Watching Bollywood films can often strike you with a maddening case of deja
vu. You think you’ve seen the movie before, but you just can’t identify
the what, when and where of your suspicion. Enter Bollycat (via Nirali
Magazine),
a new web site started by a team of students at SUNY Rockland, which aims to
link Bollywood films to their Hollywood “inspirations.”
“It’s wrong to even use the word inspiration here,” said web site creator Haydur Agha in a press release. “It’s really stealing someone else’s creation and molding it to fit the Indian taste without ever officially mentioning or paying for the rights to the original content. And it’s not fair to the fans either.”
The site invites visitors to submit their own listings, and currently cites more than 100 such cases of plagarism: “Shree 420,” a story about a young man’s self-destructive journey to the top, allegedly derives its source from Orson Welle’s classic “Citizen Kane.” My personal favorite, “Dil Chahta Hai,” might have taken its story of post-college estrangement and reunification from “St. Elmo’s Fire,” and “Reality Bites.” I submitted my own Bollycat — last year’s “Kal Ho Naa Ho,” a NRI-flavored tale about an ill-fated love triangle, clearly took its cues from adult megahit “Three-Way Betty IV: Dildo’s Revenge.” Go ahead, try to prove me wrong.
being sadly indifferent to American cop films, I started watching Reservoir Dogs one time – after I’d started watching Bollywood flicks in 2003 – and burst out with, ‘wait… that’s just like Kaante’ before I realized what I’d said.
Now I want to see St. Elmo’s Fire cause I liked Dil Chahta Hai so much. Quit laughing. I was seven when it was in theaters.
It’s always worth revisiting my favorite Bollywood flick inspired by an American blockbuster – Indian Superman.
My favorite is when the American movies just don’t have enough action for a Hindi movie, so they’ll take one entire American movie and make it a small subplot. Pretty Woman is condensed into about fifteen minutes of … I think it was Chori Chori Chupke Chupke. Whatever it was about 4 years ago with Salman Khan and a rather unusual take on the idea of surrogate mothers.
One example of the reverse was with Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro. as far as I can tell, the plot mirrors that of the execrable Men at Work and the chronology is reversed. I have no idea whether this was coincidental.
The one’s that freak me out are the ones using theme songs, i.e. Dallas and Knight Rider.
Here’s a nice rethink on plagiarism: Something Borrowed (Malcom Gladwell)