Also out: 1408, special edition Dracula, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, and more

"You are so full of shit, yaar, that I can smell it from here," declares my erstwhile friend Ramesh on the phone, not from Mumbai or Chennai or some other sub-continental capitol, but from Racine, Wisconsin, a locale that at this moment feels equally remote. We have been rehashing our long-standing wrangle on a sore subject: whether any firang ("foreigner") can claim to be a true fan of Bollywood movies if he (meaning me) often prefers pictures that aren't popular with the salt-of-the-earth mass audience in India itself. How can I claim to be a pop-culture populist when so many of the movies I review favorably, such as Vidhu Vinod Chopra's Eklavya: The Royal Guard and Shaad Ali's Jhoom Barabar Jhoom, aren't authentic street-level crowd pleasers but glossy, Westernized middle-brow semi-hits aimed at the NRI (Non-Resident Indian) audience around the world and at the urban middle-class in India that patronizes "multi-plex" cinemas?

I never know how to respond to a barrage like this. I am conflicted. I both agree and disagree. I know Ramesh has a point: Box office figures reveal that the only Hindi movies that have been substantial hits thus far in 2007 were Aap Ka Suroor, in which burly Punjabi playback singer Himesh Reshammiya became an instant movie star, and Partner, a labored Salman Khan farce that is such a blatant carbon copy of the Will Smith vehicle Hitch that Sony was reported to be threatening legal action.

Superstar Rajnikanth in Sivaji — The Boss

SUPERSTAR
And beyond that is the awkward fact that the biggest hit produced in India this year wasn't a product of the supposedly dominate Hindi-language cinema of Mumbai (formerly Bombay), but of the deep South Indian Tamil-language industry based in Chennai (formerly Madras). Which means that the most popular movie star in that entire enormous nation is neither veteran tough-guy Amitabh Bachchan nor his heartthrob son Abhishek (who appeared together in JBJ), but the performer invariably referred to as Superstar Rajnikanth. Superstar Rajnikanth is the ham-acting, 50-something favorite of cab drivers and paan sellers who swept all before him in director Shankar's 2007 blockbuster Sivaji — The Boss, dancing in a series of garish wigs to a brace of A.R. Rahman tunes. (The movie played its four-wall theatrical engagements in the U.S. without subtitles, but when the DVD arrives, I will be all over it.)