Bollywood, please wake up

When I watched my first Bollywood movie (‘Salaam Namaste’) in a cinema hall, I was 21(not so surprising considering the fact that I was born and brought up in Chennai). Ever since then I’ve been watching a lot of them, and most of the movies were of colossal disappointment to me.

India is the largest producer of films in the world, even bigger than Hollywood. Bollywood is the largest industry within India and it has a lot of money – a LOT! But where does the money go to? To make films that manages to get themselves off the screens in less than a week?

I’d like to make one thing clear though. I’m not taking about making Oscar or National award winning movies here. I’m just talking about movies that are entertaining and at the same time do not insult the intelligence of the audience. I’m talking about making movies like ‘Rock On’, ‘Om Shanti Om’, ‘3 idiots’, ‘Kaminey’ with a considerable frequency and not just once a year.

IMO, one of the biggest problems with Bollywood movies is that they fail to connect with the common Indian. Their movies are about rich Indians or Indians in other countries (“NRI”). Why is this constant effort to ignore the common? All romance seems to be happening outside India. Unless this “NRI” obsession is funded by the tourism departments of other countries, why not make movies about couples here? Why not more of ‘Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Naa’? I understand that there is a huge potential in foreign markets, but don’t you have more than half a billion of consumers here? Bollywood’s target audience seems to be young and well-to-do Indians. But the movie industry should work on volumes and not on high net worth individuals since a person is likely see a movie only once.

The only build up to the movies are about bikinis, six-pack-abs, lip-locks, intimate scenes or some weird costumes by Manish Malhotra. Actors talk about how comfortable they felt while doing an intimate scene and not about how they acted. No discussions about the technology, actors, music etc. Sad sad situation.

A lot of promising directors came up during this decade. Ashutosh Gowarikar, Rakeysh Omprakash, Farhan Aktar, Pradeep Sarkar – but they have struggled to beat their own benchmarks and have faltered in their recent attempts. Even Maniratnam has resorted to mediocrity since his entry to Bollywood. Vishal Bharadwaj (Omkara, Kaminey), Anurag Kashyap (Black Friday, DevD) and Rajkumar Hirani (Munnabhai Seriens, 3 idiots) seem to be from those rare breed of directors who have broken rules and have given us some ground breaking movies consistently.

As of now, the safe bet seems to be watching SRK or Aamir Khan, because these guys manage to pick scripts that end up being entertaining movies and movies that a whole family can watch. Akshay Khanna is suffering from over exposure and his comedies are not fun anymore. The kind of movies made by Bollywood make ‘My Name is Khan’ look like Oscar material.

Good movies do come sometimes, but they are out of the theaters in a flash before I could even make a decision whether to watch it or not after reading the reviews. ‘Udaan’ came and flew away quickly before I could give it a try.

And those awards! Not a single award ceremony that awards Bollywood movies seems to appreciate good movies. If movies such as ‘Koi Mil Gaya’ and ‘Veer Zaara’ win the best picture awards and movies such as ‘Love aaj kal’, ‘Dhoom 2’ get nominated for the same, what can you say about these state of affairs? It is either pure politics or the sheer ignorance of the judges. Or there are no other good movies at all.

Everyone keeps saying that Bollywood is growing up. It indeed is growing up. Nowadays, one can see more professionalism in terms of marketing, finance, contracts, profit sharing etc. More movie production houses are in place rather than individual producers. Good signs of better things to come. But the professionalism on the financial/marketing domains is not being balanced by a similar growth in story telling or script writing. This imbalance is causing the power of money to decide the fate of art. Recently, a film marketer (who came to our college) commented on how marketers are first showed the script of the movie so that adjustments could be made for non-ticketing profits. Good from the business point of view, but curbs director’s freedom.

There is one more thing that is killing the industry – contracts. Rani Mukherjee’s contract with Yash Raj Films (YRF) destroyed her career and many similar artists. Pradeep Sarkar, who made a promising debut with Parineeta, has not been able to come up with a convincing script ever since his contract with YRF. There seems to be too much contracts signed up which is shaking the fundamentals of movie making freedom. A director ends up choosing the contracted artists/technicians of the production house rather than people who will fit the role.

Every human being would have a interesting story to tell and we Indians are billions in number! The story is right out there. We just have to start looking for them. Bollywood should at least start adapting books/novels similar to what Hollywood does.