Wednesday, March 24, 2010

love aaj kaal









One of the hallmarks of Bollywood cinema in recent years has been its almost single-minded purpose to imitate Hollywood and MTV to such extremes that the weekly offerings of the Indian marquee often play as parodies of parodies (that's right, I'm talking to you, Kambakkhth Ishq). The main purpose of Bollywood cinema is no longer to tell stories or to give actors characters to play, but rather to rev up the hype machine, produce chartbusting musical numbers, and to guarantee an initial weekend box office take which will recover all of the cost of making the film. High art mainstream Bollywood is NOT.

But then it doesn't pretend to be either. So imagine my delight when in the midst of that swell of mediocrity came Imtiaz Ali's delightfully charming (and similarly charmingly delightful) 2007 feature "Jab We Met". His second directorial feature combined all the ingredients of popular cinema: a rigid-boy-meets-garrulous-girl love story full of comedy, song, dance and even (dare I say it?) intellect. Whatever was going on on the sets of "Jab We Met" clearly worked -- the story (while not entirely original) seemed fresh and interesting, compounded by the sincere turn put in by Shahid Kapur and the dizzyingly enthusiastic and big-hearted performance of Kareena Kapoor. Clearly, a major new talent had arrived.

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