Raa Review

"I love women! I need women! And that's why I hate women!" spews Sri, yanking himself out from between the bedsheets at a time when his audiences are looking for him to demonstrate just the former two preferences. The woman in the sheets has an oh-great-just-my-luck-to-get-a-Freudian-case-study-my-very-first-time-round look, and the audiences fully sympathize, and wish they could finish off where Sri's left.

If you have watched women naked in your life, then you can give Raa a skip. It's only a poor second, since the women here are only semi-naked. Other than that? Okay, too many chips between 6:30pm and 9pm can kill your appetite for dinner, Galaxy is a good theater and has velvet-covered seats in its box, it's getting chilly in Hyderabad and driving at 9:30pm is not really pleasurable, these vinyl hoardings look really good in the night... and okay, yeah, we did it. We sat through it. So indulge our woes.

Sri (Upendra) is a kid when he sees his auto-driver brother hang himself after a rich girl tells him to go catch the moon after she's flirted with him a while. This is in contrast to normal filmi dudes' deciding to avenge the slight and building the next Reliance, but you are forgetting that this one is about semi-naked women, and Reliance deals only in boring petrochemicals and stuff.

Anyway, Sri grows up and has a similar experience himself when another rich girl flirts with him and then ends up sleeping with some rich cousin. So he decides that he'll do what's in line with the vision of this film - turn psycho so that the movie can show him taking plenty of semi-naked women to bed and still blame the evil society and poor old Freud for it.

The next 2-1/2 hours of the film have women in various stages of undress, Sri in various stages of psychological disturbance, audiences in various stages of titillation and/or lunacy depending on what they are there for, and the hands of your watch in the same damned position. If you stretch your imagination until its Young's Modulus just starts to cease staying applicable, you can put together the following residual story.

Sri becomes a big-time college Casanova who can get babes naked easier than they can do it themselves. But he will stop at that because his purpose is to just spoil them, not himself (please excuse us as we constipate). His mission in life is to avenge his brother's death by such spoiling of all the women in the world, at least the ones in college. Don't you wish they'd put this guy on the committee that drafted the IPC?

Then Shanti (Priyanka) enters, and keeps spurning Sri's advances and insulting him. Their scheming/counter-scheming appears scripted by someone whose IQ is slightly lesser than that of the earliest form of protozoa, and is superior in keenness of acumen only to the overall script. The film continues mercilessly, but if you can survive till the end, you get to go home.

Upendra did the screenplay for this himself, and we have the feeling he must have edited, produced and directed it, too - we mean, who else would do it? In return he gets to feel up several women. Priyanka looks good, and can act, too. She should try to get into movies. The rest of the cast actually has Giribabu in it, in a 10-second role - shucks, things must be bad.

Yes, go right ahead and buy the music. And put the rest of your money in buying some land on Pluto. Or better still, in this guy's next film.