Hurray for Bollywood!

I've always enjoyed watching foreign films and reading subtitles has never been a hassle for me (although I really prefer the yellow ones to the white). I've seen French, German, Danish, Japanese, Spanish (a lot of Almodovar) and Portuguese. Never Hindi. Until this weekend.

I had read on a couple of boards how great Rakesh Roshan was as a director, so I took out two of his movies - Koi Mil Gaya and Krrish - both starring his son Hrithik Roshan.

These movies put to shame the most lavish Hollywood movies of the Golden Age - these are spectaculars in the true sense of the word. We have action, adventure, drama, romance, danger, singing, dancing and whatnot which - like the Energizer Bunny - keeps going and going and going. The only gripe I have is I believe that the female singing is dubbed - every Bollywood actress cannot sound like Yma Sumac and have that screechy, unearthly, near-ultrasonic voice that can puncture eardrums and cause horses to shift uneasily in their stalls.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then these Roshan epics are indeed a homage to no less than 11 (count'em - 11!) Hollywood movies. Not to give the plot away, but in Koi Mil Gaya, you can easily identify pieces from:

• Charly
• Forrest Gump
  
• Singin' in the Rain
• Saturday Night Fever
• Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
• House of Flying Daggers
• Flubber
• Top Gun
• E.T.
• Close Encounters of the Third Kind
• The Sound of Music

The surprising thing is - it's amazingly enjoyable! And there is definitely no dearth of extremely handsome actors and glamorous actresses in these movies. What's also endearing is the fact that all of them are distinctive in their own right - again, far more reminiscent of the "stars" of Hollywood's Golden Age in their heyday (just think James Mason, Barbara Stanwyk, Bette Davis, Errol Flynn, Richard Widmark, Dana Andrews and William Holden) than the the current spate of bleached, botoxed and homogenous actors/actresses we have today. Below are pictures of the two stars of Koi Mil Gaya - Hrithik Roshan and Preity Zinta:


The next movie to watch is Krrish - another Roshan/Roshan production. This is supposedly the Hindi equivalent of Batman/Superman/James Bond combined. I can't wait!!!