In Theaters: November 8, 2013

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Superhero flick Krrish 3 is the only game in town for Bollywood fans this weekend, having earned $1,049,560 in its opening weekend in U.S. theaters. That’s a really good number, but it’s less than half of what Chennai Express earned in its first weekend in The States. Krrish 3 carries over at the following Chicago area theaters: the AMC River East 21 in Chicago, Regal Gardens Stadium 1-6 in Skokie, Big Cinemas Golf Glen 5 in Niles, AMC Loews Crestwood 18 in Crestwood, AMC South Barrington 30 in South Barrington, AMC Loews Woodridge 18 in Woodridge, and Regal Cantera Stadium 17 in Warrenville.

The other Indian movies showing around Chicagoland this weekend are all Tamil films, including Arrambam at the Century Stratford Square in Bloomingdale, Cinemark at Seven Bridges in Woodridge, and the Golf Glen 5, which is also showing All in All Azhagu Raja and Pandiya Naadu.

Movie Review: Krrish 3 (2013)

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Krrish32.5 Stars (out of 4)

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Krrish 3‘s great flaw is not that it’s a derivative mishmash of X-Men, The Island of Doctor Moreau, and Superman. It’s that Krrish 3 is boring. Why does a standard superhero plot — bad guy wants to takeover the world, good guy needs to stop him — need so much exposition?

Krrish 3 starts with a helpful recap of the previous films in the series — Koi… Mil Gaya and Krrish — narrated by Amitabh Bachchan. Rohit (Hrithik Roshan) inherited superpowers from an alien and passed them on to his son, Krishna (also Hrithik Roshan), who moonlights as the superhero, Krrish.

Bachchan’s narration disappears for half-an-hour so that we can see Krrish rescue some folks, only to return unexpectedly to introduce the villains. After that, we don’t hear from Bachchan again.

The primary villain is Professor X, er, Kaal (Vivek Oberoi), a telekinetic quadriplegic who somehow retains the use of both index fingers. Bachchan assures us: “Unbelievable as it is, but it’s true.” As a byproduct of his experiments to cure his paralysis, Kaal creates an army of animal-human hybrids: his “manimals.”

One of the manimals is a chameleon-hybrid shape-shifter named Kaya (Kangana Ranaut). In addition to looking sexy in a strapless latex catsuit, Kaya can pass through walls and possesses super-strength.

Kaya’s storyline is the highlight of the film. Her role in Kaal’s evil scheme requires her to impersonate Krishna’s wife, Priya (Priyanka Chopra). While gathering intel for her boss, Kaya gets to live a life she’s never experienced, one in which she’s a beloved member of a family. This causes her to question her loyalties to her creator, Kaal, who’s always treated her like a tool.

Kaya is a better developed villain than Kaal, whose plans seem scattershot. He spends the first hour of the film infecting countries with a virus, and then charging high prices for the cure in order to fund his paralysis-cure research. The movie is half-over before Krrish and Kaal have anything to do with one another.

After exhausting his animal research, Kaal becomes obsessed with bone marrow. When he says, “I need your bone marrow,” he dramatically emphasizes the tissue as if he were saying “heart” or “brain” or some other vital organ. It’s as if no one told him that a bone marrow transplant is a relatively common, non-lethal procedure. Boy, is he going to be bummed when he finds out.

Kaal’s not intimidating enough to be a super-villain, and he’s not as complex a character as Kaya. He’s about as scary as his henchman, Frogman (Gowhar Khan), who gets way too much screentime for a guy whose only weapon is his tongue.

Krrish/Krishna is kind of a dud, too. There’s a germ of a running gag in which Krishna keeps getting fired from service jobs because of his superhero duties, but it doesn’t go anywhere. Krrish rescues a boy, only to lecture him not to try superhero stunts at home.

That lecture, plus a bunch of speeches about how we’re all like Krrish whenever we do something nice for someone else, make Krrish 3 too self-aware to be truly engrossing. Whenever scenes show a glimmer of emotional truth, the camera zooms soap-opera style into a close-up of a character’s face, just to make sure the audience knows that this is an emotionally significant moment.

The performances by Roshan and Chopra are corny, and Oberoi isn’t villainous enough. Ranaut’s compelling turn as Kaya makes the film bearable.

The musical numbers are also a letdown. About half the audience at my showing headed for a bathroom break as soon as “God Allah Aur Bhagwan” began. “Dil Tu Hi Bataa” is so wacky that it’s almost charming. Why is Ranaut dressed like she’s in the Ice Capades?

But, wait! Isn’t that my boy Sushant Pujari from ABCD bustin’ moves in red sneakers in “Raghupati Raghav”? Maybe Krrish 3 is worth watching after all.

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Streaming Video News: November 3, 2013

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Vishal Bhardwaj’s Matru Ki Bijlee Ka Mandola is now available for streaming on Netflix. I love this quirky comedy from earlier this year. Here’s a link to Netflix’s current “Bollywood” catalog (they have a separate category for “Hindi-Language” films that’s mostly the same thing).

A few movies in Eros Now’s “Coming Soon” section have confirmed dates for when they will become available on the streaming service. Those include: Welcome to Sajjanpur (November 8), Paan Singh Tomar (November 15), No One Killed Jessica (November 15), and Aamir (November 22).

Movie Review: Gunda (1998)

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GundaEntertainment Factor: 4 Stars (out of 4)
Quality: 0 Stars

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Gunda was brought to my attention by a reader named Harry in the comments about my review of Boom, a movie I considered to be so bad that it’s actually good. Turns out Boom has nothing on Gunda: the ultimate So Bad, It’s Good movie.

Director Kanti Shah’s Gunda is a B-movie with blockbuster aspirations. By failing to allocate the obviously modest budget for optimal use, the quality of every aspect of the movie suffers. As a result, not a single component of the film bears even a hint of competence. And that’s what makes it so great.

To call Gunda a revenge movie is to underplay the role revenge plays in the story. It’s the whole plot! Someone kills a member of someone else’s family or entourage, which precipitates a retaliatory murder, which precipitates another retaliatory murder, and so on. That’s it. That’s all the story is about.

The presumptive lead character, Shankar (Mithun Chakraborty), doesn’t appear until about twenty minutes into the two-hour-long movie. By that point, there have already been five murders committed at the hands of warring dons Bulla (Mukesh Rishi) and Lambuatta (Ishrat Ali). Also by that point, Lambuatta and the man who hired him to kill Bulla are dead, making their inclusion in the movie totally unnecessary.

Unnecessary, but not worthless. Lambuatta is my favorite character in the film. He repeatedly shouts Bulla’s name while hanging out on an airport tarmac. Why an airport tarmac? Who knows?

Lambuatta provokes his own death when he rapes and murders Bulla’s sister. More accurately, Lambuatta rips open her shirt in public, killing her. In Gunda, rape — or the PG-rated, fully clothed version presented — is always fatal to the woman. Always.

Shankar enters the story when he stops one of Bulla’s goons from fleeing the police after committing a murder, prompting Bulla to “fix a date” for Shankar’s death. But first, Shankar and Bulla have to kill off everyone else associated with the other party.

Bulla merits a place in the American cultural lexicon as one of the greatest villains of all time. He pronounces every line of dialogue with an extended enunciation of the last syllable. He and his crew are prone to speaking in couplets that make no sense when translated from Hindi to English. Take Bulla’s catchphrase, for example:

“My name is Bulla, and I always keep it open.”

I read somewhere online that Bulla may be indicating that he’s not wearing underwear, but who the hell knows? Does it even matter? It starts to sound pretty awesome after the thirtieth time he says it.

The majority of Bulla’s scenes are shot with him and his femmy brother, Chutiya (Shakti Kapoor), sitting two-feet from the camera in the living room of their mansion. There are only a handful of sets in the whole movie, most notably Bulla’s living room, the airport tarmac, a quarry, and a dock. All of them are apparently located right next to one another.

The rest of the scenes are shot in public places, usually in parks or in the middle of busy streets. A fun drinking game would be to take a drink every time a bus tries to plow its way through the middle of a shot or is forced to skirt around a huge crowd of spectators.

Shoehorned in between all the revenge killings is a romance of truly awkward proportions between Shankar and Ganga (Verna Raj), who navigates the world with a pair of basketballs stuffed in her bra. Shankar and Ganga engage in several stiff, goofy dance numbers in which the then 51-year-old Chakraborty appears to be actively trying not to dance.

Scenes go on far too long, especially the dance numbers. Much of the film can be fast-forwarded through, but I found something charming in the relentless dullness of many of the scenes.

Many of the events in the second half of the film are beyond ridiculous, and it would be a shame to spoil them for those new to Gunda. The less prepared one is for this movie, the better. I will point out that the climactic battle in Gunda — which, again, takes a really, really, really long time — is one of the best, wackiest things I have ever seen. Ever.

And then the movie just ends. It’s brilliant.

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Opening November 1: Krrish 3

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The big superhero blockbuster Krrish 3 is finally here. Leather-clad Hrithik Roshan swoops into Chicago area theaters on November 1, 2013.

Krrish 3 opens on Friday at the AMC River East 21 in Chicago, Regal Gardens Stadium 1-6 in Skokie, Big Cinemas Golf Glen 5 in Niles, AMC Loews Crestwood 18 in Crestwood, AMC South Barrington 30 in South Barrington, AMC Loews Woodridge 18 in Woodridge, and Regal Cantera Stadium 17 in Warrenville. It has a listed runtime of 2 hrs. 32 min.

Movie Review: War Chhod Na Yaar (2013)

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War_Chhod_Na_Yaar_Theatrical_Poster2 Stars (out of 4)

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War Chhod Na Yaar (“Let’s Forsake War“) is neither as good nor as bad as it could have been. Given that the movie is a comedy about a war between India and Pakistan, the fact that it’s not a disaster is something of a success in its own right.

War Chhod Na Yaar (WCNY, henceforth) avoids many potential pitfalls by laying blame for the ongoing hostilities between India and Pakistan far up the chain, and not at the feet of the soldiers on the front lines. The film blames politicians hungry for votes, foreign powers hungry for money, and news outlets hungry for sensational headlines.

The action takes place primarily at a pair of army outposts along the border. The soldiers on opposite sides of the barbed wire fence exist under an informal truce built on the playfully contentious friendship between Indian Captain Raj (Sharman Joshi) and Pakistani Captain Qureshi (Javed Jaffrey), who secretly meet at night to play cards.

Their peace is threatened when the Indian Defense Minister (Dalip Tahil) reveals to a reporter, Rut (Soha Ali Khan), that war will break out in two days time. They travel to the Indian outpost where the minister enlists Rut’s help in creating a propaganda video to be released after the fighting begins. The minister quickly gets out of Dodge, but Rut stays to find out what life is really like for the soldiers. She and Raj fall in love in the process.

Many of the jokes come at the expense of the Pakistani Army, who are portrayed as bumbling due to chronic malnourishment. The leader of the Pakistani troops, Commander Khan (Sanjai Mishra), is supposed to be played for laughs, but his character isn’t well-defined enough to really be funny. He’s a collection of character flaws rather than a character with flaws.

Another problem is that many of the jokes rely on Hindi wordplay and rhymes, and they don’t survive the translation into English. Likewise, certain jokes rely on regional and cultural knowledge that international audiences lack.

Joshi and Jaffrey are charming as the friendly officers, but Khan doesn’t pull off the reporter role. The soldiers from two hostile countries engage in a singing competition, but Rut doesn’t find it newsworthy enough to record with her video camera.

Tahil plays not only the Indian Defense Minister, but the defense minister from Pakistan, America, and China. The Chinese defense minister would’ve been recognizable in his army uniform and Chairman Mao hairstyle, so I could’ve done without the potentially offensive eye makeup. (And why are the Chinese minister’s two bodyguards African?) But Tahil is pretty funny as the American defense chief, who’s clearly modeled on George W. Bush.

WCNY portrays China and America as pitting India and Pakistan against each other in a proxy war. The U.S. gets off relatively easy under accusations of profiteering. China, on the other hand, is repeatedly criticized for flooding India and Pakistan with cheaply made products. The Pakistani army is so ineffective because all of their Chinese-made weapons are defective.

WCNY falls prey to a common mistake: over-explaining things rather than trusting the audience to interpret events for themselves. When the predetermined nature of the war is revealed on Rut’s cable news network, the film cuts to reaction shots of ordinary citizens as they take to the streets in outrage.

All the movie needs to show is the ruse revealed. The audience can figure out what would come next. The movie doesn’t need to show man-on-the-street interviews of random people saying how bad corruption is. We know it is!

I doubt that WCNY will inspire many other filmmakers to tread the tricky ground of India’s ongoing tension with Pakistan, but it does show that it’s possible to do so without being offensive. Now the trick is to make it funny.

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Movie Review: Mickey Virus (2013)

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MickeyVirus1 Star (out of 4)

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There are moments in Mickey Virus where the film appears to be an engaging thriller, but it falls apart under the barest scrutiny. As the runtime stretches beyond two hours, the missteps pile up in the run-up to a climax that makes no sense.

Debutant writer-director Saurabh Varma set himself up for failure by making Mickey Virus about hackers. I’m no programmer, but all of the tech stuff in the movie is laughable:

  • The lead character, Mickey (Manish Paul), plays a video game that looks like something that came out on the Dreamcast.
  • The super-sophisticated security system on a hacker gang’s website is a Flash animation of a car chase.
  • A screen full of random numbers and letters purports to be code.
  • Mickey tries to figure out someone’s password, and the first thing he tries is the young woman’s own first name.

I know septuagenarians who could write more believable tech stuff than this. It could be forgiven if the plot were air-tight, but that’s just as bad.

Mickey comes to the attention of some police officers investigating the murders of a pair of foreign hackers on Indian soil. The cops suspect a gang of hackers is behind it, but they need their own hacker to poke around on the internet and find the evidence for them.

Even though Mickey meets the police officers within the first fifteen minutes of the film, he doesn’t get involved with their case until after an hour has transpired. He spends the rest of the time avoiding his mother’s phone calls and romancing a woman named Kamayani (Elli Avram, who got the job more for her willingness to disrobe and make out with Manish Paul than for her acting chops).

The action doesn’t get rolling until Mickey is framed for a crime he didn’t commit and has to clear his name. Even then, the evidence is so easily explainable that one wonders why Mickey doesn’t just tell the cops, “I’m being set up. Help me find out who’s doing it.”

The ultimate explanation comes out of left field, with no set up and no possible way it could’ve transpired. That the revelation happens during the course of a tedious speech just compounds the problem.

This is a shame, because Mickey’s a good character. He’s talented, but he’s awkward with women and he’s not a know-it-all. He’s almost a regular guy (a rare specimen among Bollywood heroes). Paul is decent in the role, too.

Still, this is a movie worth skipping. When crafting a thriller — especially one centered around computers — screenwriters need to write for the most well-informed members of the audience and hope that the less-informed will keep up. Better that than writing for the least-informed and hoping that best-informed won’t notice.

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Streaming Video News: October 24, 2013

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Chennai Express is now available for streaming on Netflix! I wasn’t that crazy about the movie, but it is really cool that it’s already on Netflix less than three months after its theatrical release. It’s a good business plan for Indian distributors in that it gives international fans who don’t live near Bollywood theaters access to their films without resorting to piracy.

Opening October 25: Mickey Virus

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Update: I initially thought this was a typo, but apparently the AMC South Barrington 30 is showing Satya 2 this weekend. Ram Gopal Varma postponed the release of the film in India until November 8, so enjoy the preview, South Barrington!

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The new comedy Mickey Virus opens in the Chicago area on October 25, 2013. While I hope the movie is good, given that it lacks even minor stars, I expect its stay in U.S. theaters to be brief.

Mickey Virus opens on Friday at the Big Cinemas Golf Glen 5 in Niles, AMC South Barrington 30 in South Barrington, and Regal Cantera Stadium 17 in Warrenville. Its runtime is variously listed as two hours and 2 hrs. 30 min.

Akshay Kumar’s Boss carries over for a second week at all of the above theaters. The Golf Glen 5 is also carrying over Shahid, which is a surprise given that it only earned $12,153 total from the sixteen U.S. theaters that carried it last weekend.

Other Indian movies showing in the Chicago area this weekend include Singaravelan (Malayalam) and Zinda Bhaag (Punjabi) at the Golf Glen 5; Bhai (Telugu) at the Muvico Rosemont 18 in Rosemont; and Atharintiki Daredi (Telugu) at the Cinemark at Seven Bridges in Woodridge.

Streaming Video News: October 23, 2013

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Shootout at Wadala debuts on Eros Now on Friday, October 25, 2013. I was surprised by how much I liked this thriller from earlier this year.

For those of you wanting a refresher before Krrish 3 releases on November 1, Eros Now offers both of its predecessors — Koi… Mil Gaya and Krrish — for rent at $1.99 each or as part of the $7.99 monthly subscription.