April 13 movie: Satte pe Satta. Amitabh Night is back! We had to take a few weeks off for me to have surgery and Sylvia to go to Puerto Rico. Which sounded like the most amazing trip ever.
It was great to see Sylvia again. We had it at our place this time, and made mini-hamburgers with spicy curry yogurt sauce, and a cucumber salad with spinach and green onions from our garden. What fun.
Satte pe Satta is a remake of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. Which I had just recently seen, and I was surprised by how similar the two movies are. A lot of scenes were taken directly from the original: the drive up to the mountain house, the first dinner where the brothers act like animals, the bride stealing the brothers' clothes to wash them, the party where the brothers have a dance-off with the boys from town to win the girls from town ... They're basically exactly the same movies, except Satte pe Satta adds a whole big subplot about a beautiful rich girl in a wheelchair being the target of an attempted murder. Which was a good change, since Seven Brides for Seven Brothers was fairly low on plot as I recall.
One really cool thing about Satte pe Satta is that the family car is an art car! It's a sort of open jeep with enough seating for all seven brothers and all seven kidnapped girls, a bunch of horns attached to the front, and a kooky multi-colored paint job. And no one ever says a word about it! This crazy car is just there and no one ever comments on it. My god I love Bollywood.
Satte pe Satta also bucked the Bollywood trend in pacing: most of these movies are really exciting at first, start to drag at about the 90 minute mark, and then get exciting again to finish up with a bang. In contrast, Satte pe Satta starts out kind of dull. It finally gets going at about 45 minutes in and the pace never slackens from there. And I haven't even mentioned the kinky undertone (like Amitabh showing his love by flicking his switchblade at the object of his affection. No, really.)
The only negative to me is that the movie had more buffalo shots of portly Indian men than I ever wanted to see. Seriously, the brothers, who are not all that fit, spend the first half hour of the movie in their underpants. I could have forgiven it if Amitabh were included, but no! He's the classy brother who spends the entire movie fully clothed. Figures.
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