(no subject)

[winterbadger]

The DVD I'm watching tonight has a preview for this movie. I HAVE to see it! Romance, battles, India--total coolness!

(It sounds as if it's about as accurate as any Hollywood movie ("The director has admitted that about 70% of the movie is based on his imagination." If only some US directors would admit as much....) but it still looks like huge fun! Aishwarya Rai--rawr! Massive armies, huge palaces, spectacle--yay!

Netflixed!

ETA: The movie I'm watching (which had the trailer for Jodhaa Akbar) is Dhan Dhana Dhan Goal, which is proving to be a total kitsch gem. It's A Shot at Glory plus Bollywood, filmed in Brick Lane, with a touch of Mean Machine thrown in. The voice track is massively Hinglish, with Hindi sentences with English words thrown in and English sentences with a Hindi word or two stuck in.

I am imagining that I'm sharing the evening with my Dad. :-)

Comments

[la-renardine.livejournal.com]

That does sound good. I don't see enough Bollywood movies, even when I'm in Bollywood. :-)

[winterbadger]

It was very fun. Over the top in places, and occasionally goofy (one of the supporting characters is a journalist and general fixer who does match commentary at games--his commentary is in Hinglish, even though most of the listeners at the games are Anglo Brits). And the subtitles did the usual job of being not always a good match to the words (I don't speak Hindi, but they would occasionally summarise, or even mistake, what was being said in English).

What I did find sad and a little disturbing, is that the central message of the film is that Asians will never be accepted in Britain and that the only way they will ever have self-respect and acknowledgment for their accomplishments is by identifying more or less exclusively with the Asian community. This runs totally counter to the ethos of directors like Gurinder Chadha, who I'm very fond of, and Mira Nair, or even the writer Hanif Kureishi. They recognise the blatant discrimination and cruelty that Asians are subject to, and the understandable feeling that one needs to fall back on one's own community, but they also recognise that interracial understanding and acceptance are not only possible but desirable.

[winterbadger]

I will say it was also very ...unusual to find myself identifying with characters who, judging from the film, would not be receptive to such an identification, and to have all the people who "look like me" be the unquestionable villains (I think the last movie that made me feel that way was Denzel Washington's "Malcolm X". There's no shading, no equivocation: all the "gora" characters are either bad people or at best morally neutral.

Another interesting observation is that the Asian characters are from all sorts of different backgrounds and mix with no (ethnic or religious) tensions (there are plenty of personla ones, but they are never expressed in ethnic/religious terms). There's a (clearly token) Sikh, an (equally token) Bangladeshi (who of course is very dark skinned and rotund--stereotypes are always OK if it's "your own" people you are stereotyping), a Pathan, a Punjabi Hindu, a Muslim.... And some of the Asian female characters are very fair, would certainly pass for Anglo (as would, interestingly, the Sikh character).