Entertainment
‘Beautiful Boy’ is deeply flawed but a must watch film
Film: “Beautiful Boy” (Amazon); Director: Felix Van Groeningen; Starring: Steve Carell, Timothy Chalamet; Rating: ***(3 stars)
There is so much that this heart-shattering drama about a distraught father coping with his son’s drug addiction could have done. Instead “Beautiful Boy” plays it safe. It casts Timothee Chalamet as Nic Sheff, a teenager trying to shrug-off his addiction even as he sinks lower and lower into the abyss of drug abuse.
Chalamet takes care of all the sympathy that the plot needs to muster for us to go along with his nerve-wracking journey into self-destruction. The film is based on Nic Sheff’s account “Tweak: Growing Up on Methamphetamines” as well as his father David Sheff’s “Beautiful Boy: A Father’s Journey Through His Son’s Addiction”, so we ought to have been provided with a spectral double view of a family tragedy that unfolds over a period of several years during which time the young addict’s life comes apart at the seams.
Soon, as I watched the honest but not memorable film, I realized this is not Nic’s story. It is his father’s story of coping with a crisis of unimaginable proportions as his family life falls apart. How much of himself can David Sheff give to his son’s problem before giving up the fight? The film, in its own somnolent style, shows us the threshold of parental patience. And Steve Carrell is fine if not memorable, as the father. This is more his story than his son’s.
It’s easier to follow the father’s steps as he moves further and further away from his son’s emotional axis. There are sequences that are designed to bring us close to tears. But we never get that close to the characters to feel their pain. The emotional responses never emerge organically from the plot characters.
Carrell and Chalamet playing the estranged father-son routine seem to say all the right things to each other with just the right pauses and punctuations. It’s almost like watching them do a translation of the real emotions in digestible terms.
I missed a sense of unrehearsed spontaneity in the dialogues. In addition, the unhurried pace and the repetitive mode of unveiling the inherently-dramatic dysfunctionalism (drug addict comes home, disappears, comes home) makes “Beautiful Boy” more remarkable for what it sets out to say rather than the way it says it.
Not that the film is without its moments. In some sequences we see Nic’s naked anguish as he stares blankly into his own future. Chalamet, so effective as a man-boy discovering gay love in “Call Me By Your Name” is deeply effective though not as impact-driven as Lucas Hedges in “Ben Is Back” , that other recent more powerful drama of a parent coping with the son’s drug addiction.
“Beautiful Boy” is riddled with problems, none of which are related to the protagonist’s drug addiction. It jumps back and forth, impatiently creating a breach between the characters, their problems and our empathy for them.
But the background score is magnificent. The narrative uses insistent pounding rock sounds to echo Nic’s psyche and settles down for a quieter musical statement at the end when all options for redemption are exhausted.
So, to be honest, are we.
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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