Prague Journal

Saturday, June 18, 2005.

Paul and his friend Juraj, who was Paul’s student in the first USBSP MBA class in 1991, took me to the Krystal Hotel for breakfast. USBSP (U.S. Business School Prague) used to hold classes at the Krystal Hotel, which was built in 1989 by the communists, but only used for “capitalist” classes and seminars. It still has a communist past – it was intended for classrooms and seminars when the communists built it, even though they were ousted before they used it themselves—so locals think of it suspiciously. Two years ago USBS moved its classes to the city center, so Paul and Juraj went to the Krystal for a nostalgic tour, including the ever-consistent breakfast of sausages, cheese, bread, and soup. Sadly, there was no soup this morning. Instead there was yogurt and jam.
After a proper tour of the Krystal, and a walk around the funky suburban neighborhood, I went to Dejvicka to meet Veena for coffee. We really had no agenda or anything important to discuss today, but we did talk about our Prague experiences and suggestions for new Fulbrighters who are coming this fall.
This evening, Rick and I went to see “Bride and Prejudice” at the Svetozor cinema on Wenceslas Square. This film is a “Bollywood”-style re-telling of Jane Austen’s classic tale of marriage and manners, transplanted to modern-day India, England and America, and complete with lavish musical spectacle. Roger Ebert of Chicago Sun-Times described Bollywood musicals as “the Swiss Army Knives of the cinema, with a tool for every job: comedy, drama, song and dance, farce, pathos, adventure, great scenery, improbably handsome heroes, teeth-gnashing villains, marriage-obsessed mothers and their tragically unmarried daughters who are invariably ethereal beauties.” Bollywood is Bombay (which is now called Mumbai, although there has been no movement to rename the genre Mumblywood). Most Bollywood movies are interminably long, so they don’t play well in the west, but this one (named “My Big Indian Wedding” in Czech) was mercifully only 111 minutes. Bollywood has developed a healthy audience in London, where the Bollywood Oscars were held a year ago. American film critics have been less scathing than the criticism “Bride” met in the UK and India. Indian audiences, however, were not particularly delighted about some of the musical sequences in the film. The locals in Amristar, where the movie was shot, strongly objected to the theme of young girls wooing suitable bachelors and disrupted the shooting for days. The main appeal for most people (guys, anyway) is Aishwarya Rai, described by Ebert (and others) as the most beautiful woman in the world. She was Miss World of 1994 and has starred in ads for both Coke and Pepsi. She had to GAIN weight for the role of the beautiful and cuttingly witty Lalita. Ebert describes the plot as “recycled from Austen, is the clothesline for a series of dance numbers that, like Hong Kong action sequences, are set in unlikely locations and use props found there; how else to explain the sequence set in, yes, a Mexican restaurant? Even the most strenuous dances are intercut with perfectly composed closeups of Aishwarya Rai, never sweaty, never short of breath. What a smile.” The songs really are a major disaster, so bad they’re funny. From another review: “Characters burst into song and dance at the slightest provocation, backed up by a dance corps that materializes with the second verse and disappears at the end of the scene.” All this comes at you in a blaze of colors. Perhaps the movie is worth seeing only for the youngest sister’s snake dance.

posted by JWinn @ 10:40 PM