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Post by dancelover on May 25, 2014 17:46:00 GMT
Released Friday. BoxOfficeIndia says 6.5 crore Friday, 6.25 Saturday, maybe 7 Sunday. That would be a Good Start, with chances of a Big Success. BOI
Me, I still think that Tiger Shroff looks like Johnny Weir.
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odadune
Star of the item number
not around much due to stuff in my personal life.
Posts: 1,494
Favorite actor: Currently a certain Kumar, but I like most of them
Favorite actress: whoever's in films I'm interested in this week
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Post by odadune on May 26, 2014 13:18:05 GMT
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odadune
Star of the item number
not around much due to stuff in my personal life.
Posts: 1,494
Favorite actor: Currently a certain Kumar, but I like most of them
Favorite actress: whoever's in films I'm interested in this week
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Post by odadune on Aug 30, 2014 23:35:05 GMT
Just watched this. I haven't seen Parugu (the Telugu masala film it is based on), but I would guess this to be a rather faithful remake, just because it feels like other faithful Tollywood-to-Bollywood remakes I've seen. I'm not going to give you a complete rundown of the plot, but basically the hero's best friend and the heroine's elder sister elope, and the hero, heroine, and comic reliefs get sucked into the vortex of violence that follows, as the girls' father (Prakash Raj) tries to track down the runaway lovers. The humorous stuff is fairly well-executed, and the film works the suspenseful aspects of the story (mostly related to Prakash's character) effectively. The songs are decent and the picturizations are amusing if often objectifying-frankly I could have done with a couple more of them, because the story has kind of an oppressive feel overall.
Tiger Shroff gives a better performance than I expected. He has a quiet raspy tenor voice and his line delivery is kind of bland but not awful. His facial expressions are very earnest and effective and not overdone. He's maybe not quite good enough to sell the emotional conflict of a guy caught between his loyalty to his eloping friend, his newfound empathy for the girls' father, and the whole conundrum of being in love with the daughter of someone who's so dangerous and so rigidly opposed to love marriages. But overall he does a serviceable job. He's a flamboyant dancer somewhat in the style of Hrithik, and pulls off some really impressive flips, cartwheels, and mid-air spins, but the fight choreography kind of lets him down: mostly it's stuff you can see in the old 90s b-movies, albeit the cinematographer and film editor are a vast improvement on the hacks who used to handle those jobs back in the day. If you want to see a fairly young, injury-free man really beat the crap of the baddies with panache and a few moves you've not seen before, Vidyut's Commando is a better choice.
Kriti Sanon has kind of a bland screen presence, and feels miscast. The character is a very traditional woman with just a few tiny seeds of rebellion in her soul, and this tall, lean woman with the angular face, confident mannerisms and ramp-walk stride just isn't a comfortable fit. But her diction is better than Sonakshi's was circa Joker (her second movie in order of filming) or Shraddha circa Aashiqui 2, and she emotes well. Also has decent comic timing, and although her technicolor cholis and lenghnas, and net dupattas are not very setting appropriate, they are really cute and she wears them with style.
Prakash Raj originated the role of the father in the Telugu version, and sometimes he goes on autopilot when he reprises a role for the remake, but this time he did really well. I kind of found myself wishing they had cast one of the Bollywood 50+yr+olds, because the father's pretty much the most complicated character in the piece, and it would have been interesting to see one of them take a stab at the role. We learn late in the film that just the fact that the father has adult daughters and didn't infanticide them makes him kind of a rebel within his family, and really the whole story-including the discomforting sequence where Tiger acknowledges Prakash's values and submits to his authority rather than elope-is building up to that moment of finding out whether the old man can take just a few tiny baby steps towards the modern world. (The sequence where Prakash and goondas are cruising around Delhi looking for his daughter and unwanted son-in-law with Kriti and Tiger in tow reminded me of John Ford's The Searchers, only with Prakash instead of John Wayne and eloping Indians instead of kidnapping Comanches, complete with the suspense about whether the man will kill or spare his "dishonored" female relative once he finds her).
There's been some talk about how regressive the film is; it's actually pretty nuanced in its efforts to convey where the young people are coming from, where the father is coming from, and the ending can be seen as either an exercise in chickening out and splitting the difference, as Bollywood films often do, or as evidence that the film is aimed more at convincing dictatorial fathers/uncles/elder brothers to open their minds and hearts a little bit than at guilt-tripping young people into obeying their elders. I personally had more of a problem with a near-rape situation the heroine ends up in, and with another scene where her uncle is dragging her around by her hair trying to get her to identify a particular guy and yelling at her to focus on the task at hand, not on the physical pain she's in. Hey dude, you might get a more coherent response out of her if you stopped trying to pull her hair out by the roots, you #$*%$*(#$&. (This particular uncle is played by the guy who loses his mustache to Rani in the opening of Dil Bole Hadippa, incidentally.) The romance is also pretty stalkertastic at times, with the hero being initially unsympathetic to how much trouble the situation can get his girlfriend into, and him taking (some) liberties with her when he's drunk.
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