Word: indianism
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...Eventually Jackie Chan and Jet Li, after years as stars in the East, made a dent in the U.S. market; and in 2005 the movie Bride and Prejudice, starring Bollywood princess Aishwarya Rai, tried unsuccessfully to anglicize the Indian musical. Yet there's been little foreign exchange between the two national cinemas. So far as I know, Chandni Chowk, which Warner Bros. is giving a fairly wide release in the States this week, represents the first A-budget crossbreeding of Bollywood and Hong Kong...
...oversimplify just a tad, the nods to Hong Kong culture are fun, the Indian bits much less so. Yuan, who's worked mostly in the States, has a lovely gravity otherwise missing from the enterprise. And it's always great to see Liu, who bounded onto the Hong Kong screen as the head-shaved star of such '70s action classics as Challenge of the Masters and The 36th Chamber of Shaolin; his lingering impact in these roles led ex-fanboy Quentin Tarantino to cast him as a mob potentate in Kill Bill, Vol. 1 and as the white-bearded...
...Indian stars aren't all bad either. Chakraborty exudes a fine and understandable exasperation at Sidhu's shenanigans; and 23-year-old Padukone, a former Model of the Year and the daughter of Indian badminton star Prakash Padukone, is up to the job of looking pretty while glycerine tears run down her perfect cheeks...
...child-man whose talisman is a potato imprinted with the elephant likeness of the Hindu god Ganesh; but the 6 ft. 1 actor is too big and imposing to lend vulnerability to this naif. Instead of being innocent, he just seems slow. (On the flight to China, an Indian man seated behind Sidhu asks him, in English, "Are you stupid?") Comedy is the most local of movie genres, difficult to translate from one culture to another. What's funny in Austria won't get a giggle in Australia. The star's antics may kill 'em in Mumbai, but this...
...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...