Latest news with #Lyca
The Hindu
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Hindu
Levy of 30% interest by film financiers not usurious, says Madras High Court
The Madras High Court has refused to accept the argument of actor Vishal Krishna Reddy that the levy of interest at the rate of 30% per annum by financiers in the film industry was usurious and against the provisions of the Tamil Nadu Prohibition of Charging Exorbitant Interest Act, 2003. Justice P.T. Asha also found the actor to have made false averments on oath in a case related to the repayment of ₹30.05 crore with 30% interest from February 16, 2021, and rejected his claim of having signed the loan agreement with Lyca Productions Private Limited in 2019 without reading its contents. The judge decreed a suit filed by Lyca Productions in 2021 for recovering the entire loan liablity with interest. Finding the actor to have not been forthcoming with his bank statement and not attempting to discharge even a part of the loan amount, the judge also imposed costs on him. Senior counsel V. Raghavachari, representing Lyca Productions, told the court that Mr. Vishal had originally taken a loan of ₹21.29 crore from Anbuchezhian of Gopuram Films for making a movie titled Marudhu in 2016. Since the actor could not discharge the liability, Lyca had taken over the loan. After settling the entire amount to Gopuram Films in different tranches, Lyca made Mr. Vishal sign an agreement on September 29, 2019, agreeing to repay the loan amount with interest before December 31, 2020. However, since he did not honour the agreement, the present civil suit was filed in 2021. Refuting the claim made by Lyca, the actor denied having taken a loan of ₹21.29 crore either from Gopuram Films or Lyca Productions. He said, Marudhu was produced by Gopuram Films and and hence, the question of taking a loan would not arise at all when he had only acted in the movie for remuneration. He also claimed to have had a financial dealing only for a sum of ₹12 crore with Gopuram Films and said that he had signed the 'one-sided' agreement with Lyca in 2019 without reading all of the clauses because he had reposed total trust upon the production company and did not expect any foul play. He also argued that the interest rate of 30% demanded by Lyca was usurious and exorbitant. On the other hand, Mr. Raghavachari told the court that 30% was the standard rate of interest levied by film financiers because they give away crores of rupees in loan, and that Gopuram Films had also charged 30% After recording their submissions, Justice Asha recalled that the High Court had in Indiabulls Financial Services Limited versus Jubilee Plots and Housing Private Limited (2010) refused to interefere with the 33% interest rate, and held that it would not be violative of the provisions of the 2003 Act. Then, the court had categorically stated that the 2003 Act was intended to protect gullible people who borrow small amounts of loan and get slapped with usurious interest rates and not for mammoth loan transactions carried out for huge sums under the Negotiable Instruments Act of 1881. 'In the instant case, the defendant (Mr. Vishal) has signed the dotted lines agreeing to pay interest at 30% p.a... After having promised the plaintiff (Lyca) that the amount would be repaid with interest at 30% p.a., the defendant is now attempting to renege on his agreement,' Justice Asha concluded.
Economic Times
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Economic Times
5 films, one weekend: These must-watch movies have just dropped on OTT
Tourist Family Lal Salaam Single Bhool Chuk Maaf Jaat June 2025 has turned into a mini feast for film lovers, as a diverse batch of Indian titles dropped across top streaming platforms. Whether you're in the mood for family comedy, high-octane action, breezy romance, or political commentary, there's something fresh on every app. With theatrical runs wrapped and mixed box office fates behind them, these films are now finding new life and audiences on OTT. Here's what's new and where you can watch Family is a Tamil-language comedy-drama that blends humour with heart. Marking Abishan Jeevinth's directorial debut, the film follows an Eelam Tamil family who flees Sri Lanka's economic crisis for a better future in India. Featuring a strong ensemble led by M. Sasikumar and Simran, the film balances migrant struggles with comedic moments. With Yogi Babu, M.S. Bhaskar, and Ramesh Thilak in supporting roles, the film's warmth and relatability make it a standout pick on OTTplay PremiumStreaming from June 6, 2025Aishwarya Rajinikanth's Lal Salaam has made its quiet OTT debut a year after its theatrical release. Despite having Rajinikanth in a cameo, music by AR Rahman, and production from Lyca, the film was criticised for its underwhelming storytelling. Now streaming in an extended Tamil cut, the Telugu version remains unavailable. While the film may not have created buzz in theatres, the digital version gives curious fans a second chance to engage with this politically charged sports VideoStreamingNow streaming in five languages, Single is a rom-com that leans into its chaos. Sree Vishnu stars as Vijay, a man desperate to escape singlehood who ends up in a love triangle with Purva (Ketika Sharma) and Harini (Ivana). Directed by Caarthick Raju, the film combines heart, humour, and confusion with cameos and supporting turns from Vennela Kishore, VTV Ganesh, and more. With music by Vishal Chandrasekhar, it's a feel-good, pan-India entertainer available now on Prime VideoStreamingAfter a brief, delayed theatrical stint, Bhool Chuk Maaf is now available to stream on Prime Video. The rom-com features Rajkummar Rao and Wamiqa Gabbi in a story disrupted by offscreen geopolitical tensions. Directed by Karan Sharma and backed by Maddock Films and Amazon MGM Studios, the film blends quirky romance with social undertones. While its box office numbers underwhelmed, early streaming buzz suggests it's finding its audience on digital, especially among fans of slice-of-life love adrenaline is what you're after, Jaat delivers a gritty, action-packed ride. Directed by Gopichand Malineni in his Hindi debut, the film stars Sunny Deol and Randeep Hooda as two forces on a violent collision course. The story follows a mysterious passenger whose obsessive need for an apology sparks a brutal face-off with a former labourer turned crime boss. With Regina Cassandra, Jagapathi Babu, and Ramya Krishnan in key roles, Jaat adds some punch to Netflix's thriller lineup.
Yahoo
31-01-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Why Contemporary Fiction Loves Analog Tech
This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors' weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here. In Catherine Airey's new novel, Confessions, a Gen Z teenage girl, Lyca, pieces together her family's secrets in the late 2010s using decidedly 20th-century technology. She is a product of her time: She makes avatars in The Sims of herself and her crush; her mother nags her about lingering on social media instead of going out into the world. Someone like Lyca, born in the early aughts, may be just old enough to have burned songs onto a mix CD, used a phone attached to a wall, or taken an atlas on a childhood road trip—but most of their life has been defined by constant connection. (They've probably never had to reunite with friends in a post-concert crowd without the aid of a group chat or Find My Friends.) From this vantage point, fully understanding how life was lived in the absence of digital infrastructure can be challenging. But when Lyca begins investigating where she came from, she feels compelled to try. First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic's Books section: In search of the book that would save her life 'Cloud Pantoum,' a poem for Sunday The 'dark prophet' of L.A. wasn't dark enough Like any digital native, Lyca turns immediately to Google. She hopes to figure out the identity of the father she's never known, but the results are unsatisfactory. She starts to learn about family events that have long been buried—things even her mother doesn't know—only when she finds a trove of analog heirlooms: diaries, letters, and an old point-and-click-style video game that her great-aunt helped create, which is set in the house Lyca grew up in. This juxtaposition—tech-savvy teen, antiquated technology—may seem unusual, but it's actually become quite common in fiction. In the 2020s, Mark Athitakis writes in an Atlantic article this week, 'vintage media have emerged as tactile objects that symbolize integrity, solve the crime, and radiate realness.' Airey's novel is just one of a number of stories that seek some kind of lost meaning in the reels, discs, and cartridges that were ubiquitous before the turn of the 21st century. Athitakis points to the popularity of Stranger Things as a catalyst for this trope, but I imagine it also reflects a more personal longing. Lyca's quest isn't only about investigating her familial roots. It's the story of a person who's never lived without the internet in their pocket envisioning a lost past—and learning what life was like when their parents were young. Athitakis writes that VHS tapes and film cameras offer 'cozy reminders of the past' and a kind of 'cultural authenticity.' I was born in the mid-1990s, so watching a videotape or developing a roll of pictures from a birthday party is associated, in my mind, with a kind of prelapsarian youth and innocence. Likewise, when I was a teenager, records, cassettes, and even CDs represented a more spontaneous, pre-algorithmic era of music discovery. My father, a lifelong music obsessive, had huge collections of physical media in our home; he'd buy whole records on the strength of their singles or word-of-mouth boosterism. My taste, by contrast, was dictated in large part by instant downloads and recommendations from Pandora and iTunes, so picking a CD from his shelf of hundreds was already an exercise in nostalgia. For Lyca, discovering and sharing old media without the interference of an algorithm is a powerful experience. She reads The Catcher in the Rye because of a quote on her crush's Facebook; she's fascinated and moved when he plays her Philip Glass's score from Koyaanisqatsi. This curiosity and slight bewilderment about a completely different kind of life—one lived without social media or streaming—is deployed to superb effect in Confessions. Few of the misunderstandings or secrets that animated the novel's historical plot could have persisted in the modern day, and in fact, they come apart with the intervention of 2020s technology such as readily available DNA tests. Lyca has access to many things her mother, grandmother, and great-aunt didn't; what she can't really replicate is the texture of their experiences, which is found not in analog implements but in the elements that determined the course of their lives: chance, mystery, the ability to disappear or transform without a trace. The Effect Comes for the Novel By Mark Athitakis A crop of stories is responding to the fakery of the digital age by embracing the realness of analog objects. Read the full article. , by Richard Mirabella The pivotal car travel takes up a paltry section here, but it is impossible to look away from. Brother & Sister Enter the Forest follows two siblings as they try to find their way through a haze of trauma and estrangement. Justin is unhoused, dealing with PTSD and the physical effects of a traumatic brain injury; Willa is a nurse who makes dioramas of her and Justin's childhood. When Justin shows up at Willa's door asking to move in, the narration turns its gaze backwards to the events that broke them apart—a road trip that Justin took with a violent ex-boyfriend in the aftermath of a terrible crime. The trek is the book's dark, truthful center, casting a shadow of gay shame and survivor's guilt that takes Justin and his sister decades to see clearly. Still, even outside of those few crucial pages, the plot is infused with driving, aimless and otherwise. 'I love this idea,' the siblings' mother says to Justin. 'Taking someone out in a car. You're trapped. So we can really have a good talk without you running away like you always do.' — Emma Copley Eisenberg From our list: Eight books to take with you on a road trip 📚 Pure Innocent Fun, by Ira Madison III 📚 Cleavage, by Jennifer Finney Boylan 📚 The Uncanny Muse, by David Hajdu America Is Divided. It Makes for Tremendous Content. By Spencer Kornhaber Jubilee has proved adept at mining this new paradigm for views. Its video with Shapiro was the fifth-most-watched bit of election-related content on YouTube, just a few spots down from Joe Rogan's interview with Donald Trump; that '1 Woke Teen,' the fledgling TikTok commentator Dean Withers, was invited to the White House after his performance. The company's offerings also include dating shows, a forthcoming dating app, and a card game to provoke interesting interactions with friends. Students at high schools and colleges have held Jubilee-inspired events to mimic the debates they see on-screen. Lee said he's trying to build 'the Disney of empathy': a media empire that teaches people how to connect, listen, and healthily disagree—an ambitious, even fanciful-sounding notion in a time of cultural fracturing and political polarization. Read the full article. When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic. Sign up for The Wonder Reader, a Saturday newsletter in which our editors recommend stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Explore all of our newsletters. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
31-01-2025
- Entertainment
- Atlantic
Why Contemporary Fiction Loves Analog Tech
This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors' weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here. In Catherine Airey's new novel, Confessions, a Gen Z teenage girl, Lyca, pieces together her family's secrets in the late 2010s using decidedly 20th-century technology. She is a product of her time: She makes avatars in The Sims of herself and her crush; her mother nags her about lingering on social media instead of going out into the world. Someone like Lyca, born in the early aughts, may be just old enough to have burned songs onto a mix CD, used a phone attached to a wall, or taken an atlas on a childhood road trip—but most of their life has been defined by constant connection. (They've probably never had to reunite with friends in a post-concert crowd without the aid of a group chat or Find My Friends.) From this vantage point, fully understanding how life was lived in the absence of digital infrastructure can be challenging. But when Lyca begins investigating where she came from, she feels compelled to try. First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic 's Books section: Like any digital native, Lyca turns immediately to Google. She hopes to figure out the identity of the father she's never known, but the results are unsatisfactory. She starts to learn about family events that have long been buried—things even her mother doesn't know—only when she finds a trove of analog heirlooms: diaries, letters, and an old point-and-click-style video game that her great-aunt helped create, which is set in the house Lyca grew up in. This juxtaposition—tech-savvy teen, antiquated technology—may seem unusual, but it's actually become quite common in fiction. In the 2020s, Mark Athitakis writes in an Atlantic article this week, 'vintage media have emerged as tactile objects that symbolize integrity, solve the crime, and radiate realness.' Airey's novel is just one of a number of stories that seek some kind of lost meaning in the reels, discs, and cartridges that were ubiquitous before the turn of the 21st century. Athitakis points to the popularity of Stranger Things as a catalyst for this trope, but I imagine it also reflects a more personal longing. Lyca's quest isn't only about investigating her familial roots. It's the story of a person who's never lived without the internet in their pocket envisioning a lost past—and learning what life was like when their parents were young. Athitakis writes that VHS tapes and film cameras offer 'cozy reminders of the past' and a kind of 'cultural authenticity.' I was born in the mid-1990s, so watching a videotape or developing a roll of pictures from a birthday party is associated, in my mind, with a kind of prelapsarian youth and innocence. Likewise, when I was a teenager, records, cassettes, and even CDs represented a more spontaneous, pre-algorithmic era of music discovery. My father, a lifelong music obsessive, had huge collections of physical media in our home; he'd buy whole records on the strength of their singles or word-of-mouth boosterism. My taste, by contrast, was dictated in large part by instant downloads and recommendations from Pandora and iTunes, so picking a CD from his shelf of hundreds was already an exercise in nostalgia. For Lyca, discovering and sharing old media without the interference of an algorithm is a powerful experience. She reads The Catcher in the Rye because of a quote on her crush's Facebook; she's fascinated and moved when he plays her Philip Glass's score from Koyaanisqatsi. This curiosity and slight bewilderment about a completely different kind of life—one lived without social media or streaming—is deployed to superb effect in Confessions. Few of the misunderstandings or secrets that animated the novel's historical plot could have persisted in the modern day, and in fact, they come apart with the intervention of 2020s technology such as readily available DNA tests. Lyca has access to many things her mother, grandmother, and great-aunt didn't; what she can't really replicate is the texture of their experiences, which is found not in analog implements but in the elements that determined the course of their lives: chance, mystery, the ability to disappear or transform without a trace. The Stranger Things Effect Comes for the Novel By Mark Athitakis A crop of stories is responding to the fakery of the digital age by embracing the realness of analog objects. What to Read Brother & Sister Enter the Forest, by Richard Mirabella The pivotal car travel takes up a paltry section here, but it is impossible to look away from. Brother & Sister Enter the Forest follows two siblings as they try to find their way through a haze of trauma and estrangement. Justin is unhoused, dealing with PTSD and the physical effects of a traumatic brain injury; Willa is a nurse who makes dioramas of her and Justin's childhood. When Justin shows up at Willa's door asking to move in, the narration turns its gaze backwards to the events that broke them apart—a road trip that Justin took with a violent ex-boyfriend in the aftermath of a terrible crime. The trek is the book's dark, truthful center, casting a shadow of gay shame and survivor's guilt that takes Justin and his sister decades to see clearly. Still, even outside of those few crucial pages, the plot is infused with driving, aimless and otherwise. 'I love this idea,' the siblings' mother says to Justin. 'Taking someone out in a car. You're trapped. So we can really have a good talk without you running away like you always do.' — Emma Copley Eisenberg Out Next Week 📚 Pure Innocent Fun, by Ira Madison III 📚 Cleavage, by Jennifer Finney Boylan 📚 The Uncanny Muse, by David Hajdu Your Weekend Read America Is Divided. It Makes for Tremendous Content. By Spencer Kornhaber Jubilee has proved adept at mining this new paradigm for views. Its video with Shapiro was the fifth-most-watched bit of election-related content on YouTube, just a few spots down from Joe Rogan's interview with Donald Trump; that '1 Woke Teen,' the fledgling TikTok commentator Dean Withers, was invited to the White House after his performance. The company's offerings also include dating shows, a forthcoming dating app, and a card game to provoke interesting interactions with friends. Students at high schools and colleges have held Jubilee-inspired events to mimic the debates they see on-screen. Lee said he's trying to build 'the Disney of empathy': a media empire that teaches people how to connect, listen, and healthily disagree—an ambitious, even fanciful-sounding notion in a time of cultural fracturing and political polarization.
Yahoo
30-01-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
The Stranger Things Effect Comes for the Novel
'When a moment means more,' reads a 1984 ad for blank Kodak VHS cassettes, 'tape it. And keep it.' Keep it? That was a fib. As old-timers know, VHS tapes don't keep well—they wear out; crack; demagnetize into staticky oblivion; disappear into attics or the unloved corners of yard sales. Playback devices have grown scarce and expensive; a Japanese firm that operated the last VCR assembly line ended production in 2016. Despite their obsolescence, however, cassettes routinely appear in popular culture four decades after their heyday, usually serving as surprising symbols of stability and truth. In modern reality, most media are streamed, digitized, and easily vaporized; not so much owned as leased; pockmarked with ads and often tweaked (or falsified) via AI. In modern fiction, meanwhile, vintage media have emerged as tactile objects that symbolize integrity, solve the crime, and radiate realness. Catherine Airey's debut novel, Confessions, is a new entrant in this growing subgenre. In the modern-day timeline of this multigenerational family drama, Lyca, an extremely online member of Gen Z, is investigating the mysterious estrangement of her grandmother and great-aunt. The internet offers no clarity on the matter: 'I learnt the hard way that googling for answers doesn't just give you them; it leads you into a hall of mirrors, down infinite rabbit holes, leaving you with can upon can of worms.' Some answers can't be generated by a search engine, Airey suggests. She is only the latest in a wave of writers distilling the anxieties of the digital age into a celebration of the analog. The popularity of Stranger Things seems to have a lot to do with the trend; the Netflix series' mid-'80s aesthetic helped revive a 'kids on bikes' young-adult genre in books and on TV, where teens go spelunking through a spooky town's secrets. In Jane Schoenbrun's 2024 horror film, I Saw the TV Glow, tapes of a Buffy-esque drama connect a pair of teens attending Void High School (VHS). In Wim Wenders's 2023 film Perfect Days, a man cleaning toilets in Tokyo uses audio cassettes and an old camera (with film!) to shape and capture an existence beyond his humdrum job. Over the past five years, novels including John Darnielle's Devil House, Jeneva Rose's Home Is Where the Bodies Are, and Ransom Riggs's The Extraordinary Disappointments of Leopold Berry have all turned on their protagonists resolving the past via old media. Hybrid essay collections such as Chris Campanioni's forthcoming VHS use analog recordings to explore family history. To an extent, each of these works satisfies a nostalgic urge. Several of the novels sport visual references to cassettes on their covers, which serve as canny triggers for Boomers and Gen Xers raised on mixtapes (or younger generations who wish they'd been). And although such works channel specific pop-culture memories, they also position old media as avatars of an overarching '90s value: cultural authenticity. The janitor at the center of Perfect Days warms to a young woman who appreciates the sound of his Patti Smith tape, but becomes cranky toward the co-worker who sees his cherished objects only as collectible commodities. [Read: The technology that actually runs our world] Yet old media, in these new works, aren't just cozy reminders of the past—they actively disrupt the fictional present. These recordings shed light on characters' mysteries and personalities; they also set plots in motion. Early in Confessions, in 1977, Róisín—Lyca's great-aunt—is enchanted by the Golden Record attached to the NASA Voyager probes, a collection of songs, voices, and nature sounds meant to explain Earth to possible alien civilizations. 'Like a time capsule for other forms of life to discover,' Róisín tells her mother. 'And they're actually gold.' The record is an early indicator of what old media will do throughout the book: save, compress, reveal. Confessions opens in the '70s in County Donegal, Ireland, where Róisín and her sister, Máire, are fascinated by a house occupied by the 'Screamers,' a group of devotees of primal-scream therapy. The Screamers' peculiarity makes them fodder for horrific folklore about what really goes on in there. But it's also an escape hatch: Máire joins the Screamers as an artist in residence, setting off a series of events that will eventually encompass sexual assault, 9/11, the Irish battle over abortion rights—and an antiquated video game. Threaded through this story, which stretches to 2023, are excerpts of Scream School, a text-based choose-your-own-adventure video game about two sisters who have been sent away to a Donegal boarding school. The game becomes an allegory for the novel's larger story, which explores Róisín's and Máire's fates through the lives of Máire's daughter, Cora, and Cora's daughter, Lyca. As Confessions moves into the '80s, Róisín takes up residence in the old Screamers house, which a woman named Scarlett has converted into a Victorian-style B&B that is actually a front for then-illegal abortions. The physical game cartridge (complete with a J-card) plays a key role in revealing all of this, but it's one of many forms of old media in which Confessions marinates: grainy videos of post-9/11 Manhattan uploaded to YouTube; an old Pentax film camera; handwritten letters; penciled gameplay maps. All of these artifacts add up to reliable evidence in the case of the separated sisters. In 2018, Lyca is tasked with using the Scream School cartridge to put the story together. With the help of a tech-savvy schoolmate who procures a vintage Commodore 64 computer ('It's from the eighties,' he says, adorably), they work through the game. No magic wormholes open up ('It's not a very good game,' he says), but the experience sets Lyca on the path of accessing family histories, as game maps and letters expose a long-held secret. To keep the letters safe, Lyca stores them in an old laptop—useless as a piece of technology, but essential as a hiding place—as if the letters themselves were a hard drive, only more valuable, because they hold information you can't access through a web browser or alter with a keystroke. [Read: Murdered by my replica?] Confessions is based on a true story: A County Donegal building was home in the 1970s to the Atlantis Foundation, a group of primal-scream practitioners. From the early '80s to early '90s, the building housed a women's commune called the Silver Sisterhood, where residents cosplayed as Victorian-era women for tourists. They also developed text-based video games such as Jack the Ripper and The Secret of St. Bride's. The commune was generally averse to technology, but as one leader later explained, 'unlike television, which … is passive and mind-rotting, computer games call for concentration and commitment.' All new technologies stoke anxiety in artists. Today, AI companies are feeding the texts of books into large language models, prompting authors to pursue legal action against the firms to preserve their copyrights and their livelihood. In his forthcoming history of mechanized art, The Uncanny Muse, the cultural critic David Hajdu argues that the onset of artificial intelligence is just the latest iteration of an ongoing worry that computers might eventually outperform human creators. 'The idea that machinery could replace people—and, in some ways, surpass them in performance—became a truism,' he writes. 'Why shouldn't a machine do the work of a human being, if the human body is essentially a machine, anyway?' Not all disruptive technologies are created equal, though; tools like ChatGPT raise the stakes for the role of the creative human being in the way that, say, the Moog synthesizer never did. Artists are responding to this dizzying change by remembering a time when technology was a tool for creativity and connection. I Saw the TV Glow imagines a culture unpolluted by the internet, as substantive and innocent as the videotapes its characters pass around like samizdat. Similarly, the game in Confessions is a way of concealing the central family history and documenting a fight over the control of women's bodies. For safety's sake, the details are hard to search for—encoded in physical artifacts only a human could decrypt. Airey's debut is a historical novel, but its concerns are lodged in 2025. It arrives at a time when artists are looking for ways to represent our strange reality. For many of them, it seems that the answer is in the past, on tape. Article originally published at The Atlantic
