3 idiots

Bollywood's audiences clearly demand much more than just their money's worth: in addition to frantic action, sentimental romances, family values, epic song-and-dance routines, luscious colour schemes and superstar actors, they expect long running times. Which are really necessary to accommodate all the aforesaid prerequisites. Bollywood certainly fulfilled their needs with 3 Idiots in 2009, and its audiences rewarded the comic caper with record box office receipts, at more than US$75 million gross (ten times its production budget).

It's not just a good buddy movie, about three room-mates at a top engineering college. It's also a road movie and a rom-com, in which the irreverent lead character (superstar Aamir Lagaan Khan) hits it off with a soignee medical intern (Kareena Kapoor) whose frizzy-haired arrogant father is the college's director (Boman Irani). And it's a nerd saga, with a materialist college rival discovering the true meanings of science and success when he tracks down his nemesis a decade after college.

The six grandiose quick-cut musical set-pieces are above-average smile-inducing sequences of movie quotations from Hollywood, Bollywood and classic romances. The aerial location work in Simla and Ladakh provides wide-screen delight, and the ageing lead actors convey youthful elan and silliness with the winking stylishness of vintage Cliff Richard movies.

Technically, however, the movie is light years ahead of Cliff and Carry On comparisons, as are the plotting and dialogue. Credits go to young story creator and editor-director Rajkumar Hirani and veteran screenplaywright-producer Vidhu Vinod Chopra, who'd previously won many awards and big profits for their two Munna Bhai comedies (starring Sanjay Dutt).

At almost three hours, the movie is never boring, with excellent subtitling that enables non-Hindis to appreciate the local comic touches, even the wordplay in a hi-falutin Hindu speech delivered by a Pondicherry-educated ex-Ugandan Indian. It's also cheering to see a film in which India is presented so positively as an aspiring society overcoming racial, religious, gender and caste issues, its everyday language decked with English-language expressions and liberal thoughts.

There's some astonishing coy homo-erotic campness, including chorus-lines of engineering students in non-sexy underpants whose rears are lowered, animated sperm, running jokes featuring farts, and levels of tear-wrenching super-strength schmaltz no old-style Hollywood mogul would have ever dared to produce in so many bucketfuls in so many sub-plots.

This is the sort of musical comedy that Hollywood used to make, on a much smaller and less cerebral scale, set in West Coast campuses and beach resorts. No one's still making such Grease or Xanadu clones in the USA, except Disney for the pre-teen market; the adult version has been outsourced to India, where it's done very well.

Peepli [live]

Peepli [Live], a female Indian writer-director's debut feature, was criticised by some Indians for showing too much European influence. They might suspect that its tragi-comic satirical tone was inspired by post-Communist (especially Romanian) movies, but it would be unsurprising if Anusha Rizvi hadn't learned lessons from watching bitter-sweet European fables about oppressed people. There may not have been many equivalent stories produced in Bollywood for her to study.

Her concept is a well-detailed set of black-comic set pieces satirising India's politics, mass media, caste system and urbanisation. There's wit and slapstick, and only two on-screen singing scenes (both apropos), the handsome male lead and bewitching female star do not have a romance, and the ending is far from happy, all very non-Indian.

A bank is foreclosing on two boozy farming brothers, and seek a loan from local headmen. Instead, they are told that the government is donating the level of funds they need to the families of farmers who commit suicide. The lazy unmarried brother thinks it'll be best if his malleable, married and equally lazy hen-picked sibling with two children saves the family. Their bed-ridden harridan of a mother, whose medical costs helped achieve the financial ruin, blames the son's bitter shrew of a wife.

A local news stringer overhears the brothers' suicide plan and passes the story to an English-language TV news station, whose lead reader-reporter he worships. Meanwhile, a local politician is setting up a by-election in the village area (the Peepli of the title), which eventually involves a handful of different political campaigns and intrigues urging the confused would-be suicide to carry out his suicide, or not, to suit their electoral plans. If not, he'll be killed, and there'll be no government compensation for the family.

Simultaneously, a fleet of rival TV stations news teams have set up camp in the village, trying to get an exclusive interview with the suicidal bumpkin. Armed forces then have to be billeted, to protect the villager, which is only a problem because the farmer has a weak bladder, and major comic chaos caused when he gets the chance to have an unescorted crap. Only at that point did the screenplay lose its cool, in a scene when a TV station provides live commentary on the social condition of his faeces.

It's impossible to admire any of the well-acted characters. The rustic brothers are not presented as virtuous noble savages, but neither are the villains truly evil. The one kind soul in the whole story dies, like the villager who digs up earth for a living, trundles his bicycle through all the chaos, and dies at the bottom of his own pit - a bitter symbol of the whole political charade.

The movie, produced by actor and industry veteran Aamir Khan (Lagaan and much more), was India's entry for the 2011 Foreign Picture Oscar. It wasn't short-listed. It was nominated at Sundance (where it was the first invited Indian feature) and the Asian Film Awards, and deserves to win something significant, other than a good calling card for its creator.

My name is Khan

Moviegoers who felt that Slumdog Millionaire was OTT in its sentimental depiction of Indian urban horrors possibly excused them as melodramatic allegorical symbols. In fact, they were typical plot angles from a movie industry whose home audiences presumably love to wallow in Dickensian emotions and Perils of Pauline sentimentality. A recent overdose of such maudlin plotting is My Name is Khan, a 165-minute warning to avoid romantic dramas from Bollywood unless they are one's big cup of char.

This one gained attention because Fox Star reportedly paid a record billion rupees for distribution rights, promoted it well enough to make a profit, and issued an international dvd.