Tag Archives: Hindi Film 101

Hindi Film 101: Nehru-Gandhi Family Part 3, The Emergency and Sanjay

Posted on by
13

Did anyone notice I skipped Hindi Film 101 on Tuesday?  These loooooooong posts take a long time to write, and in the meantime I am missing reporting on trailers, news stories, box office.  So I am trying to find a better balance, and since Hindi Film 101 is the least read of them all (then DDLJ posts, then Sunday Speculative. Monday Malayalam and Tuesday Telugu/Tamil, so long as I write about newer movies, do really well.  No one reads about the K. Balachander films), it is getting the axe.  Well, the half axe, I’m still doing it on Thursdays. (last Nehru-Gandhi post here)

Continue reading →

Hindi Film 101 One-Off: Box Office, What it All Means or Doesn’t Mean

Posted on by
22

I was going to do a box office report for Raabta earlier this week, and it turned into this very very long post about what box office is and why I look at it the way I do and so on and so forth.  And I thought “heck, I should just turn this into a 101 one-off so people can easily refer back to it later!” (don’t worry, I will come back to my Nehru-Gandhi family history and finish it in a bit)

Continue reading →

Hindi Film 101: The Nehru-Gandhi Family, The 1st Generation and the Young Jawaharlal

Posted on by
19

Well, this is one I’ve been avoiding!  Because I know feelings run high on it.  And I know that, as a non-Indian, I have no right to talk about another country’s politics.  So I am not going to talk about politics, I am going to give as impartial a perspective as I can on the progression from Motilal to Jawaharlal to Indira to Rajiv to Sonia to Rahul.  Because as I discovered yesterday when looking at the posters for upcoming films, we are about to have a spate of Indira-era period pieces, and to understand them, you really need to know about not just Indira, but what came before and after.

Continue reading →

Hindi Film 101: Shahrukh’s Filmography Continues! Where Do You Go When You Reach the Top?

Posted on by
21

Happy Thursday!  Welcome back to our journey through SRK’s filmography.  Not to see which films are good and which are bad and so on, but as a case study for how a career can grow.  (part 1 here, part 2 here, part 3 here)

Continue reading →

Hindi Film 101: Shahrukh’s Filmography, Part 3!

Posted on by
28

Happy Tuesday!  Once again, I am going through Shahrukh’s filmography film by film in chronological order.  Because it is an interesting case study for how a career progresses, and how the industry has changed, over the past 25 years. (part 1 here, part 2 here)

Continue reading →

Hindi Film 101: A Journey Through SRK’s Filmography, Part 2!

Posted on by
22

Well, this is fun!  It’s partly a list of every Shahrukh Khan film, but more than that, it is a case study for how a career progressed in the 90s in Bombay.  Lots of work, not a lot of hits.  And then the 2000s came in, and it was less work and less hits (notice I was able to cover twice as many years in this post as in the last one)

Continue reading →

Hindi Film 101 One-Off: A Tour Through Shahrukh’s Filmography

Posted on by
34

This is just a random idea because I am in the middle of unpacking my Shahrukh DVD box and putting them in chronological order on my shelf.  It’s kind of fascinating to look at his career as a case study of how an actor’s career progresses.

Continue reading →

Hindi Film 101: Bombay and Crime and Films, Part 2

Posted on by
20

Happy Tuesday!  Time to finish off my posts on Crime and Film (first post here).  And if I end up mysteriously disappearing, or randomly shot in a drive-by, you will know why!  But it probably won’t happen.  Although my new apartment is in the neighborhood of the American headquarters for D-Company….Oh well, it will probably be fine.

Continue reading →

Hindi Film 101 One-Off: Bombay, The Mafia, and Hindi Film

Posted on by
15

Just saying, if I end up getting threatened/killed for writing this, it’s on all your heads!  But I probably won’t, right?  It’s not like Dawood is in exile in Karachi reading English language film blogs. (if he is, “Hi Dawood!  You should turn yourself in to the authorities because you are a terrible person who deserves to be punished!”) (also, this is one of those posts that is very similar to my book.  If you like it, you might want to buy the book)

Continue reading →

Movies on Netflix I Recommend: An Update!

Posted on by
17

Accesbollywood.net just updated her amazing “all Indian Netflix films” list to include three new films.  So I am going to update mine.  This may or may not become a routine, on the one hand it’s a lot of cutting and pasting and all, but on the other hand it is probably a very practical tool for readers.  Most importantly, SUBSCRIBE TO ACCESSBOLLYWOOD!!!  She does most of the work for this list, and you will find out about updates much faster, instead of whenever I get around to it.

Continue reading →

Hindi Film 101: A Very Very General History of Dance

Posted on by
16

Prepare yourself for another Hindi Film 101 that takes me out of my comfort zone!  Someone asked a question on Monday about dancers on film, and there was also suggested that I do some discussion of actresses from the south.  So I am going to try to combine that and talk in very very general terms about classical dance traditions in India and how that relates to actresses, especially from the south.

Continue reading →

Hindi Film 101: Samarth-Mukherjee Family Part 3, Tanuja and Kajol and Tanisha and Ajay and Nyssa (Also, Vote for Next Topic!)

Posted on by
31

Happy Thursday!  It’s too bad this family is so nice, makes for a kind of dull Hindi Film 101 series.  But at least now we have gotten to the interesting people, Tanuja and Kajol.  Well, exciting might be a better term.  Nutan was plenty interesting too. (don’t forget to go to the end and vote for what you want to read about next!)

Continue reading →

Hindi Film 101 One-Off: Thank you AccessBollywood.net for the Netflix List! I Am Stealing It To Write a Post

Posted on by
28

Do you know about the website accesbollywood.net?  It’s run by a very nice woman who reviewed my book, and is a friend of a friend through moviemavengal (moviemavengal=most socially competent and adventurous person I know!).  Anyway, one of the greatest things on the accessbollywood website is her updates of the Indian films available through Netflix.  I am going to steal her current list, because joyomama asked what I know about each film.  But please keep checking her site just in general, and specifically if you want to see a monthly update to this list!  Oh, and this is today’s Hindi Film 101 post, because it will give you basically a “watching list” of films to stream, which is an important part of learning about Hindi film.

Continue reading →

Hindi Film 101: Mukherjee-Samarth Family Part 3, Nutan and Tanuja Arrive!

Posted on by
11

Happy Thursday!  And Happy “Day I Finally Reach Famous People” in my Samarth-Mukherjee family tree.  We are through all those b-level stars and pre-Independence film figures, now we are finally into the golden age stars, the ones who matter! (part 1 here, and part 2 here)

Continue reading →

Hindi Film 101 One-Off: Bahubali 2 and the Future and the Past of All India Hits

Posted on by
18

I’ve been tossing around the idea of doing a post that tries to put Bahubali 2‘s all India success into context.  And then both T.J Stevens and Cerusee indicated that they would be interested, so the poor Samarth-Mukherjee family has to wait another week for me to finish them, because I want to try a brief history of “regional” films.

Continue reading →

Hindi Film 101: RIP Vinod Khanna! One of the First 70s Heroes to Leave Us

Posted on by
12

This is not my first post on Vinod, for additional background you can look at his birthday post from last year here, and my post on his involvement with Osho here.  And my review of his Chandni here, and Parampara here.  But moimeme just informed me that he passed away this morning, so I felt like I should do a special post explaining why he was important and why this death matters.

Continue reading →

Hindi Film 101: The Samarth-Mukherjee Family Part 2, The Mukherjee (Ganguly) Branch

Posted on by
7

Happy Tuesday!  Back to the Samarth-Mukherjee family.  This one is going to be a long one, but not necessarily a super exciting one.  I’ll try to make it as exciting as possible, but both families are too old and too savvy to really get involved in scandals.  Although that first post did have Shobhna Samarth’s affair with Motilal, so at least that’s something.

Continue reading →

American Musicals Post: La La Land and Vennilave

Posted on by
12

This is one of those situations when I get SO FRUSTRATED with how everyone is going “WOW! Did you see this?”  While I am going “Yes, when I was 5 years old…..Do you, like, never watch anything before 1980?”, and I just CAN’T TAKE IT ANY MORE!!!!  So I am going to force you all to learn the basics of American musical/dance history on film, so you can better appreciate how that interacts with modern Indian film, and the occasional very very rare modern American musical.

Continue reading →

Hindi Film 101: Woman Filmmakers, Why So Few?

Posted on by
26

This is partly inspired by the Op Ed that was in the Washington Post a few days back.  It was a so-so article, there were some things that I felt weren’t fully explored, but then on the other hand it was just a brief article for an audience with no background in the Indian film industry, so he couldn’t really explore everything.  But I can!  I want to zero in on one point from the article, how there are so few films with women working behind the scenes, and even fewer films with real female lead roles.  This isn’t something that just came up in the past year, and it isn’t something that will be solved overnight.

Continue reading →

Hindi Film 101: Poor Parveen Babi

Posted on by
8

After taking a little journey through film as a family industry and the Ratnam-Rahman connection, back to the old reliable Hindi Film 101 topic, tragic film heroines!  Parveen Babi is a strong contender for “most tragic”.  And part of that tragedy is how very short her story is, I bet I can do it all in one post.

Continue reading →

Hindi Film 101 One-Off: The Importance of Ratnam-Rahman and the Director-Composer Relationship

Posted on by
44

Happy Tuesday!  I did a quick two-parter on Nepotism (really more the history of Hindi film as a family business) last week, now I want to do another quick one inspired by Kaatru Veliyidai on why it is so especially exciting when a new Ratnam-Rahman movie comes out, and why that director-composer relationship is so special. (also, usually in this posts I try to use images instead of songs, but because of the topic, this will be an all songs post.  I encourage you to actually watch all the videos too)

Continue reading →