CityWalk, an outdoor mall in Hollywood, figures prominently in two terrible date flicks I saw this weekend, Shopgirl and Deewane Huye Paagal.
Perhaps I can spare you the pain.
In the Anand Tucker-directed Shopgirl, the extremely funny Jason Schwartzman takes Claire Danes out on a date to CityWalk just to sit and watch its theater marquee from the outside because he doesn’t have the cheddar to take them both. ‘Well, we could split it,’ she says cautiously. To repeat an old joke, she offers her honor, he honors her offer, and all night long it’s ‘honor’ and ‘offer.’ Tucker, whose father is desi, serves up this mini-haha:
‘Lisa?’
‘Ray.’
‘Lisa Ray, it’s nice to meet you.’
I’m not sure whether Tucker’s Bolly-aware enough to sneak in a desi shout-out, but producer Ashok Amritraj certainly is. 
Sadly, the rest of this bildungsroman about a lonely salesgirl is so slow-moving and trite that the little double entendre was my highlight. Steve Martin sleepwalks through the movie. The Martin I loved from Roxanne in junior high still makes movies for 12-year-olds — saccharine, kiddie and devoid of edge. His novella-based voiceovers are from the Bulwer-Lytton school of writing. Danes’ character spends much of the movie next to glove mannequins, disembodied hands pointing at the sky. Hands beseeching heaven are exactly what came to mind when I realized how long this movie ran.
The same appall-mall shows up at the end of Deewane Huye Paagal (Suitors Gone Crazy), a charmless Bollywood film which tries to recapture the comedic energy of the jittery, hilarious blockbuster Hera-Pheri. The same comedic trio (Akshay Kumar, Sunil Shetty and Paresh Rawal) attempts a complete rip of There’s Something About Mary. Vijay Raaz and Johnny Lever top off the yuks. The movie lifts a key fight scene from Ong Bak, trademark moves and all, as well as the melody from a Juggy D hit. There’s plenty of obligatory T&A; apparently all blondes are strippers, all desi women wear micro-minis, and the best way to affirm a male lead’s virility is to surround him with gay backup dancers. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. The Cher-cheekboned Rimi Sen is all bone structure without charisma, and her mottled blue contacts are irritating.
The movie’s casual racism is the most depressing bit. A black bad guy is a grunting, pec-dancing racial caricature out of Mortal Kombat. Akshay Kumar calls him kaliya (darkie) and says, ‘Play his kind of music, something with bongo.’ A chubby South Indian parody wears a crocheted brown rug on his head and a long, frizzy moustache. He’s slapped around for speaking Tamil instead of Punjabi-accented Hindi. In a movie this mean-spirited, you just know the original’s handicapped jokes are retained.
I must, however, commend the comically inaccurate subtitles. The subtitles read ‘five’ when a character was saying ‘six’ and ‘six’ when he said ‘seven.’ The captions had him entering Bar X, but the next shot was of the neon sign for Bar Y. They were an independent source of amusement. But then any movie which begins with a misspelling (‘These charaters are fictional…’) advertises its language-cad intentions up front.
DHP makes me despair for mainstream Indian film. It’s not for lack of money, editing or effects; it’s that writers are perfectly content to refry overseas hits. And it’s a reminder that a culture that’s unsophisticated about dating, though wonderful with love, will neither appreciate nor correct its own cheesiness for some time yet. Movies this bad make me appreciate the sewage my canary-in-a-coalmine suffers to find me the handful of great Bollyflicks every year.
And I’m staying the hell away from CityWalk. Like the Poltergeist graveyard, it’s an Indian burial ground.
Related posts: Shopguy
goodness, those words give me deja vu. 😉
a culture thatÂ’s unsophisticated about dating, though wonderful with love
well put! bollywood cannot deal with dating without being crass and shallow. i’ll take veer-zaara any day.
“And itÂ’s a reminder that a culture thatÂ’s unsophisticated about dating, though wonderful with love,”
Astute observation!!
I’ll prefer love anyday….dating be damned. Reminds me of the old girlfriend adage “good boyfriends make bad husbands” (reverse isnt true)
Sumita
Ofcourse, Bollywood is racist (the newer movies especially). That is the result of not paying writers to write original material. I recommend a movie (which is based on original work) Pinjar which is based on novel by Amrita Pritam a distinguished writer who just passed away.
At first, I feared that this was gonna be a gripe about a terrible date. But now, I realize that you were talking about the flicks.
Yay, there is hope for 25+ single bloggers.
So, tell me Manish, did they have that famous “shampoo” scene as well?
M. Nam
the plot summary sounds to me like a desi version of There’s something about Mary..what say?
errr…please ignore my last message
Hey, what are you up to in LA? What happened to BKLYN?
I am also despairing for mainstream Hindi cinema. With liberalization, the comedies have a new level of ugliness to them: gratuitous sexism, rampant homophobia, and now, with the intense emphasis foreign/western locations, hostility to people of African descent.
One small exception in the otherwise tortuously bad Garam Masala (also starring Akshay Kumar): the film opens with a long, eroticized shot of a black/African woman (in Mauritius) walking down the street to the film’s opening number.
I find it a bit rich that a Rushdiophile should complain about Steve Martin’s style. : ) Anyway, I was actually planning to see Shopgirl, I think it got a glowing review in either the New Yorker or the NYT. But I think I will skip it.
There was a Govinda movie with casual racism as well. In the movie we the audience are supposed to find it funny that Govinda while trying to sneak into Rani Mukherjee’s hotel room accidently ends up in the room of an African woman, the joke supposedly being that African women are not attractive.
I find it strange that Bollywood audiences and moviemakers seem to be so oblivious to the offensive depictions of Tamilians in some movies. I am thinking of the depiction of the Karnatic music teacher in Padosan.
tef, i remember that movie- “hadh kardi aapne.” actually i think it was an african couple inside, and they were speaking “tribal” gibberish and govinda was afraid of them or something. it was so fucked up and ignorant that it made me laugh. ;(
even in salaam namaste during “what’s going on” preity is walking near 4 black men that are just harmlessly smiling and doing their choreographed swagger, and saif sails in and makes urgent gestures, singing something about how she’s impulsive and puts herself in risky situations. ?:| i wonder, do the bollywood directors have no shame in approaching black people for such roles?
Why would they, when they do the same stereotyping with whites (as strippers) and Asians (as stupid tourists)?
The extras recruited out of backpacker havens make the same tradeoff as desi actors in the U.S., taking the role for a few rupees.
uh…how are “Asians” stereotyped in bollywood? hello, indians are asians. unless you were talking about east asians, but you didn’t say that.
interesting how some people get riled up about ethnic misrepresentations, and don’t even know how to use ethnic labels appropriately.
Context, young Yank. Asian means something else in Bollywood (and for that matter in the UK).
Why, because you believe middlebrow doesn’t dig lowbrow? Or because you think Martin is a better writer than Rushdie?
No hair gel for you!
I visit sometimes for weddings.
I am sorry, first of all, I didnÂ’t realize you had pretensions to middlebrowness.
I just found it odd that you should accuse Martin of Bulwer-Lyttonesque writing. IÂ’ve read some of his stuff. I think he wants to be Woody Allen. He ainÂ’t. I just donÂ’t remember it being Bulwer-Lyttonesque though. Perhaps my memory is corrupted, because I remember the cover of the book was minimal and sexy. I just googled for the image and now I remember why I was sooo drawn to the book.
Touché.
Not sure about the book, but the voiceovers he narrated in the movie are very cheesy.
Read the book on a plane. I had strange reactions to it: sometimes I hated it, sometimes I really liked it, sometimes I didn’t know what to think. It’s worth a read even if, apparently, the movie adaptation doesn’t seem great. I think Steve Martin is trying to do something unique in the book – he’s trying to be honest about a certain type of person, and as that person is partially loathsome, it comes off badly. But I didn’t think the writing was awful. Perhaps it’s just that voice-overs are so hard to do well.
Hmm, change that ‘trying to do something unique,’ to ‘trying to do something different,’ in this book. It’s not that unique, but it is different. Yes, I really do mean that.
“I find it strange that Bollywood audiences and moviemakers seem to be so oblivious to the offensive depictions of Tamilians in some movies. I am thinking of the depiction of the Karnatic music teacher in Padosan”
This is as old as the hills…didn’t Salaam Namaste have a South Indian character as the owner/boss at the radio station? Of course the guy had a thick accent while speaking Hindi and if I’m not mistaken, some Carnatic music plays in the background when he is on screen. Why do we expect anything better?
Yeah, maaaan, bollywood def blows at it’s portrayal of anyone other than north indians. Complete ignorance. It’s surprising that they don’t have tolerance taught in schools with all the diversity (within browns anyways)in India…. but then again, I wouldn’t know since I skip school as much as possible.
Best, Brooding Jordan Catilano
There’s a lot of intra-desi stereotyping in some of the Indian television serials too. I’m not sure if this is just a Goodness Gracious Me-type “in-joke” (possible, considering many of the actors & actresses are actually from the same backgrounds as the characters they’re stereotypically depicting), or if this is deliberately offensive (also entirely possible).
But I do agree that there are frequent, routinely racist depictions of non-South Asians in many Bollywood films. Until relatively recently, white people were shown as rabid imperialists (if the character concerned was of British origin — with the corresponding “saala angrez” commments from the film’s lead actors) and/or with severe “morality” issues (eg. “Pardes” and other similar portrayals of mainstream Western culture). Even the muttered comments against the English characters in K3G were quite blatantly racist.
There have been some positive portrayals here and there in recent times, though — for example, “Out of Control” (okay, she was fetishised as the randy, sexy blonde gauri stereotype, but at least they tried to show her as simultaneously being a genuinely nice person), “Kisna” (even though she was emphasised as some kind of de-Westernised “Radha” type), and most recently “The Rising/Mangal Pandey” (the Toby Stephens character).
There’s another recent film with Amitabh Bachchan as the father-figure — I can’t remember the name — but it also has a white heroine along with a desi lead actress.
I haven’t seen “Salaam Namaste” yet either, but from what I understand, one of the Australian girlfriends in the movie was also apparently portrayed realistically and positively.
… Cultural stereotypes and ethnic slurs will exist in Indian movies as long as they wish to please the least common denominator for maximum returns. The only nuanced portrayal of a foreigner that I remember was in a Marathi film Mukta where the female lead brings home an African American friend from the States.
I’ve heard about blatant racism in Bollywood films. Maybe if some films in America (Hollywood) didn’t openly show buffoonery in so-called “black” films, or at least greenlighted/distributed more serious stereotype-free “black” films, then Bollywood wouldn’t be so quick to portray blacks negatively in their movies.
I heard that Will Smith is trying to make films in Bollywood. Maybe with his influence, along with other black actors, will stop or at least slow down the negative stereotypes of black characters in Bollywood…and maybe it’ll catch on back in Hollywood. Only time will tell.