Musical melodramas from Mumbai: the Bollywood movies

Bollywood Night, LSUS a photo by trudeau on Flickr.

Bollywood is the informal term popularly used for the Hindi-language film industry based in Mumbai, Maharashtra, India, says Wikipedia.

The term is often incorrectly used to refer to the whole of Indian cinema; it is only a part of the total Indian film industry, which includes several regional film industries sorted by language.[1]

Bollywood is the largest film producer in India and one of the largest centers of film production in the world.[2][3][4]

Bollywood is formally referred to as Hindi cinema.[5] There has been a growing presence of Indian English in dialogue and songs as well. It is common to see films that feature dialogue with English words, phrases, or even whole sentences.[6]

Bollywood films are mostly musicals, and are expected to contain catchy music in the form of song-and-dance numbers woven into the script.

Indian audiences expect full value for their money, with a good entertainer generally referred to as paisa vasool, (literally, "money's worth").[52] Songs and dances, love triangles, comedy and dare-devil thrills are all mixed up in a three-hour-long extravaganza with an intermission. Such movies are called masala films, after the Hindi word for a spice mixture. Like masalas, these movies are a mixture of many things such as action, comedy, romance etc. Most films have heroes who are able to fight off villains all by themselves.

Bollywood plots tend to be melodramas. They frequently employ formulaic ingredients such as star-crossed lovers and angry parents, love triangles, family ties, sacrifice, corrupt politicians, kidnappers, conniving villains, courtesans with hearts of gold, long-lost relatives and siblings separated by fate, dramatic reversals of fortune, and convenient coincidences.