I recently debated the future of Bollywood among American desis with a couple of second genners who aren’t fans of the cinema. ‘Asoka’ thinks assimilation will make Bollywood irrelevant in the U.S. desi community, because the movies are poorly-written. I argue improvements in quality, distribution and filtering point to a bright future. The ever-reasoned ‘Birbal’ split the difference. Names have been changed to protect them from the Bollyfans who walk among us.

“I‘ll bet you $20 it doesn’t change. U.S. desis, especially the new generations, are more assimilated. They (and I’m one of them) will never be into Bollywood. I view Bollywood as an example of the excesses and frivolity of our culture and not something I am interested in preserving for myself or my offspring. I can count the number of friends I have that like Bollywood films on one finger (men and women)… even the girls I know don’t like Bollywood, and I have as many if not more female friends than male friends.

“The U.S. model will never mimic the UK model unless we start forming ethnic ghettos here. If that happens then I think you’ll be right. What it comes down to is that most Bollywood stories suck by western standards. Production value means nothing when the best Bollywood film would be a C-list Western film.

“The reason that smart Bollywood commentary is lacking is because there isn’t much coming out of Bollywood that can be considered smart… The last Hindi film I saw was Mr. and Mrs Iyer, which I thought was decent. The last Bollywood film I saw was in India and Toral from The Apprentice was in it. I’ve seen Devdas and KKKG and thought they were so bad I wanted to rip my eyeballs out. The only Bollywood film I actually liked was Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, and by American movie standards it was just okay… Yes, if you are [non-desi] it is exotic and quaint…

“I go to [Indian film festivals]… they have some great Hindi language film and Tamil language films. I both enjoy them and would take my kids to see them someday. They are not, however, Bollywood films, which in my view tend to advocate materialism and shallowness, bigotry against other races, and bigotry in their representation of 2nd gen Indians living abroad. For those reasons I would not expose my children to Bollywood films.

“I still think it’s about the ghettos. We will see in 10 years. I think if you [polled] under-26 Sepia Mutiny readers, they [would] overwhelmingly be non-Bollywood watchers.”

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The last thing you want to hear in bed: ‘Smallville’

The Partition trailer is now online, and it’s giving me déjà vu (thanks, Jay):

Partition: In the midst of one such massacre, Gian [Singh] finds Naseem, a 17-year-old Muslim girl, and takes her under his protection. They gradually find themselves drawn to each other but, as their remarkable story plays out, the obstacles to their happiness prove all but insurmountable… [Link]

Gadar: During [Partition], Tara Singh, a truck driver, rescues a young woman named Sakina, both fall in love with each other and get married. When things calm down, Sakina decides to travel across the border to Pakistan to visit her father… [who] tries to separate her and Tara… [Link]

From the trailer at least, it looks like a straight rip, but like Gangsta M.D., it’s in the reverse direction from usual. Director Vic Sarin’s pitch: Gadar meets The English Patient, minus the anti-Pakistan jingoism. He’s even kept the scene where Sunny Deol goes apeshit in front of his home to defend the girl from a raging mob.

Jimi Mistry plays a hot turbanwala, Neve Campbell stars as a Brit. Kristin Kreuk’s bare back is seamless, her desi accent not. She actually sounds a whole lot like Sheetal Sheth attempting the accent, which says something about assimilation.

I have zero problem with a non-desi lead actress here. This looks like a tightly-focused young love story (the score reminds me of trifling period romances like A Knight’s Tale), not an epic history of Partition. There are plenty of light-eyed Muslim women, and it’s not like they cast Jessica Simpson as Indira Gandhi.

No, my question is: Kristin Kreuk?! Undeniably cute, but so chirpy she makes Tweety Bird sound like Droopy Dog.

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‘What’s your name, Basanti?’: Rang De Basanti is a commercial blockbuster in the guise of protest cinema. While City of God rose from the barrios, Basanti rose from Juhu Beach. Yes, it’s an earnest critique of corruption and apathy. But it’s also Aamir Khan’s second Lagaan clone: same English love interest, same chest-pounding nationalism, same period costume drama. Our Peter Pan in high-waisted pants is calculating and relentless.

Basanti hangs on an interesting gimmick: an English filmmaker persuades a group of Delhi University students to act in her documentary. As they reenact the Indian independence struggle, they evolve from cynical partiers into hardcore patriots. But after real life (or intermission) intrudes, the plot goes medieval on your ass.

Aamir Khan leans on the same regional rube routine he’s used since Rangeela, only he’s Punjabi Sikh, not Marathi. The real stars are Saif Ali’s über-cute sister Soha Ali Khan, the handsome Kunal Kapoor (no relation to Shashi Kapoor’s son) and A.R. Rahman’s romantic ditty ‘Tu Bin Bataye.’

The movie begins a wastrel yuuuth flick like Dil Chahta Hai and Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak. There’s lots of cheesy ’80s rock guitar, very Karate Kid. Cool, yaar, stop pressurizing me, let’s freak out. At least the cheese is set off with slick music vid cuts. Then it mashes the patriotism button hard with fighter jets streaming the colors of the tiranga. It’s Top Guna for those still in the crib when Goose was in the sod.

The movie smothers its best idea in Bollywood-style subtlety, which is to say none. Like in Africa, corrupt politicians have replaced European colonists as the Man who’s Keepin’ You Down. It’s a neat transposition, but for the mentally slow, the director dissolves the Butcher of Jallianwalla Bagh directly into a corrupt government minister. It’s like admiring someone from afar until they leer at you and grab their crotch.

On the other hand, the blonde isn’t fetishized here, nor is she the babe; that falls to Soha Ali Khan. Alice Patten delivers her lines in the best phonetic Hindi I’ve heard from a Brit actor yet. And it’s always fun watching photogenic desi jocks — those are not the types let into the U.S. on brains. It’s a reasonably original script, not a lift of Oldboy, The Game or Fight Club (thanks, GC). It’s a current issues film, which in the U.S. is considered death at the box office. And it touched me, I let the manipulation in.

This is one of the three-to-four Bollywood movies a year truly worth seeing. I dislike the showy, force-fed patriotism, and the motorcycle/electric guitar factor is tacky and lame, but the issues it tackles are extremely topical: India’s rising self-confidence, the end of the brain drain and a newfound determination to throw the bums out.

WARNING: Plot summary and spoilers below.

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R.I.P. Loews State

The Loews State cinema, the last cinema on Broadway and the biggest Bollywood theater in Manhattan, closed last Friday, a victim of the AMC-Loews merger. This Times Square theater was so central that it showed up in movies ranging from Kal Ho Naa Ho to Phone Booth. As far as I know, the much smaller ImaginAsian is now the only theater on the island regularly playing Bollywood flicks. Where will I go to get my regular phixx?

I loved and hated you, my State. From playing telephone with the non-Hindi-speaking ticket window to watching tripe masquerading as film, you brought me the best and the worst on giant screens. You brought me up with Parineeta and down with Deewane Huye Paagal, up with Mangal Pandey / The Rising and down with Bluff Master; you brought me sold-out crowds (for Pandey) and a hall to myself (for everything else). Not three weeks ago, I ran backward down your escalator to retrieve a scarf and met two cuties doing the same. In recent years you were a second-run theater, but watching desi flicks at the center of the world was its own distinct thrill. And your location in the Virgin Megastore was so Bolly-apropos

When I lived in S.F., a friend of mine hosted stylish, witty desi parties for the mid-20s to mid-30s set. She had a baby, the parties stopped, and everyone felt the loss. Some things are as much community services as profit-making ventures. The Bollyrun at the Loews State was such a creature.

Fifty years ago, the neighborhood was the world’s largest showcase for cinema — the area housed over a dozen grand movie palaces, including the Paramount, Roxy, Capitol, Strand, Warner, Rivoli and the National. In late 2004, the Loews Astor Place closed on 44th Street (it is now a concert venue, the Nokia Theatre), and a few years before, the area lost the Embassy two-plex and the Criterion Center. Much of the blame can be laid at the feet of increased rents for commercial space, the recent AMC-Loews merger, and the flourishing new multiplexes on 42nd Street near Port Authority, the AMC Empire 25 and the Loews E-Walk. [Link – NSFW]

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Sajit shredded Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World as being unfunny and culturally inastute. I come bearing a lukewarm defense: having seen the movie, it is much better than its trailer and is on balance good for the South Asian brand launch.

The main flaw of the movie, a simple-minded farce, is that it’s done by Albert Brooks. Brooks is the Jewish Bill Cosby, his character a throwback, a Mr. Smith Goes to Delhi; his humor is suburban, family-friendly, with all its edges rounded off. The centerpiece of the movie is a comedy show Brooks performs in Delhi, funny to neither the Indians on-screen nor the American audience off-. He does have some choice one-liners, though none stray beyond the safety of stereotype (he gets neither green M&M’s nor a greenroom in Delhi). Even the inevitable outsourcing jokes happen only as background chatter. It isn’t insightful, but for the most part it isn’t brain-dead or offensive either.Sheetal Sheth plays a clueless, shiny-haired chipmunk. I couldn’t decide whether to smack her or take her home

You also get a Brooksian touch like Sheetal Sheth’s character, a wide-eyed naïf. Sheth plays the role like a shiny-haired chipmunk with saucer eyes and a bottomless supply of perk and oblivion. She’s Clueless in Connaught Place; I couldn’t decide whether to smack her or take her home. Sheth gets second billing in the credits. My college buddy Shaheen Sheik also got two brief closeups; it’s always cool seeing someone I went to school with.

The central elision is intact, India is not the center of the Muslim world, and the exculpatory hand wave fails even on screen. But the India-Pakistan subplot is cute in a Sleeper kind of way. And in one witty riff, the sitar on the score switches from desi ishtyle to ‘There’s No Business Like Show Business.’

There are some cultural oddities about the script. Brooks is way overdressed in formal sherwanis for a day at the office. A Native American teepee makes a baffling appearance and leaves you wondering whether exposition was cut from the script; it’s not Brooks’ style to make you think. The Iranian boyfriend’s accent sounds like a cat in a blender, the unhappy coincidence of an inflated resume (‘Dialects: Hindi’) and actually landing the role. Sheth’s own accent is painfully inexact, but you get used to it as the movie wears on. At least they’re attempting Indian accents (Casanova: the Venezians speak in British accents? Really?).

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There are few real news programs left on U.S. television. You have 60 minutes, Nightline, and PBS’ excellent series Frontline. Two weeks ago I watched all six hours of a brilliant documentary called Country Boys that followed the lives of two poor teenage boys from Kentucky into manhood. I thought it exemplified what reality TV could be if only it had a brain. SM tipster “Anu” forwards us another example by Frontline of a great documentary. Frontline’s Rough Cut series posts a short film by Sasha Khokha (only on-line) titled, India: Calcutta Calling-American girls explore their roots.

In the wake of FRONTLINE’s broadcast last week of David Sutherland’s film Country Boys, about two teenagers coming of age in rural Kentucky, FRONTLINE/World presents Sasha Khokha’s video Calcutta Calling, about three teenage girls growing up in Minnesota… The twist in Khokha’s story is that the three girls — Kaylan Johnson, Anisha Pitzenberger and Lizzie Merrill — were all adopted as infants from an orphanage in Calcutta, India. Their Midwestern American parents raised them in loving families as all-American girls who sing in the choir, play soccer and shop at the mall.

Still, the girls know they are different. If nothing else, their brown skin sets them apart in Minnesota. People are friendly, but sometimes look at them as outsiders.

Khokha is allowed to accompany Anisha, Kaylan and Lizzie when they go back to India with their American parents. This is the first time they have returned to the land of their birth. It is a chance for them to learn more about their origins and to explore their dual identities. Surprising, honest and poignant, Calcutta Calling follows these bright-eyed girls closely as they venture into a country that both delights and disturbs them. [Link]

While watching the film I KNOW that many of you will have the same conflicted reactions as me. These girls were all raised in white families and in white neighborhoods. This is an entire step removed from Indian Americans that, despite being born here, still retain cultural ties to India through family and community. Except for their skin color, these girls have no connection to Indian culture whatsoever. And yet…their brown skin instinctively causes you to sometimes unfairly judge their often shallow reactions as the film unfolds. For example, one of the three girls helps a small child color in the picture of a girl while visiting the orphanage back in India (see picture at right). It isn’t until she is done that she realizes that she helped the child draw a girl with blond hair instead of black. The movie also brought to mind some of the issues we have been discussing on SM in the past week. All three of these American families adopted girl children from India. In the end you can’t help but appreciate that these three girls at least got the chance to meet each other. All three feel that in each others presence they finally belong.

I strongly urge readers to set aside 20 minutes to watch this film. For best viewing use the Quicktime option instead of the Real Media player and enlarge the screen size in the pop up window. Also keep in mind that by posting this I am going to substantially increase traffic to their site. I had no problem viewing it but some of you may want to wait until an odd hour.

Click here to watch.

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