I started watching Bollywood movies for the dancing, and it's clearly something India does better than America on just about all counts. The Pussycat Dolls clip might be technically fine, in terms of dance technique, but everyone in it looks like they're working. It's a job. Do this move, then do that one, then do another one. Even in bad Bollywood dancing, people look like they're having fun. Compare this YouTube clip from a recent movie, Om Shanti Om (previously discussed in this column in terms of the star's abs, as I recall):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGLYYyKrF08&feature=related/

Now, the point of the song is that all these Bollywood stars are coming to a big party in honor of the hero, and some of them are great dancers, and some of them, quite frankly, suck. But you've got people who are in their teens and twenties and you've got people in their fifties and sixties all dancing together and having a great time. They're dancing because it's fun, and if they're sexy in the process, they're sexy because they're having fun. I don't know if Indians per se are better dancers than Americans, but they certainly are less self-conscious about it, and that makes it a delight to watch.

I should point out that the silliness of "Deewangi Deewangi" is deliberate--the whole movie is OTT silliness about Bollywood past and present. The funny thing about "Jai Ho" is that I read in an interview with Danny Boyle--I think it was in the LA Times--that the dance was shot before Rahman came on board, and was danced to a song called "Aaj Ki Raat" from the movie Don--you actually see people watching the song on tv in the scene just before Jamal's brother makes his last stand--and Rahman casually told Boyle that he'd just compose a song with the same structure and rhythm and it would be perfectly fine. And so it is. But this is the kind of attitude that derives from the Indian film tradition of dubbing the dialogue after the film has been shot and having playback singers performing the songs while the actors simply lip-synch as they dance. Think about the Western horror of lip-synching, yet in India, it's completely acceptable.

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