Of Remakes And Inspirations

I watched French Kiss today and once again saw how shamelessly and distastefully some Bollywood directors just rip off from Hollywood and other foreign movies. (Foreign movies. Now I'm in the States. When I look up a Hindi movie on Netflix, it's classified as a foreign movie.)

I remember watching movies like While You Were Sleeping and The Wedding Singer and seeing how they've been copied, down to the silly gags. Remember that scene from Har Dil Jo Pyar Karega... where Salman Khan was talking to Paresh Rawal and the elevator doors kept closing and opening behind them? It's a really silly gag, and it's copied. So may movies tend to be remakes, or, to use a cliche, 'inspired' from other movies. And if you've seen the original before you see the remake, chances are you'll hate the remake, like I hated Mere Yaar Ki Shaadi Hai or Salaam-E-Ishq (or whatever fraction of that movie I had the patience to sit through).

Do these filmmakers think that Indian audiences don't watch or understand or like Hollywood movies? Or do they think that we'd like them translated out for us? Or maybe, we'd just enjoy watching the way the director makes a fool of himself and his actors by ripping off a story and making his own modifications to it which just don't fit in.