NL Hafta

In this episode, we bring you a full dose of entertainment and cinema. Rajyasree discloses her illegal access to cinema, while Abhinandan’s habit of name- and place-dropping is pointed out by Aditi, our Awful & Awesome enthusiast.    Sekhri and Sen review Call Me By Your Name, which was banned from being shown at the Beijing Film Festival for no good reason. And they discuss James Ivory’s comment on the lack of full frontal nudity and normal sex scenes in the film. According to Sen, “The film stars a very beautiful man called Armie Hammer whom we’ve seen play the Winklevoss twins in the Facebook film, it also stars Timothée Chalamet, whom we saw in Lady Bird as the rebel boyfriend." She also gives us a sneak peek of the plot, “Timothée Chalamet plays a boy called Elio whose father is a professor. Armie Hammer plays Oliver, is a graduate student of Elio’s father...It’s about the love affair that starts between both of them” and is an “extremely well scripted, beautiful film”. Sekhri and Sen also discuss the significance of the year 1983, which the movie is set in. There’s also talk of why the trailer of Nude was in the news and why it was pulled from the International Film Festival Of India in November. According to our Awesome & Awful duo, the film has a “spectacular trailer”. Sekhri says, "It makes you watch the film. The plot unfolds with a brilliant cast, it’s beautifully shot with perfect lighting. It has a promise to make a political statement but not an in your face sort of political statement.” There’s a little insight about the trailer of the film, Dundee, with Sekhri giving millennials a bit of context about Crocodile Dundee which was a pop culture phenomenon when he was in school (in the Dark Ages).  Then, of course, there’s the man for all seasons, Salman Khan’s Being Human summer campaign – Look Good Do Good - where he promotes people who are trying to change the world by doing noble things. Sekhri says, “Salman Khan is ‘looking good’ and others are ‘doing good’”…The purpose of this campaign is to change Salman’s image.” Unsurprisingly, Tetley’s green tea advertisement starring Deepika Padukone is Sekhri’s favourite campaign of the week. There’s an interesting anecdote from Sekhri about Tea and Egypt! There’s also Anurag Kadhyap’s Karta, a short film presented by Kashyap and directed by Randeep Jha – which Sen quite enjoyed. The pièce de résistance though, is a musical rendition of a Punjabi song by Sekhri, while commenting on Punjab government’s proposal to set up a committee to eradicate vulgarity from Punjabi songs. And there’s Sen’s question with an un-Googleable answer (or so she hopes) at the end.   Much to look forward to this time.