Entertainment
‘Poster Boys’: Fun in a lowbrow way (Review)
By Subhash K. Jha
Film: “Poster Boys”; Director: Shreyas Talpade; Cast: Sunny Deol, Bobby Deol and Shreyas Talpade; Rating: ***1/2
If you are looking for some naughty fun this weekend, you might want to try out this wacky piece of big-screen chortles… provided you can bear with the brainless bacchanalia sheathed in a sexual innocence that the protagonists are able to convey without straining at their collective leash.
For a film about family planning and vasectomy, there is a remarkable absence of vulgarity and double meaning in the conversations. The characters speak to each other loudly and irrelevantly. They don’t know any better.
Sunny and Bobby Deol are in the fun zone doing lowbrow comedy with disarming relish. Shreyas Talpade, with his redoubtable comic timing, joins the Deol brothers. The result is boisterous humour, not all of it funny or even coherent, I am afraid. In fact, some of the gags overstay their welcome like ‘bin bulaye mehmaan’.
In his capacity of director, Shreyas Talpade keeps the proceedings on a heightened chug. No one is pretending to make a durable comedy like “Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron” or “Chupke Chupke” here. There is just that much of self-mockery including a lot of Dharmendra-Sunny Deol jokes, none of them meant to belittle the film’s message that a man doesn’t lose his ‘mardaangi’ by undergoing vasectomy.
The journey into that domain of self-awareness is carried out by the three main actors with charming gusto. Barring the ever-dependable Ashwini Kalsekar who is a hoot as a zonked-out doctor, the other female characters are screaming nags, hissing naagins, suspicious wives and jealous girlfriends.
Even the veteran Bharti Achrekar’s cameo as a blind rustic shooter looked so contrived it could be something the scriptwriters wrote in as an afterthought.
Subtlety is at a low premium in this one. But the film has no pretensions of being anything intellectually inclined. The message on family planning is subservient to the comic timing of the three protagonists. Sunny, Bobby and Shreyas are a laugh riot. And some of their encounters with red-tapism, bureaucracy and legalese will have you chuckling.
But as warned, don’t look for signs of creative spark here. “Poster Boys” is wickedly unpretentious about its intentions. Unabashedly liberated from the responsibilities of wrapping their message in gravity, the cast has fun.
So do we. At least for some of the way. Until our trio of heroes decides to take off their shirts in public to protest against the injustice done to them. This barebacked hullabaloo (referred to rather ambitiously as ‘nanga andolan’) is, for some curious reason, fodder for breaking news in the plot.
No wonder the highly regarded Sachin Khedekar who appears in the climax as the Chief Minister looks more befuddled than amused.
By the end of it, “Poster Boys” has milked its one-point family-planning programme to the utmost. But no one will go home hungry.
This is Indra Kumar’s “Masti” without the sleaze. Vasectomy without penile jokes.
–IANS
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International online casino Casino Days has published a report sharing their internal data on what types and brands of devices are used to play on the platform by users from the South Asian region.
Such aggregate data analyses allow the operator to optimise their website for the brands and models of devices people are actually using.
The insights gained through the research also help Casino Days tailor their services based on the better understanding of their clients and their needs.
Desktops and Tablets Lose the Battle vs Mobile
The primary data samples analysed by Casino Days reveal that mobile connections dominate the market in South Asia and are responsible for a whopping 96.6% of gaming sessions, while computers and tablets have negligible shares of 2.9% and 0.5% respectively.
The authors of the study point out that historically, playing online casino was exclusively done on computers, and attribute thе major shift to mobile that has unfolded over time to the wide spread of cheaper smartphones and mobile data plans in South Asia.
“Some of the reasons behind this massive difference in device type are affordability, technical advantages, as well as cheaper and more obtainable internet plans for mobiles than those for computers,” the researchers comment.
Xiaomi and Vivo Outperform Samsung, Apple Way Down in Rankings
Chinese brands Xiaomi and Vivo were used by 21.9% and 20.79% of Casino Days players from South Asia respectively, and together with the positioned in third place with a 18.1% share South Korean brand Samsung dominate the market among real money gamers in the region.
Cupertino, California-based Apple is way down in seventh with a user share of just 2.29%, overshadowed by Chinese brands Realme (11.43%), OPPO (11.23%), and OnePlus (4.07%).
Huawei is at the very bottom of the chart with a tiny share just below the single percent mark, trailing behind mobile devices by Motorola, Google, and Infinix.
The data on actual phone usage provided by Casino Days, even though limited to the gaming parts of the population of South Asia, paints a different picture from global statistics on smartphone shipments by vendors.
Apple and Samsung have been sharing the worldwide lead for over a decade, while current regional leader Xiaomi secured their third position globally just a couple of years ago.
Striking Android Dominance among South Asian Real Money Gaming Communities
The shifted market share patterns of the world’s top smartphone brands in South Asia observed by the Casino Days research paper reveal a striking dominance of Android devices at the expense of iOS-powered phones.
On the global level, Android enjoys a comfortable lead with a sizable 68.79% share which grows to nearly 79% when we look at the whole continent of Asia. The data on South Asian real money gaming communities suggests that Android’s dominance grows even higher and is north of the 90% mark.
Among the major factors behind these figures, the authors of the study point to the relative affordability of and greater availability of Android devices in the region, especially when manufactured locally in countries like India and Vietnam.
“And, with influencers and tech reviews putting emphasis on Android devices, the choice of mobile phone brand and OS becomes easy; Android has a much wider range of products and caters to the Asian online casino market in ways that Apple can’t due to technical limitations,” the researchers add.
The far better integration achieved by Google Pay compared to its counterpart Apple Pay has also played a crucial role in shaping the existing smartphone market trends.
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