Audient Bollywood: Sholay

This is my 11th and penultimate film in my 2022 series Audient Bollywood, in which I'm familiarizing myself with the cinema of India.

Eleven months into this series, I'm finally figuring out the perfect hack for how to watch Bollywood movies while still keeping a normal schedule.

Namely, watch the first half on a weekend afternoon during what we refer to in our house as "quiet time" -- a period from about 4:30 to about 7 when the kids are allowed to be on their devices -- and then the second half that night after you and your wife go your separate ways for the evening.

Conveniently, Sholay (1975) even had an intermission to provide a line of demarcation between the two.

Yes, my 11th installment of Audient Bollywood was what I was referencing last weekend when I wrote this post about intermissions. I meant to hop on the regular monthly Audient Bollywood post in the day or two that followed, so as not to forget too much of what I wanted to say about Sholay, but this led to that and I'm only just getting to it now. I think I remember most of the salient takeaways of my viewing.

While researching the post about intermissions, I discovered they are still common in Indian cinema today -- and in Indian cinemas, referring to the locations rather than the industry, where they will insert intermissions into many longer western films that obviously don't have the when we see them. Interestingly, though, this is the first film I watched for Audient Bollywood that featured an actual intermission that was considered to be part and parcel to the film, part of the print that endured and that we watch today. And it's not like Sholay is the longest film I've watched for this series, though at 204 minutes, I suppose it's second longest only to Lagaan, which is a full 20 minutes longer.

No, I think the intermission we'd see if we were watching something in an Indian cinema nowadays is inserted after the fact and can be excised when the movie is distributed internationally. In 1975, that was not the case, and the break in Sholay came along just as I need to start making dinner for my kids. 

One other funny, non-story observation to make about this film before I get into its plot. I can't tell at what point over the years this was added in, but every time a character started to smoke a cigarette -- which was not a huge number of times, maybe a half dozen over the course of the film -- a message came on screen reading "Cigarette smoking is injurious to health." It would stay on screen for the duration of the cigarette being smoked, and then it would disappear. Too funny.

I chose Sholay because a) I wanted one more older film, as in pre-1990s film (I'll be finishing with a film from the 1990s in December), and b) it was on the list of top ten Bollywood dance numbers from Time Out, which I have been consulting all year. Since my December movie is not on that list, I'll finish this series having watched exactly half of those ten movies: Sholay, Baar Baar Dekho, Lagaan, Bajirao Mastani and Dil Se. That means that Devdas, Dabangg, Khalnayak, Mr. India and Mughal-e-Azam will all have to wait for future viewings intended purely for pleasure. 

(And since this is the last time I will mention this list, I should probably answer the question as to why I considered this one random list to be definitive. The answer is, I didn't and don't, especially given some of the disappointing dance numbers the list singled out. But I had to go with something, and I didn't want to overcomplicate things.)

But once I started watching Sholay I realized there was a reason to watch it beyond its supposedly superior dance number, a reason specific to me but one that should apply to any cinephile: It's kind of a loose adaptation of Kurosawa's classic Seven Samurai.

There are only two "samurai" here -- thieves Jai (Amitabh Bachchan) and Veeru (Dharmendra) -- but they fulfill a similar function to the titular samurai in Kurosawa's film. They are brought to a remote village to defend it from a band of marauders led by the wicked Gabbar Singh (Amjad Khan), having proven their mettle as criminals and their abilities as sharpshooters. The jovial pair were identified by a retired police officer named Thakur (Sanjeev Kumar) when he was hunting them as part of his job. Thakur is kind of the paterfamilias of the entire village, and when the threat from Singh and his cohorts seems impossible to resolve, Thakur can think of only this pair to help quell it. 

Of course, Seven Samurai engendered proper westerns, most obviously The Magnificent Seven, but likely others as well. Sholay, then, feels like a western as well, as it involves guns and horses and all the other traditional western ingredients. As such it is my first western, of sorts, in this series. And its debt not only to Kurosawa, but also to Sergio Leone, is clear. (If memory serves, there is sort of a whistling score from time to time, and at least one scene that relies on no dialogue and mostly sounds and close-ups of action, like the opening of Once Upon a Time in the West.) As if director Ramesh Sippy wanted to make every one of his allusions completely clear, the actor who plays Thakur, Sanjeev Kumar, even has a bit of a Japanese appearance to him. You look at this guy and tell me if he wouldn't look completely normal turning up in a samurai film:

Even though some of Sholay verges on theft, it ended up being yet another film in this series to exceed four stars on Letterboxd. Actually in this case I ultimately went with exactly four stars, but I was considering 4.5 for a while. It has a satisfying epic arc, and explores the central relationship between the two thieves with a nice sense of humor that offsets the moments of violence and sadism by Gabbar Singh.

A discussion of Sholay would not be complete without mentioning Veeru's love interest, a frivolous carriage driver named Basanti, played by Hema Malini. She's a self-proclaimed chatterbox and she brings a great additional energy to the movie, supporting the humor that serves as an undercurrent between the two leads. In a scene involving her that is not played for humor, Singh requires her to keep dancing in the hot sun or a sniper will put a bullet in the captured Veeru. Singh's men break glass at her feet, and she has to keep dancing even while the shards are cutting the soles of her feet.

I had hoped this was the dance number that had been singled out by Time Out, but actually, it involves an older Bollywood icon who went by the single stage name of Helen, who had become famous as a Bollywood "vamp." In a one-off scene, she also dances for Singh's men. This scene did not particularly speak to me, and I imagine the writer included it primarily to honor this Bollywood legend. It's another case where the list may have had the right movie, but had the wrong dance scene in that movie. 

Jai also has a love interest, played by Jaya Bhaduri, but she doesn't sing and dance, so she doesn't get a paragraph to herself. Or at least, not a very long one. 

One final note about Sholay: Every time I see the title I can't help singing "sho-lay, sho-LAY, SHO-lay, SHO-LAY!" to the tune of Dolly Parton's "Jolene."

Okay I will wrap up Audient Bollywood in December with a movie that had a minor cultural moment in 2022. 

Asian Audient: Kurosawa weekend

This is the second in my 2017 series Asian Audient, in which I watch movies created by Asians and set in Asia. I believe they are also speaking "Asian." (That's a Cable Guy reference.)  

Only one of the two Kurosawa movies I watched this weekend is the official entrant in this series, that being the poster you see to the right here, High and Low. But I'm calling the post "Kurosawa weekend" because I did indeed watch two movies by Akira Kurosawa in the space of about 28 hours, leaving only 22 hours left over to do other things.

The one I revisited, on Saturday night, was the one where it all began: Seven Samurai. I saw Seven Samurai twice before the age of 19 ... and then not again since then. The reason is fairly obvious. The movie runs for a whopping three hours and 27 minutes, and almost never can I find a block of time like that. Or if I do find that block of time, Seven Samurai is not necessarily how I want to fill it, great as it may be.

But when you consistently rank a film among your top 50 of all time (according to Flickchart), you do need to revisit it at least once every 25 years. Especially if it's the movie that has driven you to watch as many of the other films by its director as possible, slowly but surely, to the point that I am now almost in double digits.

The opportunity for a rewatch of Kurosawa's masterpiece arose because of the two following factors: 1) My wife was going away to stay at a hotel Saturday night for her birthday, and 2) It's streaming on Stan. So I decided to screw up my courage and put one of the longest movies I've ever seen on my Saturday night schedule.

But first, the "appetizer" on Friday night, when my wife was also out.

High and Low had been on my list of "next Kurosawa films" for a while, alongside titles like The Hidden Fortress, Throne of Blood and Stray Dog (any of which we may see later in this series). But I didn't know much about it. It's the story of a wealthy man vying to take a controlling stake in a shoe manufacturing company, who is approached by other controlling interests who want to overthrow the current president, who holds the highest share. Right as he's about to execute his power play his son is kidnapped for a 30 million yen ransom. Only it's not actually his son -- it's his son's playmate, the son of the man's limo driver, who was mistaken for the rich man's son. The need to pay the ransom is then shifted from a matter of certainty, based on blood relation, to a moral obligation, based on doing the only decent thing. Whether the man will do that decent thing or continue to try his hostile takeover -- for which he is mortgaged to within an inch of his life already -- consumes the first half of the narrative. The second is a police procedural in search of the kidnapper.

When I watched The Bad Sleep Well a few years ago, and had a bit of a "ho hum" reaction to it, I concluded that the Kurosawa that works best for me is that set in feudal Japan. I like my Kurosawa with swords and samurai, and fortunately, there's a lot of that in his filmography for me to choose from, including other classics like Rashoman and Yojimbo. I hadn't gotten the chance to test this theory again until now.

Fortunately, High and Low worked a lot better for me than The Bad Sleep Well, without reaching the heights of his feudal Japan work. It is very strangely two different movies married together, though. For its first half it really is primarily interested in a rich man who holds his own interests in high regard being faced with the impossible choice of his personal fortune or the life of his employee's son. It does not address those issues with a huge amount of delicacy, as it's mostly right there in the dialogue and not much is left up to nuance. But it's an interesting dilemma that I saw repeated in a strange place, cinematically: the Luke Wilson vehicle Middle Men, about the beginning years of online porn (which I actually liked quite a bit). Were it his own son kidnapped, there's no dilemma. But someone else's ... it introduces all kinds of complications that get expertly teased out. Not only the guilt of the man considering not paying the ransom, but the guilt of the father of the boy, forced to ask his employer to go into financial ruin in order to save the life of his son. This plot culminates in a brilliantly staged sequence in the middle of the movie that I won't spoil here.

The second half, as I said, is almost purely police procedural, and I think this might be the more interesting half -- though I'm still not sure. Kurosawa really gets into the details of how police crack a case, and the fact that they're all working in the high heat of summer, fanning themselves however they can manage, just makes it more visceral and compelling. There are some sequences in this second half that go on a bit longer than they need to, and I missed the man who was the center of the first half (Kurosawa regular Toshiro Mifune) being absent from the second half (I won't tell you why he was absent, though -- don't assume he died or anything). But I love Kurosawa's close reading of a police force using all means at their disposal to find a suspect.

The film's duality is certainly represented in the dialectic established by its title, with highs and lows being extremes. Numerous instances of high and low proliferate the plot, from the employer and employee, to the physical location of the man's house high above the "low" below that has targeted him. I ended up feeling quite strongly about the film without being able to enshrine it as a Kurosawa classic. At least not after only one viewing, anyway.

Speaking of second viewings, Seven Samurai didn't disappoint, though I can't say that I loved it quite to the extent as my first two viewings. My first two viewings would have been very different, but both were equally satisfying in their own ways. The first time was in my high school class Art of the Film, in which we split the film's running time over what I would guess was more than a week of classes. You could argue that that's not a great way to watch a film, but it sure made me love Seven Samurai. The second time was in my freshman year in college, when I watched it all in one sitting on a weekend night in a classroom that was functioning as a movie theater for this event. I didn't get tired then like I do now, so I don't recall even struggling with it. This viewing more resembled my second viewing in that I watched it over the course of only about 4.5 hours, just an hour longer than its running time. I started at 8 and finished around 12:30. But the ability to pause, and the couple short naps I took, did wear me down and ultimately contributed to me loving the movie a little less, I think. I chose to have a sushi dinner with it, but I should not have chosen that Sapporo, as it left me struggling.

One takeaway from my second viewing was something I had forgotten: that the village that "hires" the samurai (i.e. agrees to give them meals for their services) is not actually as destitute as they make themselves out to be. Even though it would seem like they have pushed their resources to their limits in order to buy a defense of their village from bandits, and come across as a true charity case worthy of a noble samurai's generosity, as the story goes on it's revealed that they have access to sake and other luxuries that belie the circumstances they are presenting to the outer world. The movie, then, is really about the way that the code of honor samurais live their lives by is really disappearing from the landscape, and only lives on as an antiquated affectation in them. The ending line about the village winning and the samurai losing -- as they always do -- brings that idea home. They are a dying breed, exemplified also by the gun that factors into the finale and takes the lives of two of them. One of those is the "fool," Kikuchiyo (again Mifune), who despite his ravings and drunkenness was also the only one to realize that the villagers had resources they weren't letting on about, and essentially have been playing the samurai for fools.

One final thought about Seven Samurai: Only on this viewing did I finally acknowledge that the title does not have a "The" in it. I've been referring to it as The Seven Samurai most of my life, but it was finally time to admit the lack of a definite article and update all my various lists accordingly.

Okay, on to March. I've got a few ideas of where I might go, geographically, or I might also stay put in Japan and check in with Kurosawa's countryman Yasujiro Ozu. But since I haven't actually sourced my next film yet, I will just leave you in suspense for now.

Best of the beasts

I watched Spartacus over the weekend.

All 3 hours and 16 minutes of it.

Which is pretty challenging when you're trying to watch it during the day while also taking care of a baby. I sometimes feel guilty watching things on TV while babysitting, because he'll get exposed to TV plenty fast without our help. However, I feel a lot more guilty when my wife is around. Fortunately, she was out for most of the morning/early afternoon on Saturday, so I had plenty of time to finish the whole thing, especially factoring in his hour-long nap.

It got me thinking about really long movies in general, how they almost have to be really good for us to be willing to sit through the whole thing. Spartacus was no exception.

And that made me wonder which really long movies I like most, a potential topic for my Flickchart Tuesdays series. (I took last week off, sorry.) For the purposes of this discussion, I'm considering "really long movies" -- or "beasts," for short -- to be movies at least three hours in length.

Because it takes a certain type of movie to get the studio's blessing on a 3+ hour running time, I figure it will take awhile for me to even get a top 20 (ten to be discussed, ten just to be referenced). I mean, I may have only seen 20-30 movies that are even that long.

But given my thesis that 3+ hour movies are usually good, I'm interested in expanding my usual focus today beyond a top 20. In fact, since it's easy to quickly determine which movies even have a chance of being that long, meaning I can make rather quick work of this, I think I'll go through my whole list. After all, isn't it almost more interesting to figure out which three-hour movie I found to be the most tedious, rather than the best? On which movie did I spend the most time for the least return?

As you may know by now, the rules for this exercise are that I don't know what movies will come up as I roll on down through my Flickchart rankings. I just choose the topic and go, hoping I don't embarrass myself along the way.

One note: Spartacus itself will be conspicuously absent from this list. I have the following personal Flickchart policy: I don't add a movie into my Flickchart until it's been a month since I've seen it. That allows me some time to step back and have some perspective on the film before I decide what's better than it, and what's worse.

Here we go ...

1. The Seven Samurai (1954, Akira Kurosawa). Running time: 204 minutes. I saw Kurosawa's greatest masterpiece for the first time in film class in high school. I believe it took the whole week's worth of classes, and possibly then some. My second viewing was of the more traditional variety, though it was still in an academic setting -- it was shown as entertainment in a classroom on a Saturday night in college. This was my freshman year, possibly before I discovered beer. Flickchart: #38

2. Schindler's List (1993, Steven Spielberg). Running time: 200 minutes. My only screening of Schindler's List was of the normal, theatrical variety. Except there was nothing normal about what I was seeing on screen. Don't remember it feeling like 3 hours and 20 minutes, and never had to leave to go to the bathroom. (If I had, it wouldn't have been until the end, and only if I'd needed a Kleenex.) Flickchart: #54

3. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002, Peter Jackson). Running time: 179 minutes. And here, at #3, I already get caught cheating. The second (and best) Lord of the Rings is one minute shy of three hours. Oh well. This is my list and I can make whatever exceptions I want. I had not been a huge fan of the original movie, but The Two Towers brought me fully on board to the LOTR phenomenon -- as well as making me go back and appreciate the first. Flickchart: #70

4. Dances With Wolves (1990, Kevin Costner). Running time: 181 minutes. The first beast on this list I watched entirely in a home setting. I remember getting so emotionally invested in this story (and what a payoff at the end), in the basement of my childhood home, that I doubt I noticed the passage of three hours. And this after I'd spent the entire Oscars scoffing over the fact that Costner's movie was picking up all the awards, over two sentimental favorites (Ghost and Awakenings) and one certified masterpiece (Goodfellas). Flickchart: #84

5. Titanic (1997, James Cameron). Running time: 195 minutes. Yes indeed, Titanic is in my top 100 overall. But if Flickchart had existed in 1997, it probably would have been #1. I was simply in love with this movie when it first came out, and I refuse to throw it under the bus now. Still one of the great spectacles ever filmed, with a degree of difficulty that's off the charts. One of the phenomena about Titanic, if you loved it like I did, was that you specifically did not notice 3 hours and 15 minutes passing you by. If you didn't love it, it probably seemed interminable. Flickchart: #98

6. Malcolm X (1992, Spike Lee). Running time: 205 minutes. Another movie that blew me away. I do, however, remember the full passage of 3 hours and 25 minutes -- I just didn't care. Still, I remember my friend Susan and I emerging from the theater feeling exhausted. What part of that was the length of the movie and what part of that was the vividness and brilliance of Lee's filmmaking, it's hard to say. Flickchart: #162

7. Short Cuts (1993, Robert Altman). Running time: 184 minutes. Fresh of a high from The Player, I dove into the theaters to see Altman's Short Cuts and was not disappointed. (I'm kind of amazed how many of these really long movies I had the stamina for seeing in the theaters back in the early 1990s -- or it could just be that they don't make 'em that long anymore.) The length of Altman's adaptation of Raymond Carver's short stories may have been blunted by the fact that there were so many different storylines to follow. Flickchart: #201

8. Lawrence of Arabia (1962, David Lean). Running time: 202 minutes. My one condition for eventually seeing Lawrence of Arabia, which finally happened about six years ago, was for me to be able to appreciate its massive scope on a big screen. I finally got that opportunity when the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) played it one night, and my then-girlfriend (now wife) and I went. I believe there was an intermission and I believe we stumbled out afterward, exhausted but amazed. Flickchart: #216

9. Gone With the Wind (1939, Victor Fleming). Running time: 222 minutes. I went to college in Maine, and chose to stay on campus for the snowy first week of a two-week spring break my sophomore year. Being basically snowed in really helped in my first screening of Gone With the Wind, which occurred in one sitting at a friend's house, which I remember as feeling like five hours long. Not to say it wasn't an amazing feat of cinema, just that I could feel it eating the life out of me bit by bit. Of course, that's still good enough to be Flickchart: #314

10. JFK (1991, Oliver Stone). Running time: 189 minutes. The first beast on this list where I have no memory of the circumstances of my viewing. I know I didn't see it in the theater, but the rest is hazy. I guess that's an appropriate way to wrap up the discussion portion of my top ten films over three hours long. Flickchart: #323

And now numbers 11-20:

11. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003, Peter Jackson). Running time: 200 minutes. Flickchart: #349
12. The Godfather Part II (1974, Francis Ford Coppola). Running time: 200 minutes. Flickchart: #425
13. The Deer Hunter (1978, Michael Cimino). Running time: 183 minutes. Flickchart: #483
14. Ben-Hur (1959, William Wyler). Running time: 212 minutes. Flickchart: #554
15. Magnolia (2000, Paul Thomas Anderson). Running time: 188 minutes. Flickchart: #682
16. Gettysburg (1993, Ronald F. Maxwell). Running time: 248 minutes. Flickchart: #747
17. Nixon (1995, Oliver Stone). Running time: 190 minutes. Flickchart: #754
18. Grindhouse (2007, Robert Rodriguez & Quentin Tarantino). Running time: 192 minutes. Flickchart: #772
19. Hamlet (1996, Kenneth Branagh). Running time: 242 minutes. Flickchart: #852
20. King Kong (2005, Peter Jackson). Running time: 187 minutes. Flickchart: #1012

And because there are so few more in total:

21. Fanny & Alexander (1982, Ingmar Bergman). Running time: 188 minutes. Flickchart: #1144
22. Inland Empire (2006, David Lynch). Running time: 179 minutes*. (See variance allowed for The Two Towers). Flickchart: #1759
23. The Great Ziegfeld (1936, Robert Z. Leonard). Running time: 179 minutes.* Flickchart: #1847
24. Wyatt Earp (1994, Lawrence Kasdan). Running time: 189 minutes. Flickchart: #1916
25. Pearl Harbor (2001, Michael Bay). Running time: 183 minutes. Flickchart: #1959
26. Cleopatra (1963, Joseph L. Mankiewicz). Running time: 246 minutes. Flickchart: #2263 27. The Thin Red Line (1998, Terence Malick). Running time: 180 minutes. Flickchart: #2453

So I've only seen 27 films that cross the three-hour mark, of the 3,271 titles I currently have ranked in Flickchart. That's an extremely small number, which shows you just how rare three-hour movies really are. In fact, it's really only 24, since there are three movies on this list that I rounded up to three hours from 2:59. Though that goes back up to 25 if you include Spartacus.

For the most part, it seems like I considered the extended pressure on my butt cheeks to be worthwhile. My top five three-hour movies are all in my top 100, and my top 20 three-hour movies are all in the top third of my rankings. Only two three-hour movies -- Cleopatra and The Thin Red Line -- are in my bottom third. And that assessment of Thin Red Line may be too harsh. Let's just say I really disliked Malick's return to cinema when I first saw it, and only grudgingly respect it more now that I've seen it a second time.

Funny, even writing up this list exhausted me a little bit.

Tune in next week for more Flickchart nuttiness.