Wake Up Sid

Saw an excellent movie this week! Wake Up Sid, which was amazing and my second Bollywood movie ever. I mean to watch more of them, but they're so long and I am pressed for time...

And yet the length is one of the reasons Wake Up Sid was such an excellent movie. It isn't exactly a treasure basket of surprises - you can guess the plot from the summary: Sid, a spoiled rich boy who has just left college, meets the clever and beautiful Aisha, who has just moved to Mumbai to follow her dreams of being a writer - but the length allows it to grow beyond that simple story into an rich interlay of plots.

So you don't have just the relationship between Sid and Aisha: you also have Sid and his parents, Sid and his college friends and a college enemy (all of whom have the space to grow into three-dimensional characters), Aisha and her new job, Aisha (with the help of Sid and company) making her apartment the Best Apartment Ever, multiple Mumbai Is Totally Beautiful montages...

In a way this richness is just icing on the cake - Sid and Aisha are both marvelously realized characters, and an entire movie about them wouldn't be a hardship - but I love it. The movie feels large: like I could step into the movie and there would be a whole world of wonderful people to meet and beautiful places to go that don't even touch the main characters.

I highly recommend it.

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For those of you who are more cosmopolitan movie watchers than me: do you have any suggestions for other Bollywood films I should see? I like happy endings and interestingly flawed characters and song and dance numbers. (You know what's wrong with Hollywood these days? They've totally turned away from song and dance numbers.) I'm not a big fan of romances motivated by foolish misunderstandings, but romances where the hero and the heroine clearly have a mental connection and understanding of each other are lovely.

I've been told that I positively have to see Om Shanti Om, so that's next on my list.