Movies like "Lagaan" make me glad I'm a film critic. If I were a civilian, I probably wouldn't see a four-hour Indian film
set in 1893 and centered around the game of cricket. I would believe all the critics who told me it was a great film, but I would assume it was of those films you admire more than you enjoy, and if I'm going to spend four hours on something, I'd better be ENTERTAINED, darn it. But as a film critic, I had to watch it whether I wanted to or not, and I'm glad I did. It's the sort of high-spirited foreign film that Americans dig because it doesn't seem all that foreign. The storylines are familiar, and so are the characters. All the most pleasant cliches of a Hollywood sports film -- when you need a homerun to win the game, you pretty much always get a homerun -- are here, translated into cricket terms and enacted by Indians. Oh, and there are musical numbers.
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