70's week: Villains, action, general badassery.

I just realized I'm not really sure what villains in Parvarish do, apart from wearing swanky suits, hanging out in submarines, smuggling diamonds and smoking in lavishly decorated villain lairs, plotting smuggling more diamonds.

But who cares, right? As long as we get dishoom-dishoom. I could lapse into some thinky thoughts on how it's interesting that the villain is the rich fat cat smuggling diamonds, drinking expensive foreign booze and entertaining dancing girls, and nowadays it's the hero who has money to throw around, despite no diamond smuggling.

Gosh, it's so glamorous, diamond smuggling.

Of course, the baddies are bad. They have no regard for human life, and all of that bad bad bad stuff but still. Diamond smuggling. That's just kind of cool.

Plus if there were no baddies, when would Amitabh get to make his "shooting people" face?

If there were no villains, we wouldn't have the awesome Vinod Khanna performance where he's half-hero, half-villain. Redemption is naturally always just around the corner, but why bother when it's so fun to be evil? You get to smuggle diamonds, smoke in lavish lairs and threaten people with hand-grenades.

And if you are lucky enough to be a Vinod Khanna fan watching this movie, you get the best of both worlds - he's perfect fit for both sides of the coin, as the calculating criminal and as the romantic hero/good guy.

And when he has his change of heart? The whole scene is a delicious manpain buffet. Just so good.

I really love the action scenes, whether it's firearms or plain old physical mano-a-mano. Sadly these scenes typically fail to screencap well and me being a total screencap snob always fail to save the blurrier ones. But instead have this aftermath one from Sholay.

And speaking of which..

Just like you can't discuss heroines in the 70's (in my opinion) without mentioning Seeta Aur Geeta, I don't think you can discuss villains without mentioning Gabbar Singh. But I'm trying to keep this post short so you can read more of what I think of Gabbar from this post.

And badassery? Well, it kind of goes without saying. The villains are evil and the heroes are active, so you get epic chase sequences, shoot-outs, high-kicks and the works. The viewers all learn the Hindi words for "bullet" and "blood" (goli and khoon if I remember correctly).

You might want to skip tomorrow's 70's Week post if you are not an obsessed Vinod Khanna fangirl/fanboy. Just a fair warning!