Word: chandni
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Read TIME's Chandni Chowk to China Review: Bollywood Goes East
...Read TIME's Chandni Chowk to China Review: Bollywood Goes East
...results of this genetic experiment are mixed. Chandni Chowk (named for a working-class neighborhood in Delhi) is probably a decent sampler for Americans who've never seen a full-out Bollywood musical, since it goes heavy on the action scenes and light on the big dance numbers. The movie does include other conventions of the genre, such as the need of a young man to both rebel against his father figure and please him, and the melodramatic abasing of the protagonist; but these are familiar from Hollywood films, so they won't strike the uneducated viewer as unduly weird...
...plot should remind you of Kung Fu Panda, last year's excellent DreamWorks cartoon about the clumsy bear, employed in his father's noodle shop, who becomes a martial-arts expert and saves his village from a villainous tiger. Chandni Chowk is more a Kung Fu Pandit, with the oaf-hero Sidhu (Akshay Kumar), chopping away in the shop of his Dada (Mithun Chakraborty). Some visiting Chinese folks ID him as the incarnation of their nation's greatest warrior, Liu Sheng, and think Sidhu is just the fellow to rid their village of the oppressive Hojo (Gordon Liu). Accompanied...
...movie finally comes to life when one of the main characters is suddenly killed. That cues the old-Bollywood sentiment and family imperatives; and the complex plot picks up narrative steam. Again, you've seen it all before - last summer, when the hero was a panda. Chandni Chowk thus has the feel of one of many Indian glosses on American films, not of something fresh and foreign. For a really thrilling amalgam of Bollywood and Hong Kong, I'm still waiting...