How to Get Hooked to Bollywood

As a person who's completely addicted to movies,I loved reading about one man's journey from total ignorance of Indian cinema to being a complete fan of that wacky, irreverant and completely alien genre of movies. Richard Corliss wrote a piece in Time during the Oscars about the foreign-language films that were nominated.

"The usual ignorance attended the selections for Best Foreign-Language Film. Except for ‘Amelie' and ‘No Man's Land,' the foreign pictures that earned most critics' plaudits were absent. In their place we got an Argentine melodrama (‘Son of the Bride'), a Norwegian film about an insane couple (‘Elling') and a four-hour Indian film about cricket (‘Lagaan'). If any of these turns out to be faaaabulous, I promise to apologize in this space"

That was before he received over 100 emails from aggreviated Indian readers which led him to watch Lagaan with 150 others like him in the Floating Film Festival. In his words, "To catch "Lagaan" with 150 movie sharpies who had never seen a Bollywood picture was to see snickers turn to smiles, and indulgence to rapture" I can understand the experience. Having watched the movie twice in theatres (and numerous other times on disc), I can testify that the experience was always the same. Now, Corliss knows more about bollywood than I do, so over to him!