Halle Brockovich

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Since we were just discussing the merits (or absurdity) of Brad Pitt in a movie about the life of the Buddha, I thought it would be appropriate to point out Halle Berry’s upcoming role as “Vanita Gupta.” From Apunkachoice.com:

Academy Award winner Halle Berry is likely to play the role of an India-born law graduate in America, Vanita Gupta, whose campaign helped overturning the judicial ruling in one of the biggest drug bust cases in the US.

Vanita Gupta is like the Erin Brockovich for the colored people in the Texas town of Tulia where 10 percent of its African-American population was arrested in a drug bust case in 1999, based on the sole testimony of under-cover narcotics agent Thomas Coleman, who was also a Ku Klux Klan member.

Halle Berry portraying an Indian woman, though? Well a short haired Halle does look a little like Arundhati Roy doesn’t she? Well…the face at least. I am quite sure their bodies aren’t as similar.

halle_roy.jpg

12 thoughts on “Halle Brockovich”

  1. The real Vanita Gupta rocks– she’s in her mid-20s and argued the fake drug bust by a corrupt narc agent, which received national attention, all the way up to pardon by the governor of Texas. She only got out of NYU Law three years ago!

    Here’s the NYT on the Tulia case:

    Local authorities rounded up more than 10 percent of the town’s black population… Senator Charles Schumer of New York, in a letter to Mr. Ashcroft, said: “This is far worse than Keystone Kops police work. It looks more like deliberate racial profiling, arresting and prosecuting with trumped-up evidence. Officer Coleman’s `investigation’ is more reminiscent of the Old South of 1962 than the New South of 2002.” Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton noted in a letter to Mr. Ashcroft that Mr. Coleman had made criminal allegations against people who were subsequently shown to be innocent. But most of the time his word was enough to send people to prison, sometimes for astonishingly long sentences.

    Here’s Crime Library.

  2. So, there were no desi actresses available? This would have been a good opportunity to cast a desi woman outside of the hospital, especially considering the woman being portrayed is actually an Indian-American.

  3. I am quite sure their bodies arenÂ’t as similar.

    yeah…i don’t think halle berry’s body is QUITE as twisted with hate as arundhati roy’s is:

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4266289,00.html

    It must be hard for ordinary Americans, so recently bereaved, to look up at the world with their eyes full of tears and encounter what might appear to them to be indifference. It isn’t indifference. It’s just augury. An absence of surprise. The tired wisdom of knowing that what goes around eventually comes around.

  4. That is cool. Halle is gorgeous. I dont mind her playing Indian. At least she is brown, unlike that Matrix clown who played Buddha.

  5. gc

    Regarding the quotation you gave from Arundhati Roy; the logic of the radical left often mirrors the logic of the radical right. As an example, when Hindu extremists demolished the Babri Masjid they said it was in retaliation for the excesses of Muslim rulers…what goes around comes around. According to Arundhati that is wrong, but killing Americans is alright because what goes around comes around.

    The state of India has commited many crimes. If some psychopath decided to kill thousands of innocent New Delhites to avenge that in a September 11th style attack, no doubt she would say it was OK, that what goes around comes around. Alternatively, she could herself be killed in the same process, or one of her loved ones, and be free to reflect in heaven that its OK, my mother/husband/brother/myself deserved to be blown into one hundred pieces because I am part of a country/people/religion that “had it coming” and what goes around comes around…just like those pesky Muslims and Sikhs who were killed by the forces she opposes.

    What a putrid statement.

    As I said, the radical right and the radical left are closer to each other tahn they realise.

  6. It’s not just, or even mainly, Roy. Roy may have made those comments sitting in India, but here are Pat Robertson and Jerry Fallwell on the 700 club, discussing the 9/11 attacks just two days later:

    Then Falwell said, “What we saw on Tuesday, as terrible as it is, could be miniscule if, in fact, God continues to lift the curtain and allow the enemies of America to give us probably what we deserve.” Robertson replied, “Well, Jerry, that’s my feeling. I think we’ve just seen the antechamber to terror, we haven’t begun to see what they can do to the major population.” Falwell said, “The ACLU has got to take a lot of blame for this. And I know I’ll hear from them for this, but throwing God…successfully with the help of the federal court system…throwing God out of the public square, out of the schools, the abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked and when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad…I really believe that the pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who try to secularize America…I point the thing in their face and say you helped this happen.”

    Twisted with hate, just like you said.

  7. Better quotes from Robertson:

    We have imagined ourselves invulnerable and have been consumed by the pursuit of … health, wealth, material pleasures and sexuality… It [terrorism] is happening because God Almighty is lifting his protection from us. We have a court that has essentially stuck its finger in God’s eye. We have insulted God at the highest levels of our government. Then, we say, “Why does this happen?” It is happening because God Almighty is lifting His protection from us. This is God’s power and he sent this thing to warn us … we needed a shock.

  8. The real Vanita Gupta has more negroid features than Halle. Halle infact looks like a tanned white woman.

  10. So “The Namesake”, which focuses on Indian-American characters, is set to star actors mostly from India. Tamyra Gray has a lead role in Bombay Dreams, and Halle Berry is now rumored to play an Indian-American lawyer. Naveen Andrews (Lost) and Ravi Kapoor (Crossing Jordan) are both from the UK. Are there no opportunities for struggling Indian-American actors?

  12. How can you compare Halle Berry with Arundhati Roy? Roy’s beauty is delicate yet her features are strong and striking at the same time. She has a quiet dignity and a strengh of character that Halle cannot even come close to (no offense Halle). She is also charismatic and posseses a type of intellecutal bravery that is not evident in many women – Indian or American. I think many Indians are up in arms about Roy because she questions the conventional wisdom of today’s India. As long as she criticizes the west, and in particular America, Indians are more than happy to run with it. Unfortunately for such people, Roy does not perceive the world through such a simplistic dichotomy (India the good vs America the bad). Instead, she addresses inequality wherever it is practiced,and God knows India is guilty of this like any other nation. India can only free herself from third world misery once she realizes that it is the inherent right of all human beings to live as equals.