Movies - Bollywood

Home > Listing Index > Movies > Bollywood

	Movies - Bollywood

Bollywood is the informal name given to the popular Mumbai-based Hindi language film industry in India.

The name is a conflation of Bombay, the old name of Mumbai, and Hollywood, the center of the United States film industry. Though some purists deplore the name (arguing that it makes the industry look like a poor cousin to Hollywood), it seems likely to persist and now has its own entry in the Oxford English Dictionary.

Bollywood and the other major cinematic hubs (Tamil - Kollywood, Telugu - Tollywood, Bengali - also called Tollywood, Kannada, and Malayalam) constitute the broader Indian film industry, whose output is the largest in the world in terms of number of films produced and in number of tickets sold. Bollywood is a strong part of popular culture of not only India and the rest of the Indian subcontinent, but also of the Middle East, parts of Africa, parts of Southeast Asia, and among the South Asian diaspora worldwide.

Bollywood is also commonly referred to as "Hindi cinema", even though use of poetic Urdu words is fairly common. (Linguists would call both Hindi and Urdu variants of Hindustani. This is a political debate; see the articles on the various languages/dialects.) There has been a growing presence of English in dialogues and songs as well. It is not uncommon to see movies which feature dialogues with English words and phrases, even whole sentences. A few movies are also made in two or even three languages (either using subtitles, or several soundtracks).

Genre conventions

Most Bollywood films would be classified as musicals. Few movies are made without at least one song-and-dance number. However, they do not fit easily in the "musical" category as defined by Hollywood movies; they usually contain a great deal more in the way of plot and action than is found in the typical Hollywood musical.

Indian audiences expect full value for their money, with a good entertainer generally referred to as paisa vasool, (literally, "money's worth"). Songs and dances, love triangles, comedy and dare-devil thrills—all are mixed up in a three-hour-long extravaganza with an intermission. Such movies are called masala movies, after the Hindi word for a spice mixture, masala. Like masalas, these movies are a mixture of many things.

Bollywood plots have tended to be melodramatic. They frequently employ formulaic ingredients such as star-crossed lovers and angry parents, love triangles, corrupt politicians, kidnappers, conniving villains, courtesans with hearts of gold, long-lost relatives and siblings separated by fate, dramatic reversals of fortune, and convenient coincidences.

There have always been Indian films with more "artistic" aims and more sophisticated stories, both inside and outside the Bollywood tradition (see Indian art cinema). They often lost out at the box office to movies with more mass appeal.

Bollywood conventions are changing, however. A large Indian diaspora in English speaking countries, and increased Western influence at home, have nudged Bollywood films closer to Hollywood models. Film kisses are no longer banned; the once-ubiquitous "wet" scenes, with damp saris molded to an actress's curvaceous form, have been replaced by skin, pure and simple. Plots now tend to feature Westernized urbanites dating and dancing in discos rather than arranged marriages. Plots can be less melodramatic, more sophisticated. Some Indians think that this is "progress"; others miss the masala films of yore.

Bollywood song and dance

Bollywood film music is called filmi music (from Hindi, meaning "of films").

Songs from Bollywood movies are generally pre-recorded by professional playback singers, with the actors then lip synching the words to the song on-screen, often while dancing. While most actors, especially today, are excellent dancers, few are also singers. One notable exception was Kishore Kumar, who starred in several major films in the 1950s while also having a stellar career as a playback singer. K. L. Saigal, Suraiyya and Noor Jehan were also known as both singers and actors.

Of late, a few actors have again tried singing for themselves:

Amitabh Bachchan
, sang "Mere Angane Mein" in "Lawaaris" in the mid-80's, and has also sung in "Silsila", "Mahaan" "Toofan", Baghban, and Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham, as well as doing a duet with Adnan Sami in the song Kabhi Nahin (Never).
Aamir Khan took a turn singing "Kya Bolti Tu" in Ghulam but only because "the character had attitude that only Aamir could do justice to", according to director Vikram Bhatt.
In 2005, Abhishek Bachchan
sang a popular rap song in Rohan Sippy's film Bluffmaster
.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Bollywood ]

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article Bollywood; it is used under the GNU Free Documentation License. You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the GFDL.

Movies - Bollywood

Genre conventions

Bollywood song and dance

Searches on eBay

Related searches on eBay