COMIC-CON AND 4 ALTERNATIVES

Slave Leia cosplayers: There can only be more than one.

As many of you may have noticed, Comic-Con is currently underway in San Diego, which, as film critic Scott Renshaw noted, is “a stupid place for an event where you're indoors the whole time.” (This documentary I reviewed over at Tor is an okay-ish primer.) It's the nerd Super Bowl, a massive event, a place where somebody detonated a claymore full of comic books, video games, science fiction, TV, board games, toys, fucked-up carpeting, and laminated badges. My only in-person Comic-Con experience is with the decidedly smaller and less crazy one in New York, and let me tell you, even that blew my fuckin mind. I got lost for half an hour trying to find the room where my roundtable interview with Joe Cornish was, then I got lost for another forty-five minutes trying to find someone to covertly hand my borrowed press credentials off to, eventually randomly stumbling across a colleague who was cosplaying with her girlfriend as the Eleventh Doctor and companion. Then I tried finding another friend's booth for another bewildering few minutes and eventually just had to check the fuck out from sensory overload and get in a goddamn cab.

The thing is, as fascinating as the whole thing is, and as much a nerd as I am, I still don't quite fit in at Comic-Con. While there isn't really a Con monoculture (much as it all may blur into one for outsiders), I don't really fit in with any of the tribes, either. I'm not a comic book guy (I like them, I just sometimes brainfart and think Steve Ditko coached the '85 Bears), I'm not really a hardcore gamer, for the same reason I don't really get down with swords and orcs and gelflings and questing and saying “thou” and shit, because it feels like all the big video games are The Quest of the Eldritch Dragon Lord, unless they're Tom Clancy's Call of Modern Warfare, and if I want to play that game I can watch Fox News while voguing with my PS3 controller. Movies, I do like (as you may have noticed), but I don't get automatic geek boners for superhero trailers (the squee-est I ever got over a trailer was for Bande a Part at Film Forum, because my superpower is being tweedy enough to fucking crush planets). Toys, hey, look. I don't want to be all “I'm in my fucking 30s” and stuff, but I'm in my fucking 30s. If you told me they were putting out an Alain Delon action figure from Le Samourai I'd be all up on that shit, but otherwise y'all can have 'em with no competition.

While Comic-Con is fine and dandy for the people who it's for—and I won't lie, even though I feel like I'm in a foreign country there, it's a reasonably hospitable foreign country—it's not for everyone. With that in mind, here are some alternate Cons (feel free to break with longstanding Movies By Bowes ™ tradition and actually use the comment section to propose Cons I might have overlooked):


Fritz-Con

The idea: This is something the Self-Styled Siren and I came up with a while back (I don't remember whose idea it was, and she doesn't even remember the conversation; such is the danger with goofy passing fancies): a whole Con based on Fritz Lang. Which would fucking rule. You got a solid forty years of awesome movies to choose from, even if you'd have to stick to the classics to appeal to civilians. Though, on second thought, the idea of any civilians voluntarily showing up to Fritz-Con is the funniest thing ever.

Cosplay opportunities: Many, and awesome. Dudes can cosplay as Dan Duryea in Scarlet Street and have everyone in a hundred-mile radius be like “Whattafuckindouchebag . . .”

Or fuck it, show up as Fritz himself if you want rule fucking balls:

For the ladies, you could cosplay as Thea von Harbou and get in a fight with one of the Fritz cosplayers, or if you're feeling less dramatic, you could be Sylvia Sidney in Fury—

—or Brigitte Helm—

—or Joan Bennett—

—I mean, you got tons of options here.

Must-see booths: You got your UFA booth, with a dude on stilts dressed as F.W. Murnau, that booth's got great lighting and is shaped so weird you wonder how it doesn't tip over. Then you got your noir booth, which is lit similarly but stuff looks more normal, though the booth babes have an unfortunate tendency to make men leave behind the lives they've known and unravel along Freudian psycho-sexual spirals, but hey, man, shit happens at Con, what can I say.

Potential for commercialism to swallow it whole: Nil, unless the Skrillex “In the Hall of the Mountain King” remix blows up.


Donkey-Con

The idea: A Con for the kind of people whose jokes are too complicated and “ironic.” The entire Con is spent explaining to people with increasing exasperation that the Con has nothing to do with Donkey Kong. No one really knows why it's called Donkey-Con, because the explanation is so long no one has ever managed to sit through the whole thing.

Cosplay opportunities: I was at a Halloween party a few years ago talking to a friend of mine and her roommate. My friend was wearing a big old ratty-looking beehive and smudged make-up, and her roommate was wearing nothing but a plastic bag, a white tube top and shorts, and a big straw sticking up out of her cleavage. They explained they were Amy Winehouse and her bag of cocaine. Which was awesome, because this is when Amy Winehouse was still alive. At Donkey-Con, the people would explain that they were cosplaying as my friend and her roommate . . . get it? (Ed. Note: Donkey-Con is fucking insufferable)

Must-see booths: There are a lot of them, but after the first one explains what it is to you, you leave and go to the bar.

Potential for commercialism to swallow it whole: Virtually guaranteed, because some evil white guy in a suit would be like “Hey, wouldn't it be ironic if we made a billion dollars off this bullshit?” And he'd proceed to do so, even while everyone at Donkey-Con would explain that that wasn't really ironic, but if a trip to Donkey-Con teaches you anything, it is that you do not listen to anything anyone at Donkey-Con says.


Con-Con

The idea: The world's finest con men and women “con”vene (ahh, being me fucking rules sometimes) to present the latest in flim-flam, misrepresentation for financial gain, and plain old bullshit. Paypal me a hundred bucks and I'll tell you what city it's in this year.

Cosplay opportunities: This one can be a little tough to pull off—

—which is why this one's the most popular among men:

For the ladies, there's always the classic Brigid O'Shaughnessy—

—or if you're feeling new school, Annette Bening in The Grifters (secretly one of the sexiest performances in cinema)—

—or you could go subtle and just try a variation on “eye-catching but relatively unassuming.” You know, because you want to build trust in your mark.

Must-see booths: Hard to say, but one thing's for sure, at least one of them's going to prey on your deepest unspoken desire.

Potential for commercialism to swallow it whole: Awesomely, all the corporate sponsors lose all their money, too, just like you. Though, I mean, it sucks that you got fleeced, but hey, the evil white guys in suits did too, fuck them, woo hooo!!!


Karma-Con

The idea: Fuck yeah, that's right. A racially insensitive, commercialized-to-the-gills Indian cinema Con aimed squarely at NRI/American fans. Boosh.

Cosplay opportunities: Dude. Fucking unlimited. You can be bland and go the Shahrukh Khan NRI melodrama route—



—or more traditional, which in this case is less boring (here's Madhuri Dixit and Aishwarya Rai in a still from Devdas)—

—or straight-up 70s WTF—



—I could go on all day. We're talking the greatest cosplay like, ever.

Must-see booths: All of them. Good luck getting into the SRK panel, though, it's fuckin gonna be jammed. He'll be the only one of the Three Khans there (otherwise they'd just call it Three-Con): Aamir will not be there because it's not serious enough, and Salman won't be there because the Con isn't being held in his backyard.

Potential for commercialism to swallow it whole: Considering that this entire thing is a rancidly cynical marketing thing that would piss hardcore North American Bolly fans off to the point of murder (which is why the list of stars attending is always going to be weirdly selective), having it be consumed by commercialism would be a bit like dividing by zero. But seriously, it'll still be worth it for the mind-bending cosplay.


That, of course, is just the tip of the Con iceberg. To each your own subculture. May it never outgrow you.

REVIEW: DANGEROUS ISHHQ

It's ishq. And it's so dangerous it needs a second h. 

It's a little tough to get a bead on Dangerous Ishhq while watching it. Cinematically, it's slickly put together, and while its narrative flies around all over the place laughing its ass off at anyone trying to make rational sense of things it does so agreeably and makes a lot more linear sense afterward (an “okay, we know this was nuts, but this is how we got to this ridonkulous point” montage at the climax helps a lot) than one ever would have dreamed twenty minutes earlier. This is why, even though it has moments and indeed whole sections of being a very bad movie, Dangerous Ishhq ends up being a perfectly acceptable, utterly shameless entertainment by the time the credits roll.

Karisma Kapoor (of the Kapoors), in her comeback role after several years away from movies, stars as highly successful model Sanjana, whose romance with industrialist's son Rohan (Rajneesh Duggal) is not only highly photogenic but very much the real deal. After a very whispery, gauzy bit of romantic business, dudes in masks break into Rohan's beach house with guns and kidnap him; they throw Sanjana against a wall and she cracks her head, falling unconscious.

When she wakes up in the hospital, Sanjana begins having what appear to be vivid hallucinations. On the advice of her friend Nettu (Diyya Dutta), Sanjana goes to a shrink, who tells her nope, it ain't hallucinations . . . SHE'S SEEING THINGS FROM PAST LIVES! When I say “Re,” you say “Incar-fucking-nation,” y'all. Look, you have to understand, this may read like I'm making fun, or like I'm being culturally patronizing, but I swear this comes from a wholly innocent, good place: whenever an Indian movie features reincarnation as a plot point, I throw my fists in the air like the Knicks just scored the winning basket in the NBA Finals. I fucking love reincarnation movies. I liked the reincarnation twist in Om Shanti Om even more than I liked the joke about Abhishek not even being in Dhoom 5, and that was a good joke. (Ed. Note: for non-Bollywood initiates, even though Abhishek Bachchan is the cop good guy in the Dhoom movies, he was way overshadowed by antiheroes John Abraham and Hrithik Roshan, respectively, in the first two, and in the forthcoming Dhoom 3, the antihero “bad” guy is going to be played by Aamir Khan, aka the one of the three Khans who's so awesome no one ever snarks at him like SRK and Sallu-bhai. Oh, also, Hrithik Roshan got to tongue-kiss Abhishek's real-life wife in the second movie, and it was a wicked hawt kiss too. There, aren't jokes better when you explain them?)

That parenthetical actually serves a critical point in discussing Dangerous Ishhq: the movie goes off on tangents just like that one, with little as apparently to do with the movie at large as that bit of snickering at Abhishek Bachchan has apparently to do with this review. But, just like Abhishek was briefly engaged to Karisma Kapoor—fuck yeah, interconnectedness of all things—all these reincarnation shenanigans actually have a bearing on the kidnapping case in the present day. When Sanjana brings her incarnation-derived insights in the case to lead detective ACP Singh (Jimmy Shergill, who owns) at first he's like “yeah, right” but he tries out a bit of intel that Sanjana derived poetically from her past-life regression and finds out it's real, he's like, huh, fancy that.

Completely aside from not wanting to spoil the plot, I'll stop thereabouts because if I told you what happens in the rest of the movie, you wouldn't believe it. Suffice to say, Karisma Kapoor gets to wear a lot of cool clothes, Jimmy Shergill fucks shit up left and right, and while nothing that happens makes a lick of sense, an audience able to find something sturdy enough to suspend their disbelief with should have an okay time. It's a nice-looking picture with pretty actors and a couple not-half-bad songs.

One thing that can't be alibi-ed away, though, is Karisma Kapoor's performance. It's not that she's bad for the whole picture, but her performance is all over the place, and she seems like she's asleep for most of the present-day stuff. It doesn't help that the character is written as kind of a dingbat, but Lolo's huge unblinking, expressionless eyes don't convey a ton. I feel bad, because she's one of those actors you want to be good, but she ain't too great with nuance. The big emotional stuff, she's better at; this is why, as shit gets crazier and crazier in the second half her performance improves a bit, and she has a lot of supporting help. Like Jimmy Shergill. Holy shit that guy rocks.

So, yeah, Dangerous Ishhq: the extra “h” in “ishq” is for “Hwhat the fuck?” but mostly in a good way. No idea how it'll play with mass audiences, but it'd be nice for Karisma Kapoor to have a hit, just because.

FROM THE HEART: DIL SE

In order to be a full-fledged, card-carrying movie star, you need to have at least one picture that, no matter who you show it to, even someone who doesn't even like you, there's only one possible response: “That was fucking great.” John Wayne had Red River, The Searchers, Stagecoach etc etc to point to when the “Hey, you're a drunk right-wing shithead and you're old” clamor got too loud. Elizabeth Taylor, even when she was threatening to become more famous for her multiple marriages than her work, could sit people down and be like “Watch National Velvet, A Place In The Sun, and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf and pour yourself a Shut The Fuck Up on the rocks.” Hell, even Keanu has the first Matrix. And yes, there's a lot of room on the movie star spectrum between the first two examples and the third, but that's the thing, no matter how annoying you are, no matter how dim the memories of your previous successes are, no matter how stupid the tabloid stories you get caught up in, if you have that one unassailable classic in your repertoire, you get to be a movie star. So it is with Shahrukh Khan and Dil Se.

Now, it's not even really like Shahrukh is in that bad shape. He's still the king. Ra.One made money, Don 2 made money and featured a surprising amount of legit, not-graded-on-a-curve ownage. But dumb shit like throwing a hissy fit and smacking Shirish Kunder around for no apparent reason other than Shirish Kunder being a sarcastic wiseass (Ed. Note: I don't mean that in a bad way at all; much love and respect for Shirish Kunder) can lead to a bit of SRK fatigue—at best—and can retroactively color one's opinion of his entire career at worst. It doesn't help that even in his good movies he has bits of schtick that he falls back on that can be almost catastrophically irritating (put it this way, if I never see the guy play a dork or a hick again I will not die feeling a sense of loss) even if five minutes later he saves the day by being awesome again. Can the king stay the king without being start-to-finish awesome in at least one movie? No. How awesome does a movie star's best role have to be to completely nullify all the shaky and inconsistent others? Very. With that in mind, I present you with this:



That right there is what this whole cinema shit is about. Shouts, of course, to A.R. Rahman and Gulzar, who wrote the awesome song, Malaika Arora for existing, Farah Khan for the choreography, and everyone else involved in the creation of that six and a half minutes of joy, because that is hands down one of the most exuberant and sublime sequences ever captured on film. And that's how the movie starts. That thing at the beginning, with Shahrukh in the rain, is the first scene of the movie, right after he meets the girl in the train station and immediately falls head over heels in love with her.

The rest of the movie maintains that sense of emotional size. Set in the buildup to the 50th anniversary of Indian independence, the story concerns Shahrukh—a radio reporter—working on a story about the precarious, and indeed fractured, state of the union, with some states on the brink of openly opposing New Delhi with violence. His having fallen in love with the mysterious Manisha Koirala, and her keeping him at at least arm's length, becomes an increasing distraction to his work. Even after his family arranges for him to marry Preity Zinta, he can't get Manisha out of his head and heart. Even after he finds out that Manisha is working with a terrorist organization planning to assassinate the President.

It's one thing to have a big, booming romantic plot, another to set that story in the context of national affairs and politics, but it's something else entirely to do it so well. Director Mani Ratnam does a number of things spectacularly well here: the number and richness of the levels in the love story, portraying his characters as less good guys and bad guys than people who do good and/or bad things for believable human reasons, and keeping a long movie from feeling excessively long. Not to be underestimated among his accomplishments here is getting arguably the finest performance of his career out of Shahrukh Khan.

That's the thing about this movie. SRK is so fucking good in it. All his considerable charm and massive charisma are on display here. But more impressive is the seemingly unaffected humanity, the increasing desperation and self-destructiveness of his love for Manisha Koirala, and the way that even as it increasingly leads him to abandon his work, family, and even risk his life itself for the sake of that all-consuming love, is that he remains emotionally affecting. At no point are we ever sitting there going, “Fuck's sake, SRK, let it go.” Rather, we're like, “Oh, man, poor guy . . .” This even as Preity Zinta is sitting there in an arranged marriage to some dude who's clearly in love with someone else; a lesser movie would have the audience siding with either SRK or Preity depending on one's personal loyalties or the skill of the movie's execution, but in Dil Se both of them have the audience on their side at the same time. (And whoa boy is the SRK/Preity relationship fascinating in this. They both love someone else despite having to be married to each other, but there's a genuine fondness there that feels palpably real.)

I won't spoil the ending for anyone who's yet to see it, even though the only DVD currently available is this fucktastically terrible transfer with slightly Alvin and the Chipmunksed sound that's all stretched out and fucked up on a 16:9 TV. Watching Dil Se is an almost Zen challenge on this DVD, and lemme tell ya: if this movie was this fucking good when I had to squint to read the subtitles and mentally slow down all the music in my head by about 12%, I can only imagine what it'd be like with a good 35mm print and good speakers. Holy shit.

But back to SRK for a second. He gets to be the king, he gets to pop up in people's corn flakes in animatronic miniature form hectoring them to go see Ra.One, he can be as pissy in the tabloids for as long as he wants, but he'll always be a movie star if only for Dil Se. It says something that among all the Indian film fans in my acquaintance, across all lines of taste, genre preferences, anti-SRK, pro-SRK, every last one of them is like, “Dil Se? Good fuckin' movie.” Just like Ed Lauter in True Romance talking about Comin' Home In a Body Bag. And all true cineastes know, that “good fuckin' movie” is the highest honor cinema can achieve.

Dude, just watch this one more time:



The advocate rests.

THE FIRST PERSON TO MENTION WHITNEY HOUSTON SHALL BE DISHOOMED TO DEATH BY SALMAN KHAN: BODYGUARD

I had the great pleasure of getting to see Salman Khan's latest, Bodyguard, for free last night. Things like getting to see movies before their release, and not having to pay, are things that no one should ever get jaded about. And neither is Salman Khan, the guy's just fucking wonderful, one of the greatest movie stars in the world in all the right ways. If one were to break down the Three Khans really simplistically from an outsider's perspective (Ed. Note: What? Why are you giving me that look?): Shahrukh is the ambitious, Hollywood-y one who makes shitloads of money, Aamir is the one everyone can look at and be like “okay, that guy is a really fucking good actor” (but who also, it must be noted, makes shitloads of money), and Salman is the one who does stuff like “Every year, I'm going to time my big movie so it comes out right at the end of Ramadan when everyone's in a good mood.” And thus Salman is the one everyone thinks of as their homie, Sallu-bhai, standup guy, the kinda dude who's always got your back in a fight—and who will own the holy fuck out of anyone who steps to you—but who when you get right down to it is a total sweetheart.

In that regard, Bodyguard is very much a Salman Khan picture. In it, he plays ace bodyguard Lovely Singh, “the one man who can make the opposition pee its pants” (an apt descriptor of Salman Khan in ownage mode if there ever was one) who is hired by rich guy Raj Babbar to keep his daughter (Kareena Kapoor) safe from some baddies in the white slavery trade who wish her harm. Only problem is, Kareena and her equally lovely friend Hazel Keech—

Hazel (Left), Kareena (Right)

—are self-conscious about the other kids at their high school (Ed. Note: yes, Kareena's 30 and Hazel's 24 and they both look 24, just shush) making fun of them for having this square-ass dude in a suit following them around. So Kareena starts prank-calling him and lo and behold after a while she falls in love with him, only he's in love with who he thinks is someone else.

The romantic plot of Bodyguard, which at first appears to be the subplot but then becomes the main plot—forget it, Jake, it's Bollywood—is a little frustrating, not because it's based on cultural assumption that don't translate (those I can roll with a little easier, actually) but because it's based on my least favorite rom-com trope ever: the plot that hinges entirely on the lovers lying to each other. That shit drives me up the fuckin wall. Fortunately the annoying part of the whole business—when Kareena and Hazel are making Salman look ridiculous—is mainly confined to the first half of the picture. After the interval, the tone shifts more from stupid rom-com screwball bullshit to a more sighing romantic tragedy thing where Kareena starts to see the consequences of lying to her one true love, which is easier to take, though still it's more of a relief when the romantic plot resolves in the way it should (Spoiler alert for anyone who just had a lobotomy: Salman and Kareena get together at the end of the picture) than it is a big romantic tear-jerker thing, which it easily could have been with their individual and combined star power.

By far the most entertaining parts of Bodyguard are the (sadly few and far between) action sequences. Herein we see one of the world's foremost purveyors of ownage kicking ass on a mind-bending, ripping up speeding tickets from the cops enforcing the laws of physics, thoroughly fucking rad fashion. The first one (and the first of ten trillion times we hear Salman's goofy-ass ringtone, a joke that somehow never gets old), when his boss calls him up and sends him to go own some bad guys in a warehouse who are holding some girls hostage in a cargo container, Salman swoops out of the train he's riding on and jumps on top of one going the opposite direction and rides to the scene of the crime on top of the train, just because there isn't enough room inside the train for his balls, I suppose (kinda reminds me of the climax of Wanted when Salman jumped out of the car and did an acrobatic 180 degree mid-air kick before walking up a staircase just because). Once at the fight, Salman proceeds to unleash ownage on a scale rarely glimpsed by mortals; director Siddique does a nice job of capturing the near supernatural badassery with just the right degree of perspective of “okay, this shit isn't possible, but yo, this is a Salman Khan movie, this is how he do.”
(Ed. Note: translation approximate)

The other major ownage sequence in Bodyguard comes right before the lengthy denouement, when Salman has to rescue Kareena from the baddies. This one is really something else:

1—The baddies chase Kareena with a fucking remote-control helicopter that despite moving very quickly never catches up with her even though she does not, to be kind, run terribly fast.

2—Salman makes said helicopter explode into a cute little fireball by throwing something at it; save your “but RC helicopters are electric and don't have any gasoline to turn into a fireball” protestations, this isn't the movie for them.

3—I'm probably missing some intervening step, but the rest of the fight takes place in some ancient ruin filled shin-deep with water, and Salman has to fight the baddies blind.

4—That entire sequence is fucking dope.

5—The way Salman's shirt comes off in this one is the funniest/most awesome thing I've ever seen. To put this moment into perspective, it was so awesome that a 50ish Indian woman in traditional formal garb high-fived me.

6—Salman owns the final baddie by punching him about ten feet through the air and impaling him on the wall, a fitting climax to an excellent sequence.

Once the ownage subplot is done with (not gonna lie, the ownage plot ending up being the subplot was a bit of a buzzkill) we're back to the denouement, in which an entire movie's worth of romantic plot is related in about twenty minutes that's way more interesting than anything that's come before; it's unfortunate that it has to be rushed, as I would far rather have watched a whole movie that was a love triangle between Salman, Kareena, and Hazell than just the last twenty minutes' worth.

Still, griping about tonal inconsistency is retarded with Bollywood movies, as that's what the entire structural model is built on over there, and even griping about plot lumpiness within that model is kind of beside the point here because there's a lot to like in Bodyguard. Salman carries this joint through a whoooooooole lotta slow parts just by being awesome, and Kareena is delightful when the script doesn't insist that she be an annoying, bratty teenager (it's not the cognitive dissonance involved with her so clearly not being a teenager, either, it's the script making her look bad). And yes, I am totally under the spell of Hazel Keech and her enchanting glasses, even though it's impossible to tell whether she can actually act, stuck in the “friend” role and given nothing to do until that one scene right at the end when the love triangle is established, though she does a perfectly fine job at that.

And the music is terrific. The theme song is in Jalwa territory in terms of catchiness, with a whistled hook that's just fuckin sick. Also, in a cameo as herself, the luminously lovely Katrina Kaif shows up during said song, leading into a funny bit where Salman, as her bodyguard, kicks a bunch of dude's asses who get too close to her, leading to the revelation that Salman's boss, as a man of taste, has a bit of a crush on her. As one does.

Overall, Bodyguard is recommended primarily for audiences for whom the mere presence of Salman Khan counterbalances any weaknesses a movie might have. I fall squarely within that demographic, and so need to clarify that all my bitching about the way the romantic plot is structured should not in any way be interpreted as my not having enjoyed the movie. Like all Salman Khan movies, and like the man himself, Bodyguard totally fucking means it. Would I prefer a little more action in his next outing? Sure, but the action in Bodyguard is sufficiently dope that quality makes up for quantity. It's not Bollywood for beginners, but it's a deeply satisfying intermediate course. Goddamn Salman Khan is awesome.

FULL GROWN MAN, NOT AFRAID TO CRY: JAAN-E-MANN

Movies famously provide an escape from reality when times are tough, and without getting into too many details I'm not very happy these days. I spent a week and a half on jury duty on a really awful case that ended with an incredibly contentious deliberation and a verdict that involved a truly revolting moral compromise. Even before this I didn't have much faith in democracy as a system or in our societal institutions but right now, as I told a slightly alarmed friend the other night, my current state of mind makes David Simon look like a 6 year old waking up early on Christmas morning to see what Santa brought. I'm not saying we should nuke the United States to glass and call it a day, but you know. I'm not exactly in the mood to watch any hard-hitting dramas about abuse and injustice, let's put it that way.

Jaan-E-Mann, on the other hand, is exactly the kind of picture I'm in the mood for these days. The title in English translates to “sweetheart,” and wouldn't ya know, it's about two guys in love with the same girl. But that's like saying a string quartet is a couple schmucks with violins. Packed with metacinematic references (breaking the fourth wall so often the motherfucker simply isn't there anymore after about an hour) and featuring a number of excellent songs, Jaan-E-Mann is a totally compelling, vividly romantic movie. Amazingly, it's the directorial debut of Shirish Kunder, who also wrote (story, screenplay, and dialogues; the credits are separate in India), edited, and wrote some of the music. It's executed with such polish, its exuberance so controlled, its merging of form and content so harmonious, that it feels like the work of a veteran hitting his stride.

Before we continue, a brief aside on the difference between a movie star and an actor. I could do a whole post on this and bore the living fuck out of everyone but I'll reduce it to this maxim: movie stars can be good actors and actors can possess sufficient charisma to play leading roles, but you're either one or the other. It can be a fine distinction, and actually doesn't have much to do with talent, though “actors” tend to be better actors than “movie stars” (conversely, “movie stars” tend to be more charismatic, badass, sexy, etc than “actors”). Classifying someone as more of a movie star than an actor doesn't necessarily mean you're calling him or her a shitty actor. It just means they have that ineffable, unquantifiable “it” that makes movie magic.

This is a way of explaining that the other half of the equation that makes Jaan-E-Mann so enjoyable, and symbiotic with Shirish Kunder's inspired direction, is the presence of three movie stars of the caliber of Salman Khan, Akshay Kumar, and Preity Zinta. Part of what makes all three of them so special is the absence of any gray area. When Salman Khan is awesome, he's more awesome than anyone ever (and, paradoxically, the same is true of Akshay). When he's in love, he's more in love than anyone ever. When Salman's heart is shattered, the lights go dark and the window behind him literally explodes; sure, that's Shirish being a wiseass, but the way Salman makes his eyes go big completes the effect. The window shattering was a directorial choice, but it doesn't work without Salman selling it.

I use Salman as an example, but Akshay and Preity are both operating on the same level. Akshay's more dorky than anyone ever, and more in love with Preity than anyone ever (just like Salman is; stupid paradoxes). Preity is—play on words coincidental—prettier than any girl ever, and more torn between the two men who love her than anyone ever. You get the point. It's a big romantic picture, the kind that makes you go ooh and ahh and cry and stuff. You need movie stars for that kind of thing, and these three are most definitely that.

The story is framed by astronaut Akshay Kumar telling his blonde cosmonaut companion—whose face we don't see just yet—that he's got to call his friend to wish him happy birthday. She points out that it's only 5 am in Mumbai and gets Akshay to explain just what's up, because he's acting a little weird. So, in flashback, Akshay starts telling her about his buddy Salman Khan, an aspiring actor madly in love with Preity, his college sweetheart (Ed. Note: that wording's ambiguous on purpose; this movie may not be subtle but I sure as shit am). Naturally, being Bollywood, there's a song, and there's this awesome bit in it where Salman and Preity are dancing around the set to various producers' offices, and only when Salman takes his shirt off does a producer give him a part. For the uninitiated, an explanation:



Over the course of the song, Salman and Preity get married. Eventually, though, the song ends and Salman's producer gives him an ultimatum: no one's gonna come to see the picture if the hero's married, numbnuts, you have to hide your marriage. Though it eats him up inside, Salman agrees, and he's in the process of packing his shit to go stay in a hotel or something til he's done shooting when Preity comes home with this big smile on her face about something or other (it's explained later), which suddenly turns into utter despair when she realizes he's leaving. So she flips out, not without good reason of course, and disappears. And Salman's picture flops, leaving him with no wife, no career, nothing but a big fuckin stack of unpaid bills and his dwarf lawyer, Anupam Kher (who isn't actually a dwarf, he was Parminder Nagra's dad in Bend it Like Beckham as well as zillions of Hindi pictures, and was normal height in all of them; this is just Shirish being a fuckin goofball again, and God bless that crazy bastard). Preity's suing Salman for 5 million rupees in alimony, and Salman's fucking like “what the fuck, dude, I don't have that kind of money, even though that's only like a hundred grand US, that's still a fuckin hundred grand! Anupam Kher, my trusted dwarf advisor, what the hell am I gonna do????” (Ed. Note: they don't curse in the scene, I was just having keyboard Tourettes). Anupam Kher, because he's awesome, pulls out a book labeled “Marriage Law” and finds a thing where if Preity gets married, Salman doesn't have to pay alimony. And they smile a schemer's smile and totally go “But where will we ever find such a man?” and right on cue, Akshay Kumar rings the doorbell.

Akshay, looking like the lost Turturro brother (no shit, for a second I was like, “Did John Turturro get Method as a fuck? No, that is Akshay . . . damn, that's eerie.”) barges in demanding to see Preity, because he's been in love with her since college and he finally grew a pair to go ask her if she wants to like hold hands or something but like only if she wants to because you know like. There's a bit of broad comedy between IRL buddies Akshay and Salman (especially since Salman was the guy who swept Preity off her feet on her first big date with Akshay; whoops), at the end of which Salman decides, he's going to take Akshay to New York City—where Preity's living now—and transform him into a Salman-esque sex bomb and help him woo Preity.

Here's the subjective part of me loving this movie so much: I wasn't expecting them to not only go to New York, but have Preity's apartment be on Cranberry St. in Brooklyn Heights, right by the Promenade. Shirish makes my hometown look good, too, and the locations are just the right mix of familiar to out-of-towners and not-yet-overused. A lot of the interiors are obviously shot in India, but seriously, who gives a fuck? Not me, that's for sure.

So Salman follows Akshay and Preity around on dates, in a variety of disguises (for obvious reasons), including an NYPD patrolman (Salman wears the uniform well, lemme tell ya) and, awesomely, Elvis. There's a great scene set at Tavern on the Green where Salman, as Elvis, hilariously embarasses the yutz who's trying to date Preity. Good times. Akshay and Salman become really good buddies and have some good chats about stuff, including one seemingly idle one about everyone in the world having not just one doppelganger but several.

Of course, anyone who's ever seen a romantic movie sees what's coming a mile away: Salman's (obviously) not over Preity yet, and there's gonna come a point where he either undercuts or abandons Akshay—who does a magnificent job of playing a hapless nerd in this, his laugh is one of the no-pussy-gettingest things that's ever existed—but because Jaan-E-Mann is a good movie, the reason why comes as a surprise. It turns out, when Preity came home all smiley that day Salman was packing his shit to take off back in Mumbai? She'd just come back from her doctor and found out she was pregnant with their child. Who Salman, in spying on Preity in aid of his marry-her-off-to-Akshay scheme, sees. And realizes everything.

Thus kicks off the last hour of the movie, with Salman walking around crying. Akshay accidentally proposes to Preity, and her family—including her roid monkey asshole brother—loves Akshay so they pressure Preity into marrying him, and Salman finds out and starts crying even more, and then Akshay finds out that Preity's asshole roid monkey brother hid a whole big fistful of “my darling I love you with all my heart” letters from Salman from her, and when Akshay reads them he's like “I must step aside for my friend” and he starts crying, and then Preity reads the letters and she's like “Salman always loved me!” and she starts crying (Ed. Note: by this point, don't front, so are you) and Salman's even done that turn he always does where he renounces his irresponsible ways and decides to better himself, where his charisma (JALWA! JALWA!) reaches uncharted territory—dude fuckin smolders when he gets passionate, no two ways about it—and he accidentally stumbles into Old Spice Guy-level fame by becoming a diaper pitchman, thereby achieving fame and self-sufficiently in kind of a humbling way in a brilliant touch, and the whole romance thing comes to a head where Akshay goes off to mend his broken heart in space (having to leave Earth because of a broken heart is fucking awesome) and Salman goes back to India to be in a movie, whereupon whaddaya know, there's Preity and the kid. Happily ever after. Kind of. What about Akshay . . .?

So now we're back in the space station, orbiting Earth, with Akshay's cosmonaut girl wiping away tears (not because she's a girl or anything, just because) and hesitantly asking him “So if she's your true love, does that mean you don't love me . . .?” Akshay says, you'll understand everything once you talk to my friend. So they get on a video chat, and Akshay wishes Salman happy birthday, and has him call Preity to the screen. Salman grouchily assents, and when Preity comes into frame down in Mumbai . . . Akshay brings his cosmonaut girlfriend into frame . . . and she's played by Preity as well! No, I don't have anything in my eye, dude, I'm cryin. Fuck off.

Now, a point needs to be made here. I do cry at the movies, and I openly admit it, but it's not any old movie that gets me going. The first time I saw La Bamba, and the plane went down and Esai Morales went “RICHIIEEEEEEEE!”? That made me cry. The end of The Remains of the Day when Anthony Hopkins' and Emma Thompson's fingers touched and you knew that was the end of anything between them? That did it too, strangely. Pixar I don't count because they have a neuropsychological algorithm that enables them to induce crying whenever they want to in order to distract from all the socially conservative nostalgic horseshit in the rest of the movies; I cry at Pixar movies but that's just because the algorithm works. (Ed. Note: *adjusts tin-foil hat*) I've cried at a handful of others as well, but there are plenty of allegedly emotionally involving movies where I'm lookin around at everyone else crying their eyes out and I'm like, “huh?” If a movie makes me cry, it makes you cry too. Yes, you. I'm talking to you through your computer. The fact that Jaan-E-Mann got me the way it did—at 9 o'clock in the morning, when sober and in a nominally decent mood, no less—means it's good.

Above and beyond the fact that it's a terrifically compelling, magnificently romantic piece of cinematic entertainment, there's a whole lot of cool movie nerd stuff in there too. There's a bit where you can tell there's a song coming on—it is, after all, Bollywood—but instead of the music kicking in, there's a knocking at the closet door. They open it and a bunch of musicians come falling out. “What the hell are you guys doing here?” and the one musician is like “Who's gonna play the music for the song?” Which is just awesome. And then the song starts. I don't remember if it's that song or another one, but Anupam Kher gets out a remote control during one song and fast-forwards through it because “no one will sit through a song if it's more than 5 minutes.” There's also a whole bunch of meta stuff where Salman's the director and Akshay's the actor when they're still trying to get Akshay to marry Preity. And then there's the thing (which I don't think is deliberate) where every non-Indian person they run into in New York City has an Australian accent. Even if that was because Shirish couldn't get a whole lot of Noo Yawk accents at a Mumbai casting call, it actually lends a nice non-naturalistic touch to the movie, and makes the audience feel as much like foreigners as Salman, Akshay, and Preity. (Still, though, Shirish, next time you make a picture in New York, hire me as dialect coach. I work cheap).

But yeah. If you want a good movie star picture, and you're not gonna be a whining penisface about having to read subtitles, it's all about Jaan-E-Mann. Big, romantic pictures are a staple of any serious and truly sophisticated cineaste's repertoire. This one's as big and as romantic as they get. Here's a sample (pardon the distracting text):



Hell, just watching that made me cry all over again. Godfuckindammit.

DISPATCH FROM OUR MUMBAI DESK

Tees Maar Khan is available on Netflix Instant. None of you have any excuse to not see it now. Well, unless you don't have Netflix. In which case, you still have a very good excuse. But you people have to buy it. You can get it from nehaflix.com for $15, which is basically $.01 for every time it'll make you laugh to the point of orgasm.

I imagine the person who accused me of taking a bribe from Shirish Kunder to write my post on TMK is going look at this and go, "there he goes again." To put your mind at ease, random internet commenter, Shirish is too busy tweeting Zen shit about fog from the set of the picture he's directing to remember to send me my fucking bribes lately. Ungrateful so-and-so. . .

SINCE YOU'VE BEEN GONE

Well it ain't half been a while, huh? Let's catch up: since the last post, I undertook the massive . . . undertaking . . . (coughcough) of reviewing every single Batman movie ever made for Tor. It was interesting, starting with the 1943 and 1949 serials, then moving to the Adam West/Burt Ward “holy kitschy 60s homoerotic silliness, Batman!” incarnation, then to Tim Burton, then to Joel fucking assnuts Schumacher—research revealed that he spent the whole second movie (probably) fucked up out of his head and (verifiably) screaming shit into a megaphone about not taking anything too seriously, verifying my most wild exaggerations—and then to the Extremely Serious And Fraught With Portent version brought to us by Christopher Nolan (who sure is good at casting: Anne Hathaway as Catwoman is going to be straight uncut meeeeeow). Basically, after that whole fuckin' thing was done I needed to get the fuck out of Batman world and into something wholly other.

Enter my buddy Abe, whose contagious Bollywood evangelism has led to me being that dickhead in the front pew who doesn't really know what's going on but fucking FEELS THE SPIRIT OF THE LORD. Starting a few months ago with Endhiran (which wasn't a Bollywood movie but it had Indian people in it and was a good gateway drug for me because it was really fucking expensive and had a whole lot of trippy FX) and continuing with a recent outing to see Tees Maar Khan—the subject of a splendidly popular post—I'm starting to really dig the shit out of Indian movies, because they understand a couple things that we kinda lost here in America:

(1) Movie stars are important. The guy needs to be awesome and the girl needs to be hot and that's not fucking negotiable.
(2) Stylized acting fucking rules
(3) Singing and dancing similarly fucking rules
(4) It's a movie. It's meant to be enjoyed.

Doesn't that sound exactly like what I've been saying all this time in between the cursing and the Schwarzenegger advocacy? It's a match made in geek heaven.

So, less than an hour after finishing up the Batman pieces, I hopped into the shower and on the subway and, with the Tees Maar Khan crew, took in a Bollywood DVD double feature. The first picture we saw was called Om Shanti Om, by TMK director Farah Khan. The best way I can describe Om Shanti Om is that it's about everything, and everyone is in it; neither of those is all that much of an exaggeration.

The hero is Shahrukh Khan, a man who gives you your money's worth (and who's damn near a billionaire in US bux just from acting, which is seriously badass in its own way), playing two roles. Kind of. When the picture starts out, SRK is Om, a “junior artist” (read: bit player) in the 70s who dreams of stardom and romancing Shanti, the staggeringly beautiful movie star of his dreams (Deepika Padukone, making her Hindi debut, which surprised the shit out of me, because girlfriend has movie star written all up and down her). A whole bunch of wonderful, completely non-naturalistic romantic stuff happens and it looks like Shanti likes Om back . . . only to have Om discover that Shanti is secretly married to Mukesh (Arjun Rampal), the jerkoff who's producing the movie! (Which, by the way, is called Om Shanti Om; Farah Khan is basically sitting there at the stove with a big old pot of meta saying “Oh, no, sweetie, you're so thin, you need more, you're just wasting away, have more meta, it's good for you” for this whole picture)

Om is heartbroken, because he overhears Shanti tearfully telling Mukesh she just wants their marriage to be public, forget the damage to her career (different culture, different rules; not being single would seriously fuck things up for her, but that's love for you). Mukesh flips out and, in a scene that raises the bar for villainy to Himalayan heights, totally tells Shanti that he's going to marry her on the set of the movie, and right when she gets all excited, he goes, “Actually, no, I think I'll burn you alive.” And he has his big muscle dudes guard the entrance to make sure she doesn't get out. Om, motivated by true love, makes a damn fine effort to get in and save her, but Mukesh's dudes beat the shit out of him, and with the wasted time, Shanti dies in the fire, and Om dies in the hospital. Right after Om dies, the wife of movie star Rajesh Kapoor (Javed Sheikh; also, as I understand it, “Rajesh Kapoor” is sort of like if the guy was named “Jack Stone” or something in an American movie, like a real generic “movie star” name), who hit Om with his car on the way to the hospital, gives birth. Which leads to them naming the baby Om.

Jump ahead thirty years to the present day. Om Kapoor (also, of course, played by Shahrukh Khan) is a spoiled, shallow, puer aeternus fuckhead nepotistic brat, totally career-minded in his stardom. He's starring in a movie where he's playing a blind, deaf, and dumb guy in a wheelchair, but he insists on all kinds of rewrites, that lead inexorably to this magnificence ending up in the movie:



That bit at the end, where SRK starts freaking out? It's because he's afraid of fire. Why is he afraid of fire? Because . . . HE'S THE REINCARNATION OF THE OM FROM PART ONE! Boo ya motherfucker, welcome to India. If you don't recognize how rad this is, there is no reaching you.

Om Kapoor gradually gets less and less douchey as more of Old Om seeps in, to the point where he's almost completely Old Om, to the point of reuniting with Old Om's Old Mom and Old Childhood Chum. And—this is the best part—launching a jaw-droppingly elaborate revenge scheme against Mukesh, who's spent the last 30 years in Hollywood and now calls himself Mike and speaks almost exclusively English. This gives SRK the chance to do a fucking splendid vacantly Californian airhead accent when busting “Mike”s balls.

The revenge scheme centers around a remake of Om Shanti Om, on the original set, which has been considered “cursed” since the fire. Om takes advantage of his industry cachet to get a big star to play Shanti, only he's planning to find someone who looks exactly like the old Shanti to splice into the dailies to freak “Mike” out and drive him insane (something like that, at any rate), and lo and behold he finds Sandy (also played by Deepika Padukone, conveniently), a gum-chewing, clumsy bubblehead who, wouldn'tcha know, is a dead ringer for Shanti! PerFECtion!

Events converge. Somewhere in all of this there's a party scene where literally almost everyone who's been famous in Bollywood in the last thirty years pops in to say what's up:

All hot girls put your hands up and say
Ommmmmmmmmmmmm Shaaaaaaaanti Om!
All cool boys come on make some noise and say
Ommmmmmmmmmmmm Shaaaaaaaanti Om!

Goddamn that's catchy.

Then there's this big awards show parody thing where everybody else who's famous in India shows up (in which Akshay Kumar literalizes a joke I made a few months ago about Liam Neeson in Taken and actually machine guns a bunch of guys with his dick). And then the actual movie starts back up and there's more singing and dancing and eventually, Om is the instrument of ghost Shanti's revenge on Mukesh. The end. Standing ovation.

Om Shanti Om is feverishly ambitious, and is every movie ever made. A point made in the intro to Filmi Girl's excellent “Bollywood For Beginners” series that made me realize why Bollywood makes perfect sense to me: it's an industry as old as Hollywood, evolving in direct, completely separate, parallel. If you're able to carry the one, so to speak, watching a Bollywood movie shouldn't be that difficult. Cinema vocabulary is universal, and as long as you bear in mind that what appears to be tonal inconsistency to a cinematically monolingual Westerner is actually on purpose because it's the most popular style in India (the masala picture, so called because the mix of styles is like the mixture of spices in Indian cooking). So, given all that, it makes sense that even though I haven't seen most of the specific movies Om Shanti Om might be referencing (whole subplots might have flown over my head) I know movies, so it makes perfect sense on that level. Also, Farah Khan is awesome, so there's that.

Of course, after the mind-blowing intense experience of the totality of cinema that is Om Shanti Om, we were totally gonna watch something else. Abe got out a bunch of DVDs and was like “okay, I've got this, it's a little weird, I've got this, which is something something, and this one has Salman Khan.” No-brainer, we're going with Salman Khan.

Non-initiates might not see the absolute logic of this decision, so I'll explain: Salman Khan rules. If that's still not enough explanation, let's try the opening of Wanted (no relation to the stupid, excessively-pleased-with-itself McAvoy/Jolie thing). We open, eccentrically, at a women's kickboxing match, where a badass gangster type takes a call wherein it's explained that he has to come back to Mumbai at once. Some guy tips someone off that the badass gangster type is on his way back to Mumbai, and the badass gangster type cuts the guy's throat and leaves him to bleed to death in public. We then flash back to Mumbai a couple months before, where due to circumstances that presumably include suicidal impulses, a warehouse full of guys decide to antagonize Salman Khan. He proceeds, in Statham-esque fashion, to fuck each and every one of them up with extreme prejudice. But the capper is that after he owns the living fuck out of every single henchman within a five mile radius, Salman Khan stops the movie to sing a song about how awesome he is.



That's swagger, my friends. (Side note: I love how in every single Bollywood movie I've been watching lately, Anil Kapoor shows up with a shit-eating grin on his face to hang out for a dance number; that guy must be having a lot of fun) The rest of the picture alternates between Salman Khan getting goofy over the lovely Ayesha Takia (though the way he neurotically fucks with her heart after it becomes clear she likes him back is a little weird, but hey, weird is better than boring) and owning the bejesus out of the entire Mumbai criminal underworld, with a few not bad songs, a whole lot of tonal inconsistency (I don't mean that as a critique, it's just the way these pictures are; as Abe, an avowed Bollywood lover, put it: “Tonal inconsisency, thy name is Bollywood”) and, at approximately where the third act break would be in an American movie, one motherfucker of a plot twist.

Turns out Salman Khan, badass criminal, killer of many men, lover of many women . . . is an undercover cop. And though there's been no apparent mention of it the whole picture, his girlfriend's yoga teacher is not only an ex-cop but his dad. This is the point when Wanted stops fucking around and says, “You want ownage? Okay, here you go.” The gangster from the first scene is summoned back to Mumbai to stop Salman Khan from owning everybody (hey, they wouldn't be bad guys if they weren't fucking stupid) and makes the horrible mistake of killing Salman Khan's dad. Before he checks out, though, Papa Khan out-Dennis Hoppers Dennis Hopper and reminds the baddie that he ain't no motherfuckin Christopher Walken by laying shit out for him: My son is going to find you and fuck you up. Which is hardly a surprise at this point, it's like telling someone “Oh yeah the sun's going to rise in the east and set in the west tomorrow,” but the way he lays it out is just badass. I wish I could find the exact quote, but take my word for it, it rules.

Following his father's murder, Salman Khan openly reveals his policeman status and has the corrupt rapist shitbag cop on the bad guy's payroll take him out to the Final Action Sequence Warehouse. To set the tone, Salman Khan decides to jump out of the moving police car, spin in midair, and start walking up a flight of stairs in one motion for no reason whatsoever aside from sheer swagger. About twenty henchmen deaths in a row consecutively win “most stylishly and brutally violent henchman death of all time.” At a crucial point, Salman Khan removes his shirt by basically flexing his pecs. This lead to the following conversation:

Female friend: You know, not to be a girl, but that's why his package is kind of small. All those steroids, doesn't do well for you there.
Me: Yeah, but metaphysically, he's packing serious heat.
Female friend: Yes, metaphysically, that's true.

Because if they had steroid testing in movies, SK would be in some trouble. On the other hand, American action movies were awesome when the heroes were all on steroids and haven't quite been the same since (just like baseball).

By the time he gets to the main baddie and the rapist corrupt cop, Salman Khan is so intense the screen vibrates when the director cuts to his reaction shots. No shit, there's like eight shots in a row where they cut back to Salman Khan and the whole movie goes BWOMWOMWOMWOMWOM for a couple seconds. Final ownage is dealt. Fin.

Sure, Wanted's a little long (about two hours and forty minutes). Sure it'd be almost an hour shorter if it was made in America (or England or Europe or wherever) with Jason Statham. But if you're seriously sitting there whining about that shit you have no soul. Consider that extra hour an extra hour you get watching Salman Khan swagger, watching Ayesha Takia's smile (and, though I'm not a fake tit guy, hers are kind of spectacular), and all those songs. More on my nascent Bollywood fandom as it unfolds.


In other news, playoff football and my Tor duties kept me from doing up a Golden Globes post. The republic will not collapse. I had planned to do some snarky shit about the bribery scandal as a preview, but time didn't permit. Afterwards, the only thing worth writing about was Ricky Gervais' hosting, which has been written to death since then, so I won't pile on too much except to say this: what Ricky did out there was straight up Friars Club style, which has been around forever and is an institution in comedy. People were whining about him being mean, being a dick, so on and so forth, but seriously. If I was nominated for something and Ricky made fun of my weight, substance abuse, frequently gender-indiscriminate crushes, or foul mouth, I wouldn't be thrilled but I wouldn't whine my balls off about it like everyone there. Robert Downey Jr. makes a crack about shit being “mean-spirited” before doing a bit where he pretends to have shtupped all the Best Actress nominees? No. The spirit is one and the same, dude, you just got away with it because all five of them actually would fuck you given the chance (and when applicable, a waiver from her husband/significant other). Both jokes are in-bounds. Lighten up.

So that basically brings us up to today. I'm back on my regular irregular schedule, and have a couple things in store for you this week, including an in-depth look at the Lethal Weapon series in honor of Warner Bros' craven, avaricious announcement that they plan to reboot the series. So stay tuned.

One last note: next weekend, a project in which I had the privilege of being asked to take part is being unveiled: Piper McKenzie's Dainty Cadaver! Everyone in the NYC area is advised to come by and behold its majesty, and everyone not in NYC is advised to get your plane ticket now. Check out this “interview” about the play. Happy Sunday, y'all!

ONCE UPON A TIME IN LA LA LAND . . . SOMETHING SOMETHING . . . TEES MAAR KHAN!!!

Consensus among critics is rarely complete, in part because critics are also critics of other critics, which makes the whole enterprise like high school with bigger vocabularies and a lot more mentions of Ingmar Bergman. Critics catch a lot of shit, often deservedly so, because being a critic without being an asshole is a tightrope, from which an awful lot of professional critics fall to their nasty, capricious, ill-informed deaths (except this metaphor doesn't work because the motherfuckers simply do not die).

Most of the time when critics all unite and declare that a certain picture sucks, it does. Critics, assholes or no, usually know a bit about movies, and most bad movies aren't subtle about being bad, so a really bad movie will get everyone piling on. Every so often, though, one wonders what the fuck is wrong with the critical community. Just about every movie lover can think of at least one “what the fuck were they thinking” picture. One such is the recently released Tees Maar Khan.

I will not pretend to fully understand the reasons in the Indian critical community for panning Tees Maar Khan as viciously as they have. I've been told it's because they want to take the director, Farah Khan, down a peg, either because she's a woman or because Tees Maar Khan isn't enough like her previous picture Om Shanti Om, which was a big hit, or because the wrong megastar actor was in the lead. People are blogging about it, calling the entire Indian critical community a bunch of assholes. It's a giant mess.

I'd like to be able to evaluate the situation evenhandedly, but hey, this is a blog. Every so often I need to remember that, and my responsibility to be a flame-fanning shithead. I saw Tees Maar Khan. If you don't like this movie, you're a fucking Dalek. Everything about Tees Maar Khan is awesome. Nothing about it sucks. Yeah, yeah, yeah, “it's silly,” “the comedy's of a low-brow variety,” “it's politically incorrect.” Suck this, you nitpicking jagoff. I laughed so fucking hard at this movie I almost sprained both ankles. The prosecution rests.

The irony of so many of the bad reviews citing the fact that it was a remake as one of the reasons why it sucked is that the picture that it's a remake of, the 1966 Vittorio De Sica/Peter Sellers flop After The Fox, got a shit-ton of negative reviews its own self upon its initial release. The two pictures share a similar kind of satire of the movie business, and the respective national movie industries in which its directors work(ed), but where the similarities end is that After The Fox was written by Neil Simon, and Neil Simon can get fucked with a chainsaw. Neil Simon is the Jane Fonda of comedy writing: he sweats blood setting up every single awful, laboriously delivered joke, all to the end of utter failure. This makes After The Fox—more irony, if you aren't full to the point of nausea already—the perfect candidate to be remade: an otherwise promising picture with one or more glaring flaws that, if fixed, could yield a result either interesting or even good. Vittorio De Sica was a good director and a smart guy who unfortunately had bills to pay, needed a hit, and talked himself into doing a script by Neil Simon, then a hot playwright who'd yet to write a screenplay. Director and writer clashed, because the director wanted to make the movie interesting, and the writer was a choad. The result was, the critics hated it and the picture flopped, though it's since developed a bit of a cult following (composed of diehard Peter Sellers and Neil Simon fans), and it is notable for attempting to do some interesting stuff, even if those attempts were sunk by Neil Simon's leaden failure.

Tees Maar Khan has the distinct advantage of having been written by someone who was actually funny, in this case the director's husband Shirish Kunder and the picture's editor, Ashmith Kunder. This, combined with Farah Khan being clearly more in her element with this kind of picture than Vittorio De Sica (who, nothin but love for the cat, was a little more at home making heartbreaking “holy fuck” movies like The Bicycle Thief) makes Tees Maar Khan an absolute delight. It's also making a shitload of money, so there.

Leading man Akshay Kumar is kind of a god. As the title character—the “half Robin Hood” because “he robs from the rich . . . but he does not give to the poor”—Akshay Kumar is all that is male. He swaggers magnificently. He has that ineffable quality of Movie Star that is necessary to making a movie star picture. One does not, as the poet said, simply walk into Mordor; you can't just cast any old fuckin dickhead in a movie and tell the audience he's a badass. You need to cast a badass. (Ed. Note: I couldn't read the squiggly writing in the Hindi-English dictionary but I'm pretty sure it said “Akshay Kumar” means “He who shall fucking wreck your shit”)

So the story is basically, Akshay Kumar is Tees Maar Khan, a master thief with a penchant for Zen-like similies about what a badass he is (hey, self-awareness is a great thing), a knuckle-gnawingly hot girlfriend (Katrina Kaif; I don't mean to leer, but there's a shot of her ass in this movie that turned me black for five minutes) and a coterie of loyal, retarded henchmen. The cops lose TMK on a flight from Paris to Mumbai that involves a thoroughly hilarious and hilariously thorough establishment of TMK as a fucking legend, involving the magnificent swag of Mr. Akshay Kumar.

Once TMK lands, he has to deal with his jealousy over his aspiring actress girlfriend through the medium of dance, and with his mom not knowing he's a master thief; he's told her he's a movie director. This subterfuge, naturally, comes back to haunt him later when a pair of Siamese twins hire TMK to steal a massive amount of treasure off a moving train and TMK decides to stage a fake movie production as subterfuge.

This involves a wonderful sequence where TMK has to pose as Manoj “Day” Ramalan, successful American filmmaker, to convince movie star Aatish Kapoor (Akshaye Khanna, aka the Indian Bill Pullman . . . it is amazing how exactly like a younger Bill Pullman with a better tan this cat is, they even spaz out the same) to be the lead in this imaginary movie. It turns out that Aatish desperately wants an Oscar, since Anil Kapoor (playing himself and looking like he's tripping on laughing gas for all his scenes) got to go to Hollywood and make Slumdog Millionaire. Why not me? says Aatish.

Akshay as TMK cockslapping M. Night Shyamalan and having more fun than is legal in most of the world doing so, adopts an “American” accent and bullshits Aatish into doing the movie, promising him this will be his Oscar role. This scene is piss-yourself funny for several reasons:

(1) M. Night Shyamalan directing a movie that wins Oscars? Hahahahahaha
(2) TMK's henchmen do hilariously inappropriate caricatures of gay movie biz dudes
(3) M. Night having gay assistants
(4) “Manoj 'Day' Ramalan”? I'm pretty sure that joke gets you elected God.
(5) Akshay and Akshaye kill shit.

So TMK brings Katrina Kaif out to be the girl in the movie and they go find themselves this tiny little-ass town in the middle of nowhere with an extremely high “caricatured for comic effect” demographic (so what it's contrived? It's a fucking movie) where they set up shop. TMK and his dudes kill time getting into comic misadventures with the locals, robbing the local bank, stumbling upon a bunch of weed dealers in the middle of the woods who pretend there's a headless horseman haunting the woods to get civilians to fuck off, and shooting a bunch of really bad footage. Katrina Kaif acquires gays who serve as makeup/hair support and entourage, as any proper movie star should. (This, tangentially, is something I liked about this movie: it's a lot more gay-friendly than one might expect. Sure, flaming is played for laughs, but not maliciously. Ah, ya know, Rome wasn't built in a day.)

Eventually, right after shit almost gets serious for a couple minutes, the cops save the day by driving the treasure train up to be robbed. TMK's movie hijacks the train and he, his dudes, and the Siamese twins manage to elude the cops with all the goods, but the Siamese twins pull a fast one on TMK and he, his dudes, and everyone in the village ends up getting busted for robbing the train.

After a trial so chaotic TMK's lawyer does two of the funniest, droopiest spit takes ever committed to film, TMK cops to the whole crime by himself, accepting responsibility for his actions. Kind of. Everyone decides to finish the movie, which they do, and naturally there's a big glitzy premiere, which TMK is allowed to attend, having been the director. And he escapes, of course, because he's international criminal Tees Maar Khan.

I'm all out of fancy-schmancy movie nerd shit to say about Tees Maar Khan. It was just fucking fun. It's two hours, ten minutes and I literally think there were five minutes total in the whole movie where I wasn't laughing. The hero's cool, the girl's beautiful, the supporting players are colorful. The music numbers are good, and the main theme is catchy as hell.

Usually, I can understand why the critics whomp on something, no matter how much I enjoy it. Not in the case of Tees Maar Khan, not on the objective merits of the movie. Sure, if it's some political thing that I don't understand having to do with the context of a culture and movie industry I know next to nothing about, okay. But this very thing might make Tees Maar Khan the perfect picture for someone not familiar with Indian cinema (i.e. me) to enjoy. It's apparently got scads of in-jokes that went right over my head (if there was any significance to Salman Khan showing up to do a cameo for one dance number other than that it was awesome, I missed it), but even without that, it's such a goofy, cracked-out, awesomely hilarious movie that it doesn't matter.

So yeah. Watch the shit out of this. But with friends, and not necessarily sober, even though—bizarrely—we all were the other night (unless the other four blazed without me, fuckers). Anyway, the point is, this is a party movie, to be watched with people who know how to let their hair down. Or alone. But that hair? Down. This is not negotiable.