By Jason Apuzzo. A new Bollywood film called Tere bin Laden (Without You, Laden) that satirizes Osama bin Laden, is apparently set for release next month (on July 16th) according to the AFP.
According to the film’s Wikipedia entry …
Tere Bin Laden is a tongue-in-cheek comedy about an ambitious young news reporter from Pakistan who is desperate to migrate to the US in pursuit of the American dream. His repeated attempts to immigrate are shot down as his visa is always rejected. But when things couldn’t look worse he comes across an Osama bin laden look alike. Ali then hatches a scheme to produce a fake Osama video and sell it to news channels as a breakthrough scoop! Unfortunately there are serious ramifications as the White House gets involved and dispatches an overzealous secret agent on Ali Zafar’s trail.
Satire is an extremely potent weapon, and it isn’t really surprising that current Bollywood filmmakers would feel comfortable going into this comedic territory due to the dire, ongoing threat of Islamic terrorism to Indian society (as grimly evidenced by the 2008 Mumbai attacks). As Arun Venugopal wrote in the Wall Street Journal earlier this year, Bollywood has been cranking out movies of various sorts on the subject of terrorism for the past several years - Kurbaan (2009), Black and White (2008) A Wednesday! (2008), My Name is Khan (2010) and Aamir (2008), just to name a few – while filmmakers in the West have been cowering under dark clouds of political correctness. And as we’ve been covering here at LFM, extremely funny hit indie films like The Infidel (see the LFM review), Four Lions and the award-winning web series Living With the Infidels have recently been ripping away the veil that’s been hovering over this subject … while Hollywood dithers, still trying to figure out what is politically ’safe’ to say about terrorism.
We wish the filmmakers well with this new project. The film’s trailer is below.
Posted on June 24th, 2010 at 9:38am.
It’s striking that Bollywood would have the courage to make these films, and not Hollywood. Bollywood is much more vulnerable to attack by Muslims given the large Muslim populations nearby, and yet Hollywood, behind its protected studio gates, far from any Muslim threat, is more afraid. Shame on them.
I don’t think it’s quite that surprising. Bollywood is still in the age when they are trying to turn a profit on films and aren’t worried about pushing an ideological viewpoint. There is money to be made making fun of terrorists, even if An American Carol failed. Hollywood, solely an ideological group instead of a business group, is not willing to sell something that people want if it goes against their beliefs.
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[...] Indian satire. [...]
Hollywood has figured out how to make money no matter what, and that is why they feel they can ignore subjects that they disagree with like making fun of terrorists. They make so much money from Pixar films and Avatar and the Bourne films that they don’t need to cater to a “right wing” audience. Hollywood hasn’t suffered one bit from releasing any left-wing film from Fahrenheit 9/11 through today. There has been no audience revolt. Conservatives need to wake up to the fact that “market forces” and acting like a “business group” are not going to make Hollywood make right-wing films for them, because Hollywood is doing great making left-wing films and sees no need to change. Conservatives have to make more films of their own instead of just complaining about Hollywood all the time.