Paging mollpeartree!

[muckefuck]

Although we all four thoroughly enjoyed Les pêcheurs de perles last night (as did the rest of the audience, judging by how few left after the first intermission--right after Bizet shoots his wad on this one), it wasn't quite engaging enough to keep our minds from drifting a bit. Due to the fact that it's set in Ceylon (completely arbitrarily, as it turns out--the original choice was Mexico), two of us in particular couldn't resist a Bollywood revisioning. But without mollpeartree's encyclopaedic knowledge of Indian celebrities, I found the shadowcasting difficult: I barely know the A-list and the weak storyline makes this a B- or C-list property at best. So who would you cast if you wanted, say, Hrithik, Aiswarya, and Salman Khan, but had to hire your talent a rung or two lower? (I think we can stick with Jackie Shroff as Nourabad, as washed-up A-list lends a little gravitas without breaking the bank.)

Also, agar tumheN study partnar caahie, to maiN tumhaare saath hindee seekhooNgaa.
If to-you study partner need, then I you with Hindi will-learn.

Comments

[wiped.livejournal.com]

agarce meree urduu kharaab hai, leekan seekh rahaa hooN. kab se hindee seekh rahe ho? i'm just beginning, so i might not make a good study partner, but let me know if you're interested.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Saccaa'ee se panjaabee hee mujhe adhik pasand aataa hai, but mollpeartree is interested in Bollywood, not bhangra. Perhaps the three of us should invade learn_hindi and breath some life into that old beast again, kyaa khayaal hai tumhaaraa?

[wiped.livejournal.com]

sure - as long as we keep it romanized. i don't think i can be bothered to learn devanagari, and i don't know how interested the others are in nasta'liq. what materials are you using?

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Right now all I have is McGregor's Outline of Hindi grammar. I've actually been meaning to learn Nastaʿlīq because so much important Panjabi literature is written in it, but I've not gotten very far--the calligraphic swoops and swirls just really throw me.

[wiped.livejournal.com]

i don't know if this will be reassuring or discouraging for you, but i've been studying persian fairly actively for two years now and have still not mastered nasta'liq. (of course, the vast majority of what i read is in naskh or at least shekaste nasta'liq, so that's my excuse). however if i'm to get serious about urdu, i'm going to need to get a better grip on the swoops and swirls.

[princeofcairo.livejournal.com]

So who would you cast if you wanted, say, Hrithik, Aiswarya, and Salman Khan, but had to hire your talent a rung or two lower?

For two of those, we have Bollywood's own answer: Harman Baweja (purely coincidentally the director's son) was marketed as the new (read: "poor man's") Hrithik for Love Story 2050, and Sneha Ullal was supposed to be the second coming of Aish in Lucky: No Time For Love. I'll let mollpeartree tackle the doughty question of who the C-list Salman is.

[mollpeartree.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry for the delay in my response to a direct page! I was out sick Monday and too busy at work yesterday to look at lj much, and didn’t see this entry until today.

I think princeofcairo did a good job with the lookalikes. If you just wanted cheaper actors in the general niches of the ones you named, I think Celina Jaitley would be a good swap-in for Aishwarya (exotically beautiful, good at crying), and Zeyad Khan or Arjun Rampal could do for Hrithik (pretty boys, good at dancing).

When it comes to Salman, I have to ask, why do you want Salman Khan. Of course that is my question for Indian moviegoers generally, but beyond that, when you think about it, being at the extreme end of hammy in comedies and smoldery in dramas is kind of an unusual combination in an actor. I would say Uday Chopra is about as scenery-chewing and generally annoying as Salman is in a comedy, while Shiney Ahuja approximates the smoldery Salman, and judging by reviews of movies of his which admittedly I haven’t seen, benefits about as much as an actor by having the fewest possible lines to say as Salman does when a director is smart enough to do this (Shiney’s performance in Gangster was roughly equivalent to Salman’s in Saawariya). Shiney may be too expensive now, though, he’s had a couple of successful movies.

Caveat: These are really B list actors probably. Only the very top thin slice of Bollywood movies get marketed in the U.S. where I can hear about them, so probably the second-banana actors in those are B-list rather than C-list.

And yes, of course I want a study partner! I was about to ask you for help on something anyway! I might get around to posting about that today ...

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

When the day comes that you will actually be expected to pay attention to LJ as if it were a vital source for communication and contact, please, Earth, hurl yourself into Venus and kill us all.

It's a drama, so I'm comfortable with casting Shiney Ahuja. But mainly because I just like the idea of a leading man named "Shiney". (Please don't spoil my fun by telling me it's pronounced "shin-NAY".)