5 Things You Can Learn about India from Their Action Movies
Part of being a decent human is attempting to understand and empathize with the many different cultures and societies that surround us. And what better way to accomplish that than by watching their most hilariously confusing movies and extrapolating out a set of unfair, ridiculous stereotypes from them? I've already done it once, and I learned a very important lesson: Never go up against a Christian when death is on the line. Now I'm going to apply the same absurdly faulty logic to understanding another huge portion of the world around me: the Indian subcontinent. Sure, it's an impenetrably dense network comprised of a billion people and untold thousands of heterogeneous subcultures, but I figure we can probably get the gist of it from this fucked-up musical about killer robots.
Physics Need Not Apply
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Time Holds No Meaning
Enthiran is a hell of a long movie. Like I said, it's a three-hour musical epic, and as we all know, adding the term "musical" to anything makes it at least four relative hours longer. But even the term "epic" is not doing this monumental bastard any sort of justice, because in addition to the unwieldy run time, there isn't a single slack nanosecond in Enthiran. Characters move fast, talk fast and walk fast, and if you want crap like atmosphere or time to process, then you're a disappointment to your grandparents; why can't you be more like Ishwar? He has two doctorates, three jobs and four ulcers, and he just turned 12.
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Love Like You've Never Been Hurt, Rape Like Nobody's Watching
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What the Fuck Is a Context?
Enthiran thinks "context" is some sort of intraprison messaging service. Whereas Bollywood movies will often segue into relevant musical numbers, Enthiran will slam on the brakes to make you watch random music videos at the drop of a Haatim (that's the mustachioed fellow who just got booted through the cinder block wall behind you). For example, what happened after our heroes escaped the attempted rape by Indian Lennie Small back there? I mean right after -- what was the very next frame that followed that scene? Why, this right here, of course:
"Wait ... no, we were on a rural Indian back road and you -- this isn't even fucking Africa! WHAT HATH SCIENCE WROUGHT?!"
The movie cuts away, mid-manic-PTSD laughter, to a musical number about the highest mountain in Africa and how it's crazy that this chick is totally the same thing as fruit. BecauseRelated: 8 Famous Superhero Memes (That Are Even Dumber In Context)
There Are No Rules
You can buy Robert's book, Everything Is Going to Kill Everybody: The Terrifyingly Real Ways the World Wants You Dead, or follow him on Twitter, Facebook and Google+. Or you can join together with him and help build a giant puma made out of pasty white dudes to defend our nation against the rising Chubby Indian Voltron threat.
For more from Robert, check out The 5 Most Mind-Blowing Moments from Indian Action Movies and 5 Bad Economic Indicators for the Criminally Insane.