A Hollywood guide to Bollywood's most super, superhits

By Thor Ganguly “This is like Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona, but with some random dancing,” said an American friend of mine about Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara, Zoya Akhtar’s film about three reasonably wealthy friends on a journey through Southern Spain, which eventually, as these sorts of films do, becomes a journey about finding oneself. There’s some random hilarity at attempting to create European cool, (an otherwise Hindi speaking character shouts, “Un sangria senor” in a hip attempt to glide into Spanish nightlife). This did not, as it never does, dent its journey to becoming a commercial hit, which, in our culture, means artistic achievement. The film could be best described as a sort of Sideways with the Californian wine being replaced with sangria, a bearded Paul Giamatti in existential crises replaced by Roshan muscle in existential crises.  The crisis for Mr. Roshan (a financial research broker in London by profession, an invented occupation) reaches its resolution, (as most things do), on a diving lesson in the Mediterranean, with a kiss from Katrina Kaif whose profession can be best described as a Cordoba-based diving instructor specializing in solving her Hindi speaking clients’ fears (in Mr. Roshan’s case, scuba diving) by means of a lip lock disguised as a life-saving technique.  I don’t know about you but if most crises resolved themselves like this, the world (Europe in particular) would be a much better place. With the teenager behind me saying “thank you” when that scene popped up, audiences seemed to agree. And in many ways, it set the tone for the year in Bollywood, what came before and after. Essentially we have a version of Hollywood, palatable, localized, westernised enough to look glossily beautiful but not so westernized that it’s too subtle and eventually (as has happened to all invading ideas in India), something of its own. There was Delhi Belly, our version of a Judd Apatow comedy, which had the necessary slacker cowardice, self-deprecating humor and a fair share of attempted defecation.  There was the globe-trotting Bourne-esque Don 2, which was also sort of like Mission Impossible  (and in several scenes, exactly like it) substituting Ethan Hunt, a Government spy, with a mafia Don on the run, who, for a Don, seemed to do a lot of errands (pick up a bag in Berlin, drop it off in Bangkok etc.)  himself.  It made one wonder what exactly he was the Don of? DHL logistics? [caption id=“attachment_167362” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“Dirty Picture was our very own Boogey Nights: Reuters/Wikimedia”]  [/caption] There was Dirty Picture, our Boogey Nights, which was touted as a film about the travails of a soft porn star that ended up being a soft porn film itself, thereby becoming a parody of what it was parodying. We also had the good fortune of seeing our biggest movie star, Shah Rukh Khan, as a superhero.   Not so much in what was in the film but in the way he traveled the world promoting it. Ra. One could be best described as a video game that developed its own mind and went insane, although the reviews said the same thing about the screenplay.  In Hollywood terms, this superhero was a combination of Iron Man and Robocop, if such a gent could sing about “booties going pop” (I have no other way to describe the lyrics). Finally, there was Rockstar, about a rockstar who didn’t have enough angst and proceeded to find some by falling in love with a Prague-based terminally ill beauty who transformed him from a guitar playing Delhi North campus nobody to an angry Sufi meets Jack Johnson stadium-filler named, obviously, Jordan. Clearly this sort of irony is widely appreciated nationwide. It explains why the films above proceeded to make over a billion dollars combined (if not much more) and its makers are on private planes celebrating New Years wherever jet-setters do and I’m desperately attempting wit in the corner of a website. Hollywood itself, which has traditionally found its worldview appealing to the whole world except India, found some footing this year with everyone’s favorite childhood detective Tintin in Spielberg’s action adventure finding new audiences after being dubbed in Hindi, Tamil and Bhojpuri. It goes to show the universality of genius storytelling. Just because you are a UP based-gangster, you needn’t be left out of the Secrets Of The Unicorn. I should also mention the sorts of 2011 Bollywood films that don’t really care about literacy.  These usually feature  (or have this year) Salman Khan/Ajay Devgan (or is it gnnn?)  beating up people wearing sleeveless vests (they themselves are without shirts, oiled, naturally). The song interludes involve the star thrusting something in some direction (usually his belt or his groin, usually at us).   There’s a required bouncing destroyed SUV, an item song, item being the word to substitute the words “featuring sexy woman”. The standard procedure here involves a big song and dance usually with gunfire and many inebriated men amidst which said item dances, sort of like a nursery version of striptease, to thinly veiled lyrics about her whorish tendencies. The moral lessons here tend to be simple; physical violence, ideally hand-to-hand combat, is the best and only solution to life’s many problems (I often feel that way about my internet service provider). These movies, titled Ready or Bodyguard or Singham rake in millions at the box office, cause fans in small towns to go ballistic (banging their heads against a wall when their star comes on screen), leaving upper middle class India flummoxed – should they justify it, ignore it, deride it or embrace it?  All good questions to ponder while carefully trying to avoid humming tunes from the movie their auto-rickshaw driver is humming.