Oh, golly, Bollywood is back: Anurag Basu's KITES opens internationally

I have now made my more-or-less annual visit to Bollywood, and once again have left a movie theater (the very nicely-appointed and extremely comfortable Big Cinema on Manhattan's East 59th Street) with my jaw hanging down to my knees.  What can one say about a project as silly, expensive and inconsequential as KITES?   As much as I sometimes rail against Hollywood's blockbusters, they seem models of intelligence and restraint when set against the schlock-fests coming out of India.  If you found, as did I, the screenplay for Avatar slightly "wanting," wait until you get a load of this film, produced by Rakesh Roshan and directed by Anurag Basu (shown below).

Kites' biggest idiocy is that every event in the film happens simply because the characters want it to happen -- from marrying rich to winning a dance contest to falling in mad/luxuriant/forever-after love to suddenly having a sub-machine gun in your hands because you need to wipe out the bad guys.  When anything/everything can happen this easily, very soon there is no logic, suspense or viewer goodwill remaining.  Perhaps I just don't "get" Bollywood .  (On the plus side, compared to my last B'wood outing -- Chandi Chowk to China -- this movie is at least shorter and features fewer interrupting dance numbers.)

Because Kites provides some visual enjoyment, starting with its two stars, I'll stick to pictures rather than verbiage on this one. In the male lead is one of the most handsome men currently in movies, Hrithik Roshan (shown at right), who could give the young Alain Delon competition face-wise, and whose body may be the best on view anywhere these days.  As a poor, grown-up orphan boy known as "J", Mr Roshan teaches dance classes, swims, showers and de-shirts often, so his physique, with every muscle showing and glowing, is on display front and center.

In the lead female role is Uruguayan actress Bárbara Mori, shown above and below, who made a bit of a Latina splash here in the USA a few years back via the soap-opera-ish My Brother's Wife.  Mori is an eyeful and so makes a nice match for her leading man.

Once the pair connect, they go dancing -- in the rain, of course, so that their clothing adheres tightly to those voluptuous bodies.

Unfortunately, as they are betrothed respectively to the sister and brother of a Las Vegas casino-and-crime family (don't ask), they are then hunted down by the family and so must endure foot chases with lots of vaulting...

car chases (with the expected car wrecks)...

more chases, this one resulting from a bank robbery
(again, don't ask)...

smooching...

a wedding in Mexico...

followed by more smooching...

 and then a little "down" time on the cliffs above the sea.

Probably the wackiest moment (for viewers) will come during an extended scene of animated shadow puppets cast upon the wall by our two protagonists.  And once again, I say, don't ask. 

TrustMovies is used to covering small independents and foreign films that are lucky to find a berth in one theater or two here and there in the nation's larger urban areas.  Yet Kites opens big-time in three major countries (not cities -- countries!) on Friday, May 21.  Click here to find the cities and theaters across Canada, the USA, and the UK.  And then go practice your own shadow puppetry.
You never know when this may come in handy.