The Current Cinema - Barrie Pattison examines military incursions in GOJIRA -1.0/GODZILLA MINUS ONE (Takashi Yamazaki, Japan, 2023) and FIGHTER (Siddarth Anand, India, 2024)

 PRO PATRIA.

Curious to find Gojira -1.0/Godzilla Minus One, this number thirty plus Godzilla movie getting wide sub-titled release. I can’t go along with the chorus of praise it has received. Roland Emmerich’s 1998 piece of cultural appropriation still remains the most accomplished entry in the cycle and, while I could find some sympathy for the Twentieth Century Japanese items with Kurosawa’s people -Takashi Shimura as white coat scientists and Masaru Satô providing scores – my favourite representation is the 1976 Arkush/Dante Hollywood Boulevard, where on-screen movie director Paul Bartel tells the man in the suit to remember that he represents a tragic figure, the last of his kind alone after thousands of years, but he should also try to stomp as many people and cars as possible.

Writer director Takashi Yamazaki and his lot have taken all this in an unfamiliar direction on the new film, starting at the close of WW2 war in the Pacific, where reluctant Kamikaze pilot Ryunosuke Kamiki lands his plane, bomb still suspended beneath it, on the small Odo Island base the already defeated Japanese Army is using as a maintenance depot, to the scorn of ground crew commander Munetaka Aoki. However, that very night a monster monster rampages through the camp with Kamiki afraid using his plane’s twenty millimetre cannon will get it mad. Well might he worry.

Back in the ruins of his bombed out Tokyo district, his relatives dead, Kamiki forms a blended family with girl fugitive Minami Hamabe and the child which has fallen into her care. Their bare existence is made more secure when he takes a well-paid but perilous job on a rundown wooden minesweeper. (Metal attracts US magnetic mines.) What should the crew encounter but that same prehistoric menace, now able to digest the pair of mines they drag into its mouth – good scene.

Godzilla, mutated and enlarged by the United States' (tinted) nuclear tests at Bikini Atoll can now destroy the heavy cruiser (“the Takao is a beast”) sent to take it out. The government’s decommissioned war ships are unequal to the task and the Americans don’t want to get involved and rile up the Soviets. Godzilla is of course on its way to stomp Tokyo and eat subway trains. It hits the Ginza district, where we know Oishi works.

Now thirsting for revenge, Kamiki joins the only potent force – the Japanese military, betrayed by their nation in the war years (dive bombers without ejector seats). They now form a vigilante army (with a few walk outs) and engage battle. The minesweeper’s rejected scientist comes up with a plan to do in the menace by decompression and our hero is kitted out in a prototype Kyushu J7W Shinden fighter, serviced by rehabilitated Aoki. Big action finale backed by Ifekube’s rousing Godzilla theme.

Down the years, the technicians have now spent a lot of time in the Toho tank and the model work is impressive, though we can’t help noticing that ships’ decks are curiously unoccupied. The monster action scenes, which are the reason for the film, are widely spaced, getting second place to not too involving personal material airing issues like survivor guilt, radiation sickness and, by implication, the pacifist constitution. Thoughtful doesn’t strike me as the way to take these. An implausible happy ending further undermines the shift to serious.

Outside the film’s entertainment credentials, it contains an unexpected emphasis on idea content. We are expected to admire a belligerent ex general who we would usually be the bad guy in one of these and we get another homage to the Zero like Miyazaki’s Kaze tachinu / The Wind Rises.

Considering that this one arrives the same time as Dunki, Siddharth Anand‘s new Fighter, is a film sufficiently accomplished to leave us wondering what we are missing in the way of (traditional Hindi) film from India. There are a whole lot of things you can say about this one. Yes, it is a rip-off of Top Gun Maverick but it’s a whole lot better film with superior aerial combat sequences and more stirring flag waving - the all-time best military funeral or star Hrithik Roshan leaning out of the helicopter holding the Indian Tricolor steaming in the wind to acknowledge the one the cadet is flying from the endangered truck convoy below.

Roshan leaves Tom Cruise in his dust in the military hero stakes – taller, better built, more authoritative. Imagine a dignified Indian Jimmy Cagney or a damp-eyed John Wayne and you’re on the way. Around the year 2000 mark, Roshan rapidly turned into his industry’s leading Sylvester Stallone imitator and, in this one, he wastes no time reassuring his admirers he’s been keeping up his time at the gym, by getting his shirt off under the opening titles.

Squadron Leader Hrithik is, of course, India’s greatest pilot in a time of increased tension over Pakistan housing Kashmir training camps for extremists - not even the full bottle on Koran quotation. Hrithik (Patty lettered on his visor) joins the squadron doing air combat scenarios and spots robust Deepika Padukone, who proves to have spectacular shoulder length hair tucked into her flyer’s helmet. However he has a secret sorrow restraining his romantic urges. Nevertheless they get to share inserted dance numbers (think Grease & Saturday Night Fever), party with the flyers and at dawn he runs her back to her single officer quarters on the back of his motorbike. Their profiles approach only to have an emergency call arrest their impending lip lock. Nothing too much has changed in these.

Turns out that super menacing Jaishih Rishabh Sawhney has launched an attack modelled on the 2019 Pulwama incident, where forty Indian military police were killed in Kashmir. The Indian response was their Balakot air strike, of which we get a spectacular recreation, where Sawhney is injured, his blood-filled eye making him even more sinister. An informer, his identity concealed in a black chador, fills in the I.A.F. briefing. He is not what he seems.

This one emphasises the Indian government’s restraint in the face of the atrocities committed by militants based in Pakistani occupied Kashmir, with the Indian Air Force responsibly respecting the invisible LOC demarcation and avoiding civilian casualties.

Hrithic is found guilty of recklessness and transferred to Hyderabad air training facility as an instructor – impressive scene of talking down the beginner-girl pilot, whose first landing is jeopardised by an unexpected crosswind. He also finds time to use his famed charmer smile and sort out Padukone’s stressed family situation.

However, it’s plot and counterplot with the bad hats wanting to lure the Indian flyboys (& girls) into crossing the border to a trap, using Hrithik’s shot down pilot mates as bait. This one runs to the ultra-sadistic, with the crazy cutting off one pilot’s fingers before they send him back in a body bag. Of course the rule book goes out the window with victory demanding our hero be restored to his place leading the rescue and facing off in the sky with his opposite number in the red nosed jet fighter, before we get some more cheer worthy action on the ground.

It’s another Indian popular film where you sit there thinking “Well all right” for the first couple of hours and, after the obligatory interval, you are jolted out of complacency by waves of superior material. Think Mother India, Lagaan or Seventh Horse of the Sun.

The action staging is some of the best ever, outclassing the work we are seeing from the U.S. and China now – the fighter plane paused vertical in the air, the bogus Russian airliner peeling off to reveal the jets its shadow covers on the radar, the shots of the training facilities exploding, our hero’s re-appearance at the crucial moment and the chopper strafing the evil rug heads pouring out waving automatic weapons. Director Siddharth Anand is a specialist in these military spectaculars. If it wasn’t so stirring you’d think it was ridiculous. Well, maybe it still is a bit ridiculous.

Of course overriding such considerations, is the question of putting such a persuasive film into the market to endorse military incursions spurred by religious differences. Ukraine, Palestine, Iraq make uncomfortable comparisons. The film has already been banned in most Arab countries but Viacom and Netflix have money in it, so Fighter looks headed our way after its brief theatrical showing. 

The consistency of the pattern – films from the U.S, China, Japan and India, often made by people unaware of the others’ existence – is not a little disturbing. The message is clearly that the only way to prevent people, with an outlook that doesn’t match your own, building nuclear refining plants, training blood thirsty insurrectionists - or at very least stomping on your coastal cities - is to send out military hardware manned by sexy characters in uniform. That this will play with unsophisticated target audiences is disturbingly possible.

There is a gloomy kind of comfort to be had in comparing these with productions made around the world near the 1930 mark, when the Anti-War movement was at its most vocal, films more thoughtful and better than this batch of of gung ho actioners – Wings, All Quiet on the Western Front, The Eagle and the Hawk, Les croix du bois/Wooden Crosses, Niemandsland/Hell on Earth, Kameradschaft. A steady stream of serious, reasoned and master-crafted product preceded the greatest military calamity in history. Can’t help but hope no one is listening this time either.

The Current Cinema - Barrie Pattison says its worthwhile tracking down the Hindi blockbuster DUNKI (Rajkumar Hirani, India, 2023)

Time was when Hollywood got stick for presenting a glamour version of life, with all the boring bits left out - the world of George Sidney. Well, the same contempt has been heaped on Bollywood for the much same reason. From this distance it’s hard to make a judgment, though Indian (that’s Hindi and all the rest) films are said to be occupying one in four of Australia’s release slots now. People must be going to them, because they keep on showing up. It would be interesting to know how many and where. There were three of us attending on the last night of the new Sha Rukh Khan movie Dunki during its one week run at Event Cinemas in George Street.

Back in the late nineties, before MTV impacted their industry, Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge/Brave Heart Takes the Bride ran for three years, where a fortnight used to be considered good.  Lagaan hit the festivals. Yash Raj Productions and Sha Rukh Khan were regular highlights of our movie-going. Nice to find they are still in place.

Dunki has the old damp eyed sentimentality, knockabout comedy, bright colour and exoticism all set at the top of the dial ... and the big musical number, a spectacular affair featuring the Union Jack, comes more than a half hour in when we’ve had time to accept the film’s tempo. I was relieved to see the formula still played, though at 160 minutes it does hang about too long after SRK’s stout court room defense of Mother India. On top of this comes a detailed analysis of immigration. Our hero’s “When the British came to our country no one demanded they speak Hindi!” gets muttered approval.

Shah Rukh Khan, Dunki

The plot of Dunki has a flashback structure. The mature Indian immigrants, who have made a place in Britain, are stirred at the news that their idol Hardy/SRK is coming. We see him distracted from the finish line in his Laltu senior citizen’s athletics event. Our curiosity is caught as we try to figure out the circumstances that produced this situation.

Back in the Punjab, Hardy showed up to return the radio of a fellow soldier, who had rescued him on the battlefield, and our hero found himself teaching wrestling to the dead man’s sister, the rather fetching Taapsee Pannu – nice scene. With fellow nationals they find themselves needing to make their fortunes in Britain, represented by seeing a soppy romance film where the lead proposes to his intended in front of Big Ben. The monument will become an effective motif in the film – background to a human statue routine or reflected on the window of a passing car.

The wannabees are told of the three ways to enter – marriage, study or political asylum. Comic routines in Boman Irani’s incompetent language school prepare them with a lavatory song for their “Student Veejaar.” It leads to a plausible self-immolation with a handy kerosene stove. Not uncharacteristic for these, I still remember Lehk Tandon’s cheery 1962 musical Professor building to Shammi Kapoor’s mother getting stoned by the locals.

The situation comes down to Dunki, the donkey route of people smuggling. At the length of this one, there’s time for what would take up a complete film itself – striking effects work where a real bus metamorphoses into a toy on a map, circuitous border crossings, avoiding watchtower gun fire by walking under water and confronting a murderous Iranian patrol officer.

Disillusion faces the group at the end of the trip. Dog walking locals don’t understand why they need to be told they are in Britain. An understanding judge is unable to endorse their good will. Of the many hazards they encounter, the sham marriage to a doper in a giant, so nice church is particularly vivid. When we get to the present day the group find themselves forbidden to re-enter their native land and in the hands of another Dunki immigration agent. The film comes up with a sting in the tail documentary sequence which will upset preconceptions.

The scripting is unpredictable and clever and the staging first class. This is a top of the line item. Writer-director-editor Rajkumar Hirani is one of their industry’s key figures. His Three Idiots got some action abroad but I was more taken with his P.K. and Muna Bhai MBBS films. The new entry may not be his best but it benefits from the imposing presence of Khan at the head of a strong cast.

Forget about the celebrated canon. It’s instructive to remember that most of the several millions of fans who think Shah Rukh Khan is the world’s greatest star have never heard of Robert Bresson or Pedro Almodovar any more than their critic and festival programmer admirers accept SRK. It’s simple minded (and racist) to automatically believe they are wrong … and it cuts the viewer off from some of the most involving work being done in this troubled period of film making.

It will be an effort to track down Dunki in our erratic local distribution scheme but it is a great way to bring the situation into perspective.

The Current Cinema - Barrie Pattison tracks down CREATION OF THE GODS 1: KINGDOM OF STORMS (Wu Ershan, China, 2023) and JAWAN (Atlee Kumar, India, 2023)

Not so long ago we had unprecedented access to the films of China and India - and not a few more - in dedicated cinemas and video stores. Where did all that go? Well not really all that far. The multiplexes now run their product in late sessions, sometimes to empty houses and occasionally in ones sold out.

Wu Ershan’s grim new Block Buster Creation of the Gods I: Kingdom of Storms is getting a down town first run. This one offers monster budget myth as special effects piece and is being touted as the second biggest earner in the history of the Chinese film. Actually it logs in about number twenty eight but its owners are talking it up big with an eye to the overseas market - European musical scoring and script participation by James Schamus, long time collaborator with Ang Lee, including Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon.

The film opens with the usual captions on graphics explaining the descent of the Shang Dynasty from the Gods, to rule a China divided into four territories, the governor of each having to send a non heir son to the Shang court to participate in the hostage Legion of the Disinherited. It is this that the Shang ruler sends against a rebel province (where have I heard that description before?) under the command of his own son Fei Xiang who is scornful when the commanders are repulsed by a fire barrier, which their horses will not cross and sends them back with the animals blindfolded.

The now defeated governor is pursued by two of the Legion Commander sons who overtake him and his alluring daughter Narana, who they feel it would be wasteful to slaughter with her father. They bring her back to Fei Xiang for his victory celebration. Bad move guys! Her pupils narrow to those of a cat. Yes she’s a Fairy Fox in human form, who sets about bewitching the macho leader. His solution to the disturbances is to have a massive funeral pyre which - promises, promises - he will ascend to assuage the wrath of the Gods.

It’s not long before people are assassinating their children or parents as part of the royal power struggle and the concerned gods dispatch ancient sage comedian Huang Bo, in loads of make up, with the enchanted message stick, to impose control. The convoluted plot is spaced by mass action footage and, rather better, a bit of erotic by-play like the scene of the power couple bathing together naked in the milky pool with Narana’s floor length hair trailing in a circle round them. 

It looks like things get sorted but a couple of epilogues tell us that the fox demon will have it all going again for part two.

We recognise a mash up of Shakespeare, Eisenstein, John Woo and Kurosawa (the fake head in the bag is instantly Ran). Westerners would be battling to follow events or to find a focal point for their sympathies in three hours of all this violence within families. Origins in the Chinese classic “Investiture of the Gods” from sixteen hundred AD would be known to its home audience, if not from the original, then from adaptations like the Xu An’s 2016 Feng Shen Bang / League of Gods 3D, which similarly buried Bingbing Fan and Jet Li in CG effects work.

It all left me yearning for the great days of Chu Yuan and the Shaw Brothers whose fantastic costume melodramas packaged this kind of material with welcome self deprecating comedy - at considerably shorter length.

The great days of (mainly) Hong Kong movies were succeeded by the great leap forward in Twenty first Century Hindi Cinema which followed the arrival of MTV in India. Front runners were the Jash Rash productions with their imposing stars Sha Rukh Kahn and Amitabh Bachchan, who now make joke promotion videos about giving roles offered them to one another.

Despite the difusion of interest through Bengali, Tamil and Sanskrit regional cinemas (not however the English language productions), Yash Rash is still a thing and Atlee Kumar’s new Jawan is a big hit for them. It offers the old Yash Raj over production even before SRK shows up again. 

Our superhero makes a spectral looking entry as he arrives to take down the hoard of red star soldiers conducting a village massacre. It’s not long before that looks like him again running the hijack and terrorising of the commuter train with ransom demands by ‘phone to the Minister, bringing his own fake hijab casualties, like the bank bandits in Un Flic, before blending in with the crowd, like the team in the 1981 John Huston Victory - all backed by SRK's personal Charley’s Angels. While we are processing that, our hero, rendered youthful, shows as the governor of the model women’s prison sheltering all the green uniform inmates (OK digitally populated aerial shot intro) which provides a haven for arrestees who never re-offend. Confused - that’s the idea.

Throw in successive production numbers, like the one where our high stepping hero does his routine in the red shirt, the “Fly Away Little Birds” dance and becoming progressively more virtuoso till we get to the finale where a couple of him dance together while the motion capture camera. weaves around them.

As a follow up to the red star soldiers, we get Bhopal style industrialists backed with goon squad heavies and money from the Mafia (who are making a comeback as movie heavies - Equalizer 3) Our heroes out smart them by holding the countries' voting machines ransom, when it looks like the election will be bought, complete with the spectacular highway stunt action piece where the veteran biker retainers fan out to make a moving wall and truck loads of bribe money blow in the wind. It takes a super cop to battle our super heroes, so Sanjav Dutt (Munna Bhai himself) makes a late appearance - ripple of audience recognition.

Despite virtuoso touches this one is too nasty, too loud and too simple minded to recommend to the outside audience that once lapped up their industry’s Lagaan, Mohabateen and Robot - when they had the chance.

AT THE SYDNEY FILM FESTIVAL - Adrienne McKibbins recommends the mini-retrospective of the biggest star of all time - AMITABH BACHCHAN

Amitahb Bachchan

“I am as common as the common man and as special as him too” -- Amitabh Bachchan 

How is it possible to sum up Amitabh Bachchan? arguably the most recognised and important figure in Hindi cinema Amitabh Bachchan. Bachchan is an actor, film producer, television host, and briefly a politician. His career has lasted over five decades. During that time, Bachchan has appeared in over 200 films. An icon of the Hindi film industry, he has worked with virtually every major director, and important female star, and has more books and articles written about him than any other figure in Indian cinema.

At 80 years of age, he has three films in progress for 2023-2024.

It is actually impossible to underestimate his significance to world cinema. In 1999 a BBC online poll voted Bachchan the all-time greatest star of stage or screen, winning by a substantial margin over Sir Laurence Olivier in second place, followed by Sir Alec Guinness in third. 

Deewaar (The Wall,1975) 

Despite his world-wide fame, his versatility as an actor, and superb spoken English, he has not ventured beyond Indian cinema to the global mainstream, (despite numerous offers) except for a small role in Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby.

Of course, in a career of such longevity there have been upheavals, controversies, digressions and flops.  

Bachchan, has reinvented his persona a number of times to suit the changing trends and styles of filmmaking. He has taken a tilt at politics as well as a successful stab at being a TV host via Kaun Banega Crorepati (the Hindi version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire), which saw him acquire the following of a new and younger audience.

Kaala Patthar (Black Stone, 1979)

Bachchan’s screen career started in 1969 as a voice narrator in Mrinal Sen's film Bhuvan Shome. Utilising his impressively deep and wide baritone vocal range, he has narrated many films, including Satyajit Ray's 1977 film Shatranj Ke Khiladi. and Gowariker’s 2001 Oscar nominated film Lagaan . 

As an on-screen presence Bachchan popularity soared in the early seventies with a series of films that earned him the designation of ‘Indian cinema’s “angry young man”. His fast rise to fame from 1972 to 1974 catapulted him to the heights of superstardom having made 44 feature films between 1969 and 1976, his impact being measured by the fact that at any time during his period at least four films of his films were playing simultaneously in Indian cinemas,

In 1992 Bachchan took an extended break from the Hindi film industry and did not appear on screen for five years. The nineties were a difficult time for him with failed business ventures and paucity of successful films.

Amar Akbar Anthony (1977)

In 2000 he returned to the screen starring with Shah Rukh Khan in Mohabbetien produced by Yash Chopra and directed by the producer’s son Aditya Chopra. Mohabbetien was a huge triumph, both critically and importantly, commercially.  This ushered in a new period of success for the actor, as he adopted a new, more paternalistic persona that returned him to prominence.

Although you could not call four films a comprehnsive retrospective — it’s a drop in the ocean — the films selected for screening at this year’s Sydney Film Festival all represent Bachchan at the height of his popularity. Deewaar (The Wall,1975) and Kaala Patthar (Black Stone, 1979) are by his favourite director Yash Chopra and were scripted by Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar, the writers who invented and shaped Bachchan’s “angry young man persona” from the nineteen seventies.

Amar Akbar Anthony (1977), a Hindi classic that paired Bachchan with two other big stars of the seventies, Rishi Kapoor, and Vinod Khanna, demonstrated Bachchan’s impeccable comic timing, a talent that was probably not exploited enough during his long career. Then there is the iconic Don (1978), nowadays considered a cult classic in which Bachchan plays a double role, a familiar narrative device in Hindi cinema.

Also written by Khan and Akhtar, Don is such an iconic film that it has been remade in various languages, including Tamil, Telegu, and Punjabi. The most famous version is the 2006 Don made by Javed Akhter’s son Farhan Akhtar (actor/producer/director).  The script was adapted and updated by Farhan and Javed Akhtar, and the lead (double) role was played by Shah Rukh Khan and inspired a successful sequel. 

Don (1978)

This snapshot mini-season of Bachchan gems offers a look at the superstar in sone of his finest early roles. These films should encourage those not so familiar with his work to further explore (and appreciate) a phenomenal Indian icon’s filmic oeuvre.

For more information about venues session times and bookings CLICK HERE FOR THE SYDNEY FILM FESTIVAL BACHCHAN PAGE