The lowdown on film, books, television, music & happenings

By Staff writer

Movies:

Murder On The Orient Express

The fatal stabbing of an American tycoon (Johnny Depp) on board a train travelling from Istanbul to Paris means everyone on the train is a suspect. The train stalls on a snowdrift and the passengers are stuck on board while the murder is investigated by Hercule Poirot (Kenneth Branagh), a celebrated detective.

With so many red herrings to sift through Poirot has his work cut out for him and the rest of the passengers don’t make it easy as he interrogates the lot of them to come to his inevitable reveal of the murderer or murderers.

Agatha Christie’s most popular novel comes to the big screen on 10th of November, 2017 featuring a star studded ensemble cast with the likes of  William Dafoe, Michelle Pfeiffer, Penelope Cruz, Daisy Ridley and Judi Dench.

TV Series:

Girlboss

Loosely based on the bestselling book #Girlboss by Sophia Amoruso, the series tells her real life rags-to-riches story of starting out flipping vintage store finds on eBay to heading a multi-million dollar fashion ecommerce brand Nasty Gal.

Britt Robertson(Tomorrowland, A Secret Circle) as the heroine Sophie Marlowe, is a feisty force of nature, a walking disaster, who is unable to hold a job, on the verge of eviction and generally directionless. We see her turn her life around when she stumbles onto a vintage jacket at a thrift store that she manages to buy at 1/10th of its value and resells for great profit. An idea is born and the story snowballs from there.

Joining her on her adventures is her best friend Annie, her sometimes love interest Shane, and watching from afar her father, who just wants Sophie to grow up and settle down, something our heroine is just not cut out for. This series is an ode to millennial entrepreneurship, while at the same time giving a nod to the narcissism and selfishness prevalent in this particular generation.

Music:

HOT 100

TOP 5

Books:

Love In Chakiwara & Other Misadventures by Muhammad Khalid Akhtar (Translated by Bilal Tanweer)

This novel, originally published in Urdu 1964, is given new life in this English translation by author Bilal Tanweer. “A bakery owner and collector of writers and geniuses”, Iqbal Hussain Changezi chronicles the daily life of a small Karachi neighbourhood.

He relates the stories and mishaps that occur to his friends along with his role in small stories such as The Smiling Buddha about a friend with a toothache who visits a Chinese dentist and The Love Meter about a doctor whose invention can tell if a woman nearby likes you or will marry you by swinging its dials around like on a watch.

Bilal Tanweer manages to do the impossible by translating not only the words of Akhtar’s novel but carrying the humour over as well. The original was called “the greatest novel in the Urdu language” by Faiz Ahmed Faiz. It loses  loses none of its greatness in this retelling of the story in English, and in fact has created an opportunity for the book to reach a new generation of readers for whom reading and thinking in Urdu has fallen by the wayside.