I watched two in Spanish: Volver from Pedro Almodóvar (so from Spain) and Ladrón Que Roba a Ladrón (quite honestly, I'm not sure if this is a Mexican film or an American one filmed in Spanish. At any rate, the action takes place in LA.). Back when I used to work at a movie theater, my boss was a huge Pedro Almodóvar fan. So for 20 years I've been intending to see a Pedro Almodóvar film but never quite got around to it. This was my first. I was mostly impressed by how low-key it was. Some pretty intense things happen, but these women all take it as a matter of course and just move on. If anyone felt any really strong emotions, it was in the past. It was also one of those movies that starts at some arbitrary point and rambles on then stops at some other arbitrary point. I'm a structure enthusiast - how stories are put together is nearly always more interesting to me than what the story actually is. And lack of structure is itself a form of structure, to be sure. Mostly I found this movie not too terribly moving, and given the subject matter of incest, rape and murder, it really ought to have been. But I'll have to dig up one of Pedro's older, more praised works before I write him off. (Sometime in the next 20 years I'll get to that. At the very least, I have to try one of the ones Antonio Banderas is in, yeah?).
Ladrón Que Roba a Ladrón I liked better. It's very indy: limited locations with the focus on witty dialogue. It's a heist movie with a bit of a message about not screwing over your own people. My husband watched this one with me, being a sucker for a heist movie. It was good, although perhaps not multiple-viewings good.
Next up is my first movie from Thailand: Citizen Dog. Aidan was studying Thailand for geography when I saw this review up at Andrew Wheeler's blog and thought it would be cool to check it out. The boys and I watched it while Quin was out of town and we all enjoyed it, even Oliver who has to really focus to keep up with subtitles (although at not quite 7, reading any subtitles is pretty cool, I think). He particularly enjoyed the teddy bear that smokes, drinks and swears like a sailor. Although like Wheeler says, you gotta like the quirky to get into this movie at all; it is exceedingly quirky. The other five movies are all in Hindi (natch). My method of picking out which movies to buy at Eros is pretty arbitrary. Quin brings home a few Post-Its a month with recommendations from his coworker. If I find a director I like (Sanjay Leela Bhansali or Karan Johar, for instance), I get all their stuff. But mostly I'm stuck picking by actor. I've learned not to read the backs of the boxes; they summarize the whole film including the ending, which I'd rather not know ahead of time. Sometimes I've seen a few of the musical numbers already on You Tube (although frequently they are clips where some fan has taken that dance number and set it to music from a different film, so that can be confusing for neophytes like me).
In the category of things with cool dancing that turned out to be songs from other movies when I saw them on YouTube: Josh (not a boy's name; in Hindi every O is a long O) with Shah Rukh Khan and Aishwarya Rai. It is sort of a Hindi West Side Story with a Christian gang and a Hindu gang duking it out on the streets of Goa. The dancing was of course top notch (Farah Khan was the choreographer, and I always love her stuff. She creates dances that reveal something about the characters. She also choreographs large groups really well and shows a lot of influences like Egyptian bellydance and western musicals old and new. I haven't yet found a list online of things she's done to specifically buy things she's done, but when I see her name in the credits it's always a good sign). I also learned a bit about the history of Goa in this film which cleared up a lot of things I had been wondering from seeing other films (apparently the Portuguese controlled Goa until 1961, far later than I had thought anyone had controlled parts of India). It was a decent movie, although I could see why the videos on YouTube are all set to music from other films', the music here was pretty unspectacular.
Next up was a Shah Rukh Khan/Salman Khan double header: Karan Arjun. It's the story of two brothers who are murdered. Their mother goes to the temple of Kali Ma and prays to the dark mother to let her sons be reborn to avenge (themselves or her? which ever). This is a much better depiction of Kali Ma than The Temple of Doom, but perhaps this is an unfair comparison. Her temple was a really cool set, with a waterfall behind the many-armed statue and bells hanging all around. This movie did quite a few things I liked: the prayers to Kali Ma were always accompanied by mom's blood (which satisfied the fantasist in me that magic comes at a price, although Wikipedia characterizes this as a religious film, so perhaps I ought not to call that fantasy). Salman Khan's character is realistically reluctant to accept the idea that he is the reborn son of this old woman (he's not disbelieving in reincarnation, just the idea of reincarnation on demand). There is a really cool interpretative dance bit in the temple of Kali Ma that was very reminiscent of those old Hercules movies. Not that I would recommend this movie to anyone, it is in fact rather cheesy. Car tires squealing on dirt roads and Salman Khan throwing a telephone pole like it's a javelin cheesy (I like cheese myself, but most folks don't. Like my husband, who stared at me through the very little chunk of this movie he actually watched with me).
Har Dil Jo Pyar Karega... stars Salman Khan, Rani Mukerjee, and Preity Zinta, all of whom I like generally but when they get together here and in Chori Chori Chupke Chupke, the results are only so-so. This movie starts out being about a guy who moves from Goa to Mumbai to make it as a singer. Then he rescues a girl from being run over by a train and is mistakenly taken to be her fiance by the people at the hospital. Rani is in a coma so she can't clear it up, and her family instantly bond with him so he's reluctant to admit he's never actually met her before. Then things get complicated when he falls for the coma girl's best friend. Yes, as a matter of fact, that does sound a lot like While You Were Sleeping. I actually don't mind that Bollywood puts out their own versions of Hollywood movies. Yes, it's a lot like they are thumbing their noses at our copyright laws, but it's not like if they paid for the rights of the story that would be money that would ever find its way to the writers' pockets. Plus I'm just a sucker for different tellings of the same story. That said, this one wasn't particularly interesting. Which is odd; I've long told my husband that WYWS is only a few musical numbers short of being a Bollywood movie. The idea that these two people fall in love and decide to do nothing about it because it would be upsetting to other people is the very bedrock of Bollywood plotting (and the anti-Bollywood movie would therefore be Troy, where Paris and Helen hooking up is worth thousands of innocent lives because dammit, she's hot! or something). But for whatever reason this story just didn't make the translation well. The tone was all over the map, and some of the actors' performances were just weird, going for funny when the scene called for something quieter, that kind of thing. I blame the director.
Dulhan Hum Le Jayenge is largely forgettable as well. I like Salman Khan and Karisma Kapoor together, and parts of this story are quite funny. Karisma plays a girl who is basically a shut-in raised by three very demanding, very eccentric uncles. She runs away from home to take a tour of Switzerland and finds that the social skills she acquired to deal with her crazy uncles don't get her far in the real world. But when Karisma gets hassled by two drunken Swiss guys while she's dancing, Salman's character crosses the room and slaps her, then apologises to the two guys for making a scene. Then he bawls her out for acting like a European girl (she's wearing a suit of his since her luggage was stolen, so she's showing no skin at all, and her dancing was by no means suggestive). So she complains that he's not being a real Indian either, not defending her honor. So he goes back to the Swiss guys, smacks them both, then comes back to tell her "but this is still your fault". It was one of the most bizarre and creepy things I've seen. A few minutes later this brute of a woman slaps Salman's character hard enough to knock him out (not a punch, a slap. Right on the ear). Which made me feel a bit better, but the movie never really recovered for me. Plus the music wasn't all that great, which as my husband would tell you is generally the break point for me. I can put up with a lot in a movie if the music is good.
Last film Veer Zaara, which I had heard a lot of good things about. Too many good things, I fear, it didn't quite meet my inflated expectations. It's a Pakistani-Hindustani love story and it was well done, but it didn't hit it out of the ballpark the way I was expecting it to. Gorgeous cinematography, gorgeous clothes design, some nice cameos from Amitabh Bachchan, Kirron Kher and Anupam Kher. The old person make-up they used on Shah Rukh Khan and Preity Zinta for the end scenes was well done, but really too well done. He's been in prison for 22 years. I figure he was maybe 30 when he was arrested, and she about to be married couldn't be more than 22 or 23. So why do they both appear to be in their 70s when they meet again? I can see how prison would age a man, but what aged her? Perhaps being separated from your One True Love will do that to you.
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