Limbo (Ben Sharrock - 2020)

Team Idiots,Naiyo lagda,Naiyo lagda dil tere bina,Salman Khan,Pooja Hegde,Himesh Reshammiya New Song,Kamaal Khan,Palak Muchhal,Dheere dheere chupke se chori chori,Kisi Ka Bhai Kisi Ki Jaan Movie,Kisi Ka Bhai Kisi Ki Jaan,Heart Touching Love Story,Meri Tarah,Dil Louta Do,Sad Song,Salman Khan New Movie,Naiyo Lagda Dil,Pooja hegde Movie,Himesh Reshammiya,Haule intezar mujhe tera,Ishq ne tere poochha na haal mera,Vikash,Cute Love Story,Gangster Story

currently watching this. it’s laugh out loud funny

Dreary conclusion to what was, on the whole, a bad mini-series. It failed to generate tension, it failed to generate interest in what was happening, it failed to generate empathy for the characters. All of them were unlikeable. Particularly the self-absorbed, self-important protagonist. A protagonist who, it must be noted, accomplished nothing whatsoever.

The death in this episode was so enthusiastically foreshadowed in episode one that I fully expected that character to be the first one to die. Instead, they were the last. And their death was a ridiculously-contrived moment of absurdist comedy. So bad it actually made me laugh.

1/10

Limbo | Ben Sharrock | 2020

Kwabena Ansah, Ola Orebiyi, Vikash Bhai, Amir El-Masry

A tale as old as time

Limbo

directed by Ben Sharrock, 2020

Meet the cast of SEASON 2!!!

Limbo

Limbo    [trailer]

Omar is a promising young musician. Separated from his Syrian family, he is stuck on a remote Scottish island awaiting the fate of his asylum request.

Bitterly funny but it doesn't trivialise the seriousness of the topic.

At the beginning I was a bit worried that there would be too much beautiful Scottish scenery. But it gets increasingly well used to illustrate the isolation of the characters.

I feel embarrassed because, while the actress looked familiar, I didn't really recognise Sidse Babett Knudsen.

Limbo (12A)

Limbo (12A) Director: Ben Sharrock Runtime: 104 minutes Cast: Amir El-Masry, Vikash Bhai, Sidse Babett Knudsen, Ola Orebiyi, Kwabena Ansah Synopsis: An offbeat observation of the refugee experience. On a fictional remote Scottish island, a group of new arrivals await the results of their asylum claims. Among them is Omar, a young Syrian musician burdened by the weight of his grandfather’s oud,…

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'Limbo' is an Offbeat and Lovely Ode to Refugees

Limbo (CREDIT: Focus Features) Starring: Amir El-Masry, Vikash Bhai, Ola Orebiyi, Kwabena Ansah, Kenneth Collard, Sidse Babett Knudsen, Kais Nashef Director: Ben Sharrock Running Time: 103 Minutes Rating: R for Occasionally Angry Language Release Date: April 30, 2021 (Theaters) Limbo is like Napoleon Dynamite, but if it were about refugees on a remote Scottish island instead of high schoolers in…

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In Limbo, Omar is a promising young musician. Separated from his Syrian family, he is stuck on a remote Scottish island awaiting the fate of his asylum request. Written and directed by Ben Sharrock (Pikadero), the film stars BIFA-nominated best actor Amir El-Masry (Industry, Jack Ryan, The Night Manager), along with Vikash Bhai, Kwabena Ansah, Ola Orebiyi and Sidse Babett Knudsen, among an international cast with actors from British, Egyptian, Nigerian, Palestinian, Syrian, Lebanese and Iraqi backgrounds as well as members of the real-life Scottish refugee community in Scotland. 

Ben Sharrock on the making of his film, Limbo, a darkly comic look at asylum seekers' Scottish experience

Limbo (Ben Sharrock - 2020)

कल्याण , मिलान डे , मधुर डे , कानपूर डे , जयपुर डे , टाइम बाजार ,मधुर मॉर्निंगार , महालक्मी डे का ओपन लाइव रिजल्ट 30 मिनट पहले लेने के लिए कॉल करे

Vikash Bhai-09109610335

Lack of story progression and some really ludicrous moments drag the show down a lot in this second episode.

The choice is made to focus on the attackers. This demystified them considerably, removing a lot of their power and making them a lot less threatening. It feels as if the whole show has been defanged.

Our heroine is ineffectual. She spends this episode following some other guy around. Also, in a very daft scene, she starts telling him all about her marital infidelities. Her daughter does something very similar (in that terrible bathroom scene).

There’s a lot of running around, but not a huge amount of clarity about what these people are trying to achieve. Yes, we know they mostly want to leave the hotel but where exactly are they going? The show never explains any of this.

After a hour of nothing much happening, we were brought back to (basically) the same cliffhanger again. The same three characters in a standoff. Different location this time, but the same jeopardy as before.

5/10

Limbo | Ben Sharrock | 2020

Sidse Babett Knudsen, Kenneth Collard, Kwabena Ansah, Ola Orebiyi, Vikash Bhai, Amir El-Masry, et al.

TIFF 2020: Days 1 & 2

Films: 5 Best Film of the Day(s): One Night in Miami

One Night in Miami…: I guess you could form an argument that basing a film on a pre-existing play would make the feature easier to put together, but that wouldn’t be taking into account the tremendous differences between the mediums, their relative strengths and weaknesses. For her feature debut, the Oscar-winning actress Regina King has cinematically adapted the stage play  by Kemp Powers about a fictionalized fateful night amongst four famous Black men in 1964. Those men, Malcolm X (Kingsley Ben-Adir), Jim Brown (Aldis Hodge), Sam Cooke (Leslie Odom Jr.), and Cassius Clay (Eli Goree), are all in town ostensibly to celebrate Clay’s beatdown of Sonny Liston to first become the heavyweight champion of the world at the tender age of 22. But the film puts them all together in Malcolm X’s modest hotel room, watched over by Nation of Islam security men, to spend a night, essentially, debating the merits of what they bring to the struggle for Black equality and economic emancipation, and arguing back and forth about their distinct positions. Here is precisely where many play adaptations falter, without the dramatic friction of a live performance to power the emotional core, such conventions generally fall flat on the screen, but King’s virtuoso acting instincts serve her able cast well, and her work with DP Tami Reiker allows the film to flow, seemingly organically between its few location movements. Working from a skilled script by Powers, the celebrated figures feel three dimensional, which gives even their more didactic diatribes (Malcolm), and pithy rebuttals (Cooke) enough weight to avoid sounding contrived. The cast work wonders on the material, granting a needed organic vibe to their nonfiction characters, echoing the essences without tipping into caricature. It’s a strong debut for King, and the film’s complex ruminations on the responsibility of successful Black people towards their community as a means of bringing attention to the country’s oppression couldn’t be more on point. At one point Clay tells Cooke the four of them will always remain friends, because they are among the few who can possibly understand what it’s like to be “young, Black, famous, righteous, and unapologetic.”

Shiva Baby: Danielle (Rachel Sennott) is in the midst of having a day. Turns out Max (Danny Deferrari), the sugar daddy with whom she has frequently been visiting as part of her regular prostitution gig, is somehow a friend or cousin of the deceased at the same Shiva she has come to attend with her well-meaning, but completely overwhelming parents (Polly Draper and Fred Melamed). If that weren’t enough in Emma Seligman’s spry comedy, Danielle is also horrified to find Maya (Molly Gordon), a successful young woman she’s known for years, and a recent ex, also there. Crammed into the Shiva house, full of cousins and aunts and uncles all kvetching about everyone else, and being physically grabbed and moved about by her mother, Danielle faces this house of horrors, with everyone commenting concernedly on her weight-loss (“You look like Gwyneth Paltrow  —  on food stamps!” her mother hisses at her), and her lack of job prospects when she graduates, and her parents telling scathingly embarrassing stories about her in front of Max and his shiksa wife (Dianna Argon), whose 18-month-old baby, her mom says is “freakishly pale  —  and no nose,” with no respite in sight. As a result of this sort of hyper-scrutiny, Danielle goes the only route that makes any sense: Lying to everybody about nearly everything, from her current major (“gender business”), to the many job interviews she has supposedly lined up. She’s just trying to get through the ordeal, one that Seligman, along with a continually spiraling score from Ariel Marx, ratchets up, until, near the end, poor Danielle is in a near fugue state, sweat glistening on her face, and the attendees, shot in unflattering slo-mo, and distorted lenses, take on the sheen of a waking nightmare. At a brisk 77 minutes, the film still doesn’t have quite enough to sustain its running time  —  at a certain point it begins doubling back on itself  —  but it’s still a lot of horrific fun, as Seligman expertly captures the absolute loss of agency one can feel, swallowed up in a claustrophobic family gathering, where escape feels futile.

Limbo: If Scotland has a cinematic identity, as such, it seems like the kind of place, desolate and unforgiving, where individuals come to exit regular society and come to a land filled with eccentric loners (stoic and unique in their oddities), in order to get better in touch with their souls. Ben Sharrock’s serio-comedy captures both the pitiless beauty of the land, and the lonely plight of a Syrian immigrant, Omar (Amir El-Masry), waiting with a group of other men from across the Middle East and Africa, on an island off the mainland, for word from the Immigration Office that his bid for political asylum has been accepted. Omar, sweet-faced and approachable, was a musician by trade in his native Syria, and walks around everywhere carrying his precious oud, bequeathed to him by his grandfather, also a musician, even though his right hand is locked in a cast from an unspecified injury. Even without the cast, however, you get the sense that his heart really isn’t into playing, despite the entreaties from Farhad (Vikash Bhai), his Afghani roomie and self-appointed “agent and manager,” who wants him to enter a local music contest. Omar is carrying a significant amount of weight beyond missing his mother’s fragrant home-cooking. Talking to her on the lone payphone on the island, where other immigrants-in-waiting stand in line for a chance to hear from home, she implores him to speak to his older brother, who chose to stay behind in Syria and fight in the Civil War that has plagued the region for years. Omar feels guilty for having left, and suffers from having disappointed his father in the process. It doesn’t help him that the culture he finds himself in seems so foreign to him, despite his speaking flawless English. Sharrock’s brand of deadpan perfectly suits the setting, but as funny as the film can be (when asked in a culture/language class to create a sentence using the “I used to” construction, one immigrant offers “I used to be happy before I came here”), it doesn’t paint a rosy affirmation for Omar and his ilk, stuck as they are, as the title suggests, between countries and lives. Omar’s pain is real, and for every positive step forward he takes, it’s one further away from his family and his beloved home country.

Enemies of the State: Sonia Kennebeck’s challenging and curious documentary seems at first to present a case for its protagonist, Matt DeHart, a young teen hacker interested in social justice, who through his work with Wikileaks runs afoul of the U.S. government, and his beleaguered parents, Paul and Leann, who vigorously defend their only child against the evil forces conspiring against him. Through a series of personal interviews with Paul and Leann, both retired Air Force intelligence officers, who believe their country has turned against them for what Matt had downloaded from his computer into secret thumbdrives shortly before the FBI arrived at their door and confiscated all his equipment, and various lawyers they employed, first to protect Matt from what they claim as utterly bogus child-porn charges, then, after they slip away to Canada in the middle of the night, the lawyers trying to earn them asylum. While in Canada, under close supervision and confined to his parents’ apartment, Matt uses his charms, his hackavist bonafides, and his skill at PR, to generate enough interest in his case to become a digital cause celebe, along the lines of Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning. Protests are fronted, defense funds gathered, and pressure put on the government to come clean about why they seem so hard-driving against the young man. During a peculiar reenactment set in a Canadian immigration hearing  —  Kennebeck employs actors who apparently lip sync their lines in perfect time with the actual recorded audio  —  DeHart describes a harrowing ordeal earlier in the affair, after having moved to Canada to attend college, being abducted by the FBI shortly after crossing the border to renew his Visa, and tortured for days for information related to the material on the thumb-drives. Some documentation seems to corroborate his claims (even Paul and Leann, as fierce supporters as can be, were shocked to see just how ready the FBI were to snatch him), but as the film continues, and we hear more and more from the investigators and prosecuting attorneys about the original child-pornography crimes, it becomes clear that our sympathies are being played with by Kennebeck. By the end, the film itself becomes an indictment of our rapid-assumption culture, in which decisions of guilt and innocence are determined in seconds online and forever after based on the presentation of information before us.

The Way I See It: For non Trumpites, the switchover from eight years of the dignified, intelligent, and measured leadership of Barack Obama, to the perma-tanned tackiness of power-mad, narcissistic bloviating of Donald Trump, was like a double-feature that went from Citizen Kane to Kevin James’ Loudest Farts. One man better than most to measure Obama’s time in office against the subsequent regime is photojournalist Pete Souza, who served as the official White House photographer for both of Obama’s terms, and has gone on to become an outspoken critic of Trump by way of his devastating IG account, in which he juxtaposes stately Obama photos with Trumps scandal-du-jour. Lest you think he’s just another divisively partisan liberal, you have to take into account his previous turn in the White House, as one of the official photographers for Ronald Reagan’s presidency. In fact, Souza’s fly-on-the-wall quality was considered one of his strengths in the oval office. Documentarian Dawn Porter travels with Souza as he makes the media rounds promoting his newest book, Shade, a collection of those IG photos that have earned him millions of social media followers (a sort of companion piece to his previous book Obama: An Intimate Portrait). Hauling from far-off India (where he gets a standing ovation before he even takes the stage), to domestic conferences and speaking engagements, Souza emerges as a man becoming more used to being out from behind his ever-present Canon lens. Through that lens, as he displays to his rapturous audiences, he has taken many hundreds of indelible photos, showing Obama’s various interactions with foreign dignitaries, his council of cabinet members, and his more raucous time with his two daughters (one shot of Obama with his girls making snow angels on the rear lawn during a heavy snow storm remains his computer screensaver, Souza says with pride). As Porter moves from talking heads to public oratories, Souza’s remarkable photos  —  brilliantly composed, and inspiringly intimate, having been given nearly unlimited access to the president  —  play throughout, showing us a collection of images that capture the inspiring hope the president inspired and the agonizing rigors of the job he was elected to perform. The film spends little time on his Reagan years, except to note how media and image-savvy the former Hollywood actor and his wife were (Souza professes no political ill-will towards the Reagans, other than noting that while he didn’t always agree with him, he was a genuinely caring man, who at least understood the parameters of leadership). At first, the film trolls Trump by a sort of subtweet level of backhandedness: Without directly naming names, Souza makes it entirely clear who he finds failing in comparison to Obama’s empathetic, engaging deportment, but by the time the film comes around to his notorious IG account, there can be no doubt the subject of his ire. Souza maintains it has less to do with his partisan feelings (his political affiliation is never revealed), and more the way he finds the current president’s undignified manner and total disrespect for the office and the leadership it demands unacceptable. Trumpers will of course take great exception to the portrait the film portrays of the sitting president, but even the most hardcore GOP folks won’t be able to help noting the blatant differences between the loving, genuinely close Obamas; and the preening, viciously competitive Trumps, each trying to outdo the others in acting as their father’s primary sycophant.

In a year of bizarre happenings, and altered realities, TIFF has shifted its gears to a significantly paired down virtual festival. Thus, U.S. film critics are regulated to watching the international offerings from our own living room couches.