About This Site

I watch a lot of Indian films, mostly Hindi and Bengali and often made before 1980. Not exclusively, but that's where my heart lies. Except for Rani and Shah Rukh. I don't blog very much anymore, but I write at The Cultural Gutter every other month and I'm always on twitter @bethlovesbolly. You can also reach me by email at bethlovesbollywood at gmail.

I have two film-related tumblrs: Paagal Subtitle for funny/surprising/questionable English subtitles on Indian films and Fully Phoney (co-run with The Cult of Kumar) for telephones in Indian films. Both take submissions!

In addition to watching movies and imitating dance routines very poorly, I work in the world cultures museum of a big university in Illinois, have a dog, and like to knit, which is hard to do while watching subtitled movies.

I often get asked how I started watching Bollywood movies. The short answer is that when Bride and Prejudice came out, I was so excited to see it—being a lover of most Jane Austen adaptations—that I went to the film's website and started poking around. The director had put up a list of Indian film conventions that she was playing with or winking at in the film, and as I read about them I thought "These films sound amazing! Why have I never seen any of them?!?" I ran to my local independent video store, That's Rentertainment, which had a truly wonderful international film collection, and grabbed things off the shelf. Because it had such happy-looking people on the cover, my first Indian film was Mujhse Dosti Karoge. And I was hooked.

In addition to this site, I have written about and discussed Indian cinema in the following publications/media:
I'm very lucky to have been interviewed, profiled, and mentioned in several publications. Here are some of those stories:

Below: a slideshow of the recently retired rotating banner images from this blog.

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