Uneasy Rhetoric

I don’t think I ever sat through an entire Bollywood movie, but I know I can sit for hours and watch the Indian music “videos” (many of which I think are just taken from the movies) on the International Channel.

Bollywood for the Skeptical includes an excellent history of Bollywood movies and the languages of Indian film. For example, did you know:

The film industry in Bombay, which is now called Mumbai for reasons which have more to do with regional and religious intolerance than with anticolonialism, is the biggest in the world. It makes almost double the number of movies and sells a billion more tickets each year than Hollywood.

Bollywood movies, as I understand it, are insufferably long, have many musical numbers, and generally use a small set of vastly overused stock plots. But, of course, Star Wars Episodes 1 and 2 were also insufferably long and used vastly overused plots. They would have benefited tremendously from a few song and dance numbers.

The best thing about this site? MP3s! You can download 19 Bollywood tunes to listen to while you read the excellent synopsis. Then you should immediately go to Netflix and add Lagaan to your Queue.

(via BoingBoing)