In India—to my great excitement!—I got to meet Vinci Wadia, the son of JBH Wadia and nephew of Homi Wadia. JBH and Homi Wadia are the brothers who founded the Wadia Movietone studio in the 1930’s, and launched the career of Fearless Nadia the stunt queen. Homi Wadia also eventually married Nadia in 1961. Vinci Wadia spent a couple of hours with me talking about films, life, and Nadia, and generally charming my socks off (as a boy he met Frank Capra on Capra’s visit to Bombay!).
For anyone who doesn’t know, Bollywood Ka Boss is a new Indian television show on the Sahara Filmy channel, hosted by Boman Irani. It’s a Hindi film trivia quiz show, and I was very honored to have them do a special short segment on me: a pagli American girl who essentially has nothing better to do all day but obsess about Hindi movies and retain all kinds of useless information about them.
I am in India, hence not much time to write a post. BUT I was on the sets of Bollywood Ka Boss yesterday, Boman Irani’s new film trivia quiz show on the Sahara Filmy channel. He did a short segment with me.
Will update when I get home!
When I first heard about this film I was excited, because—as you may have figured out by now—I love Hindi films from the 50’s and 60’s, and have devoured every biography on every personality from that era that I can find. Also I think Sudhir Mishra is a good director, and Shantanu Moitra was doing the music; his songs for Parineeta were as close to the quality of old film music as most modern film music gets.
Attention all Shashi fans (and I know you’re out there)—this is a must-see movie for you! It is just so much fun, and Shashi is so…well…Shashilicious! His first song alone is worth buying the DVD for (I’ve watched it many times already and just can’t get enough of it). It’s called “Kehne Ki Nahin Baat” and it features Shashi dancing like Shammi, a marching band and a bunch of guys wearing berets with pom-poms.
I recently realized that I have not written about any movies from the 1990’s, mostly because I’ve seen the ones from that decade that I want to (I started off watching films from the 90’s and 2000’s and then moved on, or back, depending how you look at it). Essentially, I haven’t seen a movie made in the 90’s for a long time. So I thought I’d give this one a shot since Nana Patekar is in it, although my expectations of enjoyment were not too high. Turns out Nana IS the main reason to watch this—but what a reason! He almost singlehandedly makes this a good movie. It’s a great lesson in how one actor’s performance and charisma can carry a film to another level than it would be otherwise. The other actors (Jackie Shroff, Manisha Koirala) are competent, but it is Nana’s film all the way.
I thought of this while writing yesterday’s post. How were Mehmood and Meena Kumari connected in real life?
Anonymous UK is our winner today! Mehmood married Meena Kumari’s older sister Madhu, making him Meena’s brother-in-law.
MemsaabStory 