Turns out, telophase had a doozy.

Aabra Ka Daabra is a Bollywood children’s movie not at all reminiscent of Harry Potter or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or anything, OKAY, so STOP ASKING. Featuring “amazing” 3D effects, according to the box; this is technically true, but probably not in the spirit they intended.

Please note that, because I have no idea how you even go about screencapping a 3D movie in 2D, I have done what I can to ameliorate the 3D effects in the screencaps, but some scenes I will just have to describe because the 3D was so amazing that it was basically an Impressionist painting.

However, that does mean that the screencap quality and the film quality are both lacking.

Thank you, Flying Carpet Class teacher.

So many pictures…so many things to talk about.

So, our movie opens with this visual effect (not kidding):

Actual visual effect.

The wand rises (heyooo) and begins to tell us of the sage who made it, long ago, and founded a school for magic, the venerable and extremely serious academic institution Aabra Ka Daabra. But of course, because you know those ladies, a woman challenged his power:

…FABULOUSLY.

A terrible fight ensues!

…We are left to assume!

(It’s not a terribly exciting fight. It was, however, not unlike the Wizard-off in Fellowship of the Ring, which says more about Peter Jackson than about this movie, I think, if we’re being honest.)

The sage was defeated, but he held on to his magic wand, and someday a hero shall come to claim it, etc, we know the drill.

Roll credits! Comic Sans only, please.

This was the last credit, and while I don’t deny Anupam Kher has earned the title of “Above All,” I also sort of hope he just snuck onto the computer and wrote that in himself.

Meanwhile, hundreds of years later, our hapless hero Shanu arrives at his wizarding school in the middle of the night, alone, because sure.

He’s immediately confronted by a hostile bouncing ball! When he threatens it, the ball turns into the disgraced groundskeeper and magic-school dropout (ding!) Limbu.

(In case this facial expression concerns you, know now that “subtler” was never a direction given to any of these actors, at any time.)

After apparently spending the night on the steps of the school (they never mention what happened to him that whole night! This movie cares not!), Shanu has to report to the evil headmistress, who looks exactly like the evil sorceress from hundreds of years ago but is not, as we can clearly see from this portrait of Great-great-great-great-Grandma Evil hanging in the Headmistress’s office:

Also hanging in the Headmistress’s office, a day player who’s in the middle of a punishment!

But when Shanu enters, the fun’s over, and the headmistress summons Zulu, her purple flying dismembered head demon, to show Shanu around the school.

(Featuring amazing 3D effects!)

Literally three seconds later:

Worldbuilding? Please. That’s for movies without these groundbreaking special effects! (A clever ruse, though, movie, I’ll grant you that.)

And now, for a smug antagonist and some loyal friends!

The hair is so bad that the teachers call him “the blonde kid” at regular intervals. Also, his signature move is to wipe his nose aggressively, at which point wind chimes always play. We’ll assume that any nose candy in this movie happens only in the Chocolate Factory interlude (we’ll get there).

He demands that the new kid prove his magic; Shanu does the old “punch this hand as hard as you can, but the noise will come from somewhere else” setup that means Thug Assistant 1 ends up clocking Thug Assistant 2 right in the kisser. (Blackmailing a groundskeeper and making his enemies beat each other up? This is already more savvy than Mr. Potter had for, like, three books.)

These are the friends, Pinky and Dinki. I was pleased that they were both girls and seemed to have active personalities, until I realized Dinki’s personality trait was “hungry.” It’s literally her only one. During the flying carpet capture the flag fight, someone tosses an apple at her and she drops the flag to catch it and eat it. It’s one of those.

The teaching body is in an uproar about this one-dimensional characterization!

Or not.

In levitation studies, Shanu is the bestest and can concentrate right away (ding!); Antagonist Kid manages to lift the teacher, to much amusement. But then the five minutes allotted to classes in this movie are up, and it’s time to break into the traditional Daily Magic School Paint Balloon Fight and Tug-of-War Musical Number!

(Pinky is noisemaking happily for Antagonist and his gang. No one calls her out on that rude-ass teamswitching, but I will, because that shit is not cool, Pinky.)

With that out of the way and no overarching theme or plot or scene of dialogue yet to emerge (ding!), it’s time for the next five-minute class, Flying Carpets, taught by that teacher everyone had who thought she was the Cool Teacher with her thumb on the Pulse of Youth Trends and probably said you could call her “Ms. M” or whatever.

Agreed!

(Actually, this is in reference to the kids who answer her question about the purpose of magic carpets. Pinky suggests it’s to see all the beauty of the world, which is, of course, correct. Antagonist Kid suggests they use it to catch pigeons and mimes tearing their heads off, and then is super surprised when it’s termed Very Bad, which, really? I mean, you can say that all you want, but at no point are people going to listen to that idea and not say, “That’s kind of a Very Bad idea, Kid with Glittery Highlights.”)

Still, it’s time to fly! Shanu and Antagonist Kid are, of course, the best in class.

But all is not musical numbers and flying carpets at Aabra Ka Daabra school of magic! Shanu’s nights are filled with sorrow.

(Above, the Pose of Sorrow, struck under the Purple Flowered Bedspread of Sorrow.)

You see, his extremely 3D father whose scenes I couldn’t screencap well was a Houdini-esque magician, whose trick of a lifetime was being locked in a box and thrown into the ocean without any kind of safety line or emergency buzzer or anything. To no one’s surprise, he didn’t come up again. Melodrama for everyone!

Here, Shanu’s mother and uncle argue about the future of the family. Also, subtly, this actress is hoping to drum up some bigger-budget roles.

Shanu, for his part, sees a commercial on TV for a contest being sponsored by Camlin school supplies and Parle-G chocolate (sure), where they offer full tuition to the children who find the golden tickets (ding! For a completely different movie!).

Shanu and his mom are in for a long bout of dreaming and hardship. You know what that means! Musical number.

(Not visible without access to the amazing 3D special effects: all of those flying objects are enormous sweets, including one cookie that, judging from the scale, is about five and a half feet long.)

To no one’s surprise, Shanu finds the very last ticket, and declares his intention to enter the magic school that everyone knows about and is not at all secret, so that he can learn magic and no one can ever again say his father was a fraud! Mom cries. Music soars.

(Also, I have to say, if someone drowns during a magic trick, and all you can say about it to his widow and child is that he must have been a fraud, you’re kind of a dick, right?)

Meanwhile, Limbu is in his very-high-production-value magical lair, making a magical friend because he’s so lonely (there are lots of issues this movie maybe should have explored and never did).

Friend not pictured because of extreme 3D-ness, but if I say “Casper,” you’ll have a good idea, because that little dude is fucking exactly Casper. His name is, I believe, Tu Tu, though that might just be the sound he makes. He will spend the rest of the movie delivering extremely important plot messages that no one ever listens to the first time, even though everyone uses him for their most important secret messages, so I am not sure why they all assume he’s out to punk them constantly, but at some point that turns into my problem and not the movie’s problem, so let’s move on.

He’s surprised by the arrival of Shanu, Pinky, and Dinki, who want to snoop around for kid-movie reasons. He gives them magic marbles that, when held in your mouth, make you invisible. (Dinki is warned repeatedly not to eat it, because of course.)

With their 3D invisibility in place, they follow the evil headmistress out to the woods for no particular reason, only to discover she has a hidden lair! They follow her inside, where they immediately spit out their invisibility marbles, as is the best strategy when you’re alone in your enemy’s stronghold.

But what is the treasure of this remote woodland stronghold?

It’s Shanu’s father! And he’s being held prisoner until he gives her what she wants most!

As awesome as that parenthetical is, it’s also not quite accurate, since as it turns out the concoction in question gives one eternal life instead, and THAT’s what she’s after, but not for herself – it’s so she can transport her soul into the bird that loves her best:

(Actual thing that happens. Sometimes it screams “I LOVE YOU” at her. I can’t help you. Nothing can help you now.)

And she knows he can do it, because as a flashback later explains, she saw him make it the very first time, using only magic and his Minority Report computer screens!

But Shanu’s father steadfastly refuses to do any such thing, which is apparently fine with her, because the potion is what she wants SECOND-most. She’s really after something else:

Rahul hates it when a chick can’t just be cool.

But he’s forgotten the powers of sorcery that are at her command! SEDUCTION POWERS.

In the movie, they go from standing six feet apart to neck-nuzzling instantly, even though the clothes are different. While this is the kind of movie where no one would be surprised by a lack of attention paid to continuity, there’s actually a deleted scene that makes more sense, where she tries to seduce him with a Musical Number.

It’s exactly as blurry and awkward as it looks, but it’s worth it for the faces of the kids:

Aces.

But despite Shanu’s worries that his dad is going to nuzzle the shit out of his evil headmistress, we know that’s not going down – because the evil stronghold has a portrait of the sage in it (because of reasons? I don’t know why you’d have a portrait or your archenemy in your stronghold), and he is NOT COOL with how this is going.

GREAT GREAT GREAT GREAT GREAT GREAT GRANNDAD IS DISAPPOINTED IN YOU, RAHUL, YOU BIG HORNY DUMMY.

As soon as Rahul has been shamed by Granddad Sage’s laser eyebeams into not sexing the headmistress (actually happens), it’s back to the dungeons, and back to school with the nosey trio, to contemplate the bittersweet joy of a living parent in magical captivity, but mostly to rest up for the magic carpet capture the flag game!

It’s all extremely 3D and full of Amazing Effects; take this Technicolor blur as a placeholder for this endless scene and let’s just all move on.

The stakes for this game included the winner’s right to roust the loser from the school. However, when Shanu is declared the victor, he opts not to punish Antagonist Kid at all, but instead to bury their animosity forever! (Antagonist smiles even though he knows this means he’s being dropped from the plot never to be seen again.)

And to deliver the prize, our item number!

*deal with it.gif*

He then sings a long song about acceptance and love, and vanishes without ever giving Shanu his prize! What a jerk.

Meanwhile, someone finally thinks to send Tu Tu to Shanu’s mom’s house to let her know her husband isn’t dead:

Shanu’s mom speaks for all of us.

Shanu’s uncle is swiftly dispatched to the magic school, where he presents himself as…a student? Or, a visitor? Something that requires a fake hypnotism as part of the room and board, that’s all I know, and we’re so awash in subplots by now that nothing matters any more.

Fall in love with the Cool Teacher? Sure, fine, see if I care! Be painful, bumbling comic relief for no reason? Be my guest!

(Though I will cop to cracking up when he comes into his room and sees his Very Magical Running Ostrich Statue:

I don’t even know why! It just happened.)

But now that all the helpful adults are in place, it’s time to face off against the evil headmistress!

First, they have to make their way through the dangerous forest to rescue the magic wand of the great sage, Shanu’s great-great-great-great-great grandfather!

AMAZING 3D effects!

After his granddad nearly kills his only two friends for getting flustered as they hover on tiny balancing stones poised above the endless abyss of death (weenies), Shanu is able to answer the Quest Questions (spoilers: God and love are the answers, NOW GIVE ME MY WAND, OLD MAN), they split up – Shanu and Bumbling Concentration Teacher head off to the stronghold, and the girls are dismissed back to the school, where they promptly gather the adults – including Bumbling Concentration Teacher.

DUN DUN DUNNNN!

Meanwhile, completely unable to guess that anything about this suddenly-creepy Bumbling Teacher who wants possession of the wand he’s carrying, Shanu sneaks inside the stronghold to greet his father, and finds him in an electrified cage.

You can’t! (YES, that was an MC Hammer joke. NO, I do not care.)

But the reunion is interrupted by Headmistress, who was temporarily posing as Bumbling Concentration Teacher! Then there are impossible-to-screencap flying carpets everywhere and she shoots at Shanu and one of her hands turns into a snake and bites Shanu who starts to foam at the mouth and have a seizure and Rahul scrambles to pull up his Minority Report screens and put the aphrodisiac together for his son because his son NEEDS THAT APHRODISIAC and the headmistress shoves the wand underneath her on the throne and cackles and the bird-girl screams I LOVE YOU and you begin to think you are hallucinating.

Luckily, they cut outside for a glimpse of the fight going on out there!

Actually happens.

Long story short (you should be so lucky), the headmistress is vanquished, Shanu is healed, the aphrodisiac destroyed, the bad guys beaten to a pulp, Rahul reunited with his wife, Limbu promoted to headmaster of the school, and all is well!

And now it’s a happy ending for everyone, except maybe Shanu, who now has That Cool Teacher for an aunt, which will probably get super annoying.

But, asks Zulu the purple flying skull who should probably not actually be interested in this, will Shanu return to school? What will happen to the magic wand? What happens next in this plot that I had apparently mistakenly thought was pretty much all wrapped up?

NOPE, I’M GOOD, THANK YOU.

So, let’s do a slightly random giveaway!

Leave a comment on my LJ or on my website, preferably about the strangest movie or TV show you saw in 2011 (just to keep a theme going), and I’ll send you…something! It will probably be a book vaguely related to me – an anthology I’m in, Geek Wisdom, Mechanique – but it could be something else entirely. I’ve been poking around with the apartment recently, trying to make it look like a grownup lives there, and I’m enjoying that, so maybe I’ll just send you a bud vase! A vintage photograph! A doorknob*! A completely unrelated book with a picture of me shoved inside like a big creeper**!

And since we’re celebrating because of Twitter, there should probably be a Twitter component – if you’d prefer, tweet about said shitmazing film/tv item,, tag it with #QTT (for obvious reasons), and @-reply me because I am 85 years old and don’t always trust hashtags to actually make it through!

Rules and stuff: Contest runs through Monday February 6 at 10pm Eastern Time-ish. Open to the US, Canada, and international readers who enjoy receiving very lightweight prizes. Winners will be chosen by random draw. You can enter once on LJ, Twitter, and my site if you want to, but you can only win once. Number of winners to be dictated by the number of books and/or tiny silver bowls available, to be determined later.

* I am not sending anyone a doorknob. I need all mine.
** I will probably not do this. Probably.

However, in a group interview with Movieline, Dermot Mulroney reminds us all not to forget that the heart of this film is the man on man on man on man on man action that cinema so desperately needs:

Dermot Mulroney: “I loved Jaws and Aliens and…Deliverance. So to me it read like those, I thought I’d like to be in a movie like that once, that’d be amazing. I’ve made a lot of movies that had both men and women in them, a lot of movies that were dominated by the woman’s storyline. And in this case it was a very different experience making the movie and enjoying the movie, when it was completed, because of the fact that there are no women in it… It was like thank God, I get to do a movie with just guys.”

Let’s get it out of the way that anyone referring to “actor” Dermot Mulroney needs to include those air quotes, so for him this quote stops, for all intents and purposes, at “thank God, I get to do a movie.”

Let’s also get it out of the way that Deliverance is a very…interesting film to reference in the context of two other films in which non-human monsters literally rip people to shreds.

Let’s also also get it out of the way that Aliens is, in fact, a movie about a woman who teams up with a small squad of Marines that includes two women to investigate an alien-riddled colony of which the only survivor is a young woman, and then proceeds to nearly-singlehandedly torch alien ass into oblivion.

I can’t help but picture Dermot Mulroney, sitting in the house that playing second fiddle to a bunch of vaginas all the time has bought him, wrinkling his nose and holding up scripts with two fingers as he deposits them carefully in a box labeled STORIES ABOUT WOMEN and a frowny face on them. He’s tired of it, don’t you see? He’s had to be billed under Sigourney Weaver, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Emily Watson, Emily Mortimer, and Glenn Close, and he BARELY edged out Anne Bancroft and Alfre Woodard that one time, and just a bunch of other bitches, all right? God, why is Hollywood so deluged with stories about women? Everywhere you look it’s just thoughtful, respectful, non-objectifying stories about the deep conflicts of women in a variety of situations that are never sidelined or belittled as being domestic or romantic, and Dermot Mulroney is TIRED OF IT. “Why can’t there be a movie about MEN, and THEIR concerns!”, Dermot cries, checking his junk casually just to get a look at some man-stuff before the day is over. When will Hollywood realize that men could be bankable, too, if only someone would give them a chance? Why won’t they give men leading roles? Why won’t these boardrooms packed full of women making all the key financial and business decisions that dictate the market and its gender attitudes finally stop asking for him to talk to women already? WHY?

No, seriously though, why.

What a shithole.

Shame, which I thought was an obvious awards contender for both quality and General Awardnesness, was utterly ignored. Drive has it even worse, with one piddly nomination for Sound Editing. (Shame at least got a nice clean cut direct; the Academy walked past Drive, turned around, came back, and flicked it right in the nose. That’s why Ryan Gosling’s face looks like that. That shit stings.)

In other news, we live in a world in which Puss in Boots is up for consideration for Best Anything, and Jonah Hill can now put “Oscar Nominee” in front of his name forever. Didn’t they understand what that means? You can’t take them back! No amount of 21 Jump Street can ever take that away! THE OSCARS INVITES YOU TO 21 JUMP STREET, OKAY? THAT IS WHERE WE LIVE NOW.

But that horror aside, the dual snub of two of the best films of the year seems especially cruel since the new 10-slot Best Picture slot had plenty of room for the appalling Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, the Are You Kidding Me With This The Help, and the middling Midnight in Paris, and still had a slot left over. They only used nine out of ten, and STILL wouldn’t nominate Shame or Drive. That’s sort of when you know that you’ll be in for an evening of watching Steven Spielberg and/or Martin Scorsese repeatedly take the stage and pretend like either of their nominated movies is anywhere close to their best. And that’s if you’re lucky. (Also when you knew that: as soon as those movies were announced. Be real.)

Amid rare victories (If a Tree Falls gets rightly nominated for Best Doc), there are other small outrages (Rooney Mara and not Tilda Swinton? I see), and some all-around sighing (so, we can nominate actresses of color…as long as they’re playing maids, I see, yes, that is an excellent thing to reinforce, thank you, definitely we should have more of that), but honestly, the movie that annoys me most in terms of the accolades being showered upon it is The Artist, because seriously.

Here’s why; very vague spoilers under the cut.

Despite its obvious Awardsness, The Artist, while always competent and sometimes clever, is the barest sketch of what it purports to be about; the hat-tips to Singing in the Rain are cute, but the movie rarely goes deeper than that. A slightly-dickweed silent-movie star is sidelined by the development of the talkies; he spends most of the rest of the movie drinking and feeling sorry for himself, while the young object of his affections rises to a potentially-interesting studio-system stardom we barely see, because her main function is to Love Hero. Jean Dujardin is clearly talented (though the dog was the most compelling aspect of this particular character), and Berenice Bejo is…there, but the movie was both jaded and blithely twee; the story and its central relationship are flat (unless you count the central relationship as Jean Dujardin/Uggie the Dog, in which case, it’s fine), and the eleventh-hour career solution is the kind meant to be an adorable, self-congratulatory transition to talkies, but only if you never, ever question it for one second; otherwise, the whole movie is a series of echoes of the early scene in which Our Hero shoves his leading lady into the wings so he can return and take another grinning bow himself.

The thing is, I don’t even dislike this movie because of what it isn’t. Silent film is a vast and complicated phenomenon that definitely deserves in-depth study, but not every movie that takes place in that era has to be that study. (Singing in the Rain wasn’t; then again, Singing in the Rain wasn’t trying to be.)

But like Berenice Bejo sliding her own arm into his tux so she can molest herself, this movie is too navel-gazey to be grand, too happy skipping to be sweeping. If it had gone for more complex characterization, or a smaller, better story instead of A Story of Art, The Artist might have been sweetly forgettable. As it is, it’s carrying the awkward burden of being Forgettable While Smug, which means that dog will be given its own musical number during the ceremony, just before it wins Best Picture for being a movie that’s proud of being The Movie about The Movies, while Tilda Swinton stands just backstage in her presenter’s dress, Watching, and Waiting.

That seems to be largely because its star is MMA all-star Gina Carano, who does her own stunts, and who is under the sort of scrutiny most male action stars never see. (Among some bizarre pearl-clutching about her fight scenes, her acting ability has been repeatedly questioned, which is strange, because I do not remember a lot of interviews asking Jean-Claude Van Damme how his workshops with Meryl Streep are going.)

We live in a world that makes it impossible to leave discourse at the door about this kind of thing, and means that the movie hits theatres under a lot of baggage it doesn’t deserve. But Haywire itself seems to be blithely unconcerned about it all. Instead, it focuses on turning in a slick action movie that can be boiled down to Vasquez: The Motion Picture, and is exactly as fun as that sounds.

Example: in the film’s opening moments, Carano’s Mallory Kane sits at a diner in upstate New York, waiting for someone. The man who shows, Aaron (Channing Tatum, bless his heart), is not the one she wanted to see, and when she refuses to leave with him, he sighs, orders a cup of coffee – and attacks her. The fight that follows is swift and brutal, with a brief intervention by a college-kid bystander; when Mallory inevitably gets the upper hand, she singles the kid out as her getaway, and the two of them take off in his car while she explains how she got where she is.

The scene, like the movie as a whole, is solid. The cast, including Michael Fassbender, Michael Douglas, Antonio Banderas, and Ewan McGregor as Indeterminate Accent Man, is clearly having fun. The plot, though it has the requisite double-crosses, is uncomplicated (she’s awesome, she’s set up, she busts out, she tracks down everyone responsible and beats the snot out of them). The script maintains tension while being just light enough that no one ever delivers a tearful speech about the perils of private security contracting in a politically wheeler-dealer world run mad. It’s a wise choice for the untested Carano, though she’s a capable enough actress – she has presence and timing, and while I wouldn’t pay to see her as Lady Macbeth, I enjoyed watching her as an action hero far more than I have enjoyed other actress’s recent attempts at it.

And yes, part of that is because when she’s fighting, it looks sharp, smooth, natural. The fight scenes are hardly ever scored, and often brutal. (The audience responses tended to be a moment of excitement that a fight was coming, followed by a long and increasingly tense silence broken by audible wincing as the fight progressed, and then a release of nervous laughter at scene’s end, which seems notable in an audience likely saturated with action-movie imagery.) One vaguely Bourne-y sequence follows her as she hightails it through Dublin, avoiding the enemy and tangling with the police, and includes her jumping between buildings at considerable height; however, the move doesn’t stand out as a stunt, but rather as a point of tension in a long and palpably exhausting escape attempt. (The camera often follows her claustrophobically as she has to backtrack through escape routes, shimmy down close quarters, and track enemies under pressure. It’s effective; if we could convince Soderbergh to drop the canary-yellow flashback filter and surreal piano interludes, we’d be in good shape.)

But beneath this standard spy story is a quietly subversive main character. Mallory Kane exists in a sphere in which she’s allowed to bypass the usual narratives offered to women who tote action movies on their shoulders. She never has to prove herself against the odds; she’s the best there is, a point no one on her team – or up against her – ever disputes. She doesn’t have to overcome a backstory of victimization; the movie suggests she became a Marine because why wouldn’t you, if you were as dedicated and as calm under pressure as she is? She isn’t vilified for sexuality; casual hookups happen but don’t hamper. She’s not overly sexualized, despite one formalwear fight scene that had the potential to turn into a James Bond set piece and wisely steered away. She doesn’t have to scrabble out from abusive circumstances or punishing family losses; her dad is adoring and capable of handling himself. And she doesn’t suffer from unnecessary machismo off the field of play; while on the run with Frame Story McGee, she strikes up a capable and friendly rapport, smoothly checking in at intervals to make sure he’s following the story that she knows he’ll end up telling the cops.

Though we’re still at a point where a leading woman in a movie tacitly stands for All Women in Movies, it’s still odd that a character who is white, fit, and conventionally attractive can still deviate so much from what Hollywood has made its norm. But she does, and this movie serves both as an action flick with a convincing female lead, and as an under-the-radar glimpse of a possible Hollywood, one that makes the assumption that a female character can be worth watching simply because she’s kind of awesome.

And it’s a good assumption; I’ll be seeing this again.