NewYork Magazine on “How a Nepo Baby Is Born”

How a Nepo Baby Is Born

How a Nepo Baby Is Born Hollywood has always loved the children of famous people. In 2022, the internet reduced them to two little words.

In 2022, the internet uncovered a vast conspiracy: Hollywood was run on an invisible network of family ties — and everybody was in on it! Everyone is someone’s kid, but it was as if everybody were somebody’s kid. Euphoria, the buzziest show on television, was created by the son of a major director and co-starred the daughter of another. Actress Maya Hawke was not only born to two famous parents but looked like them, too. Half of Brooklyn’s indie artists had dads with IMDb pages. Even Succession’s Cousin Greg turned out to be the son of one of the guys who designed the Rolling Stones’ lips logo. Aghast, content creators got to work. An unwieldy phrase — “the child of a celebrity” — was reduced to a catchy buzzword: nepo baby. TikTokers produced multipart series about nepo babies who resembled their famous parents, exposés on people you didn’t know were nepo babies (everyone knew), and PSAs urging celebrity parents to roast their nepo babies “to keep them humble.”

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What powers the Boycott Bollywood movement and why is it working : By Sharmi Adhikary

Sharmi Adhikary

Link

Though Karan Malhotra’s period action drama Shamshera depicted the story of a dacoit tribe and their fight for independence against the British, the Ranbir Kapoor and Sanjay Dutt starrer tanked massively. This failure was symptomatic of the audience’s ire at the rabid anti-Hindu stance in the script. The hero is shown as an atheist, while the villain sports the shikha and the elaborate tilak worn by upper-caste Brahmins. Since soldiers recruited by the colonizers were not encouraged to wear their religion so prominently on their uniform sleeves, this forced maligning of Hindu iconography was clearly directed at expressing Hinduphobia. The audience, Yash Raj Films should have realised by now, would not be duped so easily anymore.

On the ‘my moments’ with THE Bachchan…(part 3) by An Jo – Updated

Part 3
Continuing from the closing moments of the ‘70s, extending onto the late‘80s, time for the 48 year old AB to compete with the ‘young Khan’ blood: the innocent-looking Aamir, the go-getter/ham-expert SRK, the non-actor but damn good-looker/vada-pav seeker Salim Khan’s son.

The Cult of the Angry Young Man

The Cult of the Angry Young Man

The rebel with hope has reflected his audience’s mind
Ranjani Mazumdar
AMITABH BACHCHAN turns 80 on October 11, 2022. Not surprisingly, there is a clamour to look back at what has clearly been a stellar career with many re­markable highs and some significant lows. As the most active actor and star of his generation, Bach­chan has continued to be a major media personality even today. His journey with cinema has remained dynamic since he kept reinventing himself to suit the demands and challenges of technological transformations that started in the 1990s. Bachchan is an active social media user, a popular host of the reality show Kaun Banega Crorepati, a character actor in a number of films, and holds on to a legacy that continues to grow, with many actors citing his 1970s and 1980s persona as a pivotal moment in influencing their own work and desire to become actors. With the Bachchan persona of that time, Bombay cinema expanded its ubiquitous presence in everyday life; his posters and billboards carried a new facial physiognomy of anger and an action-oriented body language available in a host of posters of films like Zanjeer, Deewaar, Trishul, Kaala Patthar, Don and Kaalia, among others. It was hard to miss Bachchan’s larger-than-life presence as audiences lined up outside theatres to experience the magic of this lanky star.

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Bollywood 1947-2022

Link – complete article – Each era details at website

They are the wizards turning words, props, light and shadow into worlds we can’t forget. But how does the timelessness of storytelling adapt to new technology, to a nation that is young and vibrant and reinventing itself?

What spells do the wizards choose to cast when the audience is looking up at the screen and hoping, hungering, for something new? These were questions as vital in 1947 as they are today.

Father’s Day 2022

How Delite, among Delhi’s first cinemas in Independent India

How Delite, among Delhi’s first cinemas in Independent India

Adrija Roychowdhury
A plot was purchased in an auction by the Delhi Improvement Trust, for an exorbitant Rs 6 lakh, to make way for the hall with about 1,100 seats.

Piyush Raizada (61) faintly recollected his father, Brij Mohan Lal Raizada, narrating a fond experience of a cinema in Calcutta, that convinced him of entering a similar business. Raizada was involved in an automobile business at that time and lived in Sitaram Bazar inside the Walled City.

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How Dynasties Rule Bollywood

How Dynasties Rule Bollywood
A marriage brings out the clan power in the Hindi film industry.
Kaveree Bamzai

IN BOLLYWOOD, FAMILIES HAVE ALWAYS been the first port of call and also the last resort. When Sony Pictures Entertainment wanted to take on the might of Shah Rukh Khan at the height of his popularity in 2007, they put their money on Sanjay Leela Bhansali, who went back to two of Bollywood’s oldest families for inspiration, casting Ranbir Kapoor, a fourth-generation actor, and Sonam Kapoor, a second-generation actor, in Saawariya. The two families were connected informally, as indeed most dynasties in Bollywood are, through Sonam’s grandfather Surinder Kapoor who was secretary to actor Geeta Bali, who was married to Ranbir’s grand-uncle, beloved ’60s swinging star Shammi Kapoor.

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An Jo on The Power of the Dog

Spoilers ahead

Link
There’s a scene in ‘The Power of the Dog’ where Rose (Kirsten Dunst) mentions as a casual comment to Peter Gordon (Kodi Smit Mc-Phee), her son, and I paraphrase, ‘Oh, don’t be afraid of Phil; he is but just a man.’ And the next frame that Jane Campion the director shifts to, is that of Phil Burbank (Benedict Cumberbatch), walking as the greatest alpha male the world has ever created—in his mind—to castrate a farm animal, without gloves, and with a rousing background score that raises in crescendo to match the walk of this man as the man. The year is 1925: And this scene epitomizes how fantastically Jane Campion has managed to capture Thomas Savages’ written words and weave them into magical cinema, just as Phil manages to weave those ropes, tie those ‘knots’ from animal hides, analogous to his character as shown to the audience.

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Cinema’s Biggest Mythmaker

Cinema’s Biggest Mythmaker

There is a moment in the ₹ 550-crore epic, RRR, when Komaram Bheem promises Seetha that he will bring Ram to her. Only someone as steeped in the Indian storytelling tradition as Koduri Srisaila Sri (SS) Rajamouli can dare to make the Ramayana meet the Mahabharata because in Bheem’s character they do. Born of Vayu, both Bheem and Hanuman are spiritual brothers, both with gargantuan appetites for feasting and fealty.

The Hyderabad-based Rajamouli, 49, has many such moments plucked from history, mythology and fiction for his latest heart-pounding blockbuster, his 12th movie, RRR. Set in the 1920s, it is based on two subaltern superheroes, Komaram Bheem, a Gond tribal who fought the Nizam, and Alluri Sitarama Raju who battled the British. Adding some fantasy to the real story, he has conjured up a magical spectacle, studded with flying, flaming motorcycles that can reduce a palace to ashes; with burning arrows that pierce thick forests to find their targets; guns that fire with unerring precision; and raging tigers that are mauled by men. Resting elegantly.
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How MM Keeravani Made A Name For Himself

How MM Keeravani Made A Name For Himself

Also known as MM Kreem, the Telugu composer behind classic Hindi film songs from the 90s and 2000s remained on the fringes for a long time – until Baahubali resurrected his legacy.

For Hindi film music listeners, in the late 90s, early 2000s MM Kreem was a name without a face, the mystery composer behind such hits as ‘Tu Mile Dil Khile’, ‘Gali Mein Chand’ and ‘Jaadu Hai Nasha’. We didn’t know who he was but we loved the songs. Today it seems absurd how such a thing was even possible. It was a time when the term ‘pan-Indian’ hadn’t been coined and film industries operated in their own bubbles. And here was someone who was working in different film industries under different names – as Keeravani in Telugu, his actual name, as Maragathamani in Tamil and Malayalam – and no one really knew about the other. In a pre-internet India, this created all kinds of confusion – and comedy.

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An Jo on JHUND

My take on JHUND

On TEAM ‘Jhund’

Spoiler Alert

Of all the scenes that any audience could have imagined from Nagaraj Manjule, the first scene of the movie is the one that subverts everything that one would associate with a director like Manjule, thanks to his background which could, of course, nudge one to deduce toward what side his ideology would tilt to. Razia, accused by her husband of adultery since he is confident that he has the ‘power’ to produce only boys, starts calling her all sorts of names. Fed up, she walks out of the house as her husband follows her ordering gently not to create a nuisance on the street. And then she retorts, “Are you scaring me with talaaq? I am the one who says ‘talaq, talaq, talaq,,” and walks away. Who on this scrap-yard earth would have thought Manjule would start a movie on poverty and systemic oppression with Modi or the BJP’s claims of reformation. But then, that’s Manjule for you.

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An Jo on THE FAME GAME

ON THE ‘UNFAIR GAME’

Now the reason I mention the above scene specifically is that this series is glittered through wonderful scenes like this. Hiding behind the ‘veil’ of a terrific on-screen persona, Madhuri is the foremost reason you watch the series. There are many cruel, grueling scenes like these that reveal the brilliance of MD as a performer-par-brilliance. The distinctions she draws between her ‘extraneous’ performance when she is ‘acting’ for the trade or publications or the celebrity parties or the paparazzi she is fierce, strong, and gives them back with equal punch—[There is a scene with Manav Kaul (they were lovers before), her co-star, and she realizes he is making her wait while she’s ready for the shot, she goes to his make-up room, and tells him with that killer smile, “We are both professionals. And we both know who the bigger star is]—and when alone or with her dysfunctional, she switches on superbly the internal, vulnerable performance – but more on that later.

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