neadods: (bollywood)
[personal profile] neadods
You've Got Mail meets a gender-switch Cyrano de Bergerac, with an extra helping of angst and a happy ending: Mujhse Dostie Karoge (Let's Be Friends).

It's a sweet little story, padded out with the Obligatory Obstacles To The Wedding.* Pooja's sweet on Raj. Raj is sweet on Tina. Raj's family moves to London to make a killing in computer programming when the kids are about 8. Raj makes Tina promise to email him, but it's Pooja who becomes his steady e-pal for 15 years, always signing Tina's name on the belief that he wouldn't have bothered to read messages from her. And she has a point, because after making a passionate e-plea that he would recognize his correspondant's heart, Raj comes back to India and blows right past Pooja to fawn all over Tina.

*(Considering that said obstacles are an inevitable part of most of the Bollywood movies I see, I should come up with an anagram for that. OOttW? O2T2W?)

I rather liked it; Pooja's motivations for what she did certainly made sense at her age, and her fury that Raj's pretty words about soul mates could be trumped by a pretty face made even more sense. (I was rather reminded of While You Were Sleeping, another favorite movie where the heroine ends up over her head for reasons that are not entirely her fault.)

The one flaw is that Raj acts like an utter jerk for about a third of the story. Yes, I understood his motivations, and I'm realizing that it's part of the genre to have as many scenes as possibly where the hero grumpily angsts while the heroine stares silently out at the audience with doe-eyed despair. Still, he was the one who came up with both the notion that Pooja had to marry on his wedding day, and he was the one who picked a possible groom, so it's a bit much that he has to chew that amount of scenery when she gives due consideration to the concept.

Points to the casting director and the scriptwriter too, because the romantic rival was an excellent supporting character. In a romance series he'd've gotten his own sequel book, and he had the personality to carry one off.

Date: 2005-06-29 04:36 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] neadods.livejournal.com
Well, the wonderful thing about Netflix is how easy it is to stop watching a movie if I don't like it...

Definately look up the song crossovers; you've got more experience, so you're more able to recognize them than I.

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