Bollywood

The #bollywood movie RRR helped me define what I am looking for in films, and a lot of stuff out there is really lacking by comparison.

I had planned on talking about this maybe two months ago, but then the whole COVID thing happened and then I went to Canada and I ended up taking a month off. I have spent, I don’t evangelize many things.🎙 00:00:00.000–00:00:27.560
I, okay, let’s be honest, I’ve had an afternoon come. cocktail. So my normally fairly well planned out and yet still somehow messy podcast is going to be messy and planned out, but I’m going to ignore that because of my afternoon🎙 00:00:27.560–00:00:43.523
cocktail. Why did I do that? I don’t know. New Jersey, Japan this morning was a bit rushed. I don’t know why I had a steak and a rum and coke. That was my lunch. Oh, and some kimchi because I’m a very international kind of person. But🎙 00:00:43.523–00:01:01.483
None of that matters because I’m here to talk about a Bollywood movie. And again, I’ve been evangelizing this film for months now. Basically, if you are a close friend of mine, I have insisted that you watch it.🎙 00:01:01.899–00:01:19.899
And probably if you’re a close friend of mine, you’re like, Peter, I’ve heard you talk about movies in the past. You watch a lot of dog shit primarily to analyze why it is dog shit. Like I’ll watch 70s Kung Fu movies.🎙 00:01:19.899–00:01:33.939
and look at like what they can and cannot do. I will look at cheap films and think about like did they achieve what they wanted to achieve? Did they do the thing they wanted to set out to do? I like to watch movies, even bad ones. I don’t necessarily watch the bad ones because I find🎙 00:01:34.005–00:01:50.485
them amusing. I want to watch the bad ones because I’m like this is a failure. What made it a failure? There is a Netflix movie with Ryan Reynolds. I think it’s Underground 6. There’s Underground number.🎙 00:01:50.485–00:02:22.805
It is to me the single worst film ever made and it’s because they had the money They had the talent they had the ability they had the time they had everything they needed to make a good movie and yet somehow fucked up every step the🎙 00:02:07.382–00:02:24.462
Michael Bay Camera work it does look good but It does not help this movie the throwaway lines and characters and lack of depth Ruins the film because you don’t feel connected to anyone in the film by the end of it. I think if I was going to run a movie,🎙 00:02:25.222–00:02:45.297
like a media film study class, one of the first movies we would watch is Underground 6, so that we could analyze all the things that went wrong with Underground 6. So that if you were to make your movie, you would not make those same mistakes. So for a lot of the bad movies I watch,🎙 00:02:46.017–00:03:04.657
it’s analytical. And I enjoy the analysis. It’s not necessarily that I enjoy the film. I enjoy the analysis. that I get to do while watching the film. So I watch a lot of movies that no one else would watch.🎙 00:03:04.657–00:03:15.505
This takes me out into strange paths. I recently watched a movie that happens at Taipei, so a Chinese film. It’s a zombie movie called The Sadness. And it was cheap, but gross. And the thing is, it was, the gross doesn’t bother me.🎙 00:03:15.505–00:03:33.185
Often I’ll quite enjoy gross, like Ricky O, The Story of Ricky, is one of my favorite films because the grossness is humorous in this. It was just gross and it was almost like gore porn and it did nothing for me.🎙 00:03:33.185–00:03:48.642
There’s a horror movie called The Hostile. Plot wise, it’s a very good movie. The gore porn held there within actually diminishes the film itself. It makes it less of an enjoyable film. There is a limit.🎙 00:03:48.642–00:04:01.682
I actually think implied gore, implied violence, implied things are more effective because your imagination fills it in and makes it more powerful. That said, we’re here to talk about one of the greatest films that was ever made.🎙 00:04:01.682–00:04:34.142
It is a film from Bollywood and I don’t watch a lot of Bollywood films because I don’t enjoy the dancing song sort of bits But they have these over Overly dramatic action scenes that are super fake and they’re not fun. They’re funny as clips on the internet almost like his gifts🎙 00:04:15.264–00:04:31.684
But they’re not funny as films. So I don’t tend to watch that many RRR rise roar revolt So I’m gonna refer to it as triple R for the rest of the podcast because that’s what I’ve been calling it It’s just easy to hear🎙 00:04:32.604–00:05:03.904
to say than RRR because the R sound is too hard to say three times in a row and the title itself is too long. Triple R is one of the greatest movie going experiences I have had in years. It is pure enjoyment and adulation and I’m not sarcastic. So what I was going🎙 00:04:46.121–00:05:08.121
to say before my alcohol riddle brain kicked in was like I’ve made every close friend I know watched this and they’ve all been hesitant at the beginning because they think Oh Peter is trying to force a bad shitty🎙 00:05:08.121–00:05:47.161
weird, Bollywood film on me, I don’t want to watch it. And then I have to explain to them, no, I sincerely enjoy this film and I sincerely think you will too. Every single person who’s watched it, who’s come back afterwards, has said to me,🎙 00:05:20.586–00:05:33.386
this is one of the greatest movies they’ve ever seen. This is one of the most enjoyable films they’ve seen in years. This is a fun movie experience. And so the analytical part of my brain would not let it go. I’ve seen the movie in total🎙 00:05:33.386–00:05:46.866
three times now. I’ve watched parts multiple times. I’ve had very set complaints about media in recent years. And one of those complaints is that every character, this actually started sort of the mid,🎙 00:05:46.866–00:06:00.909
sort of early 2000s, mid 2000s in video games. And it was primarily that men didn’t seem to be capable of writing women characters as strong women. Because what they did was they took every female character🎙 00:06:00.909–00:06:14.909
and they made them sarcastic and kind of mean and bitchy. And these were supposed to be the tough, strong women. And this is how they showed it was by making them be really awful every time someone spoke🎙 00:06:14.909–00:06:26.372
to them. I know strong women and they don’t talk like that. They just talk like normal people. In fact, strong characters tend to be poorly written overall. The strongest, most powerful, confident men and women I’ve met are super chill because🎙 00:06:26.372–00:06:46.092
they can be because things don’t threaten them because, you know, stuff comes at them and they’re like, I can handle this because I’m a strong, capable human. being male or female. The strongest dudes I know have this quiet confidence and it just🎙 00:06:46.092–00:07:03.475
exudes from them and it makes you not want to mess with them. The boisterous ones are the ones I was like, ah, you just get him all riled up and he won’t be able to do things properly. You get him all riled up and he won’t be able to be effective. So I have a🎙 00:07:03.475–00:07:19.195
very direct idea of what a strong man is. So the writing of these characters. is problematic because I think the writers are not the character. I actually did an old Velocipod cast maybe three, four years ago and it was how that writers struggle to write🎙 00:07:19.195–00:07:35.498
geniuses because the writer themselves is not a genius. So they’ll create a situation, create a solution and then have the genius figure it out or they’ll imply genius without actually demonstrating any sort of genius attributes because they can’t come up with themselves🎙 00:07:35.498–00:07:48.538
because they’re not a genius. So that’s problematic. I think that also falls into the saying that they are probably not strong. confident men or women. Therefore, they struggle to write strong, confident men or women effectively.🎙 00:07:48.538–00:08:03.376
So they just make them sarcastic. They always have something to say back. The strongest, most confident men I know, you say something to them and they would just look at you and go, that response is so belittling. It’s just like almost like your attack on them isn’t worth their🎙 00:08:03.376–00:08:18.896
time. And so I’ve struggled with in recent media, everyone is shitty and no one supports each other. So you have like a military. unit and everyone in the unit is Addy Chasar’s throats, but that’s going to be an ineffective🎙 00:08:18.896–00:08:34.116
military unit. They’re not going to come together and solve a problem. A truly effective unit of any sort is going to be a group of people that likes and supports each other. Yes, there can be some ribbing, but the ribbing would primarily come from one or two characters,🎙 00:08:34.116–00:08:49.036
not all of them. And I think that is maybe where the first mistake is made. Making every character sarcastic and shitty means that there is no such thing as not sarcastic and shitty. means there is no love behind the teasing or jibing or anything like that.🎙 00:08:49.036–00:09:04.552
So there’s a sincere lack of positivity in modern characterization of lead characters because they wanted to be strong. Therefore they write them as kind of shitty assholes. This is sort of the Rick and Morty Rick paradox where Rick is the bad guy.🎙 00:09:04.552–00:09:23.032
He’s broken. But because he always has as a quip, he always has something he can say back to people. He always has a sarcastic remark. People admire that and they want to aspire towards that where he is.🎙 00:09:23.032–00:09:59.352
for all intents and purposes, the bad guy of that show. He’s broken. He’s trying to get his shit together and he can’t actually do it. Whereas if you have a character come in and they’re soft and quiet and yet still strong and weirdly I’m thinking, Birdman, that’s the good guy. That’s🎙 00:09:33.195–00:09:50.715
the strong character and we need to emulate that. We need to see more of that. We don’t see that in Western media. So Bollywood being a different culture has a whole different take on this. And that’s why it was so refreshing for me as a Western viewer.🎙 00:09:50.715–00:10:04.555
The two main characters, now the thing is the first problem is they actually have to end up like having three or four names throughout the film because there’s their real name, there’s their cover name, then there’s kind of their like nickname.🎙 00:10:04.181–00:10:18.181
So I’m going to call one of them beam because I think that’s his real name and the other one the Raj, which I actually think is short form of Raj something else. I watched it in Tamil. It was it was Hindi over dubbed in Tamil with.🎙 00:10:18.181–00:10:34.181
subtitles. So there was a lot of maybe subtleties or confusion and like names and stuff like that. Because they start out, they’re both kind of undercover. So they’re using fake names and then they switch names part way through. And then they introduce what they’re🎙 00:10:34.681–00:10:45.761
full names. And then I kind of got lost with the name. So I have the names, it’s beam and Raj. These two men love each other like no two men have ever loved each other in the past. Now it’s a bromance. It’s it’s a purely platonic love. And this is something that’s🎙 00:10:45.761–00:11:02.561
also problematic because platonic love, sincere love between two is something that’s very difficult to depict on the screen. Because there’s a weird thing now where all love has a sexual undertone.🎙 00:11:02.561–00:11:19.376
And we’ve lost the idea of platonic love as a real thing that happens. And it’s probably because of toxic masculinity. It’s probably because men have trouble showing it. But these two men, there is a friendship montage.🎙 00:11:21.056–00:11:36.416
So they meet each other, they hang out for a bit. And the friendship montage is one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen, but it’s because it’s pure, magical, unadulterated joy. There’s part of it is, Beam gets radged up on his shoulders🎙 00:11:36.416–00:11:50.265
and starts doing squats. They start doing chin ups. They’re just exercising together. They’re running out in fields. They go to return a goat to a shepherd, but then the shepherd starts chasing them away🎙 00:11:50.265–00:12:00.425
for attacking the goat and they run away, laughing and having a good time. One is very modern. It’s a dichotomy. He’s actually from a tribe out in the forest, but he’s the one he f- fixes motorcycles and rides motorcycles where Raj is the modern man and he’s undercover🎙 00:12:00.425–00:12:18.568
as a police officer and yet he’s the one who rides a horse. So they kind of put all this stuff together but it’s the yin-yang aspect where they like the opposite things in every moment but at the same time they compliment each other.🎙 00:12:18.568–00:12:33.608
Which is, I would say it’s very difficult to do but RRR did it so well and so quickly. They establish that these guys love each other and then one scene for some reason really stands out where beam walks up to Raj and goes like what are you doing?🎙 00:12:33.608–00:12:47.168
I’m writing a letter to… my girlfriend. He’s like, Oh, you have a girlfriend. She must be wonderful. And he’s super supportive. He never says a shitty thing. And I think it’s been years and years and years that I’ve seen a film🎙 00:12:47.168–00:13:00.542
where a character walks up to a character and talks about a love relationship or any kind of relationship and doesn’t say something shitty. And so just this like, Oh my God, you’re amazing. Your girlfriend also must be amazing. She’s lucky to have you. You’re lucky to have her. I hope this🎙 00:13:00.542–00:13:16.062
is the best relationship that ever happens. And then Raj is helping beam. Like with how to hit on another girl, how to how I like set up a situation where he could actually spend time with and talk to another girl and it’s beautiful.🎙 00:13:16.062–00:13:29.269
Because it’s completely self sacrificial. I will spend my time. I will spend my energy. I will help you achieve your goal. And this leads us to the very first dance off in the film. So there’s a couple of songs and all the songs are good. They slap.🎙 00:13:29.269–00:13:45.269
There’s a thematic thing that repeats that I’m going to talk about in a minute. But they do a dance off and it’s beam and Raj versus all the white people. And the white people do not get a good take it.🎙 00:13:45.269–00:14:13.269
this but it’s awesome. It is so disparaging of the British and their occupation of India but it is so fictional that it’s awesome. Like I would put on a British accent just so I could go in there and get beat up or shot by Raj or beam or whatever. It doesn’t matter. I would have loved🎙 00:13:55.059–00:14:12.739
to be the bad guy in this movie just so I could be in and amongst this story but they do this dance-off and the dance-off the woman that beam is in love with is watching and then it gets down to all the white guys have fallen to the side.🎙 00:14:12.739–00:14:40.979
They just can’t keep up. Beaman Raj are doing the final two person dance off. And what does Raj do? He sees that the girl that Beam likes is watching, she’s watching Beaman wants him to win. So he fakes losing, even though maybe he could have win, he probably could have because he’s🎙 00:14:27.357–00:14:43.017
kind of more, he’s more of the physically capable character in many ways. He’s presented that way. To the point where, and then he falls and then that means, Beam gets to win. So he sacrifices his loss.🎙 00:14:43.017–00:14:57.397
He takes a loss so that his friend can win just so his friend can look good in front of his girl It’s just awesome, and it’s just such a beautiful thing and that becomes the crux of the story because🎙 00:14:57.391–00:15:10.031
their goals For the most part of the film are antithetical Raj is trying to catch beam. He doesn’t know it’s beam yet beam is trying to kidnap or re-kidnap So a little girl is kidnapped at the beginning film beam is trying to get her back🎙 00:15:10.031–00:15:25.191
So it’s like an undoing of a kidnapping and then Raj’s task to stop him Raj has an ulterior motion that, but he has to complete this task to achieve his ulterior motive. And this becomes the conflict between the two characters because they both need to achieve🎙 00:15:25.191–00:15:42.752
their goals, their greater goals, goals bigger than themselves. But how can they achieve their goals? Are their goals worth achieving if they have to portray the only, like their best friend, the only person in this world they truly love in a pure and kind way?🎙 00:15:42.752–00:15:57.872
I mean, you can say that the love relationships between the men and the women are pure at their entire spirit. I don’t believe it. I think it’s uh, these the the the man love here is the purest You could ever see on film🎙 00:15:57.872–00:16:09.231
So that’s the bromance and it’s all very positive and then you get to the there’s there’s the music which I mentioned before so i’m going to talk about it now the music is exquisite It’s but it’s also thematically connected because the first half of the film it’s a three hour film by the way🎙 00:16:09.391–00:16:27.711
So if you’re gonna sit down you really want to plan this out The first half of the film they’re seeing this song about what happens when these two guys meet opposites, they have opposite goals. The line that stuck out to me the most is🎙 00:16:27.791–00:16:40.321
what happens when a volcano meets a storm. Surely this can only end a betrayal. Surely this can only end in violence. And it’s setting up the second part of the film where do they betray each other? Do they end up fighting each🎙 00:16:40.321–00:16:54.301
other? And it’s amazing because the movie is planned out so well that the song is leading you to the like inevitable conflict. It’s predicting it and that makes the inevitable conflict even that more powerful because you know it’s🎙 00:16:54.301–00:17:09.181
coming because the song has been telling you it’s been coming. the whole time. The themes throughout. So beam is represented by water and Raj is represented by fire. So again, there are opposites but complementary. There’s a🎙 00:17:09.181–00:17:23.543
scene where I showed it to my friend and he goes, why are these guys walking underwater to shake hands? So they’re underwater, they’re shaking hands, but a tanker from a train that is caught on fire has sunk down in the background. So🎙 00:17:23.543–00:17:36.543
it’s actually the moment when fire and water come together, the fire is in the water. It’s coming up from the gas. flames in the background, but they’re underwater and they come together in Shaeh Kansan. This is showing the connection between the characters is🎙 00:17:36.543–00:17:48.791
inevitable and it is the greatest thing. And that thematic consistency is throughout the film. So anytime you get a really you know strong shot of Raj there’s probably fire in the background or his that the screen is encircled in🎙 00:17:48.791–00:18:03.071
fire and then when they have battles and stuff there’s water around beam or he’s very wet and sweaty and then there’s one where he smashes a fountain in the fountain that’s fountain spraying behind him. This is also when you get to one of🎙 00:18:03.071–00:18:14.591
the bigger action scenes of the film. Now, one thing I have complained about primarily like superhero movies is the inconsistency of powers. So powers in, let’s say the Marvel universe, it’s very hard to tell what a character can🎙 00:18:14.591–00:18:31.708
and can’t do. So Thor and the Hulk are the ones that come to mind first because in one moment, they will be able to do something in the next scene, like five minutes later, they’re not able to do something that’s actually much easier than the thing they did previously.🎙 00:18:31.708–00:18:45.948
And then at the end of the movie, when it’s necessary, they can do something. something. And that actually really bothers me because well, I should have a sense of danger because I know that Thor or I know that Hulk isn’t strong enough to do this thing.🎙 00:18:45.948–00:18:57.360
Boobies are actually making it so that they have whatever power they need at the time for dramatic purposes. But actually that needs to be established at the beginning what they can and cannot do. And either they overcome it and succeed or they, you know, do something to achieve🎙 00:18:58.560–00:19:13.920
the goal, which is beyond their powers. It was the Star Wars Obi-Wan TV show where most of the show he has very basic. He hasn’t been using the force. He has very basic, very limited force capabilities.🎙 00:19:13.920–00:19:30.012
But then in the very last one where he fights Darth Vader, he suddenly lifts up a bunch of rocks. And I’m like, that really took me out in the moment because I’m like, I don’t think he should be able to do that🎙 00:19:30.012–00:19:38.812
just because he hasn’t been able to do anything even close to that. That is like a double 10 times stronger than he was 15 minutes ago or every other episode of the show. R-R does the exact same thing.🎙 00:19:38.812–00:19:51.492
Triple R does the exact. same thing and that their power is whatever they need to be in the moment. But why is it in this movie it’s okay? And I realized that this movie is the cumulation of all Kung Fu films mixed with Bollywood.🎙 00:19:51.492–00:20:07.716
Because it’s so open and honest about what it is, because it’s so clearly gold towards one thing, they have to be able to do whatever they need to be able to do in the moment because all we really care about is that they look cool or look interesting or it looks funny or it looks fun.🎙 00:20:07.716–00:20:23.416
They’ve proven these guys are strong. but they haven’t made them super superhuman strong and yet they have kind of established it. Beam at the beginning catches a tiger in um like a trap and he’s holding two ropes together to🎙 00:20:23.416–00:20:35.922
catch the tiger. He’s physically stronger than the tiger which is an impossibility. The tiger is probably like six, seven, ten times stronger than a human being. This would have been very easy for the tiger to get out of. There’s a scene probably one of my favorite scenes where Beam catches a🎙 00:20:35.922–00:20:49.042
motorcycle, picks it up and then hits two guys with it and you would honestly go why is he able to suddenly pick up a motorcycle and it’s a And it’d be literally the answer to me would be because he needs to do that in that moment🎙 00:20:49.042–00:21:00.355
to be able to do that scene. So there’s a sincerity to the silliness they’re willing to engage with. And because that’s consistent throughout the movie, they’re super powered and then normal people and then super powered and then normal people, they just are capable of doing🎙 00:21:00.355–00:21:17.155
whatever they have to do no matter what. But it’s to the singular goal of entertainment, whereas in a movie like any of the Marvel film or any of the… Star Wars movies where they’re trying to set up a narrative as being a serious thing,🎙 00:21:17.155–00:21:31.116
it now doesn’t make sense because it’s not serious if suddenly my power multiplies by ten when I just happened to need it and it’s convenient for the plot. But I think maybe more than anything else, honestly anything else was this may be cultural🎙 00:21:31.116–00:21:46.356
is that by the end of the film, throughout the film, I could never guess what was going to happen next. And maybe that to me was the best part. I was consistently surprised by whatever was going to happen.🎙 00:21:46.356–00:21:59.716
So it could have been serious, it could have been silly. It could have been dramatic. It could have been entertainment. Just just pure entertainment. I couldn’t guess what was coming next because they mixed everything in so well.🎙 00:21:59.716–00:22:09.350
So I didn’t I honestly by the end of the film could not tell if they were actually going to end up in conflict I kind of knew they were gonna end up being friends and resolve that issue because that’s the best way to end a film🎙 00:22:10.030–00:22:21.190
It’s a happy film. So it’s going to end on a positive note So the only way to end on a positive note is everything works out in the end and all the British die because the end of any good Story all the British die, but I think maybe the last part I need to mention🎙 00:22:21.190–00:22:34.510
is that this is perhaps the first film in my entire life. So I’m 50. I’ve watched movies, tons and tons of movies. This is maybe the first time I’ve actually ever watched a film and thought, why did these men still have their shirts on?🎙 00:22:34.492–00:22:47.992
They’re doing fights, they’re doing action scenes, take their shirts off. I’m all for gratuitous sexuality, for, you know, have tight pants and women wearing bikinis and stuff. But these guys were so awesome. I just wanted more of them.🎙 00:22:47.992–00:23:04.572
and the clothes were just getting in the way. So there’s a couple scenes, but it seems very early on, they do some high candy and it’s great. Like even as again, a heterosexual male, I had feelings and I was like,🎙 00:23:04.595–00:23:15.835
God damn, Raj should never have a shirt on and beams looking pretty good too. And they do another nice thing. Raj is completely, you know, smooth and beam has a lot of hair on his chest. So they even got like one for each sort of taste.🎙 00:23:15.835–00:23:27.075
No matter what you like, it’s in there for you. So I am sincerely recommending to anyone who listens to Seamik Bee. If you have three hours and Netflix because it’s on Netflix. I know that but if you have to type pirate it,🎙 00:23:27.075–00:23:39.189
it’s hard. It’s hard to find a copy without with English subtitles. But if there’s any way, spend some time and try to get a copy of Triple R and just sit down for three hours and watch it. I guarantee you’re gonna have one of the🎙 00:23:39.189–00:23:53.389
best experiences. Cinematically, you’ve had in years and years and years because of the purity of the emotion held therein, which a lot of movies, because I think maybe they’re done to committee or there’s too many people involved. They lose🎙 00:23:53.389–00:24:06.829
some of that purity of emotion. that we’re seeing again like Avengers films and Star Wars films. Those are supposed to be emotional stories but quite often things happen you’re like, well, I mean they got 50 characters on screen, who cares?🎙 00:24:06.829–00:24:19.488
You should absolutely try to get this film sit down and watch it. I’ve recommended to everyone, I recommend it to you. And I think if you stand and watch it, you’ll realize that I’ve just done you one of the biggest favors you’ll have had of this year.🎙 00:24:19.488–00:24:32.288