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Nah. I know nothing about the glorious game going in, but that's part of the plot—the ragtag band of misfit villagers know nothing about it either, going in. You'll learn as they do.
Caught this on video some months ago and found it hugely entertaining: in many ways it's an old-fashioned Hollywood movie, refracted through an Indian sensibility. The aforementioned "ragtag band of misfits" (each representing a different, well-defined ethnic, religious, or social "type," of course) is an old Hollywood standby, and the way they Learn To Put Aside Their Differences For The Common Good, the way they Realize We're All In This Together, is straight out of the playbook for any 1940s war movie. The fact that it is a musical, like so many of the films of Hollywood's "golden era," reinforces the fact.
The villain is a fifth-rate Billy Zane simulacrum, in full-on Titanic moustache-twirling mode: the golden-hearted Englishwoman is a fifth-rate Minnie Driver impersonator. It's cute.
It's relentlessly good-natured and fun, very much a rip-roaring, essentially apolitical populist entertainment, and without a mean bone in its body. Even the English—well, some of them, anyway—came off as honorable at heart, if misguided.
I watched it with a huge grin on my face throughout, and indeed laughed out loud at the naive sweetness of it.
The music is indeed very good.
One odd cognitive-dissonance moment for me, though, was when one of the Anglo actors joined in a song, singing in English (the film is multi-lingual, switching from Hindi to English sometimes in the space of a single sentence). It seemed normal and natural for Indian actors in a Bollywood film to burst into Hindi songs, but for an Anglo character to do so was jolting to me.
That probably says more about me than about the movie itself. |
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