Ever since last year’s lockdown heaped misery on migrant workers and pushed many into penury, actor Sonu...
Tuesday, May 30, 2023
It’s with a keen eye that we have been watching the galloping increase in the popularity of Mouni Roy—less possibly for her roles in television and movies than for her easy mastery of cinema’s well-rigged dance floors as well as the self-generated supply of her perfect proportions on social media. Casting about our weekly net for an image that would do justice to her stature as a reigning sex symbol, we came up with this, catching Mouni in an artfully reflective pose, a golden pendant keeping company with a black bralette and skirt. The easy-on-the-eye, reposeful effect thus achieved is nearly undone, though, by that cheapening, inside out of the lower garment, perhaps betraying a bad stylist rather than a rush of blood. To her Instagram caption, “positively exotic”, we won’t add more, except comment that Mouni needs help with words too.
The more you have, the more you have to throw away. Drew Barrymore has John, Lionel and Ethel Barrymore—some of Hollywood’s founding royalty—as ancestors, and Sophia Loren and Steven Spielberg as godparents. Yet her volatility, like her sparkling movie career, started early. Her teens and early 20s were speckled with time in drug and alcohol rehabs, but spangled, too, with high, fawning acclaim from critics and the public. It’s for no small reason that we watched reruns of Poison Ivy (inset), Scream and Never Been Kissed. Now, the 46-year-old, lovely of face still, with a generous hint of embonpoint, says she’ll not keep her storm-tossed youth from her daughters Olive and Frankie. “I think it will give me ammunition to say, ‘This is why I am this way’,” says Drew, promising to embrace her past as a staging post of her journey thus far. Makes us yearn for the ’90s too, when we were so drunk on her provocative glamour, framed by that wavy hair that always caught the sun.
If we didn’t nod our heads to the progressive rock of Genesis, we burrowed deep into the solo hits of its drummer-singer, Phil Collins. As simple folk of the realm sat down to TV’s Ramayana, others tried to decode what ‘groovy’ meant in A Groovy Kind Of Love. In the ’80s, if you didn’t jive to Another Day In Paradise, you liked One More Night. If Take Me Home didn’t agree, the irrepressible Sussudio certainly did. Collins, who in recent years have been laid low with nerve damage after spinal injury that left him unable to handle his drum sticks, has decided to shake of the resultant depression with another tour of Genesis with bandmates Tony Banks and Mike Rutherford. ‘The Last Domino?’ sees their return after 14 years. The 70-year-old—how youthful greats fall prey to the patient nibbles of time—rues his partial infirmity: “I can barely hold a drumstick in this hand”. And there is a whiff of the swansong about it too. The tour, says Collins, is the band’s way of “putting it to bed”.
One hand on the waist of her crimped dress, what more does Yami Gautam has to declare, except her ineffable charm? With that playfully arch look, Yami tells us that she has never needed a godfather to further her career in Bollywood, that in an industry where she’d complete a decade soon, she has no use for undue preferment. Then, in a burst on confidence natural in the self-made, she lets it be known that she’s her “own godfather”, and her well-honed conscience and wisdom her only consigliere. Yami hastens to credit her family for keeping her sane in the mad whirligig of filmdom. One of the most naturally captivating of popular actresses also deplores the constant, drossy media scrutiny, and the need to avoid the shoals of solicitous advice that drifts the way of ingénues. Then, a flash of astuteness: one can never fully understand the film industry, she feels.
