The world gets smaller and smaller everyday, and with the entire world getting smaller, products and services are seeing a greater base and greater markets than ever before. And these products result from a wide selection of niches, electronics, technologies and obviously, entertainment. Gone are the days when a movie from Hollywood took 12 years to come calmly to India, and gone are the days when Indian movies were a sideshow in foreign countries. Today, movies from both schools of film making are almost simultaneous, which leads to a really perplexing situation, where one read glowing tributes about Indian movies by foreign critics and exactly the same movie is widely panned by the local critics. Needless to say, there are several factors at play here – and not absolutely all are incidental. This short article tries to drive out some of the misconceptions that foreign reviewers have about Bollywood movies, and more specifically the sort of movies that work in Bollywood.
- Bollywood isn’t Broadway:
Ok, you’ve your Broadway, we have our Prithvi Theater, named after the legendary Prithivraj Kapoor, father of the multitalented Raj Kapoor, Shammi Kapoor, Shashi Kapoor. So, not absolutely all movies are art house cinemas, in reality, very few movies which are released commercially in theaters and multiplexes even aim at catering to the art house market. So please, the next time you find a Bollywood movie a yawn, say so. Bollywood will often really make some boring movies – movies that make the two hour movie seems like ten. bigg boss 6 telugu voting So if you learn yourself yawning in the middle of the movie, it isn’t that you didn’t obtain the movie, it’s just that the movie didn’t obtain the audience.
- Bollywood Has it’s Cliches (and they’re really bad):
Comedies, Actioners, Drama, Real Life Stories – you name it, we have precisely what Hollywood has – and we have all of the cliches that Hollywood has too – the token, the cliffhanger, the lone ranger, everything – and that’s sometimes been good and sometimes it’s been bad. So, the next time you see a romantic comedy film with one a lot of cliches, please do not write it to be ‘cutely reminiscent of classics’, just write that the movie had nothing original.
- Bollywood isn’t Young:
I do believe that one will come in exactly the same range of individuals still riding cows in the middle of the street in India. Bollywood is among the, if not the oldest movie film industry on earth, and has every resource and financial backing to make everything possible. A Star Wars could be made, an Avatar could be made, everything could be done. So the next time you come across some pathetic special effects or makeup, don’t genuinely believe that the make up artist did some real life adventure to obtain even that sort of makeup – those are bad production values and you’ve every directly to call them out to it. Basically, stop treating the Bollywood Industry with kid mittens.
- Every Bollywood movie is just a Genius Story:
There’s very, hardly any you will find out about Indian culture from Bollywood, the same as how we’d learn hardly any about actual American culture from a Hollywood movie, unless we’re watching documentaries on the respective countries. So, if you learn a Bollywood movie with a tale that’s going nowhere, don’t genuinely believe that you don’t ‘get’ the movie because you’re not ‘connected’ with the Indian culture – the storyline can be a faltering mess of drooling scriptwriters for whatever you know.