COMEBACK: Preity Zinta has said she is now willing to make a comeback to Bollywood.


Bollywood personalities have the ability to keep a straight face and talk about themselves in a manner that flies in the face of reality. Or how else do you explain some of the recent comments by Preity Zinta.
After a hiatus, Preity will be back on the screen but it is not in a movie. She will be a judge in a reality television show around dance. Naturally, she is giving interviews to the media in which she seems to be wont to saying that she in fact chose to distance herself from Bollywood some years back after taking on the part ownership of a club cricket team in the Indian Premier League tournament.
She apparently wanted to concentrate on the cricket and if she had continued to act, then she would not have been able to do justice to the movie.
But after eight years in which the team and its business has stabilised, she says she could now think of returning. It is very disingenuous of her to say this because actually there is not too much overlap between the cricket and acting.
The tournament only lasts three months in a year and there is not much to do after that period. The reality is that she decided to get into cricket because her innings in Bollywood as a leading actress was over after a number of flops. She also spoke about being an actress who only did one film a year during her hey days but a cursory look her career shows that there were always two to three annual releases.
Meanwhile, there is also a news about her on the personal front. She has spoken about seeing someone and the person is said to be from the US. Preity hinted that she would make the relationship public soon.



Photo caution


Recently, Sonam Kapoor did a photo shoot for a fashion magazine and some of the images were much talked about for their sensual nature. The idea for such a photo shoot is to get maximum eyeballs and this one seemed to have accomplished its object.
But Sonam was probably not celebrating because of a rather strange issue. She is the heroine in Sooraj Barjatya’s next movie, Prem Ratan Dhan Paayo, and plays a homely village girl. After seeing the images of the photo shoot, Sooraj was apparently very upset because it was in diametrical opposition to her character in the movie.
She is said to have told Sonam to be careful of the kind of image she projects while doing a movie and see that it is in tune with her character. The Barjatyas are known for their ultra conservative cheesy family movies and Sonam would therefore have a hard time doing any photo shoot for a glamour magazine if she adhered to the diktat. But then the success of the movie might make up for it.


Sunny sequel

If you look at the opening weekend collections of movies released in 2015, Ek Paheli Leela has raked in more than both Detective Byomkesh Bakshi and NH10. This is interesting because both the latter movies featured popular actors like Sushant Singh Rajput and Anushka Sharma, who have a huge following.
This is in keeping with why the star system is so overwhelming in Bollywood, because they have the power to bring in an initial audience and reduces the financial risks of the filmmaker. Also, both these movies had been raved about by film critics and had great publicity and marketing going for them.
That Ek Paheli Leela should collect more means that Sunny is now very popular with the Bollywood audience. Some time back, in an allusion to her popularity, a spokesperson of a national political party had tweeted that ‘western rejects like Sunny Leone’ should not be allowed to become Bollywood icons.
But then someone becoming an icon is hardly a matter of choice, it is the public that decides it. Admittedly Sunny has a large following only because of her past career as an actress in pornographic films.
But she has carefully managed her image in India so that her past is not a subject of conversation in the public sphere. Ek Paheli Leela has done so well that its makers have already announced that they will be making a sequel.
The movie was made at not a very large budget and has already moved into profitable territory. The sequel will shot on a bigger scale.
Interestingly, all the movies that have become hits in 2015 have been low or medium budget movies. But while most of them rely on the urban multiplex audience, Sunny’s movie relies on the single screens that are catered to by the lower middle class and tier-2 cities.


Broken reviews

Vidhu Vinod Chopra is an ambitious filmmaker and that explains his making of Broken Horses, a Hollywood movie with a western cast for a predominantly US audience.
But you can’t take Bollywood out of his blood and so his movie seemed to many as very similar to Parinda, a Hindi classic that he himself had made in 1989. How would western critics find a movie that, even though set in the US, was Bollywood in many of its tropes? Unfortunately they have panned it.
Rotten Tomatoes, a website that aggregates all the reviews of a movie and scores it, gave Broken Horses a miserly 23%. Out of 13 reviews, 10 were negative. One reviewer had an issue with ‘the legless character…wheeling around in a motorised chair while warming his dilapidated abode with a fiery barrel’ and said that the director was trying and failing at invoking a ‘surreal quality.’
Another spoke of a character in the movie who ‘looks somewhat at a loss about what goes on here, and who can blame him, especially when he visits the former music teacher who has lost his legs in a run-in with the bad guys and now lives in a house warmed by a flaming barrel.’
Such outlandishness is normal fare in Bollywood and it probably just doesn’t translate well when taken into a foreign land.

Send your feedback to
[email protected]