Entertainment Unlimited

Watching Salman Khan go all fist and fury in Jai Ho sends you on a deja vu spin. Like most films the superstar and many others of his ilk have been churning out lately, Jai Ho makes no apologies about its retro pitch. It is almost as if you were back to the eighties, watching a gag bag hauled from a decade deemed creatively the worst for Hindi mainstream.

Watching Salman Khan go in Jai Ho also reminds you of the basic divide between the definition of largescale entertainment as Bollywood and Hollywood perceives it. If Bollywood biggies have lately been about going back in time for inspiration, the ploy is in stark contrast to what Hollywood does.

Think Avatar, think Skyfall, think any recent superhero flick. We are not talking art-house stuff here. Mainstream blockbusters in Hollywood are normally about pushing the envelope, about finding new ways to entertain.

Okay, we lack the budgets to match Hollywood tech tricks. What about looking forward with script ideas? Watching Jai Ho, it seems rather embarrassing that Bollywood's brand of cinema to pamper the audience stubbornly remains regressive while big- ticket Hollywood forever aims to be pathbreaking with stories to woo larger audiences worldwide. Most Bollywood hotshots forward the theory that Hindi mainstream is the way it is only because the masses want it that way.

That is rubbish, actually. You don't need the brain of a rocket scientist to savour Iron Man 3, a notion evidenced by the credible Rs.35- crore weekend the film saw on its India opening last year. Iron Man 3 released in 1,100 screens here, which is only about a fourth of the screen tally an average Khan biggie commands.

The point worth noting is dubbed Hindi, Tamil and Telugu prints of the film- like dozens other all- out Hollywood entertainers over the past few years- managed to reach out to what we tend to dismiss as the single- screen crowd.

Fun on the screen can be intelligent- and imaginative- and still sell, the normally good run of these Hollywood biggies in India have proved. There is an evolving market for smart entertainment across audience segments and it could spell profits if sold wisely.

If Bollywood's big- money hunt is reluctant to move beyond Jai Ho, Chennai Express or Dhoom 3- all of which have scored rehashing sundry cliches- it is because Hindi commercial cinema doesn't want to take chances.

Many among the Bollywood lot have an amusing explanation. We Indians are traditional by mindset, they argue. So the tendency to go back to roots extends to our brand of entertainment. That is the excuse for milking retro formulae.

Art- and that includes popular art- is however about redefining existing ideas and not falling back for inspiration on what worked 30 years ago.

Most of our moolah- lusting Bollywood types of course do not think of updating popular art while rehashing what worked once ( the makers of Jai Ho, for instance, shelled out crores to buy rights of an old Telugu flick called Stalin starring Chiranjeevi and translated it into Hindi). Nor would most of them admit that creating original entertainment calls for a little bit of brainstorming.