नरगिस ने अपने शानदार करियर में कई हिट फिल्मों में काम किया. यहां तक कि पहली बार ऑस्कर के नॉमिनेशन...from आज तक https://ift.tt/3gQevmO
When Madhuri Dixit released her maiden single 'Candle' recently, the name of the song took me back to Sanjay Leela Bhansali's Devdas. When the titular character (Shah Rukh Khan) visits a brothel, he is welcomed by Chandramukhi (Madhuri) with an ornate candle stand.
Madhuri picks the candle stand and places it between both her eyes. The flame seems to rise like a phoenix, as the two captivating eyes, with bottomless depth, stare into the camera. With renewed ferocity, the kohled eyes then stare at Devdas, determined, penetrative yet deeply commiserative. Her eyebrows punctuate the fire in her eyes with a little dance of their own, before Madhuri breaks into a peafowl-like kathak recital on Pt Birju Maharaj's vocals. And then she starts singing, "Dhai shyam rok lai," in her recorded voice.
It was a rare instance when Madhuri had taken to the mic, and made the audience take notice of her command over vocals, and not just the mesmerising dance. Like the candle in the stand, Devdas was the last life of wax left in Madhuri before she moved to Denver with her husband Shriram Nene, and quit showbiz.
Five years later, she would rise from the ashes and lead an ensemble cast in Anil Mehta's 2007 dance film Aaja Nachle. In the stunning 20-minute climactic sequence, in which she served as a narrator, she took to the mic again, singing portions of the 'Laila Majnu' medley. However, her singing would be limited to reciting poetry, as was the case in Devdas. Sunidhi Chauhan and Kavita Krishnamurthy did the heavy-lifting in both the respective songs.
Her major turn as a singer came in Soumik Sen's 2014 action film Gulaab Gang, where she crooned the folk song 'Rangi Sari Gulabi Chunariya.' She took charge here, and was accompanied by her mother Snehlata Dixit, a trained Hindustani vocalist and an MA in Indian classical music.
"She always encouraged me to sing along, get training with her all through the childhood. But I'd usually be very busy with other stuff, like dancing. So I never learnt singing professionally like my mother did. But it was always on my mind, just that I never got around to doing it," says Madhuri in an exclusive interview.
Music was nonetheless a crucial part of her childhood. She got well-versed with rhythm and swar, listening to her mother's riyaz at home. Dancing also helped her crack the rhythm of the songs she went on to sing. But she confesses singing is a different beast altogether.
"In dancing, you have the luxury of your body, face, and expressions. You have a lot of tools in your arsenal. But in singing, there's only the voice. People should connect to the expression in your voice as they will not see your face throughout the song. It's like saying dialogues, except even there, you have your face to help you. Singing is trickier. It's like dancing with your voice."
Madhuri feels 'Candle' was far more challenging than all her previous singing stints, since it was the first time she set out to be a singer primarily. All the other times, singing was a part of the larger narrative of what the film was trying to convey. Here, Madhuri had the authorship as well as the ownership. But she denies that the medium was a challenge. "When we were in school, we used to sing only in English on the stage since it was an English-medium school. So singing in English wasn't that much of an issue here."
She adds that she did not walk blindly into the recording room, and was trained by Ron Anderson, a renowned name in Los Angeles, and credited with training Ariana Grande, Mariah Carey, and Whitney Houston. "He helped me with the intonation and all the technical details. Obviously, I had a lot of help with me, from the lyricists to Raja Kumari, who ensured the pronunciation was on point. I had a little butterfly in the stomach going into the recording room. You know, it (singing) is something you love, and yet you're apprehensive about doing it professionally. But once I went in, and I started singing in the emotion, it went smoothly," says Madhuri.
While Madhuri recorded the song in LA much before the lockdown started, she later decided to release it as an ode to the frontline warriors of the coronavirus crisis. "In every person's life, there comes a point when you feel bogged down by pressures of various kinds. So in order to express that and pick myself up again, I decided to record my first single. A candle was initially a symbol of endurance and tenacity."
But later, she realised everyone else in the world is going through the same struggle right now. Economies are on their knees, and the destruction caused by the virus is unprecedented. "So I decided to dedicate the song to the health workers and everyone who's struggling to keep their spirits high at this time. Candle then became a symbol of hope and peace. All of us are like candles in the rain right now. And whatever happens in your personal life, you have to be a beacon of light to other people in tough times," she adds.
(Click here to follow LIVE updates on coronavirus outbreak)
Since she chose to release the single during the lockdown, she had to shoot the video by herself at her Mumbai home. Luckily, she had a professional camera that she gifted to her husband on his birthday last year, and lights for the video, which she keeps at her place for regular photoshoots. "And obviously, I did the hair and makeup myself," she says laughing, reminiscing of the time it was a common fare in the '90s, when actresses of her ilk had no entourage at the peak of their careers.
"When you're on a set, you do have specialised experts for makeup, hair, lighting, and camera. But here, we didn't have all that so Ram was behind the camera as I was in front of it," says Madhuri, explaining why shooting the video was a lesson in being self-reliant or atmanirbhar.
Had the lockdown not been in place, she would be on the sets of Dance Deewane season 3, the reality TV show where she serves as a judge. She also hopes to start her Netflix show, a relationship thriller produced by Karan Johar's Dharmatic, soon. "We should go on floors as soon as possible. But we don't know when the shoots will start, and under what circumstances we'll have to go forward on set. Because we don't want anyone to be harmed."
It is a certainly difficult time for the world. But as Madhuri insists in her new single, "This is never gonna change because we burn like that. Burn like fire."
Language: English
How do you keep an audience laughing when their reality keeps getting stranger — and funnier — than fiction? Not George Carlin, not Monty Python, and not even Charlie Chaplin can compete with a man who suggests the drinking of disinfectant to cure a deadly virus, thinks the world needs global warming because it is freezing in New York, and oh-so-casually wishes he could date his daughter. Trump and his laughable administration have sure been an inexhaustible source of comedy. It is now hard to find anything more hilarious and absurd than the daily news. Greg Daniels and Steve Carell seem to think otherwise.
Reuniting seven years after The Office (US) concluded, its writer and star try to recapture the same comedic alchemy in their Netflix series, Space Force. Carell leads a new workplace, a galaxy far, far away from the Scranton branch of Dunder Mifflin. He is no more Michael Scott, the well-meaning buffoon; he is Mark R Naird, a decorated general in charge of the newly formed sixth branch of the US military-industrial complex: the US Space Force, inspired by US President Donald Trump's cosmic military agency of the same name.
The chief item on their agenda is to put "boots on the moon": install American forces on the lunar surface, and establish the first habitable settlement before the rest of the world (read: China). The show attempts to mine humour from the unforeseeable space misadventures and the unmanageable interpersonal conflicts that undermine the credibility of the Space Force, and the US' efforts to win the space race. But Space Force shoots for the moon, runs out of fuel quite early, and self-destructs among situations that cannot possibly eclipse the hilarity of reality.
From the get-go, Space Force's "boots on the moon" plan runs into a variety of setbacks, from the anticipated (defending its sky-high budget amid failed launches and avoiding diplomatic conflicts with competing nations) to the absurd (guiding a "chimpstronaut" to repair a satellite and testing space suits with a BB gun combat training exercise). Both the serious and silly co-exist in a show that cannot decide if it wants to be a clever satire (like a modern-day Dr. Strangelove) or an absurdist spoof (akin to Angie Tribeca).
It even veers way off course with subplots involving Naird, the absentee dad, and Naird, the sexually repressed general, whose wife is in a maximum security prison. Diana Silvers plays his daughter Erin, a teenager dealing with angst and resentment after being forced to move from her sweet life in DC to a middle-of-nowhere town in Colorado. Lisa Kudrow is his wife Maggie, who has got got her own "Orange is the New Black" thing going on in prison.
Assisting Carell's General Naird through Space Force's many setbacks is John Malkovich's Dr. Adrian Mallory, who acts as the sole voice of reason. The chief scientist on the project, Mallory believes international collaboration, not competition, should drive mankind on its journey to colonise the next frontier. Only, the military men and office-bearers higher up the chain-of-command only understand war, the one true American ideology, not science. This leads to some conflict between Mallory and Naird initially, before the latter proves himself to be more than just a 'yes man,' and they begin to find some middle ground.
Interestingly, Trump is neither mentioned by name nor gets smacked with the comedy hit job you might expect. But when characters make passing references to his tweeting habits or the slur he uses for "countries like India," we know exactly which world leader they are referring to. In another wink to the Trump presidency, a Russian spy roams around the Space Force offices, and even dates Naird's daughter to get close to him. There is also the eager-to-please first lady whose space suit designs are a veritable disaster and the butt of jokes. Some of the allusions are less ambiguous: In a congressional hearing over Space Force's budget, we meet an AOC-type congresswoman named Anabela Ysidro-Campos, while Kaitlin Olson's Silicon Valley whiz is a clear stand-in for disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes.
In The Office, characters that seemed one-note became multi-faceted when paired together. The same cannot be said of Space Force.
Ben Schwartz (Parks and Recreation), Tawny Newsome (Brockmire), Jimmy O Yang (Silicon Valley), and the legendary Fred Willard (in possibly his last role) make up a cast of comedians not all cut from the same cloth. So, on paper, they should make for a winning combination of comedic talents. But they cannot quite complement their different styles seamlessly like The Office did in its depiction of a dysfunctional workplace.
For example, Schwartz as Naird's PR manager "Fuck Tony" Scarapiducci may seem like an extension of Jean-Ralphio Saperstein from Parks and Recreation but this time, his clueless hijinks get grating quite soon. So some episodes are unfunny in long patches, relying on Carell and Malkovich to dig them out of a hole. It feels like the cast keeps running into each other for 10 episodes in search of laughs that do not always come. Moreover, there is no laugh track here to signal us on how to react, which usually helps mask poor writing.
The hope lies in a trend among Greg Daniels' shows. The Office and Parks and Recreation also suffered from disappointing debut seasons before going on to become beloved TV comedies. So let us look at the first season of Space Force too as a test run before Daniels and Carell can assert better control over its setup, tone and characters — i.e. if Netflix does not cancel the show. If it does, Space Force will just be another throwaway piece of cultural ephemera, forgotten in the endless gaffes and episodes of Trump's Theatre of the Absurd.
Space Force is now streaming on Netflix.
monkeypox second case confirmed in kerala केरल में मंकीपॉक्स का दूसरा मामला सामने आया है। सूबे के स्वास्थ्य मंत्रालय का कहना है कि दुबई से प...