Word: bollywood
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...number of Indians, led by prominent Bollywood figures, have condemned the movie for depicting India as a poor, dirty, lawless, and backward nation. Amitabh Bachchan, perhaps Bollywood’s most successful living actor, said that the movie “causes pain and disgust among nationalists and patriots” because of its unwarranted portrayal of India as a “Third World dirty underbelly developing nation...
...poor, have virtually no credibility on this issue. Poverty may be far removed from their Indian experiences, but a different world exists not far from their pampered villas. Indeed, Bombay’s own Dharavi slum, home to one million people, is just miles from the Bollywood studios that so regularly exclude any mention of those who have been left behind...
Second, it’s clear that Bachchan and his ilk have thought little about what it means to actually produce art, a self-evident fact given the state of most Bollywood films. While there is hardly agreement about the “purpose” of art—if art has a “purpose” at all—the raging debate for the past half century has been about whether art should serve as a medium of protest or simply a psychologically-credible reflection of society. The writer James Baldwin famously upbraided some novelists...
...While Slumdog does succumb to this weakness, it compares favorably to the average Bollywood flick, which lacks both narrative credibility and discernible substance. The result is that a nation with so many challenges and so vibrant a film culture produces so many movies that feature meaningless plots punctuated only by feel-good song-and-dance routines. Indeed, it’s not that the movies fail to penetrate the surface—it’s that they don’t even capture it. And so it has fallen to talented British producers to make movies that actually bring...
...film generated controversy in India even before its release there. A Jan. 13 blog entry by Bachchan, in which he asked if the film would have generated such hype if it had been made by an Indian director, led to an avalanche of Bollywood stars and critics taking positions for and against him. On Jan. 22, some 40 slum dwellers protested outside the Mumbai home of Anil Kapoor, who plays the Millionaire host in the film. (The actual Indian show's original host was Bachchan, followed by Khan.) The protesters held banners reading...