Bollywood/Hollywood (2002)

Very Cool!!!

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.

I am a devoted fan to Deepa Mehta's Earth, Water, and Fire trilogy which I have found deeply moving. However, this film I could barely sit through. I have seen a few (quite a few) Bollywood films and it would be difficult to create a send-up of a genre that is already a send-up itself. Bollywood films are already exaggerated, colorful, and dramatic and brimming with stereotypes. Deepa's film, I'm sad to say, was a terrible disappointment. It lacked any kind of originality, insight, or even good dance/song numbers (the best part of the film I thought was the rooftop number)which is the essence of Bollywood films. Given the power and intensity of her other films, this was an embarrassment. What was she thinking???

About an hour into "Bollywood/Hollywood," Rahul (Rahul Khanna) tells Sue (Lisa Ray), "You're so unpredictable." Really? Because there's nothing she does in the film, and nothing in writer-director Deepa Mehta's script, that's even remotely unpredictable. Sue's about as unpredictable as the sunrise.The premise: Forced to find a nice Indian bride before his sister gets married, westernized Rahul Seth meets Sue in a bar. And in a deal stolen right out of "Pretty Woman" (1990), she agrees to pose as his bride in order to satisfy his mother.Well, it doesn't take a genius to figure out what will happen.It's obvious Mehta set out to make a lighthearted parody of romantic comedies and meld the genre into the suddenly popular Bollywood movies. I enjoy good Bollywood films. But in trying to find the best of both worlds, Mehta falls horribly short.The romantic-comedy aspect of the story doesn't work because the characters aren't all that interesting. The outcome's a foregone conclusion and both Khanna and Ray have such poorly defined characters that, although they look nice, there's nothing beneath the surface. Ray has screen presence to spare. But Mehta needed to give the poor girl a stronger role.The film's Bollywood angle does worse. What's fun about good Bollywood movies is that their songs are peppy and the song-and-dance sequences are fun to watch. Here, there's just one song-and-dance number - Sue's routine - that comes close to emulating a Bollywood number. The rest are unimaginative and completely forgettable.Mehta tries to gently poke fun of and respect Bollywood films and Indian culture. Unfortunately, she does a lousy job straddling that fine line. Subplots and characters, including a bit about men in drag and a grandmother who quotes Shakespeare, make no sense and one female character keeps popping up in various scenes repeating the same line of dialogue: "What a bunch of losers." Why? Mehta also tries to capture the Bollywood essence with some ridiculous supertitles, including one during a kiss that says, "Kiss to end all kisses. No debate." It's a horrid, desperate attempt at humor, trying to force laughs out of us because nothing in her story makes us chuckle.Intermingling western and eastern genres could have made for a fun, exotic, unpredictable film. But Mehta doesn't seem to quite know what she's doing. I'm certain the initial idea sounded terrific and the film likely looked good on paper. But it suffers when translated on to the screen."Bollywood/Hollywood" is the kind of film that makes "The Guru" (2002) seem like a masterpiece.

B/H stands up as a comedy AND an affectionate parody of Bollywood formula romances. The very title underscores the love-hate relationship many contemporary South Asian filmmakers feel about the Hollywood hegemon (see http://www.thefilmjournal.com/issue9/bollywood.html ). As such, it offers a sly reworking of the Pretty Woman formula, with an Indian twist – which raises the question of why Mehta's writers chose THAT Hollywood movie to build a comic plot upon. One answer requires examination of how women, especially young women, are depicted in Bollywood movies, which valorize – even enforce – Ramayana-like ideals of female purity versus the reality and problems of female identity in a modern world. Compare Mehta's Fire. The comedy and parody in B/H offers a different take on a Mehta theme. The Shakespeare-quoting grandmother reflects another aspect of the film's comic concern with the clash between tradition and modernity – here, the kind of British-inspired education the grandmother would have received, which often required students to memorize whole scenes from Shakespeare (whose plays were and are very popular in India). The comic turnabout at the end might be examined in light of equally sudden turnabouts in movies like DDLJ, the difference being that the main blocking character at the end of B/H is Sunita herself. Her father, minutes before, reverses himself BECAUSE he has seen movies like that one. A very "filmi" intrusion into the comic plot, but (true to Mehta's sympathies) it is Sunita herself who becomes – for a moment – the blocking character whose needs must be recognized. It's a matter of HER identity, albeit within the framework of Bollywood comic romance. As such, her situation offers, for the perceptive, a bittersweet comic take on a question Mehta raises more seriously elsewhere. B/H is a parody, yes, but it has a serious side as well. Think about this while you laugh.

First of all: I LOVE Bollywood movies. I know quite a lot of them. I think I got most of the references to Indian culture/Bollywood here. I loved the trailer and expected an exhilaratingly funny parody.But after having seen this movie, I just thought it was utter cr*p.The dialog had a terribly "papery" feel to them - as if someone without any sense of humor had tried to write something 'funny'. (Akshaye Khanna saying about his real-life brother Rahul 'He's like a brother to me' - oh, what a laugh!)And worst of all: the song/dance scenes are just bad - they are boring, badly directed and choreographed, and utterly uninspiring. This is probably the worst thing one can say about any movie that tries to have something to do with Bollywood...The only redeeming feature here is Lisa Ray who is indeed a very charming, lively actress. So it is even sadder that she had to star in such a bad-bad film....P.s.: 'Fire' was a quite good (albeit not perfect) movie though - maybe Deepa Mehta should stick to dramas instead?!