Yedukondalavaada Venkataramana Andaru Bagundali Review

The guys at Sandhya 35mm seem to have an idea about this movie - they spent the first 30 minutes of the 11am show playing devotional songs.

Edukondalavada... is about three guys Edukondalu (Sunil), Venkat (Siva Reddy) and Ramana (newcomer Surendra) who run a small time hotel, their love lives, corrupt politicians, robbers, farmers and their suicides. And trust us, it is courage and courage only to make a movie with all this and no Chiranjeevi or Rajanikanth in it.

The first half of the film runs in three parallel tracks: the three guys' daily lives, M P Gangaraju's corrupt ways, and the audience thinking about more interesting things. The second half is about why the three guys keep robbing Gangaraju - it is not because he can't act, but because he sells spurious seeds and fertilizers, becoming the direct cause of farmers' suicides. The three guys' families were effected by it, and so as modern-day Robin Hoods, they keep robbing the MP and giving it all out among poor farmers.

The ending is a face-off between the trio, the MP, the police and the general junta who gathered around to watch the shooting. Even they realized how bad the actors are, so they beat up some of them.

There is a lot of political colour in the movie, especially in the second half. The sentiments echoed about farmers being the backbone of the state could be used in an election campaign, so the movie at this point in time seems meaningless. It is likely to be meaningless at any point, actually.

Among the actors, debutante Surendra deserves special mention. That cow-boy hat look he sports in the posters is for a reason. He was required to smile normally for a song, but since he couldn't pull that off, the makers smartly got the hat and singlet to take the focus off his face. And compared to him, everyone else deserves a National Award, though in reality Sunil and Siva Reddy are the only two who do not make you cringe.

There are women, too - there is debutante Harshika who plays a girl with a crush on Ramana (it is never revealed in the movie why she got partially blind and lost her mind), Jhansi who has a crush on Sunil, and Navneet Kaur who was signed on to do the skimpy clothes dance.

Ghantadi Krishna's music is functional, and the songs as visuals do not really register, except for the customary last-and-raunchy song of the movie.

The producer at some point must have refused to spend any more money (which is understandable since all Surendra's retakes must have cost lots of money), and so there is a whole song which has clippings from TV9 news, YSR's padayatra, DD8's infomercial on agriculture and animal husbandry, and a Gaddar-like face panned by the camera from a 5mm distance.

If catching a movie is the only thing you want to do this weekend, please stick to the TV - you can at least flip channels there.