From movies to trailers

I've been watching a fair bit of TV these days. The reasons are that I don't have a laptop or a PC at home I can surf aimlessly on, and that watching TV is easier than reading. Reading a book requires me to concentrate fully on it, TV on the other hand can be and often is, watched on autopilot.

My favourite part of TV fare is movie trailers. I have tried to develop an interest in news but I can never stay on a news channel long enough for it to develop any news story in full. That's one reason why when everyone was making fun of Headlines Today and its start anchor Jhujhar Singh who had a massive lisp that somehow was ignored when he was signed on as a newsreader, I actually liked the channel. It did not think of itself as a serious news channel devoted to upholding high journalistic standards and gave little more than headlines in two-minute quanta. I was also captivated by Jhujhar Singh's delivery. In fact, my father and I marvelled at how Headlines Today could have employed a newsreader who found his own name a tongue-twister and how in spite of his clear and pronounced lisp, Jhujhar Singh dared to dream of becoming a newsreader and was able to realize his aim in style.

My Headlines Today days are long past. Now I limit myself to flipping between Channel [V] and MTV and assorted Sony's, Star's etc with a dash of VH1 now and then unless there's a great movie on, which is never. I like Channel V's 'Bai' and MTV's “Sorry for the Interruption” although I find “Bakra” offensive or/and irritating at times. Between them, these channels, with the honourable exception of VH1 which seems devoted to Hip Hop for which I have no patience, show movie trailers nearly through the day.

I like movie trailers because they showcase the best parts of movies and are short and snappy. I've often marvelled at how movies that I know I will hate if I get down to watching them have such great teasers. I believe that although the level of Bollywood films is definitely on an insane slide down, the quality of packaging, production values, and especially the quality of trailers, teasers and the entire publicity and post-production machinery is world-class. Our movies often have excellent art direction (Lagaan), brilliant teasers/trailers (Mangal Pandey), posters and marketing (Bunty and Babli, or any Yashrajland movie). If only the movies themselves were as good! But I suppose one can't have it all.

The above paragraphs are simply a background to what I really wanted to say: I've been watching lots of movie trailers and while I would normally enjoy them in the way that one can enjoy advertisements knowing fully well that the products being advertised can in no way match the glitzy ads, I have started to get irritated by one aspect of movies that is often given prominence in trailers. That aspect is the presence of tens of scantily clad white models gyrating in inane videos along with our heroes. That these videos are completely irrelevant to the storyline is expected. How many scripts actually need yet another song on the beach with imported extras in bikinis?

As long as the import of white women was limited to a couple of songs, they were an effective way of breaking the clutter of mediocre songs. Now, however, every film has these nubile nymphets dancing to Sanjay Dutt's laughable (as opposed to funny) flute antics, Himesh Reshammiya's soulful nasal melodies or even Paresh Rawal's grating number in Naseeruddin Shah's directorial debut. Speaking of which, if the overplay of the song is anything to go by, the film can only be horrendous. Someone wrote somewhere recently in a review of Krrish (or is it Kkrish?) that the government should pay Naseeruddin Shah some annual salary so he doesn't do tripe like Krrish for money. I hope for his sake Shah's film is a success. Surely Shah knows Paresh Rawal, despite his talents as an actor, does not make for a pretty picture. Surely he can see that every film has twenty white women dancing around the hero to words they can't understand but repeat. In fact, the better ones among what must be a limited East-European talent pool must have been booked because the women around Rawal are sadly, at best plain.

I was watching trailers the other day and in about five minutes saw four different films all with near-identical trailers. Each had a hero or heroes lip-syncing rubbish and utterly unremarkable white scantily clad women dancing suggestively around them. They don't break the clutter, they contribute to them.

Yana Gupta was a novelty when she just came in. Today, however, every unemployed white woman willing to shed some clothes for Bollywood's hypocritical camera can walk into a Bollywood studio and earn a bit part in a Bollywood film. This hypocrisy is age-old. We can lust after (and simultaneously bemoan the lack of morals and inhibitions of) white women but will react with shock and thrilled outrage when Rakhi Sawant does the same on TV. Our heroes can romance (with all attendant meanings) all the white women they want, but Indian girls come in only two varieties – the easy and the chaste. Maybe it's time Indian women proved Bollywood wrong. :)