http://www.sulekha.com/redirectnh.asp?cid=317757
New Indian Movie Proving Too Hot for Audiences
Tue September 23, 2003 09:27 AM ET
NEW DELHI (Reuters) - With a cast that includes Bollywood’s top stars, three leggy models who show loads of skin and a plot set in the underworld, Indian audiences were expected to flock to movie halls to watch “Boom.”
Instead, they are shunning the much-hyped film released last Friday – some even walking out midway through what critics are panning as soft porn from an industry better known for mushy melodramas and cheesy song-and-dance routines.
“Boom has boomeranged,” film critic Taran Adarsh told Reuters.
“It got a good initial response but box office collections are now falling. Sex to a limit is good in cinema. But too much sex is also difficult to digest.”
Described by director Kaizad Gustad as a “very dark black comedy” where the fashion world meets the underworld, Boom is about three mafia dons chasing three models to recover lost diamonds.
Bollywood superstar Amitabh Bachchan – India’s best known actor – plays the villain, supported by Jackie Shroff, British author Salman Rushdie’s Indian-born girlfriend and model Padma Lakshmi, and top models Katrina Kaif and Madhu Sapre.
Hollywood star Bo Derek makes a cameo, emerging from the sea in a golden sari in an echo of a scene from her film “10.”
But more than anything, Boom is filled with what counts for oodles of explicitness in conservative India. The three women strut through most of the two hour film in little more than bikinis and are frequently the target of crude sexual remarks from the mafia dons.
One don also asks a woman to perform oral sex under his desk as he works. Elsewhere in the world that might be considered relatively tame stuff, but not in India where even smooching in public can still cause outrage.
:yukh: