3 results
2 - Relocating Bollywood: Gully Boy and the Worlds of Hip-hop
- Edited by Aakshi Magazine, Amber Shields
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- Book:
- ReFocus
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 12 August 2023
- Print publication:
- 31 July 2022, pp 38-58
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Summary
Luck by Chance (2009), Zoya Akhtar's debut film and a commercial flop, is not the first film made about the Mumbai film industry. Nor is it the first to reveal its dark underside roiled by opportunism, hypocrisy and an insider culture indifferent to genuine artistry and fresh talent. As is to be expected in the ‘movies about the movie business’ subgenre, disenchantment is a predominant narrative and affective payoff. Both protagonists, the one who makes it (Vikram [Farhan Akhtar]) and the one who supposedly does not (Sona [Konkona Sen Sharma]), learn, along with the audience, that talent and ability have very little to do with success. It is all a matter of connections and contingencies or, in other words, luck, by chance. Yet this might have been one of the first films in the abhinetri film genre, ranging in the Bollywood context from Actress (Balwant Bhatt 1934), Kaagaz ke Phool (Guru Dutt 1959), Guddi (Hrishikesh Mukherjee 1971), Hero Hiralal (Ketan Mehta 1988), Rangeela (Ram Gopal Varma 1995) to Main Madhuri Dixit Banna Chahti Hoon (Chandan Arora 2003), to suggest that a career in mass entertainment is possible even after your dreams of becoming a movie star have died. LBC's remarkable closing sequence belongs to Sona, who takes her feckless lover Vikram's words that one chooses one’s successes and failures to heart. Rather than regret that she could not become a film star, she takes pride in the fact that she became a working actress in television soaps, earning a good living. Sona ends up as an independent professional woman in a big city with a growing fandom of her own, a rising star in a career that may even reconcile her one day to her middle-class estranged parents, for they see her each night on their television screens in the provincial town that Sona left behind. In granting to her protagonist Sona a new life in television, Akhtar inaugurates the project of relocating Bollywood; a process that comes to a successful close with her most recent film Gully Boy (2019), a film that, I suggest, captures a new phase in Bollywood's relationship to other circuits of entertainment in contemporary India, pre-eminently popular music.
24 - “Coming to a Multiplex Near You”: Indian Fiction in English and New Bollywood Cinema
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- By Sangita Gopal, University of Oregon
- Edited by Ulka Anjaria, Brandeis University, Massachusetts
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- Book:
- A History of the Indian Novel in English
- Published online:
- 05 August 2015
- Print publication:
- 08 July 2015, pp 359-372
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The story of the adaptation of Chetan Bhagat's best-selling 2004 debut, Five Point Someone, into the blockbuster Bollywood film 3 Idiots (dir. Rajkumar Hirani, 2009) is an interesting one. While most discussions around an adaptation stress how different the film is from the book, Bhagat and his fans stress how similar the two properties are, insisting that perhaps the author should have received greater prominence in the film's credits and promotion than he did. Bollywood has a long history of borrowing (to be generous) plots and ideas from other (especially Hollywood) films, but the case of 3 Idiots is not one of intellectual property, as both parties agree that no legal injury has been done to the author. The film's producer, Vidhu Vinod Chopra, director, Rajkumar Hirani, and star, Aamir Khan, have averred that although Bhagat had been given his due, he was generating controversy in order to cash in on the film's success. Bhagat and his supporters agree in a sense by suggesting that his claims are moral rather than legal. Given how closely the film resembles the novel – down to such details as the red Maruti 800 car featured in several scenes – Bhagat's supporters stress that the author of the bestselling novel on which 3 Idiots is based should have received a little more airtime in the media blitz that preceded and followed the release of the film. They repeatedly contrast Bhagat's shoddy treatment at the hands of a Bollywood producer to that of Vikas Swarup, on whose novel Q&A (2005) the international hit Slumdog Millionaire (dir. Danny Boyle, 2008) was based. While Swarup was front and center at all events celebrating the film's phenomenal success, including at the Oscars, Bhagat's name appeared just once in the credits for 3 Idiots and that too at a very low billing!
For an English-language novelist such as Bhagat to desire a closer association with a blockbuster Hindi film such as 3 Idiots is indeed noteworthy if we consider the cultural dynamics that have historically kept the Indian novel in English at a great remove from the Hindi popular cinema.
Chapter Two - Sentimental Symptoms: The Films of Karan Johar and Bombay Cinema
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- By Sangita Gopal, University of Oregon
- Edited by Rini Mehta, Rajeshwari Pandharipande
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- Book:
- Bollywood and Globalization
- Published by:
- Anthem Press
- Published online:
- 05 March 2012
- Print publication:
- 01 January 2010, pp 15-34
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Summary
Indian film historian Ashish Rajadhyaksha had once famously and perhaps apocryphally quipped that all Indian films may be divided into two categories – Bombay cinema and Satyajit Ray – the former a cinema for the masses, the latter an art cinema of limited commercial appeal of which Satyajit Ray was the great exemplar. More recently, this mass-class/commercial-art binary is being re-written by the popular press, and by fans and bloggers as ‘hat-ke’ versus ‘KJo.’ ‘Hat-ke’ literally means ‘off-center’ and ‘KJo’ is short for the Bollywood Director Karan Johar. These terms name divergent tendencies in Hindi cinema in the last decade and as such can shed light on the disintegration of film form and the segmentation of movie publics currently ongoing in the film industry. ‘Hat-ke’ refers to a growing body of films that are made on smaller budgets by new production corporations like Adlabs, Pritish Nandy Communications and UTVfilms. They feature lesser-known stars and match formal innovation with utterly contemporary – often risky – subject matter. The ‘hat-ke’ film usually plays well in the multiplexes in India's many urban centers and is favored by a younger, cosmopolitan spectator. Though more commercially oriented than art cinema, ‘hat-ke’ films share the vision of the art film movement that attempted to capture reality more authentically by creating an alternative to the mass product emanating from the industry in Bombay. In other words, they bear a morphologic affinity with what Rajadhyaksha calls the ‘Ray’ film.