i’ve grown bored with sanjay dutt. i’m turning my starry-eyed celebrity affections toward the unanimously proclaimed superstar of bollywood film: Amitabh Bachchan.
i saw him recently in the movie boom which i reviewed earlier. bachchan was easily the best thing about the movie. well, other than the supermodels.
so what makes this man so cool? well, he’s the host of the indian version of "who wants to be a millionare" (translated idiomatically into hindi as "who wants to be bumped up a caste"). he got his start in showbiz because he got a personal letter of recommendation from PM Indira Ghandi. he even served in the indian parliament for a time, before something called "the swedish gun scandal". what is it with indian celebrities and the violence-implication scandals? but these days bachchan spends most of his time apologizing for the bad acting of his son, heartthrob Abhishek Bachchan.
he’s also cool because he’s a senior citizen and he’s still bopping around like a 30yr-old. he followed a similar career path to patrick mcgoohan, where he played an angry young man in the 70s, and then graduated into being a distinguished patriarch. but what’s really impressive is his baritone voice and his flawless command of english. and apparently japanese, german, and arabic.
i bought a dvd because i recognized him on the cover:
but it didn’t look much like he does in the movie itself. and then it hit me, for the cover photo they took a picture of him from the 70s and photoshopped in a modern hairdo and his gray goatee.
AKS had some interesting action and music sequences (including a hypnotically PG strip-club dance), but then right when the villianous assassin transfers his soul into bachchan’s body (the sort of thing that must happen daily in a hindi/buddhist culture), my DVD stopped working. and the DVD down at the video store stopped working in the exact same place. aaaargh!
