I’d like to introduce you to one of India’s greatest movie superstars. Active from around 1950 to 1980, Uttam Kumar is still the biggest name in the popular cinema made in Calcutta. The term “matinee idol” doesn’t imply enough scope or staying power to describe his career, and […]
In the real world, I generally think vigilante justice and conceptually literal revenge are a bad idea. So why does Khoon Bhari Maang, a 1988 Bollywood remake of (and improvement on) the 1983 Australian miniseries Return to Eden, make me abandon my own moral code? Why is it so fun […]
Rudraksh (2004) is a famously terrible Bollywood movie. Since I first started watching Hindi films in 2005, I have read multiple blog posts gleefully detailing its shortcomings, and an Indian comedy duo made further mincemeat out of it in an episode of their recent series “Pretentious Movie Reviews”: […]
What happens when a Bollywood film gives the female lead all the privileges and powers that male leads get and she does things that very few women on screen ever get to do, including making herself and others laugh while still being taken seriously? Aiyyaa (2012), a nearly […]
A woman tearfully leaves her newborn in the lap of a giant statue of Shiva during a thunderstorm and keels over dead. Hindu brothers are separated when one one falls into a raging river, presumed dead, but actually rescued and raised by a thief. Boys from good homes […]
Like George Costanza, I’ve often wanted to pretend to be an architect, and an offshoot of this dream is to do some kind of major study of the architecture of evil spaces in Hindi movies. The most distinctive visual marker—physical manifestation, even—of evil in Bollywood is the villain […]
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The Cultural Gutter 