Bhoothnath - Preview

BHOOTHNATH was a lot of fun and, a few mildly "spicy" dance bits involving Amitabh Bachchan and Aman Siddiqui with scantily-clad ladies aside, could play unedited on The Disney Channel over here in the US. We started calling it "Ghost Grandpa", and wondering what a weekly television series version of it would look like....

The main cast of Bachchan, Siddiqui and Juihi Chawla was doing such a great job with the plot that yeah, I kind of wondered what Shahrukh Khan was doing there in what amounted to a glorified cameo. (To us, it would be like seeing Tom Cruise show up in SPY KIDS as a neighbor Dad starting a carpool - it sort of yanks the movie out of shape having a major star in a minor non-"star turn" role.) Did he owe the producers or Bachchan a favor? Did he need a quick couple Crores for a day or two's work? Did he wander onto the wrong set, and just went along with it? Personally, I like the last explanation best - "You mean, this isn't OM SHANTI OM 2? Bloody Hell - and I was about to take my shirt off, too!" ;)

@meetu - Since Bollywood movies usually front-load their fun comic stuff in the first half, and start getting "darker" after the Intermission, I accepted all the drama coming up near the end as a storytelling convention. We liked that it was more than just light silliness all the way through - that he was a proud stubborn traditional old Indian man who felt abandoned ::and I think I'm treading into spoiler territory here!:: The religious ceremony that bothers you is, as I said about 1920, a trope of supernatural movies in every culture - and I found it significant that ::wow - not giving away the ending is hard !::

Anyway, I think you may be a bit more concerned about the religious aspects than most audiences are, meetu. Or perhaps, as Western viewers in a predominantly Christian culture (though we have Buddhist, Hinduist and Muslim places of worship in the Upstate New York city I live in now, as befits our large Central Asian population), we can watch movies featuring rituals of religions not our own with interest rather than rage over perceived blasphemy.