Shah Rukh Khan-Deepika Padukone's King leak goes viral: Are fan pages bigger than official promotions now?

Leaked visuals from the South Africa schedule of King, featuring Shah Rukh Khan and Deepika Padukone, went viral online; Siddharth Anand requested fans not to circulate such visuals to preserve the film’s cinematic experience. Once upon a time, Bollywood controlled the first look. A poster was planned. A teaser was timed. A still was approved. A magazine cover was negotiated. A campaign was built week by week, sometimes month by month. The audience saw what the studio wanted them to see, when the studio wanted them to see it. That world is gone. The King leak controversy proves it. One leaked visual from a foreign schedule can now do what crores of marketing money once did. Ignite national conversation before the makers are ready. Shah Rukh Khan and Deepika Padukone’s leaked visuals from the sets have sent fans into overdrive, while director Siddharth Anand’s appeal not to circulate them has raised a larger question: in today’s cinema ecosystem, are fan pages more powerful than offici...

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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