Anees Bazmee reacts to rumours about the exit of Diljit Dosanjh from No Entry 2; says, “I’m just happy that the film is getting made”

Director Anees Bazmee has broken his silence on the reported exit of Diljit Dosanjh from No Entry 2, the long-awaited sequel to the 2005 comedy hit. While the news of Diljit walking out of the project has made headlines, Bazmee maintains that his focus remains on getting the film made, regardless of casting shifts. Speaking to News18, Anees Bazmee said, “I’m just happy that the film is getting made. There’s no bigger joy than that. At this point, woh hi ho raha hai jo upar waala chahta hai (Whatever is happening is the will of God). I work with a lot of earnestness and I leave the rest to God.” Bazmee also reflected on the reality of filmmaking, noting that ideal casting doesn’t always work out. “It’s not like I’ve only worked with actors who’ve been my first choices on the films I’ve done so far. I’ve had to work with actors who were my second and even third choices. But once these films got released, audiences felt that those actors fit the characters perfectly and nobody else could...

The Wicker Man review brilliant conspiracy chiller is a one-movie genre in itself

The satirical masterpiece goes well beyond what one expects from folk horror, with Edward Woodward as the priggish cop sent to investigate a pagan island

After 50 years, here is a re-release for that gamey satirical masterpiece of folk horror – although “prog horror” is perhaps a better description. Folk horror, like film noir, is a term that seems to have been first used by critics before film-makers themselves, but The Wicker Man is so much better and more distinctive than any film that comes under the folk-horror heading that it’s virtually a one-movie genre in itself. It now appears billed as a “final cut”: a restoration complete with the footage that was excised when it was released as a B-picture support to Don’t Look Now in 1973.

It is a brilliant conspiracy-chiller set on May Day on a remote fictional island off the Scottish coast, ruled over by the haughty laird Lord Summerisle (Christopher Lee), whose inhabitants are devoted to sinister pagan observances to preserve the annual fruit harvest on which their economy depends. The Summerislanders are variously polite and insolent towards a thin-lipped young copper from the mainland who has been alerted to the disappearance of a teenage girl by an anonymous letter. This is the fiercely respectable Sgt Neil Howie, wonderfully played by Edward Woodward, a stickler for the Christian religion, saving himself for marriage to his demure fiancee, and outraged and yet also faintly excited by the sensual abandonment he sees around him.

The film is a genuinely scary adventure in group psychopathology, carried off by director Robin Hardy with an inspired seriousness and density of imagined folkloric detail. It is all clearly inspired by Ira Levin at some level, but adapted by Anthony Shaffer from the 1967 novel Ritual by David Pinner, an actor-turned-writer who originally developed the story for Michael Winner and whose cop protagonist may owe something to a part that Pinner played in the West End: Sgt Trotter, from Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap. (Like TS Eliot’s The Waste Land, incidentally, The Wicker Man is indebted to the images of death and rebirth from James Frazer’s The Golden Bough.)

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