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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