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.

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.

RACE IN CINEMA MONTH: MY NAME IS KHAN AND THE PROVERBIAL LIBERAL MESSAGE MOVIE

Shahrukh Khan as Rizwan Khan in My Name Is Khan. Don't be a wiseass and ask what his name is.

Continuing on the theme of the last post, I want to talk about a peculiar variant on unintentional racism: the Hollywood liberal message movie. This is a very specific thing, as there are plenty of movies with progressive political themes, and they can be great, but a Liberal Message Movie (or, as they should probably be called, LIBERAL MESSAGE MOVIES because the all-caps is proportionate to their subtlety) is frequently really fucking embarrassing. This is because of the “awwwww, wookit the cute widdue culture that we don't weally undastand, SO CUUUUUUTE” tone that these pictures tend to take. Even in LMMs that manage to keep their levels of condescension down, there's a tendency to grossly oversimplify shit. Irony of ironies, the liberal tendency to not want to offend anyone ends up being the most offensive thing in the movie.

Weirdly, when I was trying to think of the most annoying example I could of this tradition, the one I came up with wasn't a Hollywood movie. It wasn't even from America. But much like one sees one's one flaws most clearly in others, it took a foreign picture trying its damnedest to be a Hollywood liberal message movie to really shine a light on how staggering the fuckups can be therein. The picture is called My Name Is Khan, directed by Karan Johar, and starring Shahrukh Khan.

It's not a total disaster, and its heart—as with all LMMs—is in the right place. Shahrukh Khan stars as Rizwan Khan, a Muslim from India who has Asperger's Syndrome (thus making it a near-stereotypical “PLEASE I'M DESPERATE FOR AN OSCAR PLEASE GIVE ME ONE I'LL SUCK YOUR DICK” role, though it's one that SRK does a creditable and sympathetic job with; he's never quite as annoying as he could be, even though the accuracy of his portrayal of someone with Asperger's is slight at best). The story is told through heavy use of flashbacks, but what's eventually revealed is the following: In typical LMM fashion, Rizwan has a savant-like ability to repair just about any mechanical object, and a tendency to utter Great Truths. He encounters, first in India and then when he emigrates to the United States, a good deal of anti-Muslim prejudice that basically takes the form of people marching up to him and going “I AM PREJUDICED AGAINST YOU BECAUSE YOU ARE A MUSLIM. HAVE YOU ANYTHING TO DO OR SAY THAT SHALL REVEAL ME TO BE FOOLISH IN MY PREJUDICE, MR. KHAN?” And when it's expedient for the plot, he does.

In San Francisco, Rizwan falls in love with a pretty Indian hairdresser, Mandira (Kajol). It's love at first sight, at least for Rizwan. (The first picture Shahrukh and Kajol made together, Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, in 1995 is an all-time classic in Bollywood, and is so largely because Shahrukh and Kajol blaze when they're on screen together. Anyone who's ever cried at the movies and hasn't seen it is advised to stop reading this immediately and rent DDLJ.) So a bit of mildly (but not terribly) embarrassing cutesy “I'm autistic and awkward but I love you” business out of Shahrukh—not the world's subtlest actor at the best of times—and Kajol triumphs over the fact that there's no way Mandira should plausibly fall in love with yutz Rizwan and falls in love with Shahrukh. (Or, more simply, real movie stars don't let dumb scripts get in their way. They know what people are there watching the movie for.) They get married, and Rizwan's brother manages to get past the fact that Mandira is Hindu, and everyone's good and happy and it's the American dream, and Rizwan adopts Mandira's son Sameer and yay!

Then 9/11. One thing I do have to give MNIK credit for is a straightforward anger at how fucking stupid Americans got about Muslims after 9/11 (which has eased slightly in the decade since, but not anywhere near enough). This comes to a head when Sameer's white American BFF, having snubbed him out of post 9/11 racism, and a group of bullies set upon Sameer (who, being brown, was clearly responsible for the attacks) and call him “terrorist” and rough him up a bit. Sameer makes the mistake of fighting back, and they really stomp the piss out of him. I mean, they fuck him up good. But (and this is where MNIK did an irreversible plausibility swandive and faceplanted straight into an unforgiving concrete floor of “get the fuck out of here”) the way the bullies kill him is when Sameer gets back up and is talking shit, the alpha bully kicks a soccer ball into his chest. And that puts him out. Yes, that happens, you hear about kids getting hit with baseballs and just dropping dead, but come on.

Mandira goes into deep shock, and in her anger blames Rizwan for Sameer dying, by being Muslim. Rizwan, having no other sense of the world than the absolutely literal, says, “but I am not a terrorist,” to which Mandira, rhetorically, says “Go tell the president 'My name is Khan and I am not a terrorist'” in a “get the fuck out of here you Forrest Gump motherfucker” kind of tone. So Rizwan packs a bag and sets out to go find the president to tell him “My name is Khan, and I am not a terrorist,” his refrain for the whole movie, introduced in the first scene.

In Rizwan's travels, he meets a bunch of people, some good, some bad, but all are overshadowed when he finds himself in Georgia, and a young black urchin wipes out on his bicycle and asks Rizwan for help. Rizwan takes him home and . . . well . . . there's no way to accurately convey how unfuckingbelievable this is if you haven't seen the movie, but anyone who has can tell you, I'm not exaggerating at all when I say the kid with the bicycle lives in a village that's like the fucking Shire in Middle Earth but instead of Hobbits it's Gone With The Wind-esque black people. Again, that's not an exaggeration at all. The bike kid's mom is literally named Mama Jenny. And Rizwan calls the kid, Joel, “Funny-hair Joel” for the whole rest of the movie because he's got a 'fro. Yeah.

Like, okay. American movies fuck stuff up all the time. I'm sure at some point some American movie set in another country and committed fuckups of this or similar caliber. I'm sure thirty of you could name the worst example and come up with thirty different answers. It's just . . . until someone comes and does it to your country you don't really realize how bad it is (and I know it sounds like I'm whining about people being mean to America, that's not it at all, it's that I'm like oh fuck this is how it feels to everyone else when we make shitty movies. . . ) And to compound things, in the mutual agape for all things Hollywood middlebrow shared to varying degrees by Karan Johar and Shahrukh Khan, they do it in a really earnest Hollywood middlebrow kind of way, which means not only does it suck, it's so melodramatically treacly that it's just like . . . fuck.

So, Rizwan stays in the Shire for a little while before moving on and getting into trouble for trying to barge up to the president while saying something about the word “terrorist.” Eventually, everything gets cleared up, but then a fictional version of Hurricane Katrina hits, and Rizwan has to race back to the Shire and singlehandedly try and save everyone. This makes national news, and finally gets Rizwan his audience with the president (the guy they got to play Barack doesn't look much like him but does a fair vocal impression, though they cover for this by not naming him, he's just “the president”) and finally gets to tell him “my name is Khan and I am not a terrorist.” And Barack is like, “I know.” Because Barack is awesome. (Well, also, Barack kills the fuck out of terrorists. You know what I'm saying? Like, he doesn't just kill them he kills the motherfucking fuck out of them. The Seal Team Six raid that ended up with Osama bin Laden getting murked was so fucking awesome they needed to get Kathryn fucking Bigelow to direct the movie of it. So, if Rizwan had been a terrorist, Barack probably would have crushed his nuts with his fucking mind. Anyway, sorry, that's me not being a terribly good progressive, but hey, them's the bricks.)

The thing to remember, is that like all good Liberal Message Movies, My Name Is Khan doesn't mean any harm. It doesn't have a mean bone in its body. Even the little shitheads who kill Sameer are immediately remorseful. It's just . . . dude, that bit with Mama Jenny in the Shire is just flabbergasting. My Name Is Khan is an atypical Bollywood movie in a lot of ways (paramount among which is that it's distressingly light on songs) but one way in which it holds true is in the sense that when Bollywood movies go there, they Go There. When they're good they're damn near the best thing there is. When they're bad, holy shit do they suck. I'll take the bad if it means we also get the good, but fuck a duck when you mix the way Bollywood swings for the fences with the kind of guileless schmaltz of Hollywood Liberal Message Movies the result is a serious cautionary tale. Because My Name Is Khan came out in 2010. It shouldn't leave its audience floundering for a cultural frame of reference more recent than Gone With The Wind.

And the great shame of that bit is that it undermines a lot of the things K-Jo and SRK got right. There's a subplot about how Rizwan's in a mosque praying and overhears a bunch of guys who have fucking Had It and are about to resort to terrorism. Shahrukh plays Rizwan's freakout really well. He just flat out tells the guys, you're wrong and you shouldn't do this, in a way that would have been horribly on the nose and basically the filmmakers getting a bullhorn and shouting “TERRORISM IS BAD YOU GUYS” at the audience, if Shahrukh didn't get it just right. Which makes up for the seven or eight scenes when you just want to strangle the fucker for overplaying the Asperger's.

I guess the point of all this is, Liberal Message Movies are annoying, but there's a limit to how pissed off at them one can get, because they are trying to do the right thing. (Speaking of Do The Right Thing, a celebration of the cinema of Spike Lee is coming in a couple/few days, so Race In Cinema Month won't all be scolding and complaining.) But there's nothing worse than seeing a movie try to be good and fuck up. And it's especially unfortunate when it comes at the expense of the things the movie does well. Oh well.

As a counterexample of this kind of bullshit, I caught In The Heat of the Night on TCM the other day. That was the same year Sidney Poitier was also in Guess Who's Coming To Dinner?, which spends its entire running time shrieking about how important it is (and poor Spencer Tracy looks so horribly uncomfortable the whole movie, I felt bad), but In The Heat of the Night takes a different tactic, which is basically, “Sidney Poitier is fucking awesome.” It's shot by Haskell Wexler, it's cut by Hal Ashby, people like Rod Steiger and Warren Oates are in it and rule, and most importantly holy shit Sidney Poitier. He's waiting for a train in a small town in The South when he gets arrested for existing while black after a guy gets killed, and because he's smarter and more badass than everyone in three states Sidney Poitier solves the murder. Not only that, but he manages to do it without the benefit of any modern advances in forensic science. In The Heat of the Night is pure ownage, great filmmaking and holy shit Sidney Poitier. See? That's how you do a movie about how racism is stupid. All you need is a good script, talented filmmakers, and really good actors. But most importantly, know who the people are who are in your movie. Caring isn't enough.

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!