EXCLUSIVE: After OMG Oh My God and 102 Not Out, Umesh Shukla's acclaimed play Madhuri vs Dixit to be made into a film

Umesh Shukla has been a popular name among Gujarati audiences for several years and since 2012, he has also enjoyed nationwide popularity. That was the year when OMG Oh My God, an adaptation of his cult Gujarati play Kanji Viruddh Kanji, was made as a Bollywood film. Starring Paresh Rawal and Akshay Kumar, the devotional courtroom drama emerged as a sleeper super-hit. Six years later, he made 102 Not Out (2018), an adaptation of the Gujarati play of the same name. The film adaptation, starring Amitabh Bachchan and Rishi Kapoor, was also a success. And now, Umesh Shukla is all set to adapt yet another of his acclaimed plays for the big screen – Madhuri vs Dixit. Madhuri vs Dixit is a Hindi play and its premiere took place on April 26 in Mumbai. Interestingly, it was earlier staged in Gujarati, with the title Madhuri Dixit. It stars Riddhi Shukla and Jaideep Shah in leading roles. Interestingly, the former is also the wife of Umesh Shukla. Unnati Gala and Harshad Patel feature in suppor...

Frankenstein review – Guillermo del Toro reanimates a classic as a monstrously beautiful melodrama

Venice film festival
Oscar Isaac and Jacob Elordi star as the freethinking anatomist and his creature as Mary Shelley’s story is reimagined with bombast in the director’s unmistakable visual style

Guillermo del Toro has created a movie about a grotesquely unnatural attempt to make a human being shocking in his physical strangeness … but that’s enough about his film version of Pinocchio. Now Del Toro has written and directed a bombastic but watchable new version of Mary Shelley’s great novel and makes of it a stately melodrama, starring Oscar Isaac as the anatomist and passionate freethinker Victor Frankenstein and Jacob Elordi as his creature: no passé neck-bolts or big fringey forehead, of course, and if you compare him with portrayals by other actors – Boris Karloff, Peter Boyle, Robert De Niro – he is, for all the picturesque prosthetic scars, the nearest this iconic figure has come to being a bit of a hottie.

It’s an epic bromance between scientist and monster, both of whom speak with plummy British accents, the monster’s one having a touch of John Hurt in The Elephant Man. The visual style of the movie is utterly distinctive and unmistakably that of Del Toro: a series of lovely, intricate images, filigreed with infinitesimally exact cod-period detail; deep focus but also strangely depthless, like hi-tech stained glass or illustrated plates in a Victorian tome; pictures whose luxurious beauty underscores the film’s reverence for the source material and for itself, but which for me impedes the energy of horror. For all the guignol, this movie is not going to risk actual bad taste, unlike the brilliant and far more interesting film on the Frankensteinian theme: Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things.

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