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Bollywood actor Sanjay Dutt gets jail time for ties to Mumbai bombing

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 13:00:00 +0000

Despite its reputation for corruption, India's legal system has sentenced one of Bollywood's most famous actors, Sanjay Dutt, for his link to the 1993 terrorist attack that left 257 people dead and 713 wounded. The AP notes that the bombing was the biggest terrorist attack in India's history.

Dutt, who already spent 20 months in jail for buying illegal weapons from the terrorists, has been on bail since 2007, "when he appealed against his original sentence of six years," reports the BBC. "On Thursday, the Supreme Court reduced it to five years."

From the BBC:

Fox’s populist dance spectacle

Tue, 18 Sep 2012 18:08:00 +0000

The Fox network is known for its thought-provoking television programming, so it was no surprise, last month, to flip the channel there and find a group of six bare-chested men wearing skirts, writhing and leaping in a frankly eroticized war dance, as they performed choreographer Robert Battle’s The Hunt.

Or, wait. Perhaps you were surprised? These members of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater appeared on Fox’s hit reality program So You Think You Can Dance, which wraps up its ninth season tonight. Viewers enjoyed the Ailey performance while waiting to find out which dancers would be, in reality-speak, “eliminated.” As if to make up for the daring of the professional troupe’s performance, the results were blandly predictable: two white girls (who are nearly indistinguishable from two other white girls currently on the show) got to stay; one lithe black ballerina named Amber was voted off. Thanks for nothing, America.

Pick of the week: Bollywood’s blissful, idiotic “RA. One”

Fri, 28 Oct 2011 00:30:00 +0000

I won't remotely pretend that I'm qualified to judge "RA. One," the Indian science-fiction action-adventure movie that opens all over the world this week, against the larger context of Bollywood cinema. What I can tell you is that "RA. One" is reportedly the most expensive movie the Indian film industry has ever produced, that it represents the continuing fusion of Eastern and Western sensibilities and technologies, and that it's prodigiously silly and miscellaneous and a whole bunch of fun. This is hardly an original statement, but Hollywood had better not take its global supremacy for granted. While "RA. One" is as calculating as all get out, is loaded with blatant product placement and -- in classic Indian style -- combines any number of different and perhaps contradictory genres in an effort to reach babies and grandmas and everyone in between, it never feels cynically niche-marketed or fundamentally bored with itself, the way so many big-budget American movies do.