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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American Graffiti at 50: a classic hangout comedy with a surprising melancholy

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George Lucas’s 60s-set tale of California teens offers some freewheeling fun but also a lingering sadness

Ninety-nine times out of 100, the postscripts that get tucked in before the closing credits, telling us where the characters’ lives have gone from there, are totally unnecessary, especially in a fictional story where their fates are better left to the viewer’s imagination. But in George Lucas’s American Graffiti, which turns 50 this week, they are the most important part of the film, not least because two of the four characters don’t have much longer to live. We can feel that darkness lingering around the edges of Lucas’ dusk-till-dawn nostalgia piece about the last night of summer vacation in 1962 Modesto, California, even while its teenagers are getting into mostly light-hearted forms of trouble. This night has to end, and when the sun comes up, their entire world turns back into a pumpkin.

From the opening shot of Mel’s Drive-In, set to Bill Haley and His Comets’ Rock Around the Clock, American Graffiti seems to unfold inside a snow globe, an idealized past with invisible borders that separate it not only from the outside world, but from the future itself. It’s one of those films, like its spiritual successor Dazed and Confused, that has the quality of a hangout comedy, loose-limbed and goofily episodic, but laced with an air of melancholy that’s so subtle you miss it entirely. (That’s why the postscript is such a slap in the face.) It aches for a scene that had passed just a decade earlier, before the tumult of the Vietnam war and counter-culture, but must have seemed, even then, like ancient history.

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