Past Misdeeds: Qurbani (1980)

This is a re-run with only the slightest of edits, so please don’t ask me what the heck I was thinking when I wrote any given entry into this section.


Rajesh (Feroz Khan) leads the charmed life of a manly man Robin-Hood-like thief, a life that is more than a little sweetened by the existence of his beautiful nightclub singer girlfriend Sheela (Zeenat Aman, alas not allowed to do more than that description promises). Between random motorcycle riding and disapproving of Sheela's job (but hey, she disapproves of his job too, so they're on the same level here), there's not much that troubles him.

Until one of his jobs goes wrong and he meets his own private nemesis in the form of Inspector Amjad Khan (Amjad Khan, playing himself, but as a rather sleazy cop!?) and goes to jail for a bit.

While Rajesh is behind bars, Sheela meets single dad Amar (Vinnod Khanna), and befriends and nearly falls in love with this second hairy-chested piece of manliness, who comes with the bonus of being a widower with a highly decorative daughter. Sheela's taste in men is a little dubious, since Amar did also stand on the wrong side of the law once, working as a smuggler for Rakka (Amrish Puri), until he disagreed with his boss's personnel politic of shooting people who fail at their jobs and quit.

When Rajesh gets out of jail, he and Amar meet and fall madly in love with each other (well, the film calls it friendship, but isn't really fooling anyone).

This could be the beginning of a wonderfully progressive three person relationship with bonus child, but alas, Rajesh's jail acquaintance Vikram Singh (Shakti Kapoor) and his sister Jwala Singh (Aruna Irani and her mad contact lenses of doom) have other plans.

They really, really hate Rakka (or his afro), you see, so much so that Jwala has an illuminated portrait of the man on her living room wall next to her horse pictures.

What better method to take revenge on him could there be than to kill him and blame the deed on Rajesh whom they'll only need to rope into stealing all of Rakka's money? Rajesh isn't too enthusiastic about the whole thing - even without knowing about the scape goat part - because he has promised Sheela to give up on his wicked ways. But what is Amar's little daughter Tina (Natasha Chopra) good for if not for being kidnapped to press Rajesh into service?

Qurbani was edited, produced and directed by Bollywood's hairiest chest Feroz Khan himself and say what you will about his overly manly acting, he does handle his three other jobs very nicely indeed.

His direction shows a much finer eye for frame composition than was typical for some of Hindi cinema at the time, as well as a love for weird camera angles, and a more than a little dubious sense of fashion without ever overdoing it and getting so crazy as to be eyesight-destroying.

The obligatory musical numbers by Kalyanji Anandji are mostly Bollywood standard, not as mad as they sometimes get, but extremely useful to strengthen the emotional underpinnings of the film and delight its viewers with the lesser of Zeenat Aman's talents.

It has to be said that super macho Feroz Khan was an equal opportunity cheesecake director, and so friends of hairy, sweaty manliness will have their own moments of joy here.

Of course the film features the typically enthusiastic and slightly insane fight choreography of its time and place, with lots of jumping and kicking, a serious amount of back flipping and a friendly disinterest in physics or the way human anatomy functions. All of that is of course a good thing if you're like me and like your action scenes entertaining instead of realistic.

The whole film has a very fine flow to it that even the usual annoying scenes of comic relief (Jagdeep in the house, why does nobody burn it down?) can't disturb too much.

The plot consists of a merry randomness of incidents which are less bound by logic than by Qurbani's thematic core of male friendship and sacrifice (as the title promises). Somehow, Khan manages to tie up his plot threads satisfyingly enough to come to a tight and exciting finale and a surprisingly poignant ending that shows a spiritual connection to the brand of epics of manly friendship people like Cheng Cheh or John Woo traded in in Hong Kong.
Now, all this might sound like a million other action melodramas, and Qurbani is most certainly never original in the things it does, but the trick lies, as it often does, in the film's flawless execution of its tropes, and in the sure hand Khan shows in deciding when to use them.


There is something deeply satisfying about a film like Qurbani that knows which buttons a genre film has to push and then pushes them expertly and incessantly with a sort of relish that stops just shy of decadence.

Jagir (1984)

This is part of "Bob's Your Uncle", a multi-blog-extravaganza celebrating the memory of Bollywood's great Bob Christo, who died earlier this year, initiated by the fabulous Beth of Beth Loves Bollywood. Follow this link to find out what others have to say about the wonders of Bob.

The Maharajah of Anjangarh (Kamal Kapoor) and his forefathers have amassed an incredibly shiny treasure of jewellery and gold in their times. Because the Maharajah is incredibly virtuous and devout, he's hiding the treasure away in a cave quite out of reach of everyone to praise the gods with it, instead of, say, doing something for the people he's lording over with it. Only a map hidden away in an amulet shows the way to the treasure.

But the forces of evil in form of bandit leader Lakhan Singh (Amrish Puri, of course, though for some reason not quite as often doing his goggle eyes as usual) and the Maharajah's drunken brother think there are better things to do with treasure than nothing, and assault the Maharajah's palace. As this is a masala through and through, things don't end up as anyone had planned: the Maharajah and his brother don't survive the assault, the Maharajah's loyal friend and companion Mangal Singh (Pran) loses a hand to Lakhan's anger, the Maharajah's young son (of course carrying the treasure map amulet) disappears with the help of the family falcon, as does Mangal Singh's son - the latter believed dead after having been sacrificed by his father (whose "loyalty" to the Maharajah we are supposed to admire because of this; personally, I thought he deserved every punishment he got throughout the movie for it) to distract from the flight of the heir and the amulet, but in truth saved by "gypsies".

An amount of time the film calls twenty years, but that somehow has enabled the Maharajah's son - now called Shankar - to turn into fat middle-aged Dharmendra and Amrish Puri to age not at all, later, Lakhan Singh has become a beloved pillar of the community by day and evil-doer dressing up like a Catholic missionary also by day, while Shankar has gone into the whole Robin Hood business.

Because it's that kind of movie, Shankar meets Mangal Singh's son Sanga (Mithun Chakraborty) on a treasure hunt, and both hit it off after playing around with each other's hats in a spontaneous outburst of Freudian metaphors. They also meet and learn to love a certain Danny (Danny Denzongpa, looking like he has the time of his life), who just happens to be an enemy of Lankhar's too, though he doesn't know that at this time (let's just say it has something to do with Lankhar's foster son Ranjeet - played by Ranjeet, obviously - a dead wife, and a psychosomatically mute son). This still being that kind of movie, the three will soon enough cross paths with Lakhan again, and though nobody recognizes the other, there are still enough reasons for Lakhan for trying to kill our heroes in various ways. Namely, Sanga is in love with Lakhan's daughter Asha (Shoma Anand), and the bad guy does take that whole "overprotective father" role a wee bit too seriously, while Shankar is always trying to steal the same things as Lakhan.

Obviously, Shankar also has a right to a love interest, so the lucky bastard gets to romance Seema (Zeenat Aman, as often quite underutilized, but at least allowed to kick one or two asses and shoot a few people in the finale), who is of course also slightly connected with the whole family affair. Don't worry, please, this isn't a Japanese movie, so there's not too much risk of an incest plot. Anyway, lots of other stuff happens, until old secrets are revealed, families reunited, evil doers punished and Bob Christo kicked in the face.

Honestly, when I say that "lots of stuff happens", I really mean it. Pramod Chakravorty's Jagir is one of those masalas that pack so many minor plotlines, diversions, action scenes, and moments of random awesomeness in that a running time of 170 minutes actually feel a bit short for everything the director wants to show us. There's not just always something happening, but there's always something fun happening, as if Chakravorty and writer Sachin Bhowmick had taken a long hard look at the genre they were working in and decided that there's nothing wrong with its traditions and its structures that couldn't be fixed by replacing two thirds of the regular slots for comedy scenes and one third of the regular slots for melodrama with action sequences of the patented Bollywood style. Since the film is as long as it is (and 170 minutes are quite long even in Bollywood), there are still more than enough dramatic scenes and jokes (sometimes even funny ones) to give Jagir the expectedly baroque plot.

And, because it is also that sort of movie, Jagir includes so much ridiculously awesome stuff that I'd still be quite excited about it if it had no plot at all. To wit, apart from the things already described (padre Puri!) you will see: a Bollywood super animal in form of a falcon (often stunt-doubled by a stuffed falcon, making him doubly wonderful) who not only repeatedly saves Dharmendra's enormous behind, but also knows how to shoot a gun; a guy with steel teeth - obviously not at all inspired by a certain Bond character - having a car part throwing duel with our heroic trio; Pran doing one-armed Hindi kung fu like Wang Yu's long lost brother; Mithun in red cowboy boots that I suspect were initially part of Zeenat Aman's wardrobe; people calling Dharmendra a young man; one of the best death trap rooms with magnetic shackles and a spiky cross under a Christian graveyard in India ever; religious symbols and their use as lock picks; pneumatic jumping from everyone except Amrish Puri; and of course golden oldies like the obligatory scene where our heroes and their girlfriends (poor Danny's status as a widower alas means he doesn't have one) dress up as a "gypsie" dance troupe and sneak into a bad guy's base - well, tent camp. What's not to love?

But what, you might ask, does all this have to do with Bob Christo, the supposed target of today's ramblings? Well, in his career, Mister Christo might have been in every Bollywood movie made between 1980 and 1995, but because of this astonishing workload he was in many of them only for five or ten minutes, as is the case in Jagir. As you know, Bob was usually the actor a Bollywood director used when he needed a physically impressive white guy specialised in being evil to play the main henchman of the evil mastermind's main henchman, a position where his face made contact with all the great feet in Bollywood - like in this particular case those of Mithun and Danny (I suspect only Mac Mohan - also in Jagir of course - has been kicked or hit more). There is an obvious historical fairness (and a show of a re-growing self-confidence in a former colonized country) in having a white serial bad guy in post-colonial Hindi pop cinema getting punished by the hero of the hour. Watching Christo, I can't help but imagine (though I know it's probably not true) he knew that whenever Amitabh punched him in the groin in a movie, Amitabh was actually punching the British colonial reign (see also Mard). I imagine Christo accepting that, polishing his bald head, smiling about taking on a role that has to be taken by someone, so it might as well be him, and going on to the next movie.

Technorati-Markierungen: indian movies,bollywood,reviews,dharmendra,zeenat aman,danny denzongpa,mithun chakraborty,pran,amrish puri,iftekhar,shoma anand,action,comedy,drama,pramod chakravorty

More rambling, different place

Kevin Pyrtle of WtF-Film.com has graciously invited me to contribute to his site.

This means not much of a change for The Horror!?, since my regularly scheduled natterings will still appear here and I'll diligently link to everything that will go up on WtF-Film.

So, what could be a better start for really anything than a film featuring Feroz Khan's hairy chest?

It's time for adventure (and barely concealed manlove) in Feroz Khan's wonderful Qurbani!

 

Technorati-Tags: other places,bollywood,indian movies,reviews,feroz khan,amrish puri,zeenat aman,vinod khanna,aruna irani,action,drama

Commando (1988) - The Bollywood one

The Eighties, age of bad action movies, bad ninja movies and rampant nationalism, or - as in this case - bad Indian nationalist ninja action movies featuring not bad but downright evil dance numbers. This is, of course, something I have always dreamt of.

The film starts innocently enough. A slightly puffy guy (Satish Kaul) takes his little son out on their daily training routine. There are many things a young Indian MAN has to learn, including jumping from a roof into a swimming pool, getting hit by his father in the face and impregnating the ground. Well, the last one could be push-ups, but I doubt it. But a good father won't stop at his son's physical education, he will always try to awaken in his child an appreciation for the important things in live, like never bowing to anyone and being constantly ready to spill one's blood for the motherland (sweet, pure and innocent Mother India).

As it goes, Dad soon proves his commitment by catching a few bullets meant to kill Indira Gandhi in full sight of his wife, who doesn't take too well to her husband's death.

An unspecified number of years later (judging by his face and paunch about forty) Kid Commando has turned into Chander / Chandru (whatever it is the subtitles call him at the moment, always played by Mithun Chakraborty), whose years of diligent beer drinking training have finally paid off. India's biggest arms manufacturer has offered him a job working for them as a commando (or as I would call it: "armed security guard").

Finally, Chand can give his lifeblood for his beloved country (queue Indian national anthem here) and pay for the psychiatric treatment of his ailing mother, who has been driven mad by his father's dead. At first, I wasn't all that sure about the quality of her treatment - putting a woman in a big room with other women and letting her tear her hair doesn't look very expensive or therapeutic to me. In truth most of treatment's cost is based on the price of ballet tickets, as we will learn at the film's ending.

Unfortunately, not all is well at the arms factory. Unknown to its owner Kailashpuri Malhotra (Om Shivpuri) the evil mastermind Mr. Marcelloni (Amrish Puri) uses the factory's products not for the good of holy, pure and incredibly innocent Mother India!

In fact, Marcelloni is paid by "a neighboring country" (oh, what country might that be, pray tell) to destabilize (holy, pure, innocent and motherly) India by playing the Indian Hindus and Moslems against each other. For a project like this, even someone of Marcelloni's stature (and he is not merely great, he is a genius, let him tell you) needs helpers. Besides a training camp full of ninjas, led by Ninja (Danny Dezongpa, who certainly looks swell in his red satin ninja ensemble), he employs Malhotra's partner and the security chief of the factory to steal badly needed weapons for him. He told us he's a genius.

It really isn't surprising nobody has discovered the dastardly plan up to now, when one looks at the subtlety and care the traitors exhibit.

On Chand's first outing as security guard, their chief orders his soldiers to not open fire without his explicit orders, whatever may happen. Would you believe the transport is attacked by terrorists just then? Or that the chief orders his soldiers to lay their weapons down? How could anyone see through this plan?

All would go well for the Evil Ones, if Chand wouldn't discover his talent for patriotic (oh! glorious Mother India!) disobedience and attack the terrorists and their ninja cronies. What follows is one of the better action scenes of Bollywood cinema I have seen, possibly thanks to its close (like a Siamese twin) resemblance to a scene from American Ninja. Now that I mention it, the whole film has quite a few parallels to American Ninja, ignoring the dancing and bigger paunches.

The enemy's advantage in number forces our hero to retreat - fortunately not before demonstrating the real usefulness of a screwdriver - pulling the arms factory's owner's daughter after him. Asha (Mandakini) accompanied the convoy to "see original terrorists", which is as spunky as it is stupid. To my disappointment, Asha's spunkiness shrinks the longer the film goes on.

During their flight, the two rest in the wreck of a hay-transporting plane that also houses a helpless and innocent cobra who is promptly slaughtered by his paunchiness. Oh, and our heroes fall in love.

At some point, the two have crossed the border to another neighboring country, a place peopled by Indians wearing fake eyelids and demonic eyebrows while wearing Japanese sombreros - it's possibly Chindia, or Chinustan. Among those slightly disconcerting people dwells an even stranger creature, Ram Chong (Satish Shah), a fat old dude who thinks Asha & Chand are Asha Bosle and Kishore Kumar. To the sweet sounds of Ennio Morricone he offers to lend them his fabulous red vintage car, if they will just sing a little song for him. Of course they do, not even stopping when their enemies arrive and one of the stranger car chases of my movie nerd career begins. It isn't necessary to stop singing anyway - the old guy's car is outfitted with James Bondian gimmicks like oil spilling nozzles, mechanical boxing gloves and the ability to turn into a flying model car, ahem, I meant outfitted with a parachute of course.

When they return, Chand is reprimanded heavily for his weapon and women-saving ways, has a fight with one of his commando colleagues (Hemant Birje), who will become his best friend, parties hard, fights more ninjas, destroys fruit wagons during a chase sequence, is framed in most devious ways as evil terrorist spy, escapes from prison, has to sneak into the enemy's base in a neighboring country, has a dance dance party, does the robot, kills more evil people, makes things explode, murders a bunch of weaponless people (who are evil enemies of sweet, loving and innocent Mother India, of course), has the mandatory fight on a cable car, prevents the murder of another Gandhi by Ninja and restores his mother to sanity.

By the love of Michael Dudikoff, that was fun. Sure, Commando's production is slapdash (look at Mithun's training outfit, or look at Mithun, for that matter), its special effects of dubious specialty (it's hard for me to decide what is "better", the hills turned into a mountain range by a few scrawled lines in post production or the brilliant model work that is even more beautiful than that of Ajooba), the soundtrack cobbled together from parts of Once Upon A Time In The West and Star Wars (I  understand, I am a fan too), the editing bad and the acting only done by Amrish Puri. But all these are things I expect, even demand of an 80s Ninja/action film. As long as a movie in the genre features surprisingly competent fights and a ninja called Ninja I am happy as as a loon.

There are lots of other things to admire in Commando, from the interesting inside view into B-movie security measures (tight as a great big hole in a wall, I tell you) to the wish to only steal from the best without false modesty or shame, this film delivers everything someone of my taste could possibly ask warm.

 

Warm thanks to Todd of Die, Danger, Die, Die, Kill! for recommending this movie and especially to Beth of Beth Loves Bollywood for granting me her copy of this timeless work of art.

 

Technorati-Tags: indian movies,bollywood,action,ninjas,mithun chakraborthy,amrish puri,reviews,mandakini,danny dezongpa,hemant birje,babbar subhash

Ajooba (1991)

The oriental state of Bahrujistan has it all: Barren landscapes, brownish towns, a virtuous Sultan (Shammi Kapoor) and Amrish Puri as the prime minister. It is of course possible that the prime minister has something to do with the high mortality rate of potential heirs to the throne, but really, who could mistrust such an honest face?

The newest heir seems to be doing just fine, anyway, thanks to to the intervention of a bunch of gods (I suppose) we'll never see again.

So Amrish starts a little palace revolution, starting with the disposal of a friendly magician (Saeed Jaffrey) who knows of his evil ways and is all to willing to explain the source of his magical powers to someone he himself calls a devil anyway. Amrish is as grateful as one would expect, steals the wise man's amulet and throws him into the deepest, darkest dungeon. Afterwards he attacks the royal family's escape boat on the flying carpet he also stole from the magician, seemingly killing them all, but actually doing his worst job ever.

The baby heir is rescued by a helpful dolphin (whom the grown-up boy will call his mother) and adopted by a smith who starts to train the boy early to become a bad-ass-by-way-of-a-terrible costume revolutionary, who will be known as Ajooba (Amitabh Bachchan). Besides his superior fighting skills (like catching flying arrows and throwing them back at his enemies with deadly force; also, compelling his enemies to never shoot more than two arrows at once), Ajooba also develops the ability to always appear where his name is spoken and make us listen to his cheesy synthesizer theme whenever he heroically rides to the rescue.

On the way to the Happy End, our extremely heroic hero and his cross-dressing side-kick Hassan (Rishi Kapoor) will rescue old, blind women who certainly won't turn out to be someone's mother, rescue amnesiac saints gifted with healing powers who certainly won't turn out to be someone's father, fall in love with Amrish's daughter (Hassan) or the magician's daughter (Ajooba), shrink to the rescue, ride a flying boat, go all King Arthur on us, get rescued by a giant crab and fight an authentic Bollywood kaiju. I have probably missed a few things here, but you get the gist, I think.

But, as awesome as all that may sound, a part of the film is marred by Shashi Kapoor's (or his Russian co-director's Gennadi Vasilyev's) problems with setting scenes up properly. The first hour of the film is just puzzling - important characters aren't set up, but just appear somehow sometime (Ajooba has to wait quite some time until he gets a little more character than "absurdly costumed guy on white horse"), sensible ways of transition are eschewed for, well no transitions, and so on. The later two thirds of the film are a lot better though, at least I wasn't in doubt anymore that there was a professional editor available.

The mad ideas that didn't want to stop anymore also did a lot to alleviate my irritation. Still, some directorial decisions just bug me. Why use boring brown and gray locations when you could have color-coordinated sets? Why film many scenes in such a way that everything has to look so incredibly cheap and tacky?

Less irritating and a lot more fun are Ajooba's very special effects. Seldom, if ever has the screen seen less detailed models than in the flying carpet sequences which really let you appreciate the good old Thief of Baghdad. Let's not start talking about the kaiju or the giant crab, creatures of singular and beautiful ineptness that nearly made me weep for joy.

Finally, the acting...There are in fact actors on screen, some of which sometimes decide to do some acting, but even Amitabh (who at least is able to wear his costume with some kind of dignity) is overshadowed by the greatness of Amrish Puri's bug-eyed stare and his repeated utterance of my new catch-phrase "Praised be the devil!". I even have a theory to explain this performance - after his many years as the evilest of the evil of Indian evilness, Amrish Puri set out on a journey to the west to find new ways of being, well, evil. Sadly, his quest was cut short by an unscrupulous German film merchant who sold him Bela Lugosi's collected poverty row films as the apotheosis of Western evilness acting. Amrish Puri, being kind-hearted and perhaps a little naive in the ways of evil German film merchants, of course believed him and used Ajooba to do his best to rise up to Bela's challenge. We all should love him for that.

 

Technorati-Tags: indian movies,bollywood,reviews,amitabh bachchan,amrish puri,shashi kapoor,shammi kapoor,rishi kapoor,fantasy