Post by odadune on Jun 8, 2014 3:38:34 GMT
First off, having just had a wonderful time with my friends the non-Bollyviewers (NBVs) during our expedition to see this at the Big Theater Far Away, I don't really want to harsh my mood by looking up and linking the media reviews on this one right now. Last time I checked, the "paid" reviewers were making positive noises that sounded slightly more sincere than usual (you can always tell when Taran Adarsh has been handed a turkey that even he isn't quite sure how to praise), and the snooty middle-to-highbrow reviewers who don't like anything Akki's done in the past ten years except Special 26, OMG and maybe Khakee, didn't like this.
Second off, if you are not familiar with the somewhat complicated production history of this film and its Tamil counterpart, Thuppaki, please see my first post in the "upcoming movies" thread for Holiday: bollywhat.boards.net/thread/55/holiday-akshay-kumar-sonakshi-govinda
I liked it a lot, my two friends liked it a lot. It's a suspense drama with some flag-waving patriotism, a romance/comedy track (including three songs and a certain amount of sexism) to lighten things up a bit, and a fair amount of (potentially disturbing) violence and action to darken things again. Very entertaining for people whose tastes run that way or can tolerate whichever of those elements they find objectionable. The filmmakers carefully dodge any religious angle on the terrorism as best they can. Both the comedy and the suspense/drama angles feel more aggressive and in-your-face than what I remember of Thuppaki*, but not in a bad way-I felt the humor really consistently worked for instance, while Akshay's broader slapstick movies sometimes work for me and sometimes don't. Outside of the Tu Hi Toh Hai song (which appears to be a fantasy taking place inside the main character's head), I didn't feel like the May-October romance issue was much of a problem; if you liked this jodi in Rowdy Rathore, you will like it here, if you didn't, you won't, simple as that. That's the short version. The rest of this TLDR post is me ruminating on the film overall and the expectations/issues other reviews had put in my head before going in....
The film's received some flak for its take on eve-teasing; mostly for Tu Hi Toh Hai (see above), the mirror-kissing scene shown in the trailer, and a scene where the hero makes fun of women for giving men mixed signals. The mirror-kissing scene, to me, actually played marginally better with a more mature-looking actor than it did in Thuppaki with the baby-faced Vijay, where it felt a standard "teasing" scenario. The Holiday version feels like he wants to wind her up a little but isn't really trying to get her to change her mind about him, and also like he has enough sense to stop before doing anything that would upset her on a deeper level. The other scene is well on in the story, after the couple are properly and requitedly in love and it seems to be a case of him trolling her for funsies. (Also Akki's impression of a teenaged girl going "that boy's so meeean!" in this scene is hysterical.) Certainly, none of it's strictly appropriate behavior and attempting it any of it the real world with a woman who hadn't made it clear that she enjoys such things would probably get you slapped, but that applies to about 80s% of everything Bollywood heroes do, including in romance films.
Some reviews of both Thuppaki and Holiday took issue with the ethics of what the protagonist does in the process of his fight against the terrorist network...
Anything else to note? Newcomer Freddie Daruwala plays the main villain and has taken some flak for not being Vidyut Jamwal (who played the role in Thuppaki). I didn't quite "get" Freddie's take on the character initially, but by the end of the film I thought he worked really well: he has an obnoxious-young-punk quality that makes him a good foil for Akshay's maturity, he's convincingly tough and fast in the final fight, and I can see the wheels in his head turning far more clearly in the "clever villain" segments than I could with Vidyut. The action scenes (choreographed by the Skyfall guy and the Rowdy Rathore guy) aren't ground-breaking by western standards but they are well-executed and fairly exciting, with a minimal use of wirework from what I could tell. The songs you can find on youtube or in the "upcoming movies" thread for Holiday-they're middling-decent IMO, with Shaayraana being probably the best of the lot, and I really love two of the picturizations (Shaayraana and Blame The Night). Sonakshi's in bratty-cute mode here; the NBVs were amused by her but she didn't make much of an impression on them. (They did comment on her weight, in more of an amused way, and were-there is no delicate way to put this-awfully impressed by Akshay's ability to lift and spin her in the Shaayraana picturization).
Govinda is hilarious in his few scenes as Akshay's CO-he's billed third, but get significantly less screen time than Freddie or Akshay's police friend. I don't remember the name of the guy playing the friend but he was also good. The subplot with the dog worked well. I didn't feel like the film was overly long, but there were places where it felt sloppily edited to me, including some of the fight scenes. The female NBV was unimpressed with the first fight scene (sparring match while the soldiers were waiting on the train) and I had the impression she was not entirely okay with the sister-as-bait plot twist. Both the NBVs disliked what they termed the "modern hip-hop" dance moves in the picturizations. (The More Casual Fan had a similar reaction a couple years back to Allu Arjun's dances in Aarya 2, which I believe was the MCF's introduction to modern dance in Indian films.)
Again, I can recommend this one if you like suspense movies and don't mind a). Akshay Kumar; b). standard Bollywood commercial elements like song and dance numbers, ani-pals, and humor; c). the violence/vigilantism described above. If you are a suspense movie fan and only (a) applies, check out 8x10 Tasveer, free on youtube. If (a) and a bit of (b) both work for you but not (c), there's always Special 26.
*(watched about 2/3rds-3/4ths in a somewhat fragmentary way without subtitles)
Second off, if you are not familiar with the somewhat complicated production history of this film and its Tamil counterpart, Thuppaki, please see my first post in the "upcoming movies" thread for Holiday: bollywhat.boards.net/thread/55/holiday-akshay-kumar-sonakshi-govinda
I liked it a lot, my two friends liked it a lot. It's a suspense drama with some flag-waving patriotism, a romance/comedy track (including three songs and a certain amount of sexism) to lighten things up a bit, and a fair amount of (potentially disturbing) violence and action to darken things again. Very entertaining for people whose tastes run that way or can tolerate whichever of those elements they find objectionable. The filmmakers carefully dodge any religious angle on the terrorism as best they can. Both the comedy and the suspense/drama angles feel more aggressive and in-your-face than what I remember of Thuppaki*, but not in a bad way-I felt the humor really consistently worked for instance, while Akshay's broader slapstick movies sometimes work for me and sometimes don't. Outside of the Tu Hi Toh Hai song (which appears to be a fantasy taking place inside the main character's head), I didn't feel like the May-October romance issue was much of a problem; if you liked this jodi in Rowdy Rathore, you will like it here, if you didn't, you won't, simple as that. That's the short version. The rest of this TLDR post is me ruminating on the film overall and the expectations/issues other reviews had put in my head before going in....
The film's received some flak for its take on eve-teasing; mostly for Tu Hi Toh Hai (see above), the mirror-kissing scene shown in the trailer, and a scene where the hero makes fun of women for giving men mixed signals. The mirror-kissing scene, to me, actually played marginally better with a more mature-looking actor than it did in Thuppaki with the baby-faced Vijay, where it felt a standard "teasing" scenario. The Holiday version feels like he wants to wind her up a little but isn't really trying to get her to change her mind about him, and also like he has enough sense to stop before doing anything that would upset her on a deeper level. The other scene is well on in the story, after the couple are properly and requitedly in love and it seems to be a case of him trolling her for funsies. (Also Akki's impression of a teenaged girl going "that boy's so meeean!" in this scene is hysterical.) Certainly, none of it's strictly appropriate behavior and attempting it any of it the real world with a woman who hadn't made it clear that she enjoys such things would probably get you slapped, but that applies to about 80s% of everything Bollywood heroes do, including in romance films.
Some reviews of both Thuppaki and Holiday took issue with the ethics of what the protagonist does in the process of his fight against the terrorist network...
{Click to view!}...he withholds terrorists from police custody, he tortures terrorists (although the film notes that this is not a guaranteed way of getting information), he executes them in cold blood and maneuvers his fellow soldiers-on-leave into doing the same, he uses his younger sister as unknowing bait to trap part of the network, and is, um, less than sensitive when she calls him on it after the fact. There's also a fair amount of patriotic speechifying as well, but I mean, we're talking about a film whose full title is: "Holiday: A Soldier is Never Off-Duty". Whaddyah want?
My friends and I didn't have much of a problem with the hero's attitude in Holiday, but it will take a bit to unpack why, so bear with me. I'm not 100% sure how this went down in Thuppaki due to lack of subtitles at the time, but my takeaway from that was that this was a fairly standard cool-guy Kollywood Superhero, perhaps a bit colder (and "cooler") than most, with a bit of partial-English dialogue about having to think like a terrorist to catch a terrorist. Akshay's character in Holiday, on the other hand, is both written and played as a fanatic who exists to counter the fanatics on the other side. When he's on the terrorists' trail, his eyes light up with a cold gleam of anticipation, and you realize that although he's still profoundly angry at these people and angry for their victims, he's looking forward to taking them down. When he starts ranting, late in the film and somewhat at random, about the Taj bombings, he makes you uncomfortable but you have no doubts about his conviction-this isn't like that thing you sometimes see in Akshay's films where he seems to be yelling just to listen to the sound of his own voice. His response to his sister is unkind, but rooted in real-world resentments that combat soldiers and policemen often (though not always) feel towards civilians for not understanding the risks that the former run. Writer-Director Murgadoss does not really condemn any of this in his protagonist; I've said before that I think this director has an engineer's mind-he's sort of invested in certain emotional scenarios that push his personal buttons, but ultimately the creative drive behind his movies is to set himself a series of problem scenarios and solve them. Morality (outside of his personal hot buttons) doesn't really enter into his calculations that much.
Basically, if you're okay with nigh-infallible fictional vigilantes like Liam Neeson in Taken or Clint Eastwood in (and as) Dirty Harry, you won't have much of a problem with Captain Virat Bakshi. I can enjoy characters like that and find their deeds cathartic while understanding why their tactics wouldn't work in the real world. If you want to read Virat as more of an anti-hero than Murgadoss perhaps intends him to be, I think the film leaves room for that as well. Either way, (IMO) it's an outstanding performance by Akshay, slightly exagerrated in places but in a way that works with the material. The character has a few mannerisms borrowed from/homaging Vijay's version of the character (like the shirt-tugging), that I found mildly distracting because I *knew* where they came from. The non-Bollyviewers didn't seem to mind. My friends and I didn't have much of a problem with the hero's attitude in Holiday, but it will take a bit to unpack why, so bear with me. I'm not 100% sure how this went down in Thuppaki due to lack of subtitles at the time, but my takeaway from that was that this was a fairly standard cool-guy Kollywood Superhero, perhaps a bit colder (and "cooler") than most, with a bit of partial-English dialogue about having to think like a terrorist to catch a terrorist. Akshay's character in Holiday, on the other hand, is both written and played as a fanatic who exists to counter the fanatics on the other side. When he's on the terrorists' trail, his eyes light up with a cold gleam of anticipation, and you realize that although he's still profoundly angry at these people and angry for their victims, he's looking forward to taking them down. When he starts ranting, late in the film and somewhat at random, about the Taj bombings, he makes you uncomfortable but you have no doubts about his conviction-this isn't like that thing you sometimes see in Akshay's films where he seems to be yelling just to listen to the sound of his own voice. His response to his sister is unkind, but rooted in real-world resentments that combat soldiers and policemen often (though not always) feel towards civilians for not understanding the risks that the former run. Writer-Director Murgadoss does not really condemn any of this in his protagonist; I've said before that I think this director has an engineer's mind-he's sort of invested in certain emotional scenarios that push his personal buttons, but ultimately the creative drive behind his movies is to set himself a series of problem scenarios and solve them. Morality (outside of his personal hot buttons) doesn't really enter into his calculations that much.
Anything else to note? Newcomer Freddie Daruwala plays the main villain and has taken some flak for not being Vidyut Jamwal (who played the role in Thuppaki). I didn't quite "get" Freddie's take on the character initially, but by the end of the film I thought he worked really well: he has an obnoxious-young-punk quality that makes him a good foil for Akshay's maturity, he's convincingly tough and fast in the final fight, and I can see the wheels in his head turning far more clearly in the "clever villain" segments than I could with Vidyut. The action scenes (choreographed by the Skyfall guy and the Rowdy Rathore guy) aren't ground-breaking by western standards but they are well-executed and fairly exciting, with a minimal use of wirework from what I could tell. The songs you can find on youtube or in the "upcoming movies" thread for Holiday-they're middling-decent IMO, with Shaayraana being probably the best of the lot, and I really love two of the picturizations (Shaayraana and Blame The Night). Sonakshi's in bratty-cute mode here; the NBVs were amused by her but she didn't make much of an impression on them. (They did comment on her weight, in more of an amused way, and were-there is no delicate way to put this-awfully impressed by Akshay's ability to lift and spin her in the Shaayraana picturization).
Govinda is hilarious in his few scenes as Akshay's CO-he's billed third, but get significantly less screen time than Freddie or Akshay's police friend. I don't remember the name of the guy playing the friend but he was also good. The subplot with the dog worked well. I didn't feel like the film was overly long, but there were places where it felt sloppily edited to me, including some of the fight scenes. The female NBV was unimpressed with the first fight scene (sparring match while the soldiers were waiting on the train) and I had the impression she was not entirely okay with the sister-as-bait plot twist. Both the NBVs disliked what they termed the "modern hip-hop" dance moves in the picturizations. (The More Casual Fan had a similar reaction a couple years back to Allu Arjun's dances in Aarya 2, which I believe was the MCF's introduction to modern dance in Indian films.)
Again, I can recommend this one if you like suspense movies and don't mind a). Akshay Kumar; b). standard Bollywood commercial elements like song and dance numbers, ani-pals, and humor; c). the violence/vigilantism described above. If you are a suspense movie fan and only (a) applies, check out 8x10 Tasveer, free on youtube. If (a) and a bit of (b) both work for you but not (c), there's always Special 26.
*(watched about 2/3rds-3/4ths in a somewhat fragmentary way without subtitles)