Truth trickles over like a hot block of lava when two lovers, on the brink of separation, fight. "Everyone is unhappy in New York!" Jonathan 'Jon' Larson (Andrew Garfield) screams in defense when Susan (Alexandra Shipp) tells him what he has, frankly, known all along: that he is a success-crazed, table-waiting, broke artiste with a pigeon-holed approach towards musical writing.

<img alt="Xfgbghhdfareg" data-entity-type="file" data-entity-uuid="57667aa4-c3c4-4cfa-99bf-c91805b17ec5" src="//cdn.wionews.com/sites/default/files/inline-images/pjimage%20-%202021-11-19T170135.535.jpg" /> 
And, oh boy, obsessed he was! Every hour of the day, Larson, who's just weeks shy from turning 30 in an era when it was considered 'old' (1990, if you are asking), day-dreamt of playing his works to housefull Broadway audiences. After all, he had spent eight long and painful years writing the futuristic musical 'Superbia', only to be turned down for being overambitious in tone and treatment later.&nbsp;

Also read:&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/entertainment/hollywood/news-andrew-garfield-on-mothers-death-everything-has-changed-nothing-can-prepare-you-for-that-kind-of-cataclysm-413778">Andrew Garfield on mother's death: Everything has changed; nothing can prepare you for that kind of cataclysm</a>

 
Andrew Garfield's 'Tick, Tick... Boom!' is an ode to a revolutionary musical writer who hankered after success but could not live long enough to sip on it.&nbsp;

 
Angst, anxiety--the movie piggybacks on the metaphor of time, its inevitability in the creative space; the tussle between fear and love, passion and perseverance--and palpable vulnerability that justifies Larson's hopelessness and delusions pertaining to the creative world. Ambition must really be a synthetic drug for Jonathan seems to have consumed every last shred of it and drowned in its ever-tightening grip: friends were dying, relationships were altering and money, running thin. But, even in his lowest moments, a 'gifted' Jon thinks about writing songs. "I am one of the last of my species," he says, boastfully.

Also read:&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/entertainment/lifestyle/news-wion-exclusive-raftaar-i-choose-to-mentor-young-rappers-as-i-never-had-one-during-my-time-429300">WION exclusive! Raftaar: I choose to mentor young rappers as I never had one during my time</a>

 
Director Lin-Manuel Miranda's secret weapon for this film adaptation of his hero's work (by the same name) capitalises on Andrew Garfield's chocolate boy looks, those piercingly kind eyes and a face that could imitate&nbsp;a thousand expressions when grief washes over. Perhaps it is Garfield's boyish charm and 'everyman' vulnerability that renders heightened intensity in the dramatic scenes with best friend Michael (an absolute gem of an actor, Robin de Jesus). A former art sellout-turned-current corporate honcho, Robin de Jesus is the anti-thesis of Andrew Garfield. Even while worshipping his idol--the writer of the classic musical 'Rent', who died at 35 and a day before the preview of the play that brought him international fame--Miranda doesn't demonise or trivialise the lives and struggles of those that shaped up the life of the man who influenced his artistic endeavours.&nbsp;

<img alt="cvgfbfdsaDFDD" data-entity-type="file" data-entity-uuid="ce6a70c2-fd6e-4b04-ba71-53adf3a178da" src="//cdn.wionews.com/sites/default/files/inline-images/pjimage%20-%202021-11-19T170024.415.jpg" /> 
Andrew Garfield's crooning is just above decent and he dances like an old man with a limp; all adorable. Alexandra Shipp is the glamour factor in this biographical musical drama and Vanessa Hudgens' cameo is only for the vocals, we reckon.&nbsp;

Also read:&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/opinions-blogs/opinion-britney-spears-a-long-walk-to-freedom-429069">Opinion | Britney Spears: A long walk to freedom</a>

 
Lin-Manuel Miranda reconstructs and replicates every little detail from Jonathan Larson's life and the period he lived and thrived in. But, in doing so, he struggles to move beyond the obvious trials and tribulations of a 20-something&nbsp;navigating the financially volatile field of arts. Sure, there was more to Larson beyond his words and dwindling personal life. Where are those chapters in this two-hour long memorabilia? Despite its poignancy, 'Tick, Tick... Boom!' is also a fanboy account of Jonathan Larson.

<img alt="XDSFHGSAS" data-entity-type="file" data-entity-uuid="6b06191a-22f9-4d61-a869-f67871c92c13" src="//cdn.wionews.com/sites/default/files/inline-images/pjimage%20-%202021-11-19T170223.604.jpg" /> 
In the last few years, musicals and films on music have left the audience mesmerised--Damien Chazelle's 'Whiplash' and 'La La Land' both deserved Oscars--and while 'Tick, Tick... Boom!' may not have ticked all the right boxes in storytelling, it sure does tug at our heart strings. Nothing more refreshing than an unguarded, naked Andrew Garfield talking about life, love and friendship. &nbsp;

'Tick, Tick... Boom!' is now streaming on Netflix.&nbsp;

Truth trickles over like a hot block of lava when two lovers, on the brink of separation, fight. "Everyone is unhappy in New York!" Jonathan 'Jon' Larson (Andrew Garfield) screams in defense when Susan (Alexandra Shipp) tells him what he has, frankly, known all along: that he is a success-crazed, table-waiting, broke artiste with a pigeon-holed approach towards musical writing.

Truth trickles over like a hot block of lava when two lovers, on the brink of separation, fight. "Everyone is unhappy in New York!" Jonathan 'Jon' Larson (Andrew Garfield) screams in defense when Susan (Alexandra Shipp) tells him what he has, frankly, known all along: that he is a success-crazed, table-waiting, broke artiste with a pigeon-holed approach towards musical writing. And, oh boy, obsessed he was! Every hour of the day, Larson, who's just weeks shy from turning 30 in an era when it was considered 'old' (1990, if you are asking), day-dreamt of playing his works to housefull Broadway audiences. After all, he had spent eight long and painful years writing the futuristic musical 'Superbia', only to be turned down for being overambitious in tone and treatment later. Also read: Andrew Garfield on mother's death: Everything has changed; nothing can prepare you for that kind of cataclysm Andrew Garfield's 'Tick, Tick... Boom!' is an ode to a revolutionary musical writer who hankered after success but could not live long enough to sip on it. Angst, anxiety--the movie piggybacks on the metaphor of time, its inevitability in the creative space; the tussle between fear and love, passion and perseverance--and palpable vulnerability that justifies Larson's hopelessness and delusions pertaining to the creative world. Ambition must really be a synthetic drug for Jonathan seems to have consumed every last shred of it and drowned in its ever-tightening grip: friends were dying, relationships were altering and money, running thin. But, even in his lowest moments, a 'gifted' Jon thinks about writing songs. "I am one of the last of my species," he says, boastfully. Also read: WION exclusive! Raftaar: I choose to mentor young rappers as I never had one during my time Director Lin-Manuel Miranda's secret weapon for this film adaptation of his hero's work (by the same name) capitalises on Andrew Garfield's chocolate boy looks, those piercingly kind eyes and a face that could imitate a thousand expressions when grief washes over. Perhaps it is Garfield's boyish charm and 'everyman' vulnerability that renders heightened intensity in the dramatic scenes with best friend Michael (an absolute gem of an actor, Robin de Jesus). A former art sellout-turned-current corporate honcho, Robin de Jesus is the anti-thesis of Andrew Garfield. Even while worshipping his idol--the writer of the classic musical 'Rent', who died at 35 and a day before the preview of the play that brought him international fame--Miranda doesn't demonise or trivialise the lives and struggles of those that shaped up the life of the man who influenced his artistic endeavours. Andrew Garfield's crooning is just above decent and he dances like an old man with a limp; all adorable. Alexandra Shipp is the glamour factor in this biographical musical drama and Vanessa Hudgens' cameo is only for the vocals, we reckon. Also read: Opinion | Britney Spears: A long walk to freedom Lin-Manuel Miranda reconstructs and replicates every little detail from Jonathan Larson's life and the period he lived and thrived in. But, in doing so, he struggles to move beyond the obvious trials and tribulations of a 20-something navigating the financially volatile field of arts. Sure, there was more to Larson beyond his words and dwindling personal life. Where are those chapters in this two-hour long memorabilia? Despite its poignancy, 'Tick, Tick... Boom!' is also a fanboy account of Jonathan Larson. In the last few years, musicals and films on music have left the audience mesmerised--Damien Chazelle's 'Whiplash' and 'La La Land' both deserved Oscars--and while 'Tick, Tick... Boom!' may not have ticked all the right boxes in storytelling, it sure does tug at our heart strings. Nothing more refreshing than an unguarded, naked Andrew Garfield talking about life, love and friendship. 'Tick, Tick... Boom!' is now streaming on Netflix.

'Tick, Tick... Boom!' review: Andrew Garfield's ode to musical genius is heart-wrenching

So far this season, five plays by Black authors have opened on Broadway, each with something urgent to say. Whether despairing (“Pass Over”) or lighthearted (“Chicken &amp;amp; Biscuits”), broadly representative (“Thoughts of a Colored Man”) or laser-beam specific (“Lackawanna Blues”), they are talking to us now, like a newspaper come to life. Like newspapers, too, they are remade every day; when I caught up with “Thoughts of a Colored Man” recently, it had been updated with a hot take on the Kyle Rittenhouse trial.

 
Yet for sheer crackling timeliness, the play most of the moment is in fact the oldest: Alice Childress’ “Trouble in Mind,” which opened Thursday at the American Airlines Theater. Originally produced in 1955 in Greenwich Village, but derailed on its path to becoming the first play by a Black woman to reach Broadway — a distinction that went to Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun” four years later — it is only now getting the mainstream attention it deserves, in a Roundabout Theater Company production that does justice to its complexity.

 
And justice, both broadly and narrowly, is the point. What begins as a backstage satire of white cluelessness and Black ingratiation gradually broadens and darkens into something far more mysterious: a peculiarly American tale of lost opportunity.

 
Because Childress uses the play’s structure to express her theme, the ingratiation naturally comes first, and Charles Randolph-Wright’s lively staging leads with warmth and humor. As a mostly Black cast assembles on a perfectly period set (by Arnulfo Maldonado) to begin rehearsing an “anti-lynching” melodrama called “Chaos in Belleville,” their high-spirited chatter is often about fabricated résumés, mutual acquaintances and glorious triumphs past.

 
Yet for Wiletta Mayer (LaChanze) — and for us as we listen — that past is already beginning to crack open. Though she rhapsodizes to the stage doorman (Simon Jones) about a song she once performed in a show called “Brownskin Melody,” she and her colleague Millie Davis (Jessica Frances Dukes) have more often been reduced to “flower” or “jewel” roles: stereotyped Black women with names like Gardenia, Magnolia, Crystal and Opal. In her most recent job, Millie says, “All I did was shout ‘Lord, have mercy!’ for almost two hours every night.”

 
“Chaos in Belleville,” by a white playwright, is no better, despite its supposedly sympathetic theme. In it, Wiletta is set to play Ruby, and Millie to play Petunia: women working for a white family in the Jim Crow South. When Ruby’s son, Job, gets in trouble after daring to vote, the women are left, as usual, to wail and sing.

 
Wiletta has no question that the play “stinks.” But then so does any mainstream play she can reasonably hope to book. An idealistic young actor like John Nevins (Brandon Micheal Hall) — who has been cast, in his first Broadway outing, as Job — may feel pride on becoming a part of the theater, but Wiletta knows better.

 
“Colored folks ain’t in no theater,” she says. They are merely in a business.

 
As such, she and Millie — soon joined by Sheldon Forrester (Chuck Cooper), an old hand playing Ruby’s husband — are experts at not rocking the boat. They dress beautifully (in costumes by Emilio Sosa) and feign enthusiasm. In a hilarious yet devastating scene, Wiletta advises John that, in order to feel comfortable, white producers and directors need Black actors to be walking contradictions. They should be “natural” talents yet experienced, not too needy and yet not too cocky, have no opinions except good ones and laugh at every joke.

 
If this seems extreme, read about the experiences of Black theater artists today. The question they have been asking, in manifestoes and Twitter threads, is whether the systemic imbalance of power backstage is in any meaningful sense different from racism.

 
Some 66 years ago, that was precisely Childress’ question as well, and once the white characters appear it starts to get answered. We see that even the most powerless of them — a put-upon stage manager (Alex Mickiewicz), a Yale-trained ingénue (Danielle Campbell) and a neurotic journeyman (Don Stephenson) — have more agency in their profession than any of the Black characters do.

The journeyman, though not very good, never lacks for work. (Stephenson, though, is expert.) The ingénue complains that if “Chaos in Belleville” fails she’ll have to move back to her parents’ house in Connecticut, blithely unaware that Sheldon is probably one week’s salary short of homelessness. 
But it is of course the director, Al Manners (Michael Zegen), who sits at the top of the pecking order, pecking away at everyone’s nerves. An egoist whose veneer of open-mindedness is easily stripped away, he regularly explodes in nasty snits that today would be understood (and yet perhaps tolerated) as big-man harassment. Though he calls Wiletta “darling” and “my sweetheart,” his growing intransigence in response to her growing dissatisfaction is the primary source of conflict within the play.

 
Their fight is a fascinating knot of racial politics and dramatic theory. In Zegen’s apt take, Manners has the reptilian insouciance of a would-be Elia Kazan, bringing to the stage the new techniques of Method acting he has learned as a hack in Hollywood. Yet Manners’ demands are completely incoherent, and as Wiletta fails to satisfy him despite “justifying” and “relating to” the nonsensical dialogue she’s given, she realizes that “Chaos in Belleville” is in fact racist — and, in defending it, so is he.

 
LaChanze gets that arc just right in a wonderfully rangy and compelling performance. At first confident that she can continue to game an unfair system, her Wiletta becomes almost existentially confused as insight floods in; when finally she regains her clarity and resolves not to participate in her own degradation, it has the weight of both victory and defeat in one choice.

 
By then, we understand that “Trouble in Mind,” its title taken from a classic blues song about suicide, is, for all its backstage comedy, a tragedy of waste — not, like lynching, the waste of what happens so much as the waste of what doesn’t.

 
All the Black characters, but none of the white ones, know that tragedy intimately. At one point, Sheldon, who spends most of “Chaos in Belleville” saying “Yes, sir” and “Thank you, sir” and whittling pointlessly at a stick, casually remarks that unlike that play’s author and director he has actually witnessed a lynching. Cooper then gives us a brilliant, horrific aria, filled with Method detail, that makes you see as if you were behind his eyes, and at the same time makes you understand how much of America’s talent has been squandered.

 
That includes Childress, a figure who looks in hindsight a lot like Wiletta. It was because she refused to license a softened ending that “Trouble in Mind” did not make the move to Broadway after its off-Broadway success; none of her later work made it to Broadway either. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t important — or that, in our day, as this eye-opening production demonstrates, we can’t make it important again.

So far this season, five plays by Black authors have opened on Broadway, each with something urgent to say. Whether despairing (“Pass Over”) or lighthearted (“Chicken &amp; Biscuits”), broadly representative (“Thoughts of a Colored Man”) or laser-beam specific (“Lackawanna Blues”), they are talking to us now, like a newspaper come to life.

So far this season, five plays by Black authors have opened on Broadway, each with something urgent to say. Whether despairing (“Pass Over”) or lighthearted (“Chicken &amp; Biscuits”), broadly representative (“Thoughts of a Colored Man”) or laser-beam specific (“Lackawanna Blues”), they are talking to us now, like a newspaper come to life. Like newspapers, too, they are remade every day; when I caught up with “Thoughts of a Colored Man” recently, it had been updated with a hot take on the Kyle Rittenhouse trial. Yet for sheer crackling timeliness, the play most of the moment is in fact the oldest: Alice Childress’ “Trouble in Mind,” which opened Thursday at the American Airlines Theater. Originally produced in 1955 in Greenwich Village, but derailed on its path to becoming the first play by a Black woman to reach Broadway — a distinction that went to Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun” four years later — it is only now getting the mainstream attention it deserves, in a Roundabout Theater Company production that does justice to its complexity. And justice, both broadly and narrowly, is the point. What begins as a backstage satire of white cluelessness and Black ingratiation gradually broadens and darkens into something far more mysterious: a peculiarly American tale of lost opportunity. Because Childress uses the play’s structure to express her theme, the ingratiation naturally comes first, and Charles Randolph-Wright’s lively staging leads with warmth and humor. As a mostly Black cast assembles on a perfectly period set (by Arnulfo Maldonado) to begin rehearsing an “anti-lynching” melodrama called “Chaos in Belleville,” their high-spirited chatter is often about fabricated résumés, mutual acquaintances and glorious triumphs past. Yet for Wiletta Mayer (LaChanze) — and for us as we listen — that past is already beginning to crack open. Though she rhapsodizes to the stage doorman (Simon Jones) about a song she once performed in a show called “Brownskin Melody,” she and her colleague Millie Davis (Jessica Frances Dukes) have more often been reduced to “flower” or “jewel” roles: stereotyped Black women with names like Gardenia, Magnolia, Crystal and Opal. In her most recent job, Millie says, “All I did was shout ‘Lord, have mercy!’ for almost two hours every night.” “Chaos in Belleville,” by a white playwright, is no better, despite its supposedly sympathetic theme. In it, Wiletta is set to play Ruby, and Millie to play Petunia: women working for a white family in the Jim Crow South. When Ruby’s son, Job, gets in trouble after daring to vote, the women are left, as usual, to wail and sing. Wiletta has no question that the play “stinks.” But then so does any mainstream play she can reasonably hope to book. An idealistic young actor like John Nevins (Brandon Micheal Hall) — who has been cast, in his first Broadway outing, as Job — may feel pride on becoming a part of the theater, but Wiletta knows better. “Colored folks ain’t in no theater,” she says. They are merely in a business. As such, she and Millie — soon joined by Sheldon Forrester (Chuck Cooper), an old hand playing Ruby’s husband — are experts at not rocking the boat. They dress beautifully (in costumes by Emilio Sosa) and feign enthusiasm. In a hilarious yet devastating scene, Wiletta advises John that, in order to feel comfortable, white producers and directors need Black actors to be walking contradictions. They should be “natural” talents yet experienced, not too needy and yet not too cocky, have no opinions except good ones and laugh at every joke. If this seems extreme, read about the experiences of Black theater artists today. The question they have been asking, in manifestoes and Twitter threads, is whether the systemic imbalance of power backstage is in any meaningful sense different from racism. Some 66 years ago, that was precisely Childress’ question as well, and once the white characters appear it starts to get answered. We see that even the most powerless of them — a put-upon stage manager (Alex Mickiewicz), a Yale-trained ingénue (Danielle Campbell) and a neurotic journeyman (Don Stephenson) — have more agency in their profession than any of the Black characters do. The journeyman, though not very good, never lacks for work. (Stephenson, though, is expert.) The ingénue complains that if “Chaos in Belleville” fails she’ll have to move back to her parents’ house in Connecticut, blithely unaware that Sheldon is probably one week’s salary short of homelessness. But it is of course the director, Al Manners (Michael Zegen), who sits at the top of the pecking order, pecking away at everyone’s nerves. An egoist whose veneer of open-mindedness is easily stripped away, he regularly explodes in nasty snits that today would be understood (and yet perhaps tolerated) as big-man harassment. Though he calls Wiletta “darling” and “my sweetheart,” his growing intransigence in response to her growing dissatisfaction is the primary source of conflict within the play. Their fight is a fascinating knot of racial politics and dramatic theory. In Zegen’s apt take, Manners has the reptilian insouciance of a would-be Elia Kazan, bringing to the stage the new techniques of Method acting he has learned as a hack in Hollywood. Yet Manners’ demands are completely incoherent, and as Wiletta fails to satisfy him despite “justifying” and “relating to” the nonsensical dialogue she’s given, she realizes that “Chaos in Belleville” is in fact racist — and, in defending it, so is he. LaChanze gets that arc just right in a wonderfully rangy and compelling performance. At first confident that she can continue to game an unfair system, her Wiletta becomes almost existentially confused as insight floods in; when finally she regains her clarity and resolves not to participate in her own degradation, it has the weight of both victory and defeat in one choice. By then, we understand that “Trouble in Mind,” its title taken from a classic blues song about suicide, is, for all its backstage comedy, a tragedy of waste — not, like lynching, the waste of what happens so much as the waste of what doesn’t. All the Black characters, but none of the white ones, know that tragedy intimately. At one point, Sheldon, who spends most of “Chaos in Belleville” saying “Yes, sir” and “Thank you, sir” and whittling pointlessly at a stick, casually remarks that unlike that play’s author and director he has actually witnessed a lynching. Cooper then gives us a brilliant, horrific aria, filled with Method detail, that makes you see as if you were behind his eyes, and at the same time makes you understand how much of America’s talent has been squandered. That includes Childress, a figure who looks in hindsight a lot like Wiletta. It was because she refused to license a softened ending that “Trouble in Mind” did not make the move to Broadway after its off-Broadway success; none of her later work made it to Broadway either. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t important — or that, in our day, as this eye-opening production demonstrates, we can’t make it important again.

Review: ‘Trouble in Mind,’ 66 years late and still on time

Sung by a pack of slithering paparazzi amid an explosion of flashbulbs, so begins “Diana, the Musical,” which seems to exist to answer the question. Digging deep into the celebrity-bio-musical barrel, there to squabble for preeminence with pop divas and Jersey boys, it may well win the prize as the tawdriest and least excusable wholesaling of a supposedly true story ever to belt its way to Broadway.

 
I doubt that was the intention behind the show, which opened on Wednesday at the Longacre Theater after somehow surviving two disasters: the pandemic, which knocked it down in March 2020; and a filmed version for Netflix (“the year’s most hysterically awful hate-watch,” wrote The Guardian) that did much the same thing earlier this fall. Still, it’s worth asking, as the poor woman’s corpse is forced to rise again, what its authors could possibly have been thinking.

 
The cynical answer, as always, is money. The Princess of Wales, in her short life and long death, has been dragooned into any number of commercial entertainments, including memoirs by her household staff, thinly sourced biographies, a multi-season story line on “The Crown” and, most recently, the movie “Spencer.” Whether middlebrow or low, these works reshape Diana to their own needs, borrowing her familiar, eventful yet unknowable story to sell mere gossip as relatable real-life tragedy.

 
But at least none of those involved any of the following, as “Diana” counterfactually does: the title character getting jiggy with Mstislav Rostropovich to an electrified version of Bach’s first cello suite; Barbara Cartland, the romance novelist, lasciviously pawing Diana’s lover James Hewitt as he arrives half-naked on a horse; a man with AIDS consenting to have his photo taken with the princess by singing, “I may be unwell, but I’m handsome as hell”; and a sort of boxing match between the rivals for Prince Charles’ affections set to the words: “It’s the thrilla in Manila but with Diana and Camilla!”

 
I wish propriety would allow me to tell you as well about the song in which Diana and her butler, Paul Burrell, choose the low-cut, off-the-shoulder “revenge” dress she wears in response to Charles’ 1994 interview blaming the failure of their marriage on her. Only for turning a common vulgarity into an uncommon one could the number be regarded as clever.

 
Yet these are merely the most extractable of the horrors that “Diana,” as directed by Christopher Ashley, has on display. The real problem is intrinsic, arising from the choice to tell the story in song at all. Musicals, like laws, are often compared to sausages: You don’t want to know what goes into them. In this case, you don’t want to know what comes out, either; if you care about Diana as a human being, or dignity as a concept, you will find this treatment of her life both aesthetically and morally mortifying.

 
Granted, the authors did not make it easy on themselves. In choosing to cover the entire arc of her fame — from 1980 to ’96, with an epilogue about her death tacked on — they probably doomed themselves to the narrative scrawniness that makes the show so twitchy. (“Spencer” limits itself to three days in 1991.)

Roughly, and I do mean roughly, Joe DiPietro’s book touches on Diana’s rise from meek kindergarten helper to surprise candidate for what one song calls “the worst job in England,” to fairy-tale bride, to scorned wife, to doting mother, to England’s favorite royal, to unfaithful wretch, to carousing divorcée, to martyrdom and points beyond.

 
Once you add songs into the mix — and Diana (Jeanna de Waal) sings in 17 of them — there’s no time for coherence, let alone subtlety. De Waal is left to embody each new incarnation of the character as quickly and superficially as she swaps William Ivey Long’s trick costumes, which could tell the story better on their own. They are, at any rate, wittier and sparklier than the score; with music by David Bryan of Bon Jovi, and lyrics by Bryan and DiPietro, the songs are cold and crass — and so, not surprisingly, their Diana is, too.

 
This is not just a matter of de Waal’s bravura yet resolutely unthrilling performance, but also of the framing. In her introductory number, looking back on her life from some point presumably after the divorce but before her death, Diana suggests that it was tactically valuable to be “underestimated” — a word that doesn’t scan as a lyric no matter how mercilessly the songwriters flog it. It doesn’t scan as an idea either; rather, it sets up Diana as a kind of English Evita, a schemer who triumphed, which is bizarre on both counts.

 
Indeed, there is something seriously wrong with a Diana story whose most believable and sympathetic character is Camilla Parker Bowles. But other than the degrading “thrilla” scene, Camilla is mercifully underwritten, allowing Erin Davie room to find something human in her that the real Camilla never could. 
The other two central players have no such room. Roe Hartrampf’s Charles is basically a Prince of Wails, complaining bitterly and at the top of his voice for the entire show; Judy Kaye’s already one-note battleship of a performance as Queen Elizabeth II is further undercut by her popping up occasionally as Cartland — Diana’s step-grandmother — for supposed comic relief.

 
Choices like these suggest that the authors simply did not know what tone to take and so took every one they could think of. Wanting us to engage with the story seriously, they nevertheless ham it up with randy grannies and cheesy catfights. Seeking to cover 16 years in little more than two hours, they condense or flat-out fictionalize with a wink. In this context, it counts as a kind of discretion that the portrait of Burrell as a trusted confidant (and dress wrangler) neglects to mention that he was later prosecuted for stealing from the princess’s estate — a case hastily dropped after the queen interceded — and, for an encore, wrote a tacky bestselling memoir.

 
Ashley’s staging follows suit, going for grandeur but, in its haste, reaching only the clamminess of farce. (The chilly sets are by David Zinn.) And in Kelly Devine’s bizarrely noncontextual choreography, the ensemble — whether representing palace flunkies, Knightsbridge snobs or worshipful Dianaphiles — performs the same frenzied gymnastics.

 
Musicals are difficult and expensive. No one says they have to be serious, too. “The Cher Show” and “Jersey Boys,” among many others, would have been much better with less drummed-up significance. Nor will an insufficiency of craft and proportion necessarily sully a modest, invented tale like the one told in “Memphis,” the 2010 Tony Award winner from the “Diana” creative team.

 
But if you decide to write a musical about a real woman, known worldwide, who died tragically while still a young mother, something more rigorous is demanded. “Diana,” though, is lazy and thus neither entertaining nor insightful. Although audiences talk back to it at will, it’s not even campy fun. It’s just exploitative, doing to the Princess of Wales pretty much what the tabloid press — let alone the monarchy — did to her in the first place.

Sung by a pack of slithering paparazzi amid an explosion of flashbulbs, so begins “Diana, the Musical,” which seems to exist to answer the question. Digging deep into the celebrity-bio-musical barrel, there to squabble for preeminence with pop divas and Jersey boys, it may well win the prize as the tawdriest and least excusable wholesaling of a supposedly true story ever to belt its way to Broadway.

Sung by a pack of slithering paparazzi amid an explosion of flashbulbs, so begins “Diana, the Musical,” which seems to exist to answer the question. Digging deep into the celebrity-bio-musical barrel, there to squabble for preeminence with pop divas and Jersey boys, it may well win the prize as the tawdriest and least excusable wholesaling of a supposedly true story ever to belt its way to Broadway. I doubt that was the intention behind the show, which opened on Wednesday at the Longacre Theater after somehow surviving two disasters: the pandemic, which knocked it down in March 2020; and a filmed version for Netflix (“the year’s most hysterically awful hate-watch,” wrote The Guardian) that did much the same thing earlier this fall. Still, it’s worth asking, as the poor woman’s corpse is forced to rise again, what its authors could possibly have been thinking. The cynical answer, as always, is money. The Princess of Wales, in her short life and long death, has been dragooned into any number of commercial entertainments, including memoirs by her household staff, thinly sourced biographies, a multi-season story line on “The Crown” and, most recently, the movie “Spencer.” Whether middlebrow or low, these works reshape Diana to their own needs, borrowing her familiar, eventful yet unknowable story to sell mere gossip as relatable real-life tragedy. But at least none of those involved any of the following, as “Diana” counterfactually does: the title character getting jiggy with Mstislav Rostropovich to an electrified version of Bach’s first cello suite; Barbara Cartland, the romance novelist, lasciviously pawing Diana’s lover James Hewitt as he arrives half-naked on a horse; a man with AIDS consenting to have his photo taken with the princess by singing, “I may be unwell, but I’m handsome as hell”; and a sort of boxing match between the rivals for Prince Charles’ affections set to the words: “It’s the thrilla in Manila but with Diana and Camilla!” I wish propriety would allow me to tell you as well about the song in which Diana and her butler, Paul Burrell, choose the low-cut, off-the-shoulder “revenge” dress she wears in response to Charles’ 1994 interview blaming the failure of their marriage on her. Only for turning a common vulgarity into an uncommon one could the number be regarded as clever. Yet these are merely the most extractable of the horrors that “Diana,” as directed by Christopher Ashley, has on display. The real problem is intrinsic, arising from the choice to tell the story in song at all. Musicals, like laws, are often compared to sausages: You don’t want to know what goes into them. In this case, you don’t want to know what comes out, either; if you care about Diana as a human being, or dignity as a concept, you will find this treatment of her life both aesthetically and morally mortifying. Granted, the authors did not make it easy on themselves. In choosing to cover the entire arc of her fame — from 1980 to ’96, with an epilogue about her death tacked on — they probably doomed themselves to the narrative scrawniness that makes the show so twitchy. (“Spencer” limits itself to three days in 1991.) Roughly, and I do mean roughly, Joe DiPietro’s book touches on Diana’s rise from meek kindergarten helper to surprise candidate for what one song calls “the worst job in England,” to fairy-tale bride, to scorned wife, to doting mother, to England’s favorite royal, to unfaithful wretch, to carousing divorcée, to martyrdom and points beyond. Once you add songs into the mix — and Diana (Jeanna de Waal) sings in 17 of them — there’s no time for coherence, let alone subtlety. De Waal is left to embody each new incarnation of the character as quickly and superficially as she swaps William Ivey Long’s trick costumes, which could tell the story better on their own. They are, at any rate, wittier and sparklier than the score; with music by David Bryan of Bon Jovi, and lyrics by Bryan and DiPietro, the songs are cold and crass — and so, not surprisingly, their Diana is, too. This is not just a matter of de Waal’s bravura yet resolutely unthrilling performance, but also of the framing. In her introductory number, looking back on her life from some point presumably after the divorce but before her death, Diana suggests that it was tactically valuable to be “underestimated” — a word that doesn’t scan as a lyric no matter how mercilessly the songwriters flog it. It doesn’t scan as an idea either; rather, it sets up Diana as a kind of English Evita, a schemer who triumphed, which is bizarre on both counts. Indeed, there is something seriously wrong with a Diana story whose most believable and sympathetic character is Camilla Parker Bowles. But other than the degrading “thrilla” scene, Camilla is mercifully underwritten, allowing Erin Davie room to find something human in her that the real Camilla never could. The other two central players have no such room. Roe Hartrampf’s Charles is basically a Prince of Wails, complaining bitterly and at the top of his voice for the entire show; Judy Kaye’s already one-note battleship of a performance as Queen Elizabeth II is further undercut by her popping up occasionally as Cartland — Diana’s step-grandmother — for supposed comic relief. Choices like these suggest that the authors simply did not know what tone to take and so took every one they could think of. Wanting us to engage with the story seriously, they nevertheless ham it up with randy grannies and cheesy catfights. Seeking to cover 16 years in little more than two hours, they condense or flat-out fictionalize with a wink. In this context, it counts as a kind of discretion that the portrait of Burrell as a trusted confidant (and dress wrangler) neglects to mention that he was later prosecuted for stealing from the princess’s estate — a case hastily dropped after the queen interceded — and, for an encore, wrote a tacky bestselling memoir. Ashley’s staging follows suit, going for grandeur but, in its haste, reaching only the clamminess of farce. (The chilly sets are by David Zinn.) And in Kelly Devine’s bizarrely noncontextual choreography, the ensemble — whether representing palace flunkies, Knightsbridge snobs or worshipful Dianaphiles — performs the same frenzied gymnastics. Musicals are difficult and expensive. No one says they have to be serious, too. “The Cher Show” and “Jersey Boys,” among many others, would have been much better with less drummed-up significance. Nor will an insufficiency of craft and proportion necessarily sully a modest, invented tale like the one told in “Memphis,” the 2010 Tony Award winner from the “Diana” creative team. But if you decide to write a musical about a real woman, known worldwide, who died tragically while still a young mother, something more rigorous is demanded. “Diana,” though, is lazy and thus neither entertaining nor insightful. Although audiences talk back to it at will, it’s not even campy fun. It’s just exploitative, doing to the Princess of Wales pretty much what the tabloid press — let alone the monarchy — did to her in the first place.

‘Diana, the Musical’ review: Exploiting the people’s princess

South Korea’s soft power -- music and entertainment is an industry to reckon with in global standards. As the world continues to stay obsessed with Korean dramas, K-pop music has charted worldwide success thanks to a few groups/bands that have made a powerful standing for themselves. We cannot not mention BTS that has become the face of K-pop music with fandom for the boy band only increasing by the day but there’s one more band that is not far behind in numbers and their way to global superstardom -- Blackpink.&nbsp;

As the girl band celebrates their five years anniversary since their debut in 2016, they released a documentary/short feature ‘BLACKPINK: THE MOVIE’ that lets the fans come a step closer with their beloved band members -- Jisoo, Lisa, Jennie, Rosé -- all unique personalities with different backgrounds and vision for themselves.&nbsp;

Based on the journey of K pop supergroup Blackpink until now, the feature explores the individuality of each member as they jam together and make world-class music that has made records and shattered many others in due course of its run. The film caters to the liking of fans who are crazy in love with the group Blackpink and call themselves BLINKs, much like how BTS fans are called ARMY all around the world.&nbsp;

The film has lots and lots of music as group members dance, look cute in glitzy outfits and belt out their hits including Lovesick Girls, How You Like That, Ice Cream, Forever Young, As If It’s Your Last, Whistle and many others.&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/entertainment/lifestyle/news-blackpink%E2%80%99s-lisa-dropped-her-solo-debut-album-lalisa-412312" hreflang="en">Blackpink’s Lisa dropped her solo debut album 'Lalisa'</a>

<iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="378" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/MHncNFal0ms" title="YouTube video player" width="672"></iframe>

Directed by Su Yee Jung and Oh Yoon-Dong, ‘Blackpink: The Movie’ sees the girls get emotional with the love of their fans, their last world tour, their urge to get back on stage as concerts/public gatherings have been stopped since COVID-19 brought in hindrances. However, it does give you a feel of the concerts and what it will be like once you get back to the ‘pre-pandemic normal’, if at all!&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/entertainment/watch-blackpink-girl-rose-solo-debut-album-r-is-finally-here-369863" hreflang="en">Watch: BLACKPINK vocalist Rose finally drops her solo debut album</a>

More than anything, ‘Blackpink: The Movie’ rejigs our memory of the time when going for a performance wasn’t such a novel idea and was just a matter of buying tickets. The film definitely creates an urge for us to go back in time when social and physical distancing was only a thing of the mind.&nbsp;

Also read:&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/entertainment/lifestyle/news-oxford-english-dictionary-adds-26-new-words-and-they-are-all-korean-418554" hreflang="en">Oxford English Dictionary adds 26 new words and they are all Korean</a>

South Korea’s soft power -- music and entertainment is an industry to reckon with in global standards. As the world continues to stay obsessed with Korean dramas, K-pop music has charted worldwide success thanks to a few groups/bands that have made a powerful standing for themselves.

South Korea’s soft power -- music and entertainment is an industry to reckon with in global standards. As the world continues to stay obsessed with Korean dramas, K-pop music has charted worldwide success thanks to a few groups/bands that have made a powerful standing for themselves. We cannot not mention BTS that has become the face of K-pop music with fandom for the boy band only increasing by the day but there’s one more band that is not far behind in numbers and their way to global superstardom -- Blackpink. As the girl band celebrates their five years anniversary since their debut in 2016, they released a documentary/short feature ‘BLACKPINK: THE MOVIE’ that lets the fans come a step closer with their beloved band members -- Jisoo, Lisa, Jennie, Rosé -- all unique personalities with different backgrounds and vision for themselves. Based on the journey of K pop supergroup Blackpink until now, the feature explores the individuality of each member as they jam together and make world-class music that has made records and shattered many others in due course of its run. The film caters to the liking of fans who are crazy in love with the group Blackpink and call themselves BLINKs, much like how BTS fans are called ARMY all around the world. The film has lots and lots of music as group members dance, look cute in glitzy outfits and belt out their hits including Lovesick Girls, How You Like That, Ice Cream, Forever Young, As If It’s Your Last, Whistle and many others. Blackpink’s Lisa dropped her solo debut album 'Lalisa' Directed by Su Yee Jung and Oh Yoon-Dong, ‘Blackpink: The Movie’ sees the girls get emotional with the love of their fans, their last world tour, their urge to get back on stage as concerts/public gatherings have been stopped since COVID-19 brought in hindrances. However, it does give you a feel of the concerts and what it will be like once you get back to the ‘pre-pandemic normal’, if at all! Watch: BLACKPINK vocalist Rose finally drops her solo debut album More than anything, ‘Blackpink: The Movie’ rejigs our memory of the time when going for a performance wasn’t such a novel idea and was just a matter of buying tickets. The film definitely creates an urge for us to go back in time when social and physical distancing was only a thing of the mind. Also read: Oxford English Dictionary adds 26 new words and they are all Korean

'BLACKPINK: The Movie' review: A concert film with an ode to live music & performances

Irene Redfield, the restless heart of Rebecca Hall’s piercing drama “Passing,” has a beautiful dream of a life. She also has a handsome husband who’s a doctor, a pair of well-behaved children, an elegant town house and a maid to help keep the domestic churn in check. She has good friends and meaningful charity work. Her figure is trim and graceful; her lovely face serene and unlined. Everything is as it should be, or so Irene believes. She doesn’t know that her idyll is as fragile as a soap bubble, and that this glistening, quivering fantasy she has created needs just one touch to vanish.

 
Set in the 1920s, “Passing” tells what happens to Irene (Tessa Thompson) when a childhood friend, Clare (Ruth Negga), enters that dream, disturbing its peace and threatening its careful illusions. Like Irene, Clare is a light-skinned African American living in Jim Crow America. Unlike Irene, Clare is living as white: “passing.” Orphaned after her father’s death and put into the care of white relatives who treated her like the help, Clare vanished. Years later, she has reemerged with a wealthy white husband, John (Alexander Skarsgard), who’s oblivious to her history. He also — as he tells the startled Irene as Clare watches — hates Black people, unaware that he’s speaking to one.

 
Based on Nella Larsen’s brilliant 1929 novel, “Passing” is an anguished story of identity and belonging. Like the book, the movie centers on Irene, a bourgeois wife and mother who can’t grasp why she is so addled by Clare. The two meet again by accident, each having taken refuge from the blistering summer heat in the grand tearoom of a fashionable New York hotel. Irene enters the tearoom with palpable wariness, her gait slowed, head down and face partly obscured by the semitransparent brim of her cloche hat. There are no racially restrictive signs in the hotel; the restrictions are a given. Like Clare, Irene has transgressed. But then she goes home to Harlem.

 
Irene doesn’t recognize Clare at first, a confusion that reverberates throughout a story that hinges on appearances, racial and otherwise. Irene may be on her guard in the hotel, but the very fact that she enters the tearoom speaks to her self-confidence and to how she has learned to navigate the color line. Because, like Clare, Irene is also passing; unlike Clare, she is only briefly slipping into a masquerade. Irene compartmentalizes and rationalizes her act; she needs to cool down, the tearoom is a breezy refuge, if one she intentionally seeks out rather than merely happens upon. Yet by passing, however fleetingly, she also becomes Clare’s double.

 
Hall wrote and directed the movie, her feature debut, and has followed Larsen’s lead. The novel is told through Irene’s limited point of view, although it takes time to grasp the subtleties of her blinkered perspective (understanding their implications takes longer). Irene is a sympathetic, attractive, purposely opaque character with a quick mind and tongue, a richness of character that Hall’s filmmaking and Thompson’s performance convey in exacting, illuminating detail. But there’s a stubborn rigidity to Irene’s self-assurance and how she engages her reality, and she is by turns surprised, baffled and angered that other people’s actions and desires don’t always conform to her own.

 
In sticking close to the novel, Hall has pulled scenes and lines from the book, but she also visually conveys how Irene sees and exists in her world, mapping the coordinates of a life and consciousness through the expressionistic lighting, through the many tonalities of the black-and-white visuals and through the elegant rooms that edge on dollhouse claustrophobia. It all looks so irresistible:

 
Everything and everyone is lovely. There’s an ethereal quality to this picture (Irene’s, Hall’s) and Thompson gives her character a gestural delicacy and a suppleness of movement that at times makes it seem as if Irene is drifting along on a heavenly cloud. Yet, at other times, she seems to be sleepwalking.

 
The movie tracks Irene and Clare’s relationship over several seasons of falling leaves and snow, and then regenerative growth. The women go in and out of each other’s orbit amid parties and more informal get-togethers. When Clare disappears for a while, Irene comes into greater focus, as does her brittle exasperation with her husband, Brian (André Holland), who wants to live abroad. Irene wants to stay put, although the contradictions of this resolve are evident in the charity work that she does for the (fictional) Negro Welfare League and by her insistence that Brian avoid talking about race in front of their sons. She reads about the fight for civil rights in The Crisis magazine while tucked into bed.

 
Larsen’s feelings about Irene are embedded in her narrative choices and in her chilled reserve, in the archness of her tone and in winding sentences that seem fairly benign until the final telling clause. Hall’s approach is warmer and less intellectually distancing.

 
On-screen, you like Irene right away, partly because there’s a human being (Thompson, no less) whose presence and persona instantly draw you to the character. But in little and big moments — in coyly and sharply delivered lines, in hesitant and abrupt movements — Hall and Thompson play with and subvert your sympathies, pushing you far enough away so that you can actually see, and become equally invested in, Clare too.

 
Thompson and Negga are both tremendous. Although Irene is the protagonist and the story is organized around her, the character’s complexities largely emerge in her relationship with Clare. The two reflect each other, but they’re in a hall of mirrors in which every pane presents a different image: Black, white, attentive wife, independent woman. Again and again, you watch these two characters discreetly or openly watching each other — Irene’s eyes are darting and demure, Clare’s searching and intense — creating a network of looks. And, as the story progresses, and as Irene continues on about her old friend’s attractiveness (“aren’t you lovely”), her gaze becomes persistent, troubled and erotic.

 
Hall fits an extraordinary amount into her version of this streamlined, deceptively simple story of two women whose lives intersect in ways they don’t or can’t fully grasp. Irene keeps looking at Clare, as if trying to solve a puzzle or as if she wanted something. But what does Irene desire? Clare’s beguiling beauty or her seductiveness, her wealth or her outward, presumably futile escape from the burdens of race? With restraint and bursts of plaintive emotion, Negga shows you how casually Clare receives attention — this is a woman accustomed to admiration — but she also shows you the performative quality of this blitheness, the moments when Clare drops whatever mask she’s wearing.

 
At one point early in the novel, Larsen writes of Irene: “She wished to find out about this hazardous business of ‘passing,’ this breaking away from all that was familiar and friendly to take one’s chance in another environment, not entirely strange, perhaps, but certainly not entirely friendly.” There is so much embedded in those last three words — &lt;em&gt;not entirely friendly! The mind reels, and the heart breaks, although, like Larsen, Hall maintains her cool. She bathes the movie in tenderness but remains faithful to the story’s brutal lack of sentimentality, which can make you gasp. Together with Thompson and Negga, Hall hauntingly brings to life characters forced to exist in that “not entirely friendly” space, with its cruelties, appearances, ambiguities and hard, merciless truths.

Irene Redfield, the restless heart of Rebecca Hall’s piercing drama “Passing,” has a beautiful dream of a life. She also has a handsome husband who’s a doctor, a pair of well-behaved children, an elegant town house and a maid to help keep the domestic churn in check.

Irene Redfield, the restless heart of Rebecca Hall’s piercing drama “Passing,” has a beautiful dream of a life. She also has a handsome husband who’s a doctor, a pair of well-behaved children, an elegant town house and a maid to help keep the domestic churn in check. She has good friends and meaningful charity work. Her figure is trim and graceful; her lovely face serene and unlined. Everything is as it should be, or so Irene believes. She doesn’t know that her idyll is as fragile as a soap bubble, and that this glistening, quivering fantasy she has created needs just one touch to vanish. Set in the 1920s, “Passing” tells what happens to Irene (Tessa Thompson) when a childhood friend, Clare (Ruth Negga), enters that dream, disturbing its peace and threatening its careful illusions. Like Irene, Clare is a light-skinned African American living in Jim Crow America. Unlike Irene, Clare is living as white: “passing.” Orphaned after her father’s death and put into the care of white relatives who treated her like the help, Clare vanished. Years later, she has reemerged with a wealthy white husband, John (Alexander Skarsgard), who’s oblivious to her history. He also — as he tells the startled Irene as Clare watches — hates Black people, unaware that he’s speaking to one. Based on Nella Larsen’s brilliant 1929 novel, “Passing” is an anguished story of identity and belonging. Like the book, the movie centers on Irene, a bourgeois wife and mother who can’t grasp why she is so addled by Clare. The two meet again by accident, each having taken refuge from the blistering summer heat in the grand tearoom of a fashionable New York hotel. Irene enters the tearoom with palpable wariness, her gait slowed, head down and face partly obscured by the semitransparent brim of her cloche hat. There are no racially restrictive signs in the hotel; the restrictions are a given. Like Clare, Irene has transgressed. But then she goes home to Harlem. Irene doesn’t recognize Clare at first, a confusion that reverberates throughout a story that hinges on appearances, racial and otherwise. Irene may be on her guard in the hotel, but the very fact that she enters the tearoom speaks to her self-confidence and to how she has learned to navigate the color line. Because, like Clare, Irene is also passing; unlike Clare, she is only briefly slipping into a masquerade. Irene compartmentalizes and rationalizes her act; she needs to cool down, the tearoom is a breezy refuge, if one she intentionally seeks out rather than merely happens upon. Yet by passing, however fleetingly, she also becomes Clare’s double. Hall wrote and directed the movie, her feature debut, and has followed Larsen’s lead. The novel is told through Irene’s limited point of view, although it takes time to grasp the subtleties of her blinkered perspective (understanding their implications takes longer). Irene is a sympathetic, attractive, purposely opaque character with a quick mind and tongue, a richness of character that Hall’s filmmaking and Thompson’s performance convey in exacting, illuminating detail. But there’s a stubborn rigidity to Irene’s self-assurance and how she engages her reality, and she is by turns surprised, baffled and angered that other people’s actions and desires don’t always conform to her own. In sticking close to the novel, Hall has pulled scenes and lines from the book, but she also visually conveys how Irene sees and exists in her world, mapping the coordinates of a life and consciousness through the expressionistic lighting, through the many tonalities of the black-and-white visuals and through the elegant rooms that edge on dollhouse claustrophobia. It all looks so irresistible: Everything and everyone is lovely. There’s an ethereal quality to this picture (Irene’s, Hall’s) and Thompson gives her character a gestural delicacy and a suppleness of movement that at times makes it seem as if Irene is drifting along on a heavenly cloud. Yet, at other times, she seems to be sleepwalking. The movie tracks Irene and Clare’s relationship over several seasons of falling leaves and snow, and then regenerative growth. The women go in and out of each other’s orbit amid parties and more informal get-togethers. When Clare disappears for a while, Irene comes into greater focus, as does her brittle exasperation with her husband, Brian (André Holland), who wants to live abroad. Irene wants to stay put, although the contradictions of this resolve are evident in the charity work that she does for the (fictional) Negro Welfare League and by her insistence that Brian avoid talking about race in front of their sons. She reads about the fight for civil rights in The Crisis magazine while tucked into bed. Larsen’s feelings about Irene are embedded in her narrative choices and in her chilled reserve, in the archness of her tone and in winding sentences that seem fairly benign until the final telling clause. Hall’s approach is warmer and less intellectually distancing. On-screen, you like Irene right away, partly because there’s a human being (Thompson, no less) whose presence and persona instantly draw you to the character. But in little and big moments — in coyly and sharply delivered lines, in hesitant and abrupt movements — Hall and Thompson play with and subvert your sympathies, pushing you far enough away so that you can actually see, and become equally invested in, Clare too. Thompson and Negga are both tremendous. Although Irene is the protagonist and the story is organized around her, the character’s complexities largely emerge in her relationship with Clare. The two reflect each other, but they’re in a hall of mirrors in which every pane presents a different image: Black, white, attentive wife, independent woman. Again and again, you watch these two characters discreetly or openly watching each other — Irene’s eyes are darting and demure, Clare’s searching and intense — creating a network of looks. And, as the story progresses, and as Irene continues on about her old friend’s attractiveness (“aren’t you lovely”), her gaze becomes persistent, troubled and erotic. Hall fits an extraordinary amount into her version of this streamlined, deceptively simple story of two women whose lives intersect in ways they don’t or can’t fully grasp. Irene keeps looking at Clare, as if trying to solve a puzzle or as if she wanted something. But what does Irene desire? Clare’s beguiling beauty or her seductiveness, her wealth or her outward, presumably futile escape from the burdens of race? With restraint and bursts of plaintive emotion, Negga shows you how casually Clare receives attention — this is a woman accustomed to admiration — but she also shows you the performative quality of this blitheness, the moments when Clare drops whatever mask she’s wearing. At one point early in the novel, Larsen writes of Irene: “She wished to find out about this hazardous business of ‘passing,’ this breaking away from all that was familiar and friendly to take one’s chance in another environment, not entirely strange, perhaps, but certainly not entirely friendly.” There is so much embedded in those last three words — not entirely friendly! The mind reels, and the heart breaks, although, like Larsen, Hall maintains her cool. She bathes the movie in tenderness but remains faithful to the story’s brutal lack of sentimentality, which can make you gasp. Together with Thompson and Negga, Hall hauntingly brings to life characters forced to exist in that “not entirely friendly” space, with its cruelties, appearances, ambiguities and hard, merciless truths.

‘Passing’ review: Black skin, white masks

Romanticism reigns in “Belfast,” Kenneth Branagh’s cinematic memoir of his childhood in a turbulent Northern Ireland. From the lustrous, mainly black-and-white photography to the cozy camaraderie of its working-class setting, the movie softens edges and hearts alike. The family at its center might have health issues, money worries and an outdoor toilet, but this is no Ken Loach-style deprivation: In these streets, grit and glamour stroll hand-in-hand.

 
So when Ma (Caitriona Balfe) sits in her doorway to peel potatoes for dinner, what we notice is the soft afternoon light dancing on her luminous skin and brown curls. And when Pa (Jamie Dornan), square of jaw and shoulder, strides toward home after a spell working in England, the camera shoots him like a returning hero. Which, of course, he is, at least to his younger son, Buddy (a wonderful Jude Hill), a smart, cheery 9-year-old and a fictional version of Branagh himself.

 
Viewed largely through Buddy’s eyes, “Belfast,” which opens in August 1969 (after a brief, colorful montage of the present-day city), is about the destruction of an idyll. Mere minutes into the film, a hail of Molotov cocktails ignites the friendly neighborhood where Catholics and Protestants live amicably side by side. A swirling camera conveys Buddy’s confusion and terror; yet, even as the barricades go up and the local bully-boy (Colin Morgan) tries to draw Buddy’s Protestant family into his campaign to “cleanse the community” of its Catholic residents, the movie refuses to get bogged down in militancy.

 
Instead, we watch Buddy play ball with his cousins; moon over a pretty classmate; watch “Star Trek” and Westerns on television; and spend time with his loving grandparents (Judi Dench and Ciarán Hinds). Drawing from his own experiences, Branagh crafts nostalgic, sentimental scenes suffused with some of Van Morrison’s warmest songs. Family visits to movies such as “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” (1968) add wonder and fantasy to Buddy’s life and a clue to his future career. They also offer an escape from a conflict he doesn’t understand and his director refuses to elucidate. Snippets of television news play in the background, but the growing Troubles that would tear the country apart are not the story that Branagh (whose family moved to England when he was 9) wants to tell.

 
So while “Belfast” is, in one sense, a deeply personal coming-of-age tale, it’s also a more universal story of displacement and detachment, located most powerfully in Balfe’s fierce, shining performance. Her authenticity steadies the heartbeat of a film whose cuteness can sometimes grate, and whose telescoped view offers little sense of life beyond Buddy’s block. Branagh’s remembrances may be idealized, but with “Belfast” he has written a charming, rose-tinted thank-you note to the city that sparked his dreams and the parents whose sacrifices helped them come true.

Romanticism reigns in “Belfast,” Kenneth Branagh’s cinematic memoir of his childhood in a turbulent Northern Ireland. From the lustrous, mainly black-and-white photography to the cozy camaraderie of its working-class setting, the movie softens edges and hearts alike.

Romanticism reigns in “Belfast,” Kenneth Branagh’s cinematic memoir of his childhood in a turbulent Northern Ireland. From the lustrous, mainly black-and-white photography to the cozy camaraderie of its working-class setting, the movie softens edges and hearts alike. The family at its center might have health issues, money worries and an outdoor toilet, but this is no Ken Loach-style deprivation: In these streets, grit and glamour stroll hand-in-hand. So when Ma (Caitriona Balfe) sits in her doorway to peel potatoes for dinner, what we notice is the soft afternoon light dancing on her luminous skin and brown curls. And when Pa (Jamie Dornan), square of jaw and shoulder, strides toward home after a spell working in England, the camera shoots him like a returning hero. Which, of course, he is, at least to his younger son, Buddy (a wonderful Jude Hill), a smart, cheery 9-year-old and a fictional version of Branagh himself. Viewed largely through Buddy’s eyes, “Belfast,” which opens in August 1969 (after a brief, colorful montage of the present-day city), is about the destruction of an idyll. Mere minutes into the film, a hail of Molotov cocktails ignites the friendly neighborhood where Catholics and Protestants live amicably side by side. A swirling camera conveys Buddy’s confusion and terror; yet, even as the barricades go up and the local bully-boy (Colin Morgan) tries to draw Buddy’s Protestant family into his campaign to “cleanse the community” of its Catholic residents, the movie refuses to get bogged down in militancy. Instead, we watch Buddy play ball with his cousins; moon over a pretty classmate; watch “Star Trek” and Westerns on television; and spend time with his loving grandparents (Judi Dench and Ciarán Hinds). Drawing from his own experiences, Branagh crafts nostalgic, sentimental scenes suffused with some of Van Morrison’s warmest songs. Family visits to movies such as “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” (1968) add wonder and fantasy to Buddy’s life and a clue to his future career. They also offer an escape from a conflict he doesn’t understand and his director refuses to elucidate. Snippets of television news play in the background, but the growing Troubles that would tear the country apart are not the story that Branagh (whose family moved to England when he was 9) wants to tell. So while “Belfast” is, in one sense, a deeply personal coming-of-age tale, it’s also a more universal story of displacement and detachment, located most powerfully in Balfe’s fierce, shining performance. Her authenticity steadies the heartbeat of a film whose cuteness can sometimes grate, and whose telescoped view offers little sense of life beyond Buddy’s block. Branagh’s remembrances may be idealized, but with “Belfast” he has written a charming, rose-tinted thank-you note to the city that sparked his dreams and the parents whose sacrifices helped them come true.

‘Belfast’ review: A boy’s life

In what is touted to be one of the biggest releases of 2021, cross-country heist flick 'Red Notice' has glitz, glamour and a very attractive pair of con artists wrestling for the title of being the world's greatest art thieves: Gal Gadot, and the other one being Ryan Reynolds.&nbsp;

In a recent exclusive, entry-per-invite-only press conference with the Asian media--which WION was a part of--global star Gal Gadot admitted that, yes, it is good to be bad (in a movie, that is!), explained why the thought of dancing next to Dwayne Johnson was terrifying and revealed that Johnson was actually more interested in playing her role in the movie.&nbsp;

Also read:&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/entertainment/hollywood/news-exclusive-ryan-reynolds--red-notice-wanted-dwayne-johnson-gal-gadot-and-my-friendship-to-be-seen-on-screen-427681" hreflang="en">Exclusive: Ryan Reynolds- 'Red Notice' wanted Dwayne Johnson, Gal Gadot and my friendship to be seen on screen</a>

"Dwayne!" Gal Gadot exclaimed to WION's question about her main motivation behind taking up 'Red Notice'. "No, but to be honest. Rawson Marshall Thurber, our wonderful director and writer. When he first pitched me the idea for the movie, I was blown away by the ambitiousness and how surprising the story is. And I was also very intrigued to be able to play a character who's a bit different than what I usually used to do," she further told WION, exclusively.&nbsp;

<img alt=" cfmhndcv" data-entity-type="file" data-entity-uuid="78749c2f-4e6f-4717-bacf-85dbab028fbc" src="//cdn.wionews.com/sites/default/files/inline-images/pjimage%20-%202021-11-08T205100.330.jpg" />

 
This big-budget movie marks Gal Gadot's first collaboration with director Rawson Marshall Thurber. So when an Indian media house--whose question had overlapped with other international media outlets--asked about her first-time working experience with Thurber, she replied, "Amazing. He is such a sweetheart."&nbsp;

 
"I'll tell you the truth. I was a bit nervous at the beginning just because, you know DJ is a giant man and I have feet down there, so I wasn't sure what was going to happen. And I kept telling DJ, we're going to practice, we're going to rehearse. And he was super cool, kept on calming me down and saying, don't worry, this is going to be great. And of course, that just made me more nervous. But then he showed up, and this guy is a freaking ballerina. I don't know how it works with like physics rules and all that, but he had, he's so talented and such a good dancer. And it was so much fun to shoot the scene with you," added the 'Wonder Woman' star while elaborating on the difficult aspect of her creative collaboration on 'Red Notice'.&nbsp;

Also read:&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/entertainment/hollywood/news-%E2%80%98red-notice%E2%80%99-review-all-for-the-star-power-of-dwayne-johnson-gal-gadot--ryan-reynolds-426682">‘Red Notice’ review: All for the star power of Dwayne Johnson, Gal Gadot &amp; Ryan Reynolds</a>

Another Indian media outlet asked Gadot about that one piece of item she would steal from her co-stars--both Dwayne Johnson and Ryan Reynolds--if she could? The actress laughed, and said, "If I could steal one thing from D.J.. Yeah, it would be. Is there??Such a.. I'm so slow today. It's just like I would steal your. I would steal his... I don't know. I wouldn't want... OK, so I'll go cheesy as well, yeah. If I could steal anything from Dwayne The Rock Johnson, a.k.a. DJ, I would steal his smile."

<img alt="cffgngfvxzxdsbsd" data-entity-type="file" data-entity-uuid="bdd44cb1-8b6e-4066-b8ee-d45d2a906d39" src="//cdn.wionews.com/sites/default/files/inline-images/pjimage%20-%202021-11-08T205019.327.jpg" /> 
The banter went on throughout the 25-minute long press con where&nbsp;Gal Gadot also talked about the rise of 'Squid Game', among other Korean entertainment entities, that has gained global prominence and said that she is happy to see such interesting work coming out of Korea.&nbsp;

<img alt="cmhgsadftkyugs" data-entity-type="file" data-entity-uuid="8f29a105-0790-4f3e-acbd-fc915a082d87" src="//cdn.wionews.com/sites/default/files/inline-images/pjimage%20-%202021-11-08T204939.988.jpg" />

'Red Notice' streams on Netflix from November 12.&nbsp;

In what is touted to be one of the biggest releases of 2021, cross-country heist flick 'Red Notice' has glitz, glamour and a very attractive pair of con artists wrestling for the title of being the world's greatest art thieves: Gal Gadot, and the other one being Ryan Reynolds.

In what is touted to be one of the biggest releases of 2021, cross-country heist flick 'Red Notice' has glitz, glamour and a very attractive pair of con artists wrestling for the title of being the world's greatest art thieves: Gal Gadot, and the other one being Ryan Reynolds. In a recent exclusive, entry-per-invite-only press conference with the Asian media--which WION was a part of--global star Gal Gadot admitted that, yes, it is good to be bad (in a movie, that is!), explained why the thought of dancing next to Dwayne Johnson was terrifying and revealed that Johnson was actually more interested in playing her role in the movie. Also read: Exclusive: Ryan Reynolds- 'Red Notice' wanted Dwayne Johnson, Gal Gadot and my friendship to be seen on screen "Dwayne!" Gal Gadot exclaimed to WION's question about her main motivation behind taking up 'Red Notice'. "No, but to be honest. Rawson Marshall Thurber, our wonderful director and writer. When he first pitched me the idea for the movie, I was blown away by the ambitiousness and how surprising the story is. And I was also very intrigued to be able to play a character who's a bit different than what I usually used to do," she further told WION, exclusively. This big-budget movie marks Gal Gadot's first collaboration with director Rawson Marshall Thurber. So when an Indian media house--whose question had overlapped with other international media outlets--asked about her first-time working experience with Thurber, she replied, "Amazing. He is such a sweetheart." "I'll tell you the truth. I was a bit nervous at the beginning just because, you know DJ is a giant man and I have feet down there, so I wasn't sure what was going to happen. And I kept telling DJ, we're going to practice, we're going to rehearse. And he was super cool, kept on calming me down and saying, don't worry, this is going to be great. And of course, that just made me more nervous. But then he showed up, and this guy is a freaking ballerina. I don't know how it works with like physics rules and all that, but he had, he's so talented and such a good dancer. And it was so much fun to shoot the scene with you," added the 'Wonder Woman' star while elaborating on the difficult aspect of her creative collaboration on 'Red Notice'. Also read: ‘Red Notice’ review: All for the star power of Dwayne Johnson, Gal Gadot & Ryan Reynolds Another Indian media outlet asked Gadot about that one piece of item she would steal from her co-stars--both Dwayne Johnson and Ryan Reynolds--if she could? The actress laughed, and said, "If I could steal one thing from D.J.. Yeah, it would be. Is there??Such a.. I'm so slow today. It's just like I would steal your. I would steal his... I don't know. I wouldn't want... OK, so I'll go cheesy as well, yeah. If I could steal anything from Dwayne The Rock Johnson, a.k.a. DJ, I would steal his smile." The banter went on throughout the 25-minute long press con where Gal Gadot also talked about the rise of 'Squid Game', among other Korean entertainment entities, that has gained global prominence and said that she is happy to see such interesting work coming out of Korea. 'Red Notice' streams on Netflix from November 12.

Exclusive: Gal Gadot- I said yes to 'Red Notice' for its ambitious script, and Dwayne Johnson!

Lebanese-born actor Haaz Sleiman, who plays Ben in Chloe Zhao's latest Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) offering 'Eternals', reportedly said during a recent interview that he was close to tears when he learnt that the film has been banned in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar for its LGBTQ+ content.

Sleiman's character Ben is the husband of Marvel's first gay superhero Phastos (Brian Tyree Henry) in 'Eternals'.&nbsp;

Also read:&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/entertainment/hollywood/news-viola-davis-warrior-epic-to-be-released-in-september-of-2022-427464" hreflang="en">Viola Davis' warrior epic to be released in September of 2022</a>

While speaking to a leading entertainment portal, the gay actor reportedly said, "They (Disney) stood their ground and said, 'Nope, we are not going to compromise the integrity of our film'. It made these Arab countries look so ignorant and pathetic."

According to reports, international movies with LGBTQIA content are often trimmed and altered to maintain peace with international censor boards around the world but Disney refused to do the same with 'Eternals'.&nbsp;

Also read:&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/entertainment/angelina-jolie-calls-eternals-ban-in-gulf-countries-over-same-sex-scenes-ignorant-427404">Angelina Jolie calls 'Eternals’ ban in Gulf countries over gay couple ignorant</a>

"I have no respect for those governments. They have displayed to the world that they are not only a disgrace to humanity, but to God. Hopefully this will inspire the Saudi people, the Kuwaiti people and the people in Qatar to fight back," Sleiman said.&nbsp;

Haaz Sleiman, who was raised a Muslim in Lebanon before moving to America at the age of 21, came out as gay in 2017 after rising to prominence for playing Tarek--an undocumented Syrian immigrant--in 2007's 'The Visitor'.

Also read:&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/entertainment/lifestyle/news-billy-porter-apologises-to-harry-styles-over-magazine-cover-slam-its-not-about-you-427382" hreflang="en">Billy Porter apologises to Harry Styles over magazine cover slam: It's not about you</a>

Lebanese-born actor Haaz Sleiman, who plays Ben in Chloe Zhao's latest Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) offering 'Eternals', reportedly said during a recent interview that he was close to tears when he learnt that the film has been banned in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar for its LGBTQ+ content.

Lebanese-born actor Haaz Sleiman, who plays Ben in Chloe Zhao's latest Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) offering 'Eternals', reportedly said during a recent interview that he was close to tears when he learnt that the film has been banned in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar for its LGBTQ+ content. Sleiman's character Ben is the husband of Marvel's first gay superhero Phastos (Brian Tyree Henry) in 'Eternals'. Also read: Viola Davis' warrior epic to be released in September of 2022 While speaking to a leading entertainment portal, the gay actor reportedly said, "They (Disney) stood their ground and said, 'Nope, we are not going to compromise the integrity of our film'. It made these Arab countries look so ignorant and pathetic." According to reports, international movies with LGBTQIA content are often trimmed and altered to maintain peace with international censor boards around the world but Disney refused to do the same with 'Eternals'. Also read: Angelina Jolie calls 'Eternals’ ban in Gulf countries over gay couple ignorant "I have no respect for those governments. They have displayed to the world that they are not only a disgrace to humanity, but to God. Hopefully this will inspire the Saudi people, the Kuwaiti people and the people in Qatar to fight back," Sleiman said. Haaz Sleiman, who was raised a Muslim in Lebanon before moving to America at the age of 21, came out as gay in 2017 after rising to prominence for playing Tarek--an undocumented Syrian immigrant--in 2007's 'The Visitor'. Also read: Billy Porter apologises to Harry Styles over magazine cover slam: It's not about you

'Eternals' Lebanese actor Haaz Sleiman slams Arab nations: No respect for those governments

“Spencer” is a Christmas movie, in which a big, dysfunctional family gathers at the holiday to feast, exchange gifts and engage in peculiar traditions meant to provide “a bit of fun.”

 
“Spencer” is a horror movie about a fragile woman held captive in a spooky mansion, tormented by sadistic monsters and their treacherous minions.

 
“Spencer” is a psychological thriller about a powerful, unaccountable authoritarian cabal conspiring to crush the spirit of an independent-minded rebel.

 
“Spencer” is a love story, a melodrama of maternal devotion, an early-’90s fashion parade and a very British baking show. (The scones and pastries are organic.)

 
“Spencer,” described by its director, Pablo Larraín, as “a fable from a true tragedy,” is all of the above and also a fact-inspired drama about Diana, Princess of Wales, played with grit and grace by Kristen Stewart. Diana, who died in a car crash in 1997 — and whose maiden name gives Larraín’s film its title — is hardly an obscure figure. A global celebrity and tabloid fixture in her lifetime, she remains somehow irresistible.

 
Her troubled marriage to Prince Charles and her vexed relations with her royal in-laws have been subject to scrutiny from every angle, most recently in “The Crown,” where she was played in the last season by Emma Corrin. (In the next one, Elizabeth Debicki will take up the role.) A superficial reading of “Spencer,” which takes place over three days (from Christmas Eve to Boxing Day) in 1991, might see it as a sidebar to “The Crown,” lingering over a minor episode in a vast epic and isolating a single, relatively minor character amid the pomp and pageantry of palace life.

 
That is exactly wrong. Larraín and the screenwriter, Steven Knight, offer not a footnote but an ardent and unsparing rebuke to the mythical monarchist mumbo-jumbo that the Netflix series (to which I am entirely addicted) exists to promote. The conceit of “The Crown” is that, for all their flaws, defeats and compromises — or because of all that — the members of the House of Windsor are fundamentally more interesting than anybody else. Their dilemmas are more exquisite, their choices more tragic, than anything the commoners can know.

 
This is a persistent conceit in the literature of power — one that Larraín, wielding his camera like a rapier and Jonny Greenwood’s lacerating score like a stiletto, leaves in tatters. The only members of the royal family whose voices are heard in “Spencer” are Charles (Jack Farthing) and his mother (Stella Gonet). Queen Elizabeth II is as bland and cold as a dish of old porridge. Her eldest son, at least with Diana, is callous and cruel, mocking her eating disorder and lecturing her on the necessity of keeping up appearances.

 
“There have to be two of you,” he says — one for “the people” and one in private. (Like much of Knight’s script, these lines explain things a little too bluntly.) But one of the reasons Diana was called “the people’s princess” was that she seemed always and authentically herself, an idea that Larraín, Knight and Stewart implicitly endorse. She’s devoted to “what’s real” and describes her tastes and interests, in a flawless aristocratic accent, as “middle class.” Fast food. Musical theater. Driving her European sports car instead of being chauffeured in a Rolls-Royce.

 
She wants to be herself, and she wants to be free. Larraín, who is Chilean, has made a handful of tough, unsettling films about life in his country under a military dictatorship determined to control the thought and behavior of its subjects. While “Spencer” hardly equates Elizabeth with former Chilean President Augusto Pinochet, the power that the crown exerts over Diana can accurately be described as totalitarian.

 
Preparations for Christmas at Sandringham House — a moated mansion near the Norfolk coast — have the character of a military operation. Groceries are delivered by armed soldiers, and the chief of the kitchen “brigade” (Sean Harris) is like a field commander. (He’s also one of the few people in the castle who treats Diana with kindness.) Everything is scheduled down to the minute: sandwiches, meals, hunting parties. Diana is instructed on which outfit she must wear for each activity.

 
The dresses are tagged “POW”; it stands for “Princess of Wales,” of course. Still, Diana, in the midst of marital combat with Charles (who is having an affair with a briefly glimpsed, never named Camilla Parker-Bowles), is very much a prisoner. She glides through empty corridors and chambers under constant surveillance. Her every notion, whim and word is observed and reported. She is entirely alone, with no real privacy or solitude. Her only comfort is the company of her sons, William (Jack Nielen) and Harry (Freddie Spry).

 
“Spencer” is, finally, a study in the psychological effects of captivity. Diana, fragile when she arrives at Sandringham — and the subject of much “concern” from the Windsors — spirals toward a breakdown over the next 72 hours. She hallucinates the ghost of Anne Boleyn, pierces the skin on her arm with a wire cutter and acts out in ways that alarm her children and disgust the prince.

 
Watching over her with sympathy — although not necessarily on her side — are two members of the royal staff. Major Gregory (Timothy Spall) tries to reason her into compliance, at one point telling a hair-raising story about his military service that is apparently meant to emphasize the importance of duty. Diana’s favorite dresser, Maggie (Sally Hawkins), is a more steadfast ally, a sympathetic ear and then something more.

 
“Spencer” is a companion piece to “Jackie,” Larraín’s 2016 film about Jacqueline Kennedy in the aftermath of her husband’s assassination. Both movies examine the isolation and paranoia of a woman at the mercy of political forces and family interests beyond her control, and turn on the heroine’s attempt at resistance. “Spencer” seems to me the more coherent film, partly because the directness of Stewart’s performance stands out so poignantly against the moral vacuity and aesthetic constipation of her surroundings.

 
Stewart leverages her own star power to turn Diana into someone familiar. The intimacy and care the character craves is something the audience feels compelled to supply. Our sympathy is more than pity, and “Spencer” is more than the portrait of a woman in distress. If it’s a fable, it’s a political fable, an allegory of powerlessness, revolt and liberation.

“Spencer” is a Christmas movie, in which a big, dysfunctional family gathers at the holiday to feast, exchange gifts and engage in peculiar traditions meant to provide “a bit of fun.

“Spencer” is a Christmas movie, in which a big, dysfunctional family gathers at the holiday to feast, exchange gifts and engage in peculiar traditions meant to provide “a bit of fun.” “Spencer” is a horror movie about a fragile woman held captive in a spooky mansion, tormented by sadistic monsters and their treacherous minions. “Spencer” is a psychological thriller about a powerful, unaccountable authoritarian cabal conspiring to crush the spirit of an independent-minded rebel. “Spencer” is a love story, a melodrama of maternal devotion, an early-’90s fashion parade and a very British baking show. (The scones and pastries are organic.) “Spencer,” described by its director, Pablo Larraín, as “a fable from a true tragedy,” is all of the above and also a fact-inspired drama about Diana, Princess of Wales, played with grit and grace by Kristen Stewart. Diana, who died in a car crash in 1997 — and whose maiden name gives Larraín’s film its title — is hardly an obscure figure. A global celebrity and tabloid fixture in her lifetime, she remains somehow irresistible. Her troubled marriage to Prince Charles and her vexed relations with her royal in-laws have been subject to scrutiny from every angle, most recently in “The Crown,” where she was played in the last season by Emma Corrin. (In the next one, Elizabeth Debicki will take up the role.) A superficial reading of “Spencer,” which takes place over three days (from Christmas Eve to Boxing Day) in 1991, might see it as a sidebar to “The Crown,” lingering over a minor episode in a vast epic and isolating a single, relatively minor character amid the pomp and pageantry of palace life. That is exactly wrong. Larraín and the screenwriter, Steven Knight, offer not a footnote but an ardent and unsparing rebuke to the mythical monarchist mumbo-jumbo that the Netflix series (to which I am entirely addicted) exists to promote. The conceit of “The Crown” is that, for all their flaws, defeats and compromises — or because of all that — the members of the House of Windsor are fundamentally more interesting than anybody else. Their dilemmas are more exquisite, their choices more tragic, than anything the commoners can know. This is a persistent conceit in the literature of power — one that Larraín, wielding his camera like a rapier and Jonny Greenwood’s lacerating score like a stiletto, leaves in tatters. The only members of the royal family whose voices are heard in “Spencer” are Charles (Jack Farthing) and his mother (Stella Gonet). Queen Elizabeth II is as bland and cold as a dish of old porridge. Her eldest son, at least with Diana, is callous and cruel, mocking her eating disorder and lecturing her on the necessity of keeping up appearances. “There have to be two of you,” he says — one for “the people” and one in private. (Like much of Knight’s script, these lines explain things a little too bluntly.) But one of the reasons Diana was called “the people’s princess” was that she seemed always and authentically herself, an idea that Larraín, Knight and Stewart implicitly endorse. She’s devoted to “what’s real” and describes her tastes and interests, in a flawless aristocratic accent, as “middle class.” Fast food. Musical theater. Driving her European sports car instead of being chauffeured in a Rolls-Royce. She wants to be herself, and she wants to be free. Larraín, who is Chilean, has made a handful of tough, unsettling films about life in his country under a military dictatorship determined to control the thought and behavior of its subjects. While “Spencer” hardly equates Elizabeth with former Chilean President Augusto Pinochet, the power that the crown exerts over Diana can accurately be described as totalitarian. Preparations for Christmas at Sandringham House — a moated mansion near the Norfolk coast — have the character of a military operation. Groceries are delivered by armed soldiers, and the chief of the kitchen “brigade” (Sean Harris) is like a field commander. (He’s also one of the few people in the castle who treats Diana with kindness.) Everything is scheduled down to the minute: sandwiches, meals, hunting parties. Diana is instructed on which outfit she must wear for each activity. The dresses are tagged “POW”; it stands for “Princess of Wales,” of course. Still, Diana, in the midst of marital combat with Charles (who is having an affair with a briefly glimpsed, never named Camilla Parker-Bowles), is very much a prisoner. She glides through empty corridors and chambers under constant surveillance. Her every notion, whim and word is observed and reported. She is entirely alone, with no real privacy or solitude. Her only comfort is the company of her sons, William (Jack Nielen) and Harry (Freddie Spry). “Spencer” is, finally, a study in the psychological effects of captivity. Diana, fragile when she arrives at Sandringham — and the subject of much “concern” from the Windsors — spirals toward a breakdown over the next 72 hours. She hallucinates the ghost of Anne Boleyn, pierces the skin on her arm with a wire cutter and acts out in ways that alarm her children and disgust the prince. Watching over her with sympathy — although not necessarily on her side — are two members of the royal staff. Major Gregory (Timothy Spall) tries to reason her into compliance, at one point telling a hair-raising story about his military service that is apparently meant to emphasize the importance of duty. Diana’s favorite dresser, Maggie (Sally Hawkins), is a more steadfast ally, a sympathetic ear and then something more. “Spencer” is a companion piece to “Jackie,” Larraín’s 2016 film about Jacqueline Kennedy in the aftermath of her husband’s assassination. Both movies examine the isolation and paranoia of a woman at the mercy of political forces and family interests beyond her control, and turn on the heroine’s attempt at resistance. “Spencer” seems to me the more coherent film, partly because the directness of Stewart’s performance stands out so poignantly against the moral vacuity and aesthetic constipation of her surroundings. Stewart leverages her own star power to turn Diana into someone familiar. The intimacy and care the character craves is something the audience feels compelled to supply. Our sympathy is more than pity, and “Spencer” is more than the portrait of a woman in distress. If it’s a fable, it’s a political fable, an allegory of powerlessness, revolt and liberation.

‘Spencer’ review: Prisoner of the House of Windsor

Plush locales, high-octane action sequences, elaborate car chases and of course, if-looks-could-kill level of gorgeous people. What’s not to love, right? Wrong! ‘Red Notice’ is one of those—and we say this with a heavy heart—big-budget, star-studded affairs that streaming service Netflix was perhaps counting on to bring in the big moolah. Well, big moolah it shall, critical appreciation it shall not.&nbsp;

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Spread across multiple touristy places, countries and continents (in no specific order)—London, Bali, Egypt, Russia, to name just a few—a flamboyant The Bishop (Gal Gadot) frames the now disgraced FBI profiler John Hartley (Dwayne Johnson) as he finds himself on the wrong side of the law. A charming, former world’s-greatest-thief Nolan Booth, however, is hell-bent on helping him clear his name. On the surface, it’s a classic arrangement of ‘convenience’—a recurring theme in the movie—but has any heist ever been simple? There’s the tussle over the title of world’s greatest thief, there’s Cleopatra’s eggs in the narrative, and then there are snitches and goons to combat.&nbsp;

‘Red Notice’ is your quintessential fast-paced, excitement-evoking heist, but, sadly, without an innovative trail to follow or even the path that leads its audience to an oh-so-very predictable climax.&nbsp;

Also read:&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/entertainment/hollywood/news-will-smith-makes-shocking-revelation-in-memoir-wanted-to-kill-his-father-426595">Will Smith makes shocking revelation in memoir, wanted to kill his father</a>

Clearly, director Rawson Marshall Thurber was banking on the collective star power of Johnson, Gadot and Reynolds to ride this one out and emerge victorious. Truth be told, that formula sticks in certain sections of the movie, especially with Reynolds’ humour—after all, it is because of one-liners like “adult virgins have been obsessing over Cleopatra’s eggs” that we love the actor so much. Don’t we? As for Gadot, with that slender frame, never-ending legs and flamboyance that could move even the hardest of them all; she appears to be the poster child of the sex-meets-thrill phenomena. Dwayne Johnson does Dwayne Johnson things in ‘Red Notice’—flexes his sculpted muscles, performs impossibly difficult action scenes, mouths high-sounding dialogues in his deep-set voice and charms his spectators over.

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‘Red Notice’ is off to a stupendous start, with plenty of subplots rendered to keep the narrative flowing and its audience, engaged. However, somewhere between expensive parties and beach-side shenanigans, the film loses its initial sheen. The climax—oh, the climax!—could be predicted from a mile away, and, even then, it is depressing for lack of originality.&nbsp;

Also read:&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/entertainment/hollywood/news-gal-gadot-to-play-evil-queen-in-disneys-live-action-snow-white-426588" hreflang="en">Gal Gadot to play evil queen in Disney's live-action 'Snow White'</a>

At best, ‘Red Notice’ is a visual homage to the Hollywood stars that adorn its premise. It neither has the swiftness of ‘Baby Driver’ or the crisp, to-the-point direction of Netflix’s own monster hit, ‘Money Heist’.&nbsp;

Watch the trailer here:

&nbsp;

<iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Pj0wz7zu3Ms" title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe>

Plush locales, high-octane action sequences, elaborate car chases and of course, if-looks-could-kill level of gorgeous people. What’s not to love, right? Wrong! ‘Red Notice’ is one of those—and we say this with a heavy heart—big-budget, star-studded affairs that streaming service Netflix was perhaps counting on to bring in the big moolah.

Plush locales, high-octane action sequences, elaborate car chases and of course, if-looks-could-kill level of gorgeous people. What’s not to love, right? Wrong! ‘Red Notice’ is one of those—and we say this with a heavy heart—big-budget, star-studded affairs that streaming service Netflix was perhaps counting on to bring in the big moolah. Well, big moolah it shall, critical appreciation it shall not. View this post on Instagram A post shared by therock (@therock) × Spread across multiple touristy places, countries and continents (in no specific order)—London, Bali, Egypt, Russia, to name just a few—a flamboyant The Bishop (Gal Gadot) frames the now disgraced FBI profiler John Hartley (Dwayne Johnson) as he finds himself on the wrong side of the law. A charming, former world’s-greatest-thief Nolan Booth, however, is hell-bent on helping him clear his name. On the surface, it’s a classic arrangement of ‘convenience’—a recurring theme in the movie—but has any heist ever been simple? There’s the tussle over the title of world’s greatest thief, there’s Cleopatra’s eggs in the narrative, and then there are snitches and goons to combat. ‘Red Notice’ is your quintessential fast-paced, excitement-evoking heist, but, sadly, without an innovative trail to follow or even the path that leads its audience to an oh-so-very predictable climax. Also read: Will Smith makes shocking revelation in memoir, wanted to kill his father Clearly, director Rawson Marshall Thurber was banking on the collective star power of Johnson, Gadot and Reynolds to ride this one out and emerge victorious. Truth be told, that formula sticks in certain sections of the movie, especially with Reynolds’ humour—after all, it is because of one-liners like “adult virgins have been obsessing over Cleopatra’s eggs” that we love the actor so much. Don’t we? As for Gadot, with that slender frame, never-ending legs and flamboyance that could move even the hardest of them all; she appears to be the poster child of the sex-meets-thrill phenomena. Dwayne Johnson does Dwayne Johnson things in ‘Red Notice’—flexes his sculpted muscles, performs impossibly difficult action scenes, mouths high-sounding dialogues in his deep-set voice and charms his spectators over. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Gal Gadot (@gal_gadot) × ‘Red Notice’ is off to a stupendous start, with plenty of subplots rendered to keep the narrative flowing and its audience, engaged. However, somewhere between expensive parties and beach-side shenanigans, the film loses its initial sheen. The climax—oh, the climax!—could be predicted from a mile away, and, even then, it is depressing for lack of originality. Also read: Gal Gadot to play evil queen in Disney's live-action 'Snow White' At best, ‘Red Notice’ is a visual homage to the Hollywood stars that adorn its premise. It neither has the swiftness of ‘Baby Driver’ or the crisp, to-the-point direction of Netflix’s own monster hit, ‘Money Heist’. Watch the trailer here:

‘Red Notice’ review: All for the star power of Dwayne Johnson, Gal Gadot & Ryan Reynolds

Those of you who follow Bhuvan Bam’s sketches on YouTube—turns out, a lot of you do—would know this man has an innate talent for cooking up dangerously awkward situations with extremely hilarious characters. All played by the man himself. In ‘Dhindora’, he takes it notches higher and his alter egos from ‘BB Ki Vines’ (the YouTube channel that made him the digital star he is today) get to live and breathe in the real world... or not!

‘Dhindora’ stays true to Bam’s signature style—subtle satirical motifs—with a certain middle-class Papa ji at the heart of a humungous conflict: he has won a lottery but doesn’t seem to remember the details. It doesn’t help tad bit that Mummy ji is a loudmouth looking for charity projects to nurture.&nbsp;

No skit of Bhuvan Bam’s is complete without his expletive-mouthing band of brothers. Here, we have a nymphomaniac and a catch-phrase stealer to keep those outrageous one-liners coming: If those two do not crack you up, we don’t know who&nbsp;would.

Also read:&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/entertainment/bollywood/news-wion-exclusive-kubbra-sait-we-are-rushing-representation-it-needs-to-have-a-narrative-425263">WION exclusive: Kubbra Sait: We are in a rush for representation</a>

Sitting here, writing this review, reminds us of what Bam had said during <a href="https://www.wionews.com/entertainment/lifestyle/news-wion-exclusive-bhuvan-bam-%E2%80%98dhindora%E2%80%99-could-have-been-on-any-ott-platform-but-thats-unfair-to-my-viewers-424368">his recent interview with us</a>— “…what this series really stands for is the importance of family, the importance of relationships.” In spirit, when one moves beyond the stereotypical Delhi aesthetics and young-lad profanities this eight-part series otherwise rides on, one would see what lessons Bam is actually trying to impart—life is too short to take a beloved for granted. In all fairness, life indeed is man’s greatest teacher and Bam knows that all too well.

 
Clocking close to half an hour per episode, ‘Dhindora’ follows the traditional technique of storytelling—nothing wrong with that, of course—of leaving the viewers with a mystery to come back for in its weekly-episodic-release format. So far, it has worked tremendously well.&nbsp;

<img alt="vgfmhbCDVBNHMJJM" data-entity-type="file" data-entity-uuid="56bca9dd-9a99-4d5c-a8c6-9e1f08d6c135" src="//cdn.wionews.com/sites/default/files/inline-images/1%20dhindora_0.jpg" /> 
To sum it up, ‘Dhindora’ is heartbreakingly funny, surprisingly deep—the creator is all of 27, conceptualised when he was around 25; go figure—and a wonderfully crafted satire. It is the visual version of what Kabir once said, “Kya leke aayo jagme, kya leke jayega.”

Check out the trailer here:

<iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/IUsiTOUo3HE" title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe>

'Dhindora' is now streaming on YouTube. Please note: this review is based on the first four episodes and is subject to change.&nbsp;

Those of you who follow Bhuvan Bam’s sketches on YouTube—turns out, a lot of you do—would know this man has an innate talent for cooking up dangerously awkward situations with extremely hilarious characters.

Those of you who follow Bhuvan Bam’s sketches on YouTube—turns out, a lot of you do—would know this man has an innate talent for cooking up dangerously awkward situations with extremely hilarious characters. All played by the man himself. In ‘Dhindora’, he takes it notches higher and his alter egos from ‘BB Ki Vines’ (the YouTube channel that made him the digital star he is today) get to live and breathe in the real world... or not! ‘Dhindora’ stays true to Bam’s signature style—subtle satirical motifs—with a certain middle-class Papa ji at the heart of a humungous conflict: he has won a lottery but doesn’t seem to remember the details. It doesn’t help tad bit that Mummy ji is a loudmouth looking for charity projects to nurture. No skit of Bhuvan Bam’s is complete without his expletive-mouthing band of brothers. Here, we have a nymphomaniac and a catch-phrase stealer to keep those outrageous one-liners coming: If those two do not crack you up, we don’t know who would. Also read: WION exclusive: Kubbra Sait: We are in a rush for representation Sitting here, writing this review, reminds us of what Bam had said during his recent interview with us— “…what this series really stands for is the importance of family, the importance of relationships.” In spirit, when one moves beyond the stereotypical Delhi aesthetics and young-lad profanities this eight-part series otherwise rides on, one would see what lessons Bam is actually trying to impart—life is too short to take a beloved for granted. In all fairness, life indeed is man’s greatest teacher and Bam knows that all too well. Clocking close to half an hour per episode, ‘Dhindora’ follows the traditional technique of storytelling—nothing wrong with that, of course—of leaving the viewers with a mystery to come back for in its weekly-episodic-release format. So far, it has worked tremendously well. To sum it up, ‘Dhindora’ is heartbreakingly funny, surprisingly deep—the creator is all of 27, conceptualised when he was around 25; go figure—and a wonderfully crafted satire. It is the visual version of what Kabir once said, “Kya leke aayo jagme, kya leke jayega.” Check out the trailer here: 'Dhindora' is now streaming on YouTube. Please note: this review is based on the first four episodes and is subject to change.

Dhindora review: One Bhuvan Bam, 10 versions of him... all hilarious!

They call Mumbai sapno ki nagri for nothing, and the central characters of this superficial yet hilarious show would tell you that—Amal (Aahana Kumra), Treasa (Soni Razdan), Monty (Rajat Kapoor) and Mehershad (Ayush Mehra). The story, much like its award-winning French version by the same name, deals with the madness that ensues in the daily lives of those holding the&nbsp;tote bags behind the camera: celebrity agents.

<img alt="Call My Agent: Bollywood is the Hindi adaptation of a French show by the same name" data-entity-type="file" data-entity-uuid="6c680642-84e3-4acc-9d2b-7d9cb86daf77" src="//cdn.wionews.com/sites/default/files/inline-images/pjimage%20-%202021-10-29T210140.327.jpg" /> 
‘Call My Agent: Bollywood’, directed by Shaad Ali of ‘Saathiya’ and ‘Bunty Aur Babli’ fame, an eight-part series, cherry picks one borderline tantrum at a time—of course, circling a celebrity—on the surface, what it does on a subliminal level is, however,&nbsp;peel off various layers shielding the mysterious establishment that is Bollywood.&nbsp;

Also read:&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/entertainment/lifestyle/news-wion-exclusive-ub40-we-are-old-frts-now-our-kids-carry-the-flag-for-revolutionary-change-424650">WION exclusive: UB40: We are old f*rts now, our kids carry the flag for revolutionary change</a>

In Ali’s adaptation, there’s love, sex, sexuality and the insecurity of falling from the top that consumes showbiz, or so we are told. Interestingly, the subject&nbsp;of insecurity, served on the sharp platter of humour, humanizes this universal emotion instead of demonising those who experience it—almost saying, “Hey, it’s okay to be insecure. I feel you.” Despite its quick-witted content and too-cool-for-school vibe—believe it or not—‘Call My Agent: Bollywood’ has deeper life lessons to impart: in modern-day life, more so in Bollywood, who’s your own, and for what?

<img alt="The show is a no-brainer, just what it was supposed to be" data-entity-type="file" data-entity-uuid="b300665d-28b4-4d10-8cd4-f4f6cbdd4682" src="//cdn.wionews.com/sites/default/files/inline-images/pjimage%20-%202021-10-29T210354.623.jpg" /> 
Aahana Kumra and Soni Razdan stand on two extreme ends of the fabric that constitutes the backbone of Bollywood—the former, fun and feisty, the latter, sweet and a smooth-talker. Rajat Kapoor is a no-bulls*it&nbsp;agent hobnobbing with the&nbsp;crème de&nbsp;la crème. Ayush Mehra, understandably, is placed somewhere&nbsp;in the middle. These four actors from diverse backgrounds felt like a conscious choice, perhaps to add a dash of individuality and ‘character’ to their otherwise ostensible lives (referring to the show, only).

Also read:&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/entertainment/bollywood/news-dybbuk-review-emraan-hashmi%E2%80%99s-charm-doesn%E2%80%99t-suffice-this-insipid-horror-flick-424992">'Dybbuk' review: Emraan Hashmi’s charm doesn’t suffice this insipid horror flick</a>

‘Call My Agent: Bollywood’ is a whole country away from its French counterpart, both in terms of storytelling and character arcs. But, in essence, the show goes on to reiterate&nbsp;what we have known all along—all that glitters is, indeed, not gold. Touché!

'Call My Agent: Bollywood' is now streaming on Netflix.&nbsp;

Watch the trailer here:&nbsp;

<iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/HJGtb9QYVRU" title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe>

They call Mumbai sapno ki nagri for nothing, and the central characters of this superficial yet hilarious show would tell you that—Amal (Aahana Kumra), Treasa (Soni Razdan), Monty (Rajat Kapoor) and Mehershad (Ayush Mehra).

They call Mumbai sapno ki nagri for nothing, and the central characters of this superficial yet hilarious show would tell you that—Amal (Aahana Kumra), Treasa (Soni Razdan), Monty (Rajat Kapoor) and Mehershad (Ayush Mehra). The story, much like its award-winning French version by the same name, deals with the madness that ensues in the daily lives of those holding the tote bags behind the camera: celebrity agents. ‘Call My Agent: Bollywood’, directed by Shaad Ali of ‘Saathiya’ and ‘Bunty Aur Babli’ fame, an eight-part series, cherry picks one borderline tantrum at a time—of course, circling a celebrity—on the surface, what it does on a subliminal level is, however, peel off various layers shielding the mysterious establishment that is Bollywood. Also read: WION exclusive: UB40: We are old f*rts now, our kids carry the flag for revolutionary change In Ali’s adaptation, there’s love, sex, sexuality and the insecurity of falling from the top that consumes showbiz, or so we are told. Interestingly, the subject of insecurity, served on the sharp platter of humour, humanizes this universal emotion instead of demonising those who experience it—almost saying, “Hey, it’s okay to be insecure. I feel you.” Despite its quick-witted content and too-cool-for-school vibe—believe it or not—‘Call My Agent: Bollywood’ has deeper life lessons to impart: in modern-day life, more so in Bollywood, who’s your own, and for what? Aahana Kumra and Soni Razdan stand on two extreme ends of the fabric that constitutes the backbone of Bollywood—the former, fun and feisty, the latter, sweet and a smooth-talker. Rajat Kapoor is a no-bulls*it agent hobnobbing with the crème de la crème. Ayush Mehra, understandably, is placed somewhere in the middle. These four actors from diverse backgrounds felt like a conscious choice, perhaps to add a dash of individuality and ‘character’ to their otherwise ostensible lives (referring to the show, only). Also read: 'Dybbuk' review: Emraan Hashmi’s charm doesn’t suffice this insipid horror flick ‘Call My Agent: Bollywood’ is a whole country away from its French counterpart, both in terms of storytelling and character arcs. But, in essence, the show goes on to reiterate what we have known all along—all that glitters is, indeed, not gold. Touché! 'Call My Agent: Bollywood' is now streaming on Netflix. Watch the trailer here:

'Call My Agent: Bollywood' review: Fun, flirty and unapologetically frivolous

If you play the little game of stream of consciousness for Indian representation of the horror genre, what are the terms that usually pop on top of your head? In all probability, these ones: shockingly bland special effects, histrionics that butcher the concept of subdued acting, outlandish scripts and, of course, garish make-up of the paranormal. And, if you thought, you are missing out on groundbreaking work that is ‘Dybbuk’, fret not!

The story&nbsp;has a shattered Mahi (Nikita Dutta) trying to reintegrate her life after tragedy befell in the form of a miscarriage, thereby affecting her marriage to Sam (Emraan Hashmi). Desperate to piece it all back together, the pair makes a move from Mumbai to Maldives. Little did they know that a fresh start in a foreign land would entail a brawl with the devil.&nbsp;

Also read:&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/entertainment/lifestyle/news-wion-exclusive-ub40-we-are-old-frts-now-our-kids-carry-the-flag-for-revolutionary-change-424650">WION exclusive: UB40: We are old f*rts now, our kids carry the flag for revolutionary change</a>

‘Dybbuk’ hook trope is a 16th century box (called dibuk, hence the glamourised name) that a lonely Mahi sources from an antique shop. Going by Jewish legends, a dibuk is a spirit on the lookout for a body to dwell in. Sure enough—the inter-faith couple’s home hosts a series of paranormal activities and strange occurrences that demands an immediate exorcism and spiritual cleansing of the house.&nbsp;

<img alt="The movie lacks originality, conviction" data-entity-type="file" data-entity-uuid="a8e5da2f-3309-4ded-b4ee-ac14a885d680" src="//cdn.wionews.com/sites/default/files/inline-images/pjimage%20-%202021-10-29T153234.331.jpg" />

Yes, ‘Dybbuk’ is an insipidly executed, uninspiring hotchpotch that has an abused premise for a screenplay, which, by the way, Bollywood has been rehashing and re-launching in their horror flicks since time immemorial.

Director Jay Krishnan (aka Jay K) has remade his own Malayalam debut movie, ‘Ezra’, in Hindi and called it, mysteriously, ‘Dybbuk’. While we cannot comment on ‘Ezra’, we sure have our two bits to share on the latter. First things first, the jump scares—a prerequisite for horror mystery—are barely there to evoke any sense of fear, even the ones that are inserted into the script lack conviction and fail to erect&nbsp;the hair on your head… leave alone evoking goose bumps! Twist (read: attempt to rediscover) comes in the form of religion. Crowd favourite Christianity and its notorious exorcism—still pining for a desi version of&nbsp;‘The Exorcism of Emily Rose’, ‘The Conjuring’ saga and what not!—has been plucked out of equation and Rabbis and Judaism have been introduced to make it look… new? Fresh? Well, that did not sit well with critics et al. A rehash is a rehash is a rehash!

Also read:&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/entertainment/lifestyle/news-wion-exclusive-bhuvan-bam-%E2%80%98dhindora%E2%80%99-could-have-been-on-any-ott-platform-but-thats-unfair-to-my-viewers-424368">WION exclusive: Bhuvan Bam: ‘Dhindora’ could have been on any OTT platform, but that's unfair to my viewers</a>

The pace of the plot may have been swift, but the same cannot be said about its progression—the mystery in this horror-mystery remains largely underexplored, with Jay K barely scratching the element of intrigue in ‘Dybbuk’. It also comes off as rather rude and obnoxious that the makers turn this horror story into a guide to Jewish folklore, thus evoking a sense of inferiority among the audience by virtue of assumption that they cannot read between the lines. A massive downer.

<img alt="The movie is a boring rehash, to be honest" data-entity-type="file" data-entity-uuid="5988374d-8109-435d-bd94-e764e7d13626" src="//cdn.wionews.com/sites/default/files/inline-images/pjimage%20-%202021-10-29T153318.810.jpg" />

Emraan Hashmi and Nikita Dutta are solid, well-rounded actors but they had very little to go with&nbsp;as far as the script of ‘Dybbuk’ goes. Like we mentioned before, Bollywood has an ocean of change to&nbsp;undergo in the horror-mystery department. Sadly, ‘Dybbuk’ is not a flicker of hope, either.&nbsp;

Also read:&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/entertainment/hollywood/news-dune-review-a-visual-masterpiece-on-life-culture-far-ahead-of-our-times-423285">Dune review: A visual masterpiece on life, culture far ahead of our times</a>

If you play the little game of stream of consciousness for Indian representation of the horror genre, what are the terms that usually pop on top of your head? In all probability, these ones: shockingly bland special effects, histrionics that butcher the concept of subdued acting, outlandish scripts and, of course, garish make-up of the paranormal.

If you play the little game of stream of consciousness for Indian representation of the horror genre, what are the terms that usually pop on top of your head? In all probability, these ones: shockingly bland special effects, histrionics that butcher the concept of subdued acting, outlandish scripts and, of course, garish make-up of the paranormal. And, if you thought, you are missing out on groundbreaking work that is ‘Dybbuk’, fret not! The story has a shattered Mahi (Nikita Dutta) trying to reintegrate her life after tragedy befell in the form of a miscarriage, thereby affecting her marriage to Sam (Emraan Hashmi). Desperate to piece it all back together, the pair makes a move from Mumbai to Maldives. Little did they know that a fresh start in a foreign land would entail a brawl with the devil. Also read: WION exclusive: UB40: We are old f*rts now, our kids carry the flag for revolutionary change ‘Dybbuk’ hook trope is a 16th century box (called dibuk, hence the glamourised name) that a lonely Mahi sources from an antique shop. Going by Jewish legends, a dibuk is a spirit on the lookout for a body to dwell in. Sure enough—the inter-faith couple’s home hosts a series of paranormal activities and strange occurrences that demands an immediate exorcism and spiritual cleansing of the house. Yes, ‘Dybbuk’ is an insipidly executed, uninspiring hotchpotch that has an abused premise for a screenplay, which, by the way, Bollywood has been rehashing and re-launching in their horror flicks since time immemorial. Director Jay Krishnan (aka Jay K) has remade his own Malayalam debut movie, ‘Ezra’, in Hindi and called it, mysteriously, ‘Dybbuk’. While we cannot comment on ‘Ezra’, we sure have our two bits to share on the latter. First things first, the jump scares—a prerequisite for horror mystery—are barely there to evoke any sense of fear, even the ones that are inserted into the script lack conviction and fail to erect the hair on your head… leave alone evoking goose bumps! Twist (read: attempt to rediscover) comes in the form of religion. Crowd favourite Christianity and its notorious exorcism—still pining for a desi version of ‘The Exorcism of Emily Rose’, ‘The Conjuring’ saga and what not!—has been plucked out of equation and Rabbis and Judaism have been introduced to make it look… new? Fresh? Well, that did not sit well with critics et al. A rehash is a rehash is a rehash! Also read: WION exclusive: Bhuvan Bam: ‘Dhindora’ could have been on any OTT platform, but that's unfair to my viewers The pace of the plot may have been swift, but the same cannot be said about its progression—the mystery in this horror-mystery remains largely underexplored, with Jay K barely scratching the element of intrigue in ‘Dybbuk’. It also comes off as rather rude and obnoxious that the makers turn this horror story into a guide to Jewish folklore, thus evoking a sense of inferiority among the audience by virtue of assumption that they cannot read between the lines. A massive downer. Emraan Hashmi and Nikita Dutta are solid, well-rounded actors but they had very little to go with as far as the script of ‘Dybbuk’ goes. Like we mentioned before, Bollywood has an ocean of change to undergo in the horror-mystery department. Sadly, ‘Dybbuk’ is not a flicker of hope, either. Also read: Dune review: A visual masterpiece on life, culture far ahead of our times

'Dybbuk' review: Emraan Hashmi’s charm doesn’t suffice this insipid horror flick

He has these vivid dreams, then there’s the Voice (inherited from his Bene Gesserit mother Lady Jessica/ played by Rebecca Ferguson). But, is he— Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet)—The One who will rise above one and all, and cross the gates of heaven along with his tribe?&nbsp;

 
This one-of-two-part film adaptation of Frank Herbert’s 1965 sci-fi novel by the same name partially answers that question.&nbsp;

<img alt="Visuals so stunning!" data-entity-type="file" data-entity-uuid="f43bb0ca-7656-4ec5-9ad8-4e302a2ba8e5" src="//cdn.wionews.com/sites/default/files/inline-images/pjimage%20-%202021-10-23T151820.694.jpg" /> 
In a parallel universe, far ahead of our times, the noble House Atreides and its ruler Duke Leto Atreides I (Oscar Isaac) are off to the desert land of Arrakis, where a certain spice grows exclusively and they must source it for survival. However, this uprooting of the House and relocation is the Emperor’s command and obeying it means putting everyone in harm’s way: that being the House of Harkonnen and its treacherous techniques of snatching dominance.&nbsp;

 
Watching this visually exciting sci-fi flick felt like going back to learning the basics—through simple, coherent language Denis Villeneuve explains a rather complex Utopian premise. So, we have the interstellar called the Imperium that is inhabited by various Houses. Team A comprises the noble House of&nbsp;Atreides (led by a brooding Oscar Isaac) and Team B, of the evil presence of Harkonnens. Team C is led by Javier Bardem’s cameo-presence Stilgar. The story may have a futuristic spin to it, but, at its core, speaks volumes of man’s insatiable hunger for power and the levels of indignity it stoops down to for territorial victories.&nbsp;

<img alt="The desert sequence in 'Dune' is marvelous" data-entity-type="file" data-entity-uuid="cf67c74d-b910-453f-897e-cc4c1c26782c" src="//cdn.wionews.com/sites/default/files/inline-images/pjimage%20-%202021-10-23T151940.722.jpg" /> 
Quite evidently, in ‘Dune’, Villeneuve marries his innovative cutting edge technological ambitions with human endeavors that are universal and transcend space and time. Go beyond what’s on the periphery and the idea that this sci-fi is no less than a mirror image of society, quickly sets in. There’s war in the name of colonisation, future conflicts being conspired in the name of religion and authority, the instinct to survive against all odds—harsh desert conditions, coupled with lack of water and the scorching heat, serve as metaphors—and the mutilation of nature in the hands of us, mere mortals.&nbsp;

 
The enormous and oh-so-very-convincing props and the overall set up is amped up with Hans Zimmer's drama-heightening BGM (background score).&nbsp;

<img alt="xkjasmcldscsaxACDD" data-entity-type="file" data-entity-uuid="f6e1617c-9d2a-4b2d-a45e-b9096aedc296" src="//cdn.wionews.com/sites/default/files/inline-images/pjimage%20-%202021-10-23T152035.416.jpg" /> 
Frank Herbert’s Paul was about 15—give or take—in the book, and Timothée Chalamet, though in his early 20s, glides into his shoes with much ease, and complete conviction. As a young man torn between his father’s vision of his future and his innate desire to take risks, Chalamet maintains a restrained demeanour throughout. In one scene, just one, you see Paul’s pent-up frustration on his parents’ combined projection of their aspirations onto him trickle over. He screams—possibly looking for an outlet for all that his teenage mind cannot fathom—and retreat soon after. That’s the highlight of Chalamet’s presence in ‘Dune’. Rebecca Ferguson, Oscar Isaac, Josh Brolin and Jason Momoa are hard hitting in their respective parts—all akin, all agitated. Zendaya, more of a dream within a dream persona, is a lingering presence in her special guest-esque role.

 
There are few films that strike the perfect balance between grandeur and spectacular storytelling; one’s invariably put in the back burner. ‘Dune’, however, will go down in history for its visual mastery and methodical recital.&nbsp;

<img alt="Zendaya is a strong presence in her brief role" data-entity-type="file" data-entity-uuid="dd93cb9a-ce28-42d4-ad67-c6a42221c6ff" src="//cdn.wionews.com/sites/default/files/inline-images/pjimage%20-%202021-10-23T152201.982.jpg" />

He has these vivid dreams, then there’s the Voice (inherited from his Bene Gesserit mother Lady Jessica/ played by Rebecca Ferguson). But, is he— Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet)—The One who will rise above one and all, and cross the gates of heaven along with his tribe?

He has these vivid dreams, then there’s the Voice (inherited from his Bene Gesserit mother Lady Jessica/ played by Rebecca Ferguson). But, is he— Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet)—The One who will rise above one and all, and cross the gates of heaven along with his tribe? This one-of-two-part film adaptation of Frank Herbert’s 1965 sci-fi novel by the same name partially answers that question. In a parallel universe, far ahead of our times, the noble House Atreides and its ruler Duke Leto Atreides I (Oscar Isaac) are off to the desert land of Arrakis, where a certain spice grows exclusively and they must source it for survival. However, this uprooting of the House and relocation is the Emperor’s command and obeying it means putting everyone in harm’s way: that being the House of Harkonnen and its treacherous techniques of snatching dominance. Watching this visually exciting sci-fi flick felt like going back to learning the basics—through simple, coherent language Denis Villeneuve explains a rather complex Utopian premise. So, we have the interstellar called the Imperium that is inhabited by various Houses. Team A comprises the noble House of Atreides (led by a brooding Oscar Isaac) and Team B, of the evil presence of Harkonnens. Team C is led by Javier Bardem’s cameo-presence Stilgar. The story may have a futuristic spin to it, but, at its core, speaks volumes of man’s insatiable hunger for power and the levels of indignity it stoops down to for territorial victories. Quite evidently, in ‘Dune’, Villeneuve marries his innovative cutting edge technological ambitions with human endeavors that are universal and transcend space and time. Go beyond what’s on the periphery and the idea that this sci-fi is no less than a mirror image of society, quickly sets in. There’s war in the name of colonisation, future conflicts being conspired in the name of religion and authority, the instinct to survive against all odds—harsh desert conditions, coupled with lack of water and the scorching heat, serve as metaphors—and the mutilation of nature in the hands of us, mere mortals. The enormous and oh-so-very-convincing props and the overall set up is amped up with Hans Zimmer's drama-heightening BGM (background score). Frank Herbert’s Paul was about 15—give or take—in the book, and Timothée Chalamet, though in his early 20s, glides into his shoes with much ease, and complete conviction. As a young man torn between his father’s vision of his future and his innate desire to take risks, Chalamet maintains a restrained demeanour throughout. In one scene, just one, you see Paul’s pent-up frustration on his parents’ combined projection of their aspirations onto him trickle over. He screams—possibly looking for an outlet for all that his teenage mind cannot fathom—and retreat soon after. That’s the highlight of Chalamet’s presence in ‘Dune’. Rebecca Ferguson, Oscar Isaac, Josh Brolin and Jason Momoa are hard hitting in their respective parts—all akin, all agitated. Zendaya, more of a dream within a dream persona, is a lingering presence in her special guest-esque role. There are few films that strike the perfect balance between grandeur and spectacular storytelling; one’s invariably put in the back burner. ‘Dune’, however, will go down in history for its visual mastery and methodical recital.

Dune review: A visual masterpiece on life, culture far ahead of our times

In a galaxy far, far away, a young man in a sea of sand faces a foreboding destiny. The threat of war hangs in the air. At the brink of a crisis, he navigates a feudalistic world with an evil emperor, noble houses and subjugated peoples, a tale right out of mythology and right at home in George Lucas’ brainpan. But this is “Dune,” baby, Frank Herbert’s science-fiction opus, which is making another run at global box-office domination even as it heads toward controversy about what it and its messianic protagonist signify.

The movie is a herculean endeavor from the director Denis Villeneuve (“Arrival”), a starry, sumptuous take on the novel’s first half. Published in 1965, Herbert’s book is a beautiful behemoth (my copy runs almost 900 pages) crowded with rulers and rebels, witches and warriors. Herbert had a lot to say — about religion, ecology, the fate of humanity — and drew from an astonishment of sources, from Greek mythology to Indigenous cultures.

Inspired by government efforts to keep sand dunes at bay, he dreamed up a desert planet where water was the new petroleum. The result is a future-shock epic that reads like a cautionary tale for our environmentally ravaged world.

Villeneuve likes to work on a large scale, but has a miniaturist’s attention to fine-grained detail, which fits for a story as equally sweeping and intricate as “Dune.” Like the novel, the movie is set thousands of years in the future and centers on Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet), the scion of a noble family. With his father, Duke Leto (Oscar Isaac), and his mother, Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), Paul is about to depart for his new home on a desert planet called Arrakis, aka Dune. The Duke, on orders from the Emperor, is to take charge of the planet, which is home to monstrous sandworms, enigmatic Bedouin-like inhabitants and an addictive, highly valuable resource called spice.

 
Much ensues. There are complicated intrigues along with sword fights, heroic deaths and many inserts of a mystery woman (Zendaya) throwing come-hither glances at the camera, a Malickian vision in flowing robes and liquid slow motion. She’s one piece of the multifaceted puzzle of Paul’s destiny, as is a mystical sisterhood (led by Charlotte Rampling in severe mistress mode) of psychic power brokers who share a collective consciousness. They’re playing the long game while the story’s most flamboyant villain, the Baron (Stellan Skarsgard), schemes and slays, floating above terrified minions and enemies like a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day balloon devised by Clive Barker.

 
The movie leans on a lot of exposition, partly to help guide viewers through the story’s denser thickets, but Villeneuve also uses his visuals to advance and clarify the narrative. The designs and textures of the movie’s various worlds and their inhabitants are arresting, filigreed and meaningful, with characters and their environments in sync.

 
At times, though, Villeneuve lingers too long over his creations, as if he wanted you to check out his cool new line of dragonfly-style choppers and bleeding corpses. (This isn’t a funny movie but there are mordantly humorous flourishes, notably with the Baron, whose bald head and oily bath indicate that Villeneuve is a fan of “Apocalypse Now.”) 
That impulse to linger is understandable given the monumentality of Villeneuve’s world building (and its price tag). But the movie’s spectacular scale combined with Herbert’s complex mythmaking also creates a not entirely productive tension between stasis and movement.

 
Not long after he lands on Dune, Paul is ushered into the new world of its tribal people, the Fremen, a transitional passage leading from dark rooms to bright desert, from heavy machinery and vaulted spaces with friezes to gauzy robes and the meringue peaks of the dunes. Paul is on a journey filled with heavy deeds and thoughts, but en route he can seem caught in all this beauty, like a fly in fast-hardening sap.

 
Chalamet looks young enough for the role (Paul is 15 when the novel opens) and can certainly strike a Byronic pose, complete with black coat and anguished hair. The actor has his moments in “Dune,” including in an early scene with Rampling’s Reverend Mother, who puts Paul through a painful test; Chalamet excels at imparting a sense of confused woundedness, psychic and physical. But he doesn’t move with the coiled grace of the warrior that Paul is meant to be, which undermines both his training sessions with the family “warmaster” (Josh Brolin) and in his later role as a messianic figure, one who is considerably less complicated and conflicted on screen than he is on the page.

 
Written by Villeneuve, Jon Spaihts and Eric Roth, the screenplay has taken predictable liberties. The movie retains the overall arc of the book despite having jettisoned characters and swaths of plot. There have been felicitous changes, as with the character Dr. Liet Kynes, an ecologist who’s a man in the book but is now a woman. Played by a formidably striking Sharon Duncan-Brewster, the character doesn’t receive nearly enough screen time, particularly given Kynes’ weighty patrimony and narrative function. But Duncan-Brewster — like so many of the other well-cast supporting performers — makes enough of an impression that she helps fill in the script’s ellipses.

 
Throughout “Dune,” you can feel Villeneuve caught and sometimes struggling between his fidelity to the source material and the demands of big-ticket mainstream moviemaking and selling. It’s easy to imagine that he owns several copies of the novel, each copiously dog-eared and heavily outlined. (The movie is relatively free of holiday-ready merch opportunities, outside of a cute desert mouse with saucer-sized ears.) At the same time, Villeneuve is making a movie in a Marvel-dominated industry that foregrounds obviousness and blunt action sequences over ambiguity and introspection. There’s talk and stillness here, true, but also plenty of fights, explosions and hardware.

 
The trickiest challenge is presented by the movie’s commercial imperatives and, by extension, the entire historical thrust of Hollywood with its demand for heroes and happy endings. This presents a problem that Villeneuve can’t or won’t solve. Paul is burdened by prophetic visions he doesn’t yet fully understand, and while he’s an appealing figure in the novel, he is also menacing. Herbert was interested in problematizing the figure of the classic champion, including the superhero, and he weaves his critique into the very fabric of his multilayered tale. “No more terrible disaster could befall your people,” a character warns, “than for them to fall into the hands of a Hero.”

 
There’s little overt menace to this Paul, who mostly registers as a sincere, sensitive, if callow hero-in-the-making. Mostly, the danger he telegraphs exists on a representational level and the dubiously romanticized image presented by a pale, white noble who’s hailed as a messiah by the planet’s darker-complexioned native population.

 
Whether Paul is white in the novel is, I think, open to debate. Herbert’s focus is on the human race, which, as the writer Jordan S. Carroll notes in a fascinating essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books, hasn’t prevented white supremacists from embracing the book. “Fascists love ‘Dune,’” Carroll writes, though he sees this love as a self-serving misreading.

 
One of Herbert’s talents was his ability to blend his promiscuous borrowings — from Navajo, Aztec, Turkish, Persian and myriad other sources — into a smoothly unified future world that, as befits science fiction, is at once familiar and strange. The shadow of Lawrence of Arabia and colonialist fantasies does loom large, particularly because the Fremen and their language are drawn from Arabic origins. Still, the book gives you room to cast Paul in your head in whatever image you choose. But movies tend to visually lock in meaning, and, like David Lynch’s much-maligned 1984 adaptation with Kyle MacLachlan as Paul, this “Dune” is also about a white man leading a fateful charge.

 
That doesn’t make Villeneuve’s “Dune” a white-savior story or not exactly or maybe just not yet. The movie ends before everything wraps up too neatly or uncomfortably, which injects it with some welcome uncertainty.

 
Herbert wrote five sequels, and Duneworld continued to expand after his death; if the movie hits the box-office sweet spot, the story can presumably continue, which would be a gift for a franchise-hungry industry. Whether it will become the kind of gift that keeps on giving is up to the audience. Villeneuve has made a serious, stately opus, and while he doesn’t have a pop bone in his body, he knows how to put on a show as he fans a timely argument about who gets to play the hero now.

In a galaxy far, far away, a young man in a sea of sand faces a foreboding destiny. The threat of war hangs in the air. At the brink of a crisis, he navigates a feudalistic world with an evil emperor, noble houses and subjugated peoples, a tale right out of mythology and right at home in George Lucas’ brainpan.

In a galaxy far, far away, a young man in a sea of sand faces a foreboding destiny. The threat of war hangs in the air. At the brink of a crisis, he navigates a feudalistic world with an evil emperor, noble houses and subjugated peoples, a tale right out of mythology and right at home in George Lucas’ brainpan. But this is “Dune,” baby, Frank Herbert’s science-fiction opus, which is making another run at global box-office domination even as it heads toward controversy about what it and its messianic protagonist signify. The movie is a herculean endeavor from the director Denis Villeneuve (“Arrival”), a starry, sumptuous take on the novel’s first half. Published in 1965, Herbert’s book is a beautiful behemoth (my copy runs almost 900 pages) crowded with rulers and rebels, witches and warriors. Herbert had a lot to say — about religion, ecology, the fate of humanity — and drew from an astonishment of sources, from Greek mythology to Indigenous cultures. Inspired by government efforts to keep sand dunes at bay, he dreamed up a desert planet where water was the new petroleum. The result is a future-shock epic that reads like a cautionary tale for our environmentally ravaged world. Villeneuve likes to work on a large scale, but has a miniaturist’s attention to fine-grained detail, which fits for a story as equally sweeping and intricate as “Dune.” Like the novel, the movie is set thousands of years in the future and centers on Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet), the scion of a noble family. With his father, Duke Leto (Oscar Isaac), and his mother, Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), Paul is about to depart for his new home on a desert planet called Arrakis, aka Dune. The Duke, on orders from the Emperor, is to take charge of the planet, which is home to monstrous sandworms, enigmatic Bedouin-like inhabitants and an addictive, highly valuable resource called spice. Much ensues. There are complicated intrigues along with sword fights, heroic deaths and many inserts of a mystery woman (Zendaya) throwing come-hither glances at the camera, a Malickian vision in flowing robes and liquid slow motion. She’s one piece of the multifaceted puzzle of Paul’s destiny, as is a mystical sisterhood (led by Charlotte Rampling in severe mistress mode) of psychic power brokers who share a collective consciousness. They’re playing the long game while the story’s most flamboyant villain, the Baron (Stellan Skarsgard), schemes and slays, floating above terrified minions and enemies like a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day balloon devised by Clive Barker. The movie leans on a lot of exposition, partly to help guide viewers through the story’s denser thickets, but Villeneuve also uses his visuals to advance and clarify the narrative. The designs and textures of the movie’s various worlds and their inhabitants are arresting, filigreed and meaningful, with characters and their environments in sync. At times, though, Villeneuve lingers too long over his creations, as if he wanted you to check out his cool new line of dragonfly-style choppers and bleeding corpses. (This isn’t a funny movie but there are mordantly humorous flourishes, notably with the Baron, whose bald head and oily bath indicate that Villeneuve is a fan of “Apocalypse Now.”) That impulse to linger is understandable given the monumentality of Villeneuve’s world building (and its price tag). But the movie’s spectacular scale combined with Herbert’s complex mythmaking also creates a not entirely productive tension between stasis and movement. Not long after he lands on Dune, Paul is ushered into the new world of its tribal people, the Fremen, a transitional passage leading from dark rooms to bright desert, from heavy machinery and vaulted spaces with friezes to gauzy robes and the meringue peaks of the dunes. Paul is on a journey filled with heavy deeds and thoughts, but en route he can seem caught in all this beauty, like a fly in fast-hardening sap. Chalamet looks young enough for the role (Paul is 15 when the novel opens) and can certainly strike a Byronic pose, complete with black coat and anguished hair. The actor has his moments in “Dune,” including in an early scene with Rampling’s Reverend Mother, who puts Paul through a painful test; Chalamet excels at imparting a sense of confused woundedness, psychic and physical. But he doesn’t move with the coiled grace of the warrior that Paul is meant to be, which undermines both his training sessions with the family “warmaster” (Josh Brolin) and in his later role as a messianic figure, one who is considerably less complicated and conflicted on screen than he is on the page. Written by Villeneuve, Jon Spaihts and Eric Roth, the screenplay has taken predictable liberties. The movie retains the overall arc of the book despite having jettisoned characters and swaths of plot. There have been felicitous changes, as with the character Dr. Liet Kynes, an ecologist who’s a man in the book but is now a woman. Played by a formidably striking Sharon Duncan-Brewster, the character doesn’t receive nearly enough screen time, particularly given Kynes’ weighty patrimony and narrative function. But Duncan-Brewster — like so many of the other well-cast supporting performers — makes enough of an impression that she helps fill in the script’s ellipses. Throughout “Dune,” you can feel Villeneuve caught and sometimes struggling between his fidelity to the source material and the demands of big-ticket mainstream moviemaking and selling. It’s easy to imagine that he owns several copies of the novel, each copiously dog-eared and heavily outlined. (The movie is relatively free of holiday-ready merch opportunities, outside of a cute desert mouse with saucer-sized ears.) At the same time, Villeneuve is making a movie in a Marvel-dominated industry that foregrounds obviousness and blunt action sequences over ambiguity and introspection. There’s talk and stillness here, true, but also plenty of fights, explosions and hardware. The trickiest challenge is presented by the movie’s commercial imperatives and, by extension, the entire historical thrust of Hollywood with its demand for heroes and happy endings. This presents a problem that Villeneuve can’t or won’t solve. Paul is burdened by prophetic visions he doesn’t yet fully understand, and while he’s an appealing figure in the novel, he is also menacing. Herbert was interested in problematizing the figure of the classic champion, including the superhero, and he weaves his critique into the very fabric of his multilayered tale. “No more terrible disaster could befall your people,” a character warns, “than for them to fall into the hands of a Hero.” There’s little overt menace to this Paul, who mostly registers as a sincere, sensitive, if callow hero-in-the-making. Mostly, the danger he telegraphs exists on a representational level and the dubiously romanticized image presented by a pale, white noble who’s hailed as a messiah by the planet’s darker-complexioned native population. Whether Paul is white in the novel is, I think, open to debate. Herbert’s focus is on the human race, which, as the writer Jordan S. Carroll notes in a fascinating essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books, hasn’t prevented white supremacists from embracing the book. “Fascists love ‘Dune,’” Carroll writes, though he sees this love as a self-serving misreading. One of Herbert’s talents was his ability to blend his promiscuous borrowings — from Navajo, Aztec, Turkish, Persian and myriad other sources — into a smoothly unified future world that, as befits science fiction, is at once familiar and strange. The shadow of Lawrence of Arabia and colonialist fantasies does loom large, particularly because the Fremen and their language are drawn from Arabic origins. Still, the book gives you room to cast Paul in your head in whatever image you choose. But movies tend to visually lock in meaning, and, like David Lynch’s much-maligned 1984 adaptation with Kyle MacLachlan as Paul, this “Dune” is also about a white man leading a fateful charge. That doesn’t make Villeneuve’s “Dune” a white-savior story or not exactly or maybe just not yet. The movie ends before everything wraps up too neatly or uncomfortably, which injects it with some welcome uncertainty. Herbert wrote five sequels, and Duneworld continued to expand after his death; if the movie hits the box-office sweet spot, the story can presumably continue, which would be a gift for a franchise-hungry industry. Whether it will become the kind of gift that keeps on giving is up to the audience. Villeneuve has made a serious, stately opus, and while he doesn’t have a pop bone in his body, he knows how to put on a show as he fans a timely argument about who gets to play the hero now.

‘Dune’ review: A hero in the making, on shifting sands

When the camera zooms in on Dhruv (Dhruv Sehgal, also the creator) and Kavya (Mithila Palkar) for the first time in over a year, there’s a sense of discomfort between this otherwise adorable couple. Despite holidaying in the backwaters of Kerala, they seem rather off in each other’s arms. Turns out, the awkwardness doesn’t stem from professional distance between the actors but is a deliberate move: to highlight the subtle cracks long-distance relationships (they were away from one another in season 3) acquire&nbsp;while apart.

&nbsp;<img alt="Dhruv and Kavya is your modern-day Indian couple " data-entity-type="file" data-entity-uuid="decfa98e-9227-4398-97a6-02b63d70b516" src="//cdn.wionews.com/sites/default/files/inline-images/pjimage%20-%202021-10-17T202032.863.jpg" /> 
To nobody’s surprise, the couple glides right back into their chirpy form and the audience is, yet again, delighted to watch them derive pleasure from little portions of nothingness in life.&nbsp;

Also read |&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/entertainment/bollywood/news-wion-exclusive-salim-sulaiman--art-is-one-aspect-humanity-has-gone-out-the-window-in-afghanistan-421516">WION exclusive: Salim-Sulaiman- Humanity's gone out the window in Afghanistan</a>

 
The series—which catapulted to global recognition after Netflix took over, had started small—is an ode to the subculture of live-in couples in semi-modern India.&nbsp;

 
‘Little Things’ doesn’t endorse the whole larger-than-life-persona shebang or even follows a track that is too overbearing for the audience: a trope that is synonymous to the ‘coming-of-age’ genre. The final chapter, too, is deep-rooted in simplicity—raw, real, unsensational, ordinary.&nbsp;

<img alt="Mithila Palkar, Dhruv Sehgal's chemistry is effortless " data-entity-type="file" data-entity-uuid="ac610c8a-d85b-4bb9-898c-7a6d620fc502" src="//cdn.wionews.com/sites/default/files/inline-images/pjimage%20-%202021-10-17T201814.654.jpg" /> 
Maybe not half as meticulous in approach as&nbsp;‘Fleabag’, but ‘Little Things’ does instil the fly-on-the-wall technique of storytelling and it is this same setting that has contributed massively to the success of ‘Little Things’ while staying connected to humble beginnings: both the show, and its characters.&nbsp;

Also read |&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/entertainment/hollywood/news-snl-rami-malek-his-bulgy-eyes-and-debut-monologue-are-going-viral-watch-421571" hreflang="en">'SNL': Rami Malek, his bulgy eyes and debut monologue are going viral; watch</a>

 
In cinema, or any other medium of expression for that matter, infusing life in&nbsp;simple and effortless writing is a humungous task. In recent times, very few movies have managed to achieve that feat: Shoojit Sircar’s ‘October’ is a deserving candidate of that honour. Just like Dan and Shiuli’s love blossomed in silence, Dhruv and Kavya’s chemistry falls back on their silliness—both innocent, both irreproachable.&nbsp;

 
‘Little Things’ season 4 plays to&nbsp;its strengths by not attempting somewhat of a grand exit. All feel-good factors included, the finale gets really touchy and serves one masterstroke after another in its final moments with the audience.&nbsp;

<img alt="It's always in the little things" data-entity-type="file" data-entity-uuid="c7222bf7-6526-450b-8e9c-fae8ad176817" src="//cdn.wionews.com/sites/default/files/inline-images/pjimage%20-%202021-10-17T202105.629.jpg" /> 
The show falls back on the moments it creates: we will miss the Bambaiya candour, Dhruv and Kavya’s love for food, those late-night strolls and the magic it has swept us in. Our favourite and most cherished scenes will always be the harmless fights and endless banters.

Also read |&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/entertainment/lifestyle/news-beyonc%C3%A9-jay-z-wedding-looks-they-dont-call-them-music-royalty-for-nothing-pics-421496" hreflang="en">Beyoncé, JAY-Z wedding looks: They don't call them music royalty for nothing; pics</a>

Over the years, ‘Little Things’ has made some reach out to those&nbsp;who they love, and who loved them: the yearning for connection is one of the after-effects&nbsp;of this series. And, for that—evoking ‘feelings’ among its viewers—Dhruv and Kavya will be missed, heaps. &nbsp;

&nbsp;

<iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/YFUECGINK-c" title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe>

When the camera zooms in on Dhruv (Dhruv Sehgal, also the creator) and Kavya (Mithila Palkar) for the first time in over a year, there’s a sense of discomfort between this otherwise adorable couple.

When the camera zooms in on Dhruv (Dhruv Sehgal, also the creator) and Kavya (Mithila Palkar) for the first time in over a year, there’s a sense of discomfort between this otherwise adorable couple. Despite holidaying in the backwaters of Kerala, they seem rather off in each other’s arms. Turns out, the awkwardness doesn’t stem from professional distance between the actors but is a deliberate move: to highlight the subtle cracks long-distance relationships (they were away from one another in season 3) acquire while apart. To nobody’s surprise, the couple glides right back into their chirpy form and the audience is, yet again, delighted to watch them derive pleasure from little portions of nothingness in life. Also read | WION exclusive: Salim-Sulaiman- Humanity's gone out the window in Afghanistan The series—which catapulted to global recognition after Netflix took over, had started small—is an ode to the subculture of live-in couples in semi-modern India. ‘Little Things’ doesn’t endorse the whole larger-than-life-persona shebang or even follows a track that is too overbearing for the audience: a trope that is synonymous to the ‘coming-of-age’ genre. The final chapter, too, is deep-rooted in simplicity—raw, real, unsensational, ordinary. Maybe not half as meticulous in approach as ‘Fleabag’, but ‘Little Things’ does instil the fly-on-the-wall technique of storytelling and it is this same setting that has contributed massively to the success of ‘Little Things’ while staying connected to humble beginnings: both the show, and its characters. Also read | 'SNL': Rami Malek, his bulgy eyes and debut monologue are going viral; watch In cinema, or any other medium of expression for that matter, infusing life in simple and effortless writing is a humungous task. In recent times, very few movies have managed to achieve that feat: Shoojit Sircar’s ‘October’ is a deserving candidate of that honour. Just like Dan and Shiuli’s love blossomed in silence, Dhruv and Kavya’s chemistry falls back on their silliness—both innocent, both irreproachable. ‘Little Things’ season 4 plays to its strengths by not attempting somewhat of a grand exit. All feel-good factors included, the finale gets really touchy and serves one masterstroke after another in its final moments with the audience. The show falls back on the moments it creates: we will miss the Bambaiya candour, Dhruv and Kavya’s love for food, those late-night strolls and the magic it has swept us in. Our favourite and most cherished scenes will always be the harmless fights and endless banters. Also read | Beyoncé, JAY-Z wedding looks: They don't call them music royalty for nothing; pics Over the years, ‘Little Things’ has made some reach out to those who they love, and who loved them: the yearning for connection is one of the after-effects of this series. And, for that—evoking ‘feelings’ among its viewers—Dhruv and Kavya will be missed, heaps.

Little Things season 4 review: Mithila Palkar, Dhruv Sehgal give an impactful goodbye to Dhurv and Kavya

At the risk of sounding troubled, we are going to admit that we have pined for Joe Goldberg’s (Penn Badgley)—“And then... I saw you”—deep-toned, creepy voice in psychological thriller ‘You’. But, first things first, Joe is no longer the slushy lover (read maniac) he once used to be: he is married to fellow hell raiser Love Quinn (Victoria Pedretti) and the eccentric duo is parents to a lovely baby boy… God bless him!

 
As is the case with most iconic chows, Netflix’s thunderous success was, too, looking at the possibility of losing its initial sheen in this third instalment. But, the new tale of ‘You’ is a testimony to what reinvention and well-chalked-out plot twists could do to a show some may say was already standing on the brink of obscurity.

Also read:&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/entertainment/lifestyle/news-trans-actor-fired-from-hamilton-over-gender-neutral-dressing-room-experienced-discrimination-420917" hreflang="en">Trans actor fired from Hamilton over gender-neutral dressing room: Experienced discrimination</a>

 
The Quinns—when we saw them last over a year ago—were looking at relocation&nbsp;for a fresh start with a baby on the way after the climax blind-sided us for reasons aplenty: Love, too, was a crazed killer/ stalker. Joe being Joe, he was about to kill her before Love revealed, just in&nbsp;time, to him that she was pregnant with their child. Next shot: the psychotic pair makes a move to the Utopian town of Madre Linda, where Joe was showing signs of full recovery—from his unrealistic&nbsp;interpretations of love, not Love—when a hot, new female neighbour cracks open the animal in him. Well, we should have seen that coming: after all, Joe would “do anything for love.” Isn’t it?&nbsp;

 
Pretty much from its commencement, season three of ‘You’ does a well-founded job at intertwining the troubled minds of two troubled first-time parents Joe and Love. With dark humour serving as the primary undertone, this installment’s USP is their collective denial of just how twisted &amp; dysfunctional they truly are. Interestingly, it is this very irksome nature of the narrative that takes the plot forward, and notches higher. As clinging to their subject of obsession has always been the couple’s strongest suit, they show up at the office of an oblivious marriage counsellor who assures them they’ll be alright since they’re “not murderers”. Good use of pun, we say.&nbsp;

Also read:&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/entertainment/lifestyle/news-nsync-singer-lance-bass-husband-michael-turchin-welcome-twins-420901" hreflang="en">NSYNC singer Lance Bass, husband Michael Turchin welcome twins</a>

The fact that Joe and Love’s delusional world of domestic bliss involves parenthood—perhaps the writers are trying to use that as a tool for the pair to release their pent-up frustration against&nbsp;each other— help.&nbsp;

 
Thank goodness,&nbsp;for introduction of Madre Linda meant the much-needed arrival of a plethora of cast members and their characters. Without them, no matter how nuanced this lead pair is, Joe and Love’s shenanigans would have, eventually, squeezed a yawn out or two from its viewers.&nbsp;

 
There is a stark contrast between the book-gobbling and relationship-disaster Joe and his diabolical wife Love with&nbsp;their climate-conscious neighbours. Sherry Conrad (Shalita Grant) is a sough-after ‘momfluencer’ and is never off her social media platforms. Yes, ‘You’ takes a blatant dig at the influencing culture—not the first to do that though—and it lands where it’s supposed to, thanks to its layered character arch and deft&nbsp;twists coupled with sharp turns. The makers ability to inculcate these elements to the genre is one for the keeps. A parallel track circling Joe and Love’s younger neighbour Theo Engler (Dylan Arnold) is THE diegesis deviation we needed and deserved. Tati Gabrielle, for your information, casts a spell as the local librarian Marienne.

<img alt="Love is what 'Love' does!" data-entity-type="file" data-entity-uuid="f7731f78-3b7d-4f35-ac87-d9e91883ce2d" src="//cdn.wionews.com/sites/default/files/inline-images/pjimage%20-%202021-10-15T203239.394.jpg" />

After all the madness and mayhem Joe (and then Love) has ensued in the last two seasons, this third installment felt unnecessary on Netflix’s part and sounded like a cash cow when they had made the announcement. We mean, was there more to be shown and seen in ‘You’, anyway? Wrong! Staying true to its aesthetic value—romanticizing ruthless love through charm and context—‘You’ reaches deep into the human psyche and&nbsp;its capabilities in life's darkest hours. ‘You’ season 3 not only lives up to the hype, but also surpasses it by a huge margin.

Also read:&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/entertainment/hollywood/news-rami-malek%E2%80%99s-snl-debut-promo-leaves-everyone-in-splits-420941" hreflang="en">Rami Malek’s SNL debut promo leaves everyone in splits</a>

Be it the pace, plot progression, enigma, and the overall abnormal vibe of the series… everything moves at an acceptable speed, thus never letting the story derail.&nbsp;

Penn Badgley and Victoria Pedretti have internalized their respective quirks and smirks in ‘You’. Together, they conjure up a psychological drama that has the full recipe—and more—for it to rank among other obsession-bound stories—for instance, ‘Orphan’. Every batting of the eyelash, twitching of the eyebrow has a hidden agenda buried underneath, you have to figure which one is what.

Just like most psychological thriller-dramas, ‘You’ goes easy on the detection aspect and the intensity of their shrewdness gets murkier—and far less believable—with every new season. But, there’s something so cynically beautiful in seeing people navigate different layers of insanity. ‘You’ scores big on make-believe.&nbsp;

Hats off to the writers for not repeating or exhuming the dead bodies from the couple’s combined past to make ‘You’ work. If originality of this degree doesn’t get appreciated, we wouldn’t be surprised if Joe comes after ‘you’. After all, he would “do anything for what he loves.” Isn’t it?

'You' is streaming on Netflix.&nbsp;

&nbsp;

<iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/xAN1ThhTWsE" title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe>

At the risk of sounding troubled, we are going to admit that we have pined for Joe Goldberg’s (Penn Badgley)—“And then... I saw you”—deep-toned, creepy voice in psychological thriller ‘You’.

At the risk of sounding troubled, we are going to admit that we have pined for Joe Goldberg’s (Penn Badgley)—“And then... I saw you”—deep-toned, creepy voice in psychological thriller ‘You’. But, first things first, Joe is no longer the slushy lover (read maniac) he once used to be: he is married to fellow hell raiser Love Quinn (Victoria Pedretti) and the eccentric duo is parents to a lovely baby boy… God bless him! As is the case with most iconic chows, Netflix’s thunderous success was, too, looking at the possibility of losing its initial sheen in this third instalment. But, the new tale of ‘You’ is a testimony to what reinvention and well-chalked-out plot twists could do to a show some may say was already standing on the brink of obscurity. Also read: Trans actor fired from Hamilton over gender-neutral dressing room: Experienced discrimination The Quinns—when we saw them last over a year ago—were looking at relocation for a fresh start with a baby on the way after the climax blind-sided us for reasons aplenty: Love, too, was a crazed killer/ stalker. Joe being Joe, he was about to kill her before Love revealed, just in time, to him that she was pregnant with their child. Next shot: the psychotic pair makes a move to the Utopian town of Madre Linda, where Joe was showing signs of full recovery—from his unrealistic interpretations of love, not Love—when a hot, new female neighbour cracks open the animal in him. Well, we should have seen that coming: after all, Joe would “do anything for love.” Isn’t it? Pretty much from its commencement, season three of ‘You’ does a well-founded job at intertwining the troubled minds of two troubled first-time parents Joe and Love. With dark humour serving as the primary undertone, this installment’s USP is their collective denial of just how twisted & dysfunctional they truly are. Interestingly, it is this very irksome nature of the narrative that takes the plot forward, and notches higher. As clinging to their subject of obsession has always been the couple’s strongest suit, they show up at the office of an oblivious marriage counsellor who assures them they’ll be alright since they’re “not murderers”. Good use of pun, we say. Also read: NSYNC singer Lance Bass, husband Michael Turchin welcome twins The fact that Joe and Love’s delusional world of domestic bliss involves parenthood—perhaps the writers are trying to use that as a tool for the pair to release their pent-up frustration against each other— help. Thank goodness, for introduction of Madre Linda meant the much-needed arrival of a plethora of cast members and their characters. Without them, no matter how nuanced this lead pair is, Joe and Love’s shenanigans would have, eventually, squeezed a yawn out or two from its viewers. There is a stark contrast between the book-gobbling and relationship-disaster Joe and his diabolical wife Love with their climate-conscious neighbours. Sherry Conrad (Shalita Grant) is a sough-after ‘momfluencer’ and is never off her social media platforms. Yes, ‘You’ takes a blatant dig at the influencing culture—not the first to do that though—and it lands where it’s supposed to, thanks to its layered character arch and deft twists coupled with sharp turns. The makers ability to inculcate these elements to the genre is one for the keeps. A parallel track circling Joe and Love’s younger neighbour Theo Engler (Dylan Arnold) is THE diegesis deviation we needed and deserved. Tati Gabrielle, for your information, casts a spell as the local librarian Marienne. After all the madness and mayhem Joe (and then Love) has ensued in the last two seasons, this third installment felt unnecessary on Netflix’s part and sounded like a cash cow when they had made the announcement. We mean, was there more to be shown and seen in ‘You’, anyway? Wrong! Staying true to its aesthetic value—romanticizing ruthless love through charm and context—‘You’ reaches deep into the human psyche and its capabilities in life's darkest hours. ‘You’ season 3 not only lives up to the hype, but also surpasses it by a huge margin. Also read: Rami Malek’s SNL debut promo leaves everyone in splits Be it the pace, plot progression, enigma, and the overall abnormal vibe of the series… everything moves at an acceptable speed, thus never letting the story derail. Penn Badgley and Victoria Pedretti have internalized their respective quirks and smirks in ‘You’. Together, they conjure up a psychological drama that has the full recipe—and more—for it to rank among other obsession-bound stories—for instance, ‘Orphan’. Every batting of the eyelash, twitching of the eyebrow has a hidden agenda buried underneath, you have to figure which one is what. Just like most psychological thriller-dramas, ‘You’ goes easy on the detection aspect and the intensity of their shrewdness gets murkier—and far less believable—with every new season. But, there’s something so cynically beautiful in seeing people navigate different layers of insanity. ‘You’ scores big on make-believe. Hats off to the writers for not repeating or exhuming the dead bodies from the couple’s combined past to make ‘You’ work. If originality of this degree doesn’t get appreciated, we wouldn’t be surprised if Joe comes after ‘you’. After all, he would “do anything for what he loves.” Isn’t it? 'You' is streaming on Netflix.

You season 3 review: The malice is oh-so-attractive! Take a bow, Penn Badgley & Victoria Pedretti

The Triumph Speed Triple has always been that one complete supernaked, loved by rides from different genres. Be it street riding, freestyle or track riding, the Speed Triple has proved its metal in all these areas of motorcycling. Now, there is an all-new Speed Triple 1200 RS that claims to raise the standards even higher. It has got a new styling, bigger engine, advanced technology and most importantly, the same Speed Triple DNA. We got to spend a few days with the 2021 Speed Triple RS and here is what we think about the new model.

2021 Triumph Speed Triple 1200 RS review

The intertwining of modern love with old-world romance is always a tricky concoction: 'Love Aaj Kal' brushed shoulders with success, while 'Love Aaj Kal 2' died a slow death. Both the films were by the same director. Out here, it is almost bizarre--in some scenes even laughable--that Punjab-bred Jaggi (Sunny Kaushal) would find intense love in London-returned Kartika (Radhika Madan) after what can be safely perceived as a night of binge drinking and meaningless sex. Do we hear a song from 'Namaste London' in the shadows? We say, we do!

 
The plotline goes as this: after a brief aankh-sekna session at their common sports club, bratty Kartika tells Jaggi off when she sees that he and his chamchas are clicking pictures of her for digital clout. That electrifying encounter pops open something in Jaggi--which was further fuelled by Gautam Kapoor's (Mohit Raina) mushy speech--and thus ensues a romantic journey that not only defies the 21st century understanding of love and relationships, but also that sweet little thing called logic.

 
'Jannat', 'Tum Mile' and a few others, one would think director Kunal Deskhmukh's got this. Sadly, that is anything but the reality of 'Shiddat'. Loud, garish dialogues that are so dated that instead of evoking a sense of nostalgia in the&nbsp;viewers, they make one want to scoot.&nbsp;

<img alt="The film is dated and boring. Period!" data-entity-type="file" data-entity-uuid="91c642fd-d3a8-4106-9f4a-8a6388412c05" src="//cdn.wionews.com/sites/default/files/inline-images/pjimage%20-%202021-10-01T110214.554.jpg" /> 
'Shiddat' breaks into random songs seemingly dedicated to flashy clothes and Sunny Kaushal and Radhika Madan's minus-zero chemistry on screen. Those intense declarations of love are reduced to fleeting moments, all thanks to lack of gravitas: both in tonation and delivery. Also, are we still doing Inception-esque dream-within-a-dream sequences in 2021?

 
The element of intrigue keeps one somewhat invested in the script before interval, but that is swiftly replaced by anxiety in the second: anxiety from having to sit through a bad film. From the producers duo (Bhushan Kumar-Dinesh Vijan) to music composers (Sachin-Jigar), everyone involved with this tale of eternal love has done love right in the past. How did they get this one so wrong? Your guess is as good as ours.&nbsp;

 
They say a script can make or break a film, and bring out the best or worst in actors. Undoubtedly, the star cast suffers from that syndrome here. Diana Penty's Ira lacks depth (and screen time) with multiple layers to her persona that barely scratch the surface. Mohit&nbsp;Raina is a government servant who needed constant attention to feel love and empathy towards people. An act he has bombed.&nbsp;

 
Likewise, Radhika Madan has worked on her body and those killer moves, but, mostly because of the script, she seems completely out of it. As her leading man, despite the stereotypical Punjab-da-puttar Jaggi that's shoved down his throat, Sunny Kaushal rises and shines in this otherwise lackluster&nbsp;film.&nbsp;

 
In the 90s, romantic tales such as 'Raja Hindustani', 'Saajan' had immortalised the concept of a suffer-in-silence lover and glamourised the complex dynamics of the rich-dad-poor-lad subtext on screen. And, maybe that was the underlying theme of&nbsp;'Shiddat'. But, with the attention span of a goldfish, will Gen Z and millennials &nbsp;even get&nbsp;past the first 15&nbsp;minutes of it? Absolutely not!

 
Radhika Madan and Sunny Kaushal wanted to join the bandwagon of all those iconic pairs in Bollywood. Nothing wrong with that. But, they are 20&nbsp;years too little.&nbsp; 
&nbsp;

<iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/x60tMH7Pz9s" title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe>

The intertwining of modern love with old-world romance is always a tricky concoction: 'Love Aaj Kal' brushed shoulders with success, while 'Love Aaj Kal 2' died a slow death.

The intertwining of modern love with old-world romance is always a tricky concoction: 'Love Aaj Kal' brushed shoulders with success, while 'Love Aaj Kal 2' died a slow death. Both the films were by the same director. Out here, it is almost bizarre--in some scenes even laughable--that Punjab-bred Jaggi (Sunny Kaushal) would find intense love in London-returned Kartika (Radhika Madan) after what can be safely perceived as a night of binge drinking and meaningless sex. Do we hear a song from 'Namaste London' in the shadows? We say, we do! The plotline goes as this: after a brief aankh-sekna session at their common sports club, bratty Kartika tells Jaggi off when she sees that he and his chamchas are clicking pictures of her for digital clout. That electrifying encounter pops open something in Jaggi--which was further fuelled by Gautam Kapoor's (Mohit Raina) mushy speech--and thus ensues a romantic journey that not only defies the 21st century understanding of love and relationships, but also that sweet little thing called logic. 'Jannat', 'Tum Mile' and a few others, one would think director Kunal Deskhmukh's got this. Sadly, that is anything but the reality of 'Shiddat'. Loud, garish dialogues that are so dated that instead of evoking a sense of nostalgia in the viewers, they make one want to scoot. 'Shiddat' breaks into random songs seemingly dedicated to flashy clothes and Sunny Kaushal and Radhika Madan's minus-zero chemistry on screen. Those intense declarations of love are reduced to fleeting moments, all thanks to lack of gravitas: both in tonation and delivery. Also, are we still doing Inception-esque dream-within-a-dream sequences in 2021? The element of intrigue keeps one somewhat invested in the script before interval, but that is swiftly replaced by anxiety in the second: anxiety from having to sit through a bad film. From the producers duo (Bhushan Kumar-Dinesh Vijan) to music composers (Sachin-Jigar), everyone involved with this tale of eternal love has done love right in the past. How did they get this one so wrong? Your guess is as good as ours. They say a script can make or break a film, and bring out the best or worst in actors. Undoubtedly, the star cast suffers from that syndrome here. Diana Penty's Ira lacks depth (and screen time) with multiple layers to her persona that barely scratch the surface. Mohit Raina is a government servant who needed constant attention to feel love and empathy towards people. An act he has bombed. Likewise, Radhika Madan has worked on her body and those killer moves, but, mostly because of the script, she seems completely out of it. As her leading man, despite the stereotypical Punjab-da-puttar Jaggi that's shoved down his throat, Sunny Kaushal rises and shines in this otherwise lackluster film. In the 90s, romantic tales such as 'Raja Hindustani', 'Saajan' had immortalised the concept of a suffer-in-silence lover and glamourised the complex dynamics of the rich-dad-poor-lad subtext on screen. And, maybe that was the underlying theme of 'Shiddat'. But, with the attention span of a goldfish, will Gen Z and millennials even get past the first 15 minutes of it? Absolutely not! Radhika Madan and Sunny Kaushal wanted to join the bandwagon of all those iconic pairs in Bollywood. Nothing wrong with that. But, they are 20 years too little.

Shiddat review: Sunny Kaushal, Radhika Madan are 20 years too late

A glammed up, post teen Britney Spears turns around with mischief in her eyes—teasing the crowd; a classic popstar move—while a sold-out stadium chants her name in unison: ‘Britney! Britney! Britney!’ before the fireworks, and of course, her killer moves take over. Turning back in time, to those early 2000s, through Erin Lee Carr’s introductory montage to ‘Britney Vs. Spears’, was one calculated gesture that guaranteed goosebumps. For Britney fans, and for those who couldn’t see her meteoric rise in the music world.&nbsp;

 
Carr’s motive in this 93-minute-long documentary is loud and clear: cut through the chase and address the elephant in the room—Jamie Spears and his systematic web of callousness and control, allegedly. Of late, reports of this Netflix offering being an exposé of sorts have been keeping the rumourville buzzing. Truth be told: barring a few customary Wikipedia-ish entries at the beginning, Carr does provide an insight into the shockingly lonely world of the biggest pop star America has ever produced. Each claim, outrageous. Each speaker substantiating that claim, appalled.&nbsp;

<img alt="The many stages of Britney Spears' life" data-entity-type="file" data-entity-uuid="3bc550d9-ce8f-486c-951e-d77cd481c7e3" src="//cdn.wionews.com/sites/default/files/inline-images/pjimage%20-%202021-09-22T115015.448.jpg" />

‘Britney Vs. Spears’ is essentially a passion project of two women who care deeply about Britney and the patriarchal hangover that has seemingly crippled most of her adult life. Lovers, lawyers, friends who helped, friends who couldn’t... everyone's jumped&nbsp;in to tell their version of what has been a regular occurrence inside the twisted world of Jamie Spears and the famous daughter he has been ripping off of millions; again, allegedly. And, some of the details are heartbreaking—like that one time Britney had to seek permission to buy toys for her kids, her monthly allowance of 8000 USD despite the forced-upon world tours and concerts, and a simple 30-minute drive being labelled as ‘buying independence’. There are questions, and then there are counter questions. Statements like “I didn’t do it,” or “show me a public document with my signature on it” were thrown in every five seconds.&nbsp;

 
Sure, <a href="https://www.wionews.com/entertainment/britney-spears-lawyer-says-dad-crossed-unfathomable-lines-by-monitoring-her-calls-416487">‘Britney Vs. Spears’</a> is combative, but not unswayed.&nbsp;

 
Call it youthful exuberance or the trauma that we now know she had endured at&nbsp;the hands of her folks, Britney did have her fair share of episodes and reported spats. Most of it is not shown in the documentary (the ‘head shave’ is missing, too), including the recent accusation by her staffers, however untrue.&nbsp;

 
Having said that, Carr and a certain journalist from a musically inclined magazine do unearth damning evidence against the outgoing conservator—hopefully—and just for that, kudos!&nbsp;

 
To perform 248 shows a year—adding some more to the calendar, not by choice, of course!—one has to be pretty incredible at what they do. But, then again, Britney Spears is no ordinary girl. While watching this slightly tainted yet audacious documentary—with strong feminist undertones—a famous quote by Jim Carrey comes&nbsp;to mind, “I think everybody should get rich and famous and do everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that it's not the answer.” This real-life saga is a classic instance of that belief.&nbsp;

'Britney Vs. Spears' is now streaming on Netflix.&nbsp;

&nbsp;

<iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/SgFDWK_sf9c" title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe>

A glammed up, post teen Britney Spears turns around with mischief in her eyes—teasing the crowd; a classic popstar move—while a sold-out stadium chants her name in unison: ‘Britney!

A glammed up, post teen Britney Spears turns around with mischief in her eyes—teasing the crowd; a classic popstar move—while a sold-out stadium chants her name in unison: ‘Britney! Britney! Britney!’ before the fireworks, and of course, her killer moves take over. Turning back in time, to those early 2000s, through Erin Lee Carr’s introductory montage to ‘Britney Vs. Spears’, was one calculated gesture that guaranteed goosebumps. For Britney fans, and for those who couldn’t see her meteoric rise in the music world. Carr’s motive in this 93-minute-long documentary is loud and clear: cut through the chase and address the elephant in the room—Jamie Spears and his systematic web of callousness and control, allegedly. Of late, reports of this Netflix offering being an exposé of sorts have been keeping the rumourville buzzing. Truth be told: barring a few customary Wikipedia-ish entries at the beginning, Carr does provide an insight into the shockingly lonely world of the biggest pop star America has ever produced. Each claim, outrageous. Each speaker substantiating that claim, appalled. ‘Britney Vs. Spears’ is essentially a passion project of two women who care deeply about Britney and the patriarchal hangover that has seemingly crippled most of her adult life. Lovers, lawyers, friends who helped, friends who couldn’t... everyone's jumped in to tell their version of what has been a regular occurrence inside the twisted world of Jamie Spears and the famous daughter he has been ripping off of millions; again, allegedly. And, some of the details are heartbreaking—like that one time Britney had to seek permission to buy toys for her kids, her monthly allowance of 8000 USD despite the forced-upon world tours and concerts, and a simple 30-minute drive being labelled as ‘buying independence’. There are questions, and then there are counter questions. Statements like “I didn’t do it,” or “show me a public document with my signature on it” were thrown in every five seconds. Sure, ‘Britney Vs. Spears’ is combative, but not unswayed. Call it youthful exuberance or the trauma that we now know she had endured at the hands of her folks, Britney did have her fair share of episodes and reported spats. Most of it is not shown in the documentary (the ‘head shave’ is missing, too), including the recent accusation by her staffers, however untrue. Having said that, Carr and a certain journalist from a musically inclined magazine do unearth damning evidence against the outgoing conservator—hopefully—and just for that, kudos! To perform 248 shows a year—adding some more to the calendar, not by choice, of course!—one has to be pretty incredible at what they do. But, then again, Britney Spears is no ordinary girl. While watching this slightly tainted yet audacious documentary—with strong feminist undertones—a famous quote by Jim Carrey comes to mind, “I think everybody should get rich and famous and do everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that it's not the answer.” This real-life saga is a classic instance of that belief. 'Britney Vs. Spears' is now streaming on Netflix.

Britney Vs Spears review: A lonely princess in her hellish castle

Clearly, director Hagai Levi wanted to spare no time in actually 're-imagining' this re-told, miniseries version of 1973-released Ingmar Bergman classic, 'Scenes From A Marriage'. After the warm-up of an introductory episode, Levi breaks free from Bergman chain of events as shown through his eyes, in his episode two of the series many decades ago.&nbsp;

 
Here, unlike its predecessor, Levi doesn't give us a crash course on who Mira and Jonathan were as individuals--all we know is that they are a couple only on paper.&nbsp;

 
An otherwise put together Mira confesses to Jonathan that she has been having an affair with a man for a while now, "I am in love with someone," she tells. Jonathan, blind-sided by this piece of information, doesn't know how to process this harsh truth of life. To him, his wife seeking solace in the arms of another man is not an indication of how far they have gone in their respective journeys as humans, but only a knowledge&nbsp;'he doesn't know what to do with.'&nbsp;

Also read:&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/entertainment/hollywood/news-scenes-from-a-marriage-ep-1-review-jessica-chastain--oscar-isaac-infuse-modern-easy-into-this-old-saga-413109">Scenes From A Marriage EP 1 review: Jessica Chastain &amp; Oscar Isaac infuse 'modern easy' into this old saga</a>

Oscar Isaac's Jonathan is a repressed individual who, even when his wife he most certainly still loves, walks out the door, doesn't scream out in pain. Instead, chooses to purse his lips together and bite. Till it hurts. Mira's moment of truth may have been the highlight of this&nbsp;episode and the shock value Levi obviously wanted to inculcate, but she is a woman of stead habits, too. She knows with all her might that the relationship is hanging by a thread, yet, before exhibiting her first-ever act of bravery--of leaving the man she bore a kid with--Mira has to wrestle with her demons: "If I don’t leave now, I might never."

<img alt="Oscar Isaac and Jessica Chastain bring their A game to the series" data-entity-type="file" data-entity-uuid="e4fbbbc7-a45c-43b5-8c21-082ab212ba9d" src="//cdn.wionews.com/sites/default/files/inline-images/pjimage%20-%202021-09-14T215147.205_0.jpg" /> 
The juxtaposing of these similar-yet-different characters may not score high on the barometer for originality (Marriage Story/ Netflix) but the cracks through which this couple falls, and continues to descend, makes this modernised version truly modern--both in tone and treatment.

Also read:&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/entertainment/hollywood/news-the-starling-review-grief-knows-not-what-grief-does-415907">The Starling review: Grief knows not what grief does</a>

 
Aptly titled 'The Art of Sweeping Things Under the Rug' (bold approach, told you!), the episode yet again starts with a real-life, behind-the-scenes setting with Isaac plugging in his earphones before we are ushered into the devastation that he is about to suffer. There are no other characters that are introduced apart from these two. But, who cares? Oscar Isaac and Jessica Chastain are so&nbsp;taut as Jonathan and Mira that the monotony of each scene does not squish the purity of the emotions felt. If anything, they act as elevators.&nbsp;

 
'Scenes From A Marriage' is now streaming on Disney + Hotstar.&nbsp;

<iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/mRuVWHnQlV8" title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe>

Clearly, director Hagai Levi wanted to spare no time in actually 're-imagining' this re-told, miniseries version of 1973-released Ingmar Bergman classic, 'Scenes From A Marriage'.

Clearly, director Hagai Levi wanted to spare no time in actually 're-imagining' this re-told, miniseries version of 1973-released Ingmar Bergman classic, 'Scenes From A Marriage'. After the warm-up of an introductory episode, Levi breaks free from Bergman chain of events as shown through his eyes, in his episode two of the series many decades ago. Here, unlike its predecessor, Levi doesn't give us a crash course on who Mira and Jonathan were as individuals--all we know is that they are a couple only on paper. An otherwise put together Mira confesses to Jonathan that she has been having an affair with a man for a while now, "I am in love with someone," she tells. Jonathan, blind-sided by this piece of information, doesn't know how to process this harsh truth of life. To him, his wife seeking solace in the arms of another man is not an indication of how far they have gone in their respective journeys as humans, but only a knowledge 'he doesn't know what to do with.' Also read: Scenes From A Marriage EP 1 review: Jessica Chastain & Oscar Isaac infuse 'modern easy' into this old saga Oscar Isaac's Jonathan is a repressed individual who, even when his wife he most certainly still loves, walks out the door, doesn't scream out in pain. Instead, chooses to purse his lips together and bite. Till it hurts. Mira's moment of truth may have been the highlight of this episode and the shock value Levi obviously wanted to inculcate, but she is a woman of stead habits, too. She knows with all her might that the relationship is hanging by a thread, yet, before exhibiting her first-ever act of bravery--of leaving the man she bore a kid with--Mira has to wrestle with her demons: "If I don’t leave now, I might never." The juxtaposing of these similar-yet-different characters may not score high on the barometer for originality (Marriage Story/ Netflix) but the cracks through which this couple falls, and continues to descend, makes this modernised version truly modern--both in tone and treatment. Also read: The Starling review: Grief knows not what grief does Aptly titled 'The Art of Sweeping Things Under the Rug' (bold approach, told you!), the episode yet again starts with a real-life, behind-the-scenes setting with Isaac plugging in his earphones before we are ushered into the devastation that he is about to suffer. There are no other characters that are introduced apart from these two. But, who cares? Oscar Isaac and Jessica Chastain are so taut as Jonathan and Mira that the monotony of each scene does not squish the purity of the emotions felt. If anything, they act as elevators. 'Scenes From A Marriage' is now streaming on Disney + Hotstar.

Scenes From A Marriage EP 2 review: Living is not the same as existing

Science-fiction author Arthur Clarke once decreed that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. At the core of “Foundation,” the Apple TV+ series based on the novels of Isaac Asimov, is a similar idea: that any sufficiently advanced math is indistinguishable from prophecy.

 
But in this ambitious, overstuffed epic, that intriguing idea often gets lost in space. Like Trantor, the imperial capital in “Foundation” whose surface is buried beneath human-made layers, the story’s core ends up enveloped in levels upon levels of machinery.

 
The instigating figure remains the same as in the saga that Asimov began spinning in the 1940s: Hari Seldon (Jared Harris), a “psychohistorian” who purports to be able to predict the future by number-crunching the data on mass populations. (He is the Nate Silver of space.) When his calculations determine that the ruling empire will collapse, the bearer of bad news and his followers are exiled to a planet in the dusty, cheap seats of the galaxy, where they work on a grand plan to shape humanity’s fate and shorten the coming era of chaos.

 
At a time when “follow the science” has become a political statement, “Foundation” can play like a none-too-subtle commentary. Hari’s protege, Gaal Dornick (Lou Llobell), comes from a world whose leaders condemn scientists as heretics and refuse to acknowledge the rising of the oceans. And Harris plays the visionary with a doomed-prophet rectitude that recalls his turn as a Soviet scientist in “Chernobyl.”

 
This echoes the Asimov books’ atom-age belief in the power of reason over superstition. But the “Foundation” showrunner David Goyer is also willing to depart from the source material. Asimov’s galaxy was largely a boys club, for instance, so “Foundation” recasts key roles with women, including Gaal — as close to a central figure as the series has, although she is sidelined in the middle of the season — and Salvor Hardin (Leah Harvey), a leader of the Foundation’s remote colony.

 
Elsewhere, the series adds or shuffles story elements to create the kind of baroque intrigues viewers are used to from the likes of “Game of Thrones.” The role of the emperor is expanded — to be precise, it is tripled. In the empire’s “genetic dynasty,” Emperor Cleon (conveniently an anagram for “clone”) has been replicated for centuries in three persons: young Brother Dawn, middle-aged Brother Day and elderly Brother Dusk.

 
Every generation, the eldest member of this living Sphinx riddle is ceremonially (and lethally) retired, a fresh baby emperor is uncorked from the cloning vat, Dawn is promoted to Day and Day to Dusk. (I told you there would be math.)

 
Lee Pace, sheathed in electric-blue gladiator armor, plays a succession of Brother Days. His matinee-villain hauteur risks ridiculousness — say, when having an underling exploded like Creosote in “Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life” — but he energizes an often-stilted production.

 
In a way, the genetic dynasty and the Foundation are two solutions to the same dilemma: How do you achieve ambitions that take longer to realize than a human life span? For Cleon, the answer is to live serially. For Hari, it is to craft a plan that will outlive him, in part by creating a quasimessianic myth around himself. (Dealing with mortality is also the project of religion, yet another story thread in the series.)

 
But this is also the challenge of “Foundation” itself. Its premise and Asimov’s blueprint suggest a story that needs to unfold over centuries, shuffling cast members in and out, focusing more on larger systems of society than on individuals. Serial TV, on the other hand, relies on audiences connecting to specific characters over the long haul. 
The cloning device is one way to keep characters around over the ages; there are more spoilery contrivances, too. Other changes Goyer makes serve to translate Asimov’s talky novels of ideas into a pageant of explosions and special effects.

 
For instance, much of the 10-episode first season gets bogged down in an extended terrorism and revenge story that makes Salvor into an action hero. The thriller sequences — involving an enemy straight out of the Klingon-Dothraki warrior-society school — most resemble what viewers expect from a sci-fi epic. And I found myself increasingly tuning them out the longer “Foundation” went on.

 
The images are certainly arresting. There are spacecraft with interiors like art installations; alien worlds with beringed and bemooned skyscapes; and some sort of mysterious giant lozenge that floats near the Foundation camp like a portentous piñata, promising to burst open and spill forth plot twists and dei ex machina.

 
But there are things you can’t digitize: a surprise, a genuine laugh, the breath of creative life. Beneath the gunplay and computer-generated imagery, there’s a much weirder show struggling to get out, about statistics and space popes, decadent clone emperors and millennia-old robots.

 
OK, there is only one robot, but “Foundation” makes her count. As the undying aide to a long line of emperors, Demerzel (the name will ring a bell for hard-core Asimov fans), Finnish actress Laura Birn gives an eccentric performance that is both disconcertingly mechanical and the most vulnerably human of the series.

 
This and some of the odder inventions of “Foundation” reminded me stylistically of last year’s “Raised by Wolves,” the HBO Max drama of obsessive android maternal love. It was hardly the best show of 2020, but it was so committed to its passion, so willing to cut open a vein and bleed weird robot milk, that I was held rapt even by its worst moments.

 
“Foundation” is more consistent than “Wolves,” but less magnetic because of its concessions to sci-fi expectations. It could have been better, if only, like Hari Seldon’s disciples, it had faith in the plan.

Science-fiction author Arthur Clarke once decreed that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. At the core of “Foundation,” the Apple TV+ series based on the novels of Isaac Asimov, is a similar idea: that any sufficiently advanced math is indistinguishable from prophecy.

Science-fiction author Arthur Clarke once decreed that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. At the core of “Foundation,” the Apple TV+ series based on the novels of Isaac Asimov, is a similar idea: that any sufficiently advanced math is indistinguishable from prophecy. But in this ambitious, overstuffed epic, that intriguing idea often gets lost in space. Like Trantor, the imperial capital in “Foundation” whose surface is buried beneath human-made layers, the story’s core ends up enveloped in levels upon levels of machinery. The instigating figure remains the same as in the saga that Asimov began spinning in the 1940s: Hari Seldon (Jared Harris), a “psychohistorian” who purports to be able to predict the future by number-crunching the data on mass populations. (He is the Nate Silver of space.) When his calculations determine that the ruling empire will collapse, the bearer of bad news and his followers are exiled to a planet in the dusty, cheap seats of the galaxy, where they work on a grand plan to shape humanity’s fate and shorten the coming era of chaos. At a time when “follow the science” has become a political statement, “Foundation” can play like a none-too-subtle commentary. Hari’s protege, Gaal Dornick (Lou Llobell), comes from a world whose leaders condemn scientists as heretics and refuse to acknowledge the rising of the oceans. And Harris plays the visionary with a doomed-prophet rectitude that recalls his turn as a Soviet scientist in “Chernobyl.” This echoes the Asimov books’ atom-age belief in the power of reason over superstition. But the “Foundation” showrunner David Goyer is also willing to depart from the source material. Asimov’s galaxy was largely a boys club, for instance, so “Foundation” recasts key roles with women, including Gaal — as close to a central figure as the series has, although she is sidelined in the middle of the season — and Salvor Hardin (Leah Harvey), a leader of the Foundation’s remote colony. Elsewhere, the series adds or shuffles story elements to create the kind of baroque intrigues viewers are used to from the likes of “Game of Thrones.” The role of the emperor is expanded — to be precise, it is tripled. In the empire’s “genetic dynasty,” Emperor Cleon (conveniently an anagram for “clone”) has been replicated for centuries in three persons: young Brother Dawn, middle-aged Brother Day and elderly Brother Dusk. Every generation, the eldest member of this living Sphinx riddle is ceremonially (and lethally) retired, a fresh baby emperor is uncorked from the cloning vat, Dawn is promoted to Day and Day to Dusk. (I told you there would be math.) Lee Pace, sheathed in electric-blue gladiator armor, plays a succession of Brother Days. His matinee-villain hauteur risks ridiculousness — say, when having an underling exploded like Creosote in “Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life” — but he energizes an often-stilted production. In a way, the genetic dynasty and the Foundation are two solutions to the same dilemma: How do you achieve ambitions that take longer to realize than a human life span? For Cleon, the answer is to live serially. For Hari, it is to craft a plan that will outlive him, in part by creating a quasimessianic myth around himself. (Dealing with mortality is also the project of religion, yet another story thread in the series.) But this is also the challenge of “Foundation” itself. Its premise and Asimov’s blueprint suggest a story that needs to unfold over centuries, shuffling cast members in and out, focusing more on larger systems of society than on individuals. Serial TV, on the other hand, relies on audiences connecting to specific characters over the long haul. The cloning device is one way to keep characters around over the ages; there are more spoilery contrivances, too. Other changes Goyer makes serve to translate Asimov’s talky novels of ideas into a pageant of explosions and special effects. For instance, much of the 10-episode first season gets bogged down in an extended terrorism and revenge story that makes Salvor into an action hero. The thriller sequences — involving an enemy straight out of the Klingon-Dothraki warrior-society school — most resemble what viewers expect from a sci-fi epic. And I found myself increasingly tuning them out the longer “Foundation” went on. The images are certainly arresting. There are spacecraft with interiors like art installations; alien worlds with beringed and bemooned skyscapes; and some sort of mysterious giant lozenge that floats near the Foundation camp like a portentous piñata, promising to burst open and spill forth plot twists and dei ex machina. But there are things you can’t digitize: a surprise, a genuine laugh, the breath of creative life. Beneath the gunplay and computer-generated imagery, there’s a much weirder show struggling to get out, about statistics and space popes, decadent clone emperors and millennia-old robots. OK, there is only one robot, but “Foundation” makes her count. As the undying aide to a long line of emperors, Demerzel (the name will ring a bell for hard-core Asimov fans), Finnish actress Laura Birn gives an eccentric performance that is both disconcertingly mechanical and the most vulnerably human of the series. This and some of the odder inventions of “Foundation” reminded me stylistically of last year’s “Raised by Wolves,” the HBO Max drama of obsessive android maternal love. It was hardly the best show of 2020, but it was so committed to its passion, so willing to cut open a vein and bleed weird robot milk, that I was held rapt even by its worst moments. “Foundation” is more consistent than “Wolves,” but less magnetic because of its concessions to sci-fi expectations. It could have been better, if only, like Hari Seldon’s disciples, it had faith in the plan.

Review: The math of ‘Foundation’ doesn’t add up

Popular opinion--Melissa McCarthy, Tiffany Haddish, Amy Schumer can dissect any piece of insipid writing and turn it/them into an absolute comedy gold, if they choose to, that is. So this venturing into drama seemed like one that an otherwise stellar Melissa McCarthy could pull off--like Jennifer Aniston had in 'Cake', or even Vanessa Kirkby in 'Pieces of a Woman', both broken beyond repair over loss of children.&nbsp;

<img alt="Melissa McCarthy's a mother who has lost her infant daughter in the movie" data-entity-type="file" data-entity-uuid="977e8f79-0e3a-4d87-a690-9239fc7f43a1" src="//cdn.wionews.com/sites/default/files/inline-images/pjimage%20-%202021-09-25T180202.902.jpg" /> 
But, this supermarket employee has other battles to fight. Just outside, in the backyard of her pretty home, Lily (Melissa McCarthy)'s wrestling with a stubborn starling bird that refuses to leave the property. An uninspiring and far-too-easy metaphor for Lily's trauma and the ideation that grief is never a straight line. Tsk, tsk!

 
If the aloof yet social wife buries the heaviness of her heart in the mundanity of her regular life, the husband seems to be spiraling: Jack (Chris O’Dowd) is parked at a psychiatric facility. Both McCarthy and O'Dowd, as a middle-aged couple dissociated by tragedy, evince what an everyman with meagre means would do in the face of adversity.

Also read:&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/entertainment/lifestyle/news-wion-exclusive-manike-mage-hithe-singer-yohani-in-bollywood-i-would-love-to-work-with-ar-rahman-415805">WION exclusive: 'Manike Mage Hithe' singer Yohani: In Bollywood, I would love to work with A.R. Rahman</a>

Theodore Melfi (Hidden Figures), the director, however, squeezes the broad spectrum of love and loss into his hurried, one-hour-45-minutes-long version of events we all are now made to call 'The Starling'.&nbsp;

<img alt="McCarthy and O'Dowd are a troubled yet affable couple in 'The Starling'" data-entity-type="file" data-entity-uuid="27a358da-8795-433c-9d61-39125f4c0034" src="//cdn.wionews.com/sites/default/files/inline-images/pjimage%20-%202021-09-25T180120.565.jpg" /> 
The film neither has the splintering of one's moral compass at its heart like 'Cake'--an obscure like 'The Starling'--nor does it have the raw, rugged anger of a mother like Kirkby's in 'Pieces of a Woman'. It, in fact, didn't even echo the subtleties of Casey Affleck's big-league Oscar entry 'Manchester By The Sea'. Frankly, 'The Starling' is loud and obnoxious: about life, death, therapists, metaphors, and similes.&nbsp;

 
A work-in-progress couple, a couthie&nbsp;McCarthy... 'The Starling' could have been a cathartic experience of a drama. Instead, it is just an introductory guidebook to&nbsp;what personal loss feels like to some.

The Starling is now streaming on Netflix.&nbsp;

Popular opinion--Melissa McCarthy, Tiffany Haddish, Amy Schumer can dissect any piece of insipid writing and turn it/them into an absolute comedy gold, if they choose to, that is.

Popular opinion--Melissa McCarthy, Tiffany Haddish, Amy Schumer can dissect any piece of insipid writing and turn it/them into an absolute comedy gold, if they choose to, that is. So this venturing into drama seemed like one that an otherwise stellar Melissa McCarthy could pull off--like Jennifer Aniston had in 'Cake', or even Vanessa Kirkby in 'Pieces of a Woman', both broken beyond repair over loss of children. But, this supermarket employee has other battles to fight. Just outside, in the backyard of her pretty home, Lily (Melissa McCarthy)'s wrestling with a stubborn starling bird that refuses to leave the property. An uninspiring and far-too-easy metaphor for Lily's trauma and the ideation that grief is never a straight line. Tsk, tsk! If the aloof yet social wife buries the heaviness of her heart in the mundanity of her regular life, the husband seems to be spiraling: Jack (Chris O’Dowd) is parked at a psychiatric facility. Both McCarthy and O'Dowd, as a middle-aged couple dissociated by tragedy, evince what an everyman with meagre means would do in the face of adversity. Also read: WION exclusive: 'Manike Mage Hithe' singer Yohani: In Bollywood, I would love to work with A.R. Rahman Theodore Melfi (Hidden Figures), the director, however, squeezes the broad spectrum of love and loss into his hurried, one-hour-45-minutes-long version of events we all are now made to call 'The Starling'. The film neither has the splintering of one's moral compass at its heart like 'Cake'--an obscure like 'The Starling'--nor does it have the raw, rugged anger of a mother like Kirkby's in 'Pieces of a Woman'. It, in fact, didn't even echo the subtleties of Casey Affleck's big-league Oscar entry 'Manchester By The Sea'. Frankly, 'The Starling' is loud and obnoxious: about life, death, therapists, metaphors, and similes. A work-in-progress couple, a couthie McCarthy... 'The Starling' could have been a cathartic experience of a drama. Instead, it is just an introductory guidebook to what personal loss feels like to some. The Starling is now streaming on Netflix.

The Starling review: Grief knows not what grief does

If you were watching television in America in the 1970s and ’80s — the old three-network days that now seem as distant as the horse-and-buggy era — you could hardly miss Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker. Upbeat evangelists with the Upper Midwest in their voices, they helped expand Christian broadcasting from a niche into an empire via their PTL satellite network.

 
Even if you missed them in their prime, you couldn’t avoid the spectacle of their downfall — an end-of-the-'80s tabloid scandal involving adultery, hypocrisy and financial shenanigans. In 1989, Jim Bakker was convicted of fraud and sentenced to federal prison. His wife (who had divorced him a few years later) was razzed by talk-show hosts and stand-up comedians across the land for her gaudy makeup, her big hair and her full-throated singing voice. 
“The Eyes of Tammy Faye,” directed by Michael Showalter from a script by Abe Sylvia, tells this story dutifully, following the familiar showbiz biopic sequence of rise, ruin and redemption. We start out in Eisenhower-era Minnesota, where Tammy Faye (<a href="https://www.wionews.com/entertainment/hollywood/news-toronto-film-festival-jessica-chastain-benedict-cumberbatch-win-big-complete-winners-list-414108">Jessica Chastain</a>) grows up in the shadow of a pious, unsmiling mother (Cherry Jones). When she meets Jim Bakker (<a href="https://www.wionews.com/entertainment/hollywood/news-andrew-garfield-on-mothers-death-everything-has-changed-nothing-can-prepare-you-for-that-kind-of-cataclysm-413778">Andrew Garfield</a>) at Bible college, it seems like a providential match. 
Jim preaches a version of the prosperity gospel, insisting to his flock that God wants them to be rich. This optimism and the worldly ambition that comes with it appeal to Tammy. A natural performer onstage (and later, on camera), she brings maternal warmth, wholesome sex appeal and relentless good cheer to their itinerant ministry. And puppets, too.

 
Showalter’s film shares its title and its plot with a 2000 documentary by Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato, and also sympathy for its subject. Tammy Faye (who died in 2007) may have been an over-the-top spendthrift and an exhausting media personality, but she was also, these movies insist, sincere in her faith and generous in her view of humanity. Unlike the Revs. Jerry Falwell (Vincent D’Onofrio) and Pat Robertson (Gabriel Olds), powerful allies of her husband, she resisted mixing religion and politics, and defied their anti-feminist, anti-gay, culture-war ideology. 
The documentary version, which includes voice-over narration by RuPaul, understands Tammy Faye as a camp figure, earning both sympathy and ridicule, and emerging with a measure of dignity intact. Showalter and his cast lack the style and the nerve to convey either the wildness of the character and her milieu or the pathos of her story.

&nbsp;

The narrative beats — Tammy Faye’s temptation (in the presence of a hunky record producer played by Mark Wystrach), Jim’s betrayal, Falwell’s treachery — seem almost generic. The performances, while hardly subtle, feel smaller than life. Garfield mugs and emotes with sketch-comedy abandon, and while Chastain tries for more depth and nuance, she is trapped by a literal-minded script and overwhelmed by hair, makeup and garish period costumes. 
The Bakkers were many things to many people: appalling, inspiring, laughable, sad. This movie succeeds in making them dull.

If you were watching television in America in the 1970s and ’80s — the old three-network days that now seem as distant as the horse-and-buggy era — you could hardly miss Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker.

If you were watching television in America in the 1970s and ’80s — the old three-network days that now seem as distant as the horse-and-buggy era — you could hardly miss Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker. Upbeat evangelists with the Upper Midwest in their voices, they helped expand Christian broadcasting from a niche into an empire via their PTL satellite network. Even if you missed them in their prime, you couldn’t avoid the spectacle of their downfall — an end-of-the-'80s tabloid scandal involving adultery, hypocrisy and financial shenanigans. In 1989, Jim Bakker was convicted of fraud and sentenced to federal prison. His wife (who had divorced him a few years later) was razzed by talk-show hosts and stand-up comedians across the land for her gaudy makeup, her big hair and her full-throated singing voice. “The Eyes of Tammy Faye,” directed by Michael Showalter from a script by Abe Sylvia, tells this story dutifully, following the familiar showbiz biopic sequence of rise, ruin and redemption. We start out in Eisenhower-era Minnesota, where Tammy Faye (Jessica Chastain) grows up in the shadow of a pious, unsmiling mother (Cherry Jones). When she meets Jim Bakker (Andrew Garfield) at Bible college, it seems like a providential match. Jim preaches a version of the prosperity gospel, insisting to his flock that God wants them to be rich. This optimism and the worldly ambition that comes with it appeal to Tammy. A natural performer onstage (and later, on camera), she brings maternal warmth, wholesome sex appeal and relentless good cheer to their itinerant ministry. And puppets, too. Showalter’s film shares its title and its plot with a 2000 documentary by Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato, and also sympathy for its subject. Tammy Faye (who died in 2007) may have been an over-the-top spendthrift and an exhausting media personality, but she was also, these movies insist, sincere in her faith and generous in her view of humanity. Unlike the Revs. Jerry Falwell (Vincent D’Onofrio) and Pat Robertson (Gabriel Olds), powerful allies of her husband, she resisted mixing religion and politics, and defied their anti-feminist, anti-gay, culture-war ideology. The documentary version, which includes voice-over narration by RuPaul, understands Tammy Faye as a camp figure, earning both sympathy and ridicule, and emerging with a measure of dignity intact. Showalter and his cast lack the style and the nerve to convey either the wildness of the character and her milieu or the pathos of her story. The narrative beats — Tammy Faye’s temptation (in the presence of a hunky record producer played by Mark Wystrach), Jim’s betrayal, Falwell’s treachery — seem almost generic. The performances, while hardly subtle, feel smaller than life. Garfield mugs and emotes with sketch-comedy abandon, and while Chastain tries for more depth and nuance, she is trapped by a literal-minded script and overwhelmed by hair, makeup and garish period costumes. The Bakkers were many things to many people: appalling, inspiring, laughable, sad. This movie succeeds in making them dull.

‘The Eyes of Tammy Faye’ Review: Fall from grace

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