Priyanka Chopra, Varanasi and the question of a Telugu debut; was the Ram Charan starrer Thoofan forgotten?

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The Varanasi team’s widely circulated interview with Screen Rant features a rather awkward moment. When the interviewer asks Priyanka Chopra about her Telugu debut in Varanasi, the actor says she cannot remember when she last did a Telugu film. Mahesh Babu quickly steps in to add, “This is her first Telugu film.” But that is not entirely accurate. Priyanka Chopra had, in fact, featured in the Telugu version of the Amitabh Bachchan classic Zanjeer in 2013. Titled Thoofan, the Ram Charan starrer had Priyanka playing his love interest in what was admittedly a small role. At the time, Chopra had expressed considerable gratitude to the makers of Thoofan, as opportunities in Bollywood were scarce for her then. A senior member of the Thoofan team views her current statement as a case of selective amnesia. “When we signed her for Thoofan, nobody in the Hindi film industry was willing to sign her. We ourselves felt the role was not substantial enough for a future global star like her. But s...
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The Black Demon review daft but fun giant-shark mayhem on Mexican oil rig

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Sincere performances and lively banter turn hokey into entertaining as Josh Lucas’s engineer and his family do battle with a megalodon

It would seem that megalodons are the menace of the moment. These ginormous sharks, thought to be extinct for millions of years, have been retro-spawned for entertainment purposes by the audiovisual-industrial complex – specifically in the Meg franchise but also on the Discovery Channel – because great white sharks, veterans of the Jaws movies, just don’t cut it any more. Still, in thematic terms there’s a throughline that connects most shark movies: one way or another, they’re all about the return of the repressed, with the sharks manifesting the oceanic subconsciousness’ raging, violent id that has been enraged by the human superego effort at mastery over nature. In the original Jaws, it’s not so much Bruce the shark that’s the big bad as it is the township’s greedy mayor, determined to declare the beach safe in the interests of capitalism.

Directed by American Adrian Grunberg, its screenplay written by Boise Esquerra working from a screenplay by Carlos Cisco, The Black Demon effectively sticks to this well-greased formula. Yes, there’s a ginormous shark pootling around the waters along the coast of Mexico, locally known as “el demonio negro”. But the real, nefarious behemoth of the deep is a leaky oil-drilling platform offshore that was installed by a fictional conglomerate known as Nixon Oil, the name itself redolent of right-wing gringo corruption. (Which is ironic because Richard Nixon, for all his sins, was the president who started the Environmental Protection Agency.) Paul (Josh Lucas) is an engineer who works for Nixon, and as the film starts he arrives in the town nearest to the rig he supervised building years ago, with his wife, Ines, (Fernanda Urrejola) and two kids, Audrey (Venus Ariel) and Tommy (Carlos Solórzano) in tow for a family vacation while he inspects the rig.

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