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.