Hum Aapke Hain Koun - The Happiest Family EVER

Now that you've had your ticket punched by watching Mother India, you are hereby Officially Qualified to snack up, arrange your pillows, and settle in for a real treat.

Hum Aapke Hain Koun is a ginormous and colorful happy family spectacular, and probably the only movie in the history of all cinema to feature a 20-minute production number about hiding a pair of shoes.

OK, maybe 20 minutes is an exaggeration, and the shoes in question belonged to a bridegroom, and there is a wedding custom that involves hiding his shoes, and because Madhury Dixit is a joy to watch.

I guess you'll want some plotage. Well, it's a happy, loving, fabulously wealthy family who live in a beautiful home and always dress in beautiful clothes while singing and dancing about how much they love each other, how much they love their religious rituals (it's a happy, loving, fabulously wealthy and devout family). The eldest son is getting married, the younger son has fallen in love, the house is always full of laughter and song and love and friends and choreography.

But the best way to enjoy this movie is to let it be your very own magic carpet. Just sit on it and let it take you into this resplendent world of idealized and stylized exuberance.

There is only one Tragic Occurrence, so incongruously plopped in the middle of I lost count of how many hours of enchanting nonsense that you can just get lost in the sheer absurdity of it.

There's lots and lots of Madhury Dixit to marvel at, and if you're an Old School telenovela fan, you'll get a big kick out of how much Reema Lagoo is the spitting image of Maria Ruffo! Oh, and there's a fluffy white pupdog, too!

A note on movie titles: Unless you are a linguistics nut, don't knock yourself out trying to remember titles, or translate them. It is customary to abbreviate them, so Hum Aapke Hain Koun will be referred to as HAHK more often than not, even by lifetime Hindi speakers.

The most practical thing to do is make yourself a simple text file, and copy and paste the titles, along with any notes you want to make, like an IMDB or Wikipedia link, or a link to a review of it, whatever. If you are a nerd, you could make it a web page. The nuts and bolts don't matter, all you need is something that makes sense to you that will help you keep track of which ones you've seen and whatever else works for you.