Post by Dracula on Jul 27, 2022 22:46:17 GMT -5
RRR(7/20/2022)
I had some serious reservations about even watching RRR, despite it’s unlikely status as a critical darling, in no small part because the only realistic way to stream the copy that’s on Netflix… which is dubbed from the film’s original Telugu language into Hindi and appears to be in the wrong aspect ratio to boot, two things that made this presentation anathema to a purist like myself. On top of that, I’m just generally uncomfortable reviewing Bollywood (or in this case Tollywood) movies; I’ve seen a handful of them but I’m not well versed in their tropes and generally feel like I lack the expertise to really contextualize them intelligently. Eventually I was informed that Netflix’s aspect ratio was open matte rather than pan and scan, which made that issue slightly more tolerable, and I was eventually willing to hold my nose and put up with the dubbing (which, if I’m being honest I probably wouldn’t have noticed if I wasn’t told about it) but my nervousness about trying to review this thing did not go away and as I watched and kind of disliked it I found myself increasingly worried about having to explain this stance and be the buzzkill in the room… and yet I feel oddly confident about my take.
RRR (which stands for Raudraṁ Raṇaṁ Rudhiraṁ, which translates to “Rage, War, Blood” and has alternately been translated to “Rise Roar Revolt”), is set in 1920 during the British Raj and is kind of a fanfic about a pair of heavily fictionalized historical figures named Komaram Bheem and Alluri Sitarama Raju who never actually met or interacted but who do in this movie… and who are also basically superheroes here. Unlike the Indian films westerners are most familiar with, this isn’t really a musical (though there are a couple of musical sequences anyway and some non-diegetic songs as well) but is instead this really maximalist action movie in which two outlandishly powerful paragons of virtue seemingly singlehandedly take down British rule with their combat skills. India is generally said to have been freed through peaceful non-resistance over twenty years after this is set but this movie doesn’t see it that way, here violence is very much the answer. It would be like if an African American filmmaker made a film set in the mid-twenties where Marcus Garvey and W.E.B. Du Bois violently overthrew the governor of New York with martial arts skills that verge on being superpowers with a tone of nutty sincerity that would make latter day Fast and Furious movies looks restrained and down to earth and did this more or less unironically. Like, there’s a scene here where one of these guys picks up and throws a leopard at British soldier and this does not seem out of place at all in the tone of this film.
Is this stupid? Well, on certain levels it’s kind of hard for me to judge. Broadly speaking it’s hard to argue with the film’s anti-colonial messaging but I know the language of propaganda and dehumanization when I see it and this borders into it. The extent to which this movie exaggerates its bad guys into outright sadists and revels in killing them sits somewhere between Rambo and D.W. Griffith’s Hearts of the World in the “good taste” scale and I’m not entirely comfortable with it. Look, I don’t want to call “reverse racism” here, that’s stupid, really my issue here is less that it makes the British into heinous villains (the real ones probably were) so much that as a matter of taste I find these kind of black and white simplistic depictions of history to be inherently less interesting and less appealing than films that take a more nuanced approach. I think Quentin Tarantino’s revisionist history revenge films Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained would also be fair comparison points which, in addition to several aesthetic differences I prefer, are much less hagiographic about their heroes and tend to find at least a little more human complexity in their villains even if they do ultimately make the villainousness of those regimes very clear. Also, in the case of Django Unchained we’re dealing with a white American director criticizing the history of white Americans, which is something that’s going to have a different tone to it than a work of blatant borderline jingoistic nationalism like RRR.
But as suggested earlier my issues with this movie are much more aesthetic than moral or substance based. I just find the action scenes and style kind of obnoxious. The movie looks extremely digital and most of its sets look kind of fake in a manufactured way, they lack the wear that’s key to making period films look authentic. The action scenes involve a lot of outlandish fight choreography and heroes that are inexplicably powerful despite ostensibly just being normal people and there’s a ton of Zack Snyder style speed ramping that looks kind of choppy and intelligent. I think the biggest part of my disconnect is just how incongruous a lot of these action heroics feel against the film’s historical setting. I’m not a hundred percent sure I have a good explanation for why this type of stuff scans better to me when they happen in dynastic China or ancient Greece than in 20th Century history, but it kind of does. I think it’s because martial arts epics are legitimately “mythic” and it’s hard for me to accept something that supposedly happened less than 70 years before my birth as being the stuff of legend… or maybe I’m just more versed in Hong Kong action movies than I am with Indian Historical epics and that if I was used to movies like this I’d much more easily relax and go with this absurdity.
And that brings me back to the anxiety I had when I first started watching this: am I in any real position to judge this movie? I don’t know, but as an individual I did have an experience with this movie and it wasn’t to my tastes. Other critics are less bothered by the film’s outlandish idiosyncrasies, in fact they seem to be why a lot of people find the film refreshing. But I must say I also wonder if these same critics are maybe giving the movie a pass for its kind of reactionary outlook; its jingoism, its shallowness, and its general blockheadedness. It wouldn’t be the only kind of dumb jingoistic action movie these critics have given a pass to, Top Gun: Maverick was similarly given a free pass despite having many of the same problems. I don’t know, maybe there’s something in the air during these times which has made otherwise discerning critics want to stop being so picky and just roll with whatever movie offers a good time or maybe people are so tired of Marvel-esque blockbusters that they go overboard when given any kind of large scale action movie that’s even marginally unique from that formula, but whatever trend is leading to this is not one that seems to be affecting me and I think a lot of the people who are over-rating these movies are going to look back at their reviews and be a bit puzzled by their responses.
**1/2 out of Five
I had some serious reservations about even watching RRR, despite it’s unlikely status as a critical darling, in no small part because the only realistic way to stream the copy that’s on Netflix… which is dubbed from the film’s original Telugu language into Hindi and appears to be in the wrong aspect ratio to boot, two things that made this presentation anathema to a purist like myself. On top of that, I’m just generally uncomfortable reviewing Bollywood (or in this case Tollywood) movies; I’ve seen a handful of them but I’m not well versed in their tropes and generally feel like I lack the expertise to really contextualize them intelligently. Eventually I was informed that Netflix’s aspect ratio was open matte rather than pan and scan, which made that issue slightly more tolerable, and I was eventually willing to hold my nose and put up with the dubbing (which, if I’m being honest I probably wouldn’t have noticed if I wasn’t told about it) but my nervousness about trying to review this thing did not go away and as I watched and kind of disliked it I found myself increasingly worried about having to explain this stance and be the buzzkill in the room… and yet I feel oddly confident about my take.
RRR (which stands for Raudraṁ Raṇaṁ Rudhiraṁ, which translates to “Rage, War, Blood” and has alternately been translated to “Rise Roar Revolt”), is set in 1920 during the British Raj and is kind of a fanfic about a pair of heavily fictionalized historical figures named Komaram Bheem and Alluri Sitarama Raju who never actually met or interacted but who do in this movie… and who are also basically superheroes here. Unlike the Indian films westerners are most familiar with, this isn’t really a musical (though there are a couple of musical sequences anyway and some non-diegetic songs as well) but is instead this really maximalist action movie in which two outlandishly powerful paragons of virtue seemingly singlehandedly take down British rule with their combat skills. India is generally said to have been freed through peaceful non-resistance over twenty years after this is set but this movie doesn’t see it that way, here violence is very much the answer. It would be like if an African American filmmaker made a film set in the mid-twenties where Marcus Garvey and W.E.B. Du Bois violently overthrew the governor of New York with martial arts skills that verge on being superpowers with a tone of nutty sincerity that would make latter day Fast and Furious movies looks restrained and down to earth and did this more or less unironically. Like, there’s a scene here where one of these guys picks up and throws a leopard at British soldier and this does not seem out of place at all in the tone of this film.
Is this stupid? Well, on certain levels it’s kind of hard for me to judge. Broadly speaking it’s hard to argue with the film’s anti-colonial messaging but I know the language of propaganda and dehumanization when I see it and this borders into it. The extent to which this movie exaggerates its bad guys into outright sadists and revels in killing them sits somewhere between Rambo and D.W. Griffith’s Hearts of the World in the “good taste” scale and I’m not entirely comfortable with it. Look, I don’t want to call “reverse racism” here, that’s stupid, really my issue here is less that it makes the British into heinous villains (the real ones probably were) so much that as a matter of taste I find these kind of black and white simplistic depictions of history to be inherently less interesting and less appealing than films that take a more nuanced approach. I think Quentin Tarantino’s revisionist history revenge films Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained would also be fair comparison points which, in addition to several aesthetic differences I prefer, are much less hagiographic about their heroes and tend to find at least a little more human complexity in their villains even if they do ultimately make the villainousness of those regimes very clear. Also, in the case of Django Unchained we’re dealing with a white American director criticizing the history of white Americans, which is something that’s going to have a different tone to it than a work of blatant borderline jingoistic nationalism like RRR.
But as suggested earlier my issues with this movie are much more aesthetic than moral or substance based. I just find the action scenes and style kind of obnoxious. The movie looks extremely digital and most of its sets look kind of fake in a manufactured way, they lack the wear that’s key to making period films look authentic. The action scenes involve a lot of outlandish fight choreography and heroes that are inexplicably powerful despite ostensibly just being normal people and there’s a ton of Zack Snyder style speed ramping that looks kind of choppy and intelligent. I think the biggest part of my disconnect is just how incongruous a lot of these action heroics feel against the film’s historical setting. I’m not a hundred percent sure I have a good explanation for why this type of stuff scans better to me when they happen in dynastic China or ancient Greece than in 20th Century history, but it kind of does. I think it’s because martial arts epics are legitimately “mythic” and it’s hard for me to accept something that supposedly happened less than 70 years before my birth as being the stuff of legend… or maybe I’m just more versed in Hong Kong action movies than I am with Indian Historical epics and that if I was used to movies like this I’d much more easily relax and go with this absurdity.
And that brings me back to the anxiety I had when I first started watching this: am I in any real position to judge this movie? I don’t know, but as an individual I did have an experience with this movie and it wasn’t to my tastes. Other critics are less bothered by the film’s outlandish idiosyncrasies, in fact they seem to be why a lot of people find the film refreshing. But I must say I also wonder if these same critics are maybe giving the movie a pass for its kind of reactionary outlook; its jingoism, its shallowness, and its general blockheadedness. It wouldn’t be the only kind of dumb jingoistic action movie these critics have given a pass to, Top Gun: Maverick was similarly given a free pass despite having many of the same problems. I don’t know, maybe there’s something in the air during these times which has made otherwise discerning critics want to stop being so picky and just roll with whatever movie offers a good time or maybe people are so tired of Marvel-esque blockbusters that they go overboard when given any kind of large scale action movie that’s even marginally unique from that formula, but whatever trend is leading to this is not one that seems to be affecting me and I think a lot of the people who are over-rating these movies are going to look back at their reviews and be a bit puzzled by their responses.
**1/2 out of Five
