All these reviews on Hollywood movies got me thinking about movies from the mother and father land, India and China (they can fight about who is the father and who is the mother). As you know Bollywood is the fastest and most thriving movie industry, churning out more than 300 movies annually and Hong Kong or as I call it Hongkywood, shares the same passion for their celebrities and movies. I also know about Korean movies but we will come to that later.
I really wanted to share with you on how to make a Bollywood movie but first just to share the difference between Bollywood and Hongkywood apart from the obvious factors.
Well to begin with, Bollywood don't care what the rest of the world thinks about its movies or movie making style. It will dance and sing and change clothes all the way to the point where Hollywood may not understand. I find that very wierd since Bollywood is really like an exaggerated Hollywood musical. I thought Hollywood would take to that quite naturally. But that's so coool about Bollywood.
Hongkywood though, started with all that martial arts and death defying feats of jumping AND flying around, pretty much like a VERY exaggerated action movie. But they then veered away from that and tried to match Hollywood's expectations.
But I digress. Malaysia has its fair share of Bollywood movies shown on TV and lots of people are aware of stars like Shah Rukh Khan, Salman Khan, Iamsure I Khan (just joking), Kajol, Karina Kapor and older stars like Sashi Kapor, Kasut Kapor (joking again and it means "shoe chalk" in Malay, the stuff we put on our school shoes) and Amitabh Bachan.
The earlier movies were very easy to plot and script. If you remember the Digi ad where the mother was SMS-ing her son about his potential bride with bloodshot eyes and thunder and lightning in the background, that's pretty much the pinnacle of the special effects and the plot.
The script HAS to be as follows. 2 baby boys, sometimes twins, are from a family of good standings. More often than not their father is a police inspector or lawyer and their mother a housewife. From these movies, you would think that there are only 5 occupations in India, police, lawyer, cab driver, peasants and henchmen and all of them are males since the ladies are ALL housewives or girlfriends, which are future housewives.
So, bad guys will kill the father and in the turnmoil, the boys will be separated. The mother will take one and the other may be lost or presumed dead. Sometimes the mother dies as well. If that happens then one of the babies will be adopted by the bad guy. Whatever it is, one will grow up to be a police inspector and the other a criminal. They will meet through some SUPER coincidences and realize their brothers. Of course, its a lot easier to realize that if they were twins.
When the truth is out, there will be crying, thunder, lightning, shouting, hair pulling and gnashing of teeth. This is the height of human emotion drama. Accusations will be thrown and sometime someone will run away from home for a while to cool down. Eventually they settle into acceptance and they discover what happened to their father/parents and they will join forces to dish out an ass-kicking, DOSH-ing (that's the sound of their punches) and miraculously there MUST NOT be any bruises or bleeding from this serious ass-kicking. Just so that you know, we Indians hemorrhage a lot! Mind you the ass-kicking sometimes takes you through many streets. Sometimes a person is shot in one city and dies 5,000 miles away in another city.
All movies need a love interest and to me, this is the hardest part. I mean since all women are housewives, what role can they play?? So these geniuses write in the women to be their long lost sister, or step sister or half sister or uncle's sister's next door neighbour's gardener's daughter's tuition charge that they use to play together when they were kids. Not bad at all. So there will be courting and sometimes there will be raping where the sari top will be taken off by rolling the girl from it.
The rape scene always stops there and the next scene they will show thunder and lightning around the house. Then they will show the aftermath and she is still fully clothe minus the sari top but she still has her blouse, skirt and sari bottom. It makes us Indian men look like real lazy f***ers! Can't even be bothered to take off everything and do it right! What's the use of all that long hardware that we have???
The villan is also very stereotyped. First he HAS to have a bushy moustache curling upwards at the end. He must have these blood shot (those days TV was black and white so I am assuming it is blood shot), wide eyed, crazy maniacal look about him and its usually this one actor that plays the bad guy. Takes the suspense right out of the movie doesn't it? The moment he appears in the movie, you know he did it.
In the end, the bad guy dies or is arrested (normally dies tragically like hit by a train or fall off a cliff) and the hero will have no choice but to arrest his criminal brother as well, hoping the judge will give him a light sentence and he can be released early on good behaviour for following the script.
In between ALL the crying, ass-kicking, courting, shouting, raping, aftermath of raping, etc, there will be songs sang at a very high pitch by the women. It makes us Indian men seem as if we have hypersonic hearing like dogs. The singing will also carry on for days, different locations, cities and more importantly different clothes! Rolling down the hill and, my personal favourite, running around and hiding behind some trees are part of the deal. If you want to pass Bollywood 101, this is a must.
I don't get it at all. If a girl came to me singing in a high pitch tone, I will kick her silly and if I try to court her or talk to her and she runs behind a tree more than once, I am leaving her there! I ain't no botanist! I ain't interested in the damn tree! I don't understand the sari as well. I get it that it's a national costume but why all the layers and wrappings and multiple items? It will so slow down your sex life! Thank God I didn't date Indian girls! By the time, the clothes come off, someone will be asleep! But thinking about it, maybe they need it since India is going through a population boom right now. Slowing down sex life may seem the answer to this crisis.
So there you have it, a typical stereotyped Bollywood movie of old. After the 90s and Hollywood starting to take notice, the story line and fashion have become more open, contemporary and more sane! But the songs remain, as do the trees and hemorrhaging. So do try catch a movie sometime. I do recommend Kuch Kuch Hota Hai and Dhoom (Godfather type movie). Next we will talk about Hongkywood but now I gotta go to my sari-removing class.
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