Your Hollywood vs. My Bollywood

Finally I get time to write another beautiful piece of work here :P. I hope you have an idea as to how busy I am. Ok jokes apart, here I am to talk about something that interests almost half the world I suppose.

It was an early start to the weekend last Friday. After a 10-day long struggle of our HR manager to get all the employees to unanimously agree to a particular movie and to successfully get the tickets booked, we went for Die Hard 4. Courtesy the sincerity of the office staff here to work till the job is done and the Delhi traffic, we reached just in time for the show (and therefore missed the bird-watching-fun before the movie).

But this is not why I am writing this blog. Here is a point to be made, just what the topic of this blog suggests.

I had heard a lot about the movie and it was expected to be a wonderful experience. But I don’t understand what these Hollywood directors think - Put some action and a few kissing scenes and the job is done. What the hell!!! Bruce Willis plays some John McClane who is a member of the New York Police Department. They get to know about an Internet-based terrorist organization which is systematically shutting down the United States. McClane is quite old (has a daughter of marriageable age). Still he is given the job of setting these people right single-handedly.

Now begins the fun. He does some bold action scenes. So bold that they become too hard to digest. He gets hit so many times and so badly that someone of his age cannot bear anyhow, but this man is Bruce Willis. So he comes back harder every time. There is a scene that was completely unpalatable for me. He is driving a truck (or whatever that was) and someone is chasing him in a helicopter. He escapes somehow for some time and finally makes the truck run over a slant plank and therefore go like a projectile (me, the engineer :-)) to hit the helicopter in mid-air.....aaha....what beautiful action!!!

If a Sunny Deol does a Gadar, there are lakhs of people saying that Bollywood shows impossible things and is a highly dramatic stuff. I say at least ‘My Bollywood’ makes it look realistic, Hollywood doesn’t even do that. It just creates an impression that someone like Bruce Willis can do the impossible any day, any time.

In all these years that I have lived, I have come across innumerous people, got in good contact with thousands of them and have had talks on movies. Almost everyone says Hollywood is much better. But I have seen all kinds of people - some who don’t even understand the accent they use in English movies, some who laugh when people around them laugh, some who feel happy when there is some good action scene and some who just make an estimate of the story from what they see. They say they understand the movie completely, but if you ask them the basic theme of the movie, they have it all wrong. The basic thing is that they think they will be superior if they see and more-so-if -they-say-they-see English movies rather than those made in their national language.

I personally prefer watching the Indian cinema. I feel that at least you don’t have to make an effort understanding it. These days Bollywood is no more predictable. It is coming with entertaining and more importantly innovative stuff. See a ‘bheja-fry’ or a ‘shootout at lokhandwala’ and you would get to know that today’s Indian cinema is not predictable any more.

I am certainly not against all those who prefer watching Hollywood movies, but am also not comfortable if they say that Bollywood is crap. “Maine yeh nahin kaha ki Hollywood murdabaad hai, par mera Bollywood zindabaad tha, zindabaad hai, aur zindabaad rahega :-)”