Word: bollywood
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...work these days, there's a good chance the computer network that carries your precious data is being maintained by an Indian computer engineer in Bangalore or Bombay. It's also likely that this engineer spends his days off-assuming his employers allow him any-watching the latest Bollywood movies. No reason to worry about any of this, right? There isn't as long as you don't read Hari Kunzru's new novel, Transmission, in which an unhappy Indian programmer is driven by job insecurity and his obsession with a Bollywood starlet to write a vicious computer virus...
...Lakshya?which opened last Friday everywhere from Mumbai to Kuala Lumpur, London to New York?looks destined to be this year's big Bollywood blockbuster. If so, the key to its success will be the fearless and fastidious professionalism that Akhtar has brought to an industry too often doomed by technical sloppiness and a numbing lack of originality. Unusually for Bollywood, where directors often turn out five movies a year, Akhtar took more than two years to bring the script and music (both by his father, Javed) to the screen. Breaking with the norm again, Akhtar insisted on a continuous...
...slacker (Hrithik Roshan) who joins the Indian army on a whim and winds up finding heroic purpose fighting Pakistani troops who crossed into Indian-controlled Kashmir in 1999. The tragic context of a conflict that has cost up to 70,000 lives offers ample opportunity for that staple of Bollywood film: copious melodrama. Akhtar isn't so radical as to depart from such essential ingredients of the genre: song and dance, boy meets girl, and plenty of tears are all there. But everything is deftly updated. In the first of three dance sequences, for example, Roshan puts on a display...
...movie looks different, too. Popp brilliantly captures the starkness of Ladakh, the endless dustbowl valleys and vast plains of worthless desert that form Kashmir's unforgiving battlegrounds. As for the performances, Akhtar asked for, and got, very un-Bollywood and uniformly excellent understatement. Roshan, with his self-deprecating humor and subtle emotional depth, sets a new standard for the industry. "I went round to [Akhtar's] house to talk about the character just before we started shooting," says Roshan. "The meeting lasted maybe two minutes. Farhan said, 'I want you to be you. Nothing more, nothing less.' It's very...
...Indians will find the chest-bursting patriotism of the climax a little overdone. And at 2 hours and 40 minutes, Lakshya might have benefited from some more editing. But after waiting so long for a Bollywood movie this fresh and ambitious, it's easy to forgive a few victory reels...