Since this film is about a Muslim man married to a Hindu woman, something you might know about, can we talk about the role of religion in your life?
I’m a Muslim. I’ve been brought up by an amazing set of parents who taught me all that I know. I’m married to a Hindu girl. I’ve never tried to explain my religion to her and she’s never tried to explain her religion to me. We don’t make a big deal of it. I go celebrate Eid or might give her a gift on Diwali. Our kids know the prayers of both religions. The bottom line is that they’re thinking of God.
The modern Indian should be moving toward nonradicalism. It’s okay to be idealistic but one should be realistically idealistic. I’ve led my life that like. I am God-fearing. I am a proud Indian. I am a capitalist. More:
Oscar-winner A.R. Rahman’s song “NaNa” (click above to listen) from the Hollywood film “Couples Retreat” has been shortlisted for nomination in original song category for the 82nd Academy Awards. It will be competing with 62 other songs.
Rahman’s son Ameen also makes his singing debut in this track.
Couples Retreat is a comedy film directed by Peter Billingsley and written by Jon Favreau, Vince Vaughn and Dana Fox.
After tying up with Steven Spielberg’s DreamWorks last year, India’s Reliance ADA Group is eyeing a purchase of another Hollywood studio, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. But the Indian company isn’t willing to pay anything close to what MGM is seeking, a person familiar with the matter said.
MGM, which is struggling with $3.7 billion in debt stemming from its 2005 leveraged buyout, has extended first-round bids beyond this week as it tries to galvanize more interest in its assets, the person said.
People familiar with the talks said earlier this week that bids are in the $2 billion range, far below what MGM owes its lenders. Some could come in below $1.5 billion, they said. More
For years, Indian producers have paid Hollywood the ultimate compliment: knocking off American films scene-for-scene and turning them into Bollywood blockbusters.
Now, Hollywood is paying Bollywood a compliment of its own. Instead of ignoring the plagiarism, American moviemakers have begun suing their counterparts in India, a sure sign that this country’s booming, $2.2 billion-a-year film industry has arrived as a global player.
“This is all a long time coming. It means India is no longer some country in the boondocks where no one cares what’s going on,” said Anupama Chopra, a film critic in Mumbai, formerly known as Bombay, which accounts for the B in Bollywood. “Personally, I am really glad. It got to the point where I said to one director, ‘Where is your artistic skill?’ And he looked right at me and said: ‘My skill is knowing what to steal.’ “
Last week, 20th Century Fox accepted a $200,000 settlement from the Bollywood film producer it accused of copying its 1992 Oscar-winning comedy “My Cousin Vinny,” better known here by its Bollywood version, “Banda Yeh Bindaas Hai,” or “This Guy Is Fearless.” More:
How can it be that the star of the Oscar winning Best Picture of the Year, a little nine year-old girl, can be fated to be sold to the highest bidder by her poverty-stricken family? The movie has made $326 million so far — how can she still be living in a shack?
The British tabloid News of the World is standing by the detailed story they broke about the father and brother of “Slumdog Millionaire” child actress Rubina Ali demanding $400,000 for their “Oscar child.” Though the father is now denying that he tried to sell his daughter, he’s been arrested by the Mumbai police and a huge uproar has ensued.
Local papers in Mumbai, where Rubina lives in the sprawling slums, have reported that her biological mother, Khurshid, got into a physical altercation with her daughter’s stepmother after the story broke. She is now demanding custody of her daughter. Meanwhile relatives of the father, Rafique, explained to The Times of India: “Why will he sell her? She is going to earn so much more? Does anyone sell a cow that can still be milked?” More:
[Update: Since this post was written, the "Slumdog Millionaire" trust fund has hired a social worker to look after Rubina's interests in India. Read more here]
Mint-Lounge commemorates the actor’s remarkable journey with an essay by Rachel Dwyer, professor of Indian cultures and cinema at the School of Oriental and African studies, University of London, and author, most recently, of What do Hindus Believe? What makes the Big B legacy, she asks. And what does it say about us?
Bachchan is more than just a highly successful film star. How did he come to represent India itself on the world stage in the last decade of his 40-year-old career? What does this tell us about him, the nature of stardom, Hindi films and the vision that new India has of itself?
Dwyer says the other Bollywood icon, Shah Rukh Khan, “may be the current top box-office star, someone who is likely to enjoy many more years of stardom, he is not yet half way to Bachchan’s 40 years in cinema.” Click here to read the full essay, One-man show
When Sanjukta Sharma of Mint-Lounge asked Bachchan how he would assess his own body of work, he said, “Mediocre! I have had the privilege though to have been in the company of some of the great directors and actors of my profession, who have truly been masters. I doubt I ever lived up to their expectations. It was their generosity to have tolerated my incompetence.” Click here to read the full interview
She’s expertly navigating the red carpet, one pretty dress at a time. ‘Slumdog Millionaire‘ star Freida Pinto is Hollywood’s latest style icon. Parizaad Khan and Rachana Nakra in Mint Lounge:
Looking at images of Freida Pinto descending the red carpet in some of the world’s hottest fashion labels, it’s difficult to believe that she once shopped at Fashion Street, a street market popular with Mumbai’s college students.
The 24-year-old resident of the Mumbai suburb of Malad has been hailed by the foreign press as Hollywood’s latest It Girl as she does the rounds of the awards circuit with the rest of the cast and crew of Slumdog Millionaire. Pinto has come in No. 1 and No. 3 for two consecutive weeks on Vogue’s 10 Best Dressed, a weekly list of stylish women that the magazine’s online edition singles out. She’s also featured in the March issue of Vanity Fair. Blogs on celebrity dressing, such as Bellasugar.com and Gofugyourself.com, have raved about, among other things, her hair and eyebrows.
Mickey Rourke considers a role, Stallone shoots with Kumar. Alexandra Alter in The Wall Street Journal:
Horror movie 'Hisss'
The director is American. The stars are from India. And the movie, which is scheduled to open in India and the U.S. this fall, has Hollywood special effects and Bollywood song-and-dance.
The horror film “Hisss,” currently wrapping up shooting in Mumbai, is a result of a growing collaboration between Hollywood and the Indian film industry.
Money, stars and scripts are flowing in both directions, giving rise to a new genre of crossover cinema. Among the projects in development: Screenwriter Paul Schrader, famous for such films as “Taxi Driver” and “Raging Bull,” is working on a thriller with an Indian producer. Sylvester Stallone will appear in “Kambakkht Ishq,” or “Incredible Love,” an action-filled comedy shot in Los Angeles and starring Akshay Kumar. Indian film mega star Shahrukh Khan is producing and starring in a superhero film that will be co-written by American and Indian screenwriters and digitally souped up by American special-effects technicians.
How ‘Danny uncle’ and his ‘moral compass’ created the biggest ‘Indian’ blockbuster–and why you should watch it. Sanjukta Sharma in Mint Lounge:
Freida Pinto
Every morning, Jamal spends a few special minutes with himself in the loo. Squatting, chin resting in his palms, he dreams. Sometimes, the seven- or eight-year-old slum boy looks at the dog-eared photograph of Amitabh Bachchan that’s neatly folded and tucked in his pant pocket. The loo is makeshift-precariously perched on a wooden platform, which stands on swampland. His neighbourhood is the Juhu slum-the one we see every time our flight is about to touch down in Mumbai. The slum begins where one side of the runway ends.
At other times, Jamal plays gilli-danda or invites the ire of cops, making them chase him through grimy, narrow lanes to his matchbox tenement home.
And later, after his mother dies in a communal riot, Jamal’s life is endlessly and dangerously charged with adrenalin. He begs at traffic jams, palms pressed flat against car windows. He steals food through the windows of running trains.
As the cast of Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire was partying at the premiere of the movie in Mumbai came the news from Los Angeles: the movie has got 10 Oscar nominations, including 3 for music composer AR Rahman.
The film has been nominated in the following categories:
Cinematography – Anthony Dod Mantle
Direction – Danny Boyle
Film Editing – Chris Dickens
Music (Original Score) – AR Rahman
Music (Original Song) (Two Nominations) – AR Rahman
Best Motion Picture – Christian Colson
Sound Editing – Tom Sayers
Sound Mixing – Ian Tapp, Richard Pryke, Resul Pookutty (Mumbaiite Resul Pookutty was nominated for his first ever Oscar for the sound design)
Adapted Screenplay – Simon Beaufoy
From The Times of India: Rahman, who’s in London with his family, sounded overwhelmed. “I was like a nervous schoolboy biting my nails,” he told TOI. “I feel the whole world is watching me. I’m at the top of the world. Honestly, I am not even thinking about the Oscars now. Everything is a blur…It’ll be a great energy booster for creative people in India.” More:
Click here for the complete Oscar nomination list. The winners will be announced on Feb. 22.
“Slumdog” composer welcomes spotlight on Indian music
From Reuters:
Billboard: Many people in the States who do know about Indian music think that it is mainly Bollywood-style, up-tempo compositions, when in fact, India has a rich musical diversity. Is it your intention to try to introduce Americans to different genres of Indian music?
Rahman: The win is such a blessing in disguise. Bollywood music is definitely a big part of Indian music, and can be a great way to introduce people to the sound. But I hope to continue to incorporate other types of Indian music into my work. More:
Warner Brothers launched the most ambitious attempt yet by a Hollywood studio to crack the world’s most prolific movie market, Bollywood, with the commercial release of Chandni Chowk to China.
The film is the first full-scale campaign by a large US studio to create a Bollywood blockbuster, with Warner enlisting India’s star of the moment, action hero Akshay Kumar. He plays a poor cook who goes to China and learns kung fu.
By day Vikas Swarup is a high-flying Indian diplomat; by night he’s a bestselling author. And now Slumdog Millionaire, the film based on his first novel, has won four Golden Globes. Stuart Jeffries meets him. In the Guardian:
When they made a film of Vikas Swarup’s bestseller, they gave it an extreme makeover. But can I get the author to say anything critical about Danny Boyle’s hit adaptation of his debut novel, about a penniless orphan who wins India’s Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Not a chance. Swarup, you see, is a diplomat. And not just any diplomat: his sumptuous business card, embossed with three golden lions, tells me he is minister and deputy high commissioner of India, based in Pretoria.
They changed the title from Q&A to Slumdog Millionaire. (“That made a lot of sense,” says Swarup.) They changed the ending. (“Danny thought the hero should be arrested on suspicion of cheating on the penultimate question, not after he wins as I had it. That was a successful idea.”) They made friends into brothers, axed Bollywood stars and Mumbai hoodlums and left thrilling subplots on the cutting-room floor. Crucially, they changed the lead character’s name from Ram Mohammad Thomas to Jamal Malik, thereby losing Swarup’s notion that his hero would be an Indian everyman, one who sounded as though he was Hindu, Muslim and Christian. Instead, they made Jamal a Muslim whose mother is killed by a Hindu mob. (“It’s more dramatically focused as a result, perhaps more politically correct.”)
Bollywood megastar Amitabh Bachchan has slammed Danny Boyle’s Golden Globe award winning underdog drama “Slumdog Millionaire” for showing India in poor light.
“If ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ projects India as Third World dirty underbelly developing nation and causes pain and disgust among nationalists and patriots, let it be known that a murky underbelly exists and thrives even in the most developed nations,” Amitabh said in a posting on his blog www.bigb.bigadda.com Wednesday from Paris, France.
“Its just that the ‘Slumdog Millioanire’ idea authored by an Indian and conceived and cinematically put together by a westerner, gets creative global recognition,” he added.
Music composer A R Rahman has become the first Indian to win the prestigious Golden Globe Award. He won the award for the Best Original Music Score for the movie Slumdog Millionaire.
Danny Boyle’s “Slumdog Millionaire,” the rags-to-riches story of a poor kid from the slums of Mumbai who becomes a flawless contestant on India’s “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,” also won the Best Screenplay, Best Director and Best Motion Picture awards.
From AP: “We really weren’t expecting to be here in America at all at one point so it’s just amazing to be standing here,” said screenwriter Simon Beaufoy while accepting his Golden Globe Sunday. More:
In The Times of India: The engagingly shy mestro – whose hit numbers for the movie, ‘Jai Ho!’ and ‘Ringa Ringa’ are scorching global charts — has his fingers firmly crossed in the hope that the Oscars in February will be a repeat show. It’s not an unreasonable hope — many Globe winners also pick up Oscars. The movie has won 64 awards so far, a few more from the Academy that matters would certainly be sweet music to Indian ears. More:
Also in The Times of India: There’s a young girl in Chennai who can’t stop jumping with joy. She’s not just a Rahman fan, she’s also sung two songs for his score in the movie. Tanvi has sung Jai Ho and Gangsta Blues for the film. More:
In The Independent, a review of Slumdog Millionaire: There’s also a genuinely disturbing charge of realism in the depiction of the appalling slum conditions that the children grow up in, and the constant menace of severe violence. Effectively Oliver Twist redux, Indian-style, the film is certainly Dickensian in its constant shifts of register, in the way it asks us to take the rough with the smooth, the harshly realist with the sweetly fanciful. More:
The India film stars dictate fashion and customs, but they usually aren’t politically active. The recent killings seem to have changed that. Anupama Chopra in Los Angeles Times:
Reporting from Mumbai — Amitabh Bachchan slept with a gun. On Nov. 26, as 10 terrorists orchestrated mayhem at Mumbai’s landmark hotels and train station, Bollywood’s most enduring superstar pulled out his revolver.
The following day, he wrote on his blog: “As an Indian, I need to live in my own land, on my own soil with dignity and without fear. And I need an assurance on that. I am ashamed to say this and not afraid to share this now with the rest of the cyber world, that last night as the events of the terror attack unfolded in front of me, I did something for the first time and one that I had hoped never ever to be in a situation to do. Before retiring for the night, I pulled out my licensed .32 revolver and put it under my pillow. For a very disturbed sleep.”
As the bloody face-off between the terrorists and Indian commandos continued for three days, Aamir Khan, another major star and avid blogger, wrote: “Terrorists are not Hindu or Muslim or Christian. They are not people of religion or God . . . an incident such as this really exposes how ill equipped we are as a society as far as proper leaders go. We desperately need young, dynamic, honest, intelligent and upright leaders who actually care for the country.”
A few days after the attack, Shah Rukh Khan, who is known to Hindi film viewers as King Khan and routinely described as more famous than Tom Cruise, told a leading television channel, “I have read the Holy Koran. It states that if you heal one man, you heal the whole of mankind and if you hurt one man, you hurt the whole of mankind. . . . There is an Islam from Allah and very unfortunately, there is an Islam from the mullahs.”
A.R. Rahman on scoring music for “Slumdog Millionaire” and the challenges he faces. Brian Wise in the Wall Street Journal:
Ken Fallin
When British director Danny Boyle needed a composer to capture the frantic and violent hustle and bustle of Mumbai for his film “Slumdog Millionaire,” he turned to A.R. Rahman, Bollywood’s best-known composer, whose dozens of film scores span romantic symphonic themes, classical Indian music, and catchy pop confections. In India, Mr. Rahman is a megastar, having sold an estimated 100 million albums, or roughly the same number as Madonna or Billy Joel. Not only has he scored such Bollywood film classics as “Roja” and “Lagaan,” but he has a growing slate of international credits, including the 2002 Andrew Lloyd Webber-produced London stage musical “Bombay Dreams” and last year’s film “Elizabeth: The Golden Age.”
Mr. Boyle’s exuberantly paced story — about an orphan from the Mumbai slums who gets a shot at winning a fortune on India’s version of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” — is a distant cry from Bollywood, where Mr. Rahman has worked for nearly two decades. “He didn’t want any sentimental or sad stuff. He wanted only throbbing and edgy and pulsating sounds,” Mr. Rahman said of Mr. Boyle’s request to avoid emotion-tugging themes and maudlin arrangements.
With Hollywood hitting up comic books for blockbusters, a new comics publisher is looking to India for ideas. “The world is increasingly realizing that India is a source for creativity and great ideas, not just a back office to execute them more cheaply,” said Gotham Chopra, part of the management team at Los Angeles-based Liquid Comics.
One of the first projects for the publisher will be bringing its Ramayan 3392 AD (pictured) – a colorful, 21st-century re-imagining of Indian literary epic the Ramayana – to movie theaters. Liquid has teamed up with Mandalay Pictures and 300 producer Mark Canton for the film, which has a planned release date of 2011.
Chopra talked with Wired.com about Liquid’s birth, a new wave of Indian comics artists and the challenge of bringing an ancient Sanskrit epic to the silver screen.
Wired.com: Condensing the Ramayana into a comic book must have been hard, but condensing it into a film seems harder. What do you think about the challenge, and how do you think it will do with audiences unfamiliar with the venerable narrative’s mythology?
Gotham Chopra: Can you say, “Trilogy?” Seriously, this is something we’ve talked about at length even in relation to the original comic series. Obviously, our goal is to create a narrative structure that doesn’t require a familiarity with the original story. That’s an important note, not only so that people who have never heard of Ramayan can enjoy it, but also so those who are familiar with it are not offended by the film.
Slumdog Millionaire has a pedigree. Its director, Danny Boyle, says there are at least three Bollywood films that inspired him directly. Those films were themselves influenced by a long family tree that stretches back to the last days of the nineteenth century.
Here, then, is a list of Slumdog’s ten most flamboyant and influential Bollywood ancestors:
Black Friday (2004). This film, by young director Anurag Kashyap depicts the March 1993 bomb blasts that tore apart Bombay (as Mumbai used to be called). It was based on a book by journalist S. Hussain Zaidi and filmed in an edgy, realistic style. A famous sequence from the film, a 12-minute police chase through the crowded Dharavi slum, is mimicked by Danny Boyle in the opening scene of Slumdog Millionaire, where truant slum-kids take the place of Black Friday’s militants.
Satya (1998) a.k.a The Truth. This film was also cited by Boyle as an inspiration, as was The Company (2002). Both offer slick, often mesmerizing portrayals of the Mumbai underworld. Both films were directed by Ram Gopal Varma, a director with a fine taste for brutality and urban violence. The screenplay for Satya was co-written by Saurabh Shukla (who plays a policeman named Srinivas in Slumdog Millionaire) and Anurag Kashyap, who directed Black Friday; with its intense rhythm and captivating performances, Satya instantly became a contemporary classic in India.
Film industry in small Indian textile town of Malegaon makes low-budget parodies of Bollywood smash hits with a lot of heart, local flavour and ingenuity. Rama Lakshmi in the Washington Post:
The making of Hollywood spoof "The Superman of Malegaon."
Past a narrow alleyway filled with sleeping goats, water tanks and women washing clothes, Shaikh Nasir’s modest home is a landmark. This is where he thinks up new ways to make the people of this grim textile town laugh.
Nasir is the father of a homegrown film industry that is famous for its parodies of blockbuster movies from Bollywood, India’s Hindi film capital. For Malegaon’s power-loom workers and others laboring long hours for low pay, his wild and wacky movies provide some relief from bleak lives interrupted by frequent sectarian clashes and bomb blasts. In September, a motorcycle bombing killed six people and injured more than 100 here.
His latest role, in a film with Oscar buzz, has the Indian superstar Anil Kapoor more determined than ever to transform Bollywood into a global entertainment juggernaut. David Gritten talks to him about family, longevity and his new career as a producer. From the National:
In his new film Slumdog Millionaire, a British production set in Mumbai, the Bollywood superstar Anil Kapoor plays a character of extraordinary charisma. As Prem Kumar, the fictional presenter of the Indian version of the TV game show Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, Kapoor struts around the set as if he personally owns it, patronises a contestant – and keeps the studio audience in the palm of his hand with knowing sideways glances and supercilious wit. He can summon laughter or applause from them at will. It’s quite a performance.
But then Kapoor knows something about presence, whether on a big screen or a small one. He has been a Bollywood leading man for 25 years, and his agreement to star in a film is sufficient to get it financed. Simply put, he is an idol, and his effect on fans is remarkable. Slumdog Millionaire’s British director, Danny Boyle, witnessed the Kapoor effect first hand when he was shooting the scenes of the game show: “It took two weeks and the extras who made up the audience came in day after day and eventually got restless and bored, just sitting there.
Germans tuning into music video cable channels this month will discover an exotic new offering.
Tamisha (right), a 28-year-old schoolteacher of Indian descent from Frankfurt, will stage the official release of her first single, “Du siehst mich nicht” (You don’t see me), from an album of songs adapted from the Bollywood film Cheeni Kum (Less Sugar).
This bouncy Hindi pop tune translated into German is aimed at a much wider audience than Germany’s relatively small Indian community.
“In Germany people are saying: ‘You know what? We just want to see something else other than just the big American productions. We are over that,’” says Benjamin Bach, senior vice-president of international sales at Eros International, the London-listed arm of the Bollywood movie house. Eros is promoting Tamisha jointly with Universal Music.
Danny Boyle’s new film ‘Slumdog Millionaire‘ will close this year’s London Film Festival. Adapted by ‘Full Monty‘ writer Simon Beaufoy from the novel ‘Q&A‘ by Vikas Swarup, ‘Slumdog Millionaire‘ tells the story of an an 18-year-old orphan from the slums of Mumbai who finds himself just one question away from winning 20 million rupees ($500,000) on India’s “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?”
Danny Boyle’s (Shallow Grave, Trainspotting, 28 Days Later and Sunshine) movie features an all-Indian cast including Skins star Dev Patel and Anil Kapoor. Boyle filmed ‘Slumdog millionaire’ on location on the streets of Mumbai. Music is by AR Rehman. In a story headlined “Will Slumdog Millionaire be 2008’s Juno,” the New York Observer says it is already being positioned as 2008’s “little movie that could.”
Driven by fantastic energy and a torrent of vivid images of India old and new, “Slumdog Millionaire” is a blast. Danny Boyle’s film uses the dilemma of a poor teenager suspected of cheating on the local version of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” to tell a story of social mobility that is positively Dickensian in its attention to detail and the extremes of poverty and wealth within a culture…
Surging with colors, music, the ever-present swarming multitudes and the vitality of its youthful characters, the pic begins disturbingly with the sight of police torturing a young man to make him confess how he’s been able to make a run up to the ultimate prize of 20 million rupees on the nation’s most popular quizshow. “I knew the answers,” the sullen fellow insists, and Simon Beaufoy’s intricate and cleverly structured script illustrates how that came to be.
The Pool: Another world, just over the hedge
Director Chris Smith’s (American Job, The Yes Men, American Movie) movie “The Pool” takes a look at the lives of the haves and the someday might haves in Goa. A poor boy (Venkatesh Chavan) becomes obsessed with the swimming pool of a rich man (Nana Patekar) in the opulent hills of Panjim, Goa. His life gets turned upside down when he attempts to meet the mysterious family that arrives at the house. Smith transfers an Iowa-based short story by Randy Russell to India’s western Goa region -- and works in Hindi. From the New York Times:
In “The Pool,” a recurrent image that develops into a symbol of the gap between affluence and poverty shows the waiflike Indian protagonist, Venkatesh (Venkatesh Chavan), perched in a tree, gazing longingly at a private swimming pool on the other side of a hedge. A skinny, 18-year-old man-child who longs to dive into the water, Venkatesh ekes out a living cleaning hotel rooms and selling plastic bags on the street with his 11-year-old sidekick, Jhangir (Jhangir Badshah). The shimmering pool, in which no one seems to swim, is a window onto a world he can hardly imagine.
This calm, neorealist film, directed and photographed by the documentarian Chris Smith (“American Movie,” “The Yes Men,” “American Job”), blurs the line between fiction and reality. As the characters, who have the same first names as the actors playing them, amble around Panaji, the capital of Goa, you come to see them more as people living their lives than as a writer’s inventions.
The title of a Bollywood film has prompted a lawsuit from the studio that brought the J.K. Rowling books to the screen. From The Times:
One of Bollywood’s most eagerly awaited films has been dragged into a fierce legal battle, amid allegations that it owes just a little too much to a certain boy wizard.
The Bombay-based producer of Hari Puttar: A Comedy of Terrors is being sued by Warner Bros, the Hollywood studio behind the hugely successful Harry Potter franchise. Hari, the lawsuit alleges, is too close to J.K.Rowling’s Harry for comfort.
The Hindi-language children’s film, which was shot entirely on the Yorkshire Dales in 2006 and 2007 on a budget of £2 million, tells the story of Hari Prasad Dhoonda, a hapless ten-year-old Punjabi loner who is nicknamed Hari Puttar and moves to Britain.
Each of the five men who dominate the business in Bollywood functions almost as a one-person studio. Anupama Chopra in International Herald Tribune:
Shahrukh Khan with his wax statue
MUMBAI: ‘Who gives us clout?” Shahrukh Khan, the actor also known as King of Bollywood, asked during a recent interview here. He quickly answered the query himself. “It’s the last mile, the audience. My logic is this: Can you beat me at the box office?”
In the last 15 years few have challenged Khan at the top of the Bollywood box office. His string of blockbusters has given him such clout – as well as wax statues in his honor at Madame Tussauds in London and the Musée Grévin in Paris – that India Today, one of the country’s leading newsmagazines, placed the 42-year-old Khan at No.6 in its annual power list in February. He may have ranked below the billionaire Ambani brothers, but he came in ahead of the former president A.P.J. Abdul Kalam. And it was no accident that the most powerful man in the Hindi film industry is an actor. In Bollywood the motion picture industry remains resolutely star struck, even as special effects have helped to reduce Hollywood’s dependence on big-name actors.
“There is a variety of ways in which a picture gets made in Hollywood, but I can say without qualification that in Hindi pictures stars are the determining factor much more than they are in Los Angeles,” said Michael Lynton, the chairman of Sony Pictures Entertainment, which helped produce “Saawariya” (Beloved), the first Hollywood-Bollywood studio collaboration.
In “The Cheetah Girls One World,” the third film in Disney Channel’s successful series, the group travels to India to star in a film after one of its members misunderstands an invitation to Bollywood as one to Hollywood. The movie was shot in Udaipur and includes actors of South Asian origin. In a story headlined “Generation Mix: Youth TV Takes the Lead in Diversity Casting”, the New York Times talks about diversity on the small screen:
“This group of people is reflective of the life we all live right now,” said Debra Martin Chase, an executive producer of “The Cheetah Girls One World,” which will be shown Friday on the Disney Channel.
“One-third of the U.S. population is now nonwhite,” said Ms. Chase, one of a handful of prominent African-American producers in Hollywood. “That is reflected in the Disney Channel projects because they are committed to diversity. It has been a priority for them all along.”
I have an actress friend from India – she’s a Bollywood starlet – and she tells me that over there, if you’re a Bollywood star and you’re married, and you want to stay a Bollywood star, you have to keep your marriage a secret.
Movie fans in India, apparently, need to think that their favourite romantic leads on screen are, technically, available. That they could, possibly, meet up and fall in love without any messy entanglements to deal with.
So my Bollywood friend ends up sneaking around a lot, with her husband. And when asked by the Bollywood fan press, she describes him as “just a friend”.
And also, she tells me, that the movie fan culture over there is so strong that a lot of people have trouble making a clear distinction between her real life, and what happened to her on screen. In a movie a few years ago she played a doomed ingenue, melodramatically disfigured in a fire, and to this day her housekeeper tells her how pretty she looks now that the scars have healed.
And then there’s something called “Bollywood Age,” which is any number less than 24. Meaning, a lot of Bollywood stars make annual trips to the Middle East, where, for a price, they can get new Indian passports issued with a more graceful date of birth.
After ‘Bend it Like Beckham‘, director Gurinder Chadha was inundated with offers from Hollywood. So why is her latest project, ‘Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging‘, another British coming-of-age film? Kaleem Aftab in The Independent:
There comes a time in the career of every successful director when they decide to do a movie that is a marked departure from the winning template that has made their name. At first glance, Angus, Thongs, and Perfect Snogging is that project for the gregarious Gurinder Chadha.
Chadha established her reputation as one of the leading film-makers in Britain by making movies about second-generation Indian girls trying to live life and find love in the West. Her feature films Bhaji on the Beach, What’s Cooking?, Bend it Like Beckham and Bride and Prejudice all feature principal protagonists with backgrounds similar to her own; although she was born in Kenya in 1960, Chadha grew up in Southall, west London, to parents with strong beliefs about the value of cultural roots and the comportment of a “good” Indian girl.
What separates her previous work from Angus, Thongs, and Perfect Snogging, the adaptation of Louise Rennison’s first two books about Eastbourne-based teenager Georgia Nicolson, is the skin colour of the principal character. For the 48-year-old director this isn’t such a big deal: “I’m as English as I’m Indian and it’s good to explore that side of me. There is a lot of stuff in the film that is as much about me growing up as came from the novel.”
After a decade, Shekhar Kapur is back in India for the long haul to finish his next film. In extensive interviews with Lounge-Mint, he talks about why he’s raising a $1 billion media fund.
Kapur is in the process of roping in strategic investors for a $1 billion (about Rs4,300 crore) private fund for creative work in digital technology in South Asia. He says the Singapore government (for gaming and animation) and China’s Hina Group, an investment banking and private equity group, are already on board and he is in talks with some Indian companies as well. “This fund will not look at film-making, because I believe that the next big splurge is not in Bollywood or Hollywood; it’s in the world of the Web-to tell stories that are immediate, that can hook you in your cellphone. This fund will aggregate together content creators and technology from Asia. I want to be in creative control from the time content is made to the gatekeeping stage and then distribution. Professionals will only manage it.”
Kapur already has two characters in mind for a story that will unfold in your cellphone if the fund is successfully raised, and channelled: “an ordinary girl and her travails through life, and perhaps an animal.” After being the creative head of Virgin Comics, the company Kapur formed with Deepak Chopra, a close friend, this is the film-maker’s second big jab at mass media. Among other ideas (“I’m working on five more things that you have no clue about, and I can’t tell you”) that he is flirting with is a Twenty20 kabaddi tournament, only for Indian television. His reasons for thinking up the last are obvious, but the vision to execute it and, to an extent, generate the funds for it, is still fuzzy.
Hindus in the US have started a protest against a Hollywood comedy, saying the film will hurt the religious sentiments of millions of Hindus worldwide.
More than 5,000 people have signed an online petition protesting against the film Love Guru, starring actor Mike Myers and due to be released on Friday.
Some Hindu groups are considering a boycott of Paramount Pictures which produced the film.
Paramount says the film does not make reference to any particular religion. The company says Love Guru portrays a purely fictional faith.
With its glittery musical romances, Bollywood is reeling in billions but has so far failed to seduce western audiences. Now a new wave of moguls and directors are enlisting the cream of Hollywood to spice up its appeal. Dominic Rushe in The Sunday Times:
Lost in India’s biggest shantytown, a hellish sprawl in the heart of Mumbai, what should have been a 20-minute trip, to attend the premiere of the latest Bollywood blockbuster, was now an hour-and-a-half odyssey. Somewhere the driver had taken a wrong turn and we were crawling through Dharavi, Mumbai’s mega-slum.
Exhaustion may have been to blame. The driver was so tired he had to stop in the middle of the street every 10 minutes to splash water on his face. With neither Hindi nor geography to fall back on, I was left to stare anxiously out of the window as he drove further and further into the dense network of shambolic streets.
Dharavi’s slum looks as though it has been cobbled together from flotsam and jetsam after a flood of apocalyptic proportions. More than a million people live here, stacked in hovels that appear to teeter on the edge of collapse. But that night the population was teeming outside, preparing for a chaotic collision of religious holidays.
Black Friday (2004). This film, by young director Anurag Kashyap depicts the March 1993 bomb blasts that tore apart Bombay (as Mumbai used to be called). It was based on a book by journalist S. Hussain Zaidi and filmed in an edgy, realistic style. A famous sequence from the film, a 12-minute police chase through the crowded Dharavi slum, is mimicked by Danny Boyle in the opening scene of Slumdog Millionaire, where truant slum-kids take the place of Black Friday’s militants.
