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Tashan has fared badly at the U.S. box office with one of the poorest openings for a Bollywood movie in recent months.
Starring Akshay Kumar, Saif Ali Khan and Kareena Kapoor, Tashan comes from Yash Raj Films.
For the opening weekend (April 25-27, 2008), Tashan came in at No-24 with a gross of $301,226.
Average gross per theater for Tashan, which opened in 75 theaters, was $4,016.
Tashan did better than Aaja Nachle in opening gross but worse than Continue reading »
Having conquered the world’s markets, China’s countless millions have now embarked on a new mission – to master the English language, the global language of art and commerce.
The New Yorker has an interesting piece on the Chinese’ obsession with English in the latest issue:
China has been in the grip of “English fever,†as the phenomenon is known in Chinese, for more than a decade. A vast national appetite has elevated English to something more than a language: it is not simply a tool but a defining measure of life’s potential. China today is divided by class, opportunity, and power, but one of its few unifying beliefs—something shared by waiters, politicians, intellectuals, tycoons—is the power of English. Every college freshman must meet a minimal level of English comprehension, and it’s the only foreign language tested. English has become an ideology, a force strong enough to remake your résumé, attract a spouse, or catapult you out of a village. Linguists estimate the number of Chinese now studying or speaking English at between two hundred million and three hundred and fifty million, a figure that’s on the order of the population of the United States. English private schools, study gadgets, and high-priced tutors vie for pieces of that market. The largest English school system, New Oriental, is traded on the New York Stock Exchange.
Having watched the relentless determination of the Chinese Continue reading »
For the sake of the honor of Tamil Nadu and 77 million Tamils worldwide, we hope that the reports of Ajith’s Billa being screened on May 10 at the Cannes Film Festival turn out to be false.
Featuring the two non-actors Ajith and Nayantara, Ajith’s Billa (the remake of the old Billa starring Rajinikanth) is one of the ugliest Tamil movies we’ve seen in several decades.
As if watching Ajith’s Billa was not bad enough, now comes the horrifying news that this horror show is going to be showcased at the upcoming Cannes Film Festival.
All these years, we thought the Cannes Film Festival was the occasion to showcase high-art not serve as a bastion of low-fart.
Upon hearing of the Ajith’s Billa-for-Cannes report, we were reminded of what the British author Theodore Dalrymple wrote in the book Our Culture, What’s Left of It:
To be a man of artistic taste now requires that you have no standards at all to be violated: which, as Ortega y Gasset said, is the beginning of barbarism.
When there are far better movies like Mozhi and Sathum Podaathay, it’s an affront to all notions of fair play to send garbage like Billa to an international film festival. It’s like awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to monsters like Continue reading »
(Tashan Fares Miserably at U.S. Box Office)Â
Even the inmates in the asylum or a tramp on the Mumbai streets would have made a better movie than this Friday’s Bollywood release Tashan.
What in the heck were the bozos at Yash Raj thinking when they unleashed a trashy movie like Tashan!
Utterly bereft of anything worthwhile and an ugly amalgam of bad logic, rotten story, pitiful acting, ordinary photography and ear-damaging music, Tashan is a complete horror show, the likes of which have not been seen in Bollywood in a long, long time.
And the architect of this monumental disaster is Vijay Krishna Acharya, who takes credit (it should really be discredit) for Tashan’s story, screenplay, dialogs and direction.
Even after making movies for over eight decades, the cavalcade of Bollywood idiots has yet to realize that story, screenplay, dialogs and direction are separate departments requiring the full-time attention of separate people.Â
This clown Vijay Krishna Acharya has penned a story so bizarrely bad that it’ll surely be Continue reading »
If Gayathri Sreekanth undertakes her ophthalmological work with the same callous carelessness as her shoddy biography of Tamil film star Rajinikanth (The Name is Rajinikanth), there must be a lot of unfortunate souls moving about in Chennai with blurred vision, or worse, without any vision.
Besides being a pathetic attempt at hagiography, almost every page in the book The Name is Rajinikanth is riddled with spelling errors, grammatical errors, factual errors or arguments that are sheer nonsense.
As every page in this so-called biography amply attests, Gayathri Sreekanth is a literary bimbette who has no more than a passing acquaintance with the English language. If the task of writing in English was too heavy a cross for this dolt to bear, she should have stuck to Tamil and got the book translated.
Great biographies by authors like Carl Sandburg (Abraham Lincoln), William Manchester (Winston Churchill) and David McCullough (Harry Truman) firmly set their subjects in an age and then weave a fine tale that brings both the age and the individual to life.
Neither Rajinikanth nor his milieu, be it the superstar’s early days in Bangalore, his later years in neighboring Chennai or the Tamil movie industry, come to life Continue reading »
U Me Aur Hum, Ajay Devgan’s ugly copy of the fine Hollywood flick The Notebook, has crashed at the U.S. box office in its second week (Please click here for U Me Aur Hum opening weekend gross collection data.)
For the April 18-20 weekend, gross collections for U Me Aur Hum fell 73.3% to $171,503.
Besides starring in U Me Aur Hum, Ajay Devgan also directed and produced this mediocre movie.
In the overall ranking at the U.S. box office, U Me Aur Hum slipped to #29 for the second weekend from #19 for the opening weekend. Total gross for U Me Aur Hum amounted to $903,680.
Overall, U Me Aur Hum has not fared well at the U.S. box office compared to some recent Bollywood films. Neither has Krazzy 4, which has done much worse.
Eros was the distributor for both U Me Aur Hum and Krazzy 4 in the U.S.
Take a look at how some recent Bollywood films fared in the second weekend at the U.S. box office:
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