The Screengrab

Bollywood lost one of its most legendary directors today when B.R. Chopra, the commercially successful but often controversial filmmaker who managed to bring a tone of moral seriousness and ethical inquiry to an industry most often given over to frothy, lightweight musical entertainments, passed away at the age of 94.  As reported in the New York Times and elsewhere, Chopra's death from natural causes was announced by his son, also a film producer and a member of what has grown to be a prominent family in the Indian film industry.

Originally trained as a journalist and setting out to support a large family with only his determination to succeed as a filmmaker, crag-faced Baldev Raj Chopra initially encountered failure in his film career, helming a few forgettable romantic comedies before scoring mild success with popular thrillers that showed the influence of Hitchcock.  It was in the 1950s that Chopra's career truly blossomed, mirroring the success of the industry itself; and, as time went on, he proved himself capable of scoring popular successes with traditionally-minded audiences while still seeking to push the boundaries of what was allowed in Indian film of the day.

Read More...

We here at The Screengrab try to provide a comprehensive overview of the world of cinema, but far too often, we ignore one of the largest and most successful of all film meccas: Bollywood.

In an attempt to correct this oversight, I now present, for your entertainment and edification, the insidiously catchy video/production number, “Kalluri Vaanil” by India’s Michael Jackson, Prabhu Deva, from the 2000 release, Pennin Manathai Thottu.

Or, as it’s better known on the Intertubes, “Benny Lava” (or just “that crazy Indian video”), a time-wastingly hee-larious marriage of hyper-pixilated “happy feet” choreography and the heel-larious (and probably un-P.C.) phoentic subtitling of one “Buffalax,” whom Wikipedia informs me is a “mondegreen director.”

Okay, I know it sounds a little confusing, but trust me...if you’ve never seen the clip before, just click and enjoy. Your loony bun will be fine.

Read More...

With bandwidth cheaper than ever, the international tech market booming, and investors eager to find some new tax shelter in which to dump their millions, the internet is in the midst of a multimedia boom not seen since the late 1990s.  And hey, we all know how well that ended, right?  Yes, there's probably another massive crash coming, but that doesn't mean that in the meantime, office drones can't kill those long empty hours between lunch and five o'clock with exciting new ventures like Hulu and now Jaman.

Founded by Indian-American enterpreneur Gaurav Dhillon and backed by Hearst money, Jaman is an online on-demand video rental service, similar to those offered by Apple and Netflix, but focusing on an entirely different market.  Jaman will, with the exception of a few Golden Age blockbusters that were out of copyright control (like Audrey Hepburn's Charade) focus on independent films for an English-speaking audience, and foreign-language titles -- espeically the wildly popular Bollywood genre so beloved by a growing Indian diaspora -- for the audience it's hoping to reach overseas.  Hoping to tap into the underserved markets in tech-savvy countries like Brazil, Russia, India and China, where most people rely on DVD pirates for most of their movie needs, Dhillon is focusing on foreign language movies as both a source of cheap profit and a means towards building an audience.  To help build that audience, they're set to offer an introductory deal that will applie to indie fans everywhere in the U.S. as well:  free (well, ad-supported) access to a library of over a thousand indie films via the site's streaming browser windows.

Read More...

Although it's home to one of the most dynamic, diverse and (thanks to the Desi diaspora) popular film undustries in the world, India's Bollywood scene is still a shadowy world with internecine feuding, shadowy financing, and ties to organized crime, banditry and even terrorism that puts the dirty deals behind Hollywood blockbusters to shame.  Liz Mermin's highly engaging documentary Shot in Bombay not only sheds a light on the often bizarre world of Bollywood filmmaking and its ties to real-world crime, but does so with a cleverly metafictional structure that echoes the multiple layers of coincidence and concurrence that make it all so alien.

At the heart of Shot in Bombay is Bollywood legend Sanjay Dutt, who's been harried for over a decade by the Indian authorities for his alleged connection to a series of bombings in Mumbai with murky ties to both organized crime and terror.  It follows his struggles with the law, but it also follows his professional career as he stars as a cop in an action thriller called Shootout at Lokhandwala, based on a real incident where five wanted criminals were gunned down by the police.  By no means incidental to the labyrinthine story (it's no coincidence that Shootout's director, Apoorva Lakhia, fancies himself the Indian Quentin Tarantino, as Mermin's narrative sprawls out into Tarantinoesque complexity) is the fact that the cop portrayed by Dutt in the film later became tangentially involved in the police investigation of Dutt.

Read More...

In the New York Times Book Review, Charles Taylor celebrates Anupama Chopra's new biography of Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan, both for its own virtues and for what its existence may say about the spread of interest in popular Indian cinema to the English-speaking audience. "The larger significance of the book," he writes, "is that a major American publishing house is bringing out a biography of a major foreign star, largely unknown in the United States. And that is remarkable at a time when newspaper and magazine editors and film distributors are increasingly reluctant to offer readers and viewers what they haven’t already heard about." With more and more movies fighter for fewer and fewer screens in America, and with the international distribution system an erratic mess, it may seem a stretch to suggest that Bollywood is about to take the country by storm. "But in a global economy in which India stands poised to play a bigger part, when the Internet and DVD’s are creating film audiences not bound by borders or by the caprices of film distribution, when some American multiplexes are giving over screens to Bollywood releases in order to lure America’s growing Indian population and when the stagnation of Hollywood sometimes makes the survival of movies as a popular art form seem an iffy proposition, Americans can’t afford to ignore Bollywood much longer." At forty-one, Shah Rukh Khan could well be an important tool in breaking into the Western market; two of his recent movies, Veer-Zaara and Chak! de India (which comes out on DVD next month) are among the rare Bollywood movies that have actually played theaters in the States. Taylor describes him as "part leading man, larger part buoyant goofball" who "represents the confident, successful Indian yuppie, the citizen of the world who is nonetheless recognizably Indian." He definitely has crossover potential. But can he do it in pictures as exotically strange to American tastes as his Bollywood hits? The obvious alternative would be Hollywood-style versions of Bollywood movies, similar to the imitation-Hong Kong action knockoffs that Chow Yun Fat got shoved into when he came to America. The very idea may give migraines to Bollywood-lovers and -haters alike. — Phil Nugent