Hiatus

 I am going on vacation.  New reviews in January!

It's October. That can only mean one thing.

 In the fall, a young man's fancy turns to thoughts of bhoots.  So does mine, though I'm not really young anymore.  It's time for our annual Bhooty Call, a month-long celebration of the ghosts of Bollywood. 

The "Other" tag

 You may have noticed that I'm throwing in a few reviews of old horror movies lately.  They don't really fit with our theme or mission statement, but on the other hand it's my blog and I can do what I want.  Going forward, the "Other" tag is for movies from outside of India and Pakistan.

The spy who fooled me.

 I'm declaring April to be Spy Month here at the Gorilla's Lament.  What does April have to do with spies?  No idea, but it's Spy Month nonetheless.  No foolin'.

I'm not dead yet.

 The blog hasn't gone away, I just have relatives visiting at the moment.  New reviews will resume soonish.

Jaanemonth 2023.

 It's February, and here at the Gorilla's Lament we are celebrating Jaanemonth, a month long celebration of Bollywood romance.  Join us for gratuitous musical numbers, noble sacrifices, and Shahrulh Khan standing with his arms extended.

Hiatus!

 I'm off to Edinburgh for a few weeks.  Content will resume in January.

Whaaaat?

 This is apparently real.  There's a long way to go between "announcement" and "actual movie that I can watch", but I'm going to be excited for a while anyway.

Hiatus.

 I am going on vacation, so no new reviews until January.  See you then!

Vikram and Ajju's Excellent Adventure, Expanded Edition

 This is an old review, but I am older and wiser and have more Bollywood experience than the first time I watched Fun2ssh . . . Dudes In the 10th Century; at the very least, I am better at taking screenshots.  Let's see what Me From the Past had to say.

Retail therapy.

 When I first started blogging, being an American Bollywood fan was a bit more complicated than it is now.  Netflix had a decent selection of Bollywood DVDs available, but for the most part when you wanted new stuff you would find an online retailer, browse their catalog for something that looked interesting, and then . . . take your chances.  Sometimes the movie was good, sometimes it was terrible.  Sometimes the DVD had no subtitles.  Sometimes it turned out to be obviously and badly pirated.  It turned the movie watching experience into an adventure.

Things are different now.  There's an ocean of Indian cinema available at the literal push of a button, and rather than waiting weeks to finds out if a movie is any good, I can watch it right now.  It's great.  It's genuinely better than the old way of doing things.  But I do miss the sixty nine cent DVDs you'd pick up to round out an order; they had devotionals, mythologicals, duplicate movies, Z-movies, and the embarrassing early output of major stars.  These are movies that aren't easily available on streaming platforms, and while some of the DVDs are still out there, they cost a lot more than sixty nine cents, and they're very hard to find. 

All of which is a roundabout way of explaining why I am so happy to have maybe tracked down an affordable copy of Tum Mere Ho, the famously bad snake movie starring Aamir Khan and Juhi Chawla.  Will the picture quality be any good?  Will the DVD have subtitles?  How bad can it possibly be?  I can't wait to find out.

Meanwhile, no new review this week.  I watched Awara Paagal Deewana, only to discover that I've already reviewed it.  You can read the old review here; I pretty much agree with Me From the Past.

Bhooty Call 2020

 As if this year hasn't been terrifying enough, it's time for our annual Bhooty Call, a month long celebration of the ghosts of Bollywood (and other cinema of the subcontinent.)  Time to sweep out the haunted haweli, because we're having company.

Blarg.

I have been blessed with a jolly Christmas cold.  Reviews will resume when I'm good and ready.

When I'm feeling blue, I like to think about the time that the London News Review accused me of being Andy Kaufman.  It's a weird claim to internet fame, but I'll take it.

State of the blog.

The Gorilla's Lament has been back in business for exactly two weeks, and we already have more than two hundred reviews posted!  Obviously, the rate of new posts is going to slow down a bit, especially since I've run out of posts from the old blog to bring over.  I still don't have everything from the prior incarnation of the Gorilla's Lament, but at this point I'm just happy to have saved anything.

I'm hard at work putting together a review index, and I also need to get the tags organized so that they're a useful addition to the site.  And of course, Bhooty Call 2019 continues.

So, still plenty to do, and more content still to come!

Bhooty Call 2019

It's almost October.  The nights are getting longer, the wind is getting colder, and something is stirring.  If you're careful, you can catch a glimpse as it meanders through ruined havelis, down creepy rural roads, and into the corners of poorly lit apartment buildings.  The Gorilla's Lament is back from the dead, but something came with it.  

It's almost October.  Time for a Bhooty Call.

The Bhooty Call is one of our favorite traditions here at the Gorilla's Lament offices, a month-long celebration of the many ghosts of Bollywood.  Look for a batch of scary and not-so-scary movies (and this year, one TV show) starting in October.

Bollywood Lexicon, Part Two

More handy phrases that we use here in the Gorilla’s Lament offices while watching BW films:

Shahrukh Khan Wants His Shirt Back: Said whenever an actor is wearing a see-through shirt. If you’ve seen many SRK movies, you know what I’m talking about. A common variant is Aamir Khan Wants His Hat Back.

Everybody’s Mom: Actress Farida Jalal, who often turns up as the protagonist’s mother. If the mother isn’t Farida Jalal, it’s usually Everybody’s Other Mom, Reema Lagoo.

Everybody’s Grandmother: Zohra Sehgal, about whom I waxed rhapsodic in my review of Dillagi. This time I’ll just say that she often shows up playing a grandmother, and she’s a pretty neat lady who’s led an interesting life.

Revolving Grooms: If BW movies have taught me anything, it’s that the groom in an Indian marriage can seemingly be replaced at any point in the ceremony, as long as there’s someone on hand to be appropriately noble. That should keep them on their toes.

Bollywood Lexicon, Part One

While writing reviews, I’ve occasionally had to stop myself from using home-made terms to refer to common Bollywood tropes. Rather than keep censoring myself, though, I’ll just list and define them here. I’ve got the space. Collect them all! Amaze your friends!

Bollywood Teleportation: The amazing ability demonstrated by BW characters to move from place to place in mid-song, often to either Switzerland or the edge of a cliff. The range of Bollywood teleportation vaires; the longest distance I’ve seen covered is from New York City to Las Vegas. BW Teleportation is usually accompanied by costume changes, but it’s possible to teleport without changing clothing, or to change clothing without teleporting.

The Sari Point: The point in a film where the relationship between the hero and heroine is completely established. While the heroine has probably been wearing Western clothing up to this point, often including very short skirts, from the Sari point onward she will not be seen without traditional Indian dress.

The Bollywood Dialectic: A common type of musical number within BW films, in which the hero and heroine each sing their arguments, and hopefully reach some sort of logical synthesis. For example, in the song “Jaane Kyoon” from the movie Dil Chahta Hai, Akash presents his thesis: Love is potentially painful, and really more trouble than it’s worth. Shalini presents her antithesis: Love is really quite nice, and without love a person is lonely. The two sing their arguments, and in the end reach a synthesis and walk off talking happily. Background dancers are often involved in the Bollywood Dialectic; in such cases, the men usually side with the hero, and the women with the heroine.

It's a September miracle!

One of the frustrating things about the demise of my original blog is that with the host company collapsing, my old reviews were just gone. Didn't even show up on the Wayback machine.  Well, I checked last night, and now they do!  (Some of them, at least.)  I have no idea why, but I'm going to count my blessings and move over what I can.  Posts from the old blog are tagged "Gorilla Classic."

Sometimes I ramble.

It's more than a little weird coming back to blogging after all this time.  Looking around the internet, it seems like most of my circle of Bollybloggers have moved on to other things - even Beth, who was always a Bollywood-loving blogging machine, seems to have slowed down a bit.  I have become an internet coelacanth, a curious relic of a bygone age of Bollywood fandom.  And, let's be honest, the internet has moved on; I appreciate all the people who have dropped by to pay this site a visit, but well aware that my natural audience is limited.

On the other hand, with all the streaming services available these days I have access to more and more varied cinema from the subcontinent than ever before - Hindi movies, sure, but also Punjabi!  Marathi! Urdu!  I'm going to stop listing languages because there are a lot of them and who has that kind of time?!  Things have definitely changed, but the Golden Age of Bollywood watching is now, and I am happy to be here for it.