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.

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!