my bollywood kick has hit another couple of speedbumps.
this afternoon while patching the holes in my dickies, i watched the film "bhoot". apparently bhoot is hindi for ghost, as in, "that ghost is going to bhoot you in the head." this is a brave attempt to clone a j-horror film, right down to the spooky blue dead kid and the dead woman with stringy hair. the imdb says that "bhoot" is unusual for a bollywood film in that it has no musical soundtrack at all, and that it is a MERE two hours long. although it doesn’t have the precision of a pang brother’s film, it almost kinda is scary a couple of times. personally, i would have liked to see the dead people do some song and dance.
the second movie on the list "boom" is a brave attempt at cloning a quentin tarantino or guy ritchie film. three supermodels —
played by actual supermodels, get embroiled in the mumbai gangster scene because they did something catty to a gangster’s moll on the catwalk, causing a lot of diamonds (paapas in hindi) to go missing. there’s plenty of quirky moments, internationalism, and drug use. and supermodels strutting around. the dance numbers, although not up to bollywood standards were actually motivated in scene.
you can see in virtually every scene how the director tries to experiment with the cinematic form, wiggling as much slack as possible into the rigid bollywood system. apparently "boom" had to go through the indian censor board several times before it was allowed release.
where it collapses, is where the supermodels perform their brilliant mastermind double-cross. it is as contrived and unbelievable as the climax to "basic instinct 2".
consider the comments about this movie on the imdb. in general the feedback comes in one flavor: hateraid. "boom" suffers the hybrid’s lament. it is not bollywood enough for the indian audience and it is not up to the hollywood standard of pop film. if it was precious or hoity-toity or some sort of costume drama, then it could fly as a proper foreign movie. but it’s trying to be cool. "boom" wants to be hip and slick, but it comes off as square as a japanese hip-hop group.
let’s just say it’s pretty good for bollywood.
in the tradition of jailbird bollywood celebrities, kaizad gustad, the director of "boom", is facing charges in connection with getting his assistant run over by a train. so we might not be getting too much more edgy cinema from him.
