Hindi films languished at the North American box office over the weekend, overshadowed by big budget Hollywood releases. From May 27-29, 2016, the four Bollywood movies still showing here earned a combined total of just $32,643. Theaters can’t wait for Friday’s release of Housefull 3, which will undoubtedly follow in its predecessors’ footsteps and earn over a million bucks.
The lion’s share of the weekend’s earnings went to Sarbjit, which took in $31,594 from 37 theaters ($854 average) in its second weekend of release. It posted a 76% drop in business from its first weekend, which is still better than Azhar‘s 85% plunge. Sarbjit‘s total North American earnings stand at $230,613.
Other Hindi movies still playing in the United States:
Azhar: Week 3; $960 from four theaters; $280 average; $191,847 total
Baaghi: Week 5; $69 from one theater; $437,098 total
1920 London: Week 4; $20 from one theater; $24,854 total
Amazon’s Instant Video catalog is a challenge to navigate. Within the Prime Video: Bollywood subcategory, sort options are limited to “Featured” and “Newest Arrivals.” Also, titles are frequently misspelled, and the dates listed are often the date the film released digitally, not its theatrical release date. I’ve streamlined the (at present) 90+ titles into an alphabetical list, with correct spellings and release dates.
Amazon Prime’s Bollywood catalog skews older than the Netflix Bollywood catalog, though some recent releases like 2013’s Kai Po Che! are available. There are great older titles like Dil Se and plenty of movies featuring early performances by some of today’s biggest stars. If you’re in the mood to marathon some of Akshay Kumar’s late ’90s Khiladi films, you’re in luck.
Creating this page and making sure all of the information is correct has been a massive undertaking, months in the making. Keeping the information current will likewise require painstaking work. If you appreciate the work I’ve put into this and would like to leave me a tip via PayPal, please follow this link.
No new Hindi films are releasing in the Chicago area on May 27, 2016, which is probably a good thing with theaters devoting as many screens as possible to the new Alice in Wonderland and X-Men sequels. MovieMax Cinemas in Niles and the AMC South Barrington 30 in South Barrington are carrying over Azhar and Sarbjit, which also gets a second weekend at the Regal Cantera Stadium 17 in Warrenville.
Other Indian movies showing in Chicagoland over Memorial Day weekend:
The documentary Song of Lahore chronicles the surprising journey of an ensemble of classically trained Pakistani musicians to their performance at Jazz at Lincoln Center. The film is as touching as it is educational.
Since the Mughal era, Lahore had been internationally renowned for its music. Movie studios employed orchestras to record film scores during the golden age of Pakistani cinema, until a military coup in 1977 shuttered the studios and banned most public musical performances.
Even when restrictions eased in the 1990s, young people turned toward rock ‘n roll and away from traditional music. The Taliban’s rise in influence again drove musicians out of the public sphere.
Fearing the loss of his culture, Izzat Majeed established Sachal Studios in Lahore as a place for musicians — not just players of traditional instruments like tablas and sitars, but guitarists and violinists as well — to jam together. Ignored by local audiences, Majeed made a bold suggestion: “Let’s try to understand jazz.”
What makes the suggestion especially audacious is that the membership of the Sachal Ensemble skews old, as evident by the high number of white-haired members. The notion of ditching fifty years worth of training in a particular style in order to learn a new one is remarkable and inspiring.
Majeed himself was introduced to jazz in 1958, when his father took him to a performance by Dave Brubeck as part of the US State Department’s Jazz Ambassadors program. One theme that’s repeated throughout Song of Lahore is the way politics can shape culture. During the Cold War, the United States used jazz as a weapon against communism.
Famed trumpeter Wynton Marsalis appreciates the historical connections between American jazz and traditional music in Pakistan. Jazz was born out of the persecution of African-Americans, he explains, just as the Sachal Ensemble perseveres in a country where musicians face violence from Islamic extremists.
A YouTube video of their infectious rendition of Brubeck’s iconic hit “Take Five” garners the Sachal Ensemble international interest and an invitation to perform with Marsalis’ big band at Jazz at Lincoln Center. The second half of the film focuses on that performance and the rehearsals leading up to it.
Even though the performance is assured to happen, the rehearsal scenes are tense. The Ensemble seems unsure whether to look to Marsalis for cues or to their own arranger and conductor, Nijat Ali. When they ultimately take the stage in front of a packed house, their performance provokes tears of both pride and relief.
Directors Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy and Andy Schocken keep their story focused, giving some social context but prioritizing this particular moment in the lives of these musicians. Showing the rough patches during rehearsal with Marsalis’ band highlights the practical difficulties of their mission.
Of course, all of the music in the film is tremendous.
Song of Lahore is a wonderful example of not only the power of perseverance but of adaptability. When passion compels you to do something, find a way to get it done.
Last week, I wrote of Aishwarya Rai Bachchan: “Even her lowest earning movies are average performers compared to the rest of the field.” That proved true once again with Sarbjit, which earned $130,199 from 83 theaters ($1,569 average) in North America during the weekend of May 20-22, 2016. It had the tenth best opening weekend of 2016 out of a field of 21 films.
While that opening weekend performance seems okay, by a number of metrics, it’s not. Sarbjit debuted a week after another biopic — the Emraan Hashmi-starrer Azhar — earned almost the exact same amount ($127,266) from 32 fewer theaters, with a per-screen average of $2,495. Sarbjit‘s 83 theaters represent the lowest number of opening weekend screens for one of Rai Bachchan’s movies since 2008’s Sarkar Raj opened in 70 North American theaters. More significantly, Sarbjit‘s opening weekend total is Rai Bachchan’s lowest since 2003’s Kuch Naa Kaho, and that film only released in 32 theaters.
There could be multiple contributing factors at play, such as audience fatigue from consecutive biopics, or the fact that Rai Bachchan became the face of promotions for a movie in which she doesn’t even play the title character, but there’s something more going on here. Rai Bachchan’s presence in a movie no longer guarantees a $1 million haul, the way it did during her heyday. Surely she’ll have better luck with her next project: director Karan Johar’s multi-starrer Ae Dil Hai Mushkil.
In its second weekend, Azhar‘s business fell 85% from its opening weekend. Azhar earned $19,130 from 35 theaters ($547 average), bringing its total to $185,695.
Other Hindi movies still in North American theaters:
Baaghi: Week 4; $3,329 from six theaters; $555 average; $435,687 total
Kapoor & Sons: Week 10; $748 from one theater; $2,661,188 total
Fan: Week 6; $630 from two theaters; $315 average; $2,302,581 total
1920 London: Week 3; $40 from one theater; $24,834 total
Much of the press before the release of Sarbjit focused on whether superstar Aishwarya Rai Bachchan would overshadow the actor playing the film’s title character, Randeep Hooda. Rai Bachchan is the dominant presence in the movie, not because of her performance but because the story is tilted in her favor, at the expense of Sarbjit and the other important figures in his life.
Hooda’s character is Sarbjit Singh, a Punjabi farmer in a small town on the Indian border with Pakistan. He’s married to the woman of his dreams, Sukh (Richa Chadda), with whom he has two young daughters. He shares the family home with his father and his sister, Dalbir (Rai Bachchan).
Dalbir has survived her share of heartbreak. Her only child was stillborn, and her marriage went south not long after due to her husband’s violent jealousy over her close relationship with her younger brother, whom she essentially raised.
Jovial Sarbjit gets drunk with his friend one night and unwittingly stumbles across the Pakistani border. Soldiers arrest Sarbjit on the suspicion of spying, and they torture him into confessing to be terrorist Ranjit Singh.
It takes eight months for Dalbir and Sukh to find out what has happened to Sarbjit, after a sympathetic jailer mails a letter to them on the farmer’s behalf. By then, Sarbjit has been moved to a Lahore prison and sentenced to death.
A lengthy Pakistani judicial process affords Dalbir decades to find a way to free her brother. When Indian politicians are reluctant to intervene — if not outright dismissive — she rallies public support to pressure them into action. Dalbir’s endeavor begins with Sarbjit’s capture in 1990 and lasts long enough to see the advent of the Internet and cell phone technology to further spread her message.
Dalbir’s quest reveals the ways in which the Indian and Pakistani governments use prisoners as proxies in their ongoing conflict. An execution of a Pakistani prisoner in India can easily spur a retaliatory execution in Pakistan. Political offices change hands numerous times during Sarbjit’s incarceration, and every change delays progress to free him.
Dalbir’s story has interesting parallel’s with Sarbjit’s. He’s driven somewhat insane through years of torture and solitary confinement, and she also loses herself as his imprisonment drags on.
Yet, it’s weird the way the story — written by Utkarshini Vashishtha and Rajesh Beri, and directed by Omung Kumar — prioritizes Dalbir’s relationship with Sarbjit over all others. If my brother is ever wrongly imprisoned by a hostile foreign government and we finally get the chance to see him after eighteen years, I’m letting his wife walk through the door first.
So much emphasis is placed on Dalbir that other subplots aren’t fully explored. When they are addressed, it comes too late. About five minutes after I wrote a note wondering how Sarbjit’s younger daughter Poonam (Ankita Shrivastav) feels about spending her whole life protesting on behalf of a father she doesn’t know, Poonam has her one and only meltdown. It would’ve been nice for the sisters to have at least one conversation about how their father’s imprisonment has affected them.
The story focus is further problematic because Rai Bachchan isn’t the best actor in the cast. She conveys Dalbir’s pain, but too often she resorts to shouting to make her point, even when in front of a microphone. Piercing screams aren’t the only way to show anger.
Chadda’s restrained performance is more compelling. Her stoicism begs for more screen time, a window into how this woman perseveres with her beloved husband unjustly imprisoned, leaving her forced to raise two children on her own.
Hooda is terrific as Sarbjit. He loses a troubling amount of weight as the story progresses, but his most interesting trait is the way his speech changes. Dental hygiene isn’t high on his captor’s priority list, and you can almost judge the level of tooth decay by the way Sarbjit sounds.
The movie’s torture scenes are horrific, the conditions of Sarbjit’s imprisonment barbaric. Apart from the kindly jailer and a human rights lawyer (Darshan Kumar), most Pakistani characters are convinced of Sarbjit’s guilt and happy to see him suffer.
Some scenes need more explanation in order to help the narrative flow. Given the way Sarbjit’s fate is tied to world events, it would have been smoother to show the family learning about things like nuclear tests and terrorist attacks directly, rather than inserting stock news footage as Kumar does.
Though an imperfect movie, Sarbjit is an interesting cautionary tale about the hidden casualties of ongoing tension between India and Pakistan. The song “Meherbaan” is excellent. And Hooda and Chadda are so talented that they are impossible to overshadow completely.
[Update: In a recent interview, Richa Chadda revealed her disappointment that many of the scenes she filmed for Sarbjit were cut from the final version. That goes a long way to explaining why I found the story so unbalanced.]
Another Bollywood biopic comes to Chicago area theaters on May 20, 2016. In Sarbjit, Randeep Hooda plays an Indian farmer imprisoned for accidentally crossing the border into Pakistan. The story is told from the perspective of the main character’s sister, played by Aishwarya Rai Bachchan.
All three of the above theaters give a second week to the sports biopic Azhar. The South Barrington 30 also carries over Baaghi and Fan, while MovieMax holds over 1920 London.
Other Indian movies showing in the Chicago area this weekend:
With Sarbjit poised for release on Friday, let’s take a look at the North American box office history of the film’s leading lady: Aishwarya Rai Bachchan. Nineteen of her films have released in the United States since 1999, the earliest year for which I have reliable data. Two of those movies — Raavan and Robot/Enthiran — released in multiple languages in 2010, a time when accurate box office info for Indian films in languages other than Hindi was hard to come by. I included only amounts I could verify, so the Total Gross for both films featured in the chart below is likely lower than the actual total (whatever that may be).
While it appears as though Aishwarya’s career has had a lot of ups and downs, do not be deceived. All but one of the movies in the chart above ranked in the top half of Hindi films released in North America that year. The lone exception — Kuch Naa Kaho — ranked seventh out of the twelve Hindi movies that showed in US theaters in 2003. Even her lowest earning movies are average performers compared to the rest of the field. Aishwarya doesn’t make flops.
Her career also notably includes forays into international cinema, having made four English-language films between 2005 and 2009. Her biggest box office success came in a supporting role in the Pink Panther sequel starring Steve Martin.
Aishwarya’s English movies didn’t lead to a Hollywood career, but they did make her a recognizable star here, further cemented by her annual appearances on the red carpet at Cannes. She’s the face of Bollywood to many Americans, and Roger Ebert famously called her “not only the first but also the second most beautiful woman in the world.” Undoubtedly, her English films paved the way for her juniors to start their own international careers. Does Priyanka Chopra get the leading role in an American TV series without Aishwarya? Probably not.
The biopic Azhar opened very well in North America, especially given the modest expectations governing its release here. During the weekend of May 13-15, 2016, Azhar earned $127,266 from 51 theaters ($2,495 average). While those may not seem like blockbuster numbers, consider this: 13 Hindi movies have released in more theaters than Azhar this year, but Azhar‘s opening weekend total ranks tenth for 2016, and its opening weekend average ranks seventh. No other Hindi movie to open in fewer than 80 theaters has averaged more than $2,000 per screen in its opening weekend. Of the ten other films released into fewer than 80 theaters this year, the second best opening weekend average is just $1,157 (Rocky Handsome, which opened in 74 theaters). Distributors were cautious given that Emraan Hashmi isn’t a huge draw here, but Azhar turned out to be a modest hit.
Other Hindi movies still showing in the United States and Canada:
Baaghi: Week 3; $19,342 from 27 theaters; $716 average; $423,418 total
Fan: Week 5; $5,018 from six theaters; $836 average; $2,301,200 total
1920 London: Week 2; $984 from five theaters; $197 average; $24,084 total
Kapoor & Sons: Week 9; $727 from one theater; $2,660,140
A film about the scandal-plagued life of a former Indian cricket captain deserves a grand scale, but Azhar feels like a made-for-TV movie.
I can’t testify to the accuracy of Azhar‘s story, as I know nothing about Mohammad Azharuddin. I never saw him play a minute of cricket, which puts me in the same boat as almost every Indian under the age of twenty.
That said, Azhar requires no foreknowledge, since all the dialogue is on the nose. Here’s how the cricket chairman drops the bombshell on Azhar (Emraan Hashmi) the night before the captain’s hundredth appearance for the national team: “Azhar, I have some bad news for you. You have been accused of match fixing.”
In case the dialogue isn’t direct enough, the actors go out of their way to make things extra clear. When Azhar decides to fight the cricket association’s lifetime ban in court, the prosecutor, Meera (Lara Dutta), tries to question M.K. Sharma (Rajesh Sharma), the bookie accused of bribery. She tells Sharma that she wants dirt on Azhar, causing Sharma to make an exaggerated gulping noise, leap out of his chair, and whip his head over each shoulder to see if anyone is behind him.
During the course of the eight-year-long court case, we get flashbacks to Azhar’s earlier life, including his relationship with his grandfather, his marriage to Naureen (Prachi Desai), and his affair with Sangeeta (Nargis Fakhri). The romantic plotlines make Azhar seem like a jerk, in which case he’d better be a helluva cricket player.
This brings me to the movie’s single biggest failing: it makes cricket look totally boring. According to Azhar, cricket is just a sequence of slow-rolling ground balls, with a few balls occasionally bopped into the stands. There’s no tension or excitement whatsoever.
Director Tony D’Souza uses so many tight shots during the cricket scenes that it’s impossible to tell what a match actually looks like. The entire frame is filled by a ball skittering past an outstretched hand or a ball plucked out of mid-air by another hand. Did the fielder have to run to catch it? How high did he jump? Where were the other fielders in relation to the play? D’Souza’s direction offers no clues.
The director applies this same framing to Azhar, so we never get a sense of how good a player he is. Hashmi spends most of his time on the field standing with his hands on his hips. Never has an actor playing a star athlete seemed so non-athletic.
Another problem with the main character is that he looks exactly the same throughout, whether Azhar is supposed to be twenty or almost fifty. It’s impossible to tell by looking at Hashmi when any given scene is taking place.
This is not one of Hashmi’s best performances, but it seems as though he’s doing what’s asked of him. D’Souza’s style doesn’t allow for subtlety. Periodic reverb on the dialogue recording further distracts from the film’s performances.
Neither Desai nor Fakhri have much to do, though Desai proves herself the better of the two at crying. Kunaal Roy Kapur is proficient in the thankless role of Azhar’s lawyer. Dutta’s no-nonsense performance is the best in the film.
There are a lot of people in the world who never witnessed Mohammad Azharuddin at his peak. We don’t know him. Azhar doesn’t give us a compelling reason to care.
