Tuesday, December 7, 2010

A Night at the Movies

I wanted to see a Bollywood movie while in India, the Indian style. So I had asked Suneeta if she would like to go to movie with me. She had not seen any movie in a theater for over a year, so she was happy to go. Her husband works so late that we left him out. So it was three of us, Suneeta, her teenage son and me. We gave the task of choosing the movie to the teenager.

I want to give a little background for those who do not know my experience with Hindi movies. When I was in High School we used to live in an Army Camp. There was an open air movie theater just for the army families. My dad paid a monthly fee and we all could go as often as we wanted. The theater was about two hundred yards from our house. The theater showed three different movies every week. It would screen a Hindi movie four times a week, an English movie once a week and another regional Indian language movie once a week. I used to write down the title of every movie that I saw there. I still have the list. When the list went to 150, I decided to quit. All the Hindi movies had one story, the same story in all movies. A man falls in love with a woman. The villain comes in between. There is fist fight and the hero gets his woman. (They were supposed to be boys and girls, but the parts were played by over-thirty actors.)

So in the last thirty years I have not been able to sit through many Hindi movies. I think I have seen one, because I was with my brothers and their wives in New Jersey.

So I was expecting another one of those boy meets girl and triumphs over the villain story. It was a pleasant surprise to see this movie about a quadriplegic man who is asking the court to allow him to end his life. There was not much of a story line but it was very well done. It had only a few songs at appropriate times and no fist fights! The movie lasted only two and half hours. Not the usual four hour movie with thirteen songs.

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