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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31649 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 5, 2022

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Let's start with the very first comment.

surprise hit

RRR was Rajmouli's (director) 3rd major film after his 2 Bahubali films. They were the 2 highest grossing Indian movies at their time of release. RRR was expected to be his magnum opus, and the last thing you can call it is a 'surprise hit'.

I should have qualified it thusly: "surprise hit in the U.S."

awful-looking

I find this to be grossly untrue, most people in both the west and India seem to disagree with me on this one.

But this bit is the subjective, so I won't contest you on it.

It looks like a video game cut scene, and every visual is both so overly processed digitally and full of CGI, that it's kind of hard to tell what is real and what is fake, because it all looks fake. And there's no visual art to it, it's all just bright and garish, like the master bathroom of a nouveau riche with no taste.

And, seriously, the CGI effects are fucking terrible. I wish I could post clips. It's mind-boggling how shitty some of the CGI scenes are, one in particular that is a long shot of Bheem sneaking into a compound, and it looks like a little video game character jumping from one digital surface to another.

absurdly stupid and awful-looking surprise hit movie of 2022, the Tollywood epic RRR. While slogging through this 3-hour parade of xenophobic melodrama, incoherent action, and kindergarten-level sentiment

I don't have a week to write an entire thesis on how wrong you are. But, RRR to me, is genius of the highest order. It is a layered movie with at least half a dozen meta levels behind it. While the base movie is entertaining at face value, most discerning viewers realize that it operates entirely in the realm of metaphor.

If all dozen meta-levels are written for an audience of six-year-olds, it doesn't matter how many levels there are. Yes, there is a lot going on in RRR -- not enough to fill a 3 hour movie, unfortunately -- but it's all simple-minded busywork performed by the most shallow of characters spouting remedial dialog. Compare it to the work of a master Indian filmmaker like Satyajit Ray, and RRR looks Paul Blart: Mall Cop in the spectrum of Indian cinema. Even compared to a legit masterful musical like Lagaan, everything in RRR is pedestrian and/or insulting.

Part of my issue with how the movie has been received in the U.S. is that it seems like an egregious example of the "soft bigotry of low expections." I've only seen a few Indian movies, but of extremely high quality, so this one seems like an exception in awfulness. I could see how someone who enjoys movies like Birdemic and The Room might find similar qualities here enjoyable, but not unironically.

And there's no visual art to it, it's all just bright and garish, like the master bathroom of a nouveau riche with no taste.

Taste is subjective. When I adjusted my expectations to the acceptance that South Indian cinema is going to be blinged out to the max, I got on a lot better. Yes, it's all bright and garish, so what? At least it's not filmed in orange hues or so dark you can't tell what is going on and any objections are met with "well that's because you have cheap crappy TVs". It's meant to be larger than life, that the Heroes are on the level of mythological demi-gods. These are the equivalents of Achilles and Agamemnon, you don't tell those stories by having everyone wearing mud and shot at night. (Well not unless you're a modern Western movie-maker 'deconstructing' this, that and the other).

I should have qualified it thusly: "surprise hit in the U.S."

It earned $11 million in the US, which ranks it 67th so far this year.

I will suggest that much of what is happening there is invisible to you because you lack the context.

Consider a modern movie that takes place in the American civil war. There's a black character named Forge Lloyd who is totally not on drugs and just has a heart problem, never did any home invasions, and he's killed by pro-slavery police who stand on his back while he yells "I can't breath". And by the way, police were invented to enforce slavery in 1850's USA.

Lets have some flashbacks. Forge Lloyd's mom got pregnant, but no one can figure out who the daddy is, and she quietly admits to someone that she's never been with a man. Forge Lloyd then goes around preaching a message of love and equality. At some point he says he has a dream. Then he makes a thanksgiving dinner for 12 of his buddies, and his bro Jubas kisses him.

After the flashbacks we go back to 1850's USA, 3 days after his Forge Lloyd's death. We see a mysterious figure riding off into the sunset, :insert cinematography here: and it's Forge Lloyd.

Now imagine someone who doesn't know the story of the bible or the story of Forge Lloyd writes a review. He loves the pro-Hindutva messages in the movie, and thinks it makes good points about GST.

That's your review of RRR.

Note: I haven't seen the movie. It would not surprise me if the FX are video-game like, because that is the natural evolution of ordinary telugu cinema + modern CGI. That's telugu film vocabulary, and it's evidently not your thing. That's fine.

You might as well criticize Japanese anime for showing a character tasting some bad food, and then flashing to a scene where the character is being tentacle raped under the ocean. The viewer familiar with that vocabulary knows the tentacle rape isn't literal, it's a visual metaphor for how bad the food tastes. (Food Wars is excellent and you should watch it, BTW.)

You realize that most of these complaints apply equally to pretty much everything Disney has put out in the last 5 - 10 years as well do you not?

I’m not a Disney fan, but there’s still a learned subtlety and visual sophistication to their recent work that is light years beyond RRR, which is like an early 2000s video game in both form and content.

I can enjoy unsophisticated or technically rough cinema as well, but not when it is so narratively and thematically shallow.

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