A moment of silence, please — I have truly depressing news to report. Long years of eating English food have wreaked havoc upon the visage of an Oscar-winning desi actor:

Ben… Kingsley… plays… FAGIN! Aww yeah! That’s like Samuel L. Jackson as Ravana or Hanuman vs. the Rock. (And I think we know which one wins.)

Kingsley hams his way through an Oliver Twist revival by pedophile filmmaker Roman Polanski due out this month. Charles Dickens meets a suitable boy — the paid-by-the-word weepies collide in copyright-free drama nirvana. But seriously, after the melo-hungama of Dickens, surely Ben-ji could find it in his heart to pay Bollyrespects?

Polanski struggled with the eternal, Shylockian question of ‘who is a Jew’:

Born in 1837, Dickens’s Fagin The paid-by-the-word weepies collidewas larded with ethnic stereotypes from his first appearance as “a very old, shriveled Jew… Alec Guinness, in David Lean’s 1948 version, spoke in a droning lisp and appeared with hooded eyes and an enormous prosthetic hook nose… it also resembled anti-Semitic caricatures in… Nazi Germany. At a theater in Berlin the audience was so offended by Fagin’s characterization that it rioted… in Carol Reed’s 1968 film version… he played with gay stereotypes, mincing his way through “Pick a Pocket or Two” and twirling a frilly pink parasol in “I’d Do Anything.”

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Vikram Chatwal’s One Dollar Curry finally posts a trailer and makes its lumpy appearance in London Sep. 23rd, a full year after its Paris debut (via AiM). Nip-slip dictates that we pixelate, you pervs.

Chowhounds take note — the concoction this character vends is true Punjabi-style curry. The plot is a Paris-based, cooking-centric takeoff on The Guru, the trailer features ‘Kamasutra’ body oil nestled in a leopard-print bikini, the site uses a cloying, annoying faux-Indic font, and Chatwal seems to have both a cross and ‘waheguru‘ tattooed to his right arm.

Despite these less-than-stellar atmospherics, the soundtrack is catchy, and the movie doesn’t seem as bad as it so richly deserves to be given the hackneyed plot and inexperienced cast. It’s got an adorable, Ganesh-painted three-wheeler, the incantation of a six-degrees family tree is dead on, and Gabriella Wright is surely one of the cutest English-Irish-Portuguese-Mauritians out there.

Watch the trailer or listen to the soundtrack. Here’s the official site. Previous post here.

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What happens when Prides collide? Aishwarya Rai and Colin Firth are filming a $70M sword-and-chappals epic with Sir Ben (via DesiFans). Harvey Weinstein is backing Rai again despite the disappointing U.S. box office of Bride and Prejudice. It’s called The Last Legion:

The Last Legion is an epic adventure based on acclaimed author Valerio Massimo Manfredi’s international best-selling 2003 novel of the same name. The film is set against the fall of the Roman Empire in 470AD and its last emperor, 12-year-old Romulus Augustus…

Over-run with rebellion, Rome is a city on the brink of chaos and destruction. Imprisoned by rebels on the island-fortress of Capri, Romulus, aided by the clever strategies of his teacher Ambrosinus (Sir Ben Kingsley) and the heroic skills of his legionnaire Aurelius (Colin Firth), escape the island. Despite the turbulent events around them, this small band of Roman soldiers, accompanied by Byzantine warrior Mira (Aishwarya Rai), are determined to continue their mission to restore the Empire. This resolute group sets out on an arduous and dangerous trek for Britannia in search of the Last Legion, in their bid to make one final stand for Rome. [Link]

Colin Firth …. Aurelius
Ben Kingsley …. Ambrosinus
Aishwarya Rai …. Livia  [Link]

Finally, we’ve got a suitable hero for the queen of mock chastity: not Colin Farrell, but Colin Firth, the serious Darcy in a ridiculous jumper. Though now that I mention it, the other pairing would have been interesting, the louche Lothario meeting chastity princess:

Farrell: ‘You know, I’ve dated a desi woman before.’
Aishwarya: ‘Strippers don’t count.’

Instead we get Aishwarya Jones’ Diary. ‘Aurelius, do these knickers make me look fat?’

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That *$ siren with wavy hair whom you’re ogling is Sarita Choudhury:

British actress Sarita Choudhury has been signed up for a role in M. Night Shyamalan’s next big film Lady in the Water… M. Night Shyamalan’s latest film tells the story of a superintendent of an apartment building who discovers a sea nymph in the building’s pool…

Sarita Choudhury was born in London and spent her early years in Kingston, Jamaica. She has also lived in Mexico for a while…

In a previous interview, she put her variety of roles down to lack of opportunities for Indian actors. “Left to myself I would only play an Indian. But the reality was that there were hardly any Indian characters I could play in the films made in England and Hollywood. So I had to learn how to disappear into a variety of characters,” she said. She is currently working in three other films. [Link]

Wonder if one of those roles is a terrorist.

Over the Mountains is in post-production and will be the first to see a release. It is about a Pakistani involved in a planned attack in New York City who experiences a crisis of conscience. Indocumentados is currently in production, while work on For Real has not yet started. [Link]

Ding ding ding!

When I saw Shyamalan’s Praying With Anger, a student film that was a prototype for the American Desi/American Chai/ABCD wave, I’d never have guessed what would transpire. Over a decade later, Shyamalan tips his lid to one of the original 2nd gen actresses from his throne room in mainstream American film.

Previous posts: 1, 2, 3

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Navi Rawat and Noureen DeWulf are on the cover of the August-September 2005 issue of Audrey, the Asian-American women’s mag. My dream in life is to squeeze into the gap on the cover. Here’s the blurb:

‘Bollywood to Hollywood’: Indians & Indian Americans, like our cover girls Noureen DeWulf (left) and Navi Rawat, are poised to hit mainstream USA.

The story covers Shaista Usta, a Turkish and desi actress who starred in a recent Dev Anand movie, as well as the usual suspects (Gurinder Chadha, Gitesh Pandya). Rawat explains the numb3rs: looking unplaceably ethnic is far more useful in Hollywood than looking desi. On the other hand, Pandya says he’s happy that after 9/11, there are lots of roles for desis playing terrorists.

DeWulf talks about playing a Palestinian in West Bank Story, a film which played Sundance, and being of Indian Muslim origin. She’ll play ‘PooPoo’ with a desi accent in National Lampoon’s Pledge This. She’s also in American Dreamz, an upcoming movie with an intriguing cast: it includes John Cho (Harold and Kumar) and Shohreh Aghdashloo (House of Sand and Fog). Guess what she plays? No, really, take a wild guess.

Hollywood producers of the black comedy American Dreamz are reconsidering the script after the London attacks because it involves suicide bombers attempting to assassinate the American president. The film, starring Hugh Grant, Dennis Quaid and Willem Dafoe, features a group of Pakistani terrorists, who target a mentally frail president played by Quaid… The script has been written by Paul Weitz, who previously worked with Grant on the adaptation of Nick Hornby’s About A Boy. [Link]

Marcia Gay Harden plays the First Lady while the supporting cast finds room for the likes of Chris Klein, Richard Dreyfuss and Willem Dafoe. [Link]

Aghdashloo, the throaty-voiced Iranian-American GMILF who was so good in Sand and Fog, is also playing Dr. Kavita Rao in X-Men 3:

… she’s been cast by Ratner and co. as Dr Kavita Rao. This is the woman who, in recent X-Lore, created the Hope serum, which tried to ‘cure’ a mutant of their powers. It obviously set up a huge ethical and moral dilemma among the mutant community, and didn’t go down well with Hank McCoy, or The Beast as he is perhaps better known (this role has been filled by Kelsey Grammer). [Link]

Playing six degrees of Johnny Lever, we find that Rawat and Aghdashloo were both in Sand and Fog, Rawat playing Aghdashloo’s Iranian daughter (and for that matter, Sir Krishna Kingsley playing the father). Now Aghdashloo is repaying the compliment.

And so the circle is complete.

Previous posts on Rawat: 1, 2, 3; and DeWulf.

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