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The second half of Asoka
I finally finished watching Ashoka, and I was disappointed by the lack of urumi other than the same 30-second snippet that I already grabbed from the extras on the DVD. Ah well. But I took many screencaps.
This would be a decent movieby my standards if the song-and-dance numbers were pried out of it - they're too modern to fit in a historical piece. Still very, very pretty, though.
Summary of the second half of the movie, although it's nowhere near as funny as the Ong-Bak review. I shall have to review Aabra Ka Daabra sometime to make up for the lack of serious funny in this one.
When we last saw our lovebirds, they were singing and dancing and flirting at some sort of village fest.
Ashoka - still known to Kaurwaki, the princess, only as Pawan, a simple soldier, drags her off and marries her. But before they can do much of anything but tease the viewers with almost kissing, word comes to Ashoka that his mother's dying and he, being more of a mama's boy than Kougaiji, takes off, proming Kaurwaki and her little brother Arya that he'll return.
The Kalinga general Bheema, who is shepherding the prince and princess, hides them in a village that is attacked by soldiers looking for the royal pair. A young woman and her little brother put on their jewelry and pretend to be them, in order to save them. Bheema finds the jewelry.
This is soon be important.
Meanwhile, back at theranch palace, Ashoka's half-brother, the heir to the throne, stands around and attempts to brood, but merely succeeds in looking sort of gassy.
Turns out Ashoka's mother isn't dying at all, just engaging in a little maternal manipulation. Ashoka can't hold a grudge against her, and returns to the last place he saw his new bride. What he finds instead is the general, a funeral pyre, and the jewelry.
And, my God, the slash jsut writes itself
Mind you, Bheema turns out to be perfectly aware that they're alive.
And I thought I'd prove to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
the_z that Ashoka does indeed have more than one facial expression. (Please note the red hand. That's SYMBOLISM.)
But not for long.
(He's engaged in a little facial ash-rubbing in his grief.)
Vital, a guy who he humiliated earlier in the 3rd century BC nightclub comes looking for him to beat him up, but after landing a couple of punches doesn't have the heart to continue. And then Ashoka's royal guard show up adn attempt to behead him. Shoka says no, he's a friend, and they all decamp to a Buddhist monastery where Ashoka is randomly sick when it suits the plot.
Kaurwaki and Arya sneak off from Bheema and start spending an inordinate amount of time looking for Pawan by going up to every enemy soldier they can find and asking if they know him.
At the monastery, Vital spends some time macking on girls...
...while Ashoka hallucinates a music video about his presumably dead wife.
There's a lot of water, and flowing fabric.
Then he stops hallucinating and goes hunting, where a beautiful Buddhist woman named Devi, who is about to get married, throws herself in front of a bird he's about to shoot and begs him not to kill it.
This is the family she's about to marry into:
She, of course, has fallen in love with Ashoka from the moment she saw him, and is also one of the women treating his wounds. On her wedding day he is suffering from a convenient fever and at the wedding she remembers that she forgot to put herbs on his wounds, and runs off, managing to accidentally stop an assasination attempt and accidentally somehow killing the assassin. This somehow renders her unfit for marriage - we get to see her staring at her bloodstained hands in what turns out to be a major them in the movie - and the family stalks off and Ashoka says what the hell and marries her.
Meanwhile, Ashoka's brother broodingly feeds an elephant.
And two of his other brothers - I've lost count of how many he has by this point - cultivate their facial hair
And meanwhile, Kaurwaki is on a raft somewhere and hallucinates a song-and-dance sequence while her husband beds Devi (but he cries a while before doing it, so that's ok).
And the Three Stooges engage in their last funny bit - they show up once more, to be not funny.
Time passes Ashoka grows his bad hair extensions back - although Kalinga people all live in a time warp because in the 2 or so years it would take to grow hair that long, Prince Arya, who we see again later, has managed to age not one whit. Anyway, in this scene, Ashoka and his hair extensions are beating up a guy who worked with his brother to try to kill him. Devi attempts to stop him killing the guy by announcing her pregnancy. Note the BLOODY HAND SYMBOLISM OMG.
Ashoka is happy, and after OMG SMEARING BLOOD ALL OVER HER BELLY WITH THAT HAND natters on about teaching his son to be a warrior. Time passes, everything's OK in Ashokaland.
Untilhis brother's hired help someone kills his mother. And he goes batshit. You'll note that he tends to suffer nosebleeds at times of high emotion. I'm used to the Japanese nosebleed symbolism by now, which leads to serious mental whiplash.
He doesn't actually kill his brother - he resists the urge, his brother eventually tries to attack, and his friend the mack-daddy Vital throws a sword and pins his broher to the throne.
He kills as many brothers as he can find, is acclaimed Emperor, and goes totally fucking insane with bloodlust.
Larry, Curly, and Moe make frowny faces about this.
Ashoka conquers a lot of India, and now I have INCONTROVERTIBLE PROOF that, evidence of "people who happen to live there" aside, Mount Everest has always been named "Mount Everest"
And I think that maybe UNCONQUERED TRIBAL AREAS is a bit of a misnomer, because Ashoka conquers the hell out of them.
His Buddhist peacenik wife takes off, because she doesn't want her child to be born into war. Ashoka stands around in a snit, then goes and conquers somewhere to take his mind off things. Eventually he conquers a hairdresser's and gets better extensions.
Elsewhere, Bheema talks Kaurwaki and Arya into going back to Kalinga, since this madman Ashoka (none of them know that he's Pawan) is running the place. They've got his horse, Pawan (he named himself after the horse, yes), because Ashoka inexplicably left it with them when he was called away to his non-dying mother's side.
They get back, Bheema slaughters the person who was responsible for killing the royal parents, with no explanation of why he didn't just do that in the first place instead of taking the prince and princess out into the world (personally, I think he was trying to get into her pants). And then Kalinga decides to attempt to assassinate Ashoka because Ashoka is about to attempt to conquer them - Ashoka's last remaining brother has claimed sanctuary there and tells them alla bout how insane he is.
So the person to do the assassination is obviously not some sort of professional assassin who is disposable, but the general Bheema and Ashoka's brother.
Have a heart, Bheema! Don't mess up a man's mud bath!
Ashoka pours water on his face and turns...
...to be recognized by Bheema, who hesitates just long enough for the guards to come running and someone to stick a spear in his back. He gets on his horse and flees. Ashoka drowns his brother in the bath. Bheema makes it to Kalinga and holds on just long enough to whisper "Pawan..." to the Princess, who utterly fails to understand.
Kalinga decides to make a Last Desperate Stand, and even the women say they're fight.
We get a rather nice sequence of Ashoka and Kaurwaki preparing themselves for war mentally and ceremonially, mirroring each other.
Ashoka tends to spend a lot of the last third of the movie inexplicably standing behind, or in, this big copper pot.
They head to war. Vital - remember Ashoka's friend? - has been worked on by Devi and attempts to stop Ashoka fighting, and is beat up.
After that, Ashoka whirls the urumi a few times and then we never see it again.
Because of this delay, he's not leading the charge into battle, and the fight begins without him. This is the Kalinga general, who has the most impressive crop of facial hair I've seen in this movie so far.
There is a lot of fighting, and Kaurwaki actually manages to kick some serious ass while wearing her battle bandeau and her cute wee breatplate. Although I didn't mange to grab any screencaps of said asskicking.
She glowers, too.
The Karlinga contingent seems to be winning - they have elephants, after all - until Ashoka's group arrives, whereupon they get their asses kicked. Because Ashoka is Just That Good.
Kaurwaki sees him, and loses her Cool Points by crawling around after him. He never sees her and eventually she gets knocked on the head, and collapses, unconscious, next to a severed leg.
After the battle, Ashoka goes to his copper pot again.
A Buddhist monk, who used to be someone that he knew, arrives to tell him that he's got twins now and refuses to let him know where Devi is. Ashoka is a bit disconcerted and stumbles off into the battelground, where he sees the aftermath: people sitting around furneral pyres, keening, severed limbs, flies on corpses, and so on.
It starts to sink in a bit that maaaybe war isn't all fun and games. And then he sees his horse, which he knew he left with Kaurwaki. And starts stumbling around the battlefield looking for her.
He sees an anemy soldier, wounded, begging for water, but the enemy soldier OMG spurns water from him, wipes a BLOODY HAND OMG on his face and dies.
He turns around and sees Kaurwaki, next to the horse. Her short dagger is still tied to her hand (er, at one point in the battle, all the Karlinga people tied their weapons to the hands) and she has some impassioned lines about how the war isn't over until he's killed her.
She can't really do it, though, and he's all sorrowful and such, and then, her little brother stagtgers out of the mist ... and in a scene worthy of the most angsty of manga, FALLS OVER WITH FOUR ARROWS IN HIS BACK. Because there's still random archers now, hours after the battle is over.
Note, please, that he is still the same age despite it having been long enough since they parted that Ashoka's hair extensions have grown in, he's gotten married, and his wife has had twins.
They have a nice angsty, sad, well-staged death scene for the kid.
A Buddhist monk wanders around the battlefield...
... and Ashoka becomes a Buddhist and the movie ends with a voiceover about how the Evil Prince because the Dharma Prince and spread Buddhism everywhere, and Ashoka gets another nosebleed.
I can't actually get too snarky about it, because it's fairly well-made and there's a lot of good points - the hand symbolism (with blood and without), the way that they take the time to allow Ashoka to fully realize the horror of what he's done and that his empire is merely an empire of corpses, and the visuals of the movie are just stunning.
And they filmed 23 scenes in the first 10 days, they say in one of the extras on the DVD. Bollywood means business when they do it.
This would be a decent movie
Summary of the second half of the movie, although it's nowhere near as funny as the Ong-Bak review. I shall have to review Aabra Ka Daabra sometime to make up for the lack of serious funny in this one.
When we last saw our lovebirds, they were singing and dancing and flirting at some sort of village fest.
Ashoka - still known to Kaurwaki, the princess, only as Pawan, a simple soldier, drags her off and marries her. But before they can do much of anything but tease the viewers with almost kissing, word comes to Ashoka that his mother's dying and he, being more of a mama's boy than Kougaiji, takes off, proming Kaurwaki and her little brother Arya that he'll return.
The Kalinga general Bheema, who is shepherding the prince and princess, hides them in a village that is attacked by soldiers looking for the royal pair. A young woman and her little brother put on their jewelry and pretend to be them, in order to save them. Bheema finds the jewelry.
This is soon be important.
Meanwhile, back at the
Turns out Ashoka's mother isn't dying at all, just engaging in a little maternal manipulation. Ashoka can't hold a grudge against her, and returns to the last place he saw his new bride. What he finds instead is the general, a funeral pyre, and the jewelry.
And, my God, the slash jsut writes itself
Mind you, Bheema turns out to be perfectly aware that they're alive.
And I thought I'd prove to
the_z that Ashoka does indeed have more than one facial expression. (Please note the red hand. That's SYMBOLISM.)But not for long.
(He's engaged in a little facial ash-rubbing in his grief.)
Vital, a guy who he humiliated earlier in the 3rd century BC nightclub comes looking for him to beat him up, but after landing a couple of punches doesn't have the heart to continue. And then Ashoka's royal guard show up adn attempt to behead him. Shoka says no, he's a friend, and they all decamp to a Buddhist monastery where Ashoka is randomly sick when it suits the plot.
Kaurwaki and Arya sneak off from Bheema and start spending an inordinate amount of time looking for Pawan by going up to every enemy soldier they can find and asking if they know him.
At the monastery, Vital spends some time macking on girls...
...while Ashoka hallucinates a music video about his presumably dead wife.
There's a lot of water, and flowing fabric.
Then he stops hallucinating and goes hunting, where a beautiful Buddhist woman named Devi, who is about to get married, throws herself in front of a bird he's about to shoot and begs him not to kill it.
This is the family she's about to marry into:
She, of course, has fallen in love with Ashoka from the moment she saw him, and is also one of the women treating his wounds. On her wedding day he is suffering from a convenient fever and at the wedding she remembers that she forgot to put herbs on his wounds, and runs off, managing to accidentally stop an assasination attempt and accidentally somehow killing the assassin. This somehow renders her unfit for marriage - we get to see her staring at her bloodstained hands in what turns out to be a major them in the movie - and the family stalks off and Ashoka says what the hell and marries her.
Meanwhile, Ashoka's brother broodingly feeds an elephant.
And two of his other brothers - I've lost count of how many he has by this point - cultivate their facial hair
And meanwhile, Kaurwaki is on a raft somewhere and hallucinates a song-and-dance sequence while her husband beds Devi (but he cries a while before doing it, so that's ok).
And the Three Stooges engage in their last funny bit - they show up once more, to be not funny.
Time passes Ashoka grows his bad hair extensions back - although Kalinga people all live in a time warp because in the 2 or so years it would take to grow hair that long, Prince Arya, who we see again later, has managed to age not one whit. Anyway, in this scene, Ashoka and his hair extensions are beating up a guy who worked with his brother to try to kill him. Devi attempts to stop him killing the guy by announcing her pregnancy. Note the BLOODY HAND SYMBOLISM OMG.
Ashoka is happy, and after OMG SMEARING BLOOD ALL OVER HER BELLY WITH THAT HAND natters on about teaching his son to be a warrior. Time passes, everything's OK in Ashokaland.
Until
He doesn't actually kill his brother - he resists the urge, his brother eventually tries to attack, and his friend the mack-daddy Vital throws a sword and pins his broher to the throne.
He kills as many brothers as he can find, is acclaimed Emperor, and goes totally fucking insane with bloodlust.
Larry, Curly, and Moe make frowny faces about this.
Ashoka conquers a lot of India, and now I have INCONTROVERTIBLE PROOF that, evidence of "people who happen to live there" aside, Mount Everest has always been named "Mount Everest"
And I think that maybe UNCONQUERED TRIBAL AREAS is a bit of a misnomer, because Ashoka conquers the hell out of them.
His Buddhist peacenik wife takes off, because she doesn't want her child to be born into war. Ashoka stands around in a snit, then goes and conquers somewhere to take his mind off things. Eventually he conquers a hairdresser's and gets better extensions.
Elsewhere, Bheema talks Kaurwaki and Arya into going back to Kalinga, since this madman Ashoka (none of them know that he's Pawan) is running the place. They've got his horse, Pawan (he named himself after the horse, yes), because Ashoka inexplicably left it with them when he was called away to his non-dying mother's side.
They get back, Bheema slaughters the person who was responsible for killing the royal parents, with no explanation of why he didn't just do that in the first place instead of taking the prince and princess out into the world (personally, I think he was trying to get into her pants). And then Kalinga decides to attempt to assassinate Ashoka because Ashoka is about to attempt to conquer them - Ashoka's last remaining brother has claimed sanctuary there and tells them alla bout how insane he is.
So the person to do the assassination is obviously not some sort of professional assassin who is disposable, but the general Bheema and Ashoka's brother.
Have a heart, Bheema! Don't mess up a man's mud bath!
Ashoka pours water on his face and turns...
...to be recognized by Bheema, who hesitates just long enough for the guards to come running and someone to stick a spear in his back. He gets on his horse and flees. Ashoka drowns his brother in the bath. Bheema makes it to Kalinga and holds on just long enough to whisper "Pawan..." to the Princess, who utterly fails to understand.
Kalinga decides to make a Last Desperate Stand, and even the women say they're fight.
We get a rather nice sequence of Ashoka and Kaurwaki preparing themselves for war mentally and ceremonially, mirroring each other.
Ashoka tends to spend a lot of the last third of the movie inexplicably standing behind, or in, this big copper pot.
They head to war. Vital - remember Ashoka's friend? - has been worked on by Devi and attempts to stop Ashoka fighting, and is beat up.
After that, Ashoka whirls the urumi a few times and then we never see it again.
Because of this delay, he's not leading the charge into battle, and the fight begins without him. This is the Kalinga general, who has the most impressive crop of facial hair I've seen in this movie so far.
There is a lot of fighting, and Kaurwaki actually manages to kick some serious ass while wearing her battle bandeau and her cute wee breatplate. Although I didn't mange to grab any screencaps of said asskicking.
She glowers, too.
The Karlinga contingent seems to be winning - they have elephants, after all - until Ashoka's group arrives, whereupon they get their asses kicked. Because Ashoka is Just That Good.
Kaurwaki sees him, and loses her Cool Points by crawling around after him. He never sees her and eventually she gets knocked on the head, and collapses, unconscious, next to a severed leg.
After the battle, Ashoka goes to his copper pot again.
A Buddhist monk, who used to be someone that he knew, arrives to tell him that he's got twins now and refuses to let him know where Devi is. Ashoka is a bit disconcerted and stumbles off into the battelground, where he sees the aftermath: people sitting around furneral pyres, keening, severed limbs, flies on corpses, and so on.
It starts to sink in a bit that maaaybe war isn't all fun and games. And then he sees his horse, which he knew he left with Kaurwaki. And starts stumbling around the battlefield looking for her.
He sees an anemy soldier, wounded, begging for water, but the enemy soldier OMG spurns water from him, wipes a BLOODY HAND OMG on his face and dies.
He turns around and sees Kaurwaki, next to the horse. Her short dagger is still tied to her hand (er, at one point in the battle, all the Karlinga people tied their weapons to the hands) and she has some impassioned lines about how the war isn't over until he's killed her.
She can't really do it, though, and he's all sorrowful and such, and then, her little brother stagtgers out of the mist ... and in a scene worthy of the most angsty of manga, FALLS OVER WITH FOUR ARROWS IN HIS BACK. Because there's still random archers now, hours after the battle is over.
Note, please, that he is still the same age despite it having been long enough since they parted that Ashoka's hair extensions have grown in, he's gotten married, and his wife has had twins.
They have a nice angsty, sad, well-staged death scene for the kid.
A Buddhist monk wanders around the battlefield...
... and Ashoka becomes a Buddhist and the movie ends with a voiceover about how the Evil Prince because the Dharma Prince and spread Buddhism everywhere, and Ashoka gets another nosebleed.
I can't actually get too snarky about it, because it's fairly well-made and there's a lot of good points - the hand symbolism (with blood and without), the way that they take the time to allow Ashoka to fully realize the horror of what he's done and that his empire is merely an empire of corpses, and the visuals of the movie are just stunning.
And they filmed 23 scenes in the first 10 days, they say in one of the extras on the DVD. Bollywood means business when they do it.
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because i want one. i want an icon
to rule them allto mesmerize myself with!no subject
It takes some time to open a file from a DVD because it's over a gig, but easily doable with my new memory increase. VDM tended to croak on big files like that before I added the RAM.
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...it does, however, work with some of the bizarre engimono's i've downloaded, so i shall play with it and see what comes up. (i will get a dancing icon, damnit.)
also: i did enjoy your caps and comments. XD red hands! hair extensions!
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There's one scene near the end where the little Prince Arya brandishes a sword and, declaiming lines, stomps out. And he drops the sword, but the young actor is a trouper and without breaking character picks it up and continues to stomp out. Any American movie, they'd have re-filmed it. This one, they kept it in.