Movies in September

October is nearly two-thirds over, so let's finish off September's posts. I spent most of September writing, so this is a short movie list this time.

I had high hopes for Crank, it looked like just my sort of Jason Statham fun ride. And I could see where this could be enjoyable; I wanted to enjoy it, but it just bugged me too much. It's the first movie I can recall seeing in a long time without at least one tough chick in it somewhere. Here all the women are strippers, hookers, or living works of naked art. Then there's the girlfriend, the very dumb girlfriend. She doesn't even have any "emotional intelligence", as her complete obliviousness to Statham's character's sense of urgency shows.

I suspect they are being ironic, but the movie comes with a "family friendly" cut, which removes all profanity (or so the box said, I didn't fire it up to see). In a movie filled with misogyny, violent mahem, and rampant drug use, profanity is the least of the things to shield young viewers from. I might even find that irony amusing if not for a similar misconnect with parenting values shown in the film, when the main character is raping his girlfriend in the middle of Chinatown, pinning her down and all that, but it's when he tears her shirt and her boob pops out that a nearby mother shields her son's eyes. Cause naked boobies, that's just wrong.

So this goes down as the first Statham movie to leave a bad taste in my mouth.

I did like The Love Guru. The character doesn't work nearly as well as Austin Powers, but he's amusing enough. I particularly liked the titles of his self-help books ("Stop Hurting Yourself, Stop Hurting Yourself, Why Are You Still Hurting Yourself?") Verne Troyer (who played Mini Me) gets a speaking part here, playing a hockey coach. He certaintly got the look spot on; his haircut is perfect. But I really loved Justin Timberlake in this as Jacque "the Cock", a French-Canadian goalie with a porn star moustache. Some of the funniest bits are in the deleted scenes, though. I particularly liked the longer take of Stink Mop, when the young Deepak Chopra wants to play but is told to sit with the young virgins practicing their kama sutra positions instead (his pout is perfect). Of course the very idea of a game like Stink Mop freaked out the boys more than a little.

Some of Quin's coworkers were appalled that he had never seen The X-Files, so they've been loaning us DVDs to rectify the situation. I was working bizarre hours when this show started and wasn't watching much TV, so I've never seen it either. We watched season 1 in September, and Quin was ready at several points to give up on it, but I and his coworkers insisted he stick it out. As it turns out (to his annoyance), we were making the same point, that back when this show started networks didn't like running storylines, they preferred a series to be a series of oners so viewers don't have to worry about following the story if they turn on episode 6 or 12 or whatever. Which is a detriment to viewers like us who like continuous story lines. I suspect the success of the "mythology" episodes of this show and shows like Buffy broke the ground for shows like Lost or Battlestar Galactica, which are really one long story. By the season finale of the first season, though, Quin was just as into it as I was and anxious to start season 2 (to be covered in my October post).

Moving on to India, I watched a Merchant Ivory film from 1970 called Bombay Talkie. It was in English, but featured a few Bollywood actors I recognized. The film centers around a writer who's just written a "Hollywood Wives" type book about Hollywood and has gone to Bollywood to look for inspiration for her second. She's the most irritating kind of writer, always looking for inspiration and never just putting words down on paper. She's also a pathological narcissist who spreads ruin and destruction everywhere she goes. So not a fun film, but definitely an interesting one. To be honest, I enjoyed the special features more than the movie; they did a short film about Helen, one of the most famous dancers of Bollywood item numbers. She talked about her work day and they compiled some of her more famous dance numbers. She must have done a hundred or more films, starting in the days of black and white films and working into Technicolor (she still works as an actress playing grandmothers these days).

So I only watched two films actually in Hindi, and they were both called Shakti. The first was older, starring Amitabh Bacchan as the Angry Young Man. His father is a cop, who loves his job more than his family, or so Amit has been given very good reason to believe when he's a young boy. He grows up to work for gangsters, which would naturally create conflicts. This was a Salim-Javed film, so the dialogue is sharp and the character motivations and the way they interact with each other is spot-on. It's not my favorite of their films, but it's still worth a see.

The other Shakti is more recent and seemed reminiscent of Not Without My Daughter. Karisma Kapoor lives and marries in Vancouver, but when her husband hears of troubles at home he takes her and his young son back to the home he had very good reason to leave. Unlike NWMD, the husband isn't the problem, it's his father who wants to keep his young grandson under his influence. When her husband is killed, grandpa wants to keep his only grandchild and raise him himself, so the rest of the story is a mother trying to get back to Canada with her son. There were definitely cultural references I wasn't getting; the family were Hindu but ate meat, which I'm guessing makes them of a warrior caste, but I'm not sure. And they had a deep Hatfield and McCoy grudge against the other family in their village which led to all the death and destruction.

It was a heavy-handed film, but I found the grandfather, played by Nana Patekar, very compelling. Karisma Kapoor was very good in it as well. The dance number with Shah Rukh Khan and Aishwarya Rai was cool and fun, but totally out of place. It's meant to be SRK's dream, but still. This sort of thing comes up in a few Bollywood films; a change of tone so abrupt it loses me. I can't see a woman burned alive and then laugh at slapstick comedy immediately after (as happened in Bhagam Bhag).

I didn't see any great item numbers this month, so my YouTube this month will be from my all-time fave: Jaan-e-Mann. This is totally what I'll be singing when I finally see New York. This is a Cyrano deBergerac story, with Salman Khan telling Akshay Kumar what to sing to Preity Zinta. Watch for the bit where Salman gets hung up in a pack of joggers and Akshay has to hum...