What makes Indian cinema so easy to ignore?

For over a decade, or at least as long as I can remember, the Helsinki International Film Festival has had at least one Indian film in their programme, every single year. Last year, we were treated to four different films, ranging from the indie gem Monsoon Shootout to the big budget extravaganza of Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani. A few years back, we even got the megalomaniac Enthiran, sending every Tamizhan Finland-dweller to the theater to whistle at Rajnikanth's entrance. Overall, HIFF has consistently served up something delightful for us few Bollywood fans habiting this northern land, and a rare treat for those people who love the occasional Indian film, but don't necessarily seek them out all year round.

Then this year, nothing. Zilch. Kuch nahin.

When asked for a reason, HIFF responded on Facebook that another film festival would have a few Bollywood aces up their sleeve later in the spring. No offence to Season Film Festival, which I like but tend to miss due to it springing up (no pun intended) on me and my schedules every spring, but I found this response even more infuriating than not having a single Indian film on the schedule. So there's not enough room for two festivals to both have a few films from a country that produces hundreds of films every year?

Without getting deeper into the flawed booking models of domestic film festivals, I've always wondered why it is that Indian cinema is so universally easy to ignore, by film festivals and well-known international critics alike. The same people who appreciate varied genres, various types of films from all kinds of corners of the world, commercial, non-commercial, small budget, big budget, success or flop, all have no-India blinders on, apart from the occasional dip into the Irrfan Khan fare or a Satyajit Ray retrospective. In this post, I'm going to explore a few potential reasons and ways to argue against them, or think outside of them.

1. Indian cinema is seen as one genre. 

Not every Indian film is a romantic comedy musical with young people running through fields and dancing around ceaselessly, yet this is such a dominant stereotype that the whole concept of "different" cinema has become a weird cliché. The confusion arises from the two vastly different forms of genre distinction. In Hollywood, certain genres that we know now today as comedy, horror, romance, action etc, formed to serve a certain purpose. In commercial Indian cinema, a particular format of incorporating song sequences into narrative sequences without fully adopting the genre trappings of what Hollywood calls 'musicals' became largely the norm, influenced by not just foreign cinema, but local theater traditions as well. Slowly, the concept of masala, having varied proportions of different genres fluidly co-existing in one film, became the ideal in commercial cinema. Potboilers would entertain all kinds of audiences at once.

In modern Hindi cinema, and in other Indian film industries as well, the masala tends to be both a format and a genre. You can have masala format for a genre film - the song and dance sequences in a gangster film, the melodrama in a sports film - as well as have a full-on masala film, with a romantic track, a comedy track, and action, drama (to paraphrase the drunken paramour Veeru from Sholay, "emotion, drrrrrama, trrrragedy"), villains and mothers and heroines and songs, all thrown into the pot and stirred to perfection. There is a tendency to regard all of this as one and the same, even though they're two very different, and both valid, ways of making a movie work for the local audiences.

The logic of this dismissal works in two ways: one, lump different types of films with little in common to a "masala" genre that people outside India rarely understand to begin with, and then two, to highlight everything that isn't masala (either formatted as masala, or in the 'genre' of masala) as being different and alternative and completely out of the ordinary, even when 'out of the ordinary' in this case could easily be the vast majority of movies produced in India. Indian film fans find themselves recommending films by telling non-fans, "This is different," because the prejudice towards what is "the norm" in Indian cinema is so prevalent among international moviegoers. Indian films, for all their variety, are at best lumped into a fun colourful ball of frothy masala, and at worst regarded as a universally understood joke.

2. Indian cinema does a poor job marketing itself (and so does everybody else). 

The saddest thing about this "all the same" misconception is that at times Indian industry people perpetuate it themselves. If you take a drink every time an actor or a director promotes a movie by calling it different, you'll drink yourself to death before you finish a copy of Filmfare (I exaggerate but still). The failure to promote a different idea of Indian films doesn't stop there, though. In most countries of the world, Indian films are scarcely available, subtitled or dubbed to local languages, or even to a lingua franca, such as English. In the places where they are available, they're barely marketed to local audiences outside the Indian diaspora. When they are marketed, they are usually marketed as "different" (to what the stereotype of Bollywood films is), even though the local non-Indian audiences might have no clue whatsoever what the actual Indian films that fit the norm look like (and when they see such films, they may actually very much enjoy them).

I'm not pointing the finger at Bollywood or Tollywood or anybody else, because I'm as guilty of this as anybody else. When somebody asks me for recomendations, my mind jumps to the Band Baaja Baarats  and Amar Akbar Anthonys of the masala world, then back-pedals to something "different" from those, as if masala is a shameful thing, as opposed to a wonderful, unique, amazing form of making films. It's a hard cycle to get out of, so I've tried to take a step back and instead ask the person, what types of films they like. Indian films have all kinds. Take your pick.

But it is tragic, because there is so much cinema that even I, a voracious and mostly fearless explorer of Indian cinema, am missing out on, due to lack of availability or subtitles. Whether it's Malayalam films, or older Tamil films, it can be a struggle to find information, recommendations, subtitled DVDs, you name it, there's a lack of it. This is very unfortunate, and sadly there isn't really an easy fix for it.

3. Quantity doesn't signify quality.

The above is very much true, but I don't think quantity of films produced is the only reason why Indian films should demand more from film authorities and the world-wide film industry. It's like this: I'm not saying you have to like Indian films, or even respect Indian films, because I recognise there's tons of cinema out there I don't know about, understand or care for (with that said, I do keep an open mind). What I am saying is that there should be more recognition, in whatever form, of the true merits of Indian cinema. Looking aside the silly misconceptions, the big production numbers, the musical numbers, and the Thriller parodies, here is what Indian cinema really is:

It's an absolutely one-of-a-kind film country, with a distinctly unique history when it comes to genre and presentations of it, with multiple, interesting and thriving local, regional film industries (both commercial and more arthouse-minded) that serve important functions to local cultures and languages. For better and for worse, it's influenced Indian politics and society, and continues to do so today. It connects a huge diaspora back to their place of origin. It's at once localized and regional, and national, and international and global.

It's just too damn interesting to stay ignorant about, and too vast to dismiss entirely.

A decade in a life, and in film.

There is something poetic about the fact that while Indian cinema celebrates 100 years of existence, this year I can celebrate the tenth year anniversary of watching my first Bollywood film. If you don't know the story of the how that happened, you can read all about here. I didn't follow Indian films actively right away, obviously - I stumbled around, finding films I thought I might like, and ones I thought I ought to watch. It was only two years later, in 2005, that I actually began watching films on a less sporadic, accidental basis. I began to really get to know the stars, and look beyond the clichés. I began hanging out on Bollywood forums and websites (well, mainly the BollyWHAT? ones) and I made a friend in my city, who let me borrow a bunch of films and introduced me to so many new things, be it older Hindi cinema or the wonderful worlds of Southie cinema.

In 2007 I was already somewhat of a veteran, in that I knew what I liked, what I didn't like and what I wanted to see more of, and started this blog to showcase my fascination to the world. Ever since then, it's been my own personal opinion repository, one I sometimes maintain with extreme regularity and passion and that I sometimes let fall to the wayside in a rather regrettable manner. My love for Indian cinema remains ever-present but fluctuates - one month I'm watching three films in an evening, the next I haven't watched a single film, or even rewatched an old favourite.

The love has never gone away, though, and Indian films is the one fandom I think I'll always come back to. Therefore it's probably odd to most people that in my time watching these films, in all my time taking in their sounds and sights and cultural ideas, I've never actually been to India.

And unlike for most people, I can't even claim that it's been an issue of time or money. I've had enough time and money to travel to other far away corners of the world - I've been to the US, twice, South Korea, twice and I've even swung by the United Kingdom enough times to make up the money for a plane ticket to India. But travel is an odd beast, and my problem with India has been that I haven't wanted to go alone, nor has traveling alone to India been recommended to me.

Weirdly enough, even as I've expanded my horizons and gained more in-depth knowledge about Indian society, politics, history and culture as a whole, what eventually made me finally go to India was film-related. I was exchanging emails with a long-time friend who I'd initially met online but eventually got to know face-to-face as well, when visiting her country. She was also a fan of Indian films, so I wrote to her about how much I was looking forward to what is surely the most curious casting in the most bombastic film saga of recent memory, Aamir Khan in Dhoom 3. Jokingly I asked her, "You wouldn't want to swing by India at the end of this year?" and to my great surprise, she replied she'd love to visit India (a second visit for her). So we began talking, and then we began planning, and now we're booking.

Are your eye-brows raised? "Did she just write she's going to India to see Dhoom 3, out of all the movies in all the years, Dhoom goddamn 3?" No, that's not it. It's more one of those wonderful things where circumstances just come together and collide to create a new thing. My former music teacher probably shows Bollywood to her students on a yearly basis. It just happened so that I was the only one in that class receptive to Hindi cinema's charms, and wanted to see more. Similarly, I've wanted to go to India for over 10 years now, but have never had a friend to go with, and then suddenly I realise there is a friend who is not only willing to go, but is happy to go see Dhoom 3 and embraces the idea (and whose tastes in film tend to line up with mine), and the release of Dhoom 3 happens to coincide with a decent time to go travel in India (not too hot, not too damp) and when it's convenient for us two Westerners to go, as it's Christmas holidays.

So you see, Dhoom 3 just happens to be at the intersection of all these good things. I don't expect worlds out of it, as a movie - it's just a movie, starring some people I like, and it's a movie I'd probably see regardless of the circumstances. The fact that circumstances just happened to fall together, after my joking question, was kind of perfect. I'll be the first one to tell you that Indian culture, or cultures, are rich beyond belief and to only watch the films would be missing out on the various aspects, both positive and negative, of an interesting nation and its people. At the same, I'd be lying if I didn't admit that the films form the backbone of my personal attachment and interest in India. Thus it feels fitting that I'll be heading to India with somebody that I don't have to drag into cinemas against their will, and instead can go see films with, and visit all the historical, cultural and just plain interesting sights as well.

I'm so happy to be going to India, because it feels like a long overdue visit, and I'm even happier that it feels like I'm going to appreciate it a lot more, now that I've done my share of reading and studying India, and the fact that I'm going with somebody I like, and who I know is interested in similar things as I am. It also feels very fitting, that I'm going near the anniversary of when I first got into Indian films - almost as if it was always meant to be.

Standards, reactions and film criticism.

I'll be honest: this is going to be one of those absolutely painfully self-indulgent posts about the nature of film criticism from somebody who doesn't even do this for a living. Does the world need another pensive post from a blogger about what they occasionally do to fill the hours of the day? Probably not. And yet, I am writing it.

Look at Rani Mukherji smiling. At least this post has that going for it.

The reason I'm writing about the subject is not even because an Indian film inspired it in me. Post-Oscars, I got the sudden inspiration to actually watch some nominated and awarded films (which I rarely do, as so few Oscar contenders interest me). One of the films I went to see was Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master, which I found, simply put, brilliant. The film has some excellent performances, a simple narrative that seems to hide a lot from the viewer, beautiful cinematography and interesting subtextual themes. It made me pause a bit, reflect on what I'd just seen, recall certain scenes and then try to piece together their significance as a whole. It's that kind of film, and some people will find it difficult to understand, frustrating even, and some fans of the film will dismiss these criticisms as people just not "getting it" or not taking the time to rewatch the film and allow it to sink in properly.

These discussions caused one film writer to ask: Should some films be taken more seriously than others?

My first reaction is to say no, but then to immediately say yes. Arguably, all films should be judged by their own standards - a comedy has to make you laugh, or it's not a very successful comedy, and a romantic film ideally has you rooting for the leads to get together. A documentary provides you with new information, or portrays old information in an interesting manner, and hopefully makes you think, to boot. On the other hand, all films will be judged by your own  standards as a viewer. The best thing a film critic can do is write about a film in such descriptive terms that you can take away two things from their writing: what their standards for this film were, and how that film met those standards. More simply put - whether they liked it, in relation to what kinds of films they typically like.

So if a film makes you to pause and reflect at length on what you just saw, perhaps even rewatch, it's only fair to that reaction that you do so. If a film goes down without much pondering, regardless of how you feel about it, I don't think it's strictly necessary to over-ponder a film that doesn't inspire such a thing naturally.

This is not necessarily a split between films from interesting, respected film makers who make thoughtful cinema, and potboiler mass-entertainment films. The problems come in when people's prejudices make it so - when a critic thinks an arthouse film is worth pondering over, but an action film could never be, even if it touches on interesting themes. But film criticism is a fairly simple sport, as all it really has to contain is a certain honesty about your own reactions when it comes to a particular film.

I like to think that I can analyse films as I see fit, regardless of whether they are "meant" to be taken seriously or not. I've discussed each Upendra-directed film I've seen like it was an academic thesis, with points and arguments and explanations - while realising that these are still films made for the masses in mind. I thought a lot about Laal Patthar, even though the film was not particularly deep or even nuanced. Once I vented about my frustrations regarding a Malayalam art film - I could see it was good, but it wasn't for me in terms of the story or the characters, and I didn't catch the significance of the director's choices, nor did I think I would upon a second viewing.

To me, it doesn't really matter if you "get" a film or not, what matters if whether you like it or not. I don't know if I understood The Master, but I knew I liked it a lot. I liked it as I as watching it, I liked the performances and found the characters fascinating, I liked the soundscape and the visuals, and I loved pondering my own interpretations of the film. That's my honest reaction - whether my take on the film is wrong or right, doesn't really factor into my enjoyment of the film as a film.

Road, Movie (2010, directed by Dev Benegal and starring Abhay Deol) comes to mind. This was a small film that I remember a lot of people reacting to in a pretty negative way, finding it beautifully shot, but ultimately rather pointless. I liked it fine, but it wasn't a passionate, enthusiastic sort of like, but the lukewarm type - I didn't feel like I'd wasted my time with with it, but neither did I walk away from it feeling like I'd witnessed something magnificent. At times I do feel like I need to rewatch it, but other times I don't really think there was that much there to miss out on, so perhaps my reaction to it would be the same as last time. I don't think anybody absolutely has to give a film another chance, if it fails to impress the first time. If a reaction is not intrigue or a desire to look into it deeper, then why force it?

It's the strange nature of film-watching. Films can have enormous personal significance, or inspire a person to do something they normally wouldn't have. Films can say things about nations and cultures and points in time, or they can say not much at all. I don't think there's a right way or a wrong way to react to cinema - perhaps Jism 2 really does provide some commentary on the sexual politics of modern India, or perhaps it's just a flick with tons of skin shown. What you see in it, is what's there for you.

I remember being called out on liking a certain, "trashy", entertainment-geared fare in Indian cinema but not the same thing, coming from Hollywood. I admit to this criticism, but I would also counter - isn't this what everybody does? You can't have the same standard to every film, unless that standard is your own enjoyment of a film. So Avatar didn't inspire much thrills in me, but Dabangg did. That's my truth - feel free to share yours. 

This old chestnut: SRK on Hollywood.

I was reading SRK's reflections (see that picture? Get it? I'm too clever, honestly) on the state of Hindi cinema and the discussions it brought out in people on GetFilmy's excellent post about it, and decided to make my own post, as I have a lot of thoughts on the topic. Here's a link to the Forbes article, but I wanted to give credit to GetFilmy for bringing it to my attention.

In a way, I honestly believe that these comments have more to do with where Shahrukh Khan is at, than where Indian film is at right now. His films as of late have been successes, but they haven't been the kind of successes he probably hoped they'd be, and they certainly haven't punched through as films people would love to re-visit time and time again. His name brings people to the theater, but hardly anybody is going back for a second viewing, much less a third.

But, as more people flock to cinemas, Hollywood’s finesse will eventually win them over. India may make the most movies in the world, but “With all due respect, the production values are s***. Why will my kids watch that kind of crap when Hollywood offers something slicker?”

As far as arguments go, this is not precisely the strongest. Anecdotal evidence based on your kids? Look, dude, I get it. You're a self-made guy who made their career and fortunes through Hindi films, and now you see that your kids are growing up in a different world than you, so they'll prefer different things - and this is a new discovery for you, perhaps. But you just cannot extrapolate all that to include every child in India, every adult in India or every Indian abroad.

Here's what I've learned about Indian audiences and their love for Hollywood films - people like spectacle. People everywhere like spectacle. Finnish people will go see Avatar in huge numbers, as will Americans, as will Brits, Germans, Koreans and people all over the world. Spectacle is one of those things that no other format than film can provide quite like film, so of course flashy, big budget entertainers will draw in people, just for the novelty of it all.

Like GetFilmy pointed out, Bollywood is not suffering. Content is becoming better, genres are getting more diverse, we get tons of films breaking the 100 crore mark, which used to be a fanciful dream for producers, we have new stars and old stars having the kind of success they've never enjoyed before.

Even more importantly, films aren't just entertainment - entertainment forms a part of people's lived experience, and through that, shapes identities and in some ways, a national and cultural identity. This is why DDLJ spoke to NRI's, and people still listen to HAHK songs, or quote Sholay, or whatever have you. And because Indian films are intrinsically Indian, they will never cease to have that sort of significance in some people's lives. This is not to say that if you are an Indian person who prefers American or French or Iranian films to those of your own country, you're somehow less Indian - that's not what I mean at all (after all, I'm not less Finnish for not liking Finnish films much). It's just that to some people, this part of the culture is very important.

A bad Hindi film might not entertain anybody better just because they have a cultural connection to it, but I don't think people who are as passionate about their own films as Indian audiences can be will ever just abandon it because the visual special effects aren't as flashy as something Peter Jackson or Christopher Nolan can conjure up. That's pretty simplistic thinking on Shahrukh's part. Production value is not the only thing people go see in films - it's certainly what some people look for, perhaps even to the detriment of their own enjoyment of less flashy films (be it indie, arthouse, low budget).

They spend more on pop corn, samosas and fizzy drinks than on the tickets.

Newsflash - this has been the case in the West forever. Even before the advent of illegal digital downloads and all the things driving up ticket prices in North America and Europe. This also seems to mostly look at multiplexes. People see films in other sorts of film theatres as well, don't they?

I'm not a businesswoman, so I'm not one to criticize Shahrukh's moves in the business world - it's his company, he can run it as he likes. But I also think it's shortsighted of him to just think about visual effects, flashy spectacles and all this other stuff that Hollywood will probably make better than Hindi films do, most of the time, simply because of the fact that Hollywood has been doing this stuff for aeons. Indian films should push themselves technically, for sure, and I'm all for that - Eega was a good example. But no film would be anything without actually being good - good acting, good music, good stories. To say Hollywood is going to take over is based on almost no evidence at all - in fact, Hollywood is itself in crisis because its age-old business formula is losing in the world of online streaming and targeted marketing. Bollywood is going through changes as well, but it's not failing.

I don't mean to harp on the man's personal career graph too much, but I do strongly feel that had his latest film been his Dabangg or Three Idiots, he wouldn't be saying stuff like this. Come back to us, Shahrukh - make a damn good movie that rides on both the content (a good story, solid direction, great songs) and your star power. Jab Tak Hai Jaan probably should've been just that, but wasn't. Nevermind.

Come back to us.

Diving into the aggravatingly shallow world of Karan Johar: Student of the Year.

I knew full well going into Student of the Year that this would not become a new favourite. For the longest time, I was prepared to simply ignore the film. I know my tastes my now, and having watched a fair bit of Karan Johar's oeuvre, I know his films aren't my thing. But curiosity won over - the fact he was making a film with nothing but newcomers meant that this had potential to be something fresh, and if nothing else, at least I'd be introduced to a bunch of new faces.

I wasn't surprised that I didn't love the film, but I was surprised at the laser-like accuracy with which my brain could pin-point the things I disliked, and why I disliked them. Some may accuse me of going in with a chip on my shoulder, because I was not a Karan Johar fan to  begin with, and they'd probably be right on that. Still, there were things that I liked, and I'm prepared to give credit where credit's due, even if this review will be lopsided towards the negative. (Because of this, the post will be quite detailed so be warned for SPOILERS.)

The plot is precisely what you can deduce from the posters. St Teresa, an elite school, holds its annual Student of the Year competition, which ends up creating tensions between some of the school's top students. Rohan (Varun Dhawan, David's son) is the resident rich, cool kid, who at first butts heads with newest student, the ambitious Abhimanyu (Sidharth Malhotra) but soon develops a friendship with him. Rohan mistreats his girlfriend Shanaya (Alia Bhatt, Mahesh's daughter) and eventually a love triangle forms between Rohan, Shanaya and Abhimanyu, and the competition is only heating up...

The very first problem I had with the film was the highly objectionable portrayal of our heroine in the film as a largely hyper-superficial, consumerist fashionista or the other female principals as people who scheme, trying to win men and/or influence. This I precisely the sort of thing I ranted about last month, and it still gets my goat in a big way. Shanaya is introduced with a song highlighting her richness and fashion-obsessiveness. Her best friend Shruti (Mansi Rachh), it is implied, only hangs out with her because of the connections and her other relationships to women are an unhealthy one to her mother, and a rivalry with Tanya (Sana Saeed, ie Little Anjali from KKHH, all grown up) over Rohan's affections. I could forgive all of this if the character wasn't so supremely under-written. There is a scene where Abhi lovingly describes her personality, but at no point does the movie actually show us where he draws these conclusions from. At best you could describe Shanaya's character as a bit dim, and this is at times played up for laughs. But she's pretty, so of course the boys are in love with her! As for Shruti, she has short hair and doesn't seem to be obsessed with fashion, so naturally she's almost like a boy and Tanya's an exaggerated vamp stereotype. Yawn.

Of course, if Shanaya is unlikable, then so are the boys jostling for her attention. Rohan is introduced with an obnoxious pseudo-rockstar image (shirtless, playing noisy guitar) and quickly we learn his rich bratty ways are sourced from his father being a horrible person. He wants to become a musician, but I never learnt why this is his true passion. He starts out an asshole, and is still an asshole by the end. This is where credit to Varun Dhawan has to be given. There is nothing in the writing of the character to make me sympathetic to him (sure, his father is an ass, but does he have to follow?) but somehow I still ended up liking him better of the two. 

Abhimanyu gets the whole school swooning over his amazing charms from the get-go, but there is still little to care about him for. His backstory gets stuffed with a lot of filmi junk, which I suppose is meant to give him an underdog feel: he's not from the best family, he's an orphan, he has nobody but his grandmother.. Still, he's a pompous guy, not as clueless as Rohan, but not all that much better. The love story between him and Shanaya is based on very little but a few conversations, a couple of meaningful looks and, I suppose, the fact that they are both attractive.

That's the thing about Karan Johar's cinematic universes. This one is so painfully shallow it's almost funny. We get a lot of gratuitous slow motion shots of well-trained abs and bulging chest muscles, slightly less of loving shots of flowing hair and twirling dresses and this is all great and wonderful as aesthetics go, but you know what I'd like more of? Acting, charm, story, characterization.. I know a certain fascination with the glamorous lives of the ultra-rich is a modern Hindi film staple (from the 1990's onwards), and this kind of superficial love of fashion and objectification of bodies goes hand in hand with this trend, so it's to be expected, but its novelty value has worn off pretty quickly. 

There's nothing wrong with these things individually, but when they stack up, it doesn't make for great cinema. I can enjoy the gratuitous body display in entertainers, but when combined with flat characterizations, not the strongest acting abilities and other annoyances, the end result becomes unappetizing. 

Then there are the gay jokes. To hammer through the idea that Abhi and Rohan share the most epic dosti imaginable, we are treated to every possible flirtation with homoeroticism you could possibly conjure up. There's the running joke of Abhi asking Rohan, "You're not going to kiss me, are you?" whenever their unmanly friendship feelings emerge, and Rohan typically counters it with, "I'm not going to even hug you!", right before he goes in for that all-important meaningful hug. Then there are the many meaningful looks, the casual sleepover Abhi has at Rohan's house and of course, the limp chemistry they have with Shanaya, compared to what they have with one another.

You might think it's pretty rich of the girl who loves Main Khiladi Tu Anari, the absolute epitome of homoerotic implications in Hindi cinema, to harp on SOTY for essentially the same phenomenon. And yet I will, because what separates the two is the wink-and-nudge acknowledgment at every step of the way in SOTY at what they're doing. In MKTA, they did not set out to make an unintentionally hilarious homoerotic buddypyaari film - they set out to make a genuine 90's masala with some male friendship at the center of it, and whatever else might have intended, laughing at homosexuality was not the goal. There's also very little of that most aggravating of modern phenomenons, the "gay scare" humour. It's the sort of jokes where one of not laughing at gay people specifically, but at the potential of something happening between two members of the same gender, after which they quickly claim their heterosexuality. Far from normalizing homosexuality (which some may think it does), it actually does the opposite, since everything hinges on the denial of homosexuality. "I love my friend, no homo, because for it to be even a little bit homo would be weird and gross, ew."

The entirety of Dostana (another film let down by bad writing and lazy characterization) was built on this type of joke, so it's not like there's anything radically new about it. While it can be amusing and even cute at times, I wish dearly it wasn't in abundance here, because tucked away deep inside this sort of lazy comedy is what could've been the emotional heart of the SOTY - an actual, genuine, honest-to-god love story between two men. The two male leads have clear chemistry with one another. Not a whole lot of the plot would need to change; the flimsy characterization given to Shanaya almost seems to confirm the existence of the romance as subtext. The love triangle is never truly about her, and at one point the film gives her a rare moment of individual agency by having her get upset that the boys are squabbling over her. "You just want to own me!" she yells at them, because it's true: she's little more than a pretty accessory to both of them.

Closely related is the character of the school's Dean, responsible for the inane Student of the Year competition, played by Rishi Kapoor (who is good in the role despite writing). He is gay, but not exactly a positive example of representation - essentially he combines the stereotypes of the lonely, tragic homosexual character as well as the flamboyant comedy gay character who flirts with demonstrably straight men. Is it good that he exists at all? I'm not sure. Towards the end, it's almost as if he's the film's unofficial villain, and at no point is society's homophobia implied as the reason for his lonely fate. It's merely given that he can never be with somebody, because he's gay, and only straight people are afforded the luxury of loving partnerships. Homosexuality can be flirted with, because boys will be boys and boys will have close friendships (unlike girls, of course!) that teeter on the edge of romantic, but if you actually are gay, your life will be self-denial and tragedy.

All in all, it just makes you sad.

Possibly the sole shining point of the film are its ensemble cast of secondaries. Besides Shruti and Tanya, there's the lovable fool Jeet (Sahil Anand), who is also a hanger-on friend/lackey of Rohan's and the nerdy, heavy-set Kaizaad Sodabottleopenerwala or "Sudo" (Kayoze Irani, son of Boman). Manjot Singh, who played young Lucky in Oye Lucky Lucky Oye, plays Dimpy, an assistant of the coach and is very likable in the role. As expected, Jeet is subject to a lot of "haha, he's so dumb!" type jokes, and a lot of eye-rolling from his so-called friends, and Sudo is the butt of many a fat joke, but somehow these characters rise above the slots given to them and become a bit more real and relatable than the flawless, cool but flat main characters. Sudo particularly gets one true high point of the film, which really makes me want to see more of Kayoze Irani as an actor.

I also have to give credit to Johar for the narrative choices and the pleasing look of the film. The story is framed by the secondary characters telling the story of their past, in the present, which allows for a slow reveal of events. It gives the secondaries more room to impress, which I liked a lot. The only problem with this was that it made me hope for a better story than what eventually turned out to be the main plot of the film.

Then there are the few fantastic song numbers the film contains, mainly the wedding song Radha and the disco number The Disco Song, the latter of which has some nice cameos, and overall a good tune. The other songs on the soundtrack I'm not huge on, but these two are just fantastically filmed and have nice choreography so I could easily see myself rewatching them.

Student of the Year certainly did what I thought it would, introducing me to new faces who might be the big stars of tomorrow's Hindi films. I hope this write-up doesn't read as merely scathingly snarky, as that was not my intention - I think at a different point in my life I would've enjoyed a film like this, but as I am right now, I find myself distant from the characters and finding very little to enjoy in their stories. It doesn't help that the film seems to almost revel in its shallowness. Still, it's far from being without entertainment value, and even contains a couple of pretty solid performances. So if you're curious despite everything I detailed in this post, I'd give it a rental.

(For a more positive take, should you want one, there is Filmi Girl's review.)

Free Advice to Bollywood - from a fan who cares.

(Anushka Shetty, looking as good as I like to imagine I look while blogging.)

So hopefully I'll never be one of those people who selfishly expects Bollywood or Indian films on the whole to conform to my personal likes, or how I think the films should develop. I'm never going to be the one berating the lack of Urdu poetry lyrics or the shortness of skirts, or say that more family-centric films are in order. I like what I like, and I like a lot of things, so I'm typically one to like anything if it's executed well enough.

However, there's some advice I would like to give.

1. Alternative financing models might not be your enemy.

This is an area where admittedly, I don't know everything about everything. However, as I understand it, it seems that a lot of Indian films finance themselves like this:

You begin with a director, who's got a story of some sort. Maybe this story comes from their own brain, or they've collaborated with somebody else to get this story. Then, they seek out stars - aiming big, but trickling down to smaller stars as the bigger stars turn down the film, or agree to do it. Once you've got the star, you're seeking sponsorship - after all, a Salman Khan film is more likely to get financiers interested than one with a newer, less successful star.

What's wrong with this model, you might ask. Technically speaking, nothing - and nobody can claim there is a guaranteed way to finance a good film, so it isn't like the quality of the film is directly linked to it's financing model. On the other hand, it does lead to certain issues. What if your film doesn't get the star you aim for? Can you scale back the budget appropriately?

It also largely limits your potential pool of talent. Since the process is not a director auditioning a cast, but the cast (or the main star) auditioning the director, the idea of casting a new face, or even giving a bigger role to somebody who's mainly done side roles, usually goes out the window to begin with. There's also the gender angle - typically the "star" in this context is thought of as male, and while there are some actresses that are as sought after as the heroes, they still remain few and far between.

Would a more open-minded casting/financing approach wield better results? There's no way to be sure. Hence my cautiously phrased advice: it might not be your enemy. The only way to be sure is to try.

2. Don't ever, ever fall into the trap of Hollywood's franchise-thinking.

There's an article on this phenomenon simply titled: The Day the Movies Died. The idea is simple: afraid of investing on a new idea in hopes that it would be made into a good box office success, movie studios in Hollywood are no longer interested on your new stories, new heroes, new ideas. Even when you're an established, big-hit churning film maker, they're not really interested.

However, if you repackage your idea and slap a label on it that people recognise, they're listening. You want to make a sci-fi film? Why don't we just rework that into a "reboot" of The Blade Runner? You want to make an action film? Why don't we have boats in it and call it Battleship, after the board game? Let's make a Monopoly movie! What else was popular? Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles hasn't been re-visited in a while..

The idea of franchise replacing story, the re-boots and re-makes and re-imaginings are where it's at. Is there any going back? Who knows? My point is, we don't want this to happen to other commercial cinema.

I'm okay with sequels -  I'm actually quite anticipatory of Dhoom 3 - but those have to remain the minority, not the majority. When they become the majority, you can see that whatever creativity was left is quite obviously gone. And this at a time when Hindi films were gaining a lot of very good, very interesting variety, to chuck that all away for boring re-hashings of old names (just because people recognise them), that'd be a very sad thing indeed. You can on occasion filmmakers in Bollywood play around with this idea, and tangle the promise of re-making a classic or re-imagining a famous film that people recognise (nobody has yet used the word "reboot", thank heavens), and people typically respond negatively. Liked Kuch Kuch Hota Hai? Rewatch Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, then! Nobody is going bananas over a cartoon version where the characters are all dogs, for crying out loud!

So I hope that even in a world where regional remakes and sequels are gaining ground, Hindi films won't stop believing in stories. There are still many new ones to be told - and sold!

Hire me, Bollywood: Kiss of the Spider Woman re-imagining

Argentinian author Manuel Puig's novel "Kiss of the Spider Woman" (illustrated here by the novel's stylish Finnish translation cover art) draws a lot out of a simple premise: the dialogue between two prisoners, one a staunch communist activist and the other an effeminate gay man, forms almost the entirety of the novel. Valentin, the former, listens to Molina, the latter, tell him stories from old movies - through these re-tellings they discuss each other, life, politics and love.

The novel was perhaps the first to be told almost entirely through dialogue (with some official documents and footnotes relishing the story on the side), and it was later adapted into a stage version, that was then made into an Academy Award-winning film.

And after I finished reading and mulling this story over, I just thought to myself, "This would make a fantastic Indian film."

Why do I think it's so ripe for an Indian film remake? If you've read the novel, you know it packs a punch precisely because there is so much there to get into. The stories of the films tell us something about the character who narrates them; Molina is an escapist at heart, stuck in a world that doesn't accept him, but as the novel also shows, stuck inside these gendered misconceptions of both himself and the world around him. This kind of escapism is what forms a large part of the tradition of Indian films - the other reality where the corrupt politicians get beaten up by brave populist heroes, where the beautiful girl and the handsome boy fight adversity and find love despite their families' disapproval, the classic melodramatic heroines singing poetic tunes about their woes.. 

These kinds of aspects would find an easy translation into the films of Hindi film yore. Then there are things about the character that would obviously be different. Molina's identification with femininity means he might be categorised as a hijra in the Indian context. Or the character might be more closeted in terms of who he really is, and who he wants to be. 

Valentin, on the other hand, is the revolutionary, whose movement relies on secrecy, but who suddenly finds it impossible not to share some of himself with Molina. The two men form a bond - and without spoiling, it's safe to say this bond is not easily defined, especially given their unusual circumstances. Valentin seems haunted by doubts about his cause, and his constant reading of political literature seems to be partly due wanting to educate himself, but also to make sure he remains committed to his cause. 

India's history has no shortness of revolutionary movements, and at least in some states, the Maoist Naxalite movement has been seen as gaining prominence (as well as being classified a terrorist organisation by official authorities). So again, this would not necessarily be a difficult thing to transplant into the Indian context. 

In the novel, they get through many films - six according to some counts, seven according to others. In the film and stage version, they only delve deeply into one. On the page, scenes can whizz by when narrated, but in film, telling a story takes longer. But the narration of the films are integral to the story, not just because they form such a big part of it, but also because they cut into the differences between these two characters - Molina's melodramatic tastes in film reflect popular cinema, whereas communist Valentin's dismissal of certain films, certain scenes in them, seems to suggest an elitism. A really good director could form a story, a film within a film, with this narration, that would dig deep into this particular contrast between the two characters. The political v the non-political, the progressive v the socially conservative, the popular v the high-brow.

As for casting, well, if you want to aim big,  then why not aim the biggest? Aamir Khan as the brooding, uncertain Valentin, plagued by his past regrets but committed to his cause. Shahrukh Khan as the equally uncertain but only as fragile as he allows himself to be Molina, the narrator of the films that stir such emotions inside them both, the eternal escapist, unhappy in this world but with little desire to change it. For both stars, these would be bold roles, and fascinating characters to play; and of course, I am fantasy-casting like it's going out of style, here.

If you've not read this novel yet, do so, as I highly recommend it. I cannot speak about the strength of the English translation, as I read the novel in Finnish, but I assume it'd be worth it.

Nationalism, culture & representation - thoughts on Finnish cinema.

You might be thinking, what with that lofty post header, what the hell do Finnish films have to do with Indian films, the main subject of this blog? Not a whole lot, but allow me to explain.

A lot of foreign fans sometimes feel discouraged when Indians rag on their own cinema. "It's just not as good as American films", "they just steal plots from better foreign films", "the acting is so over-the-top and melodramatic!" are just some of the criticisms you might hear voiced. Some of that attitude might be rooted in internalised racist or colonialist thinking - the idea that if it's Indian, it's naturally subpar to anything that comes from outside of India; a certain lack of self-confidence in one's own cultural products. I say some, because it's not always the explanation, and I think it would be harmful to label other people's tastes as being rooted in something that they don't themselves recognise at all.

Another explanation of this high level of criticism towards cultural products of one's own culture/country is simply the question of representation - when we identify with a culture we were born and raised in, we might feel defensive or close to whatever members of the same culture produce as representations. We look at them through a different lense - it's not, "is this a good film?", it's "is this a good representation of Finnish culture/Indian (Tamil/Telugu/Kannada/Muslim/Sikh/etc) culture?". We don't choose to do this, instead it plays in the back of our heads like an unwelcome guest commenting on what you're reading over your shoulder, and it raises the standards just that little extra. It means you pay closer attention to everything, and are more quick to think about questions of accuracy. Dialogue, costumes, milieu - these all become more highlighted somehow. We also watch the film as a film, but with those raised standards, the film has also become something much, much more. It's sometimes not even so much a question of cultural representation as just the fact you want something from your culture to be good enough so you can present it to others with pride; this nationalist notion that even though you had nothing to do with the making of the cultural product, it's connected to you in some sort of way, because of this shared culture.

You can never see something from somebody else's eyes, and I think that's partly why people who have these "unwelcome guests" are often surprised to hear somebody else is watching, too, and doesn't mind the melodramatic acting or the song numbers (in the case of Indian films) or doesn't recognise the perpetual angsty male loser that so often ends up being the hero, or the clichéd sex scene where all you see is a naked butt but serves no purpose whatsoever (in the case of Finnish films). (Can you sense my over-critical tone from this yet?) To an outsider, sometimes a good film is just a good film. An outsider is not necessarily looking for any kind of representation, positive or negative - they just want to be stimulated by the film-watching experience.

So this is where I understand and sympathise with Indian people who just cannot fathom why anybody would want to watch some of the cinema that their culture(s) produce, because they just don't see the films as that good. Of course, there are a lot of differences between my pooh-poohing of Finnish cinema and those desi critics of Indian cinema - for one, scale and outreach. Finnish cinema has some audience outside the country's boarders, but not a whole lot; even expats would rather eat rye bread and go to sauna than watch a Finnish film to reach back into their native culture. We're a small country in terms of population. We're isolated. And most of us do end up walking out of the theatre and telling our friend, "That was okay ..for a Finnish film."

What's my point, then? Well, first of all, to say to all those who feel this way about their own cultural products - I get it, and I also get that you can't always help it. Even if you try to shut off that more critical side of your brain, it might not be possible. You are going to be paying close attention, you will be more critical than necessary perhaps, and your lived experience will define how you see the flow of dialogue, or the familiar milieu portrayed, or certain types of people characterised. That's just what film-watching entails, and in large part that's what makes discussion of film so interesting - to see how your own views of the world influence your understanding or like of a particular story, trope or character.

So you can't always shut off your inner cultural critic, but you can try to give films more of a fair chance by trying to make sure doesn't talk throughout the film. After all, what are films but stories? And stories aren't always location/time specific - at times, they're just stories. So rate them as such.

(This semi-pensive post is the 300th post in this blog. Hurrah!)

Head-first into the world of Upendra: Super (hand symbol).

What does any film watcher want in this world but to see something they've never seen before? To be surprised or provoked by a film experience is one of the greatest joys of it all, and on top of that, the delicious aftermath of telling a friend, "I saw a film unlike any film you've seen before."

From the moment I found out about Upendra, the "Real Star" of the Kannada language film industry of the south, often titled Sandalwood, I understood this was a man who was doing something Different, with a capital D. Now, whether it was something Different that I would like, I hadn't any idea, but I was curious all the same. 

So when I was putting together a DVD order of 6 films from six different film industries of India, and came upon "Super" (the title, being a handsymbol as seen in the screencap above, could be understood in multiple ways, as explained by Wikipedia but "Super" stuck in the media and fan conscious), I knew I had to see it, even if the DVD had no subtitles whatsoever. 

I mean, it's a film whose title is a hand symbol. 

A hand symbol.

Wrap your head around that first, folks, before you get on this ride - because "Super" is not just a quirky Southie director with a big ego playing around with concepts in a way that lends itself to amusing screencaps (though it is plenty of that, too!), it's also a political satire and a political philosophy dissertation in the format of a film. It's a film-long metaphor for the betterment of Indian society. It's simply put - something very unique, indeed.

Even the beginning credits provide something of interest. "Dialogues" become "die locks", story becomes "sorry". Producer becomes "fraud user". 

Behind these twists on words, we get scenes from life in India - all the negative aspects, be it violence, crime, or poverty. And then we reach this ultimatum: 

The letters "pendra" follow the U, eventually, but for a moment, the audience is literally being pointed at. This is your India. Look at it.

After that, we are taken 20 years into the future, to 2030 (this film was put out in 2010), where a foreigner comes to Mysore and sees a rich India, with cultured Indians strolling around in exquisitive Indian clothing (all the saris are made of the finest silk), with technology decorating tall buildings and not a trash in sight. Curiously, the problem of poverty has not been erased - but instead of fellow Indians slumming it, you have white people as beggars and service workers.

Naturally the foreigner - white British man, I should add - wants to know what lead to this enormous rise of India's wealth and infrastructure, and an Indian scholarly man tells him the story of how this all came to be, in a movie-long flashback.

Our "heroin" as per the beginning credits, Nayantara, enters the scene with flowers in her hair, romancing a rowdy who seems scared to death of her. Without subtitles this sequence is almost impossible to decode, but somehow she ends up threatening some rowdies until our hero bursts into the scene:

...carrying roses, accompanied by motorcycled badasses and white girls in mini-skirts. Okay!

The man is of course played by Upendra, the director himself, and the character is called Subhas Chandra Gandhi (remind you of anyone? it should). For a man raised in England, we see the enormous passion he's got for his home country, India. We even get a scene where the healing powers of the Indian soil are demonstrated in a scene that reminds me of Shahruh Khan's pigeon-curing in DDLJ.

Hand on heart, he has faith that his country, India, is the greatest in the world..

Eventually we see him meet Nayantara's character Indira (which leads me to ask what the meeting with the roses was about? God, I would kill for subtitles..), who is a traditional Indian girl, coming to London to perform traditional music and dance. We see the two fall in love.

It's all rather adorable, and they even get married, where we get the film's first twist; Indira is not really the traditional girl she acted like, but a mini-skirt wearing, cigarette-smoking, wine-glass holding schemer, who only married Subhas because years ago, her sister Mandir (Tulip Joshi) attempted suicide after he turned down her love, and now Indira wants to revenge this injustice.

She breaks down his idealistic view of India; Indians are rotten, corrupt and dirty, and could never amount to much. He's devastated, but takes up on her challenge to see Indian society for what it is.

This leads him to fight for a former teacher, who's got some trouble with his pension, but the problems of society hit him in the face every step of the way. He's distraught, but wants to make a difference all the same, and stays in India to do so.

Based on this, it might not seem like there is a lot going on, but the crux of the political satire and the message of the film only comes into full bloom on the second half. I've read that the film addresses specific Karnataka political scandals, and as I understand it, the political ideas of the film boil down to the thesis of corruption only existing so long as it is allowed by the people; Upendra's satire cuts not only the corrupt politicians but the people who dismiss politics as corrupt and don't try to change the ways things work on a microlevel.

In true film tradition, this political tale and message is still inter-cut with songs. The romance itself is a little questionable to say the least; not only the way in which it comes about (the scheming Westernised woman?) but also the way this plot-point ends - as a metaphor for something bigger. I'll get into some big spoilers later on regarding this, but for now, that's all I'll say. (I should also warn anybody who is squeamish over portrayal of rape, even just attempted such, there are such scenes in the film.)

At the end of the day, what is there to be said for a film so rich with thinking, even if a lot of it is fairly jingoistic? Well, I have to say, for all my criticisms of some of Upendra's points, and some questions that I have about the film as I saw it without subtitles, I really appreciate what he's doing, and how interestingly he is doing it. Even if I disagree with some of his choices, they are bold ones, they do make one think and they are packaged in a glorious mass entertainer that is truly in a league of its own. I think a subtitled DVD would be in high demand; this is a story not just for Indians, but also NRIs and even us Westeners to mull over.

It is weird and exaggerated (just look at the hairstyle in the screencap above), but it is also wonderful, and it has those complexities that you wouldn't necessarily expect from a blockbuster film. I don't think I understand Upendra in all his glory just yet, but I am more than happy to find out and see more. I didn't always agree with this film, but I ended up loving it for what is was - and what is was attempting to do.

SPOILERS 

Since the film is written like a thesis, I'll respond to it like one - with questions, thoughts and challenges. My first thought upon seeing Upendra's vision of the future wasn't to be offended that he portrayed white people as beggars, but rather the idea that an utopian future would include poverty in such a visible manner. To me, the problem in any society isn't the skin colour of the poor, but the fact that people are so poor they become beggars in the first place. I think the key to happiness in wealthy nations is not that I'm rich and somebody else is a beggar, because seeing them causes me grief/guilt and a number of other negative emotions - but that I'm reasonably well-off and my fellow (wo)man is not on the streets, either. The gap between the rich and the poor is what creates envy, greed and mistrust between people. I think somebody needs to send Upendra a copy of this book called The Spirit Level - which states that inequality harms us all, the rich the poor and the middle-earners. 

As far as his central idea goes, I am more persuaded. What is the responsibility of the people who consider politicians corrupt but continue electing them? What is there to be said for political apathy, and how much better would societies be if people felt more of a collective responsibility over the society that is essentially theirs? The thesis that you scale back democracy so much that the Chief Minister is the Common Man - or the common man is the chief minister of his own society - is very thought-provoking. The idea is that the choices we make on an individual level can be both to the detriment of the collective level - the society - or to the betterment of it. You can be great if you choose to live great - this sort of thinking.

I'll have to admit, I'm still unsure how I feel about the rape attempt of Indira to wake up Mandira from her coma. Even though steeped in metaphor - Indira as India, Mandira as Indian people, comatose from their apathy as to how bad things truly are - it still makes me uncomfortable. Of course, lack of subtitles made sure I had no idea whether Indira was actually in on this plan or not - whether she knew the true backstory of how her sister got to the state she ended up in. If she didn't, what is essentially happening - putting the metaphor aside for a moment - is that her husband is attempting to rape her. The horribleness of this imagery does lend the metaphor the sort of impact it was probably meant to have, but there's also other things to unpack here. (Did it have to be Subhas himself doing the raping?)

Why do women get to only to be metaphorical stand-ins for a nation and its people? There is a problematic, unquestioned misogynist premise here that is not uncommon in Indian films, but ought to be pointed out all the same; women are there to be "invaded" (raped) or protected. 

Patriarchy is not Upendra's fault, but I wish a director who obviously is thinking a lot about the film he is making, and has a tendency to present his messages in interesting ways, would question such decisions. Women who have agency are essential to any kind of social change that India needs as a country. (See several Satyamev Jayate episodes for succinct explanations of why this is.)

Another thing where I wish I had subtitles was so I could dig into the portrayal of Gandhism in the film. It seems like Upendra is saying, Gandhi's thesis of "turning the other cheek", being passive but strong against an enemy has made the Indian people docile in the face of adversity and problems. They are "turning the other cheek" towards corrupt politicians, when they should be making a difference actively, every day, in their lives. 

In the end, the biggest questions the movie brought up in me are questions of humanity - why do we do bad things, selfish things? Is it just our nature, or our carelessness about the welfare of others? And then the really tough questions - how can we change for the better, and whether we can change to leave a lasting impact?

But I do love the ending, and the punch it packs with such simplicity - who changed this all? You did. In the end, it's not a story of a hero, because no one person can change as much as needs to be. 

As for Upendra, I am extremely interested in watching his past works, both as a director and an actor. He's obviously doing something interesting, something unique and something different, and I think I can overlook the misogynist elements in his films (as I've heard there are some, and which was my biggest problem here) for the benefit of whatever else he is trying to say. He's also quite good-looking which is always a bonus. 

I also have to thank Amogh on Twitter for answering my questions about the film, helping me grasp some of the complexities of the message Upendra was putting forth.

Still gathering thoughts: sexuality & tragic stardom of The Dirty Picture.

Despite the perhaps all-too-academic sounding title, I simply wanted to write another post about The Dirty Picture for a very simple reason. I read bunch of reviews that looked at it critically, analysed it a bit and perhaps concluded it wasn't a film worth its hype, or even worth the price paid for a ticket. And even though I disagree with that assessment - I still love the film and anticipate rewatches! - I did agree with some points those reviews brought up. (This is not the first time this has happened, obviously. I can agree with a lot of things about my favourites which other people found fatal flaws.)

SPOILERS FROM HEREON.

The biggest question for me are the multiple conundrums the film throws at us and perhaps doesn't quite resolve. Silk's sexuality gets center stage, but Silk herself - or even deeper, Reshma, doesn't. Perhaps rightly so, you may think. Isn't her sexual agency what made her who she is? It's what carries her through. She uses it to her magnificent advantage, and perhaps best of all, does not let anybody victimise her for doing so. She's not a meek girl who a sleazy producer propositions in a typical casting couch cliché; she goes out there and does whatever she feels she needs to do, and things simply click in place.

However, this is not a survivor story - when she has her final down to end the supreme high she's been riding on, she still has agency, but doesn't pull herself back out. She perseveres through hatred, but not sadness.

People have commented a lot on the fact that all this story is framed through the words and perspective of the man who hates her, Abraham. This is, depending on your perspective, either an interesting choice or a lazy one. Lazy one, because it allows Silk to be displayed precisely for this sexual agency that Abraham, in almost an unabashedly misogynist manner, loathes. It provides the masala and the titillation for the masses without scratching deeper into the character that Vidya Balan so beautifully portrays.

But this choice can also be an interesting one, because this allows the viewer to question their own viewership. When Silk is framed through Abraham, it becomes clear that we're getting a version of her story, rather than her actual story. We, just like Abraham, merely sit in the audience of the film of Silk, rather than truly stepping into her shoes. We're the same audience Silk builds her success on, but at the same time the one who categorises her into the role of a vamp, so she cannot show she can do more. We don't need to be shown more, we're happy with the sexy song and dance, to have our base need for entertainment catered to.

I say we, but obviously I don't know what everybody else was thinking when they began to think through this film. I can't make this judgment about everybody. But I did start to have these thoughts, because this kind of stardom, this idealised, fragmented idea of what a star is like, is very important to Indian films. The film remains a masala, and I'm not trying to portray it as anything but - it doesn't blatantly hold up a mirror to its audience, but there are these things that rather make me wonder.

I've got this book on Marilyn Monroe, only it's not a book about Marilyn herself, or rather - it's precisely that. It's about the Marilyn created, the stories told of her, the reality that is constructed with bits and pieces of her myth, from her dyed blonde hair to her tragic suicide. We all know her story, and we all have a version of this story; we see her as a victim, or a queen, or a little girl who was just lost, or a woman exploited by men, or whatever. And there are stories similar to hers, and these kinds of iconic women with tragic endings tend to fascinate the culture at large. What happened? What went wrong? Why wasn't she the ideal that we saw on-screen, but just a human being who was sad? Or is that just another interpretation, desperately trying to reach some sort of conclusive truth where none can be found?

So you can see why the film makers wanted to tell this story, because it grips people, it fascinates people, and everybody wants to get at some sort of greater truth of it all. That's the nature of stardom, even when it's built on raw sexuality, the distance between the "real" person and the "star persona".

The question remains - could we get Silk's real story? Or would we be more satisfied with this version, because it creates the myth on our behalf - even through the imperfect lens of Abraham's character?

The curious concept of masala, and a bit of Dabangg.

Carla's Dabangg review, besides being worth reading, got me thinking.

Whereas she draws comparison between this type of masala and the good stuff of the yesteryears, my go-to comparison is the action masala's from some of the Southern industries (Tamil and Telugu). Not that I've seen a whole lot of them, but enough to draw a general picture of what kind of tropes the films are composed of.

I was going to comment something along the lines of "Well, to me, the Southie industries have been keeping this sort of masala format warm all these years, so it's nice to see Hindi films going with this tried-and-true formula again."

Then I catch myself. Is this awfully reductionist and even for a personal interpretation tenuous at best? Probably. I mean, first of all, Southie films have their own history with their own stars and their own cultural context, which Northern industries and especially the supposedly pan-Indian Hindi film industry seems rather ignorant of. Who knows where the Southie masala took inspiration from? Rajnikanth was making movies around the time Amitabh was carving a place for himself. It seems weird to speculate when one doesn't know the full history of genres in Tamil/Telugu films.

At the same time, the Southie influence is clear in my eyes. Very few 70's masalas had a high skill in choreographing the fight scenes, or interesting in terms of camera positioning. The best cinematographers in all of India have famously come from the South, and the fight choreographies seemed to learn a thing or two from Hong Kong. You can definitely see that modern flare in Dabangg, and the realism in the violence.

Then there's the hero, of course. No longer the charming NRI whose dil beats for Indian family values even though he wears Western labels, Salman Khan's Chulbul Pandey is basically a certified badass rustic cop, assuming they give out such badassery certifications, and if they see him, they had better start. As Carla points out, he's not exactly morally sound, but there's a certain ends-justifies-the-means attitude that makes sure we don't stop believing in him completely as a hero.

The story's been called lacklustre and incoherent in the few reviews I glanced at, but I think what is interesting about these sorts of action masalas is that they are complete crowd-pleasers, but the perception of the crowd has changed a bit. Nowadays there's no one mass (was there ever, truly?) but multiplex audiences, NRI audiences, segments of the "mass" that don't necessarily care for the kind of cinema Dabangg and other such masalas are all about. I started thinking about the action masala hero and how strange it is that Salman, not Akshay Kumar, became the new box office king with these sorts of ventures. You'd think Akshay would have the skills and the mass appeal - and he certainly does. He's not an actor with mind-blowing range, but that's usually not what the masalas are looking for, either. And yet, starting from Wanted and culminating in Dabangg, it was Salman who has his renaissance with these action masalas.

Salman is the Marmite Hero, or Marmite Khan if we want to get specific. Aamir and Shahrukh inspire reactions ranging from lukewarm to passionate, but Salman seems to split people into haters or lovers. I'm more inclined to agree with the latter camp. Of course, now that I've said that you can all reminisce my Let's Talk About post about him, in which I write: "-- I like Salman Khan. I don't love him, I certainly don't enjoy him unconditionally, but the fact remains I do like him."

Isn't like a lukewarm reaction? Not really, not to me. The fact remains, when Salman makes good movies, I really like him. When he makes bad movies - which is often - I can't stand them or watch them just for him. These recent films feature him in roles that suit him superbly, suit his acting, his style, his core fanbase. The flicks are crowd-pleasers, and the crowd gets what they came for, unlike the crappy favour-for-a-friend films he's been known to churn out, with half-baked plots and disappointing action. You can virtually imagine the movie theater exploding when the shirt comes off - and you know for sure it will.

Some of you that are South Indian and know the industries inside & out, or those firangis who jumped the Tamil/Telugu gravy train in a big way and know your Vijay's from your Karthi's and can cite Allu Arjun's family tree by heart, will protest purely because there are things the legitimate Southie heroes can certainly do that Salman can't. He's an old guy who's not famous for emotional range, so when you've got young Telugu lads dancing their hearts out in limber moves to rival Hrithik's, charming heroines and kicking ass left right center and just right there behind them, it can feel wrong that Salman took influence from these types of movies and is now breaking box office records. But of course, Fair is not a word in the Indian film vocabulary, otherwise new talent wouldn't find it so difficult to break into it while son-of-so-and-so gets a debut role no problem.

And as for Dabangg? Well, if you can't tell by this post, I enjoyed it. Not sure whether it jumps ahead of the perfect-in-every-way Wanted (I hear some of you Salman haters protesting but ah, there you have it, Marmite Khan on display!) but it certainly comes close.