TV
Evergreen actor Afzal Hossain turns 67
Today marks the 67th birthday of noted thespian, director and artist Afzal Hossain.
Afzal, known for his versatile presence in the media sphere of Bangladesh, was born on July 19, 1954, in Parulia, Satkhira.
One of the iconic names in the industry, Afzal Hossain is highly popular in television and film who began his acting career on stage. While studying Fine Arts, he started performing on stage through Dhaka Theater.
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He entered the world of television in the late seventies and soon became a heartthrob in television dramas during the eighties. His breakthrough was the drama titled 'Rokter Angurlata' aired in 1980 on BTV.
Revered to his fans for his creative brilliance and personality, Afzal Hossain is vibrantly present as a well-respected name in the media arena. Several of his plays, television dramas and films are still admired by his audiences.
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The actor has recently showcased a critically acclaimed performance in Mostofa Sarwar Farooki's maiden web series 'Ladies & Gentlemen', produced by South Asian OTT giant ZEE5.
A man of diverse talents, Afzal Hossain is simultaneously creative as his talents extend to direction, painting and poetry. Recently his paintings got exhibited outside the country.
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Besides, he is expected to release his debut feature film and new theatre productions after the government lifts the lockdown.
As a prolific creative advertisement maker, Afzal Hossain has revolutionized the advertisement industry of the country and is idolized by many successful creative directors in Bangladesh.
Ex-'Tarzan' actor among 7 plane crash victims in Tennessee
Investigators on Sunday continued searching for the bodies of seven people believed killed in the crash a day earlier of a small jet into a Tennessee lake, including an actor who portrayed Tarzan in a 1990s television series.
Rutherford County Fire Rescue Capt. John Ingle said in a statement Sunday that recovery efforts were ongoing at Percy Priest Lake near Smyrna. He said efforts also were focused on examining a half mile-wide debris field in the lake.
County officials identified the victims in a news release late Saturday as Brandon Hannah, Gwen S. Lara, William J. Lara, David L. Martin, Jennifer J. Martin, Jessica Walters and Jonathan Walters, all of Brentwood, Tennessee. Their names were released after family members had been notified.
Gwen Shamblin Lara founded the Remnant Fellowship Church in Brentwood in 1999 and wrote a faith-based weight loss book. Her husband of nearly three years, known as Joe Lara, was an actor featured in the TV series “Tarzan: The Epic Adventures.”
The Federal Aviation Administration said the Cessna C501 plane was heading from nearby Smyrna Rutherford County Airport to Palm Beach International Airport when it crashed Saturday morning. Authorities did not release registration information for the plane.
Smyrna is located about 20 miles (32 kilometers) southeast of Nashville. Percy Priest Lake is a reservoir created by the J. Percy Priest Dam. It is a popular spot for boating and fishing.
“With dive teams in the water, we are strongly urging civilian boaters to stay away from the public safety boats,” Ingle said.
The National Transportation Safety Board had a lead investigator at the site.
A gauzy, tear-filled reunion for ‘Friends’ actors
Toward the end of HBO Max’s “Friends” reunion special, host James Corden asks the six actors to imagine what their characters’ lives would be like today.
Chandler and Monica would be married. So would Ross and Rachel. With kids, of course. Same with Phoebe. The only mystery was Joey, which actor Matt LeBlanc answered with a joke.
“He probably opened up a sandwich shop in Venice Beach,” he said.
That’s when the disappointment of “Friends: The Reunion,” which premieres Thursday on the streaming service, hits you. How cool would it have been to take that journey?
It is what ultimately matters when anybody reunites with friends so close they felt like family during the early adult years. How has everyone turned out? Were dreams fulfilled? Did life’s inevitable disappointments cut you down or make you stronger? Can you still be friends?
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There are probably many reasons why the people involved didn’t try to advance those stories. It would have been hard. Surely not everyone would have been on the same page. There’s always the possibility of failure. You want to remember the magic of “Friends,” not the slog of the spinoff “Joey.”
Actress Lisa Kudrow noted the show’s creators, Marta Kauffman and David Crane, have said they worked hard to give every character a satisfying ending when the NBC sitcom went off the air in 2004. She hasn’t considered revisiting Phoebe.
“I don’t want anyone’s happy ending to be unraveled,” she said.
Instead, the characters remain frozen in time, forever as they appear on reruns available on, yes, HBO Max.
The streamed reunion was delayed for a year due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Each of the actors reportedly received $2.5 million to appear in the special, according to Variety. Viewers were told it was only the second time that Kudrow, LeBlanc, Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Matthew Perry and David Schwimmer had been in a room together since filming the series finale.
It has an enormously effective opening. A door opens at an empty Warner Brothers soundstage where the old “Friends” set was in place. Schwimmer walks in alone, shaking his head at what he sees.
He’s followed, one at a time, by Kudrow, Aniston, LeBlanc, Cox and, finally, Perry. Tissue is produced for Aniston and Cox’s tears, and it wouldn’t be the last time.
“Does Courteney still have her lines written on the table?” LeBlanc said, revealing a co-star’s secret.
Thus begins nearly two hours of reminiscences, helped along by generous clips and appearances by some of the people who had been on the show. Maggie Wheeler, who played Janice, still has that grating laugh and explains how Perry inspired it.
Corden asked whether any of the young, attractive actors had carried a flame for one another. Aniston explained how she and Schwimmer had a mutual crush in the first season that wasn’t consummated. She feared that their first kiss would be onstage in a scene — and that’s exactly what happened.
“We just channeled all of our adoration and love for each other into Ross and Rachel,” she said.
In an inspired way, the show intersperses the present-day actors reading their lines from the coffee shop scene where that kiss happened, with what was seen on the air at the time.
Corden is, predictably, a little too enthusiastic, a little too reverent.
“I can’t tell you how incredible it is to be here with all of you now,” he said. “We are shooting here in front of the iconic fountain where you shot the opening credits.”
No jumping in the water this time, though.
While the show offers some laughs, smiles and warm, fuzzy feelings, that ultimately grows tedious. By the time Justin Bieber walks out wearing the potato costume that Schwimmer had for a Halloween episode, the nadir is reached.
It’s when you realize that for all the talent involved, “Friends: The Reunion” doesn’t offer much more than television anniversary specials you’ve seen — and forgotten about — before.
“We’re not going to be doing this again in 15 years,” Cox says, trying to emphasize the uniqueness of the reunion, before addressing her former castmates. “But we’re not going to wait this long to have a dinner.”
Now that’s something we wouldn’t mind being a part of.
Tahsan-Mithila’s joint pledge against cyberbullying creates buzz on social media
Harmonizing unity against cyberbullying, former celebrity couple Tahsan Rahman Khan and Rafiath Rashid Mithila appeared on a Facebook live show together on Saturday after four years of their divorce, marking the festive occasion of Eid-ul-Fitr.Organized by leading e-commerce site Evaly on its Facebook page, the former couple expressed their feelings on the burning issue while urging their fans and followers to stop the cruelty and badmouthing on the internet, and also called for spreading healthy and positive mentality.Hosted by Naveed Mahbub, celebrated comedian and CEO at Naveed's Comedy Club and titled ‘Evaly Eid Live – Saturday Night Surprise, Tahsan vs Mithila’, the two-parts live programme has already become one of the most highlighted programmes on this Eid-ul-Fitr. Within 24 hours of the live show went on-air, the first half garnered over 922K Views, 57K comments and 32K reactions while the second half garnered over 1.1M Views, 46K comments and 33K reactions.Actress Mithila, who was introduced as the brand ambassador of Evaly lifestyle, said, “We are not just here as the brand ambassadors of Evaly, but to spread positivity on the internet. We all are facing crucial times, so we should not say bad things and listen to bad things, Let's spread positivity. This is our main goal in connecting with Evaly and coming live together on this occasion today.”Tahsan, who has been appointed as the Chief Goodness Officer of Evaly, harmonized his parts of speeches with Mithila's words, saying, "I am lucky that my fans have always behaved well on my posts, however, there are some people who constantly love to spread negativity and unnecessary hatred. Furthermore, Mithila has been constantly targetted and bullied in her social media accounts since we had been mutually separated, and sometimes I also get tagged on those hateful posts, which is disheartening.”“I think there is an opportunity today through this live as people did not expect us to be together, and we came to this live session together today because many people will watch this out of their curiosity. From here, the next generation can learn that even if you do not agree with someone, even if there are differences in your ideologies - you can always sit and talk with respect for each other,” Tahsan added.
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Mithila said, “We have been separated for the last four years but we are co-parenting our daughter. Here we are giving surprise gifts to our fans who are spreading positivity on the comment thread of this quiz show, and I think another surprise of this Eid special programme is that the two of us may be separated, but we can respectfully sit next to each other and talk, without insulting each other.”Pointing towards the recent negativities on social media, Tahsan said, “These type of behaviours are on the rise because we don't really talk about these things. We saw last week that Chanchal Chowdhury, one of the most talented artists in Bangladesh, got bullied for absolutely no reason at all on his Facebook post where he posted a picture of his mother. It's not just me, Mithila or Chanchal Chowdhury who get to be bullied - but it has turned into a mental disorder in general.”“If we, especially the public figures, do not speak or raise voice against this harsh notion - the next generation will not understand that there is no heroism in speaking harshly to someone. It belittles not only one’s own but the person’s family and education. We need to be compassionate towards each other on the internet, and we thank Evaly for bringing us to raise awareness and surprising our fans with gifts for spreading positivity at the same time,” both Tahsan and Mithila said at the programme.
Ellen DeGeneres to end long-running TV talk show next year
Ellen DeGeneres is calling time on her long-running talk show.
The daytime host, who has seen a ratings hit after allegations of running a toxic workplace, has decided that the upcoming 19th season will be the last, ending in 2022. It coincides with the end of her contract.
“You may wonder why I’ve decided to end after 19 seasons. The truth is, I always trust my instincts. My instinct told me it’s time,” a tearful DeGeneres said Wednesday during a taping for Thursday’s show.
“I promise you that we’re going to have a fantastic final season. It will be a season where I truly get to say, ‘Thank You. Thank you all.’ Every day will be a celebration,” she said.
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She used humor to lighten the mood and the message.
“In 1997, I knew it was time to come out on my sitcom and live my truth,” DeGeneres said, recalling a vivid, inspiring dream in which a bird escaped its cage because it had to be free.
“Recently, I had a dream that a bird, beautiful bird with bright red feathers, came to my window and whispered, ‘You can still do stuff on Netflix,’” a deadpan DeGeneres said, drawing laughs from the virtual studio audience.
“The Ellen DeGeneres Show,” which started airing in 2003 and is distributed by Warner Bros., has a mix of dancing, games and giveaways along with A-list celebrities. But the host, who built her brand on the motto “Be Kind,” opened season 18 in September with a lengthy apology.
Three of the show’s producers exited over the summer amid allegations of a dysfunctional workplace that harbored misbehavior, including sexual misconduct and racially insensitive remarks.
While the allegations were “very hurtful to me,” they didn’t influence her decision to leave the show, DeGeneres told The Hollywood Reporter. “I wouldn’t have come back this season” if they had, she said.
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“Although all good things must come to an end, you still have hope that the truly great things never will,” Mike Darnell, president of unscripted TV for Warner Bros., said in a statement Wednesday. “It was and is an indelible piece of the television landscape, and it will be sorely missed.”
Nielsen data shows “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” viewership dropped by 1.1 million people this season, from 2.6 million viewers to 1.5 million viewers.
DeGeneres was the recipient of the Kennedy Center’s Mark Twain Prize for American Humor in 2015 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom under Barack Obama in 2016. In addition to her talk show, she has had a hand in Fox’s “The Masked Dancer,” NBC’s “Ellen’s Game of Games” and HBO Max’s “Ellen’s Next Great Designer.”
DeGeneres’ scripted TV show “Ellen” became a historic landmark in TV history in the 1990s when her character came out as gay.
Netflix series signals racial breakthrough in Italian TV
The Netflix series “Zero,” which premiered globally last month, is the first Italian TV production to feature a predominantly Black cast, a bright spot in an otherwise bleak Italian television landscape where the persistent use of racist language and imagery is sparking new protests.
Even as “Zero” creates a breakthrough in Italian TV history, on private networks, comedy teams are asserting their right to use racial slurs and make slanty-eye gestures as satire. The main state broadcaster RAI is under fire for attempting to censor an Italian rapper’s remarks highlighting homophobia in a right-wing political party. And under outside pressure, RAI is advising against — but not outright banning — the use of blackface in variety skits.
With cultural tensions heightened, the protagonists of “Zero” hope the series — which focuses on second-generation Black Italians and is based on a novel by the son of Angolan immigrants — will help accelerate public acceptance that Italy has become a multicultural nation.
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“I always say that Italy is a country tied to traditions, more than racist,” said Antonio Dikele Distefano, who co-wrote the series and whose six novels, including the one on which “Zero” was based, focus on the lives of the children of immigrants to Italy.
“I am convinced that through these things — writing novels, the possibility of making a series — things can change,” he said.
“Zero” is a radical departure because it provides role models for young Black Italians who have not seen themselves reflected in the culture, and because it creates a window to changes in Italian society that swaths of the majority population have not acknowledged.
Activists fighting racism in Italian television underline the fact that it was developed by Netflix, based in the United States and with a commitment to spend $100 million to improve diversity, and not by Italian public or private television.
“As a Black Italian, I never saw myself represented in Italian television. Or rather, I saw examples of how Black women were hyper-sexualized,″ said Sara Lemlem, an activist and journalist who is part of a group of second-generation Italians protesting racist tropes on Italian TV. “There was never a Black woman in a role of an everyday woman: a Black student, a Black nurse, a Black teacher. I never saw myself represented in the country in which I was born and raised.”
“Zero,” which premiered on April 21, landed immediately among the top 10 shows streaming on Netflix in Italy.
Perhaps even more telling of its impact: The lead actor, Giuseppe Dave Seke, was mobbed not even a week later by Italian schoolchildren clamoring for autographs as he gave an interview in the Milan neighborhood where the series is set. Seke, a 25-year-old who grew up in Padova to parents from Congo, is not a household name in Italy. “Zero” was his first foray into acting.
“If you ask these children who is in front of them, they will never tell you: the first Black Italian actor. They will tell you, ‘a superhero,’ or they will tell you, ‘Dave’,” Dikele Distefano said, watching the scene in awe.
In the series, Zero is the nickname of a Black Italian pizza bike deliveryman who discovers he has a superpower that allows him to become invisible. He uses it to help his friends in a mixed-race Milan neighborhood.
It’s a direct play on the notion of invisibility that was behind the Black Lives Matter protests that erupted in Italian squares last summer following George Floyd’s murder in the United States. Black Italians rallied for changes in the country’s citizenship law and to be recognized as part of a society where they too often feel marginalized.
“When a young person doesn’t feel seen, he feels a bit invisible,″ Seke said. “Hopefully this series can help those people who felt like me or like Antonio. ... There can be many people who have not found someone similar to themselves, and live still with this distress.”
The protest movement has shifted from targeting Italian fashion, where racist gaffes have highlighted the lack of Black creative workers, to Italian television, where a movement dubbing itself CambieRAI held protests last month demanding that Italian state and private TV stop using racist language and blackface in skits.
CambieRAI plays upon the name of Italian state TV, RAI, and the Italian language command “you will change.” The movement, bringing together second-generation Italians from a range of associations, also wants RAI — which is funded by mandatory annual fees on anyone owning a TV in Italy — to set up an advisory council on diversity and inclusion.
Last week RAI last responded to an earlier request by other, longer-established groups asking that it stop broadcasting shows using blackface, citing skits where performers darkened their skin to impersonate singers like Beyonce or Ghali, an Italian rapper of Tunisian descent.
“We said we were sorry, and we made a formal commitment to inform all of our editors to ask that they don’t use blackface anymore,” Giovanni Parapini, RAI’s director for social causes, told The Associated Press. He said that was as far as they could go due to editorial freedom.
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The associations said they viewed the commitment as positive, even if it fell short of a sought-for ban, since RAI at least recognized that the use of blackface was a problem.
Parapini, however, said the public network did not accept the criticism of the CambieRAI group “because that would mean that RAI in all these years did nothing for integration.”
He noted that the network had never been called out by regulators and listed programming that included minorities, from a Gambia-born sportscaster known as Idris in the 1990s to plans for a televised festival in July featuring second-generation Italians.
Dikele Distefano said for him the goal is not to banish racist language, calling it “a lost battle.” He sees his art as an agent for change.
He is working on a film now where he aims to have a 70% second-generation Italian cast and crew. “Zero” has already helped create positions in the industry for a Black hairstylist, a Black screenwriter and a director of Arab and Italian origin, he noted.
“The battle is to live in a place where we all have the same opportunity, where there are more writers who are Black, Asian, South American, where there is the possibility to tell the stories from the point of view of those who live it,” he said.
A complete list of all the winners at the 2021 Oscars
Final winners at the 93rd Academy Awards:
Best picture: “ Nomadland ”
Best actress: Frances McDormand, “Nomadland”
Best actor: Anthony Hopkins, “The Father”
Original screenplay: “ Promising Young Woman,” Emerald Fennell
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Adapted screenplay: Florian Zeller and Christopher Hampton, “ The Father ”
International film: “ Another Round,” Denmark
Best supporting actor: Daniel Kaluuya, “Judas and the Black Messiah”
Best supporting actress: Yuh-Jung Youn, “Minari.”
Best director: Chloé Zhao, “Nomadland”
Read ‘Another Round’ wins best international film at the Oscars
Sound: “ Sound of Metal ”
Makeup and hairstyling: “ Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom ”
Costume design: Ann Roth, “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom”
Live action short film: “Two Distant Strangers”
Read Anthony Hopkins wins best actor Oscar for 'The Father'
Animated short film: “If Anything Happens I Love You”
Animated feature: “ Soul ”
Documentary short subject: “Colette”
Documentary feature: “My Octopus Teacher”
Visual effects: “Tenet”
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Production design: “ Mank ”
Cinematography: “Mank”
Film editing: “Sound of Metal”
Original score: “Soul,″ Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross and Jon Batiste
Original song: “Fight for You” from “Judas and the Black Messiah” (Music by H.E.R. and Dernst Emile II; Lyric by H.E.R. and Tiara Thomas)
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‘Peaky Blinders’ actor Helen McCrory dies of cancer at 52
British actor Helen McCrory, who starred in the television show “Peaky Blinders” and the “Harry Potter” movies, has died, her husband said Friday. She was 52 and had been suffering from cancer.
Her husband, fellow actor Damian Lewis, said McCrory died “peacefully at home” after a “heroic battle with cancer.”
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“She died as she lived. Fearlessly,” Lewis wrote on Twitter. “God we love her and know how lucky we are to have had her in our lives. She blazed so brightly. Go now, Little One, into the air, and thank you.”
McCrory was one of Britain’s most respected actors, making her mark by playing a succession of formidable and sometimes fearsome women.
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She played the matriarch of a crime family on ”Peaky Blinders” and the scheming Voldemort ally Narcissa Malfoy in the “Harry Potter” movies.
Onstage, her roles included the vengeful Greek heroine “Medea” at the National Theatre in 2014. At the same theater, she excelled as a woman caught between a dull husband and a feckless lover in Terence Rattigan’s “The Deep Blue Sea” in 2016.
While many performers struggle to find meaty female roles in film and television, McCrory played a string of them.
“Having said that, there are a lot of things I turn down,” she told The Associated Press in 2016, describing the sort of roles where “all your lines are ‘But what did you do at work?’ ’That’s so clever, darling.′ ‘How did you do that?’ ‘And then what did you do?’”
“Of course, there’s so much sexism within the profession,” McCrory said. “But I think you approach it in different ways, and my approach is just to forge forward.”
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