If you look up "cool" in my dictionary, you'll see a picture of Jason Statham. Because he's the coolest. And if he's in a heist movie, you know we'll have to get it. Hence The Bank Job. Pretty standard rob-a-bank fare, although this is apparently based on a true story.
Next up are two oldies I picked up on Blu-Ray, both of which I know I've seen but it was so long ago it was like seeing them for the first time. The first was Bullitt, of which I only recalled the car chase. Because who could forget that? I actually found this movie pretty surprising. These days every cop movie involves a break-all-the-rules maverick cop, it was palpably weird watching a movie about a cop who does his job without breaking any rules at all. It was nearly torture at the end: how many times is he going to let the bad guy shoot at him before he shoots back? As many as it takes until he can get a clear shot, or until people are in danger. Because spraying the scene with random fire is not good police work. I kind of admire this film.
The second oldie was Patton, which Quin had never seen. My memories of it were thoroughly mixed with the other WWII film of my early childhood: The Big Red One. So many great lines in Patton, I kept poking Quin - surely you've heard that before! All he would admit to was "Rommel, you magnificent bastard. I've read your book!"
In the Bollywood arena, I watched a lot of Aamir Khan movies. Mangal Pandey: The Rising is a film about the first Indian war of independence, when they got the East India Company out (and England took over, a bit of a lateral move independence-wise). This movie doesn't touch too much on the actual war, more on the circumstances that led to the Indians finally saying enough is enough. The script was based on source material, which was interesting. If they didn't know the motivation someone had for something, they left it open-ended (did the Company make ammunition casings out of cow and pig fat because it was cheaper, or just to irritate their Hindu and Muslim soldiers? The movie hints at both). Not as good as Lagaan, but beautifully shot with the usual top-notch music from A.R. Rahman.
Dil Chahta Hai was almost exactly the opposite: from lush period film to quiet indy-type film about three friends who have just graduated from college and what they do next. This is the sort of movie that I would catch on an afternoon playing on cable and leave it on because I've never heard of it but it has so-and-so in it. Then I'd get sucked in by the story and there's a whole afternoon gone. (You know, if this were in English and on cable. And this was before I had kids, when I used to have afternoons with nothing to do but surf channels). The music fit the story, sort of Indian college rock.
The last movie, Fanaa, started out as something I was really going to love. Kajol is a blind girl from high up in the mountains of Kashmir who goes to Delhi with her dance group for a performance. She falls in love with their tour guide (Aamir Khan). It was wonderful, her parents were loving and supportive, not smothering, her friends were distinct characters. She and Aamir traded extemporaneous poetry with each other. As Quin headed out for his run that night I assured him this was going to be one of my favorites.
Then terrorists hijacked my movie. Nothing on the box anywhere said this was going to turn into a Jennifer Lopez "I have to kill my husband" kind of thriller, but that's just what happened. Aamir Khan blows up part of Delhi (killing Jolly Good Singh among others, and I had liked Jolly Good) then leaves. Kajol gets her sight back (gah) and has a son which she raises up in the mountains with her dad. Then Aamir is doing more terrorist stuff and ends up half-dead on her doorstep. She of course doesn't recognize him (and to be fair, his voice in the two different halves of the movie is very different, and it's been about ten years, and she only knew him for a few days. So that was believable.) So the rest of the movie she figures who he is, then who he really is, while he keeps accidently or on purpose killing people because he really wants to go straight or whatever, but he just has to finish this one last job first.
Now Dil Se was also about love and terrorism, but I think that worked better. At the point Shah Rukh Khan encounters the woman who is intending to be a suicide bomber, she hasn't really killed anyone yet. So there is hope of redemption to drive the story. But in Fanaa we already know that Aamir Khan has killed lots of people. If they had tried to wrestle a happy ending out of that, I would have really hated it. But that left only one ending, and no real tension to drive the story. It was an interesting performance from Aamir, bouncing from scary terrorist to almost boyish fear of his own father and grandfather. I think if they would have dug deeper into his psyche I would have found this movie more interesting. As it was... well, there is a reason I don't watch these "I have to kill my husband/ex-husband/crazy stalker boyfriend" movies. Blah.
Kaante was actually Quin's pick. Shikha's husband had recommended it to him as a good heist film. The first half is The Usual Suspects and the second half is Reservoir Dogs. Some aspects of this were pretty cool. "The usual suspects" has a different meaning when it's the LA cops rounding up every Indian everytime something gets stolen. And once you figure out who's playing which TUS character, it was fun guessing which RD character they'd end up being. There were flaws, though. Their plan involved robbing the bank where all the cops do their banking, so that none of them would get paid. They walk right past the FDIC sign in the bank window a couple of times but apparently didn't realize what it meant. Quin thought that giving Malaika Arora Khan dialogues was a bad sign (she plays one of the thieves' girlfriend). I thought she handled acting fine, I just couldn't believe she was pole-dancing.
Salaam Namaste had no pole-dancing, but it did have a lot of kissing on the mouth, a Bollywood rarity. Quin said it was just like the Hugh Grant movie Nine Months. I don't remember that film at all, but I would guess he's right. Still, I found this funny with sharp dialogue.
To wrap up the Hindi films: Judwaa, whose box said it had subtitles but alas, there were none. I did watch the whole thing. On the one hand, I was only catching about one word in five. On the other hand, this was a broad comedy so one word in five was enough to follow the story. Salman Khan plays twins who can control each other. If one swings a punch, the other does too. Like Amitabh Bacchan's ghost movie, this irked my fantasist side. It was horribly inconsistent as to when it happened, clearly it wasn't all the time, or who was the controller and who the controllee. I don't need to know why something happens (and sometimes it's better not to explain the why, see Groundhog's Day, a film that works mainly because we never know why he's living the same day over and over), but the "how" should have rules. Of course this was all about comedy, so perhaps I shouldn't be too hard on it. One brother pounding a glass of milk causes the other to pound a bottle of brandy and they're both drunk (and dancing): OK, that was funny.
Alas, none of the musical numbers this month really blew me away, so for my YouTube fix I'm going with the best film I saw, a Japanese movie called Shinobi: Heart Under Blade. It's Romeo and Juliet, if the warring families were both ninja clans. And yes, it rocks. We got this on BluRay and it was particularly gorgeous. Not just the scenery, which was gorgeous enough for ten films (ooh, the falling leaves. The snow! Large chunks looked like scenes out of Hiroshige prints). The texture popped so much, I just wanted to reach into the TV screen and touch their clothes. It felt like I almost could.
Now, I have a certain person who critiques my writing who always complains about all the talking my characters do when they are meant to be fighting. This movie is so not for him. Two ninjas meet in the woods and gab at each other for a good ten minutes, and when they finally come to blows it's all over in a matter of seconds. Which is my kind of fighting, actually. I always liked the story of the two samurai who meet on a bridge and stare each other down until the lesser samurai turns and walks away. The actual trading of blows was superfluous; they both already knew who would be the victor.
(And as much as I liked this film, Quin was in raptures. This is his favorite since Marie Antionette. Although perhaps he would thank me for not mentioning that again...)
So here's the trailer (in English, this movie comes subtitled and dubbed both) for Shinobi. Highly, highly recommend.
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