120 Bahadur: Heroism in the India-China War

Why would any country ever trust the CCP's PRC? After all, India considered China a close friend and ally, yet the Communist regime launched the 1962 India-China War for the purpose of annexing resource-rich territory. Granted, that was over sixty years ago, but the same oppressive Communist Party still rules with an iron fist. Since then, relations between the two BRIC’s have been interesting. Likewise, the results of the short war were complicated. It is generally conceded that India lost, but it would have been much worse were it not for Maj. Shaitan Singh Bhati’s last stand at the Battle of Rezang La, dramatized in Razneesh “Razy” Ghai’s 120 Bahadur, which releases tomorrow for Prime subscribers in most territories.

Much to India’s shock and outrage (made clear by Amitabh Bachchan’s Morgan Freeman-esque narration), China used a flimsy pretext to invade across the Northeast border, near Bhutan. Fortunately, the resourceful and inspiring Singh had been assigned to Charlie Company, but, ironically, he was put in command of the storied Kumaon Regiment, which by that point, consisted solely of green provincial recruits, who had never experienced snow or high altitude.

The Regiment also gets a new radio operator, Sepoy Ramchander Yadav, transferred straight from a quiet office assignment. He just begs for regimental hazing, even though Singh discourages such practices. Naturally, the Major immediately recognizes the narrow Rezang La pass as the spot the Red Army will press their advance on the crucial Chushul Airfield. Consequently, only Singh’s 120 men will be there to stop them.

There might be some spin added, but screenwriter Rajiv G. Menon’s presentation of the Battle of Rezang La largely conforms to accepted history. As a winter storm approached, the 120 held off the thousand-plus-strong Red Army long enough to close the window on Chushul. It would also take several months for the Indian Army to determine their fate, because the snow-covered battlefield had frozen solid, even though the fictional composite Yadav lived to tell their story.

Obviously, 120 Bahadur never opened in China. Most likely, the studio never even tried. Somewhat oddly, the regular Indian non-commissioned soldiers rarely refer to the PRC directly. However, Ghai pulls no punches when depicting the carnage left behind when the PLA massacres the entire village of Chagga. The film also suggests Mao micromanaged every tactical decision of the Red Army, through his ventriloquist dummy intermediary, General Gao.

Don’t panic. There are also several musical numbers. Mostly they are Singh’s flashbacks to his courtship of Shugan Kanwari Singh and their early wedded bliss. Frankly, Ghai skillfully integrates them, so they are not as tonally jarring as you would assume. However, none of the tunes is particularly memorable.

Still, the dance numbers certainly prove Farhan Akhtar’s versatility. He has decent moves and seriously steely screen presence. Although not as buff as Salman Khan, he has a Jon Bernthal vibe that serves the picture well. Indeed, Akhtar’s forcefulness is intrinsic to the film’s best scene, introducing viewers to Singh, as he faces down a PLA sniper.

Kill: Featuring 52 Kinds of Knives

India's NSG commandos, the “Black Cats,” train to face the Pakistani and Chinese militaries (despite BRIC), so Captains Amrit Rathod and Viresh Chatwal should be able to handle a gang of bandits. They will be outnumbered 36 to 2. Of course, there are only two or three bad guys who match their skills, but the desperate thugs can easily kill Rathod’s beloved and her wealthy family. Consequently, the top priority for the NSG officers will be protecting innocents, but the bodies inevitably start piling up in Nikhil Bhat’s Kill, which opens this Friday in theaters.

Originally, Rathod took leave (with his wingman) to convince his true love, Tulika Thakur, not to marry the husband her wealthy and powerful father Baldeo Singh Thakur, had arranged for her. The “mission” was practically “accomplished.” They were simply waiting to explain things to her father back in New Delhi. Unfortunately, a band of cutthroats deliberately modeled on the dacoits starts robbing and terrorizing the train. When they recognize the wealthy Thakur, they figure they hit the jackpot. However, when Rathod realizes his Tulika might be in danger, he and Chatwal start working their way through the goons towards her train-car.

In terms of concept, Kill is very much Die Hard on a train, but it is about one hundred times more brutal than Under Siege 2. It might be more accurate to call it The Raid: Redemption on a train. There might be a lot of blood, but technically it is mostly bone-snapping melee rather than outright murder for the first forty-five minutes or so. Unfortunately, when Chatwal reluctantly kills a senior clan member, it stokes the gang’s rage. From there, the stakes and the body-count rise exponentially.

If you want beatdowns, Bhat and action-directors Oh Se-young and Parvez Shaikh serve them up pretty much non-stop (using 52 varieties of knives according to the press notes—so there!). Kill also has fewer timeouts than in Xavier Gens’ Mayhem or Dev Patel’s Monkey Man. You can almost think of it as the hallway fight scene from Oldboy maintained for a solid one hundred-some minutes.

Lakshya definitely has the chops and the presence to carry the film. Both he and Abhishek Chauhan (as Chatwal) look well trained in Krav Maga and Pekiti-Tirsia Kati. They also have decent comradely chemistry together. Even as the get tagged with injuries, Chatwal more than Rathod, they are more than credibly equal to the thirty-some pseudo-dacoits—at least according to the accepted logic of martial arts cinema.

Dhaakad: a Hindi La Femme Nikita

Every few years, Hollywood gets proud of itself for releasing a woman-driven action movie like Atomic Blonde, pretending they just invented something revolutionary. Of course, it is nothing new or original to those of us who have been digging Michelle Yeoh and Angela Mao films for years. With this action heroine, maybe we can give Bollywood a few points for originality, but they still have to get the job done. Agent Agni always completes her mission, but the ride is a little rough in Razneesh Ghai’s Dhaakad, which is now playing in New York.

As a young girl, Agni’s parents were mysteriously assassinated, so she was adopted by her future handler in the super-secret, off-the-books Indian intelligence agency she now serves. Agni has been hot on the trail of a human trafficking ring led by Rudraveer, who rose up from the coal fields of Bhopal through a maybe not-so weird combination of class-warfare trade unionism, a cult of personality, and brute force. He also had the brains of Rohini, a madam turned master money-launderer.

Just when Agni though she had them cornered, her operation turns to coal dust (that’s a frequent metaphor in the film). As a result, she starts to suspect there is probably a mole informing Rudraveer. Yet, despite of her standoffish nature, Agni starts trusting her nebbish local contact, Fazal, and his wide-eyed little daughter Zaira. Of course, that gives Rudraveer a weakness to exploit.

The fight choreography in Dhaakad is often spectacular and frequently surprisingly brutal. In fact, it is almost shocking how hard-edged the film is, even by American standards (and especially for Bollywood). On top of that, Agni’s wardrobe is some of Indian cinema’s most fetish-satisfying leatherware, since Sunny Leone made her Bollywood debut.

Be that as it may, Kangana Ranaut clearly trained like a demon to play Agni. Even though she must have had lots of help from stunt performers, it is still a gruelingly physical performance. Arjun Rampal is also huge on the screen and massively sinister as Rudraveer. In terms of size, he seems to hulk up somewhere between Godzilla and Salman Khan. However, Saswata Chatterjee is just too sleazy-acting for figure like the handler.

Mission Mangal: Reaching Mars on the First Try

We recently celebrated the 50^th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon Landing—still the greatest achievement in human history. The Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) also celebrated its 50^th anniversary. Although its finest hour cannot compare with the successful exploration of the Moon, it has the considerable advantage of being much more recent. ISRO’s successful launch of the Mars Orbital Mission (MOM) or Mangalyaan “Mars Craft” probe is dramatized and romanticized in Jagan Shakti’s Mission Mangal, which is now playing in New York.

The unsuccessful launch of the GSLV-F06 (a.k.a. “Fat Boy”) was not ISRO’s finest hour. Perhaps a nickname that evokes memories of one of the original Manhattan Project atomic bombs was bad karma. Regardless, mildly eccentric mission director Rakesh Dhawan takes the fall, even though it was his senior subordinate, Tara Shinde, who made the bad call. Hoping to encourage his resignation, ISRO ostensibly promotes him to director of the Mars Probe Mission, which is universally considered a futile dead-end.

However, Dhawan stars believing when Shinde devises a method to reach Mars with preexisting light rockets, through fuel conservation, inertia, and Mars’ own gravitational pull. Although Dhawan’s inter-agency rival, former NASA scientist Rupert Desai pooh-poohs the idea, the agency director is intrigued enough to give them some budget—but of course, not quite enough. Dhawan will also have to make do with the hand-picked agency cast-offs Desai assigns to him. Most of them are women, but there is also an old dude and a sad sack, whose hopes of marriage have been undermined by bad astrology charts. Think of the second act as Hidden Figures, with a cup of 40-Year-Old Virgin mixed in.

Unlike Chazelle’s First Man, Shakti is not shy about flying the Indian flag—and why should he be? Still, it is a little odd when the film ends with a triumphant speech from Modi, especially since the MOM Probe launched before he was elected. On the other hand, it is nice to see stills of the real-life ISRO scientists, none of whom are as photogenic as their cinematic analogs, especially not Sonakshi Sinha as propulsion expert Eka Gandhi, who would be comfortable as a cast-member of Sex in the City.

Be that as it may, there is no denying how much fun it is to watch Akshay Kumar somewhat play against his action-romance type as Dhawan. Think of him as seven parts Ed Harris as Gene Kranz in Apollo 13 and three parts Fred MacMurray in The Absent-Minded Professor. Frankly, most of the supporting ensemble largely represents stock characters, but Sanjay Kapoor adds some interesting wrinkles as Shinde’s more-complex-than-we-initially-assume husband, Sunil, who also has a chance to get down on the dance floor. Remember, this is a Bollywood movie.

Mission Mangal is big, rousing, and patriotic, but most importantly, it is refreshingly idealistic about the possibilities for space exploration. Sure, it was nice to celebrate Apollo 11, but now what? Maybe the scrappiness of the MOM Mission isn’t such a bad example to emulate. Recommended for fans of Kumar and space program boosters, Mission Mangal is now playing in New York, at the AMC Empire.

Badla: The Hindi Invisible Guest

This Hindi remake is fifteen minutes longer than the original Spanish film, yet it doesn’t even have musical numbers. It is structural faithful to its source, but nobody rushes the great Amitabh Bachchan—nobody. The legendary Bollywood actor plays a legendary jury consultant, who will come out of retirement to crack a particularly sensational case in Sujoy Ghosh’s Badla, the Hindi version of The Invisible Guest, which is now showing in New York.

The narrative is basically the same, but many of the genders are flipped in Ghosh’s adaptation. Naina Sethi is the tech entrepreneur who is embroiled in an adultery-murder media feeding frenzy, but she has excellent legal representation. In addition to her high-priced attorney, she will have a session with Badal Gupta, who is considered the best witness prepper ever. Yet, he requires the whole truth to do his job properly—all of it. However, pulling it out of Sethi will be a struggle.

Thus, begins a verbal game of cat-and-mouse. Frankly, the circumstantial evidence against Sethi is pretty damning. She woke up in a locked room, next to the murdered body of the lover, Arjun Joseph, who threatened to expose her in a text. Of course, wily old Gupta can tell there is more to the story. He forces Sethi to rewind a few months earlier, when she and Joseph killed a young college student in an auto accident. Instead of doing the right thing, she dumped the body in the swamp, while he was rather awkwardly bluffing his way through an encounter with the victim’s parents. To make matters worse, a blackmailer subsequently lured them to the hotel, where Joseph was murdered and Sethi was knocked unconscious.

If you enjoy being played, Badla and The Invisible Guest before it are your kind of films. There are two or three big game-changing twists that are wonderfully over-the-top, totally unlikely, and gleefully entertaining. That is particularly true of Ghosh’s take, which relishes the melodramatic luridness of the scandal and mayhem.

Amitabh Bachchan plays Gupta—case closed. Watching him charm, cajole, and interrogate Sethi is more fun than any single film requires. In fact, Ghosh rather sensibly shifts the film’s center of gravity from the flashbacks to the interview sessions, because Bachchan is definitely his ace in the hole.

As Sethi, Taapsee Pannu hangs right there in the pocket with Bachchan. In fact, she is wickedly effective at turning each new revelation. Similarly, Tony Luke constantly upends our assumptions as the ill-fated Joseph. Unfortunately, Denzil Smith and his Morgan Freeman-voice are under-utilized as the investigating cop. However, Amrita Singh and Tanveer Ghani provide a moral core to the film as the victim’s parents.

Consider yourself warned: Badla will manipulate you and use your assumptions against you, jujitsu-like. It also follows Invisible Guest beat-for-beat, so viewers who have seen the Spanish film will find no surprises here. On the other hand, the tone of Ghosh’s film is not as dark, probably because the ensemble chews the scenery with relish that is utterly infectious. Needless to say, it starts with the great Bachchan. Recommended for fans of Bollywood and twisty thrillers, Badla is now playing in New York, at the AMC Empire.

3rd i ’18: Tumbbad

The Rao family lives in Western India, but H.P. Lovecraft would probably feel comfortable in their hardscrabble village. It constantly rains there and ancient gods torment mortals nearly as often. Vinayak Rao really can’t complain, because he basically asked for it. In order to discover the fabled family treasure, he must also take on the dreaded family curse in Rahi Anil Barve & Adesh Prasad’s Tumbbad (trailer here), which screens during this year’s 3^rd i International South Asian Film Festival in San Francisco.

 For complicated reasons, Rao’s mother cares for the monstrous grandmother of her lover, his illegitimate father. Granny cannot die, because she has been cursed by an ancient god. The old dear is always ravenous, but she will conk out like Pavlov’s dog if you tell her: “go to sleep or Hastar will get you.” However, Rao does not want her to sleep. He wants her to tell him where the treasure is, but he will have to wait until he can return to his father’s abandoned castle as a grown man to renew their conversation.

The good news is the treasure really is there. The bad news is Rao will have to perform a complicated ritual to keep Hastar at bay every time he wants to “withdraw” some gold coins. Of course, a greedy cad like Rao is always willing to risk his life and soul for financial gain.

It is hard to pigeon-hole Tumbbad in a genre box, because it incorporates elements of horror, dark fantasy, and moral fables. Regardless, Barve, Prasad, and co-screenwriters Mitesh Shah and Anand Gandhi create one heck of an ominous world. It is also pretty ambitious filmmaking, encompassing nearly thirty years of Indian history, with each of the three chapters vividly reflecting the tenor of its respective era.

The genre elements are also exceedingly weird. It probably will not scare horror fans, like Halloween or The Exorcist did the first (or maybe fiftieth) time you saw them, but it is all just very strange and disconcerting. There is also an element of EC Comics morality at play, because the filmmakers clearly beg to differ with Gordon Gekko. They do not think greed is good at all, but rather the seed of everyone’s downfall instead.

Producer Sohum Shah is sufficiently intense and mercurial to hold his own against an evil elder god like Hastar. Deepak Damle is also spectacularly sleazy as Rao’s loan shark-gold-dealer-opium-broker Raghav. Watching him scheme and kvetch is quite amusing, even though we immediately assume he will come to a bad end, because obviously.

Tumbbad is just soaked in malevolent moodiness and ancient evil, which is why it is so cool. It is a very distinctive macabre fable, but anyone from any cultural background can appreciate its grim logic and massively heavy karma. Recommended for fans of the dark fantastical, Tumbbad screens this Saturday (11/3) as part of the 2018 3^rd i in San Francisco.

Baadshaho: An Emergency Caper

Given all the sky-is-falling media coverage of the Trump Administration, you would think India’s Emergency Period would suddenly be a hot topic. From late June 1975 to late March 1977, the world’s largest democracy essentially put its democratic government on hold, instituting something very much like martial law. Of course, PM Indira Gandhi was a socialist, more or less. She was complicated and the media can’t handle that. From time to time, Indian pop culture sizes up the Emergency Period and finds it rather odd. Evidently, they have reached the point when they can use the era of widespread human rights abuses as the backdrop for an action movie (that sounds like progress to us). Government stooges have plundered the ancient family treasure of a beloved Rajasthan princess, but her loyal bodyguard and on-again-off-again lover intends to hijack it back in Milan Luthria’s Baadshaho (trailer here), which is currently playing in Los Angeles.

Maharani Gitanjali always knew she could rely on strong, silent Bhavani Singh and that up-and-coming politician Sanjeev is total pond scum. She rebuffs Sanjeev’s advances, so he nationalizes her gold (meaning he will deposit it in his own coffers, for the sake of the “public good”), so Singh will assemble a colorful team to steal it back. Sounds simple, right? Wrong, complications are aplenty, starting with the transport truck, a veritable bank vault on wheels, and the multiple combination locks to be cracked therein.

Fortunately, Singh knows the crankiest safecracker on the subcontinent. He will also recruit his self-styled lothario pal Dalia, and Gitanjali’s trusted rep, Sanjana. Ordinarily, those four could easily handle all the cops and military personnel from Jodhpur to Delhi, but Major Seher Singh is also on the case. That one will be trouble, even before the double and triple crosses start coming fast and furious.

Surely, the Emergency Period was nowhere near as much fun as it looks in Baadshaho. For one thing, Dalia gets a suggestive Bollywood number with a dancer played by Sunny Leone in cameo that doesn’t exactly stretch her screen persona. There is a bounty of action involving barrel-chested Singh the bodyguard climbing over the roof and under the chassis of speeding flatbed fortress. However, the real pleasures of Baadshaho are the courtly intrigues swirling around Gitanjali.

As the dueling Singhs, Ajay Devgn and Vidyut Jamwal have mucho action chops and are quite evenly matched when it comes to swaggering screen presence. However, neither of them can lay a finger on Ileana D’Cruz, who burns up the screen as the femme fatale Mahrani. Man, is she ever formidable, just you wait and see. She basically owns the film, but it is also nice to have Denzil Smith onboard as Seher Singh’s commanding officer Rudra Singh, because his baritone voice can make even the most prosaic lines sounds like “now is the winter of our discontent.”

Screenwriter Rajat Arora largely sidesteps the bitterest controversies of the Emergency Period, but his screenplay certainly makes the cops and military of the era look venal and sadistic. It is mostly about meatheadish pedal-to-metal action, but Luthria and film editor Aarif Sheikh cleverly keep cutting back and reframing a pivotal scene that will eventually have viewing chuckling in anticipation. Mostly just good, clean, Indian-censorship-office-approved fun with the added weird fascination of its setting, Baadshaho is now showing in Los Angeles at the Laemmle Town Center.

Ithaca Fantastik ’16: Autohead

A hipster filmmaker set out to make a poverty-porn documentary, but he shot the Hindi version of Natural Born Killers instead. Moto-rickshaw driver Narayan Srivastav is already violent, misogynistic, and sexually frustrated, but the camera only encourages his anti-social behavior in Rohit Mittal’s Autohead (trailer here), which screens during the 2016 Ithaca Fantastik.

Srivastav’s desperately poor life ought to be the stuff of foreign film festival plaudits, but the director, his sound man, and his cameraman will get a nasty surprise when they meet Roopa, the prostitute. Srivastav clearly fancies himself her pimp and lover, but she clearly sees him as a creepy guy who occasionally refers clients her way. Srivastav’s interest in her gives sexual obsession a bad name. It also further poisons his problematic opinion of women in general.

As a mass of seething resentments, it does not take much to push Srivastav into violence. Of course, once he starts, it is hard to stop. Indeed, the resulting feeling of power stokes the hypocritical cabbie’s delusions of moral righteousness.

Like its obvious inspirations, Oliver Stone’s NBK and the NC-17 Belgian mockumentary Man Bites Dog, Autohead has as much to say about media malpractice as it does about the sociological causes of violent crime. The line between reportage and voyeurism is similarly porous in all three films. Salman Khan also gets name-checked a lot (so good luck getting a wide release in India).

It is pretty eerie watching Deepak Sampat turn on a dime from pathetic sad sack to sociopathic psychopath in a matter of seconds. It is a bold, fiercely unsentimental performance that really drives the film. In contrast, Ronjini Chakroborty’s Roopa is a potent, sexualized force, whose heedlessness just makes viewers wince. Frankly, we have seen the gist of this before, but the work of Sampat and Chakroborty, as well as the Mumbai setting, makes it feel relatively fresh all over again.

It is hard not to think about the horrific death of Jyoti Singh (documented in India’s Daughter) while viewing Autohead, which is definitely a buzz kill. Yet, that sort of reaction is exactly what Mittal is hoping for. It is a violent indictment of misogynist violence—and it mostly works as it was intended. Recommended for those who appreciate extreme social criticism, Autohead screens this Thursday (11/10) during Ithaca Fantastik.

Neerja: Courage in the Face of Terrorism

There was a time when flying was a glamorous business. Neerja Bhanot brought a little of that back. The part time fashion model was also a flight hostess for Pan Am Airways. Tragically, her first flight as the head purser of her Bombay-based crew was Pan Am 73. Its ultimate destination was New York’s JFK, but so-called “Palestinians” in the Abu Nidal Organization hijacked the plane during its Karachi layover. Thanks to Bhanot’s quick thinking, the terrorists would go no further, but that placed her even more in harm’s way. Bhanot’s courageous story is stirringly dramatized in Ram Madhvani’s Neerja (trailer here), which is now playing in New York.

Right from the opening scene, can see Bhanot is the life of the party, as her friends and family wait for her to arrive and inject some vigor into their snoozy get-together. Even though she had made inroads into the glamorous world of modeling, she still loved her job as a flight hostess. Life was pleasant for Bhanot, but it was not always so. During her brief arranged marriage to Kishore Mishra, she was constantly abused, both physically and emotionally. However, surviving his torments gave her strength and insight for dealing with the Abu Nidal terrorists.

Disguised in stolen uniforms, the would-be hijackers shot their way on-board during the stopover in Karachi. However, Bhanot was able to alert the flight crew, who duly followed procedure, evacuating through the cockpit emergency hatch. Being stuck on the ground drastically changed the nature of the operation for the Islamist hijackers. Hoping to regain some leverage, the terrorists instructed Neerja to collect all passports so they could identify Americans. Again, Bhanot foiled their schemes, instructing her crew to hide all American passports. There were forty-one Americans on that flight but only two were murdered.

It is pretty inspiring to watch Bhanot stand-up to the so-called “Palestinian” mass murderers and strategically think two or three steps ahead of them. Madhvani’s cross-cutting between the hijacking and Mishra’s misogynistic cruelty runs the risk of heavy-handedness, but it establishes how she found the resolution and presence-of-mind to undercut the hijacking and hostage executions. Nevertheless, at the risk of being spoilery, those who are not familiar with Bhanot’s story should not expect a happily-ever-after conclusion.

In fact, Madhvani rather viscerally captures a sense of the horror and chaos when the “Palestinian” terrorists open fire on the passengers. He also shows in no uncertain terms what Islamists do best: hit women and point guns at young children. You really start to understand the realities of terrorism in Neerja, up-close and personal. Yet, thanks to Bhanot, there were only twenty fatalities out three hundred sixty-one passengers and a crew of twenty.

Sonam Kapoor not only looks a lot like the historical Bhanot. She also projects the necessary courage, grace, and dignity. She is no martyr caricature. Kapoor’s Bhanot often has to fight off panic and re-summon her courage. It is a forceful but down to earth performance that emphasizes her empathy and resilience, showing us just what a fighter Bhanot was.

Neerja is definitely the sort of film that will choke up viewers, but when the lights go up and you start to think about what happened on Pan Am 73, it will make you mad. When you watch the national rage expressed in Kabir Khan’s Phantom, it is hard to blame India for resenting America’s refusal to extradite Mubai 2008 terrorist David Headley. Yet, what can they expect when they responded to the 1986 hijacking by officially recognizing the supposed state of Palestine and continuing to send aid to the terrorist-dominated Authority? That’s really showing the hijackers. At least there has been some tilting towards the democratic state of Israel following the 2008 Mumbai attack.

Regardless, Neerja puts an acutely human face on the issue of terrorism. Kapoor does awards-caliber work, as does Anna Ipe & Apparna Sud’s production design team, which convincingly recreates the era’s analog airliner and retro-eighties trappings. Madhvani is not shy when it comes to manipulating viewers, but he keeps them focused like a laser beam, ever if they know how it all must end. Highly recommended, Neerja is now playing in New York at the AMC Empire.