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Time of India
6 days ago
- General
- Time of India
Beauty creams, boy drama and matrimonial ads: Inside one woman's search for Mr. Right in Kerala
A wife complained to her husband: 'Our new neighbour always kisses his wife when he leaves for work. Why don't you do that?' Her Husband replied: 'How can I? I don't even know her.' All of us are acquainted with numerous marriage memes and jokes. One of the popular jokes I have heard is: Marriage is a three-ring circus: engagement ring, wedding ring, and suffering. As a girl born into a traditional Syrian Christian family in Kerala, I was introduced to the idea of marriage probably from when I burst out of my mother's womb. It was built up through insinuations from grandparents and relatives. The first sign of a pimple in my teens caused such a consternation resulting in ocean loads of creams and countless visits to the beauty parlour. When my weighing scales tipped the balance to the heavier side, my grandfather remarked, 'Don't eat too much. Nobody will marry you if you become fat'. Things came to a head when I stopped performing in my 11th grade. My father exploded,' If you don't study, I will get you married'. I looked up at him and replied, 'Thank you very much.' Not following up on his threat, he sent me to college where I had a blast for four years as the college belle enjoying the boys' attention and getting adequate envy of girls. My parents didn't let this continue. 'Enough is enough,' I was told one fine morning, and was brought back home to 'settle down with a husband'. My mother declared, 'We will have to push you into the marriage market'. Marriage market? As a business graduate, I was acquainted with the stock market, commodities market, equities market, vegetable and fruit market – even fish market which is what our town often looks like – but Marriage market? The marriage market This was new and mysterious to me. I soon learned the hard way that the marriage market also functions like any other market subject to market fluctuations and vagaries in demand and supply. For instance, the 'demand' is pretty much based on product quality – in this case is the prospective bride or groom. According to the laws of economics, I was supposed to be snapped up like hot cakes, but life often does not follow the principles of economics. My parents started out with the good old newspaper advertisement in the reputed Malayala Manorama. I still remember my first time in the Manorama office trying to come up with a catchy yet crisp advertisement so as to not shore up a large bill. The next Sunday we were bombarded as the phone rang non-stop. With so many to choose from, it became a laborious process to separate the chaff from the grain. My parents then decided to move with the times, and explored the fledgling online matrimonial websites. They prepared a nice profile of me, put it up on the website and, with bated breath, waited for the responses. Again, we were inundated with the huge inflow. I realized that Indian matrimonial websites were a very lucrative business model with the ever-expanding marriage market. It is the Indian version of Hitch. For those who are not acquainted with the movie Hitch, Alex "Hitch" Hitchens is a professional "date doctor" who coaches men in the art of wooing women. The online matrimonial websites helped but without success, unlike Hitch. I could relate to Katrina Kaif in Namaste London as she saw several prospective grooms. As time wore on, the profile my mom had created got leaner and leaner. Her predicament can be best summed up by Bishop Chrysostam, the head metropolitan of the Mar Thoma church, known for his impeccable sense of humour. A couple went up to the bishop to help find a bride for their son with a list of attributes they were looking for: that she must be beautiful, qualified, well-behaved, a good homemaker and God-fearing. The bishop looked at them and said, 'If such a girl existed in the Mar Thoma church community, I wouldn't have become a bishop!'. All I can say is that the search continues, and one day I hope to get my Hrithik Roshan , so that I don't end up like the bishop. Authored by: Zarine Susan George If you too have a soul-touching story to share, then send it to us at: soulcurry@ Snakes in the White House? Melania Trump's EXPLOSIVE Text About Ivanka & Jared REVEALED
Daily Record
19-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Record
Thousands turn out for Glasgow Pride as Still Game star lends their support
Still Game co-creator Greg Hemphill has been captured supporting Glasgow Pride 2025. Thousands of people brought colour to Glasgow's streets on Saturday afternoon, as Glasgow Pride 2025 got underway. Today's celebration marked the 30th anniversary of Pride march in Scotland, as Glasgow was awash in rainbow colours while the vibrant parade travelled through the streets for the annual event. Attendees weren't put off by the changing weather as lookers-on, with multi-coloured umbrellas, watched the dazzling parade and performances. The largest Pride event in Scotland started at Kelvingrove Park before making its way into the city centre, with groups having been asked to gather from 10am. It's estimated that 50,000 people marched for Glasgow's Pride - which represents everyone from the the LGBTQIA+ community - during last year's event. The hosts of Glasgow Pride 2025 included 'The Showbiz Lion' Bev Lyons, Lee Cammy, Miss Bella Houston and Garry King. On one float, eagle-eyed visitors spotted Still Game co-creator Greg Hemphill enjoying the celebrations as he was captured dancing while waving a rainbow Pride flag - a symbol of LGBTQ pride and LGBTQ social movements. The video had the famous sound of fan favourite Isa Drennan saying, 'Jack and Victor are gay ', over the clip from the episode 'Hitch' of Season five of the show. Social media users were thrilled by his involvement and made funny quips, including 'the people huv tae know' - a saying synonymous with Isa. One lucky fan took a snap with the Still Game star, saying: "I met Greg Hemphill from still game which was a strange surprise!" Acts such as Malta's Eurovision 2025 act Miriana Conte, dance music singer Kelly Llorenna, Norway's Eurovision 2022 act Subwoolfer and comedian Karen Dunbar entertained the crowd. Alongside the parade, those attending the event made the most of all that was on offer, from the tasty food and drink to the many stalls. Prior to the event, Trustee of Glasgow Pride SCIO, Stuart McPhail, said: 'It is the 30th anniversary of the Pride March in Scotland and we are thrilled to bring so many amazing artists to Glasgow to celebrate the LGBTQIA+ community to fight for rights and celebrate the successes we have here. "Glasgow's Pride remains FREE for everyone to attend with enjoyment and entertainment for all ages. We welcome everyone who is supportive of LGBTQIA+ rights for what is sure to be a fun day out.' Road closures were in place across the city from noon for the huge procession, before a free to attend festival at the Barrowlands. The route passed through busy streets including Sauchiehall Street and Ingram Street, before dispersing at Barrowlands Park. The full Pride route included Kelvin Way, Sauchiehall Street, Blythswood Street, West George Street, George Square North, Montrose Street, Ingram Street, Trongate and Gallowgate. Join the Daily Record WhatsApp community! Get the latest news sent straight to your messages by joining our WhatsApp community today. You'll receive daily updates on breaking news as well as the top headlines across Scotland. No one will be able to see who is signed up and no one can send messages except the Daily Record team. All you have to do is click here if you're on mobile, select 'Join Community' and you're in! If you're on a desktop, simply scan the QR code above with your phone and click 'Join Community'. We also treat our community members to special offers, promotions, and adverts from us and our partners. If you don't like our community, you can check out any time you like. To leave our community click on the name at the top of your screen and choose 'exit group'. If you're curious, you can read our Privacy Notice.
Daily Maverick
20-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Maverick
Materialists — Save the date for a witty but biting take on modern relationships
Past Lives filmmaker Celine Song pairs glossy romance with uncomfortably sharp insights on modern dating in Materialists, where a love triangle is shaped by Dakota Johnson, Pedro Pascal and Chris Evans. For the second consecutive year, cinemagoers are being treated to a romance that is more than its shiny exterior and good-looking cast suggest it will be. Last year, it was the Blake Lively-starring It Ends With Us, where the pretty people love triangle actually incorporated toxic relationships, domestic violence and repeated patterns of abuse. Now, in 2025, we have Materialists, which presents as a sleek and smart romantic comedy, only to pierce through the facade like a boba tea straw to reach the juiciest bits at the bottom: sharp-tasting insights about modern dating that can be tough to swallow. Then again, Materialists is released by A24 (in the US at least) and written, directed and produced by acclaimed playwright-turned-filmmaker Celine Song. Song's 2023 big screen romance Past Lives was nominated for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay at the Oscars, and was celebrated for its nuanced exploration of the human condition, specifically the complexities of past and present love, which can exist simultaneously. The point is that neither Song nor A24 sticks to the conventional. There's always something creatively ambitious and artful flowing through the veins of their projects, and Materialists is no different. Though it centres on matchmaking, Materialists is no breezy and cute Hitch clone. Lead character Lucy (Dakota Johnson) is a successful matchmaker in New York City. While she's great with a sales pitch about finding love, Lucy approaches dating like a business investment. All her behind-the-scenes discussions are about assets, value, probability and maths. She has no interest in relationships of her own, until the wedding of one of her clients — the peak achievement of her profession — brings both dashing millionaire Harry Castillo (Pedro Pascal) and Lucy's struggling actor ex John (Chris Evans) into her life. Who will our heroine choose? Will the film stick to genre expectation, with a 'love is all you need' message, or will it chart its own course? Materialists doesn't dabble with its decision for too long actually, resulting in a final act that feels drawn out, and low on energy. Before that, though, the film excels at showing what dating has become in the 21st Century – a mix of mercenary entitlement and desperation, with marriage the end goal, no matter what. Settling is fine; just make sure it results in you walking down the aisle and coupled up. In Materialists, Song has characters vocalising the unsaid, admitting their most selfish drives in ticking off this particular life box. Viewers should be aware that Materialists is a romantic comedy in the same sense that restaurant series The Bear is considered comic. The humour arrives in momentary pricks. It's dark, sharp and entirely dialogue delivered. Lucy's clients act like they're ordering off a restaurant menu, and while hobbies and political views may get a mention, the vast majority of partner wants are appearance-based and materialistic: age, height, body type, income. No compromise. No consideration of character. It's a shocking and sad commentary on what makes someone a viable life companion today. And yet Song doesn't simply slap a judgment on these superficial priorities. Once more, she presents and then unpacks them, largely through the self-aware character of Lucy. Is it wrong to want financial security? Are you a bad person if love and hope of better days aren't enough to keep you in a relationship? Johnson is an acquired taste as a performer, owing to her subdued delivery (especially in comparison with the warm and effortlessly charismatic Pascal and Evans), but it makes sense for the character of clinical and cynical Lucy. There's also the bonus meta pleasure of remembering that Johnson was Anastasia Steele in the Fifty Shades films, a woman won over through lavish acts of affection despite her partner's constant red flag behaviour. Lucy appreciates demonstrations of wealth, but her eyes are always wide open, looking out and inward as she assesses her response. There's a sense that critics may appreciate Materialists more than mainstream audiences, because of the film's cerebral and contemplative nature, versus being powered by passion in keeping with romcom tradition. That said, anyone should be able to appreciate the film's perceptiveness, however uncomfortable it is to look in the mirror held up by Song — one that seems gilded from a distance but is actually quite grubby and dirt-flecked on closer inspection, like even the most perfect appearing life. Materialists may be more glossy and escapist than Past Lives, but its observations still ring true. DM
Yahoo
13-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Celine Song's Materialists Tries to Subvert the Rom-Com
In the scant verdure of a steep, rocky landscape, a man in earthy rags sets down a bag of crude tools and picks out a single white flower, then loops its stem around the finger of a woman in a fur pelt. From our present vantage, on the other side of some millennia, the gesture is laden with all kinds of meaning: a marital promise, an exchange of goods—or just a token of animal affection? But the prehistoric ur-couple radiate a kind of naïve clarity, their faces brimming with the joy they find in each other. This is the brief and unexpected opening of Celine Song's Materialists, a prologue that announces a certain loftiness in the film's premise. Or in spite of it, as a sudden cut flings us into the classic opener of many a millennial rom-com: the cosmopolitan heroine at her vanity, getting ready for her white-collar job in the big city. We meet our protagonist, Lucy (Dakota Johnson), in a sunlit montage of her morning routine somewhere in downtown Manhattan. Twenty years ago, Lucy would've probably been a media worker—an advice columnist; a magazine editor—but in this economy, she's the star employee of a high-end matchmaking company, with no fewer than nine weddings under her belt. With a client pool of private equity managers and CFOs, Lucy is aware of how her ivory satin blouse and artful flashes of silver jewelry command a certain type of attention, her body a bundle of class signifiers that quietly telegraph wealth. Within minutes in public, she has handed her business card to a man who eyes her on the street. His look is forthright, primal; hers is never so simple, subjecting his romantic potential to a private, discerning calculus. What better genre than the rom-com to stage a confrontation between personal desire and social expectation? Across the late 1990s and early 2000s, a boom in rom-com production shaped the mainstream cultural register, with box-office hits like Hitch (2005) and My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002) redefining the genre's metrics of commercial success. After a relative lull in the 2010s, a recent wave of mid-budget productions—including Anyone but You (2023), starring Glen Powell, the toothy leading man of the moment, and last year's fan fiction–inspired The Idea of You—suggests a resurgence of earnest stories about lovelorn individuals entwined by chance and locked in a pas de deux with life's foibles. Materialists seems to ride this momentum while purporting to offer something more cerebral and subversive. Lucy is a hawker of romantic promise who approaches her own love life with mercenary pragmatism. The catch, of course, is that her methodical system of computing value trips on the unknown variable of the human heart. We're introduced to the duo that tests the certitude of her professed desires at the extravagant wedding of a wealthy client. There's the older, smooth-talking Harry (Pedro Pascal), an investment banker and brother to the groom, at ease in the grandeur of gilded rooms with vaulting ceilings and dripping chandeliers. A single calla lily sits in the boutonniere of his pristine tux; a luxury watch curls around his left wrist. Then there's John (Chris Evans), a struggling theater actor-cum-cater-waiter and proud Bernie voter with a broad Bostonian drawl, his only commending factor a romantic history with Lucy. If Harry seems to promise a life of ballrooms and grand entrances—of taking up space—John is all table-side interruptions and stolen moments at the staff exit. The first time we see Lucy and John speak privately, it's in the loading zone outside the reception venue, sneaking a cigarette and a catch-up as he packs up the catering van. In Lucy's line of work, everything begins with the quantitative. Client lists of nonnegotiables read like a barrage of demographic data, familiar to anyone who has ever used a dating app: six feet; BMI under 20; income over $500k; not a day older than 30. This numerical fixation is so pervasive that Lucy likens being a matchmaker to working at the morgue or at an insurance company. But among present or future clients, she flips a switch, pivoting to her sales pitch: the dream of a lifelong love. 'Who our partner is determines our whole life,' she says to a gaggle of rapt young women at the wedding reception, handing out her business card. Whenever someone assumes she must have some preternatural instinct for romantic compatibility, Lucy dispels the suggestion with a pithy refrain. It's just math, she repeats, over and over—which is how we know it isn't. As any good salesperson can tell you, you need to buy into the fantasy, even just a little, if you really want to sell it. It should be simple. Harry is, in Lucy's words, 'an impossible fantasy.' He's tall, handsome, generationally wealthy, the sole proprietor of a $12 million penthouse, and insistent on dating Lucy. Ever the savvy rom-com heroine, Lucy thinks she knows what she wants (to marry a very, very rich man), and what she's worth (not much, according to herself). But on their early dates, as they traverse one pricey, candlelit joint after another, she equivocates: 'I don't know if I like you, or if I like the places you take me.' If Lucy's job has overexposed her to the vast pool of eligible women and calcified her low self-esteem, it's amplified a confidence in her own canniness. She sees her appearance as less of an asset than her knowledge of its comparative worth, and believes her hard-won self-awareness will be enough to protect her, like the carapace of her pessimism. Contrary to the clamor around contemporary dating and its miserable vernacular of objectification, market metaphors for courtship are nothing new. In 1941, an issue of the now-defunct Senior Scholastic magazine quoted two unnamed boys who shared their thoughts on dating: 'Going Steady is like buying the first car you see—only a car has a trade in value later on.' Early in Materialists, Lucy and a co-worker insist that, when it comes to height, 'six inches can double a man's value on the market.' The language of commodity persists. Your love life is a major investment; you're looking for someone who's the whole package; you're either on or off the market. It's no coincidence that the emergence of dating as a social phenomenon (at least in the West) is roughly contemporaneous with major economic transformations in the early twentieth century. Prior to the last century, the pairing of two individuals was most often mediated by family members or community leaders. The practice of moving through a roster of potential partners corresponded with more women entering the workforce, a growing leisure class, and mass urban migrations, among other shifts. The historical transformations in how we conceptualize dating and marriage should generate friction in their contradictions. In one direction, the pull of pragmatism; in the other, love as sacred and ineffable. But in Materialists, what is it about 'modern dating' that Song hopes to articulate? As with her debut feature, Past Lives (2023), which sourced its themes about the cultural rupture and homeward longing of first-generation immigrants from Song's own life, the director draws on personal experience for Materialists. She worked as a matchmaker after moving to New York over a decade ago, and in her six months on the job, she has said, she learned more about people than she did at any other time in her life. 'I knew more than their therapists,' she has related in interviews, a line that Lucy's boss utters almost verbatim in the film. But for all Song's efforts to interrogate the frank materialism of contemporary dating, the film's ideas feel somehow anachronistic, as if they've been caught in a buffering delay. Raya is now 10 years old, and the glut of think pieces and Substack posts about the various travails of online dating could constitute their own subgenre. If Materialists had burst into the early 2000s, during the Sex and the City era of politically anesthetized escapist media (how does a freelance journalist afford an apartment like that in Manhattan?), Lucy's unabashed pursuit of wealthy men might have seemed bolder in its class confrontations. But now, when you can buy No Ethical Consumption Under Capitalism T-shirts from Amazon, and the phrase 'emotional labor' has become both an inducer of eye rolls and a weaponized microaggression, the revelations in Materialists are mostly tepid. The film's insistence on its own universalism, too, plays like a needless foil to Past Lives and its engagement with the minutiae of interracial dating and cultural identity. Perhaps the starkest instance of departure from genre here is the absence of a vital rom-com trope: the token best friend or zany sidekick who varyingly challenges or affirms the protagonist's love life. The lack of friendship in the film becomes baffling to the point of distraction. When one of Lucy's former clients is being stalked by the man who assaulted her, she calls Lucy, panicking, because she doesn't have 'any friends in the city'; when Lucy backs out of a trip to Iceland with Harry and needs a place to crash, she shows up at John's front door, because—why, exactly? How many years has she been living in New York? Every character is either a co-worker, client, or a potential lover. The film's hermetic exclusion of other communal arrangements unwittingly reflects how the parochial pursuit of romance itself can be a consequence of social alienation. In the latter half of Materialists, its ideas start to feel belabored, more contrived. The issue, though, is not narrative contrivance, arguably the very source of genre films' pleasures, the affective certainty of their unfolding tropes; it's that the dialogue is often jarring, oddly forced. It reflects a broader problem with the writing: It's apparent that certain ideas are imposed onto characters instead of emerging from them, as if they are mouthpieces for wide-ranging observations about relationships and risk. This verbosity is likely a carryover from Song's background as a playwright, allusions to which pepper the film. We see John performing in a play wherein his delivery is coldly Brechtian, discernibly experimental, and alienating to Harry; there's the briefest flash of an Antonin Artaud poster in his apartment. Even if the financial allegories strewn into the characters' speech sound stilted by design, the sheer volume of these lines begins to feel intrusive. Materialists' strength, however, is in its casting, especially of Lucy's earnest paramours. Pascal softens the off-puttingly perfect Harry with enough sincerity to make him endearing, and Evans has perfected the disarming look of a wounded, heartsick fool. In the wedding scene, the groom's father opens his speech with a thesis on love—'the last religion, the last country, the last surviving ideology'—and for all the film's shortcomings, the performances almost make you believe it.
Globe and Mail
07-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Globe and Mail
Our TikTok wedding: Why couples are turning their big day into social media content
In an era when people share everything online, from job updates to baby photos to vacation selfies, it's no surprise that weddings have also said 'I do' to the social-media spotlight. But it's not enough any more to just post candids to the grid. Now, couples, inspired by celebrity weddings, have begun hiring content creators to help them roll out the wedding quickly, in a package designed to be admired on a phone. Readers: Tell us about the best wedding you ever attended According to wedding market research firm Splendid Insights, one in six couples hired a content creator for their wedding last year. A wedding content creator is a professional hired to capture and package the big day specifically for social-media platforms such as TikTok and Instagram. The content creators get the behind-the-scenes moments, produce short-form videos, documentary-style videos and candid photos. The turnaround is fast – couples can share highlight reels as soon as the next morning. 'Everything we shoot is mostly done on a smartphone, and we shoot a lot of content in accordance with how they're seen on social media, so a lot of vertical shots for Instagram and TikTok,' says Felicity d'Eon, a full-time wedding content creator and wedding planner. According to a wedding trend report done by Hitch, there was a 586-per-cent increase in searches for wedding content creators in 2025 alone. 'Today's generation doesn't want to wait a couple months for their photos and videos,' says d'Eon, who started working part-time as a wedding planner and content creator in 2022. 'They want to wake up the next morning and post their big-day photos and videos online as soon as possible.' Increasingly, couples are planning their weddings with content in mind from the very beginning, according to a 2024 report by Zola, which surveyed almost 7,000 couples. That year, there were dramatic increases in searches for terms such as 'documentary wedding photos' and 'editorial wedding photos' on Pinterest, pointing to a preference for a cinematic, stylized approach tailored for social media. And wedding content creators are just a piece of the pie. 'If [couples are] going to be sharing on Instagram and their Facebook, it has to look top-notch. If they have a TikTok account or if they're influencers, absolutely it has to be curated and they're going to be focusing more on the photography, videography and the way it looks and feels,' says Tracey Manailescu, the co-founder of the Wedding Planners Institute of Canada. She also notes that the trend toward hyper-personalized visuals often comes with a high price tag: The starting price varies, but according to the wedding website the Knot, typical content-creation packages start at US$1,000. This is in addition to the US$2,900 average spent on a photographer, based on insights gathered from 17,000 U.S. couples who either got married in 2024 or are planning their 2025 weddings. Manailescu has also seen a growing trend of couples tailoring their special day to reflect their unique personalities. Instead of large crowds, some couples are opting for intimate gatherings that allow them to invest in a visually stunning and elegant experience. Every element is thoughtfully curated to personalize couples' wedding experience. Even things such as customized hashtags allow couples to share and collect wedding memories online. For Quinn Cove, a content creator who got married in 2024, the approach to her own wedding's content creation was more about balance than branding. 'Despite putting significant thought into capturing our wedding, through photography, videography and illustration, my primary intention was actually to reduce the time spent creating content on the day itself,' she stated. She and her husband put an emphasis on candid captures, limiting posed photos to just 30 minutes. Their documentary-style approach highlighted intimate moments: the two cuddling up in a car, or running off together with the bouquet. They also requested videography of the live ballet dancers who performed at their reception. 'We wanted something different,' she said. 'Content that reflected the genuine emotions and spontaneity of the day.' She emphasized the importance of not letting content creation eclipse the reason for the celebration. 'While capturing the day is important, so is living it.'
