Bollywood coming of age...Intellectual value vs Entertainment Value

Three recent Bollywood productions got me thinking...what an amazing variety of cinematic experience is on offer from Bollywood....and surprisingly all three did pretty well at the Box office...The three movies i am referring to "Chalo Dilli", "Delhi Belly" and "Singham"....have completely different style of narrative, treatment and creative inputs (read actors/directors)...

while "Chalo Dilli" is a small budget road movie, with no big star cast to boast of and relies primarily on an excellent script and equally excellent acting by lead actors Vinay Pathak and Lara Dutta..."Delhi Belly" on the other hand, set in urban India is a black comedy...and best part is it is situational comedy...its easy to relate with characters in both these movies..."Singham" obviously is in a different league ...characters are larger than life...but it does appeal....Now i could be part of a small section of audience, who enjoyed watching all three...common perception is if you like uber cool "Delhi Belly", you cant like over the top "Singham"....anyways that's not the point i am trying to make...my point is explained below.....

There is always a thin line between being critical and being cynical (see how well they rhyme :) ) ...sometimes that line is breached and we deal with possibility of critics sounding like cynics (with reference to movie reviews).....I often read excellent commentaries on Indian issues by a US based Indian journalist Aseem Chhabra which  gets published every Sunday in MUMBAI MIRROR.....i wouldn't say that i am a fan but i must admit that his commentaries do offer a refreshing outside perspective (may be it has something to do with our fascination for anything foren...be it a suncream lotion or recognition of our art and creative geniuses)...so may be Mr Chabra has that unfair advantage of being a Indian journalist on foreign shore....

So coming back to the point, recently post release of Bollywood blockbuster "Singham", Aseem literally tore apart the movie and genre of Bollywood masala films in his weekly column in Mumbai Mirror....which left me thinking why do critics use different standards for analysing a bollywood movies vs a hollywood flick......i am particularly intrigued by use of different lenses by critics while offering reviews for hollywood/bollywood productions...so what if action is over the top..so what if background score is at your face...we call it bollywood action...one might want to call it bollywood masala which also works fine...after all we dont always want to watch "Intelligent Cinema" ....also at the grassroots of cinema is an artist's desire to entertain and audience desire to get entertained....so i guess as a critic when you write about a movie, first question to be asked is Does it entertain? and yes its a tricky one as entertainment can mean different things to different people....so one should look at target audience....and undoubtedly Box office collection can answer the first question to a large extent...a week after Aseem's postmortem of "Singham"...Indian newspapers were flooded with reports of "Singham making it to TOP FIVE bollywood grossers of all time along with 3 Idiots, Ghajini, Dabang etc.."  so ultimately Rohit Shetty and Ajay Devgan had the last laugh :)

 Doesn't Hollywood has a fair share of such so called "Action Masala" movies....what would you call a "Transformers series" or a "spider man"...not to mention mindless broomstick tricks series "Harry Potter"...which are given "cult movie" status by may be the same critics.These are Hollywood blockbusters and will remain so...because they have managed to strike a chord with a particular set of audience...if spiderman is larger than life so is Bajirao Singham (actually Singham is even better as he doesn't have to rely on borrowed spider web to beat up the bad guys :) ) ...so the message is its not always "Intellectual Value" of a movie a critic should be worried about ...look beyond and ASK is there an "Entertainment Value"...if yes then go ahead and don't be shy in giving stars....for who knows that could prove to be next top grosser of Bollywood...........