What I HATE

There are not many things in this world I hate and there almost nothing I hate about hindi cinema - But there is one thing.

In Bollywood there is a lot of forgiveness due to tradition and respect of elders. Your mother in law tries to poison you but to ensure a happy ending, she is forgiven (Beta). It's far from my reality but I accept it with a smile because it is Bollywood.

A thing I hate and have witnessed at least twice, is so very wrong that it makes me scream, cringe and curse the damn filmmakers, are the very alternative punishment for rape.

In Hamare dil aapke paas hai Ash is raped and the rapist's family and her family arrange for them to marry.
The rapist agree because it gets him out of jail and her family agrees because her Chastity is gone and therefore there is no hope of another offer.
Thank God for Anil Kapoor and his love for long rantings about social and gender injustice. He comes and saves Ash from the barnyard idiot rapist.

The other film I have seen this in is a Mithun Chakraborty movie (can't remember the title). Where he is falsely accused of raping his brother in law's sister. She is in a coma and can't clear his name but the truth comes out in the end and she wakes up. The whole family is gathered and they decide that the rapist's punishment should be marrying the girl.

I know values and tradition is very different in India but this is just so wrong!!!

By the way did you know that the last official Funeral-Sita burning was in 1987 in Rajahstan and it was revered by the onlookers as something great and holy.

Good boy bad boy.

Other bloggers have been blogging about good guys versus bad guys and most of seem to be in favor of the good one. I don’t mind the good ones but when it comes to movies the bad guys just seem more interesting, they are sort of more complete in their range of emotions. You know that whole “even if I am bad I’m nice to the ones I love” where as the good guy he’s just sort of dull….

The good guy characters I really don’t like are Anil in Beta, Nana Patekar in Yugpurush and big B in Sooryavansham. The bad guys I like are Sallu in wanted and John Abraham in Karam.
There are of course bad guys I don’t like as well. Amrish Puri is a great actor and he is a great villain but you can’t really find any positive sides to him, he is just good at being evil in nearly all of his movies.
What bugs me about the oh so good guys is that the women they act against are so very motherly in their love towards them and that kind of creeps me out.

In Beta Anil plays a “man” who is absolutely blind when it comes to his stepmother and his wife has to work against maa behind his back-to weak! In Yugpurush Nana has just been released after 25 years in a mental asylum but he still has fits of insanity but in spite of that the two main actresses both fall for his nauseating kind hart. When it comes to Amit in sooryavansham there are some redeeming qualities, after his marriage the whole “love of a good woman” thing makes him grow up and become a man. But there is a scene in that movie where he, a 55 year- old man (he plays younger), are being fed by his mother and it isn’t one of those bless you pooja kinds of feedings, it’s a whole meal- because mummy loves her big boy!!

The instant I think bad guy and Bwood I think of srk in Don. But I don’t think you can use him as an example of a bad guy, because he is SRK the definition of HOT.



Even when he’s totally insane (Darr) or evil (Don) he is just quality bedroom fantasy fabulous ...

In wanted Sallu is on a mission to kill bad guys and save the damsel in distress. And his “I’m gonna kill everyone in spite of the law” attitude is kind of attractive-and I don’t even like Sallu! Gotta admit I found the movie more of a comedy than an action drama mainly due to the toothpaste romance and the burning the shirt of his body scenes.
In Karam John plays a hit man who suddenly develops a conscience being all improved because of his pregnant wife. The appeal is obvious… right?

So good versus bad – When it comes to movies I go for the bad guy but not too bad, just bad enough to be interesting:)

Vacation

Happy Happy me.
I have just bought a plane ticket to Mumbai and are planing to bum around the south for 6 weeks. I love my long vacations.

Mera movies

I have been on a Bollywood trip this past week revisiting my favorite movies. So now I have movies flooding my floor and table, basically my living room looks like a disaster area.
I need a new filing system for my +300Bwood movies. I decided long ago to take the DVDs out of their cassettes just to make it less obvious to visitors that I have an addiction. It doesn't look healthy when you have rows and rows of DVDs in the bookshelf instead of books, which were confined to stacks under my bed.

More than 200 movies ago I decided to organize my addiction in binders so I bought two holding each 50 movies. But now the many binders are inadequate. Should I just accept that I'm spending to much and probably will continue spending to much on DVDs and buy a giant mega case with a capacity of 900 or should I live in denial and buy another binder?

I feel like I have just woken up in a whore house with a needle sticking out of my arm and realising that I have hit rock bottom. It is time to either get help or accept that I'm an addict for life, knowing that an addiction is going to severely damage what otherwise could be an average healthy life.
My friends and family already think I'm off the deep end and this blogging isn't really helping at all, I keep being introduced to new must see movies. Every time I turn on my computer there is drug dealer ready to drag me back to LaLa land.

While writing I'm watching Kaho naa pyar hai. There has just been an APB for Amisha on tv. They are looking for a girl with long black hair and brown eyes.... LOL!!!!

Hello my name is Marianne and I'm an addict....

Of course I'm going to buy a giant mega case. The question now is how am I going to arrange the DVDs in that case. Year, name, actor, actress, favorite or ..... Well I will cross that bridge when I get to it!

Standing on a box

In Hyde park there is a corner reserved for people who wants to speak. They stand on a soapbox and share whatever they are passionate about and I guess B-Town has adopted that idea (or maybe it's vice versa-don't know who came first).

I have never really noticed it before but the shorter of the females in Bollywood has a tendency to stand on a box when they are passionate about something - usually a guy!

I first really noticed this in AAja Nachle because the "ups and downs" of Konkona are so obvious.

Can't dance on a box

But you can be passionate

I must have seen it before because there has been a lot written about how Rani and Abhi is not a good on screen couple due to height difference. I think I need to watch Bunty aur Babli, yuva and Laga chuneri mein daag again. Now that's an awesome excuse to re-watch favorites - as if I needed one!

My name is Khan

Being a teacher is hard work but it also have some perks. Every now and then the kids get vacations and even though teachers are suppose to work preparing lessons, the flexible schedule means we can work extra hard before and after and such allow ourselves a vacation as well.
Shukran Allah for that because this winter it allowed me to go to NY.
I'm in the red money wise thanks to that trip, NY is so cheap compared to DK. But it was worth it. I got to see MNIK on the big screen - happy happy me!

I read blogpeople's reviews of the movie and they are surprisingly negative. Or maybe not surprisingly, it's just that I don't think I watch movies in the same way as many other people do.
Movies are for entertainment purpose only and even the crappiest of movies are entertaining (not that MNIK is a crappy movie). Instead of being ticked off at the ignorant portrayal of USA I found it hilarious to watch KJ version of an African American community in the south. The flood had me rolling on the floor laughing, the entertainment value of those scenes scored a 12 on my tickle bone list!
I'm sure it wasn't KJ's intention to be funny but I can watch a movie anyway I want, regardless of the directors agenda and if I want thought provoking facts I read news papers.
I do not take movies seriously. And hence there are no bad movies in my book!!!

Of course I'm not so foolish as to think that movies can't affect peoples views on things but I hope/believe I'm educated enough to know the difference between fact and fiction and always when in doubt DO RESEARCH! If only everyone was like me (irony, sarcasm and satire does not translate well in writing).
Should ignorant/uneducated people be banned from watching movies? is it to dangerous? will they take anything literally? Now there is a whole new blog topic to explore!

Not really relevant to MNIK:
When in NY I met a guy who had heard that DK was the happiest country in the world. I have heard that before and I have read the research behind the statement and according to that happy in general means healthy, wealthy and educated. The research fail to mention that DK is on the bad end of the list when it comes to suicide. So what is happy? and a worldwide search involving 80,000 people is that enough to measure happiness?

I liked the NY-waley very much because instead of just taking the statement for a fact he was interested in the whys and I like people who ask questions instead of expressing absolutes (this sentence work in danish not sure if it works in English).

Veracious (sotheydance.blogspot.com)

"It's always weird to learn through movies. Not in the sense that you think whatever a movie portrays is reality, but to be inspired to find out what actually happened and what the movie did differently, or what circumstances made the movie as it is"

She has written an entry, that made me think, it is not what we know that is important, it is the awareness of what we don't know that is important.

or as Richard Cecil puts it "The first step towards knowledge is to know that we are ignorant".

Wow that was a long one I need a nap now, still suffering from jet-lag.

six degrees of separation.

In Parineeta Vidya puts a gold chain around Saif's neck and boom they are married, in Mujhse dosti karoge Hritik drops sindoor on Rani and dhoom like music starts and in Hadh kar di aapne Govinda starts a fire walks around it with Rani and oops they are married.

And since it is so easy to get married in the eyes of Bhagvan how do they cope with all these marriages in real life? Bollywood must be the the most polygamist "sect" in the world:)
It gave me the idea of making a giant "six degrees of separation" map kindly inspired by The L word. But I also realized that I'm to busy/lazy to do so - No blog homework for me thank you!

India (in theory-bjp: damn the orange extremists of that group) welcomes all religions there is law making concerning each faith. The one particular law I'm thinking about is the one that allowed Dharmendra and Hema to get married.
D was/is a Hindu and a married one at that, he fell in love with Hema, wanted to get a divorce and marry her but his wife wouldn't divorce him. His solution was to become a Muslim and marry Hema anyway because according to Indian law Hindus can have one wife but Muslims can have four. Interesting concept na?

But how do they deal with on screen marriages? don't they care about the easiness with witch they can get married, are they secularised in their thinking or do they say a couple of sorry mantras and hence annul the marriages?

I have no solution, I'm just thinking out loud!