Love Story and Films

Hollywood and Beyond Poster Indian cinema is very diverse in the genres that it produces. Bollywood has given the world everything from comedies to romances to thrillers to action films and essentially everything in between. Indeed, Bollywood is only one aspect of Indian cinema: South India has its own cinema as do other regions in the country -- and each is unmistakable in terms of production values, actors, styles, and visuals (Bowes, 2013).

Bollywood by far represents the most up-to-date and top-of-the-line cinema in India and over the years it has produced a number of hits that have attracted fame throughout the world, such as Race, Jism, Blue and Murder. Even Hollywood has begun to take note: one star of Bollywood cinema is now working in Hollywood -- Priyanka Chopra -- who stars in her own television show in the U.S., Quantico.

And famed director Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire was a film that served as a Western homage to Indian cinema in many ways -- complete with dance number at the end of the film (a Bollywood staple -- nearly every film in Indian cinema has a song and dance number). The history of Indian cinema dramatically changed in recent years with the introduction and widespread appeal of the Indian sirens -- beautiful, sexy actresses who began to be used in Indian cinema with more and more popularity in the 1990s.

The India sirens -- actresses like Chopra, Bipasha Basu, and Katrina Kaif, helped reshape Indian cinema away from its more prosaic and traditional origins towards a more modern, Hollywood-esque type of cinema, where skin was paraded with gusto (no nudity -- not allowed in Bollywood as it is in Hollywood), and where cinematographers learned from the Michael Bay school of visualizations. In fact, many modern films in Indian cinema reflect current trends in Hollywood.

Blue, starring Laura Dutta, was an Indian version of the Hollywood hit Into the Blue starring Jessica Alba. Murder, was an Indian version of the Hollywood hit Unfaithful, starring Diane Lane. Songs are a conventional must-have in most Indian films, whether they are comedies, dramas, or action films. In this manner most of Indian cinema carries into the modern era the musical conventions of the earlier, traditional era.

Some films have departed from this convention but for the most people, Indian audiences prefer their films to have dance numbers featuring the attractive stars of the film. Cultural topics typically featured in Indian cinema are vast: everything from women in the workplace, to drug use, to sexuality and lesbianism, to education has been featured in Indian cinema. Girlfriend, starring Amrita Arora, caused a stir in India when it was released in 2004 because it featured two women falling in love.

For Bollywood, this was unchartered territory -- but the film was using a cultural issue in its narrative (Apoorva, 2014). The film did not do well at the box office, though, as audiences were not interested in a film that dared to go in such a taboo direction. Indian cinema is still very traditional in spite of the modern visualizations, styles, cinematography and narratives that it uses today (Desouza, 2014). Most narratives of Indian cinema center on a love story between a.