Partly translated in English~ but fully in Español at Cinencuentro.
Archives For vidya balan
So… I thought I was wrong [1], but now I’m not so sure.
One of my pet-peeves with Indian cinema (and Chinese… and Russian) is when some sort of dubbing is involved. The Russians, of course, are the worst offenders of that when they just slap some Russian over-dubbed without even caring if it’s a man talking over a female character. It’s not even like it’s properly dubbed, it’s just lazily slapped onto the original track without even lowering the audio.
Then the Chinese mess around with you because you got Hong Kong actors that don’t necessarily speak proper Mandarin working with Mainland actors who wouldn’t necessarily speak proper Cantonese (or at all). The result? You don’t exactly know which one is the original audio track. The way I go about it is to choose always Cantonese when film is set in Hong Kong, and go for Mandarin in most epics. Anything historical epic HK production pre-97 also gets the Cantonese favoritism. xD
India has suchhhhhh an array of languages that I’m not entirely familiar with that it would mean little to choose one language over the other, unless you’re bothered with lips syncing. Though Hindi now sounds familiar, I must admit. What bothers me is that I get accustomed to people’s voices. It seems people in India find certain voices more appealing than others, and could -in a whim- dubbed you over. One of the reasons I can’t stand Ghulam is because it bothers me that Rani’s dubbed voice doesn’t match my idea of Rani.
Tabu has done a bit of non-Hindi films, and though her acting can be epic- Telugu dubbing, man. I know and I like Tabu’s voice, and it freaks me out a little how different the dubbing voice can be. As a general dubbing rule, companies tend to go for voices that are similar to the original audio… or they go for someone with a similar flare. Not generally in Indian cinema.
All this talk is because I found a clip of Vidya Balan from Urumi, for which I complained that they probably dubbed their voices. However, in the clip, it sounds… almost like Vidya. For a very long moment I thought it was her, until I read the comments… now, I’m not sure. LOL
If it’s dubbed, it’s the best dubbed I’ve seen. It’s a Japanese super-dub!
If it’s Vidya’s voice, she apparently speaks perfect Malayalam for the movie.
Too much awesomeness into one.
What made it to the list and where it placed? Some of my biggest biases placed lower than expected, and some that I don’t want to be my bias placed high on there~
I broke MindMeister a while back. Around early March actually, so I went back to FreeMind. It doesn’t look as slick, and you gotta install it… but the interface works in the most straightforward of ways. And their PNG export works really good.
Since March, there’s been a bunch of changes in the list, Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra got his own hub after a watch of Delhi 6 — which is the change that broke MindMeister. Mani Ratman also got his own hub, and a watch of Fire sprung a Deepa Meetha hub.
I’ve watched a bunch of Sridevi movies, but not a big fan of the movies themselves except for Sadma / Moondram Pirai. Also added random single titles, catching up with films as varied as Udaan (which sprung a Vikramaditya Motwane hub), Stalin, Highway, and Student of the Year (Alia Bhatt is YUCK in there), and single film additions for Aamir Khan, Shahrukh, Juhi, Madhuri, Rekha, Shabana Azmi, Seema Biswas and Tabu.
According to IMDb, it’s nearly 200 movies already.
I also bought a bunch of Indian movies. The first batch arrived yesterday with Rani Mukherji (2 titles), Vidya Balan (1), Tabu (2), Mani Ratman (1) and Sanjay Leela Bhansali (1) titles. I still wish and hope for SLB Bluray releases for everything pres-Saawariya.
The mindmeister movie journey has sprung several arms and legs, probably a few dozen fangs and a few couple of eyes. Since the beginning of the year [1], I’ve watched some 56 Indian films.
New additions? Farah Khan has her own hub, and Mira Nair has shown up there, as did M.F. Husain. Lootera sprung Ranveer Singh and Sonakshi Sinha, and Ranveer sprung Anushka Sharma and Parineeti Chopra. Luck by Chance sprung Farhan Akhtar and Madhur Bhandarkar finally got his hub. Major new film additions to Kamal Hassan, Sridevi (GOSH, Sadma/Moondram Pirai), and Shabana Azmi.
Click on the image for the large version.
Normally… normally I wouldn’t turn down the opportunity to watch Vidya Balan and Tabu (together!) on a film, which is the case with Urumi (English complete title~ Urumi: The Warriors Who Wanted to Kill Vasco da Gama), but I just can’t shake the feeling that it’s gonna be more than two hours of cringe-worthy cartoon ‘demon-white’ colonialist with random musical numbers. I could maybe take it for two hours sans musical numbers and loads of pumping action fight sequences.
You can try it out even without subs.
Plus, it’s a Malayaman film, so I bet they’ve got their voices dubbed. As an alternative, I found their item songs. Though I’m unsure if Vidya has a more extensive role in the film, Tabu’s credit on IMDb lists it as a special appearance.
The original track song is called Aaranne Aaranne [clip], but the Telugu dub upload is much better for obvious quality reasons.
Vidya’s number after the break~
I also made a [nomination] list of all my favorite foreign things of the last decade. If I had included all movies, general suspects would have applied (eg. Children of Men, Dancer in the Dark), but still remains a very ME list. I hope you like the selection, and don’t hesitate in suggesting films to watch.
I found this episode of Koffee with Karan extra hilarious… or maybe this is symptomatic of my Indian movie-watching. In any case, if you have not yet met Vidya Balan- please, get acquainted as soon as possible.
And I just gotten acquainted with Farhan Akhtar in Luck by Chance -literally- just a few hours ago.
Having said that… Vidya Balan talks about her married life and how she arranges books by their thickness (and her husband by height). I was going to ask “Who DOES that?” but my mother came to mind, and she suggested arranging books by color. So there you go~ As for me? I arrange books by topic or function. In the case of educational books (programming, design, photography, etc) or dictionaries. Fiction (books, plays, collections etc) is divided by West/East content arranged by author… and then I have a comic and graphic novel section mostly arranged by author and genre.
And Vidya is such a tease. She knows how to push Karan’s buttons.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWnkzKOOXWI
She also left us with this quote:
Women like it,need it, want it as much as men do.
I didn’t know you could actually watch The Dirty Picture subbed online. Thank you, Shemaroo.
— EDIT Nov 7, 2914 —
For some reason, StarTV has made the clips private, but you can still watch the episodes on their website.
The Indian film journey mindmap [1][2] collection is a little monster, and it keeps on getting bigger. This time some of the additions included about 21 films with Tabu, a few with Aamir Khan, a couple more from Madhuri Dixit… and about half a dozen with Konkona Sen Sharma.
Oh, and Juhi Chawla now has her own hub.
The connections now seem unreadable.
* RED bubbles denotes films from Jenna’s Beginner’s Guide to Indian Film
** BLUE bubbles are film hubs where a lot of actors show up.
*** PURPLE bubble is RED + BLUE. Duh.
Happy new year, everyone!
Sorry for the lack of posts last month. To make up for it, here are five posts so you can catch up to my 2013 and to get you going this 2014.
- 2013 in Movies (Silly Edition)
- Top50 Songs of 2013 [Xiami sorta complete Playlist]
- The Indian Movie Journey – Phase I
- Indian Cinema Success
- Diez Peliculas del 2013 [spanish only] [google translate]
