It’s been 20 years now, this movie has been made fun of and rehashed and ridiculed over and over, it’s easy to forget what a massive industry changing international hit it was when it first released.
Continue readingYou thought we were done with Karan Johar, didn’t you? But no! I have one more thing to say that occurred to me while we were doing our Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham watch. And this thing will also, once again, give me a chance to rewrite the endings of Karan Johar movies which is my favorite thing of course.
Continue readingTHERE WILL BE AN INTERMISSION!!!! We will pause at the interval (an hour and 40 minutes into the movie, 4:40pm), and restart 10 minutes later (4:50pm) I will announce Woo-hoo, Karan Johar week grand finale!!!!! At 3pm Chicago time, I will hit “play” on the movie and start up the comments. You start at the same time and just comment along with us. Refresh regularly to see the new comments (might be worth it setting up a wordpress account to make it easier).
Continue readingThis is more of a thought experiment post. I want to try looking at all of Karan’s films through the lens of parenting, specifically BAD parenting, and see what we come up with.
Continue readingThis is it! The greatest question of our time! The debate we have all be training for! Which of Karan’s two greatest scenes, is better?
Continue readingThat is the question! Thanks to our little Memorial Day festival, over this weekend we watched KKHH and SOTY2 already. Which means we are quickly running out of Karan Johar options.
Continue readingWe discovered last week that Aditya Chopra doesn’t actually do “sexy” well. But, in contrast, I think Karan really REALLY does. Question is, which is his best sexiest pairing?
Continue readingWoo-hoo! Karan Johar songs! The perfect happy escape. And not an over-whelming number of them either, so I think we can rank them all, don’t you? Especially because I am removing My Name is Khan since I don’t like throwing something that real in with the other stuff, feels disrespectful to victims of hate crimes, you know? So, Karan Johar songs, but with MNIK removed!
Continue readingHappy Christmas! 10 days left! And to start off our celebration, I am giving you the sappiest happiest family-est Hindi film EVER!
Continue readingRani Week ends on Sunday, which is also exactly 10 days before Christmas. And I think what I would like to do is 10 days of Christmas-y movies, but I need help thinking of them! So I am throwing it out to all of you. And because I really REALLY need help, I am sticking this post to the homepage until I have enough movie ideas.
Continue readingThanks for the suggestion Emily! Shahrukh (as most celebrities/actors do) has used his real life trauma to support his performances and promote his films. Which also means we can easily find 8 movies to watch if you want to get a sense of the emotional journey of the “real” SRK!
Continue readingHappy Hrithik Week! 5 reposted reviews, 2 new ones, I’m excited! And we are starting with the one link between Hrithik Week and Shahrukh Summer, Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham.
Continue readingI am having the worst day, just woke up miserable and stressed for no good reason. I hate those days! And I hate those people who are always sad! So, I’m going to stop being sad, by just forcing myself not to be. Anyway, it’s Diwali!!!!! Light over darkness!
Our last Shahrukh Month Review! So SAD!!!! There is still Jab Harry Met Sejal Day to look forward to on Sunday, but that won’t be a “new” movie to the blog. Oh well, there’s always the much less important holiday seasons of Diwali and Christmas to look forward to once Shahrukh Month is over.
What fun Karan Johar’s birthday week is! So many wonderful options for theme posts. This is a very very very long one. So long, that I had to split it in two parts, and it’s still really really long. Be warned!
I did a lot of work on this one, so why not reuse it? Alternate endings for every Karan movie, K2H2, K3G, ADHM, SOTY, MNIK, KANK, KHNH.
This is a strange little off-shoot of a discussion in the comments about Rani going back to work, and why this is so tough for her. Which ended up relating back to how she is in the “householder” stage which is in fact the most restricted time of life, and then I realized that only makes sense if you know about the 4 Stages/Ashramas of life as expected in Indian society.
HAPPY DIWALI!!!!! And also, Happy 14 Days to Shahrukh’s Birthday! Oh, and just like for Dussehra and Karwa Chauth, I temporarily updated the site header. (this is an updated and reposted post from last year)
Woot! Dear Zindagi is coming out in a week! Because Shahrukh loves me and knows I am out of town over Thanksgiving and therefore he is releasing it 2 days early in America, just for me! In return, as always, I am celebrating a little Shahrukh week before the release (if you somehow missed the Fan and Sultan celebrations, what happens is before a Khan release, I do a series of posts discussing earlier films by the lead in terms of what they might have in common with the upcoming one)
So, I and a few other lovely people stayed up very late/woke up very early to watch K3G together on twitter. And if you missed it, there is a way to relive the experience!
My publisher is helping me set up a watch along of K3G in a couple of days. If you want the live and fresh experience of my take on a film, check it out on twitter at my account, @mredlich21, or starting at 8pm CDT time on Thursday the 2nd (that’s 6:30am Friday the 3rd in India and I am embarrassed to tell you how long it took me to figure that out) follow and join in with the hashtags:
Plot, cast, inexplicable foreign locals-Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham and Dilwale share it all! But they are separated by 14 years, and a different director, and different life points of their stars. So, what changed?
So, with this new movie, there’s going to be a lot of comparisons with past SRKajol films and judgments and greatest hits lists and so on. So I thought, why not join the party! Before I’ve even see Dilwale, so my judgement is not yet sullied. And then I realized, picking a #1 all time best SRKajol film is easy, but the 5 (6, now) after that are hard.
#1, of course, is DDLJ. I say that not just because it is my favorite movie of all time, but because, objectively speaking, it is the highest quality film they have been in together, and the most beloved. The script deals with issues ranging from structural feminism to first versus second generation immigrants to marriage as a personal or societal undertaking. Plus, it has Shahrukh’s all time greatest acting moment:
If you don’t remember all the other awesome bits of the film, YRF conveniently put together this remix for the 20 year anniversary:
(I think I like the remix better than the original, don’t hate me!)
But what comes after DDLJ?
Notice how I put the really exciting picture at the top so we would remember why this really matters?
So, currently, the highest Shahrukh movie on the all time gross list for India is number 5. NUMBER 5!!! The shame of it! Ahead of him is PK, Bajrangi Bhaijaan, Bahubali, and Dhoom 3. The whole list is here on wikipedia.
Now, you know what all these films have in common? They are all from the past 5 years. And the film at the top is usually from within the past 2 years. In America, we are used to that, the top grossers are always fairly recent, but in India that wasn’t always the case. Mother India set a box office record in 1957 that stayed in place for 3 years until Mughal-E-Azam surpassed it in 1960. Mughal-E-Azam held the record until Sholay beat it in 1975. Sholay held the record until Hum Aapke Hain Koun came along in 1994. Hum Aapke Hain Koun was toppled quickly by DDLJ in 1995. Then DDLJ lost it’s crown to Kuch Kuch Hota Hai in 1998. That record held until 2001 when it was beaten by both Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham and Gadar: Ek Prem Katha. Gadar held the record until 3 Idiots in 2009, at which point everyone breathed a sigh of release because they could start pretending Gadar never happened (very very problematic messages in that film). And then 3 Idiots held the record for a long time, by a big big margin, until it was finally beaten by Chennai Express in 2013. All Shahrukh fans cheered and celebrated and laughed in the faces of their Aamir-fan friends, or at least that’s what I did. Truly, it was a magical time!
(Shahrukh, take a bow! You earned it!)
And then about 2 months later, Dhoom 3 came out and Aamir was on top again. It stayed up there for a year, until PK came out, and then Aamir had the two top spots. PK is still up there, but Bajrangi Bhaijaan did really well this summer and came close to beating it. And Bahubali, of course, is a huge deal since it is the only non-Hindi film up there (although it was distributed by a Bombay based production house, Dharma, which is very important in terms of overseas awareness and national reach in India).
So, on the micro-level, this just means we all need to buy as many tickets for Dilwale as humanly possible in order to return Shahrukh to his rightful ranking. I don’t care if you are actually seeing Star Wars, you buy your ticket for Dilwale!!!
But on a macro-level, in terms of global trends, economics, and the future of the industry, what does all of this mean and where does it come from?
dontcallitbollywood 