LOVE RULES

Facts About Jay Shetty

• It was the promise of a beer after a campus lecture by Gauranga Das (a monk) that convinced Shetty to attend, which eventually inspired and placed him on his path to monkhood and eventually, fame.

• He has been recognised on the Forbes 30 Under 30 Class of 2017 Europe for being a game changer in media.

He’s a British-Indian podcaster, author, viral content creator, life coach and former monk –we’re talking about none other than Jay Shetty. If you never miss a chance to listen to the viral social media star’s words of wisdom on your screens, you can catch him live at Dubai Opera on Thursday May 11.

Shetty launched his YouTube channel seven years ago and his videos have since garnered over four billion views. His main aim? To make wisdom go viral. But Shetty didn’t set up a camera and a green screen on a whim. At the age of 22, he traded in his suits and business lifestyle for robes, cold 4am showers and hundreds of hours of meditation at an ashram in Mumbai.

After three years, he left monkhood after being told he would do more good for the world by leaving the monastery. Though heartbroken, he returned home with no money to his name. He went on to start his career at Accenture, working on digital strategy and as a social media coach for the company’s executives, which was his ticket to fame as he was noticed by Arianna Huffington – the co-founder of The Huffington Post who invited him to New York. He left this job to create his own bite-sized videos and to grow his own brand where he shares his perspective on life, love, purpose, and peace daily.

Fast forward to today, Shetty is currently on his first-ever world tour. He will share his infinite wisdom and understanding and tips from his second book 8 Rules of Love – How to Find It, Keep It and Let It Go, which hit the shelves in January this year. Expect a 90-minute session, taking you on a journey of love through an interactive session, including live meditations, experiments, and demonstrations that will leave you feeling transformed and with a fresh outlook on life.

Jay Shetty: Love Rules, Dubai Opera, Downtown Dubai, 7.30pm, Thursday, May 11, prices start from Dhs295. Tel: (0)4 440 8888. dubaiopera.com

• His podcast with over one million followers features popular stars including Oprah, Kevin Hart, Kobe Bryant, Alicia Keys, Tony Robbins, Will Smith and Selena Gomez.

• His first book Think Like a Monk has been translated into several languages including Arabic, Chinese, Korean and Malayalam.

• Jay Shetty and his wife Radhi Devlukia have a tea brand called ‘sama’, which translates to ‘to be fully balanced’ in Sanskrit.

FILM REVIEW:

A horror comedy that’s gorily, cartoonishly-violently brilliant

For those of you with TikTok-savaged attention spans, here’s our elevator review: Renfield feels like a dialled-up, unashamedly brazen Dusk Till Dawn and Brooklyn Nine-Nine crossover project with Nicholas Cage as an archetypal Dracula and Nicholas Hoult on ghoulishly good form.

Most of us have experienced a toxic relationship at some point in our lives. It could have been a romantic entanglement, an unhealthy workplace dynamic, or just siblings lighting the touch-paper of familial trauma in a way that only people who sleep in horizontally tiered bedding can. There’s usually asymmetry within the tryst, one partner being the more toxic (obviously not you), but the truth is this sort of relationship can only exist for as long as there is a codependent element to it. There must be an enabler.

That relatively dense psychological premise (co-dependence) – its identification and eventual rejection of – forms a large part of the spinal column of Renfield. It’s a Dracula (Cage) movie, a nouvelle vague Nosferatu feature that feasts on the rich narrative vein of what sort of effect bestowing immortality on a loyal servant (Renfield, played by Hoult) might have. A gift that was coercively sold on a platform of gaslighting, false promise and pyramid scheming. It’s a live autopsy on how feelings of resentment, mistreatment and being undervalued might ferment into an unhealthy, employer-employee relationship.

At the beginning of the film we’re given a whistlestop monochrome montage of Dracula movies through the ages with Cage and Hoult’s characters superimposed onto the frame. Renfield has been a part of Dracula lore since the jump, appearing in the OG Emo source text, Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula, and a good percentage of the celluloidal reimaginings since. As you might expect from a movie that trades under the character’s name, this story is largely seen through the eyes and set to the monologuing of arch lord of the undead manservant, Renfield.

Our tale unfolds in the modern era. Being over a century old now, it’s an epoch the two central characters are struggling to adapt to. And, in addition to his shortcomings as a nurturing boss (honestly, the state of those one-on-one evaluations), it’s widely known that the malicious old Count also suffers from a severe sunlight allergy, and because of PTSD from attempted wooden stakings, EpiPens are not an option.

So it’s Renfield who is delegated the task of going out and sourcing victims to feed the Transylvanian tyrant’s bloodlust (and life force). He finds a ready supply in the souls that force individuals into emotional support groups. But it’s an occupation that becomes immeasurably more complicated when Renfield’s recruitment project inadvertently overlaps with the operations of a local gang boss (Teddy, played by Ben Schwartz) and a principled, maverick cop (Rebecca Quincy, played by Awkwafina).

Renfield runs thick with themes of love and duty, and little Freudian tickles under the chin – a treatment on manipulation, Stockholm Syndrome of the mind, selfempowerment, and catharsis. But, at its blood-flushed heart, it’s a horror comedy, that celebrates each side of that dual heritage with a reverence, than can only come from a true love of the genres.

Each cast member brings their own form of humour to the movie. There’s the menacing gothic self-aware camp of Cage’s Dracula; the chaotic pratfalling gangster Teddy is ostensibly a ‘made-guy’ version of Jean-Ralphio (Schwartz’s character in Parks and Rec) and fully deserves his own spin off.

Awkwafina’s comic timing and rapid fire delivery is demonstrative of a craft master; but it’s the wrylydry Britishness of Nicholas Hoult that impresses most. Like discovering your perfectly serviceable striker just happens to be a brick wall goalkeeper in comedy, it appears we’ve stumbled upon optimal Hoult. Despite a decidedly straight and serious filmography, Hoult’s final form might just be ‘comic actor’. Renfield flows in tangents and sparks with farce, it’s pepper sprayed with incredible fight sequences choreographed in deliberately audacious violence. Cockroaches and bug viscera are to Renfield, what spinach is to Popeye. And after powering up, we’re showered in comic splatter and gore galore, there’s even a moment where a pair of aggressors are kebabbed by the ripped-off arms of another foe. And that feels like as good-aplace as any to leave this review.

Renfield is available to watch in cinemas across the UAE now.

What’s On in conversation Ben Schwartz

ever heard. His name is literally Tedward ‘Teddy’ Lobbo and I think the focus is the origin story of when he first meets Dracula and gets these powers, every great villain needs one — like when Joker gets his smile.

How much flexibility did director Chris McKay and the team give you with developing the character?

Your character is a bit of a loveable rogue. If he was to get his own spin off, or prequel, what would it be called?

His first name is ‘Tedward’ so I think the show would be called that, just because I think it’s the stupidest name I’ve

They gave me quite a bit. Once I got the role and we started chatting about stuff, we kind of worked on it together. But the biggest leniency they gave me was in the scenes themselves, Chris would let me improvise in just about every scene, so we’d do it as is, then we’d find little moments that weren’t in the script and explore those, and that was fun. My background is in improv, so it was very fun to use those muscles.