Month: January 2022

<!-- --> A still from Kaun Banegi Shikharwati.(courtesy: larabhupathi) Cast: Naseeruddin Shah, Lara Dutta, Soha Ali Khan, Kritika Kamra, Anya Singh, Varun Thakur, Cyrus Sahukar and Raghubir Yadav Director: Gauravv K Chawla, Ananya Banerjee Rating: Two and a half stars (out of 5) An eccentric ruler of a kingdom gone to seed and his four oddball daughters who have drifted apart constitute the crux of Kaun Banegi Shikharwati, a patchy dramedy that, even at its lowest ebb, is agreeably flip. It seeks to mine quirky humour from a whimsical king's desperate bid to keep his flock together and save his decaying palace, but an outright laugh riot eludes the show. It is a mildly diverting, inoffensive parody of the repercussions of power wielded without responsibility. The Zee5 original s...

Over 120 entertainment industry figures signed an open letter against the boycott of a major cultural festival in Sydney, Australia, that began Thursday, after 30 acts and individuals withdrew over a sponsorship deal with the Israeli embassy. In the letter published Thursday by the Creative Community for Peace, the signatories said they “believe the cultural boycott movement of the Sydney Festival is an affront to both Palestinians and Israelis who are working to advance peace through compromise, exchange, and mutual recognition. “While we all may have differing opinions on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the best path to peace, we all agree that a cultural boycott is not the answer,” the letter continued. It quoted comments made by Aussie rocker Nick Cave in 2018...

Wordle (I was so damn close to getting this in 3)Screenshot: Wordle The annoying thing about anything going viral online these days—in this case, the Twitter-friendly word game Wordle—is that all the fun metaphors have gotten a little grim. You can’t talk about Josh Wardle’s hyper-shareable web game “sweeping the nation,” or people “catching the Wordle bug,” anymore, because… well. Even so: A lot of people have been playing and sharing Wordle lately, in a way that in no way invokes any other things people have been indiscriminately sharing with each other of late. And it is, in fact, the rapid transmissibility of Wardle’s game that’s made it novel. That’s not a knock on the game’s actual mechanics—which see you play a daily bout of Mastermind with a five-letter mystery word, using hi...

Amazon’s TV series based on the Fallout video games is moving into production this year. Deadline and Variety report that Geneva Robertson-Dworet (Captain Marvel) and Graham Wagner (Silicon Valley) will be showrunners on the project; the official Fallout Twitter account retweeted Deadline’s story by way of confirmation. The Prime Video show will be executive-produced by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, creators of Westworld. Bethesda Game Studios’ Todd Howard and Bethesda Softworks’ James Altman are also on board as executive producers. Nolan will direct the first episode, according to Deadline and Variety. The show was first announced in July. “Fallout is one of the greatest game series of all time,” Joy and Nolan said in a statement to The Hollywood Reporter back then. “Each chapte...