Raja Shivaji sells 40,000 tickets in advance booking; Pune goes on overdrive as 7:00 am shows open due to huge demand

Two days ago, Bollywood Hungama reported that the ticket sales of The Devil Wears Prada 2 were very encouraging. Raja Shivaji releases on the same day as the Hollywood comedy drama and this film, too, seems all set for a flying start, especially in its Marathi version. According to data accessed by Bollywood Hungama, Raja Shivaji had sold more than 40,000 tickets as of 8:00 am on April 29. By 4:30 pm on April 28, PVR Inox sold 9,800 tickets for the historical entertainer’s Marathi version. Cinepolis sold 3,000 tickets, MovieMax saw sales of 2,400, while Miraj Cinemas sold more than 4,100 tickets. The Marathi version has far more appeal due to its local flavour, ensemble cast, and the correct release period. Raja Shivaji releases on May 1, which is Maharashtra Day. Hence, the film will enjoy a three-day weekend in the state. Several films have been made on Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj in Marathi, but Raja Shivaji seems like the grandest of them all. This has further encouraged audience...

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

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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