Latest news with #romanticcomedy
The National
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- The National
Pakistani stars of Love Guru, Mahira Khan and Humayun Saeed, on filming in the UAE
Humayun Saeed are reuniting for the first time in a decade with the romantic comedy Love Guru, a Pakistani film releasing in time for Eid Al Adha. The pair, who last starred together in the 2015 romantic drama Bin Roye, were recently in Dubai to promote the family entertainer. They had earlier shot the song Aa Tenu in the emirate, featuring several locations including the Palm Jumeirah. 'The UAE feels like home,' Khan tells The National. 'It's a melting pot of so many cultures, and it never feels like I've left home. What is amazing and beautiful about the UAE is that it is a common ground for so many people. Nationality and stuff like that gets left behind, and I love that it is so safe for women.' Directed by Nadeem Baig, Love Guru is named after Saeed's character, a Casanova and 'professional break-up artist', who falls head over heels for architect Sophia, Khan's character. Saeed, who is also a producer on the 280 million Pakistan rupee (Dh3.66 million) film, is counting on Khan and his popularity to turn the film into a success. 'I want people to like the film. If that happens, you recover,' he says candidly. 'When I made Main Hoon Shahid Afridi [a film he starred in and produced in 2013], I learnt a lot about failure. But my subsequent successful films Jawani Phir Nahi Ani and Punjab Nahi Jaungi helped me gain confidence. I just pray everything goes well, and it usually does. Inshallah, this will work, too.' A major star in Pakistan, Saeed was also in the fifth season of the critically acclaimed Netflix series The Crown, in which he played Dr Hasnat Khan, a surgeon who had a relationship with Princess Diana. Both he and Khan share a passion for their work. 'I love doing what I do. Even if it's one project a year, I have to keep working,' Khan says. One of the most influential stars in Pakistan, Khan is often in the spotlight for her vocal stance on several hot topic issues. She was the first major star to publicly call out Pakistani screenwriter Khalil-ur-Rehman Qamar for verbally abusing a female journalist during a televised debate in 2020. Qamar, who was widely criticised for his comments, responded by saying he committed a 'sin' by working with Khan. The incident was recently revived during the promotional tour for Love Guru. Comments by Khan saying she could have handled the situation better and more privately have led to her being accused of backtracking. 'I was scared to open my social media today. My manager told me: 'You speak and say things from the heart and you expect people to take it in the same vein. You also expect everyone to understand the nuance of what you've said,'' Khan says. 'So I either go completely silent for a while or I step up. And when I choose to be vocal, there will always be these kinds of reactions, like 'I can't believe she said this' or 'Did she just say we should do this or that?'. 'Whatever it is, I will stand by what I'm saying. Because for now, this is what I feel.'
Vogue
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Vogue
Here's Your First Look at Molly Gordon in Sophie Brooks's ‘Oh, Hi!'
Eight years after The Boy Downstairs, her feature directorial debut starring Zosia Mamet and Matthew Shear, debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival, Sophie Brooks is back with her sharply funny, Molly Gordon and Logan Lerman–fronted sophomore effort, Oh, Hi!—and we've got your first look. A big hit at Sundance earlier this year, Oh, Hi! centers on Iris (Gordon) and Isaac (Lerman), who, four months into seeing each other, take a romantic trip into the bucolic countryside. There, they croon along to Dolly Parton and Kenny Loggins, buy great heaps of fresh berries, swim in the local creek, show-dance under the stars, and have exciting vacation sex—that is, until the couple learn that they have decidedly different understandings of just what kind of 'couple' they actually are. Throw in a leering next-door neighbor (David Cross); the intriguing contents of a locked closet; and appearances from two of Iris's friends (one of whom is cousins with…a witch?), and you've got a twisty romantic comedy that owes as much to Nicole Holofcener or Noah Baumbach as it does to Stephen King. 'After getting out of a serious relationship in my late 20s, I re-entered the world of dating with relative shock and horror,' Brooks wrote in a recent essay for Variety, explaining Oh, Hi!'s origins. 'Now, in this current modern world of dating and hooking up, where relationships can take so many forms and there are so many options and choices for labels and intentions, the romantic world is rife with possibilities of miscommunication.' Together with Gordon, who is a close friend, and Brooks's brother and producer, David, she developed the film's story during lockdown, shooting it in upstate New York last year. Ahead of Oh, Hi!'s July 25 theatrical release, see exclusive stills from the film, featuring Gordon, Lerman, Geraldine Viswanathan (Drive-Away Dolls), and John Reynolds (Search Party), below.
CBC
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
It's the end of the world and Sudbury, Ontario is 'the last romantic city left on earth'
In Anne Émond's Peak Everything (Amour Apocalypse in French), a lonesome Montrealer struggles with depression. Adam, a kennel owner played by Patrick Hivon, is staring down the end. He's often listening to the violent storms or earthquakes caused by the climate crisis raging just outside his window, or over the other end of a phone call. Or perhaps those sounds are more impressionistic, coming from Adam's own emotional turbulence. His crippling anxiety over the state of the world is at war with a tragic resignation. Adam fears the titular apocalypse. But what he's even more afraid of is his own state of mind – that maybe he couldn't even be bothered to save himself if given the chance. That is until the right woman comes along. Peak Everything is a romantic comedy that premiered this week at the Cannes Film Festival. It's also an expression of writer and director Émond's own battle with depression during the recent pandemic, an event that for many of us felt like the end of the world. "It was brutal," says Émond, recalling that period. "I had more time. More loneliness. I started to read articles, listen to podcasts and I was like, 'oh my God, we are fucked.' We are dying. It's almost over.'" A friend gave Émond a therapeutic lamp to help her cope — a device that packs sunlight in a box to help cheer up, in particular, Canadians who tend to really feel the January blues. "I put it on, under my [sun]glasses," Émond recalls. "And under the light, I started to imagine this love story; this very tender and sweet and fun story to first save myself." We're in Cannes, speaking about depression and apocalyptic conditions, under a canopy on the beach, with sunbathers lounging nearby and yachts overseeing all the action on the C ô te d'Azur in the distance. The festival has always provided a stunning contrast between its glitz, glam and sparkling scenery, and the heavier subject matter its films tend to deal with. On that front, this year's edition, which wraps Sunday, didn't disappoint. Robert Pattinson, Jennifer Lawrence and Rihanna are among the celebs who got the shutterbugs in a frenzy on the red carpet. Meanwhile the films at the festival dealt not only with depression (Peak Everything and Lynne Ramsay's viscerally dire Die, My Love, starring Lawrence and Pattinson) but also police violence and the protests that would erupt around the world (as recounted in French docu-thriller Dossier 137 and satirized in Ari Aster's Eddington) and the ongoing massacre in Gaza (documented in Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk). Émond, who broke out over a decade ago with Nuit #1, another story about a seemingly impossible romance, is cheerily discussing her new film — essentially the French-Canadian answer to Punch-Drunk Love. "One of the greatest films of the past 25 years," says Emond of Paul Thomas Anderson's whimsical love letter to the French New Wave. "I think this film influenced all my films." As with Punch-Drunk Love, Amour Apocalypse begins when its depressed and socially awkward entrepreneur receives a package that magically brings relief to his discordant life. This time it isn't a harmonium but the same therapeutic lamp that inspired Émond's story. Adam fancifully forges a connection with a woman named Tina who answers the therapeutic lamp's tech support line, which he mistakenly but serendipitously rings looking for emotional support. For much of the movie, Tina (Piper Perabo) is just a voice on the other line, like a fantasy figure recalling Punch-Drunk Love 's biggest flaw. All the women in that earlier film are thinly drawn, existing only in relation to Adam Sandler's Barry Egan, as either emotional terrorists (Barry's sisters or the phone sex scam operator), or as the tenderly comforting object of affection played by Emily Mortimer, who enters the scene solely to rescue the main character from his anxieties. Émond is happy to play along in the same mode in Peak Everything, where the women in the film are either objects of affection or frustration, but only up to a point. "I invented this woman to help me to get better," Émond says, of the Tina character who we gradually discover is married, has children and is messy enough to leave everything behind to pursue a wildly passionate romance to satisfy her own emotional needs. "At some point, I was feeling better," Émond continues. "And I wanted to tell a true love story. In a true love story, it's two real people, with their problems, flaws and everything. Tina cannot just be a nice voice — sweet and everything. So I was like, 'No, no. She's a mother. Her husband drinks too much. She has problems. I thought it was interesting also that a woman that is 48 years old, can fall in love, go crazy for a man and leave everything behind." There's another layer to the reckless abandon. Émond doesn't just explore this romance as a hopeful balm during a climate crisis, but also as a Canadian allegory for Anglo-Franco unity. Adam is from Montreal. He soon discovers that Tina, this sensual and near mystical voice he hears on the other end of the phone, is actually in Sudbury. "The last romantic city in the world," says Émond, chuckling about her cheeky choice of locale. Émond finds a lot of humour in her inter-provincial romance, taking every opportunity to poke fun at not just at the people who populate her whimsical scenarios but also all of Ontario. When Adam pursues Tina, crossing over into Ontario, he's greeted by a giant Moose statue with a sign reading "Open for Business," the provincial slogan introduced by premiere Doug Ford. "It's so funny," Emond says about the cringey greeting, not realizing it was the Ford government who cooked it up. "Every time I come into Ontario, I'm like 'what a punchline.'" Emond makes sure to point out that she ridicules with affection and tenderness — whether the punchline is Ontario or her characters. But she also says the romance at the heart of her movie was meant to conjure a sense of Canadian unity, which feels especially pertinent at this moment. "Canada is funny these days," says Emond. "Since we're becoming the 51st state, we think a lot about what is Canada," she jokes. Émond, who grew up absorbing deeply separatist influences, parses the two solitudes when it comes to Quebec and the rest of Canada, not just in terms of the social and political, but also the cinema. Quebec films rarely depict the rest of Canada, nor do they often open in theatres outside their own province. And that exclusion often feels like a two way street. Rarely do we get a chance to see what Quebec cinema is cooking up in the rest of Canada, unless of course we fly to Cannes, where our national cinema is represented solely by the work of French-Canadians — as is the case at Cannes 2025. Émond's Amour Apocalypse joins Félix Dufour-Laperrière 's Death Does Not Exist and the animated shorts Bread Will Walk and Hypersensibility as the Quebecois films raising a maple leaf in Cannes. And she's happy to have her story about an impossible romance between Anglophones and Francophones be representative of some national unity. "I was like, 'why not,'" says Emond, singing a different tune from her earlier influences. "It's a bilingual country. It feels strange to be saying that."
New York Times
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
‘Jane Austen Wrecked My Life' Review: It's Not Me, It's Jane
Besides Shakespeare, no author may haunt the screen more than Jane Austen. Her novels, full of heroines who find love and usually a life lesson or two, practically spawned the romantic comedy. So no wonder filmmakers have tackled copious direct adaptations of Austen's novels — many of which are modern classics of cinema, like Ang Lee's 'Sense and Sensibility' and the six-part TV version of 'Pride and Prejudice,' with its indelible scene of Mr. Darcy emerging from a pond in a wet shirt, ensuring generations of crushes on Colin Firth. Yet Austen's novels are timeless, and thus lend themselves to modernized spins, like 'Bridget Jones's Diary,' 'Metropolitan,' 'Clueless,' 'The Lizzie Bennet Diaries' and dozens more. And there are the meta-Austen tales, stories about loving Austen's stories: 'Austenland,' for instance, and 'The Jane Austen Book Club.' The well of, and thirst for, Austenalia is seemingly bottomless. 'Jane Austen Wrecked My Life' is not quite like any of those — more of a cousin from out of town, a little different, a little more intriguing. Written and directed by Laura Piani, it's a rom-com laced lightly with 'Pride and Prejudice' overtones, and it's also a love letter to writing and reading, and to Austen, too. But there's plenty going on here that is, if not entirely original, at least not straight from Austen. Our heroine is the 30-something bookworm Agathe (a charming Camille Rutherford), who is French and lives in Paris, where she works at the storied English-language bookstore Shakespeare & Company, having learned English from her father during her childhood. (Early scenes are shot in the real bookshop, which is a fun nugget for fans of the store.) The setup has the ring of familiarity: Her best friend Felix (Pablo Pauly, suitably impish) also works at the store, and the two are chummy and inseparable. You can feel a romance coming on, but the movie isn't going to make it quite so easy for us or for them. Agathe also dreams of being a writer, but something psychological is holding her back, and she's at a bit of a standstill. The movie takes its time unpeeling those layers. Things suddenly lurch into gear for Agathe when a prank results in her acceptance to the Jane Austen Writing Residency, in England. Intimidated but also a little pleased, Agathe gathers up her courage and goes to the residency where, upon her arrival, she meets the dour and pompous Oliver (Charlie Anson). It's obvious to us he's modeled on Mr. Darcy. He's also, as it happens, Jane Austen's great-great-grandnephew, but a somewhat ungrateful one: He much prefers contemporary literature to his relative's work. Agathe and Oliver detest each other on sight, and also clearly feel a spark of mutual desire. The next few weeks will teach Agathe a lot about herself. Piani's screenplay for 'Jane Austen Wrecked My Life' walks a tricky line with mostly sure footing. It visibly fiddles with Austen's romantic and narrative conventions, the ones that have been replicated across romantic comedies for a couple of centuries: awkward encounters, declarations of love, secondary characters invented for levity, passionate glances across a crowded room. That the movie is partly in French and partly in English adds extra possibilities for comedy — always make sure the person you're complaining about on the phone doesn't understand the language you're speaking — and is a nice twist on the normally Anglophiliac subgenre. Piani's story also seems aware that the women Austen wrote about, with enough means to live fairly comfortably and take time for leisure pursuits, are going to encounter romance differently from their 21st-century compatriots. No matter how old-fashioned the heroine's tastes and preferences are, she isn't living, and can't live, in Austen's world. Fewer family and class obligations exist to throw seemingly insurmountable obstacles in the way of her happiness. She doesn't spend most of her time paying social calls in friends' parlors or preparing for a busy social calendar of balls and trips to Bath. She works, and she moves freely, and she can have sex with more or less whoever she wants. She has, in other words, choice. Yet a romantic comedy requires a choice-restricting hurdle or two to overcome. In Agathe's case, they're entirely in her head: her desire for one man or another, her ideas about romance and her self-sabotaging tendencies, as well as old hurts and traumas. Overcoming those takes work as well as some wise advice. Like many an Austen heroine, Agathe finds her moments of self-revelation to be tied up with emotional pain, but she's also ready to trek through it toward her happy ending. In the end, 'Jane Austen Wrecked My Life' is both pleasantly diverting and sneakily wise. Following in the footsteps of her beloved literary heroines, Agathe discovers a bit about real life outside of books — and not just romance, either. It is a universal truth: Sometimes to unwreck your own life, you've got to start acting like you're the protagonist.
Geek Vibes Nation
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Geek Vibes Nation
‘Jane Austen Wrecked My Life' Review: Camille Rutherford Tangos With Romance And Writer's Block In Laura Piani's Sharp Debut
From its title alone, you can tell that Laura Piani's Jane Austen Wrecked My Life is no Pride & Prejudice. As in, it's not exactly the dramatization of a (moving) picture-perfect romance in which two people go from enemies to potential lovers, nor where they traipse around picturesque manors in gowns, drink tea from sunup to sundown, and entertain throngs of esteemed guests in massive ballrooms stuffed to the gills with champagne and crumpets. There is romance aplenty, but nothing is perfect about it. A charming estate plays a sizable role in the film's events, but its guests are welcome to wear jeans as they mill about the grounds. Coffee and wine are served; an evening out on the town is an option; the one time a ball-like reception is thrown, it's treated as a special occasion, not a Thursday. The fact that these elements are in play at all makes it certain that Piani's romantic comedy will be placed in direct conversation with the legendary author's work, but imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and the writer-director's debut feature is as much a clever, borderline satirical ode to Austen's texts as it is inspired by them. In other words, there's a reason that her film is called Jane Austen Wrecked My Life and not Jane Austen Is My Life, even if her main character makes it clear early on that she adores Austen's novels and identifies most closely with Persuasion's Anne Elliot. Agathe Robinson (Camille Rutherford) doesn't quite live the life of an old maid, but she's certainly an independent spirit whose world is confined to her duties at Paris's Shakespeare and Company bookstore, as well as her own writing dreams, which are supported and encouraged by her close circle of confidants. Her sister is a single (but ready to mingle) mom, which makes the eternally-available Agathe the ideal aunt. And while her best friend and coworker, Félix (Pablo Pauly), tends to sleep around, his heart is in the right place. That's precisely why it's no surprise to learn that he is the one who secretly submitted Agathe's newest story to writer's retreat housed at Jane Austen's old residence, a prospect she initially (and nervously) spurns due to a nagging case of imposter syndrome, only to accept once she realizes how ridiculous it would be to reject the opportunity to type where her favorite scribe once scrawled. There are a few (read: three) big problems, though: For starters, her writer's block – a symptom of imposter syndrome – is nagging heavily, and causing immense frustration for a young woman whose opportunity to showcase her gifts has finally arrived. Then, there's the fact that Felix kissed Agathe and expressed his feelings for her just moments before she had to go away for a month. (Naturally.) Finally, there's Oliver (Charlie Anson), the stuck-up, devilishly handsome sourpuss who drives Agathe to the workshop, and also turns out to be Austen's great-great-great-grandnephew. He's the worst. He thinks his renowned relative is overrated. He even speaks French – the film is in both French and English, reflecting Agathe's (and Rutherford's) bilinguality – which allows him to understand what the workshop's newest participant is saying when she mutters insults about him under her breath. But there's something about him, something that intrigues and frustrates Agathe to no end, an intangible quality that keeps her fascination with his every utterance a constant presence in the film, providing Piani's proceedings with a love triangle as its natural narrative engine. Yet the director and her star have far more on their mind than merely who Agathe will choose in the end. Jane Austen Wrecked My Life is a rom-com at its core, but it balances a plethora of tones, all of which are essential parts of its plot rather than throwaway elements that could theoretically make its characters more developed. Agathe deals with intense grief from a devastating tragedy; Oliver's father, Todd (Alan Fairbairn), is ailing, which puts a great deal of pressure on his mother, Beth (Liz Crowther), to run the Austen estate. That our two principal characters, in particular, are faced with these individual conflicts in the midst of the film's more mainstream qualities allows it to entirely clear the plane on which more basic, prototypical romantic fodder exists. It certainly helps that Rutherford's performance grounds the film with a resonance that far too few heroines are afforded in today's cinema. In an interview with Piani and Rutherford, the director told me that she especially enjoyed discovering Agathe as more of a real human than a mere character, something that Rutherford was instrumental in developing. Part of that is due to the star's innate abilities as a physical performer – Agathe is an enthusiastic dancer, whether she's fully clothed or in the nude; in one scene, she smells herself, only to discover that the odor is wretched; later, she's drunk enough to condemn a suitor for not going down on her. Agathe, thanks to Rutherford's interpretation of the character, is far from the sort of creation that Austen is famed for, and that's all the more reason for Jane Austen Wrecked My Life to succeed on its own merits. After all, despite Austen's influence and the film's meta commentary on her work and the tropes that often appear within, the story at its center is about a woman whose life has been altered because of Jane Austen's influence, not a life that has been written by Jane Austen. Austen might have wrecked Agathe's life in some ways, but the former also allows the latter to learn from the mistakes that her own protagonists have made in the process of paving her own road, both in the literary world and in the real one. Late in the film, Agathe comes to understand that both writing and love are not about operating in the ideal conditions, but about growth even when the environment appears to be barren. As one character notes, like weeds and plants, writing needs ruins to exist; 'Look for your ruins,' they tell Agathe. Naturally, this is where she finds the most success, and in many ways, it's what Jane Austen Wrecked My Life was doing all along: Exploring the perceived ruins of someone's life and uncovering profound lessons as a result.
