Hey, Adi’s birthday! Coming up tomorrow! We should celebrate! We should also put opinions on the Friday watchalong scheduling post from yesterday because no one has yet!
Continue readingUnless you think it is a brilliant perfect movie. Then it may not be better than you think, because it is definitely not perfect. But it is way better than reviews say!
Continue readingThis is really just a battle for the top between Rab Ne and DDLJ, but I am throwing in Befikre and Mohabbatein too just so they don’t feel left out.
Continue readingAnd Befikre is the winner! I was strongly tempted by Mohabbatein but then I got a couple of people who said “I absolutely will not watch that movie”, so Befikre won.
Continue readingAlbie Dog has decided his new morning routine is to have breakfast, and then pee on the floor. The first time it happened was absolutely my fault, I skipped a walk and he was desperate. But I think his doggie brain then went “hey, this is a good system, I should keep doing this”. Anyway, I had an unpleasant start to the day and now want to think about pleasant things as a distraction. So, Aditya Chopra’s Heroes!
Continue readingThank you Kainaat! And SRK, of course. Kainaat quoted SRK describing Adi as someone who writes movies about men while his father wrote movies about women, and that started me thinking a whole thing.
Continue readingOh boy! Aditya Chopra week! The beauty of Adi’s career is that it is so very limited. Even if I include the movies he scripted along with the ones he directed, still a tiny list.
Continue readingAdi! Such an odd director, unpredictable and yet predictable. And always achieves the goal he sets out to achieve. I forgot, I already covered Aditya’s personal life in a Hindi Film 101, so if you want to learn more after reading this post, click here.
Continue readingThe more I think about this film, the more I like it! It’s not a deep serious movie and it isn’t trying to be a deep serious movie, and for the farce it wants to be, it is really well made.
Continue readingAnother common NRI trope! I was thinking these films didn’t fit because the hero is still desi, and then I realized it only doesn’t fit if I consider the national identity as residing in the man. It doesn’t of course, a woman can just as easily be an NRI.
Continue readingThanks for Catherine (by the way, Catherine, I owe you a greeting card! Email me your address and I will send it off) and Whitney bringing this up in the comments because I think it is a super interesting topic to consider, especially in the Indian context.
Continue readingWell, I’m having a rumpled start to the week! Karan sent out an embarrassingly sycophantic tweet this morning, there’s a final warm spell hitting Chicago which is making me not able to sleep, the elevator is broken (again) at work so I have to keep running up and down the really abnormally steep stairs, and my boss gave Dog Hazel some food she shouldn’t eat which wasn’t a big deal except that I had to tell my boss not to do that, which was an awkward upturning of our usual power structure (he’s in charge of me, but I’m in charge of Dog Hazel). Anyway, time for a soothing interesting post with a lot of great things to watch in it.
No big massive full summary coming for Befikre! Partly because Dear Zindagi exhausted me, partly because my sense is that my commentators aren’t as interested in a massive discussion of this movie, as they are of other movies. But mostly because I don’t think it is analyzable, to take it apart would be to destroy it.
This was a request from my new anonymous commentator, she was looking for an “underappreciated” list, but when I started to think about it, “underappreciated” is kind of hard to define. So I went with “not your standard massive hits that everyone knows”. Here are some little mini-reviews and suggestions, feel free to add your own in the comments.
I hate that myth. From two sides. First, people always think it means that characters don’t kiss. Characters totally kiss! And have sex and do all the normal things. It’s the actors who don’t. So we see the characters leaning in, but then rain obscures our view or whatever. The audience knows what happened, even without seeing it. Just like a “sex scene” in a movie doesn’t mean we explicitly see the actors having sex. We just see a bunch of sheets and know what happened. Oh, and also, actors totally kiss too. Anyway, this made up holiday gives me an excuse to post lots and lots of kissing videos, woo!
Oh dear. I liked it! But apparently, not many other people did. Even worse, Aditya seriously over-estimated the American screen count. Not good!
No big massive full summary coming for Befikre! Partly because Dear Zindagi exhausted me, partly because my sense is that my commentators aren’t as interested in a massive discussion of this movie, as they are of other movies. But mostly because I don’t think it is analyzable, to take it apart would be to destroy it.
I was very very nervous about how this movie would work, but it totally worked! I was afraid it was going to be a big Aditya Chopra movie taking the industry in another new direction where I didn’t want it to go. But turns out, it’s just a little Aditya Chopra movie, a nice harmless little thing that just happens to be made really really well.
Thank goodness, Aditya Chopra is still capable of running his life and business! As trailer after trailer came out for Befikre, I kept thinking “really, Adi? You are betting the farm on this….thing?” But nope! He isn’t betting the farm, he is just betting, like, that one cow that doesn’t give very good milk any more.
Yet another Befikre trailer! I really did not much like the first one. And then I disliked the second one slightly less, and the third one even less, and now the fourth one has continued the trend, and I almost enjoy it!
“I’ve been looking the landscape over…” I’m I the only one who has that Gershwin song in their head whenever they read “things are looking up”? Moving on, Befikre! New Trailer, and I actually like this one! Oh, and also it was passed by the censors.
I saw the existing trailer on the big screen last night before Ae Dil Hai Mushkil (second watch, many new thoughts!). And seeing it on the big screen, not on my little youtube window, one thing became clear: I really don’t like this movie.
Today Dear Zindagi got it’s first poster, and Befikre got its 3rd trailer. How is this thusness? Dear Zindagi is coming out 3 weeks before Befikre!!!!
Feel free to disagree! But my reaction, after watching it, is that it is trying so hard to be “different” from the regular Indian films, that it ended up being exactly the same as a million other western films. Most obviously the French movie Love Me If You Dare (I haven’t seen it, but it was fairly successful and widely reviewed and talked about when it first came out).
I said “historic monument” as a joke about Mannat, but that’s actually what the controversy is about! Mannat’s historic status.
dontcallitbollywood 