“Chaiya Chaiya” is a Bollywood tune, but I was never entirely clear about what precisely constitutes a Bollywood tune…or a Bollywood film, for that matter. (I know how to define them generally, but not with any particularity.) So a reader named Aamir Hanif laid it all out: “Bollywood refers to all movies that are made in Mumbai, formerly Bombay. Sort of like Hollywood movies.” (Okay, I knew that.) “Pakistan, India’s neighbor, has the same sort of thing. Its movie capital is a city called Lahore and all Pakistani movies are also called Lollywood movies. The thing with India is that it makes so many movies, in so many languages, that people confuse Bollywood movies with other Indian regional movies. The reason for this is that Bollywood movies are by far the single largest group and that’s why people think of Indian movies as Bollywood movies. Bollywood movies are generally flamboyant film musicals but recently, with the westernization of the film industry, their are new kinds of variations becoming popular in the country. Dil Se, the 1998 movie from which ‘Chaiya Chaiya’ is taken, was one of the first of these arty/commercial variants. A Bollywood tune is a tune that is in a Bollywood movie, which can have songs that cover multiple genres such as ghazals, pop, classical, or a combination thereof. However, since they are in a Bollywood movie, they are called Bollywood tunes.”

I’d like to ask everyone to stop what they’re doing and bow their heads in a moment of silence…seriously…for Sidney Lumet‘s Find Me Guilty, which opened on 3.17 and is already dead. It’s one of the best films of 2006 so far, it’s Lumet’s best since Q & A, and it has what can reasonably be called an embarassment of first-rate performances (by Vin Diesel, Peter Dinklage, Anabella Sciorra, Alex Rocco and Linus Roache, for openers). It cost $13 million to make, took in $608,000 in 439 theatres last weekend, and now has about $667,000 total so far. Forget it, off to video, over and out. Was it doomed from the get-go because nobody cares about Diesel or Lumet or mafia courtoom dramas? Or because the mob-family-values theme turned prospective viewers off? Did Bob Yari screw up the marketing on top of this? Is there some kind of basic aesthetic deficiency out there…a missing hardware chip that allows average sentient beings to recognize a quality flick when it opens? All four probably apply.