RRR

7/25/2022

Taught me that Indian movies apparently should just be ignored, as ratings apparently tell you absolutely nothing about the quality of a film. This is perhaps the worst acting I've ever seen - Plan 9 from Outer Space included - with post-production dubbed voices to boot! Add to that the most cringey, cartoonish pathetic storyline, and you're seriously wondering if this is all a joke. No, SERIOUSLY wondering. I considered I might keep watching for the laughs (I was laughing from the very first scene with the lip surgery receiving evil white woman sitting in the jungle in the 1920s surrounded by kneeling indigenous worshippers and a terribly-dubbed studio recording of a little girl singing, with the girl not even remote knowing the lyrics and making all the wrong mouth movements to pre

9/1/2022

The Cinemark near me has started to show Indian movies. Not feeling like sitting home tonight, I decided to catch this one, and luck was with me. My image of Indian movies, I confess, was that they were mostly musicals centering around a love story involving a very beautiful young woman and a very handsome young man, with lots of elaborate, high-energy dance numbers to keep things going. There is a love story here, but it's not the focus of the film. There are also a few large and very impressive dance numbers, but only a few. (The men's dancing, extremely athletic, astounded me.) Rather, this movie focuses on the story of two young men in 1920s India who, each in his own way, are fighting against the English occupiers. The English are portrayed as inhuman monsters. Very often,

2/17/2023

My first exposure to Telugu Cinema, is when I saw my wife watching a near naked guy running in the forest, chased by a Tiger, looking so shredded that I thought my wife was appreciating the sweaty, bulbous body of a forest guy. I dismissed it immediately as another macho movie after-all, which is not my wife's favorite (its Korean movies). Until I saw a raving review of the Netflix viewer in Youtube who aren't Indians but Americans and Europeans. Now that caused me curiosity. So I decided to watch it, and then watched it again. First I can't believe the quality of CGI in most cases and the great acting of the very charismatic actors NTR and Ram Charan. With Ajay Degn and Alia Bhatt making the movie an experience of a lifetime. The movie is brimming with action, drama and great fun that I w

4/23/2023

**By: Louisa Moore / www.ScreenZealots.com** “RRR” is one of those movies where just about everyone who watches it, loves it. It’s an over-the-top historical spectacle about a violent uprising in 1920s India, offering a fictitious retelling of real events. This international blockbuster has everything: thrilling action sequences, adrenaline-charged stunts, a rousing story, and euphoric Bollywood dance scenes that are nothing short of show-stopping. The plot centers around two real-life India revolutionaries, Alluri Sitarama Raju (Ram Charan Teja) and Komaram Bheem (N.T. Rama Rao Jr.), and imagines what would have happened had the two met and become friends. In “RRR,” the men join together to fight against the British Raj and brutal colonialism in order to save the people. The trail o

7/6/2023

This movie is one, really fun, action-packed, superhero watch. The CGI, of course, is fantastic. What I love about this movie, though, is that it's not just an empty, trivial story as an excuse for CGI. Quite the contrary. The story itself is a fictionalized version of a very real, revolutionary period just before Gandhi's non-violence movement took the lead. If anyone could make any complaint at all, it would be that the British roles are caricatures. Honestly though, what do we white Americans know of how Imperial Britain treated its "non-white subjects"? We DO know that, in 1919, British troops fired on a crowd of unarmed protesters killing hundreds of men, women and children. So the film is steeped in real history. Perhaps, the caricatures were Rajamouli's way of side-stepping the i

10/1/2024

This has been on my watchlist for far too long, and I only wish I had watched it sooner. The film is a visual masterpiece, its beauty serving as a captivating contrast to the intense and brutal violence it depicts. For a fictionalised history, the story is remarkably deep, with characters that are not just well-developed, but also deeply engaging, with clear and believable motivations that draw you into their world. The only downside? The British actors. They're as stiff as cardboard, and not one fiddles with their moustache like a proper Edwardian villain. What's the point of being dastardly if you're not moustache-twirling?