bollywood

Bollywood is better than hollywood in movie creations. Westerners would tend to classify most Bollywood films as musicals, because few movies are made without at least one song-and-dance number. The standard Bollywood movie is expected to contain a number of elements, and one of the essentials is catchy music in the form of song-and-dance numbers woven into the script. Indeed, a movie's music is often released before the movie itself and helps increase the audience. The general opinion is that a Bollywood movie without songs and dances would need to be particularly strong in other departments to avoid being considered a rip-off. Indian audiences expect full value for their money, with a good entertainer generally referred to as paisa vasool, (literally, "money's worth"). Songs and dances, love triangles, comedy and dare-devil thrills — all are mixed up in a three-hour-long extravaganza with an intermission. Such movies are called masala movies, after the Hindi word for a spice mixture, masala. Like masalas, these movies are a mixture of many things. Bollywood plots have tended to be melodramatic. They frequently employ formulaic ingredients such as star-crossed lovers and angry parents, love triangles, family ties, sacrifice, corrupt politicians, kidnappers, conniving villains, courtesans with hearts of gold, long-lost relatives and siblings separated by fate, dramatic reversals of fortune, and convenient coincidences. There have always been Indian films with more "artistic" aims and more sophisticated stories, both inside and outside the Bollywood tradition (see Indian art cinema). They often lost out at the box office to movies with more mass appeal. Bollywood conventions are changing, however. A large Indian diaspora in English speaking countries, and increased Western influence at home, have nudged Bollywood films closer to Hollywood models. Film kisses are no longer banned. Plots now tend to feature Westernised urbanites dating and dancing in discos rather than arranged marriages. Recent years have seen movies with less melodramatic and more sophisticated plots.