Bollywood

First, watch this:



I found this via Dangerous Minds. It's been a while since I looked at any Indian film. But there was a time when I was mildly enraptured by it. In the 70s, India became the number one producer of movies in the world (although I don't think that's true anymore), and it was the ultra-commercial Bombay Hindi film machine that one mostly saw. (Bollywood is a portmanteau word combining Bombay and Hollywood.) The movies were inevitably big and bright, and as chaste as you can imagine, especially compared to Hollywood in the 70s. And they were highly melodramatic, chock-filled with just about everything you can think of, and quite long. There was an Indian cinema on 57th Street in NYC; it was worth the trip once in a while. It was not just a whole new world, i.e. India, but a whole new style of movies.

Of course, the clip above does sort of bother me, only because, I'm sorry, that's not dancing, that's moving in synch, which is what passes these days for dance with the likes of Madonna and her musical children/imitators. Dance is not just moving your arms a lot and shaking your booty and moving left and right in unison with everyone else. But, well, where are the real dancers nowadays that can do that sort of thing right, that anyone wants to see? I posted some contemporary tap last week; I can't see those folks on stage with Lady Gaga.

I don't know if I would recommend your watching a lot of Bollywood films, but it's nice to be aware of them, and to sample them on YouTube. Sometimes you'll think that the action is positively senseless and crazy; that's because it is senseless and crazy. And fun. Which is not a bad thing for movies to be.
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