“Popular Front is a terrorist organisation and RSS is a patriotic organisation. RSS is present all over the country, including the police and the army,”

Guillermo del Toro returns to form with ‘Nightmare Alley‘, the latest film from his already particular style that dwelves into horror combined with fantastic subject matters. Starring Bradley Cooper, Rooney Mara, Willem Defoe and Kate Blanchet, this noir melodrama has thoroughly enjoyable performances and unexpected wild twists that will leave you hanging on the edge of your seat. Even though this is more of the same tropes Del Toro uses in his films, we are still in front of a refreshing entry of the genre. Only the Mexican filmmaker this time added psychoanalysis and crime to the mix. We are getting similar visual style from his already fimiliar color pallets and that fantastical aspect that describes Del Toro to perfection.

The production design of this film is already racking up nominations in the award circuit as it tends to adore that classic golden Americana that tends to woo any academy when the nominations come. Del Toro has another winner in his hands that will certainly be an important part inside his body of work. Based on the 1946 novel from pulp author William Lindsay Gresham by the same name. The writer’s taste for the US sleazy circuses, travelling shows and magicians is what drove Guillermo del Toro’s visual style and what gave him the idea to make this film.

This isn’t the first installment of Nightmare Alley.

Back in 1947, Tyrone Power starred in the ‘Nightmare Alley‘ film of that era and now it’s Bradley Cooper the actor who is sinking his teeth on the role of Stan Carlisle: a guy with no money and a very violent past who requires to disappear for a while. As the reviews keep coming, ‘Nightmare Alley‘ isn’t expected to bring too much money to the box office in the U.S. but it’s still a welcome addition to the January rotation. This is definitely a movie that fans will enjoy, especially Guillermo del Toro fans.

Umno vice-president Mohamed Khaled Nordin said BN must return to a formula of genuine power-sharing and not resort to appointing token non-Malays in the government.

At the same time, he said Umno’s partners in BN must work to regain the support of non-Malays and not rely on Umno alone.

“We must return to the political power-sharing formula…

Mumbai: Wooing the minority community, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh chief Mohan Bhagwat has reiterated that Muslims have nothing to fear in India, and they must work unitedly with the majority community for the common goal of the country’s progress.

Addressing an event — ‘Nation First, Nation Supreme’ — organized by the Pune-based Global Strategic Policy Foundation (GSPF), here late on Monday, the RSS Sarsanghchalak asserted that Hindus don’t harbour animosity towards anyone, and the two communities should join hands for the country’s development.

“Hindus and Muslims in India have common ancestry… It is a well-known historical fact that Islam came to India along with the invaders, and this should not be concealed,” Bhagwat urged.

He said that our beloved motherland and the rich heritage form the basis of integrity in the country, both have the same DNA and should strive together for the common good of the nation.

According to Bhagwat, Indians have always worked for the wellbeing of others, one and all, and the word ‘Hindu’ is synonymous with the country’s rich heritage, the ancestors and its varied culture, and “in this this context, every Indian is a Hindu for us”.

“In tune with our great culture, which accepts all diverse opinions, we commit that there won’t be disrespect for other aiths, but, for that we will have to ensure and think of dominance of India and not that of a particular faith as has been happening through appeasement or vote-bank politics for many years,” he said.

While the bonding and bonhomie are inevitable for the progress of the nation and the motherland, Bhagwat called upon the saner voices among the Muslims to speak out against the ‘insanity’ committed by some sections of the community, given the emerging geo-political developments in India’s neighbourhood.

“They must firmly oppose the hardliners in the community. This could be a long drawn task that will have to be done with great care and efforts. It’s like a tough, long test which we will have to pass. The quicker we begin, the lesser the damage to the society,” Bhagwat pointed out.

Other speakers at the event included Kerala Governor Arif Mohammad Khan and Vice-Chancellor of Kashmir Central University Lt. Gen. (Retd) Sayyad Ata Hussain, in the presence of GSPF President Anant Bhagwat, Secretary John Verghese and Coordinator Zafar Lari.

Facebook might soon help you manage the overly chatty people in your social stream. The Meta brand is testing News Feed controls that let you raise or lower the volume of content you see from friends, groups, Pages and relevant topics. If a relative posts far too often while a favorite group hardly shows up at all, you can balance their appearances in your preferences.

Already available controls for favorites, reconnecting, snoozing and unfollowing should also be easier to find. Facebook’s test is initially available to only a “small percentage” of users, but it should expand over the weeks ahead. The company is giving advertisers options to exclude their ads from broad topics like “News and Politics,” “Crime and Tragedy” and “Debated Social Issues.”

The timing is appropriate, although it might not satisfy critics. Whistleblower Frances Haugen and supporting politicians have blasted Facebook’s algorithimic feeds for promoting engagement over healthy social media habits. Likewise, Meta just recently limited ad targeting for sensitive topics across its products. These latest moves put some of the power back in the hands of users and marketers, but don’t offer as much control as some would like. 

NEW ORLEANS – Netflix debuted the trailer for its upcoming film ‘Home Team’—a comedy based on New Orleans Saints Head Coach Sean Payton and his 2012 suspension from the NFL.

The film features Kevin James playing the role of Payton, and it recounts his time away from pro football when he coached his son’s sixth-grade football team. Payton’s suspension was a result of his role in the Saints’ Bountygate scandal.

‘Home Team’ also stars actors Jackie Sandler, Taylor Lautner, and Rob Schneider.

The film was made under a partnership between Netflix and comedian Adam Sandler’s Happy Madison Productions and is scheduled for a streaming release on Jan. 28.

For those whose cinematic consciousness predates “Star Wars,” the James Bond series may be the primordial experience of franchise films, with all the pleasures and limitations that they entail. The appealing predictability of familiar characters and the excitement of seeing variations on their themes has always gone hand in hand with a sense of overmanagement—of the strings being pulled by some puppeteer far from the set. The feeling that what’s onscreen is inseparable from the demands of the balance sheet has never been absent from the Bond market, and the five entries starring Daniel Craig have only intensified it. Together, the Craig films interconnect to form a sort of Bond cinematic universe whose parts slot all too neatly into a series, with all the dramatic engineering that it implies. The most recent and final Craig film, “No Time to Die,” directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga, is in that sense a culmination of the series’ necessities, with the boardroom and the writers’ room virtually taking the place of any cinematic action.

On the other hand, the series’ essential virtue was always its extravagant exaggerations—it was gloriously ridiculous and gloriously lacking in self-awareness, its macho ribaldry invested with absurdly high purpose. In the Daniel Craig era, there’s no sense of unconscious or excess expression—it has been digitized out along with any intentional humor. The devices that Bond and his compatriots use are hardly a step from Maxwell Smart’s shoe phone, as are the switch-operated gizmos of his Aston Martin. Yet their depiction and use are so perfunctory that they’re presented as neither silly nor ordinary, just checked off. Craig is a great actor who brings a distinctive affect to Bond—clenched, airtight, impenetrable, abraded. He makes Bond’s social graces seem like the product of work that’s harder than the athleticized superhero business imposed upon the character. Craig’s distinctive persona suggests pathos that the series doesn’t allow; instead, he’s merely used as a Bond-piñata, a straining for an element of realism amid stunts that, in their grandiosity and their excess, preclude it. In “No Time to Die,” Bond is launched with mourning and melancholy: he and his new partner, Madeleine Swann (Léa Seydoux), visit the Italian town of Matera, where the tomb of Vesper Lynd (from “Casino Royale”) is found. Bond visits her tomb—which explodes, as a prelude to a mighty chase and shoot-out. He survives but immediately ends the romance with Madeleine, whom he suspects of setting him up.

Five years later, Bond, retired to Jamaica, gets a visit from an old associate, Felix Leiter (Jeffrey Wright), of the C.I.A., along with a smarmy young State Department official named Logan Ash (Billy Magnussen). They want Bond’s help in finding a scientist named Valdo Obruchev (David Dencik), who has been kidnapped from a high-security bioweapon facility with a dreadful concoction in hand: a mortal virus-like nanobot, transmitted on contact and engineered to target specific DNA markers, whether of an individual, a family, or an ethnicity. But it takes a visit, that very night, from another M.I.6 operative, Nomi (Lashana Lynch)—who now bears Bond’s former number, 007—to persuade Bond of the urgency of the mission, and he joins in. It seems that Blofeld (Christoph Waltz), Bond’s longtime nemesis (dating back to childhood, as we now know), and Blofeld’s dastardly organization Spectre, is behind the kidnapping. But, infiltrating a Spectre gathering in Cuba, Bond and Nomi note the involvement of another evil mastermind, Lyutsifer Safin (Rami Malek), and the mission now involves targeting him along with Obruchev.

Yet “No Time to Die” offers a new piece of the puzzle, a bit of backstory that’s of obvious and major significance (shh) and that, by its very nature, suggests what’s both right and wrong with the franchise reboot in the Craig era. In the film’s opening, pre-title sequence, Madeleine is a child of about five (played by Lisa-Dorah Sonnet), staying with her mother (Mathilde Bourbin) in an isolated house in a snowy field and yearning for the return of her father (Mr. White, introduced in “Casino Royale”). She thinks he’s a doctor; her mother reveals that he’s a killer. Moments later, a masked gunman—Safin—shows up and breaks in. When Safin was a child, he explains, Mr. White killed his entire family, leaving only Safin to survive. Now, seeking revenge, he kills Madeleine’s mother, and prepares to kill the fleeing Madeleine, yet—in a moment of pity that may also carry an element of self-recognition—lets her go. (The moment, like so many others in the film, is merely conveyed in an informative wink rather than actually unfurled at any length.) Along with imparting the trauma and grief that Madeleine bears, the sequence insures that, later in the film, when Safin intrudes into Bond’s affairs, Madeleine can’t be far behind.

This setup implies a broader question about the role and use of backstory in recent movies. In principle, the prevalence of backstory advances an overdue democratization of the cinema: it eliminates the notion of typecasting and recognizes that each individual’s background and experience are distinctive and significant. Yet, like any dramatic method, the planting of backstory can take a decadent form, as it does in “No Time to Die,” where backstory is used to reduce the characters’ motives to single factors. With the setting up of one past experience, the movie bypasses any consideration of Madeleine (let alone Safin) as a character and turns her into a dramatic mechanism—rendering her not more of an individual but less of one. Fascinatingly and dismayingly, backstories are applied only very selectively and deterministically in “No Time to Die.” The movie brings several important new characters into the franchise, starting with Nomi, the new 007, who is a Black woman, and including Paloma (Ana de Armas), a C.I.A. agent who guides Bond into the Spectre meeting in Cuba. (The closest thing to humor that the movie offers is in the contrast between Paloma’s sunny ingenuousness and her mighty skills.) What motives prompted this admirably diverse cast of characters to serve their country in dangerous missions? What range of experience contributed to their ability to do so? The film never says. The diversity here is purely pictorial.

The formulaic drama is of a piece with the movie’s action sequences, which exhaust their ingenuity from the get-go, with the Matera chase and shoot-out. The single best moment is the very first, when, on a narrow bridge, Bond dodges a speeding car with a deft dive behind a convenient lump of concrete. The action soon grows wilder—a leap while holding a cable and a rough landing, a motorcycle jaunt up staircases and over a wall—and briefly offers a moment of tension, with Bond and Madeleine together in the Aston Martin while facing a barrage of bullets that the car’s windows barely withstand. (Bond’s stoic stillness in the face of Madeleine’s panic is also Craig’s best moment.) But, despite these (very brief) clever touches, the filming does this and other set pieces scant justice. Little attention is given to staging and placing, to ensembles and their timing, to the practicalities of massive stunts, whether chase scenes or shoot-outs or trouble on the high seas. What matters isn’t spatial coherence—which is only a virtue in real estate—but coherence of ideas, of emotions, of images. The shots, whether brief and collaged together or closely following Bond in motion, do little but convey the general concept or the basic facts, the input and the outcome. The rapid cutting and rapid camera movement don’t make the action hard to understand; they make it hard to enjoy. For all the agony that the story’s violence suggests, and the sense of rueful wonder, of horrified fascination, that it depends on, the filming gives no sense of experience either onscreen or behind it—merely a sense of dutiful, approximative technique.

“No Time to Die” wants it both ways: it makes watching violent shoot-outs and colossal catastrophes pleasurable while depicting them merely functionally, a coy fusion of the sumptuous and the abstemious. Similarly, the story is built upon an emotional foundation of melancholy and regret, of the sins of the fathers and the pain of their redemption. But these aspects of the drama get neither discussed nor developed, merely signified in the sweep of the action. Moreover, the story is almost completely depoliticized; the only hint of a viewpoint is when Ash is derisively pinpointed as a “political appointee.” All that remains, besides the vapors of nostalgia, are the broad contours of the drama, which are less matters of character or history than of positioning in the movie marketplace. Daniel Craig’s tenure as Bond is defined, ultimately, by the melancholy of unimagined possibilities and missed opportunities—for the actor and the character alike.

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Terming the statement of Surendran nonsense, Kasargod Lok Sabha MP, Rajmohan Unnithan, told mathrubhumi.com that action must be taken against him. “State police force is like the Army, Navy and Air Force as they are for the safety and security of the nation. These forces work without any political influence. The state government must wake up to weed out such communal forces from the police force. Otherwise, our state will gradually move into anarchy. Where is our intelligence system? Why have they not informed the government about the penetration of such communal forces into the police? The chief minister must answer these questions by quitting silence,” the MP said.

Trailer for Future Hong Kong Sci-Fi Film ‘Expired’ with Hugo Weaving

by Alex Billington
January 19, 2022
Source: YouTube

“There isn’t much time… and you’re deteriorating very quickly. Lionsgate has revealed an official US trailer for Expired, an intriguing sci-fi thriller from Australia set in the future in a “neon-drenched” world similar to Blade Runner. In a futuristic Hong Kong, young assassin Jack crosses paths with a nightclub singer. As Jack becomes increasingly drawn to April, his body mysteriously deteriorates. Jack tracks down reclusive life extension scientist Dr. Bergman, who unearths Jack’s long buried secret and is forced to confront his own murky past. “Every frame encourages life and emotion, an optimism as much as heartache, of what could be, and what will be.” Ryan Kwanten and Hugo Weaving star with Jillian Nguyen as April. This looks very cool, I can’t deny with this footage, I just hope the rest holds up. This trailer also has a rad score.

Here’s the official US trailer (+ poster) for Ivan Sen’s Expired, direct from Lionsgate’s YouTube:

As Jack (Ryan Kwanten) works as a hitman, his lonely life is altered by two strangers—one a club singer, the other a mysterious scientist (Hugo Weaving). Jack and the singer fall in love, but as their relationship grows stronger, Jack grows physically weaker, unable to assassinate his targets. But then the scientist discovers the shocking reasons behind Jack’s deadly affliction… Expired, formerly known as Loveland, is written and directed by Indigenous Australian writer / filmmaker Ivan Sen, director of the films Beneath Clouds, Dreamland, Toomelah, Mystery Road, and Goldstone previously, as well as few other short films. It’s produced by David Jowsey, Angela Littlejohn, Greer Simpkin, and Ivan Sen. Lionsgate will release Sen’s Expired in select US theaters + on VOD starting March 18th, 2022 coming soon. Who wants to see this?

Find more posts: Sci-Fi, To Watch, Trailer

She said, “When you’re a kid, you’re fearless, but starting at 26 years old, I had a lot of fear.”