Tag: shuvam dasgupta

The Jeff & Shuvam Show #5: Khel Khel Mein

Shuvam’s on vacation in India this month so guest co-host Ishan and I closed out the year by reviewing the Hindi-language film Khel Khel Mein, a hilarious romantic comedy about brutal honesty in the digital age.

Streaming now on Netflix, it’s a perfect film to watch for the holidays with your 13-and-ups.

It’s like The Hangover meets Glass Onion…This group of friends all come together and decide to play a game where everyone’s phones are public . . .You can guess how everything’s going to quickly go horribly wrong, but you can’t. You couldn’t guess. That’s one thing I loved about the movie.

– The Jeff & Shuvam Ishan Show

Dive into our review below. Our blinky Santa hats are widely available in the US but these two are important to us because we bought them on the street in Kolkata (Park Street and New Market) during various trips when we happened to be there in December. We treat them like gold!

The Jeff & Shuvam Show is shot in Philadelphia and produced in Kolkata by award-winning film director and my fellow former Fulbrighter Abhijit Chowdhury and his media production company Concept Cube.

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The Jeff & Shuvam Show #4: SECTOR 36

This month, Shuvam and I review the Hindi-language film Sector 36, a police thriller about a serial child killer streaming now on Netflix. Loosely inspired by true events surrounding the Nithari case, it led us to a much deeper conversation than in our usual reviews including discussing the RG Kar rape case, the Atlanta child killings, the French gang rape case and the politics of caste and religion.

It has a lot of layers. It talks about caste politics, religion politics, and the patriarchal side of society. Deepak Dobpriyal is known to play comedy roles but this movie has given him an opportunity to really shine. Vikrant Massey has also done something which he has never done before. So, kudos to both of these great actors . . . The film keeps the police thriller genre fresh by placing a real life social issue in the middle of it, which is that the police and the media are not interested if it’s a poor kid.

– The Jeff & Shuvam Show

Dive into our review below:

The Jeff & Shuvam Show is shot in Philadelphia and produced by award-winning film director and my fellow former Fulbrighter Abhijit Chowdhury and his Kolkata-based media production company Concept Cube.

Thank you, Tisch Open Arts

Wow. Thank you so much NYU Tisch School of the Arts Open Arts Program for sharing the doubly good news in their article about The Jeff & Shuvam Show, which I’m happy to say seems to be really taking off, and separately celebrating my article in UK peer-reviewed journal Race & Class. I’m grateful that they mentioned my podcast collaborators Shuvam Dasgupta and my fellow Fulbright alum, film director Abhijit Chowdhury, whose idea this was, and his India-based media production company Concept Cube which launched the podcast, not me solely.

My grant to attend the Fulbright Association conference last October, as mentioned in the article, was provided by our terrific adjunct faculty union ACT-UAW Local 7902.

The Jeff & Shuvam Show #3: LSD 2

Rock photographer Shuvam Dasgupta and Jeffrey Stanley

This month, Shuvam and I experimented with LSD. We liked it so much we tried LSD2. Here’s the result, our review of Dibakar Banerjee’s 2024 Hindi-language film Love Sex aur Dhoka 2 (Love, Sex and Betrayal 2), known to fans as LSD2, the long-awaited sequel to LSD1, now streaming on Netflix.

“It’s like Lars Von Trier meets Richard Linklater…I love that it’s about trans, gay and straight characters and how they see the world, how they see themselves, how the world sees them…And the acceptance of it…And what it means to be an ally…Are you empowering them or are you just playing a game?”

– The Jeff & Shuvam Show

We’re each doing these reviews for our own reasons. For me, I hope to turn more people in the US on to Indian cinema and not just Bollywood. Our reviews are, by design, casually presented, unpretentious, just two people hanging out in a dining room discussing films easily available through services viewers here likely already have.

I’m hoping our reviews will be a gateway drug to the harder stuff like Satyajit Ray, whom most Americans in my experience, short of film students and serious cinephiles, have never heard of, not even his Apu trilogy, or any of India’s other outstanding films and filmmakers.

So go ahead and try a little LSD2. It’s not addictive, I swear.

The Jeff & Shuvam Show is produced by Kolkata-based media production company Concept Cube.