Analyzing Bollywood in 2011: the down South saga

2011 was commercially a major success for Bollywood since lower number of productions ensured sufficiently movie starved audiences watched anything that played at their friendly neighbourhood theatre. It shows the strength of distribution when five releases of 2011 have made it into the List of highest-grossing Bollywood films.
But creatively it was a year that saw Bollywood look Southwards for inspiration both in content and subjects. Out of the top 5 grossers of 2011, 4 of them had Southern inspiration, 3 remakes BodyGuard, Ready, Singham and one failed attempt at glory called Ra-One. Even the 6th largest hit The Dirty Picture was based on the item girl of the south, Silk Smitha. The fifth Zindagi Milegi Na Dobara was the only maninstream movie that stuck to the Bollywood yuppiedom traditions and escapist NRI fare.

Lets look at the second highest grosser of all times and Bollywood's biggest hit of 2011- Bodyguard. Even for a guy who has seen its Malayalam and Tamil versions, this script would be South India's weakest export. But Salman Khan's performance in Bodyguard combined the best of what endears Salman to the masses in first place. The guy who pays gratitude to his benefactors (emotion like HAHK and MPK), the romantic guy with a heart of gold (Chori Chori Chupke chupke) , the comedy sequences and the action that can showcase his muscles. To me Bodyguard ranks as Salman's top 3 complete performances and reminded me of a movie that many would have forgotten (another South Indian remake called Bandhan where Salman keeps saying 'Jo Jijaji bolenge woh main karoonga' which ran to packed houses in the B and C cateory towns). This coupled with the haunting song Teri meri and competent performances by the rest of the crew made this firecracker the best Id release ever (imagine 3 years back before Wanted , Id was not considered a good release date in Bollywood). This movie proved that superstardom is here to stay with the post 'Dabanngization' of Bollywood in 2010. The joy of making pure mass market movies that deify the hero was rediscovered with a vengeance and with anything Bollywood nothing succeeds like excess. Even the title Dabanng was so 'dehaathi' (country style) and it unleashed the superhero Salman ( who was always uber popular with the masses from Judwaa days in my opinion but never got the right movies) who was now retitled as North India's Rajnikant (thats still sacrilege mind it)

And 'Looking South' makes sense because the South set the gold standard in contemporary entertainment in 2010(although 3 idiots held it in 2009) with Shankar's creative tour de force Endhiran starring the messianic superstar in 3 roles(loved the villainous zeal in Rajni), amazing writing by Sujatha that brough sci-fi to the masses and AR Rahman (who incidentally resurrected the Bollywood musical with Rockstar in 2011, but more on Rockstar later).

Compared to Endhiran that maintained the marvellous balance of story telling integrity of sci-fi (Except in one mosquito sequence where Shankar's creativity overflowed) and the entertainment chutzpah associated with a Rajni movie (they even stuck to SPB singing the intro song with a robotic voice) , 2011 had Bollywood's most expensive movie Ra-One sinking into a cinematic quagmire that can be best described as the Punjabi Dhaba making Zucchini Parathas. SRK struggled throughout the movie as Indians on Australian soil and the story had as much as consistency of effort as the LokPal bill. Ra -One is a perfect example of the malaise that has impacted Bollywood. Next time SRK when Shankar contacts you for a movie just say yes(SRK was first preference for Robot) , dont refuse it and try to make a hotchpotch of your own since Ra-one despite all its big budget and hoohah struggled to beat the second biggest grosser ' Ready' another Salman Khan vehicle whose script was borrowed from a Telugu hit.
Now Ready was in all aspects an average movie that become a hit since it had virtually no competition in the summer holidays and it had great music that set the audience imagination on fire (Character Dheela and Dhinkachika) . Salman brought back his comic timing in this movie with gags and dialogues that mocked old Hindi' arya putra, priye) etc and that was not surprising since the director Anees Bazmee did make commercial successful comedy like No Entry and Welcome. In fact the success of Ready is an indication that the mass market of Rest of India is no different from the South and formula movies with loud over the top comedy still works and what better than a superstar doing his own comedy , a trend that goes back to Big B's pure mania days.
Singham was the surprise package. The original tamil hit starred Surya the hero of the original Ghajini which according to some analysts started the Go South trend. And IMHO Surya did better than Aamir Khan on all counts in the original. So Ajay Devgun had tough shoes to fill into, but Ajay breezed through the movie even mouthing Marathi lines and showing off milk white banians. But the scene stealer was Prakash Raj who displayed his unique brand of villainy that has become a staple in a Kollywood potboiler.
But this time, Bollywood is badly in need of commercially viable masala potboilers than can star its aging superstars, and the South seemed to provide the answers. Some people have wrongly compared this to the 1980 Jeetendra-Sridevi routines which is largely missing the point because those movies didnt fill a cinematic vaccum but expanded a market. Hope Bollywood can get back its mass market mojo , if not there are always choices like K.S.Ravikumar's remake of Saamy with Sanjay Dutt to entertain us.

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