The News Caravan

Tag: comedy

  • Rajkummar Rao, Shraddha Kapoor’s horror comedy ‘Stree 2’ to release on this date

    Rajkummar Rao, Shraddha Kapoor’s horror comedy ‘Stree 2’ to release on this date

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    Mumbai: Makers of the upcoming horror comedy film ‘Stree 2’ on Wednesday, officially announced their film at a grand event in Mumbai.

    Actors Rajkummar Rao, Shraddha Kapoor, Pankaj Tripathi, Aparshakti Khurana and Abhishek Banerjee marked their presence at the event to make an official announcement of the film.

    Team ‘Stree’ enacted a skit to announce the release date of the horror comedy sequel.

    MS Education Academy

    The team revealed that ‘Stree 2’ is set to release on August 31, 2024.

    Helmed by Amar Kaushik ‘Stree’ was released in the year 2018 and was declared a blockbuster hit.

    Rajkummar and Aparshakti also had a cameo in Varun Dhawan’s horror comedy film ‘Bhediya’ which was released in November last year.

    The makers of ‘Bhediya’ also announced the sequel of the film. At the gala, Varun unveiled the logo of Bhediya 2 and even made a wolf sound, expressing his excitement.

    Earlier, Abhishek Banerjee also talked about the much-awaited sequel of ‘Stree’ and said, “2023 is here!!! And I am very thrilled to kickstart this year, but looking back at the work I did last year- I was very nervous about JD aka Jana as it had to be similar yet difficult from Stree. But thankfully it was received well by the audience. Now the journey of Stree 2 will be super exciting.. recently I wrapped up Apurva. I’m thrilled to see how people will react to some very extreme characters. The playground is going to get bigger and better this year… so I am looking forward to it.”

    Meanwhile, Rajkummar will also be seen in an upcoming sports drama film ‘Mr and Mrs Mahi’ opposite Janhvi Kapoor.



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    #Rajkummar #Rao #Shraddha #Kapoors #horror #comedy #Stree #release #date

    ( With inputs from www.siasat.com )

  • “Comedy must be constantly changing, like society”

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    Taking advantage of her great professional moment on both radio and television, comedian Eva Soriano (32 years old, Reus, Tarragona) returns to the small screen with ‘Showriano’, a Movistar Plus+ format (premiering on Wednesday, March 1), produced by El Terrat (The Mediapro Studio), which will have his personal label and in which he will gather well-known guests every week on a set turned into a nightclub, where there will be no shortage of improvisation, humor and music together with a piano. The presenter takes on her second solo professional challenge after ‘La noche D’ on TVE.

    How did you get convinced to present this project?

    They gave me carte blanche. As the name of the program itself indicates, the idea was developed by El Terrat, Movistar Plus+ and me. In this format there is a lot of me. I like to do entertainment and when they told me that I wanted to do it, I said of course.

    -How are we going to notice his seal?

    –To begin with, the name is already a declaration of intent. Nobody can present the program but me, because then it would be crazy. I am part of the whole gear and the conception of space. I feel great because they consult me ​​and ask, and that doesn’t always happen. Here is a proposal in which they told me that this was made for me, to have a good time. It’s like the most expensive prom party in history.

    –We see him sing in all the programs he presents. Do you have that thorn stuck in not having dedicated yourself to music?

    I am a frustrated singer. All part of the frustration. I sing in all the productions I do, both in theater and on radio. I do it from love. I am not a professional singer, but all the productions will be from the program, so that it is the common thread for the viewers.

    –Is it more complicated to make humor and comedy through music?

    It’s complicated, it’s insane and it’s crazy. What are we going to do? Also. There’s a part of the show that’s going to be improvised, and that’s completely real. We are not going to know the story that the people who want us to make a song to suit them are going to bring us. I think that’s the basis of comedy. Something improvised that turns out well is the host and incredible, everyone celebrates it, but sometimes it also turns out to be crap. Failure is also the basis of comedy. In the risk is the adventure and improvisation is what it has.

    Do you have any tricks in case you go blank during an improvisation?

    –Basically, the output that never fails me is an assonant rhyme with pot, cunt or something like that. There are certain tools that you know will make you laugh. If I see myself between a rock and a hard place, I’m going to use them.

    –It is your second television project after ‘La noche D’ (TVE). Do you feel that you have learned to present a great show like this?

    -Yes and no. ‘La noche D’ helped me to get to know myself as a professional and to know what I like and what I don’t. And, above all, it was a school. However, ‘Showriano’ has an added risk, which is that it is a very mine project, in which I am on top of it and have participated actively. There are some added nerves that I did not have on TVE. And here I have a responsibility that I did not have in other programs.

    –He debuted on a general channel, where the battle for the audience is more cruel. Is it better to work on a payment platform without such high pressure for data?

    –I think that almost all my colleagues will agree that we cannot work with figures. It is not a mathematical science. The numbers are what they are, and of course we have to accept the audiences, but you can’t work that way thinking for people to see it because in the end you are killing creativity, which is the art of this profession. I am not in favor of giving too much importance to audiences because I would be doing things to please and that is not good because it puts you in a dynamic that leaves you without personality.

    Good moment

    –It closed the previous year without stopping chaining projects. Are you taking advantage of your good moment?

    –My main problem is that I like almost everything I do. Every project I do compensates me in some way. If you start with a bit of enthusiasm, you always work better. But it’s true, I’m not going to deny it, in which there are days when I end up exhausted. That later I take a nap and move on? Well too. I think that you have to take advantage of the good times, without going crazy, because there is a point of mental health that you have to take care of. I take it as a long-distance race in which you have to be there and train more and more, but taking into account what you like.

    –Josema Yuste complained that she could no longer make jokes with homosexuals. Do you think that humor should advance or be a boundless terrain?

    –As a comedian you cannot set subjective limits. In the end, what we do is humor from our experiences and we live in a society. There is a review point towards your person that must be constant. Just like I’m saying this now, I can skate tomorrow too because I’m human, as Chenoa would say. I conceive of comedy as something that must be constantly changing like society. If it changes, your speech must also evolve. As an individual I have to do a job in which I have to progress.

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    #Comedy #constantly #changing #society
    ( With inputs from : pledgetimes.com )

  • How Volodymyr Zelenskyy United His Country — With Comedy

    How Volodymyr Zelenskyy United His Country — With Comedy

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    politico zelensky horz2

    When Ukraine became independent in 1991 amid the dissolution of the Soviet Union, it was a country in search of a national idea. This wasn’t straightforward: The ancestors of Ukraine’s citizens played different roles in a national history that included both great achievements and bloodshed. People searched for something beyond a belief in their constitution that could bring them together across differences in politics and life experience.

    Ukrainians have long struggled with forces that threatened to divide their society. Under Soviet rule, Moscow’s policies of Russification in Ukraine had contributed to a situation that made independent Ukraine seem divided along the Dnipro River, with Ukrainian speakers on one side and Russian speakers on the other. Today, the fact that many Ukrainians still speak Russian in everyday life is in many ways a legacy of those Soviet-era policies — including the death by starvation of millions of Ukrainians because of grain confiscation, and the summary executions of hundreds of Ukrainian artists, writers and intellectuals — not an expression of brotherhood with Russia, no matter what the Kremlin might say.

    But Ukraine has never been such a binary place. Ukrainians have a long multicultural history that includes not only ethnic Ukrainians but also people who identify as Jewish (including Zelenskyy), Bulgarian, Crimean Tatar, Hungarian, Greek, Korean, Polish, Romani, Romanian, Russian and others, whose languages are still spoken in Ukraine today. In his 2020 presidential New Year’s greeting, Zelenskyy acknowledged the nature of Ukraine’s diversity by speaking not only in Ukrainian, but also in Hungarian, Crimean Tatar and Russian.

    In 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea and invaded Ukraine’s Donbas region under a thinly veiled pretext of supporting Russian-speaking separatists, Ukrainians largely united against these violations of their country’s territory. At that time, Zelenskyy’s comedy troupe voiced in metaphor Ukrainians’ frustration at Russia’s incessant lies and refusal to let them go and their pain at the tepid response of the international community, singing of “European ‘brothers’ who traded us for gas.”

    During those years, the stress of the Russian occupation of Crimea and Donbas threatened Ukrainians’ unity. Some noticed an opportunity to win national elections if parts of the Russified east were no longer part of Ukraine, murmuring in private about being ready to “let the Donbas go.” But even then, still working as a comedian, Zelenskyy was not ready to abandon his compatriots in Russia-occupied areas. In their comedy skits, Zelenskyy and his troupe amplified their longstanding criticisms of Russian chauvinism, turning the tables to pantomime and mock Russians’ longstanding ethnic slurs, lies about Ukrainians and attitudes about Crimea.

    At that time, Zelenskyy and his comedy troupe performed mainly in the Russian language, reaching Ukrainians who used Russian in daily life and came from regions where people sometimes felt alienated from politics in the capital, and who previously had sometimes struggled to see themselves as sharing common experiences and identities with their compatriots who spoke the state language at home and in daily life. By making Ukrainians from different regions feel seen and valued, Zelenskyy invited them into a patriotism that held up love of Ukraine as a central value but did not insist on a particular ethnic or private linguistic identity. He and his troupe showed how Russian-speaking Ukrainians, who did not think of themselves as nationalists, could identify as Ukrainian patriots.

    As a comedian, Zelenskyy and his troupe used an approach to thinking about Ukraine’s past that differed from the us-versus-them thinking that long dominated some public discussion about politics in Ukraine. Performing songs that reminded Ukrainians of shared experiences, he and his troupe not only validated local identities, but admitted mistakes and imperfections, acknowledged disagreement, and fostered a generous, inclusive idea of what it meant to be Ukrainian.

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    #Volodymyr #Zelenskyy #United #Country #Comedy
    ( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

  • Raquel Welch: a strong and powerful personality with a rarely-tapped gift for comedy

    Raquel Welch: a strong and powerful personality with a rarely-tapped gift for comedy

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    The term “sex symbol” reeks of a bygone age of smirking sexism, and very often female stars landed with this tag would be given some exotic outfit. Ursula Andress had her ivory-white bikini with chunky belt buckle in Dr No; Jane Fonda had her sleek one-piece with black stripes and thigh-length boots as the glam astronaut in Barbarella.

    But the most outrageous piece of sex-symbol costuming of all time was given to Raquel Welch, who was called upon to rock a revealing doeskin two-piece in her role as Loana the Fair One in the 1966 dinosaur adventure One Million Years BC, featuring stop-motion dino action by Ray Harryhausen, and based on the less-than-scientific notion that humans and dinosaurs coexisted.

    Loana was the ultrasexy cavebabe who had three lines in the film, but the poster image of Welch in this quite extraordinary outfit made her a legend. Welch became naughty-but-nice shorthand for a luscious star that blokes of all ages would secretly or not-so-secretly lust after; a sort of sitcom gag, like dads watching Top of the Pops and waiting for Pan’s People to come on.

    Kenneth Branagh’s recent movie Belfast has a shot of Welch entrancing a saucer-eyed family audience in this film. And in fact, Welch became even more of a legend in Britain for a publicity stunt in 1972, when – in London to promote her British-produced western Hannie Caulder – she declared herself to be a Chelsea FC fan, dressed up in Chelsea strip for the photographers and went to a Chelsea home match against Leicester City in the itchy-bearded company of Jimmy Hill. Welch was a strong, powerful personality, who didn’t simper or blush but looked permanently amused, as if she could eat any of her admirers for breakfast.

    Welch with Strother Martin, Jack Elam and Ernest Borgnine in Hannie Caulder.
    Welch with Strother Martin, Jack Elam and Ernest Borgnine in Hannie Caulder. Photograph: Cinetext/Paramount/Allstar

    In fact, Welch had cult-classic moments before and after her ersatz-Jurassic apotheosis. She had appeared with Frank Sinatra in a now-forgotten mystery called Lady in Cement (and in fact had a tiny appearance in the Elvis Presley film Roustabout). She had been one of the crew in the amazing sci-fi movie Fantastic Voyage, shrunk to microscopic size and sent into the body of an important scientist to repair his brain – and inevitably she had to model a figure-hugging wetsuit.

    In Stanley Donen’s Bedazzled, with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, in which hapless Dudley sells his soul to the devil, Welch appears as the figure of Lilian Lust who clambers into bed with him wearing ketchup-red lingerie. Welch got no critical respect for her lead performance in the little-liked movie version of Gore Vidal’s novel Myra Breckinridge in 1970: her playing a transgender character is perhaps the least of the film’s problems.

    But like so many performers stuck with the “sex symbol” job description, Welch had a gift for comedy which was sometimes indulged and sometimes not: she scored a great success with her performance as the sly Constance de Bonacieux in Richard Lester’s all-star Dumas romps The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers, having a steamy indiscretion with Michael York’s D’Artagnan.

    And she has real presence in James Ivory’s Hollywood Golden Age drama The Wild Party from 1975 (an influence on Damien Chazelle’s Babylon), in which she plays the loyal mistress of a has-been star who is hosting an orgy for influential moguls.

    Her celebrity in the 1970s was colossal and it’s a pity that no film-maker could quite bring out of her that combination of drollery and brassy physical strength that could well have produced a tremendous comedy. But she was an icon: a sexy warrior who was more than a match for human or dinosaur.

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    ( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )

  • Everyone Else Burns: this great new British comedy will make you laugh again and again

    Everyone Else Burns: this great new British comedy will make you laugh again and again

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    Religions famously enjoy being made fun of. That’s why [very extended paragraph deleted on legal recommendation]! Don’t we? We all do that. But I am having a lot of fun with Everyone Else Burns, the new Channel 4 comedy (Monday, 10pm) that centres on a hyper-religious family in Greater Manchester. There’s a lot to like here – the Sex Education-style 70s-tinged aesthetic, the gloopy storytelling where episodes shrug into one another, a supporting cast of absolute British comedy bangers – but the main thing is: it remembers to be funny. Again and again. And – and I hope you’re ready for a rare balancing act – never punches down at religion. And lo, there was a miracle.

    Let’s start with Simon Bird, the family’s bowl-cutted patriarch. As Will in The Inbetweeners and Adam in Friday Night Dinner he was excellent but essentially played the same character, which is “Person who says: ‘What on Earth are you doing?’ whenever someone else does something odd”. Now, he’s the freak: as David, he gets his family up for punishing 2am apocalyptic fire drills, is hated by the church he loves and doesn’t understand why his wife and daughter are drifting away from him. It’s been a while – I’d probably put it around Mark from Peep Show – but one of comedy’s great characters is “Man who is ruining his life by his dedication to diligently following the rules”, and Bird’s David fits neatly into that fine tradition.

    The fear with a show like this – where the pitch is: “What if a family were weird?” – is it becomes one-note quite early on: here’s the dad being weird, look; here’s the mum being weird. What if the daughter were normal with a hint of weird? Well, then the son has to be doubly weird. And yes, there is a little of that. But the family’s performances – Amy James-Kelly’s knotted-brow teenage daughter Rachel, slowly pulling away from the idea of a religion that forbids caffeine and TV; youngest son Aaron, who keeps making crayon renderings of gruesome visions of hell, played eerily well by Harry Connor; and the brilliant Kate O’Flynn, who plays the yearning-for-more wife Fiona so well you figure they must have had to rejig the script to give her all the best lines (“David, if you’re going to scream you should do it into a pillow at home, it’s better for the kids”) – tamp down any threat of that. You’ve got two options for a comedy, really: reflect the reality of life in all its painful squirming glory; or invent a weird world and let weirdness reign supreme. Everyone Else Burns lands between the two, and feels bright and original and new as a result.

    Simon Bird with Kadiff Kirwan as Andrew in Everyone Else Burns.
    Simon Bird with Kadiff Kirwan as Andrew in Everyone Else Burns. Photograph: James Stack/ Channel 4

    The supporting cast are another accomplishment: Morgana Robinson as the cheerfully straightforward “That’s a sin, is it?” neighbour; Lolly Adefope as a flatly northern, always vaping teacher; Al Roberts as a sort of Prof Brian Cox/youth pastor hybrid who’s addicted to cola; and I’ve never not enjoyed the wild turmoil Liam Williams brings to the screen. But Kadiff Kirwan is the standout: his beaming nice-guy charm contrasts so perfectly with Bird’s always-ready-to-escalate evangelist.

    It would have been easy to bog Everyone Else Burns down with explaining theology then explaining how theology is wrong – but in the episodes I’ve seen religion is, well, not really in it. There are scenes at a nameless denomination of church, and the stringent but abstract scriptures are the motivation behind a lot of David’s more erratic behaviours but, at its heart, Everyone Else Burns is a family comedy that just happens to be flavoured by religion, rather than revolving round it.

    If you’ll allow me a semi-bizarre zig into patriotism – I have arranged an RAF flyover to coincide with the exact moment you read this, don’t worry – there’s something oddly stirring about watching a great new British comedy. Everyone Else Burns does everything we’re good at without any syrupy tropes – just crackling dialogue over a soft-sided story that makes sense. Sometimes it’s easy to forget how good we are at this and ignore a new release for whatever glossy thing the streaming giants have put out this week – why yes, I am still annoyed that I watched Glass Onion! Thank you for asking actually! – but to miss Everyone Else Burns is to miss a rare treat.

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    ( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )