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Gulaab Gang

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As our final field trip, we had originally planned to go to FunAsia movie theater in Richardson, Texas to watch a Bollywood film in an actual theater. However, due to the theater not scheduling any movies in subtitles, Dr. Ball-Phillips was forced to improvise and turn our movie day into an informal excursion to the house of the famed Prajapati, Kalachandji’s and to view the… interesting… Gulaab Gang directed by Soumik Sen.

Kalachandji’s was an incredibly fun experience. It is all you can eat, delicious, vegetarian Indian food for the low price of $12ish dollars, including drink. The food was obviously fresh and was being replaced and tended to by the incredibly friendly staff constantly. There were also an assortment of Indian breads and two western breads (a cinnamon raisin twist and a just plain white bread) that were obviously freshly baked and incredibly delicious (shout out to Micah). I will definitely be returning there many times to get my Indian food fix!

Now after we stuffed our faces at Kalachandji’s (with a distinct lack of Prajapati… gosh Dr. Ball-Phillips), we rushed back to Dallas Hall and started the movie Gulaab Gang. Now this movie is extremely loosely based on a woman’s activist group founded in 2006 by Sampat Pal Devi. However, Devi actually sued the makers of the movie and tried to stop the film from being released but this failed. Now the movie in actuality is polarizing in what people think of it. From the reviews on IMDb, there seem to be four reasons to watch this film, you are a fan of anything supporting women in strong roles and just women being empowered in general, you are a big fan of Madhuri Dixit, you are a big fan of Juhi Chawla, or finally, you just happen to enjoy the hilariously bad (by western standards) acting and just general production.

Now if you happen to be looking for a Bollywood film empowering women, this is probably the one for you! The protagonist and antagonist both make quick and easy work of any of their male opponents and spend the whole movie in an interesting power struggle. However, the historical accuracy of this film is extremely weak and therefore you really cannot in good conscience call it a historical film. Now as a Westerner who is not familiar with too much of Bollywood I must judge the two main actresses on my usual standards. The whole film is over acted to a hilarious margin. Every single fight scene consisted of pretty ridiculous slow motion shots of the beautiful women with spotless makeup and perfect hair looking directly into the camera as they slice into some poor extra. Also, Madhuri Dixit seemed relatively lacking in her acting and from the reviews on IMDb, it was one of her worse performances. Juhi Chawla however made a pretty convincing villain and that was fun to watch.

Basically, Gulaab is a fun totally crazy movie that happens to star female main characters. Anything that someone says past that is basically an exaggeration. I would definitely recommend watching this just for the fun factor but do not go into it expecting solid acting, production, plot, or historical accuracy.

Citation:

“Gulaab Gang.” IMDb. IMDb.com, Inc. An Amazon.com Company., n.d. Web.

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