Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Chuk De De La Govind

As you all may know, I am not the world’s biggest fan of Hindi Movies. The last Indian movie my husband and I saw in a theater was Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge sometime in the 90s. We did try to see Taal while I was pregnant with Sonali (8 yrs ago), but there was an incident—mechanical dysfunctions, paan chewing mobs, NJ State Police etc. Needless to say, we did not see the movie. So my childrens’ recent theatrical obsession with Chuk De (at least there is a positive feminist message…mostly) and Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (uh…athletic, short haired girl loses boy to long haired newcomer, and does not get him back until long-haired girl dies and bequeaths boy to her! WTF) have me a bit baffled and honestly a bit annoyed when they are begging to watch one of those for the gazillionth time.

I tried to convert that enthusiasm into something we all could do together and that I judged to be more worthy of 3.5 hours. So I convinced them that we would make our own version of Chuk De using our new Flip. It sounded so great in concept, but it was tough. I was a demanding director and they were not always compliant. There were costumes and props, and cinametographic limitations of the Flip. Well, we managed to get only the first scene shot before they decided this was not as fun as they had been promised. Here is the clip.