Say what you will but India is undoubtedly the CMC of the world, the Crap Movie Capital of the world.
Yes, we can already hear the tipsy, patriotic yokels coming out of the woodwork yelling out – Oh, you are not aware of the cornucopia of alternate movies that never make it to the U.S., you only watch the Bollywood or Kollywood balderdash and reach tenuous conclusions, you only love Hollywood films, yada yada yada. All drivel, all the time.
Count it any way you want but the crap-to-quality ratio of Indian movies is at least 95-5.
The centrality of Bollywood or Kollywood is a lack of imagination, the absence of even passable acting, shameless theft and fans with IQ below 70. End result – Non-actors like Abhishek Bachchan, John Abraham, Ajith, Vijay, Salman Khan, Aishwarya Rai, Nayantara, Deepika Padukone, Bipasha Basu and non-filmmakers like David Dhawan, Goldie Behl, Subhash Ghai, Murugadoss and Prabhu Deva rule the roost.
Given our frustration with Indian movies, we’ve taken to watching foreign language movies lately. And the results are mostly gratifying.
We recently viewed a Danish movie After the Wedding a.k.a. Efter brylluppet with a connection to India.
And what a fine movie it turned out to be. Most definitely worth your time and the DVD rental fee.
India Connection
Although After the Wedding (directed by Susanne Bier) is set mostly in Denmark, the movie begins and ends in India.
After the Wedding starts with Jacob (Mads Mikkelsen), an English teacher and manager of an orphanage in India, ladling out food plates from the back of a pickup truck. While the kids at the orphanage are Indian, Jacob is a Dane.
With funding for the orphanage in a precarious state, a letter arrives from Denmark offering the possibility of assistance but insisting that Jacob must go there in person for the meeting with the donors.
Back in Denmark
A reluctant Jacob heads to his home-country Denmark to obtain the funding but not before promising young Pramod (a young kid he’s close to) that he’ll be back in eight days, in time for the little boy’s birthday.
In Denmark, Jacob meets the orphanage’s potential benefactor Jorgen (Rolf Lassgard), a billionaire with a nice wife and three children.
After a cursory and indifferent look at the video of the orphanage that Jacob has brought along, Jorgen invites him to a wedding Continue reading »
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