Darr (1993) – One can scarcely overstate the popularity of charismatic Bollywood leading man Shah Rukh Khan; as my Bollywood-centric friend Chris explained to me once, “Imagine if Tom Hanks and Tom Cruise were the same person.”
Darr was apparently his breakout role. The premise seems ripe for comedy: Juhi Chawla is engaged to the stalwart marine commando Sunny Deol, and Shah Rukh is Juhi’s ignored college classmate who obsesses about her. I assumed that Shah Rukh would use zany humor to win Juhi away from Sunny.
Then I started to get disturbed, because by my (American) standards, Shah Rukh was crossing the line from “zany” to “stalkerish.”
Then I was relieved to realize that Shah Rukh was the bad guy, and the obsessive-stalker thing wasn’t supposed to be endearing. I was reading his later persona into his early role. (Sort of like if Tom Hanks’ character in Mazes & Monsters (1982) had turned out to be a serial killer, and you were watching it in 2021.)
The Hunt (2020) – Thanks to hair-triggered hyperventilating from conservatives, a witty and incisive movie deserving of eyeballs got mired in trumped-up controversy. The version of the movie that got noised about was “A bunch of left-wingers use right-wingers as prey in a human hunt.” What it really was is this: Caricatures of left-wingers hunt caricatures of right-wingers. And the right-wingers are the protagonists, so what are you complaining about?
Yes, the movie is offensive, but not in the ways that were assumed or to the audience that was assumed — it’s as gleefully violent as hell, and takes potshots at everyone’s assumptions about “them.” It’s a movie about literally dehumanizing your assumed political opponents, and the sight-unseen reaction to it only proves its point.
It’s also wickedly clever, and does a better job of bait-and-switching the protagonist than any movie I’ve ever seen (I’ll tell anyone who will listen that the protagonist flip-flop in Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) is a huge flaw, not a “daring auteur move,” so I’ve got a very high bar on that).
Scarlett (2020) – An enjoyable action timewaster about a nursing student (the titular Scarlett) who was raised by a single father who was also some kind of covert American agent who bears an uncanny resemblance to my brother-in-law. He made sure she knew how to use a gun, how to evade surveillance, etc., and even though she’s fed up with that life, it comes in handy when one of her father’s opponents kidnaps Dad and invades Scarlett’s life, looking for a bioweapon McGuffin.
If you’re like me, though, you’ll get pretty frustrated at the number of times Scarlett escapes from a baddie, then refuses to shoot someone and gets recaptured.
(All of the license plates are from Colorado, but from the look of the mountains and the background appearance of what looked like the logo for the Utah Transit Authority, I suspected a different shooting location. As I suspected: The closing credits gave special thanks to the cities of American Fork and Orem, Utah.)
Abandoned Movies:
The Galaxy Invader (1985) – Regional filmmaker Don Dohler graciously introduces all of the absolutely unlikable amateurish cast plus the monster suit within the first 15 minutes, thus sparing me the necessity of watching any further.
Assassin’s Game (2015) – I bet the director thought he was being visually artistic, when he was really just being annoying and twee.
When I saw “Scarlett” in the post title, I wondered what you were doing watching a TV movie sequel to one of the most beloved and financially-successful films of all time. Turns out there is more than one Scarlett out there.