This jewel integrated into my Wanderers practice of transiting around, sometimes further afield than other times. This time it was back to the Green line terminus (no bicycle this time) and into the Clackamas Town Center mall, on a Wednesday morning. Cinemark was still closed when I arrived. I continued reading American Sons, which I've just started.
Obviously a screening of a movie in Hindi (English subtitles), three hours long, communicating an epic most peeps around here don't get in school or on screens, unless from a South Asian background (Malaysians and Thais know the Ramayana too), is not going to fill the seats. Almost any film, including Godzilla Minus Zero (also showing) will be sparsely attended that time of day. I had a Hindi speaking family in the theater with me, and a few others.
Having grown up in South Asia in my impressionable youth, I was at least not completely oblivious to this story going in, but let's say I was a 2 out of 10 in terms of knowing the details. Now, after this movie, I'd give myself a 5 out of 10, but with key parts still missing. That's OK; I like a cliffhanger. I had to go to Wikipedia to figure out what happened to Hanuman, as I always associate the Ramayana with the so-called "white monkey" character. I expect he'll be showing up in Part 2.
The aesthetic is consistently stylized in a way I think even peeps living BCE would appreciate as much as now. This is one of those cast-of-thousands extravaganzas, histrionic on purpose. It's not a musical, but the orchestral soundtrack is hardly muted. There's not much silence in this genre.
I recognized the plot elements as archetypal, with the characters only one step removed or not removed, from being divine and in a sense immortal or at least eternal (theology goes here). I described it to my visitors later is Cecil B. DeMille meets Lord of the Rings meets Bollywood, or something.
Having just been at OMSI and seen a planetarium show on Black Holes (very cosmic), it wasn't that much of a gearshift to be seeing meetups between mortals and Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva. Ram is an avatar of Vishnu yet is in the Shiva lineage thanks to an Excalibur-like scenario, Ram being a once and future king type character. The disequilibrium between Suras vs Asuras is what gets the ball rolling. I won't recount the whole plot here (we'd be here all night, right?).
By the time I'd almost left the mall, then realized my burlap shoulder bag was missing so ran back (they let be retrieve it from F7 theater 13), the mall was crowded with every shop open, people lined up at food court places, merry-go-round (for real) spinning and like that. Macy and JCPenney are still doing their jobs as anchor stores. This is not one of those creepy abandoned malls frequented by urban spelunkers (another genre of Wandering).
