By Sharanya Gopinathan
This was such an exciting week! We were practically counting down the hours until the release of the trailer of Oceans 8, and damn, was it worth it. Just take a minute to soak in the sheer magic of being able to finally, after all those sneaky paparazzi shots and teasers, see dreadlocked Rihanna, Mindy Kaling, Awkwafina, Helena Bonham Carter, Sarah Paulson, Sandra Bullock and Cate Blanchett share screen space as they plan to rob Anne Hathaway at the Met Ball!
And then there was Padman. This week also saw the trailer release of the Twinkle Khanna-production featuring India’s lone superhero, Akshay Kumar, AKA Padman. The movie is based on the true story of Padma Shri Arunachalam Muruganantham, a Coimbatore man who took great pains to invent a low-cost sanitary pad making machine.
For a movie that’s meant, ultimately, to be about empowering women, you see really little of them in the trailer. Sonam Kapoor does make a mysterious entry towards the end of the trailer, but it’s unclear what exactly she does. And if you needed any confirmation about who the target audience and subjective centre of the trailer is, Kumar, of course, tells us that the country is only strong if our mothers, sisters and wives are strong. No, not if you’re strong. If your sister is.