Once in a lifetime, there comes along a movie in which everything is just right: a brilliant screenplay, perfect casting, a badass background score, and whistle-worthy dialogue. The result: a film that has become the single most iconic element of Indian pop culture.

Most Bollywood films are around three hours in length (because they say that when the masses pay money to watch a movie, they not only want to watch a world completely unlike their own, but they also want to sit in an air-conditioned hall for a good chunk of their day). But most Bollywood films haven't actually got enough material to stretch out over so much time, making them a chore to sit through.

But Sholay is…

I have various cinematic blindspots. One of my biggest is Indian cinema. So for my first Bollywood film, I decided to start with a classic and give Sholay a shot.

Sholay is just awesome. It is pure entertainment, filled with action, romance, comedy, melodrama, and songs. It truly has it all. Spaghetti westerns and samurai films are clear inspirations on Sholay, but it's also distinctive and obviously its own cultural thing. There's a massacre reminiscent of Once Upon a Time in the West, but done with more melodrama and less nihilism. The characters are broadly drawn, but all are wonderfully placed in this ridiculous story. The two leads exhibit the virtues of friendship with some rather campy moments of male…

Yesterday, I relived Sholay on the Single Screen and it was nothing less than a magical invitation into the echoes of history. Single screens don't just show films, they behold them and worship them. Those old screens, ageing seats, posters of history's classic cinemas; everything engulfs a story in itself. Everything becomes a personified proof that the ultimate purpose of Cinema is to unite people to not simply consume, but to acknowledge and share it. And watching Sholay on such holy whereabouts becomes a ritual of paying homage to our most celebrated and culturally rich cinematic history. The whistles, the claps, the shared laughter, the way of shouting dialogues before the characters, the hooting for songs; all these moments feel…

sholay strikes me as a work indebted to the 1970s craze for hysteric zoom lenses as well as being a part of the 1920s chaplin/keaton tradition of vagabond gallantry -- i'm crushingly unfamiliar with indian film as a whole, much less hindi-language films specifically, so the only comparisons i can meaningfully make are to western filmmakers and traditions, that's a limitation on my part, yet this is not a discredit to director ramesh sippy -- his film is a hilarious romp, a much less materialistic version of the type of playfully ironic cinemascope gags that leone brought to the western. sippy packs sholay with so many different tones, genres, and styles that one is forced to either accept the film…