In the meantime, I've got this little gem for you.
Getting to the village I volunteered in is no easy task; getting yourself to India is only the first part. It took me 12 hours to travel from Nagoya to Delhi - it took another 11 to get to our hotel in Gudivada (2 flying from Delhi to Hyderabad, 9 driving from Hyderabad to Gudivada). It's another half hour or so from there to Cheveru village.
So during this 9 hour bus ride, our "trip Dad", Ravi, asked if we'd like to watch a movie. The films they had were all in Telugu (the language in Andrha Pradesh state), but with 9 hours to kill and nowhere to go, we all said "sure. why not?"
I figured I'd half pay attention and sleep most of the way, seeing as I'd had about 2 hours of sleep in the preceding 30 or so. And then. THE FILM WAS AWESOME.
It's a musical, of course, as most Indian films are. And we couldn't understand a word of it, but, it was just so, entertaining. It probably didn't hurt that it was a love story, too ♥
The film is called Magadheera. It's the story of two lovers; one a warrior and the other a princess, who die in an epic and tragic love triangle/ battle set in the year 1609. Their love for each other is apparently so strong, that 400 years later they are reborn... but the question is, will they re-connect?
From wikipedia:
The story begins in 1609. Kalabhairava (Ram Charan) is a guard of Udayagarh kingdom. His family is praised by everyone for their sacrifice for the kingdom. Mithra (Kajal Agarwal) is the only princess of the kingdom. Bhairava and Mithra fall in love with each other while her relative Ranadev Billa wants to marry Mithra . He loses a challenge with Bhairava for marrying Mithra and he is sent out of the kingdom as per the challenge. In Bhairava's ancestral backround, no male lives more than 30 years and all of them died while protecting the kingdom. The king is worried about that and pleads Bhairava to sacrifice his love. Mean while Ranadev Billa mingles with Sher Khan (Srihari) who is in a spree of conquering India and in process nears the Udayagarh kingdom to conquer the kingdom of udayagarh. They kill everyone in the kingdom in the absence of Bhairava, who went with Mithra to Bhairava kona (a spiritual place) to offer yagnas for the welfare of the kingdom. The enemies come to that place to kill Bhairava and conquer the princess. Bhairava and Mithra die there after Bhairava kills a hundred of Sher khan's soldiers single-handedly in a fight. Sher Khan wants to form allies with Kalabhairava but cannot do so because he promised Billa the kingdom and Mithra. The second shade of the story is in 2009 where Bhairava, Mithra, Sher Khan and Ranadev Billa take rebirth in this century. One day, Bhairava accidentally comes into physical contact with Indu (Mithra) and feels a surge of electric current. But he only saw her dress. So will he in the end find her and save her from the evil desires of her cousin?
Like I said before, since it's an Indian film, it's full of songs and dances, and all sorts of allusions (no kissing! *gasp*) and it's quite long.
So we watched this film on the bus, were all amused by it, and thought that would be the end of it. And THEN. The music made it's re-appearance. Repeatedly. In fact, one night in the village we took a break from working and an impromptu dance-party broke out, fueled by, you guessed it- the soundtrack to the film :D
They're dancing to this song (on top of a half-completed building. safety first! *facepalm*), in which the hero is drunk and keeps seeing his sweetheart's face on another woman - and you can see the kids copied some of the moves from it
This one is kinda long, but I really love it, you can hear the kids singing along and you can really see they've copied a lot of the dance moves from the movie. Plus, this kid is such an awesome dancer! And what a ham! He kept asking me to show him "his video" afterward :D :D :D
It's this song, from the beginning of the film (and the silliest part of it, IMO - shocking pelivs thrust!!! hahaha)
The music popped up a few other times, occasionally during our "siesta time" (when it was way too hot to work) and I caught quite a few of the music videos on TV when I was stuck in the hotel room for 2 days with... let's just call it an unwanted byproduct of a sudden change in diet and extreme heat.
So after all this, several of us decided we wanted to get a copy of the soundtrack, which comes conveniently packaged on several different hit-song CD's full of mp3's from different movies. The one I got looks like this
My personal favorite is this one, the love song from the modern part of the movie
And my second favorite is this one, the love song from the historical part
All told, there are 6 major song and dance numbers in the film. My CD has 64 songs on it, from 10 different films. It's been a fun way to get into the genre; but I have to admit I'm still quite partial to the Magadheera songs, probably because I've seen the film and have a personal connection to the music through the village.
I've since found a version of the movie with English subtitles, which helps to explain a lot of stuff you just can't figure out on your own. It's really a cute story! But I am impressed by how much we were able to understand, just based on facial expressions and actions in the film d(^_^)b Sadly, I think I may never quite understand the, uh, shock-waves from the first song. But perhaps some things are just better left unexplained...
Some movie trivia: It was released on July 31, 2009 and was a huge HUGE hit. It was the highest-budgeted Telugu language film ever made, and became the highest-grossing one of all time. And apparently because of this, they've recently decided to dub it into Tamil.
No comments:
Post a Comment