Bollywood...

Since my move to San Diego, I've been watching a lot of Hindi Movies. Perhaps this has been exacerbated by the fact that during my two year hiatus down in Arkansas, I rarely got to watch any. Maybe its just me getting older and suddenly feeling all 'desified'. I've been noticing that I can somehow identify with some of these desi emotions too. Strange!!! I guess one can take the boy out of the country but can't take the country out of the boy. One other interesting thing to note here is that the quality of Hindi movies have dramatically improved too, okay maybe not dramatically but it has definitely shown an upward trend. Most noticable about these movies these days is the cinematography. They also seem to have become less predictable. A few years back you could start watching a movie anywhere in the middle and still catchup and also figure out the basic storyline and the ending. That is not always the case these days. The other thing was the way these movies are picking up subject matter from various Hollywood movies, incorporating them into a the hindi movie, masalafying it a little bit, and then to top it off, not even giving credit to the original! Well done Bollywood directors, for a great work of stealth(?!) plagiarism. Well I guess Indian audiences need their staple of westernized stories broken down to them bollywood style. I read somewhere that a few years back when India opened up its film industry so that Hollywood movies could be seen in theaters, Jurassic Park was a great hit. And Schindler's list just bombed! The explanation for this was that desi audiences could not relate to Schindler's list as it didn't fit into any of the regular genres (ok there was drama!) but no songs!
A typical Hindi movie of course will have to include all the basic genres and pay heed to every possible human emotion. Perhaps that is why they're so long. I remember my first ever Hollywood movie that I watched on video, of course sans commercials. The movie was over in like 90 minutes, and I was like ok what do I do now for the next 90 minutes, because I'd budgeted 3 hours for the movie! And I was only 5 at that time! I thought my goodness what a ripoff!!!!