Bollywood confidential
By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, June 17, 2011 - 4 Comments
A guide to the glitz, glamour and surreal cinema as Toronto prepares to host India’s Oscars
Reuters; Keystone Press; Getty Images; Photo Illustration by Taylor Shute
If there had ever been doubt about the appeal of Bollywood stars in Toronto, it evaporated on a Sunday afternoon in the fall of 2006. The occasion was the gala premiere of a Hindi movie called Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna (Never Say Goodbye) at the Toronto International Film Festival. Thousands of screaming South Asian fans jammed the street outside Roy Thomson Hall as two Indian superstars hit the red carpet—Amitabh Bachchan, Bollywood’s most revered patriarch, and Shah Rukh Khan, the heartthrob who ranks as India’s Brad Pitt (even if, to respect his wife, he doesn’t kiss his leading ladies). The previous night, the real Brad Pitt had worked the same red carpet for a TIFF premiere—but didn’t create half as much mayhem as King Khan. “When the stars pulled up in their SUV limos, it was absolute pandemonium,” recalls TIFF co-director Cameron Bailey. “Thousands of people rushed the barriers trying to get a glimpse of them.”
Five years later, that pandemonium will be replayed on a grand scale as Toronto hosts the International Indian Film Academy awards. The IIFA celebrations, which run from June 23-25, are expected to attract a pantheon of Bollywood stars and some 40,000 tourists to the Greater Toronto Area. The festivities will include concerts, screenings, a fashion show, a TIFF retrospective honouring screen legend Raj Kapoor, an exhibit of vintage hand-painted film posters at the Royal Ontario Museum—climaxing with the pageantry of the awards at the Rogers Centre, which will be watched by some 700 million people in 60 countries.
Despite the “Academy” brand, the IIFA awards are not quite India’s Oscars. They’re an annual road show designed to promote Bollywood around the world. Now in their 12th year, they have been staged in capitals from London to Bangkok, Johannesburg to Singapore. Toronto is the first North American city to play host—a privilege that Premier Dalton McGuinty bought with a $12-million pledge from the province to the IIFA.
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Bollywood’s ‘Brokeback Mountain’
By Katie Engelhart - Wednesday, March 3, 2010 at 1:30 PM - 3 Comments
The film ‘Dunno Y…Na Jaane Kyun’ features a gay kiss
Its promotional posters, placed throughout India, show two bare-chested men, eyes closed and necks strained, locked in a sexual embrace. And though the film does not come out until May, it is already being hailed as an iconoclastic cinematic break—or, more commonly, “Bollywood’s answer to Brokeback Mountain.”Sanjay Sharma’s film Dunno Y…Na Jaane Kyun will, for the first time in Bollywood history, feature a gay kiss. The plot centres on a struggling model who moves to Mumbai in search of fame, and then begins a relationship with another man. In a country that only decriminalized homosexuality last year, it’s no surprise that the premise has some filmgoers squirming. (In fact, until recently, even heterosexual kisses—or “lip-locks”—were taboo, although that is changing.)
To be fair, Dunno Y will not show Bollywood’s first man-to-man kiss, per se. In 2008, the film Dostana portrayed two men pretending to be gay, in an effort to fool a young woman into living with them. At the end of the film, the two men kiss…as a punishment. And Bollywood has occasionally featured gay characters. But they are effeminate men whose roles are limited to comic relief.
And they are never cast in a sexual light. In contrast, Sharma insists that his film depicts a “normal relationship” between two unambiguously gay men. “The only thing I was particular about was that this character should not come across as a caricature or just as an object of mockery,” he told the Times of India.
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The Prime Minister goes Bollywood
By Aaron Wherry - Monday, November 16, 2009 at 3:41 PM - 19 Comments
Or, more accurately, Stephen Harper claps as people dance around him.
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Cindy Gomez’s Cinderella story
By Anne Kingston - Thursday, September 24, 2009 at 12:40 PM - 2 Comments
She used to sell office furniture in Toronto. Now she’s a Nokia-branded singing, dancing global superstar.
Cindy Gomez is in motion, cruising along Los Angeles’ chi-chi Melrose Avenue in late August in the back of a big black chauffeured SUV. The Canadian singer is travelling with Dave Stewart, who came to fame as the bespectacled guy next to Annie Lennox in the innovative ’80s band the Eurythmics. Today, the 57-year-old British rock legend is a big-picture entrepreneur—performer, songwriter, producer, photographer, activist, new media savant and general connector of cosmic dots.All of these endeavours dovetail perfectly with his current quest: to turn the multilingual Gomez, with her United Colours of Benetton beauty, into a global, multi-platform superstar. That in itself isn’t the kind of visionary thinking for which Stewart, a Davos denizen, corporate consultant on “disruptive change,” and friend of Bono, is known. What makes it pioneering is that he’s doing it in tandem with US$70-billion Finnish cellphone colossus Nokia as part of that company’s quest to become the world’s biggest entertainment media network. The stakes are big, Stewart says in his soft-spoken, unassuming, sage-like way: “If the experiment works, it will change the way art is made.” Continue…
