A Certain Slant of Light

YOU GUYS YOU GUYS, I have just seen the best movie ever! It is Lagaan, a four hour long Bollywood epic answer to David Lean, which tells the story of an Indian village which played a cricket match against the local British cantonment. If they win, the lagaan, or land tax, will be repealed for three years. If they lose...it will be tripled!

Our hero is Bhuvan, who does not believe in buttons. All of his shirts have them, but he never actually uses them. When we first meet him, he’s spent the morning scaring away the gazelles that the leader of the local British cantonment, Captain Evil Mustache (he has a real name, but also a patently evil mustache), is attempting to hunt.

Captain Evil Mustache is approximately as over-the-top evil as it is possible for a character to be while still actually seeming believable as a human being. Driven by overwhelming arrogance and an unpleasant penchant for toying with people, he is the sort of person who yearns for nothing more than high office but should never be put in charge of anything.

When Captain Evil Mustache catches Bhuvan in the act of scaring off the gazelles, he threatens to shoot Bhuvan on the spot. Bhuvan stares him down, his manly bosom heaving and his eyes flashing defiance in the face of death. Captain Evil Mustache, presumably disappointed by the fact that Bhuvan is not cowering in terror, shoots a helpless adorable bunny instead.

When they meet again later, after Bhuvan and his fellow villagers have come to dispute the yearly lagaan (which Captain Evil Mustache doubled, more or less for his own amusement), Captain Evil Mustache sees another opportunity to humiliate Bhuvan: he suggests the wager on the cricket match.

Bhuvan: I accept!
Everyone else in the village: What is this madness? We’re going to lose, and then we’re all going to starve to death!
Bhuvan: No! We must stand up to the oppressors! I am the spirit of the new India!
Gauri, the beautiful village girl: I believe in you, Bhuvan!

Captain Evil Mustache’s sister, Elizabeth, is appalled by her brother’s complete lack of a sense of fair play (and also filled with admiration by Bhuvan’s heaving, manly chest). She decides to teach the villagers the secret ways of cricket, and also falls in love with Bhuvan, which naturally requires a scene where she dashes around the strangely deserted cantonment in an unlikely and extremely fluttery dress singing “I’M IN LOOOOOOOOOOVE.”

(Alas for Elizabeth, Bhuvan is already in love with Gauri. In the end Elizabeth goes back to England, where she never marries because she holds her love for Bhuvan in her heart forever.)

But Gauri has another suitor, Lakha! Lakha is so enraged that Gauri loves Bhuvan rather than him that he goes to the British cantonment to tell Captain Evil Mustache that Elizabeth has been helping the villagers. Captain Evil Mustache (proving himself stunningly inept in this one facet of evil) attempts to forbid Elizabeth to visit the village again, which has approximately zero effect. More successfully, he recruits Lakha to join the village cricket team and act as his spy.

With Lakha, Bhuvan has achieved ten of the eleven players that he needs. But how will he find the eleventh?

Bhuvan: I have found us the perfect player. He was an arm problem that gives him an awesome curveball.
Everyone else in the village: But Bhuvan! He’s an untouchable!
Bhuvan: In the spirit of the new India, I embrace all men as my brothers! The untouchable shall play with us!

(Bhuvan’s cricket team, in keeping with the spirit of the new India, also contains a Sikh and a Muslim player.)

And then there is a cricket match! My understanding of cricket is approximately on par with my understanding of American football (which is to say basically nil), but the cricket scenes are nonetheless tense and exciting. The whole movie is pretty much made of awesome.

parallelsfic nominations are upon us again! parallelsfic is a summer fic exchange for Asian fandoms, kind of parallel to Yuletide? I think that’s where the names come from.

Last year I didn’t get to take part because it was basically all anime fandoms and I knew like two of them, which was sad. But this year! This year I was proactive and nominated basically every Asian fandom that I love, although this forced me to confront the tragic fact that I haven’t seen any new Bollywood movies for over a year. They do take a certain amount of time commitment.

(Part of the reason I always try to sign up for parallelsfic is because I yearn in my soul for a Dostana OT3 fic. I realize that Dostana itself ought to fulfill this yearning, but nonetheless I am greedy and want more. I mean, just look at this.



"But when you smile for me/the world seems all right..." Doesn’t that look amazing and fun and like it should have the most enormous fandom?)

Also also! I nominated all my favorite Studio Ghibli movies: My Neighbor Totoro, Ponyo - there appears to be no Ponyo fic in existence, even though it is full of underwater magic, I do not understand - Arriety, Kiki’s Delivery Service, Spirited Away, and Princess Mononoke.

(I also recently saw The Cat Returns, but I actually didn’t like that so much, because the heroine spends most of the movie being tossed helpless on the winds of Fate.)

ANYWAY, the point of this is that everyone should sign up, even if the only Asian fandoms you know are Studio Ghibli, because a Studio Ghibli exchange would be awesome.

Dhoondte Reh Jaoge is the Bollywood retelling of The Producers. I watched it because I figured it would be almost impossible for it not to be amazing.

Behold! The impossible has been accomplished! Dhoondte Reh Jaoge is terrible. They’ve taken out all the singing and dancing, they’ve taken the Max Bialystock character beyond grandiosely sleazy into “actually a terrible person” territory, and they made a half-hearted attempt to make the Leo Bloom character a sympathetic and upstanding young accountant. He’s gotten fired from six accounting firms for refusing to turn to blind eye to corruption.

He is, actually, sympathetic and upstanding for the first hour. And then suddenly, faced with the possible loss of his would-be actress girlfriend, Neha, he comes up with the “Make a ton of money out of a Bollywood flop!” plan. But in this version, the Bialystock analogue doesn’t have to talk him into it; indeed, our upstanding young accountant is the one who talks the sleazy producer into cheating his way into a stack of cash.

Apparently the filmmakers realized that this made him significantly less upstanding and sympathetic, so they tried to spin it so that he’s not making this flop for the money but so that Neha can play a starring role. (Neha bears little resemblance to Ulla, but is a fully realized character in her own right: Dhoondte Reh Jaoge’s one improvement on the original.)

This would be sweet, except that he wants Neha to star in this Bollywood flop so that her acting dreams will be destroyed forever and she’ll marry him and spend the rest of her life beaming adoringly at him while feeding their screaming children. I’m not exaggerating. He has a daydream about this exact scenario.

RUN AWAY WITH THE MOVIE STAR, NEHA! HE’S BETTER FOR YOU!

If Neha actually ran away with the movie star, the film might be salvaged. But she ends up with the accountant, so the whole thing’s a dead loss.

Bollywood movies! I've become hooked these last few weeks. I love them: I love the characters and the musical numbers and the explosive sense of fun and joyful lack of proportion and the fact that there are hundreds upon hundreds of them so I will never, never run out!

I am not so in love with the fact that the short ones are two and a half hours long, and the long ones - don't let's even talk about the long ones. But without the length they couldn't have the epic musical numbers and all the fun secondary characters, so I've made my peace with it.

Some reviews!

( Dostana. Which is awesome! )

( Dil Se. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH. )

( Dil Bole Hadippa! The exclamation point is part of the title. )