The Screengrab : bollywood

Terror Hits the Heart of Bollywood

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 15:30:00 GMT

The recent terror attacks in Mumbai, India would have provoked some reaction from the nation's booming film industry no matter what; they represented some of the most deadly assaults in the nation's modern history, and their sheer level of audaciousness and aggression make them remarkable even by post-9/11 standards. But the attacks have particularly hit home in the entertainment industry thanks to Mumbai's status as the commercial capital of India -- where a great deal of funding for Bollywood films originates -- as well as the location of the terror attacks (the Taj Mahal Palace & Tower Hotel, which was the scene of the biggest hostage standoff and which was severely damaged in the attacks, is a frequent filming location for big-budget epics as well as a favorite destination for visiting stars).

With the entertainment industry in India reeling, almost everyone has something to say. As police continue to track down every lead they can, and Indian Muslims brace for a backlash they fear is inevitable, many in Bollywood are taking the step -- astonishing in the hard-working, non-stop, budget-conscious field -- of suspending production. The entertainment site Bollywood Hungama reports a shocked and angry mood, with no one particularly eager to return to work. Very little production was done over the weekend, with only one shooting scene being finished and actors and producers wondering whether to stop filming out of respect or continue their work in hopes it will help the city recover. Actor/producer Suneil Shetty (best known in the west for The Border) reports "The city is in a state of shock. I'm getting to know gradually that I've lost friends in the attack whom I've known for years. My family and I live quite close to the Taj...we saw smoke and fire billowing out of these places where we've spent so many evenings." Several Bollywood stars will spend the next few days attending funerals of friends and relatives of friends.

New York-based producer Mira Nair, whose Salaam Bombay is perhaps the most memorable cinematic portrait of Mumbai, was reached in the U.S., and said "I've no words at the moment. I pray for equanimity to prevail and that we don't give in to hysteria." Naseeruddin Shah, one of the best-known Bollywood actors in the United States thanks to appearances in Monsoon Wedding and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, reflected the prevailing attitude, saying "What's the point in spouting clichés? Let's leave that to the politicians. My reaction of outrage and helplessness is no different from that of any sane person."

SXSW Review: Shot in Bombay

B.R. Chopra, 1914-2008

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 19:15:00 GMT

Bollywood lost one of its most legendary directors today when B.R. Chopra, the commercially successful but often controversial filmmaker who managed to bring a tone of moral seriousness and ethical inquiry to an industry most often given over to frothy, lightweight musical entertainments, passed away at the age of 94. As reported in the New York Times and elsewhere, Chopra's death from natural causes was announced by his son, also a film producer and a member of what has grown to be a prominent family in the Indian film industry.

Originally trained as a journalist and setting out to support a large family with only his determination to succeed as a filmmaker, crag-faced Baldev Raj Chopra initially encountered failure in his film career, helming a few forgettable romantic comedies before scoring mild success with popular thrillers that showed the influence of Hitchcock. It was in the 1950s that Chopra's career truly blossomed, mirroring the success of the industry itself; and, as time went on, he proved himself capable of scoring popular successes with traditionally-minded audiences while still seeking to push the boundaries of what was allowed in Indian film of the day.

Chopra's best-known film was Naya Daur, a 1957 musical that played up the conflict between technocratic urbanism and rural agricultural life at a time when India's leadership was pushing for more urban development and a transition from old-style community values. Though he worked with many of the biggest Bollywood stars, he sometimes made a statement by eschewing big names, such as in the 1980 drama Insaf ka Tarazu (dealing with the often-taboo subject of rape); he likewise bucked the Bollywood trend of featuring songs in every film in movies like the popular courtroom drama Kanoon. Though he directed his last film in 1992, he continued to act as a producer for his won B.R. Films company until 2006, when he released another controversial film -- Baabul -- which challenged the treatment of women in traditional Indian society. His most well-known work in the west, oddly, was not a film, but a television series: in 1988, he produced a serialization of the Hindu epic Mahabharata, which found an audience in the U.S. thanks to being syndicated by PBS.

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SXSW Review: Shot in Bombay

Bollywood Bonanza: Shah Rukh Khan Breaks Big

My Loony Bun Is Fine, Benny Lava

Andrew Osborne — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 18:00:00 GMT

We here at The Screengrab try to provide a comprehensive overview of the world of cinema, but far too often, we ignore one of the largest and most successful of all film meccas: Bollywood.

In an attempt to correct this oversight, I now present, for your entertainment and edification, the insidiously catchy video/production number, “Kalluri Vaanil” by India’s Michael Jackson, Prabhu Deva, from the 2000 release, Pennin Manathai Thottu.

Or, as it’s better known on the Intertubes, “Benny Lava” (or just “that crazy Indian video”), a time-wastingly hee-larious marriage of hyper-pixilated “happy feet” choreography and the heel-larious (and probably un-P.C.) phoentic subtitling of one “Buffalax,” whom Wikipedia informs me is a “mondegreen director.”

Okay, I know it sounds a little confusing, but trust me...if you’ve never seen the clip before, just click and enjoy. Your loony bun will be fine.

We Be Jaman

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 20 May 2008 16:45:00 GMT

With bandwidth cheaper than ever, the international tech market booming, and investors eager to find some new tax shelter in which to dump their millions, the internet is in the midst of a multimedia boom not seen since the late 1990s. And hey, we all know how well that ended, right? Yes, there's probably another massive crash coming, but that doesn't mean that in the meantime, office drones can't kill those long empty hours between lunch and five o'clock with exciting new ventures like Hulu and now Jaman.

Founded by Indian-American enterpreneur Gaurav Dhillon and backed by Hearst money, Jaman is an online on-demand video rental service, similar to those offered by Apple and Netflix, but focusing on an entirely different market. Jaman will, with the exception of a few Golden Age blockbusters that were out of copyright control (like Audrey Hepburn's Charade) focus on independent films for an English-speaking audience, and foreign-language titles -- espeically the wildly popular Bollywood genre so beloved by a growing Indian diaspora -- for the audience it's hoping to reach overseas. Hoping to tap into the underserved markets in tech-savvy countries like Brazil, Russia, India and China, where most people rely on DVD pirates for most of their movie needs, Dhillon is focusing on foreign language movies as both a source of cheap profit and a means towards building an audience. To help build that audience, they're set to offer an introductory deal that will applie to indie fans everywhere in the U.S. as well: free (well, ad-supported) access to a library of over a thousand indie films via the site's streaming browser windows.

Lest anyone get too excited over the prospect, Jaman is also hard-selling the 'social networking' aspect of their site, using those magical words, speaking of the 1990s, that everyone seems to find necessary but no one seems to have thought up a way to make money with so far. Still, the prospect of at-will callups of hundreds of inde flicks will keep us interested in the site...until the Great Crash of 2010, anyway.

SXSW Review: "Shot In Bombay"

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 19:30:00 GMT

Although it's home to one of the most dynamic, diverse and (thanks to the Desi diaspora) popular film undustries in the world, India's Bollywood scene is still a shadowy world with internecine feuding, shadowy financing, and ties to organized crime, banditry and even terrorism that puts the dirty deals behind Hollywood blockbusters to shame. Liz Mermin's highly engaging documentary Shot in Bombay not only sheds a light on the often bizarre world of Bollywood filmmaking and its ties to real-world crime, but does so with a cleverly metafictional structure that echoes the multiple layers of coincidence and concurrence that make it all so alien.

At the heart of Shot in Bombay is Bollywood legend Sanjay Dutt, who's been harried for over a decade by the Indian authorities for his alleged connection to a series of bombings in Mumbai with murky ties to both organized crime and terror. It follows his struggles with the law, but it also follows his professional career as he stars as a cop in an action thriller called Shootout at Lokhandwala, based on a real incident where five wanted criminals were gunned down by the police. By no means incidental to the labyrinthine story (it's no coincidence that Shootout's director, Apoorva Lakhia, fancies himself the Indian Quentin Tarantino, as Mermin's narrative sprawls out into Tarantinoesque complexity) is the fact that the cop portrayed by Dutt in the film later became tangentially involved in the police investigation of Dutt.

If this all sounds complicated, it is -- there's not a moment of the two-hour runtime of Shot in Bombay that's wasted, and you still feel like there's plenty more story to tell. But it's an incredibly tight two hours, filmed with a lot more discipline and clarity than many flatulent Bollywood musicals, and seeing gives you a wide range of insights into a number of topics, including the Indian film industry, the nature of celebrity and its relationship to the justice system, the lattice of coincidence (and not-so-coincidence) that surrounds complex systems, and the personalities of the various headstrong individuals that make up a story that you'd never believe if you didn't already know it was true.

Bollywood Bonanza: Shah Rukh Khan Breaks Big

Peter Smith — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 16:00:00 GMT

In the New York Times Book Review, Charles Taylor celebrates Anupama Chopra's new biography of Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan, both for its own virtues and for what its existence may say about the spread of interest in popular Indian cinema to the English-speaking audience. "The larger significance of the book," he writes, "is that a major American publishing house is bringing out a biography of a major foreign star, largely unknown in the United States. And that is remarkable at a time when newspaper and magazine editors and film distributors are increasingly reluctant to offer readers and viewers what they haven’t already heard about." With more and more movies fighter for fewer and fewer screens in America, and with the international distribution system an erratic mess, it may seem a stretch to suggest that Bollywood is about to take the country by storm. "But in a global economy in which India stands poised to play a bigger part, when the Internet and DVD’s are creating film audiences not bound by borders or by the caprices of film distribution, when some American multiplexes are giving over screens to Bollywood releases in order to lure America’s growing Indian population and when the stagnation of Hollywood sometimes makes the survival of movies as a popular art form seem an iffy proposition, Americans can’t afford to ignore Bollywood much longer." At forty-one, Shah Rukh Khan could well be an important tool in breaking into the Western market; two of his recent movies, Veer-Zaara and Chak! de India (which comes out on DVD next month) are among the rare Bollywood movies that have actually played theaters in the States. Taylor describes him as "part leading man, larger part buoyant goofball" who "represents the confident, successful Indian yuppie, the citizen of the world who is nonetheless recognizably Indian." He definitely has crossover potential. But can he do it in pictures as exotically strange to American tastes as his Bollywood hits? The obvious alternative would be Hollywood-style versions of Bollywood movies, similar to the imitation-Hong Kong action knockoffs that Chow Yun Fat got shoved into when he came to America. The very idea may give migraines to Bollywood-lovers and -haters alike. — Phil Nugent