Of Swords and Parasols

Untamable Angelique/Angelique and the Sultan: These are actually the 4th and 5th Angelique movies, the 2nd and 3rd apparently became unavailable at Netflix or had a long wait or something. (I, uhm, haven't bothered to check.) These were entertaining and fun more than not, but suffered from some serious Orientalism that had me doing some major cringing through most of them. They also further convinced me that Bertrice Small is a fan who decided they needed tons more rape, Orientalism, and misogyny. I suspect I'll enjoy the middle two movies more than these as I think they're set in France. Still, good fun and I'm glad they apparently knew they weren't getting any more movies, as they wrapped things up with the fifth, if a bit too abruptly.

Also:

( is it a spoiler when the movie is older than you are? )Bardelys the Magnificent: A silent movie based on the Rafael Sabatini book. The book actually annoys me a lot as I think Bardelys pulls some of the worst stunts of Sabatini's men, but the movie thankfully took out the part that really got to me. Fun movie, and a good swashbuckler.

Devdas: This is one of the prettist Bollywood movies I've seen! It also has one of the most abrupt and aggravating endings of Bollywood movies that I've seen (Well, aggravating in the context of "I liked it until then" and excluding ones I didn't care for.) This is...basically about a dude who almost literally drinks and angsts himself to death after his childhood love marries someone else after their mother's basically declare war on each other and he runs away. (I kept expecting the mother's to have evil auras! I may be a bit sad that they didn't.) I liked it primarily for Aishwara Rai and Madhuri Dixit's characters and how the Lost True Love and The Hooker With A Heart Of Gold joined forces instead of fighting over him and, well, I enjoy Bollywood when it goes for OTT melodrama. But the movie became increasingly insistent on making it clear that it didn't care about them (or anyone else) outside of the roles they played in Devdas's life and the ending was very "well, his story is over WHO CARES ABOUT ANYONE ELSE?" But I was having a lot of fun with it until then.

Dostana: This movie actually mostly annoyed me despite some entertaining bits and I left it convinced that there are 3 things the world never needs to have again:

1. Love triangles.

2. Bromances.

3. Plots that revolve around men lying to women to manipulate them into letting the men get things they want and it being cute and/or funny.

And so I mention this one only to post this clip because of it using my favorite Bollywood scene ever:



Positive....urm....John Abraham and Priyanka are pretty? I apparently only find Abishek Bachchan (SP?) tolerable when he's costarring with his wife, though.

Inkheart: A fun if sometimes annoyingly manpain-y fantasy film about a guy who can pull fictional characters out of books by reading allowed. Which is a lot less fun when the first thing you do is read villains out of the book and they decide to take over. It was a bit all over the place at times and I felt that it couldn't decide if the main character was Mo (the guy mentioned above) or his daughter, Meggy, but also didn't quite make them co-leads. Still, a pretty fun movie.

Jodhaa Akbar: I alternated between BEST THING SO FAR THIS YEAR and BORED NOW BACK TO COURTING YOUR WIFE WHILE SHE'S TRYING TO KILL YOU WITH HER SWORD PLEASE quite a bit on this one. A Bollywood about the medieval king, Akbar, and his arranged marriage with his wife, Jodhaa Bai (though her real name isn't known for sure) and their making an arranged marriage work. I basically loved every scene with Jodhaa and every scene with Akbar that wasn't about the politics-not because it was about politics, but because the movie failed to make the politics interesting-and the fight scenes. But, uhm...there were a lot of boring stretches. Of course, it's 3 1/2 hours long, so the good parts still make up a pretty decent full length movie on their own.

Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham: Another where I really liked parts and really didn't like others. This is basically about a man who marries a woman of a lower class and gets disowned by his father and, years later, his younger brother goes to find him and try to reunite his family (and also goes and falls for his brother's much-younger sister-in-law, who he and his wife raised since the heroines' parents died just before the forbidden marriage.)

I loved Kajol's character is this (but, on the flipside, was very annoyed with Kareena Kapoor's character, which was a bit of a shock as I've liked her in everything else I've seen her in, and was glad this wasn't the first thing I saw her in so that I know she actually is a good actress, despite this movie) and basically liked most of it when I didn't think deeply about it but then got aggravated when I did because of how the movie's main theme seemed to be trying to guilt Kajol and SRK's characters into thinking the rift in the family was their fault and not the father's. Also, SRK's character was adopted and it was pretty obvious that the father kicked him out because he was adopted and disobeyed, and would have reacted differently if it was his biological son, and the movie seemed to expect us to just go with that. (And I really, really hated the father. Maybe it's just the movies I've seen him in, but I've disliked Amitabh Bachchan in everything I've seen him in.) The KKHH references were also very distracting. Kajol and SRK's characters have the same names in both movies and Rani Mukherjee shows up in both as the thoroughly likable and non-villified Other Woman in hte first half (I was surprised they didn't name her Tina to make all 3 have the same names in both movies) and they kept whipping out the KKHH music every chance they got.

Urm....I appear to be very crankypants in most of my comments, but liked all enough to keep an eye out for cheap DVDs. Well, except Dostana.