There’s a strange purity about films like [Big Brother], where the director says, “Look, I’m making my movie for the truck drivers in Ludhiana, and you multiplex types can sod off and go to hell.” At a time every filmmaker shoehorns in sops to audiences from ages eight to eighty, and in every city from Mumbai to Manchester to Melbourne, these are the films with zero compromise…For anyone who grew up with Bollywood in the 1980s, this sort of thing is so much more interesting to read than those one-dimensionally dismissive “reviews” by our big-paper divas (check today’s ToI for instance), which seem founded on the idea that everything about the Shiny New Bollywood is unequivocally superior to the films of the 1980s. (While on that, see this earlier post – Bollywood: what’s changed?)
…part of it is perhaps the Grindhouse effect, with so much recent press about that loving homage to shlock from Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez. (In a way, this is our schlock. And we watched these movies in our equivalents of the grindhouse theatres, in the pre-multiplex days.)
Saturday, April 14, 2007
Sunny Deol as God: the ultimate vigilante
Another wonderful piece by Baradwaj Rangan:
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But that's the thing isn't it. The box office of Grindhouse speaks for itself. People may have had some kind of nostalgia for certain films or think them to be kitschy or cute or so bad its good but that doesn't translate to a market for actual grindhouse films. I enjoyed grindhouse BECAUSE of its tongue-in-cheek style and the stories weren't all that bad themselves.
ReplyDeleteCut to every Bollywood producer talking about "bollywood is truly verld see-nayma" and divining for that oh-so-elusive crossover movie.
interesting
ReplyDeleteHey Jabberwock! I've been reading your blog religiously since 3/4 months now, and though this is my 1st comment here, I must say that I enjoy reading it a lot. :)
ReplyDeleteAnd for Grindhouse, I have learned not to expect much. Talking about the Bollywood Diva's view in TOI, I guess it was more of a retaliation on that particular question, than anything else.
Yes Sunny Deol era is now gone. Today only realistic kind of movie with real life characters. I miss those loudly dialogues of Sunny Deol in Gadar or Ghayal or Damini.
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