Our Bollywood Year by Tom Davis

Tom posted this on Facebook as a 2018 year-end summary of our unexpected interest in Bollywood  movies (and all other Indian movies). If you don't belong to Facebook (and there are people who don't) then you can't read it. As he was putting together the piece, we really enjoyed reminiscing about the path that got us to this point. So I'm sharing it here as part of our family chronicles for 2018.

We watch a lot of movies. I post each movie to Facebook after we watch. (That is pretty much all I post on Facebook) Some are old, some new, most at home and occasionally at the theater.

But this year took a strange turn. Of the 94 movies we watched in 2018, 43 were from India.

At the end of 2017 I was on a Skype call with a client (I will call him Srinath because that is his name) in India (Hyderabad) and while waiting for a third person to arrive we began talking about movies. Srinath asked if I had seen any Indian movies, I answered yes. Julie and I had seen Lagaan which is often recommended as a very accessible Indian movie.

Srinath was impressed and asked if I had seen Slumdog Millionaire. Of course, although I did not consider it Indian Cinema - being directed by Danny Boyle and having no song sequences. It was about India, but even then I knew what made a movie Indian. Srinath asked about a few similar movies - he finally said I needed to watch Baahubali. A two-part epic fantasy about a long ago kingdom and two princes vying to be king - one evil, one good. That was December 30, 2017. We loved it.

We did not watch any Indian movies until Sridevi’s untimely death was in the news in June. So we watched her comeback film English Vinglish. We loved it.

India produces almost 2,000 movies a year so it is difficult to choose one. Rose found a list of the Top 100 Bollywood films by Timeout London. (So their viewpoint included western sensibilities) She chose movies from after 2000 which gave us a long list of movies to watch.

So every week we were watching one or two Indian movies a week. We started learning who the big stars were and what directors to rely on. We learned what a masala movie is and began to expect at least 6 songs with dancing per movie and nothing shorter that 2 and half hours run time. (3 hours is typical)

A few months in I kept thinking I would “snap out of it”, but as we grew more comfortable these movies were getting better.

Most of the movies have been fairly light, but we have seen great action movies, intense dramas and even science fiction (of a sort). Some movies can have a lower production quality than we expect from Hollywood, but the stories and action usually compensate.

In November we went to see a first run movie in the theater - Thugs of Hindostan - which was released worldwide on the same day. We loved it. (Indians apparently did not love it.)

We also learned a lot about India. In order to understand context we had Wikipedia on the iPad ready to explain locations, situations and religions that are part of Indian culture. Just ask me about the war of Bangladesh independence - that was the movie Raazi.

Finally, we learned that Bollywood is just one part of the Indian movie industry - about 43% by box office. Bollywood is the Hindi language movie center. Tollywood is the Telugu language center (Hyderabad) and Kollywood is the Tamil language center (Chennai). These two represent 36% of the industry, and there are movie production centers all over India for other languages.

Whatever it is called it is now big part of our regular movie watching.