3 Idiots

3 Idiots is a Bollywood comedy about three classmates at a prestigious engineering college. It's also a lot of fun. Madhavan (left, above) is the would-be amateur photographer taking the safe path of an engineering degree instead of following his passion. Sharman Joshi (right) lives in fear: fear of failure, fear of letting down his family, fear in general. Aamir Khan (center) is basically the Buddha, a brilliant visionary who leads his friends (and the beautiful Karina Kapoor, daughter of the hated Dean, Boman Irana) through four years of hijinks, exams, sticking it to The Man, and enlightenment.

This is a Bollywood movie, so it's two hours and 44 minutes long and has five or six acts. In addition to laughs, it offers lavish musical numbers, an impressive flood sequence, pathos, and heaps of beautiful Indian scenery. It's performed and scored broadly, with literal bells and whistles underlying the gags and one-liners, plenty of eye rolling, and never so much as a hint that all this stuff could possibly be happening in the real world.

Perhaps its best feature, however, is its sense of goodwill. Here's a movie that'll try just about anything in the name of entertainment, and it tries so gosh-darned hard that we in the audience can't help but tap our feet, chuckle along, and even shed a tear or two. Just thinking about it makes me feel like all is well, and it's hard to ask for much more than that.

Slumdog Millionaire

Ok, so I’m the last guy in the world to have seen SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE. I liked it, and I don’t get the backlash.

The film has an interesting structure, both deviating from and underscoring the standard three-act format. It tells its story in flashback, using the protagonist’s run on the Indian version of “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” to give him reason to recall and reflect upon the events of his life. This framework gives filmmaker Danny Boyle freedom to tell his story in near-vignettes, leaving out much connective tissue and sticking to the read meat of his story. While doing so, SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE keeps us moored in the three-act structure by casting different people to play his lead characters during the different periods of their lives that serve as the acts of the narrative. It’s cool, it’s neat, it’s fun, and it gives our analytic selves something to enjoy while our emotional selves get lost in a story of love desperately trying to find a way.

Some folks say that SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE is manipulative. You know what? Fine. So’s a good song. I got caught up in the ride; I fell in love along with the characters; I rooted for them every step of the way. I’m a happy customer.

Krrish

I just scouted around the internet for reviews of KRRISH, Bollywood's first big-budget superhero movie. The movie has a 100% positive rating on the tomatometer, and everyone seems to love it.

All of these people are on crack.

Somewhere in Krrish's two hours and fifty-five minutes of bloat, there's a solid little 85-minute superhero movie. Unfortunately, the filmmakers couldn't or wouldn't edit their work sufficiently ruthlessly to get to that good, fast-paced movie, so we're left with an incredibly long shampoo commercial.

Here's the setup: young Krishna is a supergenius whose grandmother hides him in a remote mountain village, far away from the eyes of evil men who would use him, if they could. The village appears to be populated by a gang of good-natured youths, a goofy sidekick, a brilliant dentist, the world's greatest hairdresser, and at least one guy who owns a gym and has access to steroids. Krishna grows up in an extended woodland idyll, maturing into an innocent gym rat with perfect teeth and hair that would put Robin Shou to shame. Oh, and he has superpowers.



Soon enough, the inevitable occurs. Krishna meets a girl, an ethnic Indian on holiday from Singapore, whose hair is even better than his.

He follows her to Singapore, where he dazzles the locals with his flowing mane.


But it isn't long before evil intervenes, and Krishna must assume a new identity - Krrish!- and save the day through the power of wind-blown locks (btw, Krrish's locks are always windblown. One of his superpowers must include the ability to levitate an invisible fan two feet from his face.).


Damn. There's slo-mo closeup of Krrish, having just risen from the sea, whipping his head about and sending perfectly lit drops of water flying everywhere. Google image search is turning up nothing.

Anyway, back to the recap. Krrish saves the world, wins the girl, and even gets a shave. There's your movie.

And it's a perfectly fine template for a movie, but it doesn't quite work. The guy who plays Krishna, Hrithik Roshan, is a skilled dancer and a fine stuntman, but his three expressions seem to be winning grin, winning grin, and palsy. The gal who plays the eventual damsel in distress (oops - spoiler!), Priyanka Chopra, appears to be more talented, but director Rakesh Roshan (Hrithik's dad, which makes the lingering shots of Hrithik's muscles, hair, and teeth kinda creepy, now that I think about it) must've told her to play to the cheap seats, because there is absolutely no mystery in her face whatsoever. It's all right there. Add astoundingly poor special effects, a score that's a direct ripoff of Danny Elfman's work on SPIDER-MAN, and the incongruous musical numbers that Bollywood demands, and you have a movie that wears out its welcome at the 90-minute mark. Had this film been edited from three to 1.5 hours, the actors would have had less time to grate; the poorer CGI sequences could have been edited out, and we might have been left with a fun, masala-flavored masked avenger flick.

But wishful thinking gets us nowhere. As it stands, KRRISH is a three hour long mess. This time around, I took one for the team.

Rocky

So you say you want to be entertained? Well, ROCKY wants to entertain you. This 1981 Bollywood production has romance, deception, loss, redemption, motorcycle stunts, fistfights, heroes, villains, motherly love, and even a disco dance-off that you will never forget. The problem is that it isn't very good.

Here's the movie in a nutshell. Rocky's dad is a union organizer who's killed by the Indian Snidely Whiplash, who proceeds to sexually assault his mother while the boy, 6ish, tries to stop him. A family friend arrives just in time to save the day, but the boy is so traumatized that he's now an amnesiac. The local doctor believes that the boy should be separated from his mother, and the family friend steps in to adopt him. Fast forward 15-or-so years, and young Rocky's all grown up, still in the dark about his early childhood. He doesn't know it yet, but he has a karmic score to settle: over the next couple of hours, he must avenge his father, get the girl, and sing and dance his way into our hearts.

There's a problem, however. ROCKY's titular character is played by Sanjay Dutt, an actor so lacking in presence, range, and athletic ability that I couldn't decide which was more unbelievable: his acting, his dancing, or his stunt work. The supporting cast is fine, but it can't save a production that hinges on our acceptance of the entirely unremarkable Dutt as a charismatic leader, fearsome fighter, and dance machine.

As for the production, well, it's late-disco-era Bollywood, so stand by for some amusing sets and costumes. The transfer doesn't help, as the DVD producers seemed to work from the most scratched, discolorized, and generally battered print they could find. I guess it's better than nothing, if you're a Sanjay Dutt completist.

As I said, ROCKY wants to entertain you. Though it pulls out all the stops, sadly, it fails.