India’s film industry is becoming more frugal and socially aware, and the audiences are swarming to the box office, writes Priyanka Bhardwaj at Asia Sentinel
Forget the saris, cleavage, item numbers, superstars, love triangles and glamour, Bollywood is undergoing something of a renaissance.
For as long as anyone can remember, this has been the success mantra of ‘masala’ Hindi films, but India’s film industry is transforming into ‘big ideas’, not ‘big budgets.’
The usual mega bucks ‘make or bust’ films are being usurped by the low- and medium-investment flicks that were at one time labeled ‘parallel/art house’ cinema. The difference is that now they are also raking in the money at the box office.
The recent hit list is growing. Despite lacking an identifiable all-star-cast, small-budget films (made for under 100 million rupees) such as Aamir, A Wednesday, 1920, Rock On and Phoonk have not only won accolades from the critics, but also drawn the crowds to make hefty profits.
Nobody in Bollywood was betting on the outsider Katrina Kaif, but a surging need to forge stability for herself and her siblings has driven her to the top. Shoma Chaudhury in Tehelka:
Katrina Kaif
Katrina came to India at 17 as part of director Kaizad Gustad’s film Boom: he had spotted her as a model in an ad in London. It should have been a grand debut, boasting as it did a cast that included Amitabh Bachchan, Jackie Shroff, Madhu Sapre and Padma Lakshmi. But, for all its apparent star and skin power, the film flopped badly. That could have been the end of Katrina’s Bollywood career - she was young, an outsider, and incapable of a word of Hindi. Instead, in barely six years, she has grown to be a commercial female superstar, moving from the anonymity of bit roles in Telugu, Malayalam and Hindi films to mainstream directors and producers like Vipul Shah, Rajkumar Santoshi and Yash Raj Films. She has learnt Hindi, taken Kathak lessons, and is spoken of in the same breath as Aishwarya Rai and Kareena Kapoor. Far from the minor-league deals of her early years, she now charges between Rs 2 to 3 crores for product campaigns and, at last count, signed a two-film deal with Studio 18 for Rs 6 crore. What explains this singular story? Who is Katrina Kaif off-screen?
It’s not very easy to piece that together. “I am a Cancerian,” she says, “and Cancerians don’t like discussing their private lives. I also don’t buy the argument that filmstars’ private lives are fair game for the public.” Even routine questions about parents and family are not easily lobbed. If you persist though - embroidering them with caveats and exit routes - they yield some answers.
One of seven siblings - six sisters, one brother, she exactly in the middle - Katrina was born to a British mother, Suzanne, and a Kashmiri Muslim father, Mohammad Kaif. “My father is not an influence, he was not part of our family; my parents separated when I was very young and I have never met him since.”
Nandita Das, the popular actress and human rights advocate, showed “Firaaq,” her first film as director, at the Toronto Film Festival. It is set during the aftermath of the Gujarat riots in 2002. Joan Dupont in the International Herald Tribune:
Nandita Das
Das, now 38, is a ravishing, very serious and very funny woman. She has been honored as a political rights activist and has served on the Cannes jury. Her debut as director made a splash at the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado last month, where Salman Rushdie introduced the film. “Firaaq,” for all the anger and anguish it portrays, is a surprisingly fresh film, composed around a cluster of stories.
An Urdu word that means both separation and quest, “Firaaq” is set during the aftermath of the Gujarat Province riots in 2002, when Hindus and Muslims clashed: women were raped, and families slaughtered in a stunning replay of the partition. The film was made in Urdu, Gujarati and English. The director brings intensity to her characters’ plight, with sharp instinct for rooting out their hidden fears.
Danny Boyle’s new film ‘Slumdog Millionaire‘ will close this year’s London Film Festival. Adapted by ‘Full Monty‘ writer Simon Beaufoy from the novel ‘Q&A‘ by Vikas Swarup, ‘Slumdog Millionaire‘ tells the story of an an 18-year-old orphan from the slums of Mumbai who finds himself just one question away from winning 20 million rupees ($500,000) on India’s “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?“
Danny Boyle’s (Shallow Grave, Trainspotting, 28 Days Later and Sunshine) movie features an all-Indian cast including Skins star Dev Patel and Anil Kapoor. Boyle filmed ‘Slumdog millionaire’ on location on the streets of Mumbai. Music is by AR Rehman. In a story headlined “Will Slumdog Millionaire be 2008’s Juno,” the New York Observer says it is already being positioned as 2008’s “little movie that could.”
Driven by fantastic energy and a torrent of vivid images of India old and new, “Slumdog Millionaire” is a blast. Danny Boyle’s film uses the dilemma of a poor teenager suspected of cheating on the local version of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” to tell a story of social mobility that is positively Dickensian in its attention to detail and the extremes of poverty and wealth within a culture…
Surging with colors, music, the ever-present swarming multitudes and the vitality of its youthful characters, the pic begins disturbingly with the sight of police torturing a young man to make him confess how he’s been able to make a run up to the ultimate prize of 20 million rupees on the nation’s most popular quizshow. “I knew the answers,” the sullen fellow insists, and Simon Beaufoy’s intricate and cleverly structured script illustrates how that came to be.
The Pool: Another world, just over the hedge
Director Chris Smith’s (American Job, The Yes Men, American Movie) movie “The Pool” takes a look at the lives of the haves and the someday might haves in Goa. A poor boy (Venkatesh Chavan) becomes obsessed with the swimming pool of a rich man (Nana Patekar) in the opulent hills of Panjim, Goa. His life gets turned upside down when he attempts to meet the mysterious family that arrives at the house. Smith transfers an Iowa-based short story by Randy Russell to India’s western Goa region - and works in Hindi. From the New York Times:
In “The Pool,” a recurrent image that develops into a symbol of the gap between affluence and poverty shows the waiflike Indian protagonist, Venkatesh (Venkatesh Chavan), perched in a tree, gazing longingly at a private swimming pool on the other side of a hedge. A skinny, 18-year-old man-child who longs to dive into the water, Venkatesh ekes out a living cleaning hotel rooms and selling plastic bags on the street with his 11-year-old sidekick, Jhangir (Jhangir Badshah). The shimmering pool, in which no one seems to swim, is a window onto a world he can hardly imagine.
This calm, neorealist film, directed and photographed by the documentarian Chris Smith (”American Movie,” “The Yes Men,” “American Job”), blurs the line between fiction and reality. As the characters, who have the same first names as the actors playing them, amble around Panaji, the capital of Goa, you come to see them more as people living their lives than as a writer’s inventions.
The title of a Bollywood film has prompted a lawsuit from the studio that brought the J.K. Rowling books to the screen. From The Times:
One of Bollywood’s most eagerly awaited films has been dragged into a fierce legal battle, amid allegations that it owes just a little too much to a certain boy wizard.
The Bombay-based producer of Hari Puttar: A Comedy of Terrors is being sued by Warner Bros, the Hollywood studio behind the hugely successful Harry Potter franchise. Hari, the lawsuit alleges, is too close to J.K.Rowling’s Harry for comfort.
The Hindi-language children’s film, which was shot entirely on the Yorkshire Dales in 2006 and 2007 on a budget of £2 million, tells the story of Hari Prasad Dhoonda, a hapless ten-year-old Punjabi loner who is nicknamed Hari Puttar and moves to Britain.
Each of the five men who dominate the business in Bollywood functions almost as a one-person studio. Anupama Chopra in International Herald Tribune:
Shahrukh Khan with his wax statue
MUMBAI: ‘Who gives us clout?” Shahrukh Khan, the actor also known as King of Bollywood, asked during a recent interview here. He quickly answered the query himself. “It’s the last mile, the audience. My logic is this: Can you beat me at the box office?”
In the last 15 years few have challenged Khan at the top of the Bollywood box office. His string of blockbusters has given him such clout - as well as wax statues in his honor at Madame Tussauds in London and the Musée Grévin in Paris - that India Today, one of the country’s leading newsmagazines, placed the 42-year-old Khan at No.6 in its annual power list in February. He may have ranked below the billionaire Ambani brothers, but he came in ahead of the former president A.P.J. Abdul Kalam. And it was no accident that the most powerful man in the Hindi film industry is an actor. In Bollywood the motion picture industry remains resolutely star struck, even as special effects have helped to reduce Hollywood’s dependence on big-name actors.
“There is a variety of ways in which a picture gets made in Hollywood, but I can say without qualification that in Hindi pictures stars are the determining factor much more than they are in Los Angeles,” said Michael Lynton, the chairman of Sony Pictures Entertainment, which helped produce “Saawariya” (Beloved), the first Hollywood-Bollywood studio collaboration.
In “The Cheetah Girls One World,” the third film in Disney Channel’s successful series, the group travels to India to star in a film after one of its members misunderstands an invitation to Bollywood as one to Hollywood. The movie was shot in Udaipur and includes actors of South Asian origin. In a story headlined “Generation Mix: Youth TV Takes the Lead in Diversity Casting”, the New York Times talks about diversity on the small screen:
“This group of people is reflective of the life we all live right now,” said Debra Martin Chase, an executive producer of “The Cheetah Girls One World,” which will be shown Friday on the Disney Channel.
“One-third of the U.S. population is now nonwhite,” said Ms. Chase, one of a handful of prominent African-American producers in Hollywood. “That is reflected in the Disney Channel projects because they are committed to diversity. It has been a priority for them all along.”
After ‘Bend it Like Beckham‘, director Gurinder Chadha was inundated with offers from Hollywood. So why is her latest project, ‘Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging‘, another British coming-of-age film? Kaleem Aftab in The Independent:
There comes a time in the career of every successful director when they decide to do a movie that is a marked departure from the winning template that has made their name. At first glance, Angus, Thongs, and Perfect Snogging is that project for the gregarious Gurinder Chadha.
Chadha established her reputation as one of the leading film-makers in Britain by making movies about second-generation Indian girls trying to live life and find love in the West. Her feature films Bhaji on the Beach, What’s Cooking?, Bend it Like Beckham and Bride and Prejudice all feature principal protagonists with backgrounds similar to her own; although she was born in Kenya in 1960, Chadha grew up in Southall, west London, to parents with strong beliefs about the value of cultural roots and the comportment of a “good” Indian girl.
What separates her previous work from Angus, Thongs, and Perfect Snogging, the adaptation of Louise Rennison’s first two books about Eastbourne-based teenager Georgia Nicolson, is the skin colour of the principal character. For the 48-year-old director this isn’t such a big deal: “I’m as English as I’m Indian and it’s good to explore that side of me. There is a lot of stuff in the film that is as much about me growing up as came from the novel.”
‘Big B’, India’s biggest film star, has acted in more than 150 movies. Now 65, Amitabh lives in Mumbai with his wife, Jaya Bhaduri, his son, Abhishek, and his daughter-in-law, Aishwarya Rai, all actors. His daughter, Shweta, is a TV presenter. From The Sunday Times:
Amitabh Bachchan
I wake at 5.30, whether I’m working or not, because I go to the gym. It’s near my house and my driver takes me. The gym is a recent phenomenon. I made many action movies from the 1970s on, and that kept me fit. These days it’s less leading-man roles, more character roles, and I felt I needed to be more mobile, so I got a trainer. She has devised a routine - light weights, cardiovascular exercise, a bit of yoga - and I spend two hours following that.
I come back and have breakfast with my wife, Jaya - eggs, cereal, fruit, prepared by our cook. My family are very important to me. We all live under the same roof, including my son, Abhishek, and his wife, Aishwarya. In India, to have the family living together is the norm. That’s how I grew up.
I look at the newspapers and attend to any office work. My home is a little distraught - with a houseful of actors, there are scripts all over, but it’s manageable. I have a dog, a great dane called Shanuk; that is a red-Indian name for “a warm, gentle breeze on a cold winter morning”. I take him to my garden, which is big, and I play with him on the lawn. Then I go to the film studio.
Director-cinematographer Santosh Sivan on the set of "Before the Rains"
It is roads, of all things, that Indian director Santosh Sivan cites as the inspiration behind his exquisite English-language debut “Before the Rains.”
“As a kid I used to travel to all these fantastic hills which had all the spices and there used to be these beautiful curving roads going deep into the jungles,” he remembers.
In “Before the Rains” Sivan has managed to conjure up the Kerala of his childhood recollections — and there can be few films that evoke India’s natural beauty more breathtakingly.
“I got to know that these [roads] were made by the British people and it always interested me how British people must have interacted with my forefathers because we never had a chance to interact with them,” Sivan continues.
It is in the dying days of the Empire among the colonialists of the 1930s — the ambitious men who hacked paths through the Keralan jungle to their fortunes in the spice plantations — that Sivan sets his tale of passion and nationalism.
Bollywood is tackling the horror of honour killings for the first time - and they’re filming in Birmingham. In The Guardian, Anita Pati reports on a director with a mission:
Land, Gold, Women
This a Bollywood film, boss?” asks the Asian market trader, hoisting himself up between his okra and his pineapples. At Birmingham’s vegetable market, Bollywood producer Vivek Agrawal, stubbled and in Prada glasses, is telling curious Asians and beige-slacked pensioners that this is a public awareness film. “You have to be careful because there’s unruly people out there,” he says. “The other day they were shouting ‘action’ and ‘cut’.”
It is actually Agrawal’s first foray into social realism, or “arthouse” cinema, as he describes it. He’s chosen honour killings as the focus for Land, Gold, Women, the first Bollywood feature film on this controversial subject. The low-budget indie will be shot over the next four weeks in Birmingham - the city’s ethnically mixed population, says Agrawal, is perfect for the film’s cross-cultural themes.
Land, Gold, Women - named after the three elements in which tribal honour is preserved - centres on a relatively liberal Asian family in Britain. Seventeen-year-old Saira plans to study literature at university, when she’ll have more time with her white boyfriend, David. Her dad, Dr Nazir Khan, is a university professor. Her mum, Rizwana, speaks only Urdu throughout the film. Nazir’s conflict about his daughter’s potential stray from her roots is agitated by the arrival of his strict elder brother Riyaaz from India. Riyaaz brings a marriage proposal from a family back home. No is not an option. The ending is grisly.
Bollywood’s oomphiest, sexiest, vampiest vixen, Helen is making a comeback — but don’t expect her to be shaking a leg. The 1939-born Anglo-Burmese actress will be playing the role of a granny in debutant director Rajiv Sharma’s Bachpan (read the news report on NDTV here.)
Helen set the screen alight in the 1960s and 70s with such performances as Mera naam chin chin chu (Howrah Bridge) and Piya tu ab toh aa ja (Caravan) — not to forget, Yeh mera dil pyaar ka deewana (in the original Don). Then, a new era of sexy actresses who could play both vamp and heroine elbowed Helen the vamp out, reducing Helen the actress to the every heroine’s worst nightmare: character roles as an aunty, headmistress and, later, granny.
For a complete list of Helen’s films and the roles she played, click on the IMDB site here.
Finally, three questions for Helen trivia buffs:
1. What was Helen’s most common screen name?
2. In which dance-form did Helen initially train?
3. In which film did Helen play Zeenat Aman’s mother?
[please post answers as comments & feel free to post your own questions]
And, finally (again) here’s a clip from Helen Queen of the Nautch Girls by Merchant Ivory [via Bollywood Food Club]
In The Indian Express, Harneet Singh on the Bollywood ‘fight of the year’ between Salman Khan and Shah Rukh Khan. Are the gloves really off? Is politically correct Bollywood finally coming into its own?
Bollywood scribes are already terming the recent spat between superstars Salman Khan and Shah Rukh Khan as the ‘story of the year.’ For the uninitiated (though with 24X7 electronic media carpet-bombing, they’re a rarity), it all happened at Katrina Kaif’s birthday bash in a suburban Mumbai hotspot. Apparently banter between the two Khans turned ugly when professional comparisons regarding their television shows cropped up — the numbers of SRK’s Kya Aap Paanchvi Paas Se Tez Hain have not met expectations, while Salman’s 10 Ka Dum has got a favourable response. Tabloids tell us that the heated discussion took a turn for the worse when SRK allegedly made an inappropriate comment about Salman’s ex-girlfriend, Aishwarya Rai.
But it’s not just the two warring Khans — the normally reticent Amitabh Bachchan recently blogged about “being privy personally to a design by certain sections of the media and the fraternity to bring down” his world tour, The Unforgettables. Meanwhile, in an unprecedented fiery tone, Akshay recently claimed to a Mumbai newspaper that negative stories about his personal life are being circulated by certain “back-stabbing, insecure people that try and ruin me.” He goes on to say that he’d “never knight them, but I’d definitely hire them for Friday night entertainment,” and that it amazes him to see how “low some of those dogs will go when they feel I’m too hot for them professionally.” Ahem, please note the knight and the dog dig. If you recollect, Aamir Khan had kicked off a storm with his (in)famous dog blog post where he said that he owns a dog called Shah Rukh who among other things, also “licks my feet.”
Heather Timmons in New York Times asks whether Bollywood is ready for Snoop Dogg, just days before the release of Singh is Kinng where Dogg makes his Hindi film debut
The rapper once dubbed “America’s Most Loveable Pimp” by Rolling Stone makes his debut in India this summer, with a guest appearance on the title track of a highly anticipated Bollywood movie, “Singh Is Kinng.” The movie is set to open in August, but the title song is already in heavy rotation on some radio stations in India.
A fusion of hip-hop and bhangra with a simple chorus (“Singh is Kinng, Singh is Kinng, Singh is Kinng”), it features Snoop Dogg giving “what up to all the ladies hanging out in Mumbai” and rapping about “Ferraris, Bugattis and Maseratis.”
Snoop Dogg wears a Sikh turban and an ornate long coat called a sherwani in a video of the title song, which was shot this year in Chicago. Geffen Records owns the distribution rights to the song in the United States and Canada and may release it later this year as part of a compilation.
Not content with fringe roles in American and European films, they’re hitching their careers to the Indian film industry. Neelam Virje from London in Mint:
Katrina Kaif
Fists clenched, face contorted, the woman berates her best friend with accusations: How could she steal her boyfriend and then lie about it? A waistcoat thrown over her green kameez, she paces the floor in rage. Dressed in jeans and high heels, the younger woman weakly protests her innocence. The scene, performed by two aspiring actors, unfolds not in India’s film hub of Bollywood but in Ealing, west London, as part of the first batch of auditions at the UK arm of Actor Prepares, a school run by actor Anupam Kher.
The actors are in their 20s: Pirah Palijo, 28, is a lawyer from Karachi, Pakistan, and now lives in London, while her counterpart Seetal Linbachia, 23, was born and raised in London, and works as a hairdresser in her father’s salon. The duo represent a growing number of British Asians who are looking outward and hitching their acting careers to opportunities in the rapidly expanding Indian film industry.
In London review of Books, Andrew O’Hagan reviews The Happening directed by M. Night Shyamalan:
There’s a certain sort of person who will take a flashlight and go into a field of corn in the dark, but they only exist in the movies. I always think of those characters when I think of movie people in general: even in what is called real life, where people tend to have opinions and heart conditions and mortgages, film directors are largely unreal people who behave in unnatural ways. Especially in the first years after a big success, film directors of a certain sort are given to acting like geniuses, partly because a lot of desperate people have called them geniuses, but the conditions of success can serve to push them further and further away from their talent.
His arrival was dream-crafted by his uncle Aamir Khan, but Imran Khan, Bollywood’s new love, knows where he’s going. A profile in Tehelka:
The feverish speculation around a young person poised for stardom in Bollywood is one that only people who follow racehorses would understand: the endless studying of form, of bloodlines, of gossip from the stable. There’s no telling which odds-on favourite will stumble, or which robust survivor of indifference will astonish on a Friday evening. And somewhere in the center, almost obscured by the harsh light and gathering crowds, is the one who must run.
Imran Khan, star of Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na, the freshest romantic comedy we have seen in years, will never have a week like this again. In a week, he has gone from complete anonymity to Aamir Khan’s nephew to someone whose girlfriend’s romantic history is being read about across the country. On the streets in Mumbai one evening, an autograph-hunter magically multiplied into an alarming mob. A woman threw herself at him begging him to marry her. And all this before Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na actually hit the theatres, all this only because of his astonishing good looks. Once audiences sampled Jaane Tu’s soufflé-like charm, there was no holding back the enamoured hordes. And somewhere in the centre is a 25-year-old who rarely speaks a superfluous, thoughtless word.
They seemed an unlikely pair - the Tibetan Buddhist monk who had spent 33 years in Chinese prisons and labor camps and the aspiring Japanese filmmaker.
The filmmaker, Makoto Sasa, said she first heard of the monk, Palden Gyatso, when she was in college in Japan. After she arrived in New York to study film, alone and speaking no English, she read his memoir, “The Autobiography of a Tibetan Monk” (Grove Press, 1997). “His story made me think my problem is nothing,” she said.
Ms. Sasa, 35, decided to make a documentary about him. She began raising money, with loans, donations and a grant from the New York State Council on the Arts. She shot the film, “Fire Under the Snow,” in Tibet, Italy and India, where Mr. Gyatso, 77, now lives.
[Photo: Palden Gyatso, 77, was a political prisoner in China for years. He is the subject of the documentary “Fire Under the Snow.” / NYTimes]
As ‘witnessed’ by his then neighbour Arun Bhatia. From The Indian Express:
I was present at the Bangalore launch of his autobiography by Dev Anand recently. Among other things he has said in the book, he has put it on record that he loved Suraiya, but she was indecisive. I saw Dev Sa’ab at the launch but he didn’t see me - I was in the background. The same was the case in the mid-’40s at Marine Drive in Bombay. He would come to visit Suraiya who lived at Krishna Mahal in a sea-front ground-floor flat while my family was next door at Keval Mahal.
Before school hours in the morning, we kids would see a dozen or two Suraiya fans hanging about, craning their necks to see through her ground floor windows. She usually dodged them, with a burqa, deftly slinking into her big, American Packard car. It was the same story every day: disappointed fans would disperse, bringing to an end the morning’s boring routine for us kids.
After a decade, Shekhar Kapur is back in India for the long haul to finish his next film. In extensive interviews with Lounge-Mint, he talks about why he’s raising a $1 billion media fund.
Kapur is in the process of roping in strategic investors for a $1 billion (about Rs4,300 crore) private fund for creative work in digital technology in South Asia. He says the Singapore government (for gaming and animation) and China’s Hina Group, an investment banking and private equity group, are already on board and he is in talks with some Indian companies as well. “This fund will not look at film-making, because I believe that the next big splurge is not in Bollywood or Hollywood; it’s in the world of the Web-to tell stories that are immediate, that can hook you in your cellphone. This fund will aggregate together content creators and technology from Asia. I want to be in creative control from the time content is made to the gatekeeping stage and then distribution. Professionals will only manage it.”
Kapur already has two characters in mind for a story that will unfold in your cellphone if the fund is successfully raised, and channelled: “an ordinary girl and her travails through life, and perhaps an animal.” After being the creative head of Virgin Comics, the company Kapur formed with Deepak Chopra, a close friend, this is the film-maker’s second big jab at mass media. Among other ideas (”I’m working on five more things that you have no clue about, and I can’t tell you”) that he is flirting with is a Twenty20 kabaddi tournament, only for Indian television. His reasons for thinking up the last are obvious, but the vision to execute it and, to an extent, generate the funds for it, is still fuzzy.
Hindus in the US have started a protest against a Hollywood comedy, saying the film will hurt the religious sentiments of millions of Hindus worldwide.
More than 5,000 people have signed an online petition protesting against the film Love Guru, starring actor Mike Myers and due to be released on Friday.
Some Hindu groups are considering a boycott of Paramount Pictures which produced the film.
Paramount says the film does not make reference to any particular religion. The company says Love Guru portrays a purely fictional faith.
Shah Rukh Khan is the biggest draw in Bollywood and the world’s most popular film actor. He is also co-owner of the Kolkata Knight Riders, a cricket team. He talks to CNN:
CNN: When you were growing up in Delhi did you always aspire to be the star you are today?
SRK: No I never thought of being a movie star. I dabbled in theatre, but I did a lot of things when I was young. Sports, I was into anything. I liked to keep myself busy. Theatre or drama was a part of that. I did a bit semi-professionally in Delhi, and then TV came to India in a big way. Suddenly every actor was called upon to act on TV. So with that I joined TV and became popular. I came down to Mumbai to shoot a TV series but I wasn’t that keen on Indian movies. I didn’t think I was cut out for it, I didn’t think I was good enough. I still don’t. So I came for a year to give it a shot. My parents died early so I was sad in Delhi. I said to myself: Ok, come here for a change of scene. Maybe I’ll enjoy myself for a year and get over my depression of my parents death. But I just I couldn’t go back. I came for a year and I couldn’t go back. I was never trying to be a movie star, I became one by chance.
With its glittery musical romances, Bollywood is reeling in billions but has so far failed to seduce western audiences. Now a new wave of moguls and directors are enlisting the cream of Hollywood to spice up its appeal. Dominic Rushe in The Sunday Times:
Lost in India’s biggest shantytown, a hellish sprawl in the heart of Mumbai, what should have been a 20-minute trip, to attend the premiere of the latest Bollywood blockbuster, was now an hour-and-a-half odyssey. Somewhere the driver had taken a wrong turn and we were crawling through Dharavi, Mumbai’s mega-slum.
Exhaustion may have been to blame. The driver was so tired he had to stop in the middle of the street every 10 minutes to splash water on his face. With neither Hindi nor geography to fall back on, I was left to stare anxiously out of the window as he drove further and further into the dense network of shambolic streets.
Dharavi’s slum looks as though it has been cobbled together from flotsam and jetsam after a flood of apocalyptic proportions. More than a million people live here, stacked in hovels that appear to teeter on the edge of collapse. But that night the population was teeming outside, preparing for a chaotic collision of religious holidays.
Playing ten roles in the Rs 60-crore ($15 million) Dasavatharam, Kamal Hassan pushes the boundaries of cinema. M.C. Rajan in Mail Today:
Like many young Tamilians of his days, the young Kamal Hassan too spent most of his time in cinema theatres. He saw MGR’s classic, Madurai Veeran, 120 times. It must have been in the awe-filled hours in the theatre that Kamal Hassan the actor took shape. His destiny in away was foretold. The boy who came from little known Paramakudi in the backward Ramanathapuram district has been known for long as the actor who pushes boundaries. In his 214th film, the Rs 60-crore spy-thriller Dasavatharam which was released to popular acclaim this week, Kamal Hassan has pushed the borders of every known cinematic concept.
Adoor Gopalakrishnan on why his movies are not ‘art’ films, the difference between national and international film awards and why he can’t make a film in any other language than Malayalam. Paromita Chakrabarti in The Indian Express:
So how do you perceive Bollywood?
I don’t really know. The idea of an entertainment that entails leaving your common sense back at home does not appeal to me. You clap at what you see and feel happy with the mindless action in front of you because that’s what you have come to expect. It sells, I guess. So people are happy about it. As a filmmaker, I feel it’s my duty to rouse my audience’s interest in an experience that is not superficial, that is a part of life, that they have never known before. Maybe we have different priorities.
Do you watch Hindi movies at all, the kind that are being made now?
Mostly, no. I am very picky about the movies I watch. I like to have prior knowledge about any movie that I watch and I leave halfway if I don’t like it. Hindi movies, unfortunately, don’t interest me. When I go to watch a movie, I am looking for the unusual, a new approach. There has to be something new that I can take back. But, unfortunately, in Hindi movies I know what I will see. A good-looking boy and girl dancing around trees and pretending life is just about that. I’d rather not see it.
The hunt for the next Shahrukh Khan and Aishwarya Rai arrives today in the UK, when the first British acting school dedicated to training future Bollywood stars opens its doors for applications.
The Ealing-based project is the first overseas branch of the Mumbai stage school Actor Prepares, founded by the Bollywood star Anupam Kher, who appeared in Bend it Like Beckham. He aims to address the exodus of talented British Asians who move 4,500 miles to India in search of fortune after finding opportunities here limited to bit-parts in soap operas.
Kher chose to launch Actor Prepares in London partly because of the popularity of Bollywood films in Britain; they have long been a source of nostalgia and, for second-generation immigrants, a means of connecting with their heritage. The school aims to be an Indian cinema version of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (Rada), with professional actors coming in from Mumbai to pass on their knowledge.
[Photo: Sabina Sheema, from west London, is now a Bollywood star]
Filmmaker and scriptwriter Manoj Night Shyamalan in an interview with The Indian Express Editor-in-Chief Shekhar Gupta about his connection to India, the influence of politics on his movie-making, the origin of his middle name.
You’re 1970 born, I think.
1970. So ET was in 1982, and Jaws was 1975. Then Raiders of the Lost Ark, which was huge for me, in 1983. Spielberg was doing his thing right when I was a little kid. And when I saw those movies I said, ‘You know, that’s what I want to do!’
And how did your parents figure it? Because in an Indian household, for a kid who’s eight, it’s the parents who figure things.
(Laughs) When I was eight, they didn’t think anything of it. They just thought it was a kind of funny thing that I did. So they just let me do it and then they would watch the movies and then they would giggle with the family and I would take the cousins and the neighbours and we’d make these movies and they would be terrible. They would be just absolutely horrible and everyone would just sit and laugh at them and they thought it was just funny. And then I would go and do my school work, and I was fairly good at school work, so they thought, ‘OK, he’ll become a doctor, and it’ll be just fine.’ But when I became a teenager, I got more and more serious into the filmmaking of it, and they knew I really liked it as a hobby, and I went one summer when I was 16 to go to study film, just to see what it was like and I think my parents hoped that I would come back and say ‘Not for me’.
This sucks!
Well, it did suck (laughs) but still I came back and said, ‘It’s still for me.’ And they were like, ‘Ugh!’ And then I went to a film school and they’ve been worried ever since, and I think only until this week, when we came for the Padma Shri, that they are a little bit more relaxed about it all.
Ever since 1928, directors of all ages have adapted ‘Devdas’. The love affair continues, with two new versions in the pipeline. Sanjukta Sharma in Lounge:
The serpentine streets of Paharganj, teem and throb with people, bullock carts, honking horns, rattling motorcycles spewing black fumes and the collective hum of a million voices. This Delhi neighbourhood is a hub of European and Israeli budget travellers. But in director Anurag Kashyap’s next film Dev D, it is a microcosm of the world, a locus that propels the story and its characters.
From the panoramic view, his camera zooms into one corner of the frame, a run-down balcony where Chandramukhi, in between puffs of a cigarette, curiously looks out on to the streets. The interiors of the brothel where the college girl lives and works, her clothes and make-up are a riot of colours, mostly hues of pink. Kashyap’s Chandramukhi (the character decides to adopt that name while watching Madhuri Dixit in Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Devdas) seems strikingly different from the Chandramukhi that Hindi film lovers have come to know from the many film versions of Devdas. Here, she comes across as sassy, even mean, yet deep and knowing. So, will she be the same self-sacrificing Chandramukhi we know?
Bollywood’s first family, Amitabh Bachchan, Abhishek Bachchan and Aishwarya Rai Bachchan come together for the first time (post marriage) in a film, Sarkar Raj which is set to hit theatres on Friday. Kaveree Bamzai takes a look at the Bachchan clan in India Today
Amitabh Bachchan, patriarch of Bollywood’s first family, the all-time highest grossing Hindi film star of 134 films with a cumulative boxoffice revenue of over Rs 3,700 crore, the face of 20 brands, and currently the nation’s best-known blogger, is busy.
He has his arms around the waists of his son, Abhishek, and daughter-in-law Aishwarya, and he’s tickling them. Abhishek keeps a straight face, but Aishwarya can’t help bursting into her trademark laugh.
“People keep saying that I giggle,” she says. “They should see what I have to put up with sometimes.” Abhishek has already mock-threatened his father for getting too close to his wife of just over a year.
He asks Aishwarya, “is this as close as we can get?” Amitabh is complaining about his son spoiling his hairdo while Aishwarya is being shown a mirror by her husband’s make-up artist.
M. Night Shyamalan’s career illustrates one of the paradoxes of Hollywood: the industry loves the myth of the auteur — until faced with the realities of the box office. From the New York Times:
M. Night Shyamalan says he knows exactly when his relationship with Hollywood started to sour.
In 2000, he was on a conference call with executives from Walt Disney Studios discussing “Unbreakable,” the follow-up to his phenomenally successful movie “The Sixth Sense.” He wanted to market “Unbreakable” as a comic-book movie - the tale of an unlikely superhero - but Disney executives insisted on portraying it as a spooky thriller, like “The Sixth Sense.”
“I remember the moment that it happened, exactly where I was sitting at the table, the speakerphone,” he recalled in an interview from his office in a converted farmhouse near Philadelphia. “That moment may have been the biggest mistake that I have to undo over 10 years so the little old lady doesn’t go, ‘Oh, he’s the guy who makes the scary movies with a twist.’ “
Eight years later, movie audiences still know Mr. Shyamalan as the guy who makes scary movies with a twist.
[Photo: The filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan at his home in Malvern, Pa.]
Forget the saris, cleavage, item numbers, superstars, love triangles and glamour, Bollywood is undergoing something of a renaissance.
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