West Jordan latest music/film discoveries - text by Mom

Amanda decided to explore some of the international DVDs available at the B.Y.U. library for checkout, and brought home several from India (otherwise known as "Bollywood" productions). Many of them have been interesting and most have been enjoyable, and several have been good enough that we ordered copies of them from the internet for our home library. You might be interested in renting them (if they are still available); Nick had seen "Lagaan" by renting it from Blockbuster.
In particular, we have really fallen for the music of A. R. Rachman, who uses a fusion of classical methods and orchestration with the native Indian instrumentation and rhythms. Perhaps CD Universe or YouTube would provide an opportunity for a listen should you care to check out the music for "Lagaan" or "Swades". It is an energetic, upbeat, layered kind of sound which we find hard to resist. Or, of course, you can always check it out when you come here, if you like. Much love, Mom.

West Jordan latest film discoveries - text by Dad

The following text was originally a fill-in for the immediately later post, which was originally written by Mom but then partially lost in a posting malfunction. Knowing that she wanted to talk about the Bollywood stuff, we then created this post. Having posted this, we then dug round and ran across the remains of her original post, so she re-entered the missing stuff and we posted it. We got very enthused about writing this post and did not feel like thowing it away, so we spammed the date a bit so that it would appear down the page from Mom's post.
As is typical for Dad's posts, you may well die from the detail.
Confused now? Oh well. Read on.
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West Jordan, always sparse and library oriented in fillm viewing patterns to start with, has gotten into some different and slightly more promising material of late. This started with one of Amanda's recent explorations of the foreign film section at BYU Library, and the result was a stack of films from India, of all places. She says this is because she was becoming weary of the unpleasant aspects of American film and - being a prominent family try-er -wanted to ..... try something else.
Imagine what one might end up with by combining a fully developed film industry with a culture outside the US, say India, complete with stylistic nuances. There is in fact such a thing, and several of us have actually run into it.
The industry is based in Mumbai (formerly Bombay) and is colloquially known by its sobriquet of "Bollywood".
We have found several of the films to be well suited to some of our tastes and now have a small collection of our own.
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The current library consists of some films:
"Lagaan"(2001) - English:"Tax") - Theme: India under British Raj 1893 - Cast: Aamir Khan/Gracy Singh - Music: A.R. Rahman
"Swades"(2007) - English:"Homeland" - Theme: Expatriate Indians and "homeland" - Cast: Shahrukh Khan/Gayatri Joshi - Music: A.R. Rahman
"Veer-Zaara"(2006) - Names, untranslated - Theme: India-Pakistan relations issues framed behind ... the customary love story - Cast: Shahrukh Khan/Preity Zinta/Rani Mukerji/Amitabh Bachchan/Anupam Kehr
"Vivah"(2005) - English "Marriage" - Theme: Arranged marriage traditions in India - Cast: Shahid Kapoor/Amrita Rau/Anupam Kehr
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Common stylistic attributes throughout, of which we are now mildly fond - they grow on one:
- Lots of singing and dancing - the folk kind - 6 ten minute all-out onate production numbers per film
- BIG FAT HINDUSTANI Weddings! - minimum 1 per film either conducted on set, profusely alluded to or hoped for
- Lengthy-ness compared to american films - as in 2 hours minimum - see above singing, dancing and weddings
- None or little of the following on set: SHAGGING, PDA, KISSING, WARDROBE ACCIDENTS
- Language - it is all in Hindi with occasional endearing lapses into popular english such as "No problem" & "Shut Up" - always turn on the subtitles and enjoy the lovely poetic renderings from Hindi by Hindustanis
- Offensive language: No films in our library do this
- Films we did not buy: A very occasional lapse into English for cussing, otherwise all buried in lovely poetic Hindi.
- Sappy idealism: To an extent such as to make US critics cringe and totally trash the film - we therefore like it!
- Happy upbeat soppiness: Universes full - remember this is India where conditions are frequently depressing.
- Same 2-3 playback vocalists per gender for ENTIRE industry output to date, actors ALWAYS voice over singing.
- Slimmer inventory of actors compared to Hollywood, extensive reuse of talent - Think Mollywood
- Pakistani national dress allows females to cover up in stunningly graceful outfits and without wearing burkas
- Hindi national dress does have a midriff gap problem, but draped with a sari and no muffin tops ever.
- What can we say - the men are uniformly modest and studly
- Singing: All men use same style - studly baritone, All women use same style - the little girl sound.
- When they do thoughtful/issue pieces, one can stand the result. Our entire collection is issue pieces.
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And now a crash course in who's who in Bollywood (the good stuff we like):
Actors/Producers: ShahRukh Khan (SRK), Aamir Khan, Shahid Kapoor, Amitabh Bachchan
Actresses: Preity Zinta, Amrita Rao, Aishwarya Rai, Gracy Singh, Gayatri Joshi, Rani Mukerji
Singers: Udit Narayan, Shankar Mahadevan, A.R. Rahman (composer doing own stuff)
Singesses: Lata Mangeshkar, Alka Yaganik, Shreya Ghoshal
Composers: the one we like is A.R. Rahman - we are face first down and in a heap over this guy's work.
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Things to google to sample music from the movies:
Lagaan: 'Mitwah', 'Chale Chalo', 'O Palaan Haare'
Swades: 'Yun Hi Chala', 'Ye Tara Woh Tara', 'Ye Jo Des He Tera'
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This post is exactly why we got into buying off-shore DVDs, hence the recent post regarding DVD playback

West Jordan takes a crash course in DVD playback subtleties.....

This is actually the first of 3 posts regarding our latest discoveries in film literature.
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Here is a tidbit we came across recently regarding playing of off-shore origin DVDs on US domestic equipment....
Television broadcast/display encoding standards:
All TV equipment uses one of several format standards for decoding/displaying video information on TV monitors. There are 3 major standard categories worldwide: NTSC (National Television System Committee), PAL (Phase Alternating Line), and SECAM (SEquential Color And Memory).
The coverage areas for each of these 3 standards worldwide are:
NTSC: North/South America (except Brazil,Argentina, Uruguay), and Phillipines, SouthKorea, Taiwan, Japan.
PAL: Brazil,Argentina,Uruguay, Europe (except France), Asia except SECAM/NTSC areas, Africa except SECAM areas, Austrialia & Pacific
SECAM: France, former Soviet Union areas, Africa except PAL areas
Most TV equipment, unless the manufacturer offers multi-standard equipment option, uses a single standard.
In the US, most equipment is NTSC only, with some exceptions.
DVD Region Codes:
The DVD zone code is a copy protection method, which uses a single digit number 0-8 and ALL. All DVD playback equipment is set for the single Zone in which it is principally used, with some exceptions. Computer DVD drives use a single Zone number at a time but limited number of changes of Zone.
DVD media is set either to a single zone, or more recently, enabled for ALL zones. The zones are:
0: None, or informally implied "worldwide"
1: US,Canada, US Territories, Bermuda
2: West/Central Europe, West Asia, Egypt, Japan, SouthAfrica, Swaziland, British overseas territories, French overseas territories.
3: SouthEast Asia, South Korea, China(Non-PRC)
4: Oceania, Central/South America, Carribean, Mexico
5: Ukraine, Belarus, Russion, Africa, Central/South Asia, Mongolia, NorthKorea.
6: China(PRC), HongKong
7: Reserved for future or other use
8: International venues (aircraft, cruise ships, etc)
ALL: All codes set, playable on any venue or equipment
Why all this?
We have all hitherto been oblivious to this, because US media is all Broadcast std NTSC and DVD Region 1,
hence this designation is considered uniformly implicit in the US, hence there are no markings whatever of this kind on US domestic media. One only cares when purchasing exterior origin media productions, in which case one must look carefully for correct markings to assure playability.
We have recently purchased a number of international film items, and all of them were MARKED as to Playback standard and DVD region. All but one were marked NTSC/ALL and all of those played. We did not make any note of this until one was marked PAL/ALL and did not play on our home TV system player. The culprit in that case, was the TV broadcast standard PAL, which caused our PHD domestic appliance player not to be able to even read the Region code to determine that it was ALL. The DVD did play on all of our laptops, which are apparently smart enough to recognize and adapt to the PAL/NTSC issue. Now it is known why on some occasions we have recently been seen mysteriously gathered round a laptop to view a DVD.

So now you know and are proactively informed of this fascinating bit of trivia.