Welcome everyone to Episode Three of "Information Underground". Here today are Deepgeek (PAUSE) and Klaatu (PAUSE); as well as myself, your master-of-ceremonies for this episode, your host with most who never bosts, lostnbronx! But, speaking of Klaatu -- Klaatu, you there, buddy? This one goes out to you. ==================== I'M GOIN' BOLLYWOOD! 'Cause, you see, I love Bollywood movies. That's right. I love the pagent of them. I love the romance, and the acting and the singing and the dancing. No, I don't generally understand them without subtitles, since I'm monolingual; and I don't fool myself into thinking they are being subtitled with such deft skill that I'm actually catching all the nuances of the dialogue and the lyrics. So what is there for me to love? Well, before I start into this, there are likely a lot of people who've never actually seen a Bollywood, or Bollywood-style movie. For such listeners, a tar.gz description might be in order: in a nutshell, Bollywood refers to that particular segment of the Indian film industry, centered in and around the city of Mumbai, that specializes in mostly Hindi-language films; films which often feature lavish musical numbers, formulaic plots, beautiful actors and actresses, and a general focus on escapism and pop fantasy. Now, that is a hideous over-simplification. So much so, that those who ARE familiar with Indian motion pictures are strongly encouraged to ignore what I've just said, in favor of what they already know. I'm not going to analyze, critique, or explore the very rich history of Indian cinema, here today. I'm not going explain how this industry as a whole, and certain bright gems released by it over the years, have been incresingly embraced by filmgoers the world over, and film MAKERS right here in the good ol' U.S. of A. No, MY goal is much more modest: I'm going to tell you why I like them -- and why I think you should too. First though, bear with me. Bollywood movies are big, big money. And individual performers from within that sphere are some of the most popular and well-known people in the history of the human race. That is not hyperbole. Shahrukh Khan, likely the biggest Bollywood star of all time, has, according to Wikipedia, but I've heard it from other sources as well, a fanbase that numbers in the billions. Think about that for just a second: not just people who have heard of him, people that LOVE him; this one man -- still living, still acting, NOT a leader of nations, NOT a religious figure -- he is adored and could be recognized on sight by one sixth to possibly one third of the population of the planet right at this moment. If Arnold Schwarzenegger could win the govenorship of California after throwing his hat into the ring only two months before the election, imagine what THIS guy could do in India and other countries, if he so chose; imagine what his fanbase would support. There are politicians and tyrants all over the world who would give absolutely anything to have that kind of influence. So I heartily reject any offhand dismissal about the presumed unimportance of the Bollywood industry to the world as a whole, and even to mainstream America: because if something matters to a enough people, then it inevitably matters to EVERYONE on some level or other. But, I digress. This is supposed to be about me. Why do I like them? Being an American, growing up immersed in American culture as I have been, growing up as a fan of the movies, and therefore, as a fan of Hollywood, fantasy has been my meat and drink. Oh, I was a reader, too, certainly. Much of this applies to novels and comics and even radio shows -- all things I love dearly in their own ways. But it's the magic of the movies that I'm talking about here: the idea that you could escape the mundanity of the world, simply by buying a ticket, or turning on a machine in your living room; that you could follow particular characters across entire franchises of filmed stories; that you could chart a beautiful starlet's rise and fall through the expression of her art; or be catipulted into a night of eager talk and inspiration with friends who watched the same movie with you, waxing 'til dawn on the mysteries of the world...it is this essense, this modern answer to the sorcery of old, to the eternal questions of, "Who am I?", "Who would I like to be?" This is cinema to me. But, of course, it ain't ALWAYS this way. In fact, if you've been fed on the bland diet of mainstream American media, it ain't been this way for a really long time. If you turn on that machine in your livingroom, and all there is to inspire you on that screen are has-beens and wanna-be's dancing, and please-won'tcha-make-me-a-stars singing their very little hearts out, or even idiots closed inside a box with a camera turned on them...if these things are how your hours -- your irreplaceable hours -- are spent...then your dreams are anemic, and you are dying inside without even noticing. I ask you this: what is wrong with a better way, a better life? Obviously nothing, right? It's laudible. So, then, isn't the dream of a better life, perhaps a different life -- maybe one a little foreign to us -- isn't that better than the dream of an empty one perfected? Better than being a "star" in a place devoid of culture or true importance? Better than wanting, needing to be the biggest fly on the pile of rancid crap that is modern American media? We are stale. We are day-old. We are hard and brittle and crumbling. We look at endless remakes on the big screen starring generic blonds with fake boobs and botox cheeks, or fools on the small screen, chasing monsters and phantoms, and we call that entertainment. But that's the ironic part right there -- because those fools already caught them. They HAVE the ghosts ensnared, week after week after week. So, I say, hooray for Bollywood. Why? Because it ain't THAT shit. Sure, it's fake. Everyone is beautiful. Everyone can sing and dance like an angel. The pathos is heavy, the comedy is forced, the romance is thick enough to cut. And I say hooray. The production values are sometimes low, but the energy is high, and we can wink and nod our way past the continuity problems until the credits roll. Hooray. It's fantasy, like it used to be. Like Hollywood used to be. It's a better world, where it all works out in the end...or, maybe not, but don't we look GOOD, looking sad? Style, class. They used to mean a lot. A man in a well-cut suit used to be something to LOOK at. Something to admire. Something YOU really wanted to be -- at least until the lights came up. All that's gone now if all you watch is modern American media. If you study film history, you can feel it again, but that kind of fantasy is locked in time, forever out of reach of the present life. But Bollywood is alive and well and growing. And the men are sharp. The women, oh the women are classy and fine. And they sing and they dance and they fall in love -- and for a time...'til the lights come up...so do we. It's old fashioned, and brand new. It's familiar, and strange, and exciting, and tragic, and silly -- and one HELL of a way to spend a couple hours, when the alternative is game shows labelled as reality; and talking heads puking up partisan poison; and big budget CGI extraveganzas lacking heart and soul and plot. It's a better world. They're better movies. By and large. In general. There's lots of trash too. No perfection on Earth, and all that. But when they fly, Bollywood movies soar. They scrape the stars, and they take their fans along for the ride. They sweep you away. You don't sit and wish they were something else, that the makers had done something else, something more entrancing, more interesting. But good lord, I think like THAT nearly every time I see a new Hollywood movie. You need to watch indie cinema in this country now, to feel that old magic. You need to look at low-budget film making, because it is constraint -- mostly of the purse strings -- that tends to free the mind of the cinematic artist. And one could say, therefore, that the constraints of Indian life, the clash of the old with the new, of the foreign with the hereditary, of the best and the worst of a nation just stepping up as a world power; you could point to these things and see lots of fodder for fertile imaginations. But maybe I have one myself. Maybe I'm deluded, and damaged by my love for movies, by the very fantasies I cherish. But if I am, I'm not alone. Oh, man, not even close!