Bollywood movies.

wolverhampton

Going to India in march and have never seen a bollywood movie--whats the consensus--
1.Cheesy garbage.

2.Great entertainment.

3.Good for a laugh.

4.Better off being at work.

5.A good way to spend a couple of hours.

6.Better off having your fingernails removed in a north korean prison.

7.Wow--these guys can give hollywood a run for their money---great acting,beautiful scenery,fantastic plots--look at what I have been missing.

8.All of the above.

guerik

Great, cheesy, entertainment. Also: totally addictive.

It does depend a bit on the movie though, lately there have been a few with great production values, costumes, numbers, etc. But some are seriously sketchy..

cdrake

The best way to see a bollywood film for the first time is to go to India and see it..(if you haven't seen one already).

get a multiplex experience and a Jaipur theater experience(moti mahal/rajmandir).

wolverhampton

We have alot of free time in udaipur---good for movie experience,outside of endless runs of octopussy?

cdrake

don't remember any places in udaipur off hand, but I'm sure, if you're not stuck on the lake palace(and it has water now!!! ) you'll find a few by asking.

(it's an excursion to go anywhere from the lake palace but (psst: the word is that the maharajah screens his own films in the basement)..

jyotirmoy

guerik is right. Quite few bollywood movies have moved out of the running around the tree thing & have made great impact on the international scene. REcently I saw Nagesh Kukoonor's Iqbal, an awsome product!

SHIMLA

Tip for enjoying a Bollywood movie : Switch off your brains if watching at home; or leave them at home if going to a theatre.

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jgv

We watch them all the time at an India Cafe in Surry Hills called Maya. We love it. My friend watched them for the first time the other day and he was fascinated!

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Indojingai

OP:
If the first thing you are thinking about India is Bollywood, you should take 4 or 6.

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thirdreel

There are some great ones and some awful ones, just like Hollywood movies. They are perhaps an acquired taste. I find I like the newer ones, like Paheli and Bunty Aur Babli, better than the older ones.

smida02

Just like Hollywood, most are garbage and some a re really good. You can no longer lump them into a single category as they are not all just mindless song and dance nonsense anymore. I've seen about 20 or so and have seen some great ones and some that I couldn't even sit through. Like the US cinema industry Bollywood is turning out a lot of remakes and sequels these days. Bollywood also has a tendency to blatantly rip off Hollywood without giving any credit at all. For example "Zeher" is a scene for scene rip off of the Denzel Washington film "Out of Time". Speaking of Denzel, one of his earliest films was "Mississippi Masala" in which he has an inter-racial relationship with an Indian woman.

PeakXV

When I first saw one - I was perplexed that every sentence seemingly ended in heh! . I thought this must be similar to the Canadian sentence punctuation of eh!. Then I learned that verbs come at the end of a sentence and that heh actually means is..................... pretty cool eh!

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Don't go to India ~ Pre-trip Warnings & Misconceptions?

raos

I would agree with most of the posts here, that 90% of the Bollywood movies is mindless entertainment. There are some decent ones that are being made which are watchable like "Iqbal", "Hazaron Khwaish..", etc. BTW, many of these movies are "inspired" (a chutney version, as some critics call it) of Hollywood films (not Indie-American stuff, of course, but the major Studio production). Most of the scripts are then "Indianized" and shot.

Personally, I would suggest you watch these movies at one of the movie theatres in India. What I enjoy is watching Hollywood/English films in India because sometimes I am the only one laughing loudly in the theatre (because no one else is getting a funny cultural reference).

Sama

not Bollywood movies I suppose, but I saw Kaadhal and loved it.

Thirupachi reminded me of a Steven Seagall (sp?) movie

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traceyam

Definitely all of the above. And guerik is right - they are very, very addictive. I have more Bollywood DVDs at this point than I do Hollywood ones.

I approach them sort of the same way as I watch James Bond movies. It's a particular genre: you have to suspend disbelief and accept that there's going to be a lot of sexism. On the other hand, you get to see a lot of beautiful people, and in the case of James Bond movies, lots of cool explosions (and some of those in Bollywood films, too).

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