I'm trying to improve my movie diet. Club 50 took care of modern domestic hit movies. My love of the Sundance selection is taking care of my indie movie appetite. My Netflix queue is giving me a healthy stream of older classics to finally catch up on. I've been recently obsessed with documentaries. The last major area I need to improve is foreign films. That's not going to happen though if all I'm catching are the critical darlings. A lot of those are too damn depressing. I need some feel good hits.
I like India. Every since I had a year long school project about it back in 8th grade, I've paid more attention to it than a lot of other countries. My IT job inevitably has me interacting with a lot of Indian people. Beyond all that though, Indian cinema intrigues me. First of all, it's huge. Bollywood is only one part of it. There's also Tollywood, Kollywood, and several other languages in India with their own films and film industry. However, I don't understand the economics of Indian film. Boxofficemojo is one of the sites I visit the most. I check box office numbers every weekend. I hear plenty of international box office numbers. I can tell you that Wolf Warrior 2 destroyed the Chinese box office and that any Fast and Furious movie is money there. I know that Spirited Away is still king in Japan, but half of their top movies all-time are from the US. Indian numbers are a little harder to nail down. Baahubali 2: The Conclusion is their biggest movie ever (I think). U.S. films do OK there, but apparently not great. They are much more interested in their of cinema, which is great. It seems like more of their films have been making their way to the US in recent year. Nothing has really broken out. I'm pretty sure Baahubali 2, which finished 3rd one weekend back in 2017 and finished 105th is the US box office that year is the biggest hit so far from India. Like with Chinese cinema, there are some distributors that appear to be determined to keep trying until something hits big. I see a lot of trailers for these movies. Many of them look very "Hollywood". Apparently, a lot of Indians mix Hindi and English freely, which is kind of cool. I don't run into that much elsewhere. Especially with languages that are so different.
All this ranting is to say that I decided to finally watch an Indian movie. I'm not sure why I chose Jab We Met. I didn't feel like watching one of the big action movies. I wanted a RomCom and this one came highly rated. Overall, I found the movie to be quite charming. Kareena Kapoor and Shahid Kapoor have nice chemistry. Kereena in particular was very good as a manic pixie dream girl variant. Like most RomComs, it's funny without ever making me laugh. I knew to expect random dance numbers, which were good anyway, so I didn't mind them. There are a few silly things that I assume are tied to standards and practices in Indian cinema. Like, that very sexually charged hug toward the end felt really over the top. My only major issue, from my understanding, is a common one with Indian movies: it's too damn long. I'm certainly conditioned by the length of American movies, but really, no RomCom need to be going past the 2hr mark, let alone approach 2.5hrs. There's a lot of filler and repetitive plotting, so this could've easily been edited down. Otherwise, I was pleased by the movie. I'm definitely curious to see more of what Indian cinema has to offer.
Verdict (?): Weakly Don't Recommend
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