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An association of TV serial producers in West Bengal on Sunday supported an idea of "shoot-from-home" amid the COVID-19 restrictions in the state, while a body of technicians opposed the new concept, saying that such exercise will lead to a gathering of people at one's residence in "violation of the government orders". The Welfare Association of Television Producers (WATP) said the "shoot-from-home" concept appears to be the "best alternative" when people are confined at home and want to get some enjoyment on the small screen. The statement of the apex body of TV show producers came after the "shoot-from-home" was organised for several episodes of four mega serials. The Federation of Cine Technicians and Workers of Eastern India (FCTWEI), however, said that such a "unilateral" move by a section of producers "violated the basic norms of COVID restrictions", and claimed that their members were kept in the dark t...

As reports of Kartik Aaryan being dropped from filmmaker Aanand L Rai's upcoming production venture surfaced online on Monday, production banner Colour Yellow Productions in a statement said the team is still in talks with the actor for a movie project. Aaryan has lately been in the news for his exit from Karan Johar-produced Dostana 2 and is reportedly no longer a part of Shah Rukh Khan's upcoming home production, titled Freddie . Various media reports on Monday claimed that the 30-year-old actor has now lost Rai's gangster drama film to Ayushmann Khurrana. Calling the stories "baseless", the production house said they are in talks with both Aaryan and Khurrana for different projects. "These are baseless rumours. We’ve met Kartik for a different film and we’re still talking. We’ve taken another film altogether to Ayushmann and this is a complete mix up," spokesperson for Colour Yellow Productions said. Last month, Johar's Dharma productions ha...

The NCB on Sunday questioned two former domestic workers of Sushant Singh Rajput in a drugs case linked to the Bollywood actor's death last year at its Mumbai zonal office, an official said. The anti-drugs agency had issued summons against the duo, identified as Neeraj and Keshav, for questioning, he said. He said the duo came on the radar of the Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) after Rajput's flatmate Siddharth Pithani was arrested from Hyderabad on Friday. "We located the duo and brought them to the office for questioning. They are still at the office," the official told Press Trust of India. Pithani was Rajput's friend and was also staying with the late actor at his Bandra residence in suburban Mumbai. According to his statement to Mumbai Police, Pithani was among the first to see the actor's hanging body when Rajput (34) allegedly committed suicide on 14 June, 2020. The NCB began a separate probe when some WhatsApp chats of the late actor indicated dr...

The Indian Broadcasting Foundation (IBF) on Monday announced the appointment of former Supreme Court judge Justice Vikramjit Sen as the Chairman of its newly formed self-regulatory body Digital Media Content Regulatory Council (DMCRC). Besides, six other eminent industry members which include filmmaker Nikkhil Advani, writer and director Tigmanshu Dhulia, filmmaker and writer Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari, content producer and distributor Banijay Group CEO and founder Deepak Dhar would also be part of the self-regulatory body, IBF said in a statement. This Council also includes — Sony Pictures General Counsel Ashok Nambisan and Star and Disney India Chief Regional Counsel Mihir Rale, it added. "The Council constitutes prominent personalities from the Media & Entertainment industry and Online Curated Content Providers (OCCPs), with experience in IPR, programming and content creation," it said. IBF, the apex body of broadcasters, had last week announced to expand to cover digital...

Hollywood star Dwayne Johnson says playing DC anti-hero Black Adam in the much-anticipated stand-alone movie has been the most challenging task in his two-decade-long career. The professional wrestler-turned-actor, who is currently shooting for Black Adam , shared a picture of himself in a beefed up avatar from his training session. 'Big week for #BlackAdam shooting my 'champion' scenes with my shirt off and showing my body,' Johnson wrote alongside the photo on Instagram Sunday. 'Been working extremely hard dieting, training and conditioning unlike any other role of my entire career,' he said, adding he is grateful for the 'grind and support'. Black Adam is a spin-off of Warner Bros and New Line Cinema's Shazam! , featuring Zachary Levi. Here is Johnson's post View this post on Instagram A post shared by therock (@therock) The character first appeared in DC Comics in the 1940s as a villain corrupted by power. He became an anti...

Filmmaker Luca Guadagnino has started production on his latest movie Bones & All . The film is Guadagnino's first US-set project and will feature actors Timothée Chalamet, Taylor Russell and Mark Rylance. The project is currently being filmed on location in the Ohio Tri-State area, reported Variety . The coming-of-age horror movie, based on the novel of the same name by Camille DeAngelis. Dave Kajganich has adapted the screenplay. Speaking about Chalamet's role with Deadline , the filmmaker said,"I think only Timothée can play this role. It was serendipity because he was in Rome and I was in Rome and we met after this year of COVID constriction, and we could meet and spend time together. He’s fantastic, a great performer and to see him soaring the way he is doing now, I feel proud of him. And this character is something very new for him, both endearing and heartbreaking." The story chronicles the first love between Maren, a young woman learning how to survive...

Annawadi in Mumbai and the fictional Philadelphia suburb of Easttown would have little in common, yet I found myself thinking of Katherine Boo’s book on the former, Behind the Beautiful Forevers , as I watched the HBO show Mare of Easttown . In Boo’s book, a family finally manages to buy the Italianate tiling advertised with the tagline “Beautiful Forever” that signifies aspiration and upward mobility in the Annawadi slum, built over a garbage dump. But when the son, Abdul, attempts to lay it down at home, the tiling remains stubbornly skewed. Mare of Easttown specifically reminded me Boo’s closing words: “If the house is crooked and crumbling, and the land on which it sits uneven, is it possible to make anything lie straight?” The lives of many of Mare of Easttown ’s characters are built on a deep vein of despair and dysfunction. How then is it possible for them to avoid tragedy? ** The ‘Mare’ of Easttown is Marianne Sheehan (Kate Winslet), a tough-talking, hard-bitten police...

Actress-environmentalist Juhi Chawla Monday approached the Delhi High Court against the setting up of 5G wireless networks in the country, raising issues related to the radiation impact on citizens, animals, flora and fauna. Justice C Hari Shankar, before whom the matter came up for hearing, transferred the suit to another bench for hearing on 2 June. Chawla said if the telecommunications industry’s plans for 5G come to fruition, no person, no animal, no bird, no insect and no plant on Earth will be able to avoid exposure, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, to levels of RF radiation that are 10x to 100x times greater than what exists today. These 5G plans threaten to provoke serious, irreversible effects on humans and permanent damage to all of the Earth’s ecosystems, she said. The suit, filed through advocate Deepak Khosla, sought a direction to the authorities to certify to the public at large, that 5G technology is safe to humankind, man, woman, adult, child, infant, animals and e...

Singer Sunidhi Chauhan has revealed that she was asked to praise participants on the previous seasons of Indian Idol  irrespective of how they performed.  Chauhan  said she had to leave the singing reality show as she could not comply with these instructions from makers. When asked why makers want judges and guests to praise everyone, Chauhan said, "I think it is done to seek attention. I think it is required to be done to hold your audience." She further said reality shows are a big launchpad for unknown contestants, but "unnecessary praise" ruins their chances to further their career. She added that instant fame affects the contestants psychologically, and many of them don’t put in the effort which is required at this stage of their career. She said that whatever happens on such shows is done to garner maximum TRPs. "I did Dil Hai Hindustani, The Voice and Indian Idol . I could speak the truth then. Even today I would like to say what I genuinely fee...

Every three hours, every day, for the past seven-and-a-half years, an anxious, spirited Twitter bot has transmitted a short message of perseverance and hope into the universe. “The Space Jam website is still online,” it tweets. Or: “Hooray! Space Jam is still online!” To date, the bot, @SpaceJamCheck, has assured a changing world more than 20,000 times that the official website of the 1996 live-action/animated sports comedy Space Jam remains a functional web destination. If it surprises you to learn that people care whether or not the promotional website for a mid-'90s children’s movie is still online, congratulations — you have just revealed your utter, humiliating ignorance about all matters relating to the mildly famous Space Jam website. Whence the Space Jam Website? The 1996 Space Jam website is important in the way antique maps are important — not because they are necessarily useful tools for present-day navigation, but because they reveal the boundaries around which...

Days after Friends: The Reunion aired, Courteney Cox had a small surprise for her fans. Cox, who played the character of Monica in the popular sitcom, teamed up with singer Ed Sheeran and brought back memories of The Routine dance on social media. Taking to her Instagram handle, Cox shared the video in which she and Sheeran have re-enacted the steps. Check out the post here View this post on Instagram A post shared by Courteney Cox (@courteneycoxofficial) The dance was aired on the show in the episode The One With The Routine, where Monica (Cox) and Ross (David Schwimmer) performed it together. An unscripted special reunited the main cast of the show actors, Jennifer Aniston, Matt LeBlanc, Matthew Perry, and Lisa Kudrow along with Cox and Schwimmer. Stars like David Beckham, Lady Gaga, Kit Harington, Reese Witherspoon, Malala Yousafzai, BTS, among others also appeared as guests for the show. Friends: The Reunion premiered on ZEE5 in India and on HBO Max in the US. ...

Amazon Prime Video released the teaser of Vidya Balan’s next - Sherni earlier today, 31 May. Directed by Amit Masurkar of Newton fame, the film is a fictional story that takes us through the journey of a forest officer (played by Balan) who strives for balance in a world of man-animal conflict. The trailer will release on 2nd June, confirms a press release. Check out the teaser here No matter what, she will do the right thing! Trailer out, June 2. Meet #SherniOnPrime , June 2021. @vidya_balan #AmitMasurkar #BhushanKumar @vikramix @ShikhaaSharma03 @AasthaTiku @Abundantia_Ent @TSeries pic.twitter.com/6o7KknxjWK — amazon prime video IN (@PrimeVideoIN) May 31, 2021 Produced by Bhushan Kumar, Krishan Kumar, Vikram Malhotra and Amit Masukar, the film boasts of a powerful ensemble cast that includes Sharat Saxena, Mukul Chadda, Vijay Raaz, Ila Arun, Brijendra Kala and Neeraj Kabi. " Sherni is one of the most special and important stories that we’ve worked on and A...

Record producer and television personality Simon Cowell has cancelled his scheduled appearance as a judge on the upcoming season of The X Factor Israel. A spokesman from Reshet, the network which produces the show, has told Variety that Cowell has cancelled the scheduled appearance “for his own reasons”. Further, Reshet has not commented whether Cowell is associated with X Factor Israel in any other way outside of judging. The 61-year-old music mogul last December signed a deal to serve as one of the judges on the fourth instalment of the Israel version of the singing reality show. At that time, he had commented , “I can barely wait to see what the Israelis have to offer”. This would have been Cowell’s first time being a judge of an international X Factor outside of the US and UK versions. As per a Reshet representative, Cowell’s staff had reached out to the makers with “legitimate concerns” over his participation in the show after the violence broke out between Israel and Gaza but...

Akshay Kumar’s much-awaited periodical saga Prithviraj is back in the news as the youth wing of Karni Sena has threatened the film. In a letter, written by filmmaker Surjeet Singh Rathore, president of the Youth Wing of the Karni Sena, the makers have been asked to change the movie’s title. Also, if their conditions are not met, the film will receive the same fate as Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Padmaavat, the letter said. The film is a biopic on Emperor Prithiviraj Chauhan and is being helmed by Chandraparaksh Dwivedi while Yash Raj Film’s Aditya Chopra is producing it. The letter, shared on Instagram, states that Sena respects Kumar for playing the great king but it is Chopra’s duty to respect the feelings and emotions of the Rajput community. In that regard, the name of the film should be changed to ‘Veer Yodha Samrat Prithviraj Chauhan’. Also, there should be screening before the release of the film so that they can see whether due respect has been given to the Rajput characters or...

Joanna Coles published her first magazine at 11 and mailed a copy to Queen Elizabeth. She received a letter of thanks and a royal request for further issues. “It was all the encouragement I needed,” Coles said. Coles went on to become an editor-in-chief of Marie Claire and then Cosmopolitan . This was in the 2000s and the 2010s, when magazine subscriptions had already begun to slide. The world of glossies was still what Coles called, “pretty [expletive] shiny, though it soon became clear that the shine was getting a bit thin.” In 2017, in her second year as the chief content officer for Hearst Magazines, she became an executive producer on The Bold Type . An hourlong dramedy on American platform Freeform, The Bold Type is set at a legacy women’s magazine called Scarlet that looks a lot like Cosmopolitan , with a glamorous editor-in-chief (played by Melora Hardin) who looks a lot like Coles. Centred on three young Scarlet employees — a junior writer, a fashion assistant, a social ...

The Producers Guild of India (PGI), the association of Indian film, television and digital content producers, on Monday announced a vaccination drive for its members and associated production crews beginning from 1 June. According to a press release, the guild said the members will be vaccinated over the multi-day drive to be held at Mehboob Studios in suburban Bandra. Siddharth Roy Kapur, president of the Producers Guild of India, said the initiative was key to getting the film industry back on its feet amid the coronavirus pandemic. "An activity of such importance and magnitude cannot be carried out singlehandedly and we are extremely grateful for the support we have received to make this possible," Kapur said in a statement. He also thanked production banner "Excel Entertainment who played a pivotal role in securing the vaccines and Mehboob Productions who very generously offered complimentary use of the spacious Mehboob Studios". Here is the full statement ...

Oscar winner Emma Stone has denied that she is set to star in the upcoming film Spider-Man: No Way Home , fronted by Tom Holland. The Marvel Studio and Sony Pictures project will be Holland's third outing as the web slinger, and there has been speculation that the film might see actors Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield reprise their previous renditions of the titular superhero. Stone, who played Gwen Stacy in the 2012 film The Amazing Spider-Man and its 2014 sequel, was asked if she would feature in the Jon Watts directorial, which she denied. "I have heard those rumours. I don't know if I''m supposed to say anything, but I'm not. I don''t know what you're supposed to respond as an alumnus," the Cruella star told MTV News . Her comments come after Garfield also shut down claims of his own return to the film series, saying that fans should "chill" as he "ain't got a call". On the big screen, Maguire had first play...

  Investigators on Sunday continued searching for the bodies of seven people believed killed in the crash a day earlier of a small jet into a Tennessee lake, including an actor who portrayed Tarzan in a 1990s television series. Rutherford County Fire Rescue Capt. John Ingle said in a statement Sunday that recovery efforts were ongoing at Percy Priest Lake near Smyrna. He said efforts also were focused on examining a half mile-wide debris field in the lake. County officials identified the victims in a news release late Saturday as Brandon Hannah, Gwen S. Lara, William J. Lara, David L. Martin, Jennifer J. Martin, Jessica Walters and Jonathan Walters, all of Brentwood, Tennessee. Their names were released after family members had been notified. Gwen Shamblin Lara founded the Remnant Fellowship Church in Brentwood in 1999 and wrote a faith-based weight loss book. Her husband of nearly three years, known as Joe Lara, was an actor featured in the TV series Tarzan: The Epic Advent...

Moviegoing increasingly looks like it didn’t die during the pandemic. It just went into hibernation. John Krasinski’s thriller sequel A Quiet Place Part II opened over the Memorial Day weekend to a pandemic-best $48.4 million, according to studio estimates Sunday. Including the Monday holiday, the studio forecasts the film will gross $58.5 million in North America. It added another $22 million in ticket sales overseas. The film’s performance cheered a movie industry that has been punished and transformed by the pandemic. Paramount Pictures’ A Quiet Place Part II , which was on the cusp of opening in March 2021 before theatres shut, was the first big film this year — and one of the only larger budget COVID-era releases beside Christopher Nolan’s Tenet — to open exclusively in theatres. Chris Aronson, distribution chief for Paramount, called the opening “an unqualified success.” “It’s a huge sigh of relief and a sense of optimism for sure,” Aronson said. “Movies, moviegoing, movie ...

With great timing comes great responsibility. Based on JT Rogers’ award-winning play of the same name, Oslo is a dramatic account of the secret back-channel peace negotiations between the Israeli government and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1993. The Bartlett Sher-directed film – which chronicles the first face-to-face attempt between both sides, the building bricks of what was intended to be a permanent resolution to a generations-long conflict – comes in a year that has seen Gaza burn with renewed bloodshed. For several nations with no direct connection to the Middle East, Western news coverage has been the only legitimate window into the violence. And more notably, the politics behind the violence. But more on that later.  The stage-to-screen “peg” of Oslo concerns not only the verbose nature of a script composed entirely of closed-door meetings but also the device that the two Nobel Peace Prize-winning leaders – Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and ...

Damen Lindelof’s 2019 adaptation of Watchmen (the graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons) expanded the universe of the book, working both as a prequel and a sequel. Perhaps the most ambitious gambit was connecting some of the most disturbing moments in American history to the ‘covert’ history of superheroes/vigilantes — which is why the stunning opening sequence (the first thing they shot in the series as well) depicts the infamous Tulsa Massacre.  Hundred years ago this week, on 31 May and 1 June, 1921, white mobs aided and abetted by local authorities murdered hundreds (official estimates now place the toll at 300-odd) of Black residents and business owners in the neighbourhood of Greenwood, Tulsa. Greenwood was an oasis of Black prosperity amidst the racial inequality of World War I-era America and so, it was targeted by supremacist organisations like the Ku Klux Klan (in one shot in Watchmen , you can clearly see a hooded KKK member on a horse, directing the mob)....