SHIVA TRAILER

Bollywood's most interesting director, Ram Gopal Varma, has his new movie coming out this May: SHIVA. There's a lot of backstory on this one. Originally RGV produced JAMES which was supposed to be his take on the "angry young man" genre, a popular Indian genre. But RGV wasn't happy with the final product and disavowed it the way Hayao Miyazaki dumped Goro Miyazaki: hard and fast. At the same time, RGV has gotten sick of the cyclical criticism that has dogged his career where he'll make a big movie, the next four or five come and go like the wind, critics say he's over and then he makes another big movie, rinse and repeat. So he's decided to show folks what's what. Taking the star of JAMES (Mohit Ahlawat) and the female lead (Nisha Kothari) he's cast them in SHIVA, a remake of his first movie made when he was a total unknown with no more experience in filmmaking than running a video store.

But this is not a slavish remake of SHIVA. That movie was about college gangs and one brave young man who punched them all in the chest so hard they died. The new SHIVA is more like the RGV-produced SHOOL about a young cop who winds up in a corrupt police department. And it's about driving spikes through people's foreheads. As RGV says, "My new SHIVA is a remake of my old one, but in a way that JAMES was meant to be."

Unclear? Then check out the trailer for SHIVA (downloadable Realplayer) and realize that while this may be a fantastic new movie, with violence this harsh it probably won't be a hit.