The Indian version of the Razzie Awards is coming to Dubai tomorrow, courtesy of the comedy troupe All India Bakchod (AIB).
Commendable performances in Bollywood are honoured at the Filmfare, IIFA and Stardust awards every year. But what about the worst in Bollywood?
These excruciating movies demand special mention, and this is where the stage production The Royal Turds comes in.
“It’s a great thing that Bollywood makes bad movies,” says Tanmay Bhat, a comedian and the co-founder of AIB. “In any industry that is making about 900 to 1,000 crores annually, you’ll always have people to make fun of.”
AIB, the trendsetters in comedy podcasts in India, launched the show last year to name and humorously shame the “trash” that Bollywood puts out each year.
Bhat, along with his partners-in-crime Gursimran Khamba, Rohan Joshi and Ashish Shakya, nominate the worst films of 2013 in several categories, put up sketches of actors and even perform a parody song.
The troupe has staged 11 shows in New Delhi, Mumbai, Calcutta and Bangalore, and will make their international debut in the Emirates this weekend.
“Bollywood is getting better year by year, but that does not mean there isn’t trash out there,” says Bhat, who set up AIB with Khamba in 2012. “While you have better movies coming out, the people who make bad films continue to do so.”
But Bhat thanks this category of filmmakers for supplying inexhaustible fodder for his standup material.
Bhat believes the show is an interesting exercise in gauging not just the audience relationship with movies, but how professionals in the film industry view quality work.
“It is just our observation of trends and the kind of work coming out of Bollywood,” says Bhat. “The actors who come to watch us know what they are in for. Alia Bhatt [the star of the blockbuster romantic comedy 2 States, currently playing in the UAE] came to see our show in Bombay this year. She didn’t come last year because she was in Student of the Year and that was nominated in The Royal Turds. She was careful about that,” he says with a laugh.
• The Royal Turds will be performed at The Oberoi Dubai Hotel, Business Bay, at 8pm on Friday. Tickets cost from Dh150 and can be booked on www.itp.net/tickets/
aahmed@thenational.ae
KEY DATES IN AMAZON'S HISTORY
July 5, 1994: Jeff Bezos founds Cadabra Inc, which would later be renamed to Amazon.com, because his lawyer misheard the name as 'cadaver'. In its earliest days, the bookstore operated out of a rented garage in Bellevue, Washington
July 16, 1995: Amazon formally opens as an online bookseller. Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought becomes the first item sold on Amazon
1997: Amazon goes public at $18 a share, which has grown about 1,000 per cent at present. Its highest closing price was $197.85 on June 27, 2024
1998: Amazon acquires IMDb, its first major acquisition. It also starts selling CDs and DVDs
2000: Amazon Marketplace opens, allowing people to sell items on the website
2002: Amazon forms what would become Amazon Web Services, opening the Amazon.com platform to all developers. The cloud unit would follow in 2006
2003: Amazon turns in an annual profit of $75 million, the first time it ended a year in the black
2005: Amazon Prime is introduced, its first-ever subscription service that offered US customers free two-day shipping for $79 a year
2006: Amazon Unbox is unveiled, the company's video service that would later morph into Amazon Instant Video and, ultimately, Amazon Video
2007: Amazon's first hardware product, the Kindle e-reader, is introduced; the Fire TV and Fire Phone would come in 2014. Grocery service Amazon Fresh is also started
2009: Amazon introduces Amazon Basics, its in-house label for a variety of products
2010: The foundations for Amazon Studios were laid. Its first original streaming content debuted in 2013
2011: The Amazon Appstore for Google's Android is launched. It is still unavailable on Apple's iOS
2014: The Amazon Echo is launched, a speaker that acts as a personal digital assistant powered by Alexa
2017: Amazon acquires Whole Foods for $13.7 billion, its biggest acquisition
2018: Amazon's market cap briefly crosses the $1 trillion mark, making it, at the time, only the third company to achieve that milestone
The biog
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