Movies in June

By language seems the easiest way to sort this. Let's start with English...

First up: Inside Man. When I first got the soundtrack to Dil Se, the song Chaiya Chaiya (the one with Malaika Arora on the train in the movie) sounded vaguely familiar. Which was odd, this was only Bollywood movie #10 or 12 for me, where would I have heard this Hindi song before? Finally in the car much, much later I heard it remixed with an added rap bit on one of my husband's mix CDs that he had gotten from a coworker. Turns out this remix was used as the opening of a Spike Lee movie, which my husband promptly insisted I pick up for him (he really likes this song, and not just on account of Malaika). Inside Man is a pretty well done heist film (Quin's favorite kind of movie) with Denzel Washington and Clive Owen. It was a fun watch, but like most heist films it didn't leave me with any great desire to watch it again.

The other English movie was a family film night for us: National Treasure 2. I suppose it must be a guilty pleasure; I feel a bit sheepish admitting I really liked this. It is a much better film version of Tomb Raider than the Tomb Raider movies, for one, and the interactions between the characters are just plain fun. Clearly there is going to be a National Treasure 3.

Chinese: Warriors of Heaven and Earth. I got this on Blu-Ray, and it is a gorgeous film with some stunning canyons and deserts (it takes place on the Silk Road, where China ends and Afghanistan begins, although this is set in the past). Alas, I found this a bit of a disappointment. The fights weren't particularly good, the characters didn't do it for me, and the plot just sort of plodded along. Still, pretty to look at. And I haven't watch a movie in Mandarin in a while; I love the sound of that language.

I saw my first Pakistani film in June as well. Most Pakistani films come from the film studios of Lahore, so they are called "Lollywood" (similarly India actually has several different film industries. Bollywood from Bombai/Mumbai is the biggest, but there is also Tollywood which are in Telegu, Kollywood which are in Tamil, and others without the cute names. India has some 21 official languages, after all). The movie I saw, Khuda Kay Liye, is actually an independent film, so I haven't seen an actual Lollywood movie yet. The official language of Pakistan is Urdu, which when spoken is pretty much Hindi (there was only one character I had a hard time understanding, and he was probably putting a lot more Arabic words in his speech, given that he was meant to be an Islamic fundamentalist, but that's just a guess). The film centers around two brothers who are aspiring musicians and their cousin in London. One brother falls under the influence of said fundamentalist and leaves music entirely to join the Taliban, the other has the misfortune of being in the US studying music on 09/11 and is arrested under suspicion of being a terrorist. The cousin's father panics when she is about to marry a white boy and lures her to Pakistan only to leave her in a remote village over the border into Afghanistan where she is forced to marry her Taliban cousin.

So yeah, it was a bit of a heartbreaker of a film. Very well done, though. It reminded me a bit of American History X, another film dealing with how one charismatic talker can lead a whole bunch of young men astray simply because they don't have the life experience to realise the talker is spouting absolute nonsense. And when the Taliban boy listens to the scholar called to testify during the court case at the end of the film and realizes how wrong everything he had been lead to believe really was... Oh yeah, heartbreaker.

OK, Bollywood. Khullam Khulla Pyaar Karen stars Preity Zinta and Govinda. I picked it up for 99 cents. 'Nuff said.

Insan had the same plot as last month's Garv - Hindu cop versus Muslim terrorists, but was much better done. The line between good guys and bad guys is not so clear here, with a lot of people clearly floundering and trying to find their direction. The guy who played the terrorist I've never seen in anything before, but there was something so haunted in his eyes you just know he had seen terrible things (he had disappeared during a riot and his family had been waiting for years for news of whether he was alive or dead). Not that anyone accepts that as an excuse, even his own brother (Akshay Kumar), a rickshaw driver who is not trying to be a hero he's just trying to do the right thing. In Hollywood, he would be played by Bruce Willis.

I Proud to be Indian didn't really work for me. I liked the idea of skin heads versus Indians, both having some claim to the "Aryan" name. But the main character's back story was only ever hinted at, never explained, and his motivations were not particularly clear.

Two more Salim-Javed films, both starring Amitabh Bacchan: Zanjeer and Deewaar. Zanjeer had some very colorful characters. Amit falls in with a red-headed Muslim named Sher Khan (king of the lions, hence the mane-like hair and beard) and a tough-talking girl who sharpens knives, who in the end shows that she's just as proficient at throwing them. Even Quin liked that one. The second, Deewaar, was about two brothers, one who becomes a cop and the other becomes a gangster, and their mother is stuck between them. Both very well written, and worth a see (although they were made in the 70s and look it. Actually that's kind of a plus for me...)

Bhootnath stars a much older Amitabh Bacchan as a ghost who befriends a boy. As a fantasist this movie disappointed me; there were no clear rules for what the ghost could or could not do, what he could touch or not, who could see him or not. It was frustrating. Also, this was one I borrowed from Shikha. She gets her movies from her grocer, whom I believe wears an eyepatch and maybe has a peg leg. I'm just saying, the movies I get from her always have quirky subtitles. In this one when the boy's father confronts the son of the ghost who went away to America to study and never came back and tells him he should "make prays", the man says "In America we don't make prays, but even we still find peach." I puzzled that one out for a while. Is peach a metaphor? Was he saying preach? (In America we don't pray but we get preached at a lot, perhaps). Actually he meant "find peace", as it became clear later. Not a great film, but the only one I've seen where Amitabh Bacchan raps. Oh yes, he raps.

Last film, best film. I mentioned a while back how much I loved Farah Khan's Main Hoon Na. Her second film, Om Shanti Om, came out on Blu-Ray (finally!), and I'm still in raptures. Again, this is so much just my kind of thing. Shah Rukh Khan is Om, a junior artist in 1970s Bollywood (which means he is an actor employed by the studio to be in the background of scenes, never a hero). He is completely in love with Shanti, a huge star (he talks to her billboard that looms over his neighborhood). Alas, she is already secretly married to a producer who kills her when she becomes pregnant. Om tries and fails to save her and dies himself, reborn as the son of his acting idol. Growing up in the lap of luxury has made him into quite a jerk, but his memories start coming back and he hatches a plan to make sure the producer who got away with murder is outed.

This is probably not the best entry into the world of Bollywood, as it's very referential to other films (although there were only a few things I knew I was missing, and in the big Deewangi number which featured some 30 stars of Bollywood past and present there were only 4 or 5 I didn't recognize). Still I loved Om's message, that life really is like a Bollywood movie, and if it doesn't seem like you're getting a happy ending, that just means your film isn't over yet.

This month's song clip is from Om Shanti Om. This is another one where I had the soundtrack for a year now, awaiting the subtitles to know what I'm singing along with. Aidan likes this song in particular, and I tried to parse out what the title meant but it didn't make any sense. "dard" means pain, and "disco" is self-explanatory. What on earth could "Dard-e-Disco" mean?

I pretty much had it, actually. Young spoiled Om is supposed to be playing a scene which is complicated by the fact that his character is blind, deaf, in a wheelchair and has no hands. How to show his anguish at his beloved's wedding to another? (Tough call, and when he finally realizes what's in the script he never bothered to read, Om says, "What the fish?" What the fish, indeed.) Om decides what's needed to convey this anguish is an item song, a dream sequence so he can dance, only the heroine (played by the producer's girlfriend) is not hot enough for this number, better get 10 or so item girls. But what sort of music to show the emotion? A trance number? A rock song? No, it has to be disco. Dard-e-disco.

It all makes sense now...