PIL targets The Kerala Story 2, seeks removal of ‘Kerala’ from title amid communal concerns

A new Public Interest Litigation (PIL) has been filed before the Kerala High Court challenging the title and release of the recently released film The Kerala Story 2. The petition, submitted on March 3 by a retired social science teacher and a practicing lawyer, calls for the removal of the word “Kerala” from the film’s title, arguing that it unfairly associates the State with sensitive and controversial themes. According to the plea, the petitioners contend that the film’s title and subject matter risk portraying Kerala in a negative light. They have alleged that the narrative reportedly depicts the State as a centre for forced religious conversions, a portrayal they believe could damage its social and cultural image. The petition also references an ongoing legal tussle involving the filmmakers. It notes that the producers have approached a Division Bench of the High Court challenging a recent interim order issued by a Single Bench, which had temporarily stayed the film’s release. T...

Napoleon review – Joaquin Phoenix makes a magnificent emperor in thrilling biopic

Ridley Scott dispenses with the symbolic weight attached to previous biopics in favour of a spectacle with a great star at its centre

Many directors have tried following Napoleon where the paths of glory lead, and maybe it is only defiant defeat that is really glorious. But Ridley Scott – the Wellington of cinema – has created an outrageously enjoyable cavalry charge of a movie, a full-tilt biopic of two and a half hours in which Scott doesn’t allow his troops to get bogged down mid-gallop in the muddy terrain of either fact or metaphysical significance, the tactical issues that have defeated other film-makers.

Scott cheekily imagines Napoleon firing on the pyramids in the Egyptian campaign as well as witnessing the execution of Marie Antoinette (but not the humiliation of Louis XVI by the Tuileries mob, which he might actually have seen). Out of deference moreover, Scott and his screenwriter David Scarpa suppress all mention of Napoleon’s reintroduction of slavery into the French colonies. But above all, there’s a deliciously insinuating portrayal of the doomed emperor from Joaquin Phoenix, whose derisive face suits the framing of a bicorne hat and jaunty tricolour cockade. Phoenix plays Napoleon as a military genius and lounge lizard peacock who is incidentally no slouch on horseback. Others might show Napoleon as a dreamy loner, but for Scott he is one half of a rackety power couple: passionately, despairingly in love with Vanessa Kirby’s pragmatically sensual Josephine. Scott makes this warring pair the Burton and Taylor of imperial France.

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