Monkey Man (2024)

That's all true. However, the average Western movie-goer probably isn't going to differentiate masala style films from other Bollywood films so that becomes the shorthand since other Bollywood films are not as distinctive in comparison.

Captain Marvel had a dance scene but you'd have to find one of the handful of people who watched it to confirm its style.

Unsurprisingly, when you have a continent-sized country with many different languages and cultures, a very long and rich history in all kind of arts and probably the most prolific national cinematography in the world, the end result is that "indian films" is a term that covers a very complicated universe.

In the past few years, some recent indian productions have been screened in my city (I think it's a mix between some indian cultural association and indian studios using world wide sales as a promotional argument at home). Between those, some oddities I stumbled upon here and there in festivals and some more "arty movies" that ended in theaters, I maaaybe have seen 30ish indian films in my life. So at this point, the main thing I understand is that I don't understand much!

Like, for instance you mention masala films (a term I learned today thanks to you!) that is, to paraphrase wikipedia, films that mix action, comedy, drama, singing and dancing, with an emphasis on colorful high level production and costumes. It's supposedly a style that emerged in the '70s and that is still very popular today in all the movie productions hubs in India. But I feel that even before that, India had its how take on musical films. One of the few classic indian film I saw is Pyaasa (1957) (probably not that easy to find, but clearly a masterpiece - EDIT: actually it's very easy to see, it's on youTube in full!) and it already has the very long duration (2h33) and many song sequences that clearly are not sung by the actors (something that is also peculiar: the lyricist and the actual singers are also stars when it comes to the promotion of the films - our musical films tend to only focus on the composer), but there is no dancing to be found. So not really a masala, but not really your average Hollywoodian musical film either. Complicated...

Wikipedia mentioned a good example of a non-indian masal-inspired film: Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge!

Warr said:

Spoiler

0. I'm as suprised as you.

Movie was teased as "Indian John Wick" and the parts of the movie that fit that description were good. But the parts that didn't just draaaaaaged. I saw it last Sunday in a theater, but If it's on VOD now, go watch it there or pirate it instead.

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This lost my interest after he made his attack

saw it at home and really enjoyed it, broke it up over 2 nights. There are really only 3 action scenes, 1 is a boxing arena and the first action scene is pretty short. The final third of the movie is a long ass action scene though and pretty good. It can get EXTREMELY violent, definitely not for kids.

Its not really like a movie I've seen before, the last third is basically Indian John Wick but the first 2/3'ds of the movie is not. Its sort of like old 90s Steven Seagul/JVCD/third tier action movies - guy loses everything, long ass training montage, goes out and gets revenge - but not exactly.

The action scenes were mostly bad tbh, 7-10 seconds cuts and weird close camera work that was very disorienting. Still, overall I found the story pretty interesting and was never really bored in the movie. Worth a watch at home when it comes to whatever streaming service or you pirate it.

For me the most fascinating thing is if this movie was done by a white person it woulda be called woke as fuck because there are trannies, lotsa poor people, rich people are FUUUUCKED up, on and on. but it feels very authentic here because I think it has a genuine vibe of "this is what people say, and this is what they do" and for the people who are the bottom of society the two line up while for the rich they say one thing and do something completely different. In western films the two never line up anymore, the "poor" act like assholes and only whine while the rich are cartoonish and say and do shitty things.

for first time out director Dev Patel this is really wild, it'll be fascinating to see what he does next.