character here is named Anand, a serial killer who records his acts of sex and violence on film and then writes down details on the walls, which is about as much of an anti-matter opposite as you can imagine of the happy-go-lucky terminally ill Anand, one a lover of life and the other an angel of death?

Is Red Rose about brassieres? In one of the film’s opening sequences, a servant-boy goes into Rajesh Khanna’s bedroom. The first thing he sees is a black pussy (cat) and a discarded brassiere, lying on Rajesh Khanna’s bed. Rajesh Khanna (Anand) is there too with covers drawn over his bare-torso enough to reveal an abundance of lush black chest vegetation. The viewer immediately wonders whose bra it is, given that there is no woman on the bed.  Is the bra then the pussy-cat’s which might imply that Rajesh Khanna had a night of passionate loving with Minerva MacGonagall, whose animagus all Harry Potter fans will recall is a pussy cat? Before your mind can solve the origin of the bra, the camera focuses on it again, as well as the servant boy’s aroused eyes, leaving you in no doubt as to that bra being a rather significant element of the sequence.

Indeed it is. The bra is one of the “hooks” of the plot. As we find out later, a young Rajesh Khanna (played by Master Mayur) was also a servant-boy whose menial duties included, among other things, the rather onerous duties of washing the bra of the daughter of the house, something he did with much diligence as the camera did not hesitate to point out through multiple close-ups. One day when Master Mayur and the aforementioned “daughter of the house” were together in the house, she happened to get a glimpse of Mayur’s legs made wet by his washing of clothes. Thrown into paroxysms of lip-biting lust, she invited the innocent Mayur (to be Anand aka Rajesh Khanna) inside the house, greeted him with her blouse undone and the bra hooks revealed, and then proceeded to outrage his modesty. Except that when her parents burst into the room unawares she blamed Mayur for molesting her. He was beaten and then kicked out. From them on, the image of the girl turning around with her bra revealed is seared into his mind, and it is this that fuels a murderous rage whenever something (usually a wanton woman) triggers that memory.  It is worth mentioning in this context that in his secret room of horrors, he keeps a rack full of bras though it is not explicitly mentioned if they belong to the women he has murdered or are just part of Om Shivpuri’s wardrobe. Were there any more bras? Oh yes. In a 5 second comic sequence, Keshto Mukherjee goes to a shop to buy bras.

Is Red Rose about the undergarment cotton industry in general? In an age when bras were not “lingerie” but un-glamorous white receptacles  with seams as prominent as a Kokkaburra balls, Red Rose glamorizes them in a way that makes one suspect surrogate advertising.  And it’s not just bras. It’s also baniyans and rumaals. Much of the movie’s action is set in a garments shop called Roopsagar Clothing Store where Rajesh Khanna randomly ambles in and starts asking for random things from random saleswomen.

From one (Aruna Irani), he asks for baniyans while reminding the saleslady that he will only buy a baniyaan “jispe koi daag na ho” (i.e. a baniyaan with no stain). Critics are divided on whether that is an insidious reference to Rajesh Khanna’s hit movie Daag or merely a commentary on the sorry state of the garment industry where soiled baniyaans were packaged and sold as new.

From the other, Shardaa (Poonam Dhillon), he asks for handkerchiefs. Of course he doesn’t just ask for them, he harasses her, like louts harass air attendants, making her unfold reams of rumaals before he buys exactly one, while all the time ogling her all over. This apparently is what passes off for serial killer romance as well as for cleverly advertising of bras, baniyaans and rumaals.

Is Red Rose about Rajesh Khanna? In 1980, when this film was released, the superstar was well past his sell-by-date. In his heydays, he was all about head-shakes and romance, with sex entering into the picture only when Sharmila Tagore got into a towel. Here he is sexified, and in supreme scenery-chewing form, alternately romantic and lustful, pathetic and evil, breaking frequently into an English accent that would make Richard Burton go “Jai Jai Shiv Shankar”, and making no secret of the fact that he is hungry and it’s not for chicken roll. As he says once while romancing a lady, “Jee chahta hai aaj raat hum tumhe kha jaayein”. (My mind desires that I eat you). Whether it be dressed in a white shirt with red polka dots and matching white trousers, making him look an enormous loaf of horny bread, or a leather ensemble with dark shades, or brandishing a handkerchief with an image of a pussy-cat, Rajesh Khanna radiates an animal magnetism that is so severe “Red Rose” should carry surgeon general’s warning “Viewing this may give you spontaneous orgasms”.

And yet, and this is where Rajesh Khanna’s acting is supreme, he is most vulnerable even though he is a serial killer. When while showing Shardaa(Poonam Dhillon)  his “games room” he says “Main khelta hoon aapne aap ke saath” (I play with myself), it is difficult not to empathize with such a loathsome character, so powerful is Khanna’s craft.

Is Red Rose about religion? Rajesh Khanna repeatedly mocks the virginal Poonam Dhillons idols and temples, which shows that he may be even worse than a serial killer. He may be an atheist. (I am guessing this is the Kamal Hassan influence). The profusion of apples in different sequences, for example Rajesh Khanna gives prisoners apples as gifts and apples lie next to his bed, hint at original sin, and the skeleton that is found in  his room of horrors, might (and I didn’t look that quickly) be missing a rib, further strengthening the metaphor of Adam and Eve (Eve being produced from a rib of Adam).

Finally is Red Rose about ossified misogyny? No I am not just talking about Anand (Rajesh Khanna’s) ceaseless sexual harassment of his subordinates and of saleswomen, which somehow the women find dreadfully arousing.

I am talking about the deeper subtexts, which would make Gunda’s “Badshah ki behen ho ya fakir ki beti, ek na ek din zaroor aati hai mard ke neeche bajane ko seeti” look like a work by Gloria Steinem.

One of the main theses of Red Rose is that women today desire too much independence and bad things will happen to them as a result. As a matter of fact, a character says exactly that, namely that women have too much independence and the Rajesh Khanna character says that the fault is not theirs but society’s.

Indeed this message can be found in multiple mini-arcs within the overall narrative.

Woman character one. She smokes, she drinks, she says she wants to live life on her own terms, she uses her pendant like a hypnotist’s amulet to draw attention to her cleavage, she talks “smartly” back to her boss, she shows attitude, she wears Western dress.

Status at end of movie: Dead. Stabbed with butter knife.

Woman character two. She flirts with handsome men who come into her shop, dreams of snaring one, wears Western dress,  is the owner of racy English paperbacks (Harold Robbins’s Never Love a Stranger) and goes on a date with a stranger.

Status at end of movie: Dead. Stabbed with butter knife.

Woman character three. After escaping from the house of the woman-with-a-bra who had falsely accused Mayur (little Rajesh Khanna) of rape,(strange coincidence: she also used to read racy English paperbacks), our innocent hero finds refuge in the home of a kindly seth (Satyen Kappu) and his wife. Now the wife is all lovey-dovey and pativrata when the seth is around, but the moment he leaves in a Pan Am flight, she morphs into a slightly, well more than slightly, corpulent version of Savita Bhabhi where the curved lines are the wrong way round. In a scene that perhaps crystallized the moral perfidy like no other, little Rajesh Khanna is reading a book aloud, the lines being Sati aur savitri jaisi pativrata narion ke karan humare sanskriti ujjwal hai, when maaji, the seth‘s wife, comes in with a male friend. Both are drunk, both are talking in something that sounds like English, and as maaji totters along, anchal adrift, she giggles “Darling, do I look like a mother?” when little Rajesh Khanna addresses her as maaji. Then before the boy’s shocked eyes, she disappears into the bedroom  upstairs with paraya mard.

Status at end of movie: Dead. Stabbed with butter knife.

Woman character four. Sharda (Poonam Dhillon) works as a salesgirl in a store selling hankies. She looks demurely down whenever a man talks to her. While she does get coaxed into reading a racy English paperback (Harold Robbins) by her soon-to-be-dead fellow sales associate, she returns it unfinished, presumably offended by its lascivious contents. She falls in love with a customer who comes every day to harass her. When her beau, tries to kiss her, she repels his advances with a coy “shaadi ke pahele aap laxmanrekha ko paar naheen kar sakte”. (Before marriage, you cannot cross the line of control). At one point of time she says her only aim in life is to sit at the feet of her husband. And she doesn’t just say it to say it. After her husband Rajesh Khanna is revealed to be a sadist-murderer who was planning to record their conjugal couplings and her subsequent murder and give the tape to Satyen Kappu, the mad Seth, to derive carnal pleasure from, she still visits him in jail, brings him food, keeps the sindoor in maang, and remains madly in love.

Status at end of movie: Alive.

So friends, watch Red Rose at your own peril. It is not for the weak-hearted and the easily-offended.

It will shake your core beliefs, tie your mind in knots, and force you, like Rajesh Khanna in the movie, to scream:

You idiot, damn you.

I haven’t seen Humshakals.

After becoming a father and with the World Cup on, free-time is at such a premium that I don’t think I would have a few hours to destroy on something I have already seen before.

I know I just contradicted myself.

I have seen Humshakals.

As a matter of fact I have seen it many times.

It’s what used to pass off as comedy in the days of single-screens. Rakesh Bedi in “Afsana Pyar Ka”  pretending to be blind so that he can feel up girls.  Shakti Kapoor in Raja Babu with his Hitler moustache, speech impediment and intellectual disability. Mehmood in black-face dancing to Hum Kaale Hai To Kya Hua in Hua in Gumnaam right after a comedy bit where Helen tells him “Shut up you kaala aadmi”.

I could go on but then I would be guilty of Sajid Khanian repeated poking in eye excess, so I will simply state my point.

Hindi movies have had an inglorious tradition of decades of making fun of Madrasis, Bangalees, Sardarjees, Chinese, gay men (visual cue: effeminate), cross-dressers, dark-colored people, Africans, fat people, all in various cliched, unimaginative, juvenile and deeply offensive ways.

Why? For the same reason they had the rain song, with the white sari clinging to the soft contours.

The audience loved it.

And as Sajid Khan unleashes “Humshakals” and it marches towards 40 crores at the time of writing, the truth once again stares at us in the face.

The audience still loves it.  And if Humshakals do not make you believe that, try to sit through a few seconds of various “Comedy Shows” or even of Jhalak Dikh La Ja,  where the audience bursts into peals of laughter just because there is a man on stage dressed as a woman.

Of course if you read the papers you would think Humshakals would sink without a trace. Each and every reviewer, the boughts to the knowledgeables, have savaged “Humshakals”. Not just the critics, all over social media, people are aghast at how utterly senseless, unfunny and offensive “Humshakals” is.

The verdict is unanimous.

Humshakals is the pits.

And yet it has made 40 crores in a few days. Now that’s some serious cash for a movie with no Khan (Saif doesn’t count as Khan any more) or Kumar or Kapoor, even accounting for possible over-reporting of revenues.

How does that happen?

Sajid Khan, together with brother-in-law Sirish Kunder, are two of Bollywood’s most hated directors. It’s not just because they are considered to make bad movies. By that token, everyone would be hated. No. They are hated because they are brash and arrogant. They poke fun at other people in the industry, and yes, because they make worse films than those whom they trash.

The only difference is while Sirish Kunder makes crap that bombs, Sajid Khan makes crap that succeeds (a one-of Himmatwala aside).

The reason for that is while the former is clueless, the latter most definitely is not.

Sajid Khan breathes Bollywood. Those who have followed him from his wildly original breakout “Kahene Mein Kya Harj Hai” days know that. He was a pioneer in many ways, introducing the concept of making fun of “so bad it’s good” Bollywood cliches, scenes, characters and movies at a time when no one else did this kind of comedy in India. His perspective as a comic was one of superiority, it was almost as if he was telling the audience “Haha look how shitty these movies are”. Yet he was a fan too, because unless you were  a die hard devotee no one would consume as much Bollywood as he did. Which was kind of strange, but I totally got it, because I felt the same way about Bollywood.

In one of the “Making of “shorts on Youtube on “Humshakals” (I had time to see that), he says about one of his heroines something like “Yeh doctor kam aur model zyada lagti hai” before breaking into uproarious laughter.

Its like he is talking about someone else’s film in “Kahene Mein Kya Harj Hai” , but of course he isn’t.

What he is doing is very deliberately producing crap, and that act itself amuses him greatly.

Because for Sajid Khan, and this is a hypothesis of mine with nothing behind it but conjecture, the whole process of making a film is one gigantic gag, with multiple laugh lines.

Make a so bad it’s good film in the best traditions of old-world Bollywood. Throw in a few Bollywood in-references for his own amusement. Laugh.

Make the film as offensive and moronic as possible. Don’t miss a single stereotype. Raise hat to old Bollywood. Get people angry and offended. Laugh again. Because he can.

Let the critics savage the film. Throw a success party and go on channels saying “I am the greatest and reviewers are frustrated morons. Lightning-road more hate. Laugh once more.

Look at box office numbers. Be smug about being right about the fact that people were exactly like as they were before.

Laugh the biggest laugh.

Which is all well and good and I wish him the best.

As for me, a once-fan, I am done. His whole shtick  has become predictable and , though I mildly enjoyed Housefull 2 for its quirky in-references to some of my favorite Bollywood films (did not watch Himmatwala), there is only so much one of the same thing one can take.

So goodbye Mr. Sajid Khan. I no longer want to be part of your joke.

I, like many others of my generation, grew up on an oily diet of Kashmir masala films.

Roja. Which, besides introducing this guy called A R Rahman, gave hope to boys like me that you could have a physique like ArvindSwamy but still get to curl your fingers around the shapely waist of a Madhu, if you play the marriage cards right or if the script-writer writes that in the script for you.

Pukaar. Where sinister plots from across the border are spoiled by Anil Kapoor’s verdant chest hair.

Mission Kashmir. A convicted Bombay Blast accused played a patriotic cop and where the man who single-handedly wiped out polio played a terrorist.

Countless other action films, their names a-blur, typically starring Sunny Deol, in which all laws of physics and common sense could be violated as long as Pakistani ass was being mausichi-ed.

The rhetoric was simple. Pakistan was evil, India was good, Kashmiris were misguided and all would be well in the end if the pesky Pakistanis and their agents were demolished.

When I came out of the theater after seeing Haider, I was happy I had seen a film that had flipped the formula. I was happy that finally the censors were letting audiences decide what was wrong and what was right and that there were no bans or stay-orders or any of the other silliness that has so stifled the free expression of ideas in India,  a fact that was doubly surprising given that our wise mediwallahs had been prophesying a dystopian Hitlerian Bharat of suppress-oppress-depress ever since that man took over.

Haider is a film that deserves to be seen. It is about as ingenious an adaptation of Hamlet that you could hope to see, true to form and structure and with enough “A-ha that was nicely done” moments which make it more than worth the price of admission. Tabu is sensational, the cinematography marvelous, and Shahid Kapoor abandons his “saaj daaj ke tashan mein rahena” mainstream leading man avatar for something different, the kind of risk most of his contemporaries would not even consider taking. Haider is not perfect of course, with Shraddha Kapoor recycling her Aarohi expressions, the Rosencratz-Guildenstern Salmaniacs  hammy in a Keshto Mukherjee comedy track kind of way, and the politics of the film suffocating the narrative at several places. But even then it is pretty darn impressive, particularly in an age where people like me who love cinema have given up on Bollywood producing anything except 100-plus-crore targeted products of the Bang-Bang variety.

The pity though is that Haider is just as black and white as anything Sunny Deol would have put his name to, as jingoistic in its propaganda and as selective in its portrayal of reality as its less pretentious cousins.

To be honest, any time you name your villain as Abhrush as Pukaar does or the director’s credit says Guddu Dhanoa, you are not expecting the audience to take you seriously.

However Haider wants you to trust that it is painting the real picture of Kashmir, anchoring the story to actual incidents and making the film realistic and gritty, and then for good measure, harping on the “this is the true story of Kashmir” angle in the movie promotions.

This is definitely not fiction, in the way Mission Kashmir is, and it would be naive to argue otherwise.

It is pointed political propaganda.

And that’s where it goes wrong for me.

Haider starts off with the honest, upright doctor, with the sad gentle face, who also own ponderous books titled Physics in his library (alert: intellectual), being called by “independence fighters” to take out the infected appendix of its leader. Now being a dutiful doctor, he not only treats his patient, a criminal as per the laws of the Indian state, but extends the scope of the Hippocrates oath to also hide him in his emergency vehicle and bring him home. Now in some places, this might be defined as “harboring a criminal and aiding and abetting crimes against the state” but in the world of “Haider”, this is positively heroic, because of course the Indian state is the criminal and this person is a freedom fighter. The Indian Army comes, the doctor comes out holding his passport where he is identified by a masked traitor sitting in the car (There is a gigantic plot-hole here, given the resolution, but I am not getting into that, trying to keep this as spoiler-free as possible). The Indian Army goes into his house where they are fired on by the Azaadi-fighters with AK47s. Taking losses, the commanding officer decides to mortar down the house because he does not want to risk the lives of any more of his officers.

In some other film, this might seem to be the rational decision given that there are terrorists armed to the teeth firing back from the house.

But Haider is no “some other film”. Here it’s all symbolic. Tabu is the state of Kashmir, Shahid Kapoor the conscience, and Kay Kay Menon…well watch it to see what he is. And that broken down house is symbolic of the cruelty of the Indian state, as we are shown how Haider, the son of the doctor, mopes about its ruins, remembering days gone by.

Bharadwaj is pulling the heartstrings here and there is no doubt where your sympathies are supposed to lie.

And so it goes, Haider alternating between story and blunt political sloganeering.

There is nothing new about the version of events of course, this is the official azaadi narrative.

The Kashmiri-fighters are innocent lambs who only fire when fired upon,  the real terrorists are the Ikhwan-ul-Muslemoons, agents of the Indian army tasked with extrajudicial killings of the Azaadi-fighters, Kashmir is a big open-air prison for its denizens, and the Armed Forces Special Powers Act is the worst instrument of India’s aggression.

As I said, nothing new.

However even more important than what Haider keeps in is what it keeps out.

While there are anti-India graffiti scribbled everywhere on the walls, there are no green flags of Islam (not any I saw),  no Islamic slogans, no “Kashmiri Hindu men leave Kashmir but leave your wives and daughters” naarebaazi, or any kind of religious symbolism that characterizes the radical-Islamic nature of the Kashmir struggle.  In each frame, Bharadwaj drains out the radical green and colors the struggle with the neutral black color of secular suffering and “azaadi”. This de-religionization of the most radical agitations is the  intellectual subterfuge that allows self-avowed Leftists to throw their lot in with Islamic-fundamentalist power-grabs all over the world, despite inconvenient developments like the underdog-against-evil-overlord Syrian independence struggle morphing into ISIS,  and allows them to frame the battle in Kashmir as one waged by an evil expansionist state against innocent citizens, and not one of a secular nation protecting itself from Talibanization/ISIS-ization.

Moving on.

A standard author-trick is to make an evil character say a number of statements. Once you discredit a large number of those statements later on in the narrative, the ones you don’t discredit explicitly become false by association.

Bharadwaj does this in Haider. Here is how.

Ashish Vidyarthi plays an Indian Army commander who, in a press conference, expounds on the policy of using terrorists to kill terrorists, or as it is known technically “Jaise lohe lohe ko kaatta hai” from the film Sholay, historically a strategy used to break the Naxals in Bengal and Khalistanis in Punjab. Since those familiar with the history of the state know this to be true, it is obvious that we are not in the realm of total fiction, we are talking “what actually happened” now. Ashish Vidyarthi then says that the Indian Army does not torture, it interrogates. The movie then demolishes that “lie”, showing multiple instances of inhuman torture on supposedly innocent Kashmiri folk. (As a matter of fact, the original torture sequences were more graphic it seems).

Then Vidyarthi says that the freedom struggle is an expansionist design of Pakistan. That the movie wants us to believe is the second “Indian lie”. In a subsequent plot point, another treacherous Indian agent calls Person X a Pakistani ISI agent, and since this treacherous Indian agent only lies and the said person is not shown to be a Pakistani, there we have another falsehood.

Two lies. Now comes the third statement.

The Kashmiri Pandit exodus. Vidyarthi throws it out there, and by association, that becomes the third “Indian lie”. Once again, this is very much part of the Kashmiri-struggle narrative, the fact that the exodus of the Kashmiri Pandits is either false or grossly exaggerated or entirely voluntary, and that the mention of Kashmiri Pandits in any conversation on Kashmir is done with the express intent of discrediting the noble Azaadi fighters and bringing a kind of moral equivalence between them and the “Indians”.  Of course the fig-leaf used by the makers of the movie would be that it is to give the other side of the story, but that is absolute tommyrot, given that it comes from the mouth of the villain whose every other statement is a lie, and most importantly because, the film never once tries to tell the other side of the story in any serious way(and yes the closing dedication to the Army was so egregiously “for the censors” to be almost laugh out loud funny, like porn films that end with the message “Porn is bad”)

Again a film does not require balance, it can be as tunnel-visioned and as one-sided as it likes. It just needs to work as a film. Haider does. Most definitely.

But to sell it as the true story of the Kashmiri struggle requires some…what’s the word now?

Chutzpah.

[PS: My book Yatrik is now out. Here are details]

[Spoilers]

So I saw PK.

How was it?

TLDR: It’s a three-hour long episode of Satyamev Jayate.

For those of you who have not seen this program, which strongly makes me believe that you are not the kind that stops at a stop sign, Satyamev Jayate can be summarized as “social activism for those of us that like to watch Big Boss but feel guilty “. It picks a certain “problem of the week”, like police reforms or corruption or doctors, and then runs through an hour of over-explaining and music and appropriately emotioned-up guests.  The USP of the program, the reason why people watch it, is of course  Method-Actor Khan (known to mortals as Aamir Khan) for whom Satyamev Jayate is a perfect prop for his carefully cultivated  image as a socially conscientious superstar. Cycling through various  expressions, “the-oh-my-God-I-had-no-idea” (“Apko police ne yeh kaha?”) as if he is hearing the guest’s story for the first time, “the-oh-my-God-I-so-feel-for-you” eyes-welling-up-with-tasteful-tears, Mr. Khan straddles perfectly that grey area between reality and choreography, between the person and the persona, and if the topic of the week does not keep you watching, or that sharp prick on your conscience if your finger goes to the remote control to change the channel, Aamir Khan’s performance sure does.

Like Satyamev Jayate, PK too has a “problem of the week”, long passages of preachy exposition, poking-in-eye messaging, and each one of Aamir Khan’s Satyamev Jayate stock facial expressions. Except being an alien, his innocent “I-had-no-idea” face makes a little more sense, though for old-hands like us, there is a bit too much of the Main Kahaan Hoon Tiloo from “Andaz Apna Apna” and one of the characters he played in Dhoom 3, for me to be overtly blown away by the acting. Just as Satyamev Jayate, despite its flaws, is an improvement on the brainless muck that passes for entertainment on Indian television,  PK is definitely better than the “Bang Bangs” and the “Ready”s, a low bar surely, somewhat like complimenting a fast bowler for bowling faster than Venkatesh Prasad.

It had a lot going for it,  like Mr. Perfectionist’s perfect derriere, though obfuscated by mist, Raju Hirani at the helm, and some funny sequences involving pee-ing, peek-ing, peekaying and anal-probing, which I would perhaps have better appreciated if I was nine years old

However it is let down by two major cinematic boo-boos.

First the climax was so god-awful that it made the baby-delivered-by-vacuum-cleaner in Three Idiots seem kind of okay.

And second, Raju Hirani becomes so focussed on the agenda, the moral at the end, that rather than let the story deliver the message, he had the message write the story. As a result there is a really weak narrative and absolutely zero chemistry between the characters, nothing like the way there was between say Munnabhai and Circuit. Instead of story and memorable characters, there are lengthy lectures facing the camera, extremely contrived situations, and possibly the most-rushed-romantic-tale I can remember, between Anushka Sharma and Sushant Singh Rajput, reminding one of the Ravi Behl-Divya Dutta romance in “Agnisakshi”,  scurried primarily because the only reason it existed was to establish the message.

The basic problem I believe is that Raju Hirani is way out of his depth in PK, biting off way more than he can chew. To be fair, it is extremely difficult to make a movie that is anti-organized-religion without coming down inordinately on one religion, and unless you are willing to go fully “equal opportunities offender” like Maher in Religulous, which again is a very difficult thing to do in a fictional setting, treading carefully is a must.

Unfortunately Hirani is as subtle as a sledgehammer, a deft touch he doth not have.

Not that I believe Hirani has an insidious bias or that PK is part of a global anti-Hindu conspiracy, which you would believe if you followed the boycottPK loony hashtag, but it is true that Hirani exclusively ends up using Hindu religious practices as his pincushion. Sure, there are throwaway blink-and-miss-it references to Christian conversions and Muslims treatment of their own women, but the focus remains firmly on the Hindu faith. It’s the man dressed as a Hindu God who runs like a coward, it’s the Hindu Gods who stand ghoul-like silent as PK prays in front of them, which happens to be the most powerful scene of the movie. The villain is a fake baba, a supposed anthropomorphism of everything-that-is-wrong-with-religion, except that he ends up as a stand-in for only Hinduism. If it was just one character, it would be still fine, but then there is another Hindu priest who is shown as a glorified pick-pocket, taking away Anushka’s wallet in a way that is more like a hood in a dark alley than a man of God. No other religion has their people in authority get consistently poor treatment.

The explanation for that, I believe, and here is the supreme irony, is fear. Like most people with a bit of common sense, Hirani knows that depicting a maulvi as a money-grabbing goonda would lead to  consequences more dire than the mild controversy that is brought on about by social-media outrage or the isolated court-case they have more than enough resources to fight, both of which incidentally are good for the movie publicity-wise. Hirani’s consciousness of “those who must not be angered” is perhaps most evident when PK, the alien, puts up signs of different Hindu Gods on a wall and, if I am not totally wrong there was also a picture of Jesus, but even PK knows, from news that might have reached him billions of light years away, that forget pictures there are some depictions of deities  you do not put on walls, if you want to keep your head on your shoulders. In that context of fear, the rather provocative line “Jo Dar Gya Woh Mandir Gya” becomes ironic, almost as ironic as an actor convicted of Jihadi terrorism in real life being blown up by a Jihadi bomb on screen.

Personally, I loved the message of PK, mainly because being a non-observant agnostic with a healthy dislike for rituals and organized religion, I agree with what the movie is trying to say. The problem is how they say it, preachy, uneven, hammy and amateurish.

And while a lack of balance may be forgiven or even blatant bias (for are we not all biased), sophomoric  film-making cannot be.

Disappointing.